So my spam problem is solved, right? Yes and no. Spam is no longer crushing my meager inbound mail infrastructure, but I'm paying close to $14k per year to get out from under the crushing spam load. So, yes, my spam problem is temporarily controlled, but it's a fantasy to say that means that spam is no longer a problem, or that the spam problem is solved.
You are getting ripped off.
Try this combination:
1) FreeBSD (Or Linux if you prefer. I can do both.) 2) amavisd 3) ClamAV 4) SpamAssassin 5) Postfix 6) Greylisting 7) Ask for a raise for saving your company $14k/year 8) Profit!
That is all free software and all easily installed via FreeBSD ports.
A company of 700 employees really should have SOMEONE capable of installing this configuration.
Or:
Pay me for 8 to 16 hours of work (significantly less than $14k), supply me with a couple good PC servers (may only need one) and I'll have your spam problem solved. Seriously. It is not that difficult.
I'm serious. Send me an email at yarnosh@gmail.com if you are interested.
I've found that greylisting to be quite effective against all spam in general and the image spam specifically. I hesitate to recommend it because it'll probably become useless once more people start implementing it, but here it is. Try it. It works.
Let's take away yet more functionality due to spam! That's a great idea. Seriously, I hate SPAM but the zeal to stop it has ruined many useful features of SMTP.
Are you saying you'd rather people stop filtering and restricting SMTP just so you could have a little more convenience? I don't really understand what change you are suggesting. Or are you just venting frustration with the situation in general?
If you think AI hasn't increased your lying to yourself, you don't play groundbreaking modern games, or you have no idea the complexity of the AI you are looking at when you see it.
Are you replying to me? I said AI has increased in complexity significantly. I dont' even know if a lot of old games even HAD AI at all really. Most video games had characters that moved pretty much at random... or rather in a fixed sequence. I'm thinking of Donkey Kong, for example. The ape just tossed barrels in a regular sequence. It didn't "intelligently" try to hit you.
Especially when there is bittorrent to download the little bit of content that you do want to watch. I canceled my cable service* 2 years ago and my MythTV box turned into a downloader. I feel no guilt about downloading content that was otherwise broadcast. I was really only paying the cable company for delivery of content (not the content itself) and I would have MythTV'd the ads anyway... so what is the difference?
It is interesting how using MythTV actually got me watching LESS TV. I would have thought it woudl increase the amount of time spent watching content, but by the time you remove all the ads and distill the content down to just the stuff you're really interested in, there isn't much left. There's maybe 4 series that take all of 3 hours per week to watch. Lost, Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office. Oh, and Family Guy. 5 shows. 4 hours, tops.
-matthew
* If the cable company would actually let me select the few channels that I like and only charge me for those, I probably wouldn't have canceled my service.
Yeah, but then you run th erisk of "accidentally" viewing the web without filters. I once did it on a friend's computer and I thought that the whole internet had been hijacked by spammers. I was horrified.
Of course they are similar, but I want to see the numbers separated. I want to know how many people are using are using ad blocking vs. spam blocking separately. They are different because consumers don't usually choose to block spam. Usually one's ISP or mail provider implements it globally. A consumer might appreciate the feature, but they didn't necessarily request it. So to say "consumers are blocking ads at a signficantly higher rate" because their email is filtered is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that ISPs are filtering spam at ahigher rate and some consumers are installing ad blocking software.
1. Most open source is written to fulfill the developer's requirements. It may not perform so well for other people's requirements, largely because that's not something the developer has bothered with.
We're not talking about features. We're talking about quality. If business stifles software greatness, the implication is that without the demands of business, you tend to get better quality code. And it isn't the case, so I quesiton the original assertion that business stifles programming greatness.
Where is the software development utopia?
Most commercial software is professionally tested. Most open source software is tested by amateurs.
So in this sense, business actually IMPROVES overall quality. This is the opposite of the claim I was responding to.
Open source software is usually released before its ready in order to attract a wider range of developers. This is often fatal, because the new developers are more concerned about adding nifty new features than fixing the existing flaws. This is what has happened to Firefox, IMO.
Firefox seems pretty feature-slim to me. What is included in the base Firefox install that shouldn't be there? Without extensions, it is pretty basic. I guess maybe you could take out the popup blocker. But who DOESN'T want a popup blocker? Spell checker? Don't want spell checking on text inputs?
I think the Firefox team has done a pretty good job of keeping the feature bloat down. One could even argue that FF 2.0 isn't even worthy of a major version jump. Should be FF 1.6.
My attempted interpretation of bar << foo; was something like, "put foo into bar." Putting something into cout would mean printing it; putting something into a variable would be a value assignment.
Well, that would seem strange since = is the obvious choice of a assignment. Anyway, I would chalk your misunderstanding up to lack of experience with more advanced programming languages at the time. I still think using << for both bitshift and I/O is reasonable and intuitive. Just because something is intuitive doesn't mean that it is necessarily obvious to just anyone.
How far back are you going when you say "then?" Because I'm pretty sure that the AI in Space Invaders, for example, is trivial compared to most modern games. Games HAVE increased in complexity significantly over the years. There is so much that a game developer has to work on these days. AI, network mutiplayer issues, complex physics models, gameplay balancing, etc. The only really difficult part about developing games in the past was making them fit in very tight spaces because memory was always tight. Not that i am trivializing that process, but come on. What half decent programmer couldn't put together a "Pong" clone in less than a week? These days game development cycles measure in months and years with large teams of programmers and designers. There is much more than just extra "pixels" in there. It is like comparing a major motion picture to a photograph.
5. Perhaps the most important point of all: Bittorrent cannot stream files. The viewer must wait until the file is completely downloaded. With Youtube, they can simply watch their show with no intermediary steps.
I wonder if this is so much of an issue. I mean, people who use devices like TiVo very often don't watch things "live" anyway. They just let the TiVo record all the shows they want and then they go back and watch them at their leisure. So you let your Azureus client (assuming you have it set to auto-download certain content) do its thing in the background... maybe on a dedicated media PC... and then watch your shows when you want.
The real problem is the shear size of HD content. No matter how you deliver it, it isn't going to be convenient for user. I don't see how the internet could possibly compete with the "on demand" potential of cable and satellite... you know, the companies that actually have to the bandwidth to deliver HD content now.
You'd have a hard time reliably streaming SD content over the internet. Forget about HD content. It isn't going to happen any time soon.
So what you are saying is that the quality of commercial code has very little to do with business pressure and is mostly just a result of unskilled and/or unmotivated programmers.
Anyway, I'm tired of programmers complaining about how their company stifles their greatness... as if they were producing greatness outside of work (or would given the chance).
C++ can do wonders when used by highly experienced people. But most of the time, it is more cost effective to get entry level coders and use PHP/Java/C#/whatever. You will get a (somewhat) working product cheaper and possibly faster. And time to market and cost is often more important than maintainability/quality.
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous false dichotomy. You put C++ geniuses on one end and entry level PHP/Java/C# programmers on the other. As if you can't have Java/C#/whatever programmers who are really good at their job and produce high quality results. You imply that all projects would ideally be done in C++, which is just stupid.
When I first looked at C++ code (only having programmed in BASIC), sure I understood what cout << "foo"; meant. I got really confused when I saw bar << 3; and found out that it didn't set bar's value to 3.
How confused were you when you found out that cout << "foo" wasn't setting the value of cout either?
There ya go! Time pressures and price are fundamentally incompatable with code quality, even amongst the best programmers. Ergo, great programming is incompatible with most business models (i.e., most businesses don't have the money to make the software they want at the quality they want). It's sort of like wanting a Ferrari, but only having enough money to buy Gremlin. Sadly, many (most?) programming projects are nothing more than an arms race between getting something out the door that hangs together reasonably well and the bottom of the client's bank accounts.
Ok, then please explain why Open Source projects are full of flaws just like commercial products. Are all the geniuses exclusively employed by companies that stifle greatness and everyone else is doing Open Source? Please. Programming greatness is rarely achieved... anywhere. The problem developing for profit is that you need a product to profit from. That means you have to ship something that is imperfect just to stay in business and make a living. The problem developing on your own for free is, again, that you need to make a living and really don't have the kind of time to produce greatness (assuming your are capable). Either way, it comes down to resources. One can rarely get enough outside of work and one can rarely get enough AT work. Same problem. Business drives development just as much as it stifles it.
Oh please. Look at just about every open source project out there. No management holding them back. No marketing departments making unreasonable demands. No accountants cutting budgets. And yet most projects are full of flaws and crappiness. I'm not knocking Open Source. I love it, but at the same time I have to overlook a lot of shortcomings. When it comes right down to it the Linux kernel, for example, is not significantly better than, say the Solaris kernel. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. No one could point to he Linux kernel source code and say "now that is awesome code that no corporation could ever produce because of budget constraints, et al."
Fact is that programming major projects well is the real world is HARD. Really fsckin' hard. It has nothing to do with the demands of business.
Overloading the bit shift operator on I/O streams is a case of the second way of thinking: a bit shift makes no sense on an object, so why not use it for something else.
Especially when you can make it do something intuitive (if only visually). I mean, "" looks like "I/O" to me. It looks like the are sending the item to teh right towards/into the item to the left. Makes sense to me.
While it may not speak well to Democracy player, I'd have to place SOME blame on Windows. An app shouldn't crash your computer so hard that you have to reboot twice. That is just absurd.
Even if Firefox used XULRunner, it would still have to run a separate copy of it. Maybe you'd save some memory with share libraries, but I doubt the combined memory usage will be significantly lower. You have the same problem with Java apps... VM for each app...
Apparently you didn't get the memo. There is an Evil Atheist Conspiracy(tm) to destroy Christendom (and babies and America!). Evolutionism is the primary form of the movement. It is such a deep conspiracy that not even the members of Evolutionism know they are members. In fact, most don't even recognize the term "Evolutionism."
With regard to efficiency, in the Abstract they also point out that their system is more efficient than the previous standard in organic photo-synthesis:
Ok, HOW efficient is it though? I'd like to compare it to solar panels. Is there any indication of how much energy you could extract from sunlight? Is there an optimal protein density and water depth for breaking down water?
It would be cool if anyone could put something the size of a kiddie-pool outside and collect H2 all day.
Wouldn't the salt just precipitate to the bottom requiring periodic flushing? You have the same problem with any desalination process... what to do with all the salt?
Well, maybe AFTER running it through a fuel cell to make electricity. Otherwise you'd be wasting one heck of a lot of energy to make minimal amounts of water. You'd have to burn a lot of hydrogen just to get a glass of water.
Slashdot Mirror
You are getting ripped off.
Try this combination:
1) FreeBSD (Or Linux if you prefer. I can do both.)
2) amavisd
3) ClamAV
4) SpamAssassin
5) Postfix
6) Greylisting
7) Ask for a raise for saving your company $14k/year
8) Profit!
That is all free software and all easily installed via FreeBSD ports.
A company of 700 employees really should have SOMEONE capable of installing this configuration.
Or:
Pay me for 8 to 16 hours of work (significantly less than $14k), supply me with a couple good PC servers (may only need one) and I'll have your spam problem solved. Seriously. It is not that difficult.
I'm serious. Send me an email at yarnosh@gmail.com if you are interested.
-matthew
Try Greylisting. I haven't seen an image spam for weeks either. They get rejected before SA even has to look at em.
-matthew
I've found that greylisting to be quite effective against all spam in general and the image spam specifically. I hesitate to recommend it because it'll probably become useless once more people start implementing it, but here it is. Try it. It works.
-matthew
Are you saying you'd rather people stop filtering and restricting SMTP just so you could have a little more convenience? I don't really understand what change you are suggesting. Or are you just venting frustration with the situation in general?
-matthew
Are you replying to me? I said AI has increased in complexity significantly. I dont' even know if a lot of old games even HAD AI at all really. Most video games had characters that moved pretty much at random... or rather in a fixed sequence. I'm thinking of Donkey Kong, for example. The ape just tossed barrels in a regular sequence. It didn't "intelligently" try to hit you.
-matthew
Especially when there is bittorrent to download the little bit of content that you do want to watch. I canceled my cable service* 2 years ago and my MythTV box turned into a downloader. I feel no guilt about downloading content that was otherwise broadcast. I was really only paying the cable company for delivery of content (not the content itself) and I would have MythTV'd the ads anyway... so what is the difference?
It is interesting how using MythTV actually got me watching LESS TV. I would have thought it woudl increase the amount of time spent watching content, but by the time you remove all the ads and distill the content down to just the stuff you're really interested in, there isn't much left. There's maybe 4 series that take all of 3 hours per week to watch. Lost, Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office. Oh, and Family Guy. 5 shows. 4 hours, tops.
-matthew
* If the cable company would actually let me select the few channels that I like and only charge me for those, I probably wouldn't have canceled my service.
Who fast forwards a DVR? Don't you just make 5/15/30 second jumps? Or better yet, use a system that automatically skips ads.
-matthew
Yeah, but then you run th erisk of "accidentally" viewing the web without filters. I once did it on a friend's computer and I thought that the whole internet had been hijacked by spammers. I was horrified.
-matthew
Of course they are similar, but I want to see the numbers separated. I want to know how many people are using are using ad blocking vs. spam blocking separately. They are different because consumers don't usually choose to block spam. Usually one's ISP or mail provider implements it globally. A consumer might appreciate the feature, but they didn't necessarily request it. So to say "consumers are blocking ads at a signficantly higher rate" because their email is filtered is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that ISPs are filtering spam at ahigher rate and some consumers are installing ad blocking software.
-matthew
We're not talking about features. We're talking about quality. If business stifles software greatness, the implication is that without the demands of business, you tend to get better quality code. And it isn't the case, so I quesiton the original assertion that business stifles programming greatness.
Where is the software development utopia?
So in this sense, business actually IMPROVES overall quality. This is the opposite of the claim I was responding to.
Firefox seems pretty feature-slim to me. What is included in the base Firefox install that shouldn't be there? Without extensions, it is pretty basic. I guess maybe you could take out the popup blocker. But who DOESN'T want a popup blocker? Spell checker? Don't want spell checking on text inputs?
I think the Firefox team has done a pretty good job of keeping the feature bloat down. One could even argue that FF 2.0 isn't even worthy of a major version jump. Should be FF 1.6.
-matthew
Well, that would seem strange since = is the obvious choice of a assignment. Anyway, I would chalk your misunderstanding up to lack of experience with more advanced programming languages at the time. I still think using << for both bitshift and I/O is reasonable and intuitive. Just because something is intuitive doesn't mean that it is necessarily obvious to just anyone.
-matthew
How far back are you going when you say "then?" Because I'm pretty sure that the AI in Space Invaders, for example, is trivial compared to most modern games. Games HAVE increased in complexity significantly over the years. There is so much that a game developer has to work on these days. AI, network mutiplayer issues, complex physics models, gameplay balancing, etc. The only really difficult part about developing games in the past was making them fit in very tight spaces because memory was always tight. Not that i am trivializing that process, but come on. What half decent programmer couldn't put together a "Pong" clone in less than a week? These days game development cycles measure in months and years with large teams of programmers and designers. There is much more than just extra "pixels" in there. It is like comparing a major motion picture to a photograph.
-matthew
I wonder if this is so much of an issue. I mean, people who use devices like TiVo very often don't watch things "live" anyway. They just let the TiVo record all the shows they want and then they go back and watch them at their leisure. So you let your Azureus client (assuming you have it set to auto-download certain content) do its thing in the background... maybe on a dedicated media PC... and then watch your shows when you want.
The real problem is the shear size of HD content. No matter how you deliver it, it isn't going to be convenient for user. I don't see how the internet could possibly compete with the "on demand" potential of cable and satellite... you know, the companies that actually have to the bandwidth to deliver HD content now.
You'd have a hard time reliably streaming SD content over the internet. Forget about HD content. It isn't going to happen any time soon.
-matthew
So what you are saying is that the quality of commercial code has very little to do with business pressure and is mostly just a result of unskilled and/or unmotivated programmers.
Anyway, I'm tired of programmers complaining about how their company stifles their greatness... as if they were producing greatness outside of work (or would given the chance).
-matthew
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous false dichotomy. You put C++ geniuses on one end and entry level PHP/Java/C# programmers on the other. As if you can't have Java/C#/whatever programmers who are really good at their job and produce high quality results. You imply that all projects would ideally be done in C++, which is just stupid.
-matthew
How confused were you when you found out that cout << "foo" wasn't setting the value of cout either?
-matthew
Ok, then please explain why Open Source projects are full of flaws just like commercial products. Are all the geniuses exclusively employed by companies that stifle greatness and everyone else is doing Open Source? Please. Programming greatness is rarely achieved... anywhere. The problem developing for profit is that you need a product to profit from. That means you have to ship something that is imperfect just to stay in business and make a living. The problem developing on your own for free is, again, that you need to make a living and really don't have the kind of time to produce greatness (assuming your are capable). Either way, it comes down to resources. One can rarely get enough outside of work and one can rarely get enough AT work. Same problem. Business drives development just as much as it stifles it.
-matthew
Oh please. Look at just about every open source project out there. No management holding them back. No marketing departments making unreasonable demands. No accountants cutting budgets. And yet most projects are full of flaws and crappiness. I'm not knocking Open Source. I love it, but at the same time I have to overlook a lot of shortcomings. When it comes right down to it the Linux kernel, for example, is not significantly better than, say the Solaris kernel. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. No one could point to he Linux kernel source code and say "now that is awesome code that no corporation could ever produce because of budget constraints, et al."
Fact is that programming major projects well is the real world is HARD. Really fsckin' hard. It has nothing to do with the demands of business.
-matthew
Especially when you can make it do something intuitive (if only visually). I mean, "" looks like "I/O" to me. It looks like the are sending the item to teh right towards/into the item to the left. Makes sense to me.
If only the rest of C++ was the intuitive.
-matthew
While it may not speak well to Democracy player, I'd have to place SOME blame on Windows. An app shouldn't crash your computer so hard that you have to reboot twice. That is just absurd.
-matthew
Even if Firefox used XULRunner, it would still have to run a separate copy of it. Maybe you'd save some memory with share libraries, but I doubt the combined memory usage will be significantly lower. You have the same problem with Java apps... VM for each app...
-matthew
Apparently you didn't get the memo. There is an Evil Atheist Conspiracy(tm) to destroy Christendom (and babies and America!). Evolutionism is the primary form of the movement. It is such a deep conspiracy that not even the members of Evolutionism know they are members. In fact, most don't even recognize the term "Evolutionism."
-matthew
Ok, HOW efficient is it though? I'd like to compare it to solar panels. Is there any indication of how much energy you could extract from sunlight? Is there an optimal protein density and water depth for breaking down water?
It would be cool if anyone could put something the size of a kiddie-pool outside and collect H2 all day.
-matthew
Wouldn't the salt just precipitate to the bottom requiring periodic flushing? You have the same problem with any desalination process... what to do with all the salt?
-matthew
Well, maybe AFTER running it through a fuel cell to make electricity. Otherwise you'd be wasting one heck of a lot of energy to make minimal amounts of water. You'd have to burn a lot of hydrogen just to get a glass of water.
-matthew