.... all I'd have to do is block all non-US email. This would also work fine for a considerable number of businesses in the US as well.
Unless, of course, you have a website on the World Wide Web, with contact information for people interested in whatever you've put on it (read "prospective customers" for any business).
Okay, god, jeez, stop jumping all over me. SORRRRRRRY.
Ok, you're "sorrrrrrry" (but in all caps). Doesn't sound so apologetic, does it? You've got lots of reasons why you're not actually wrong, despite clearly being wrong factually.
I had no idea that this many Slashdot readers were so old.:P
Reason #1: Those who pointed out your mistake are "old".
After looking at some of those links though, it looks like those first two games were not id Software games? So why should they be considered "official" Wolfenstein games then?
Reason #2: The original game was made by Br0derbund, and since you don't really believe you're wrong (despite clear factual evidence), you'll now attempt to substitute the word "official" for "original". Yes, it's a desparate attempt, as the parent posts spoke of "original", but maybe, just maybe you can avoid being wrong.
I guess I'll always consider the first one to be Wolf 3D, since it's from id Software and is the one I played as a little kid.
Reason #3: It doesn't matter what the facts really are. It doesn't matter that the plain, undeniable truth might be. Because you played id's 3D version as a "little kid", you'll always consider it the first one. Truth and undisputable facts be damned.
But there are apparently two that are older, whether they are "real" Wolfenstein games depends on your point of view I guess!
Reason #4: If all else failes, as in reason #2, attempt to re-write history, this time subsitution the word "real" for "original".
As you said in the beginning "stop jumping all over me"... perhaps you should step back and look at yourself. I'm "jumping all over" you, not because you were wrong, but because even after being proven wrong, you post this crap claiming that even though you are factually wrong, it's somehow not so wrong, and you're "sorrrrrrry", yet not actually in the least bit sorry.
Since you're too young to remember 8-bit computers, you're probably also too young to have watched the old television sitcom "Happy Days". Briefly, "Fonzie" was one of the main characters who was ultra "cool". He road a bike, had girls hanging all over him, etc. In one famous episode, Fonzie was wrong about something, and he couldn't admit it. Every time he tried to, he'd say "I was wr, wr, wrrr" and couldn't say the word "wrong". It was quite humorous. Here's a page with a
brief summary in the first paragraph, and then transitions onto a very christian-oriented sermon, which could do you some good.
Next time, when you respond, rather than telling people to get off your back, and then make a feable attempt to deny that you could have been wrong, try something like this:
What you SHOULD have posted
It looks like I spoke too soon. Kymermosst was right that there was a 2-D Wolfenstein game in the 80's, long before I played when I played id's 3D game, thinking it was the original.
I didn't realize people would react so strongly. I'm sorry I provoked such a reaction with the words "Um, sorry but you don't know what you're talking about", when in fact I was the one who didn't know what he was talking about.
This probably won't be the last time I'm wrong about something, but I'll try to make it the last time I fly off the handle like that without even investigating the facts first.
Had you posted something along those line, many people including me would not be "jumping all over" you. I hope you can learn to understand this... if not today, perhaps when you grow older and have an opportunity to mature a bit.
... but hey, at least they're doing it. And we should be happy and support them by buying it to ensure their future support of linux (now that they have gotten their act together;).
No. Sorry. Not yet.
It's still FAR too early to say "they have gotten their act together". You might say that when they release a public beta. You could even say that when there's a "teaser" that runs on linux but only has a few character classes, spells, items, maps, etc. You might even say this if it only runs on a limited range of hardware/kernels/libc and has worse bugs than their original 1.10 windows release.
Until there is _something_ available to everyone (like me) that purchased the game in hopes of "soon" being able to play without rebooting into a yucky OS, it's too soon to say they've "gotten their act together".
I've personally only rebooted a couple dozen times to play. I originally thought I would abstain until the linux client... but I got curious, and so did my girlfriend (yep, we picked up a second copy, at approx $50 retail). One thing I can say from experience is that even on the windows client, they really only recent "got their act together" and fixed the last of the crashing bugs, somewhere around 1.25. There were MANY other little bugs... but I can live with some choppy audio on the movies and little things that aren't quite right. On my machine, it would crash on startup about 50% of the time before rev 1.25 or 1.26 (or something like that). Even that is ok.... but in-game crashing is just not acceptable. There was a bug where the game would crash sometimes when you removed your armor (eg, in front the "seedy tavern" to put on the stolen pirate uniform so they'd let you inside).
So opinions may differ... I personally will say "they have gotten their act together" when a playable linux client is released that doesn't suffer from show-stopper bugs like in-game crashing. You may differ, but certainly this recent news means nothing. The original promise of a linux client alongside windows meant nothing. The "within weeks" and "sometime in the fall" didn't mean much. Any excuse could be offered, as we just saw. They could decide to scrap the linux client for any reason.
On the plus, at least it seems Bioware's NWN linux effort has put pressure on Rad to port to linux.
on a T3 am I suddenly stealing 28x the music because it's "really fast"?!
In RIAA spin mathematics, your 45 Mbit/sec T3 is 1562.5 times faster than the "average" user with 28.8k dialup. But they'd still fudge a bit and round it up to 1563.
Why "bust" you for 28x when they could claim 1563x ??? If you're gonna lie, might as well milk it for all it's worth! (sorta like price-fixing CDs between $15 to $20....)
the Linux community and specificaly the Linux gamer community is not some huge force that programs live or die by.
No, but tech news sites like slashdot are. Maybe the several articles about NWN on slashdot contributed nothing to Bioware's sales, but that seems pretty unlikely. There are a LOT of "techie" users out there who don't keep up on the game scene, but buy a game from time to time, and read slashdot daily.
It is a fact the slashdot has a daily readership of at least 100k people... usually more. It is true that a lot of "buzz"
was created regarding NWN here, posted due to the promised linux client.
Even if you are correct, that linux users are an insignificant number, it is a well established fact that most people visit slashdot using MSIE. A LOT of people read hype on NWN as a result of slashdot. They would not have, had it not been for the promise of the linux client.
I am not speaking on their keeping with promises,
as I really couldn't care less (I play my games in Windows)
Then you are off-topic, as the topic is the fact that they are badly slipping their promised schedule for the late release of the linux client, which was originally promised to be released together with the windows one.
but please, let's not try and rpetend like the Linux gaming community is some huge force.
Let's also try not to pretend that several high profile stories carried here on slashdot and elsewhere in the "linux community" didn't generate a lot of buzz about NWN.
After all, YOU are here, reading and posting at slashdot, and you couldn't care less about the linux client. Even if there are no linux users anywhere in the world at all, YOU and hundreds of thousands of other slashdot "doze-only" readers saw several stories here on slashdot about this cool new upcoming game.
The reason why... Bioware's promises of the linux client, which was originally promised at release (and of course the release was originally promised and delayed many times), and then promised for Fall 2002, and now promised for Winter 2003.
I believe Bioware is trying. I don't believe it's some big conspiracy to simply promote the game and spread the word to "techie types" who don't read news about new games.
But only now, after supposedly working to release it with the windows client and then supposedly "actively" working on it for 4-5 months, at this late stage admit they depend on third party libraries for sound and movies... well, it does indeed give the impression that they have made a half-hearted effort.
But you couldn't care less. If Bioware is lying, if they break their promise, the fact that you don't use linux would make it ok. Moreover, your impression that there are relatively few linux users would make it OK for Bioware to lie about the linux client, or completely reverse couse and break their promises.
I'd actually pay more for a guarantee against banners and spam from my ISP.
You'd be wasting your money, since excellent
email
and
web filtering
software are available for free.
These are the two I personally use, and they are very effective. There are many others available. There's even some that apparantly work pretty well for windows users.
Do -you- know anybody that's based a major purchase off of a popup ad on the Internet? Everyone I know immediately -loses- interest in a given product when assaulted by popup ads for it..... But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy one because of their obnoxious advertising.. So who -is- buying them?
I personally do not... but from the IAB press release:
In IAB ad effectiveness research conducted by Marketing Evolution's Rex Briggs, it was found that "...the larger format sizes, which are naturally more visible and provide more creative freedom, did prove to be significantly more effective than smaller, standard banners across all campaigns."
Rex Briggs, Principal, Marketing Evolution
4062 Albert Circle, El Dorado Hills, CA 95726
www.marketingevolution.com
Rex@marketingevolution.com
Voice: 415-559-9374
Fax: 508-629-8790
Maybe Rex would be interested in some of the same catalogues and other valuable offers that Alan Ralsky is enjoying?
But it's fully covered in Joe's answer to the question posted by "acehole".
Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...
or put money into researching artificial eyes.
Joe put it very well. You obviously missed it:
I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved "at great expense." I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. "Updating" or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but that's true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is "great." Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be "great."
I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?
I honestly wonder if you read the answer to the second question, where Joe says that HTML-based sites can take care of much of the accessibility problem by simply using valid HTML with good ALT tags, and including a "skip nav links" link near the top of the page.
Even if you
went crazy and did all this stuff, it's all pretty simple and easy things to do. Much of it is just good practice in HTML. Most of the "captioning" (that ordinary IE users never see) is helpful for indexing in google and other search engines, which is pretty good reason to do it anyway.
The key point is that it's not expensive. Almost every single image on every good website involves quite a bit of work, at least croping and scaling. Many times a thumbnail is created and a link made to the larger image, or a dedicated page with the larger image. Fancy drop shadowing and other effects are commonly added, as are rounded corners. Considerable work goes of course goes into creating the image in the first place, wether that's composing it or taking a photo (posing the subject, lighting, transfering from the digital camera or negative, etc).
The effort (and expense) of an ALT tag is so very minor compared to the effort/expense that went into the original preparation of the image and its placement within the site.
Likewise, adding a "skip nav" link into the nav bar is a rather trivial task compared to the design of the nav bar itself. Many sites are built from a template (like mine). All you need to do is add it into the template. Yes, that does take some small amount of work, which is more than doing nothing, but compared to all the work that went into the nav bar, it's really very minor. Sites that don't update from a template STILL go to all the trouble of having navigation links. They're doing it _somehow_, and adding just more more tiny link, that's the same on every page and never even "breaks" because it always points within the same page is really just a very tiny increase.
It's really not hard. I did it to my site today after reading Joe's responses. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it, mostly updating some test pages before updating the live site. Now, I'll admit that I haven't updated the home page and some special pages yet... but the vast majority of pages that are built from the template were very easily updated. Also, I should admit that I checked a several sites and nearly all are using the approach of a small invisible GIF with "skip navigational links" as the ALT text (contrary to Joe's suggestion)... so I went with the established practice used on lots of other major sites that
are targeted at people with disabilities.
Nearly all my images (about 630 unique files on pjrc.com) have ALT text already, as that's just a normal part of good HTML practice.
It's really very cheap and easy. I can afford it. I spent no money, 20 minutes on the "skip nav" link, and I just type an ALT tag for every image (which is less work than even the simplest image processing). It costs a LOT less than research to develop artificial organs!
I'm no consipiracy theorist, but the elements seem to be there for this to have been intentional and the timing is very suspicious.
Like the timing of responding publicly quite promptly.
Like the timing where they disabled the 'bot soon after some people posted concerns about it?
If it really were some sinister plot to rob associates of their referal fees (which could be done much more easily by simply making accounting errors, Enron or RIAA style), don't you think they would have remained silent, or at least kept the 'bot running as a lengthy "though investigation" proceeded until the 26th?
Terminate the agreement.
Bill for the bandwidth, or sue for damages.
Various technical measures (which are prohibited by the agreement)
Point out to your contacts at Amazon that this is pointless and dumb in such a manner they actually listen.
Here's an idea.... How about politely posting a question or two about it in the appropriate forums? Who knows, something crazy might happen, like responsible people at Amazon might respond and turn the bot off while they investigate. Then, they might post a reasonable explaination and take reasonable steps to make sure they're not abusing associate's servers.
Here's another idea.... Try reading the pages that slashdot linked to. I know that's a lot of work, so I'll save you a bit of effort by posting each slashdot link, and a brief summary of what you would have found had you bothered to click on it and ACTUALLY READ it (before posting here with a subject advocating actually reading the terms and conditions).
Amazon Associates and Web Services developers are crying foul over the hammering they're taking - Alan Richmond comments that the bot made 13406 hits in 17 hours on November 26, transfering a total of 200 megs. Many posts preceed this, and several follow it. It's all pretty level headed discussion. Many people seem to feel the bot is not designed that well and ought to be improved, but very little of it amounts to "crying foul". Even Alan says he want an explaination. Nobody is terminating their agreement, attempting to recoup significant losses, threatening to sue, advocating blocking (other than discussion of robots.txt). People in the forum are expressing their concerns "in such a manner they actually listen", which happens to be a polite, level-headed manner... which you would know of had you actually read the forum, rather than blindly posting here that the associated should read the terms and conditions before they "sign".
Amazon fessed up - Amazon explains what they're doing, and why, and the steps they've taken to avoid abusing servers. They claim they've designed the bot to avoid accessing any server more than once every two seconds (Alan's example is 13406 hits in 17 hours, or one hit every 4.56 seconds, on average)
Amazon acknowledged problems exist - They actually say they're investigating, and while they're investigating their bot's impact, they've taken it off-line. They also answer the question that appears frequently in the forum... the purpose of "ia_archiver" vs "amzn_assoc". It's not clear what they'll actually do, but they obviously are trying to respond to people's legitimate concerns
but points to recent Operating Agreement changes - Yes, while Amazon appears to be taking the matter seriously, they also are making it clear that they expect to be able to verify the accuracy of links from associates. They explain the purpose in the agreement (and it's really not that unreasonable, is it?)
This just isn't that sensational of a story. Yet another 'bot that needs some refinement, but a it IS designed to avoid more than one hit every 2 seconds (and the evidence posted seems to be consistent with that). They at least did respond to people's concerns and they took the bot off-line while they investigated it. Sounds pretty reasonable. It's not clear what might actually be done, and some of it appears that Amazon is claiming the problem isn't so great... but clearly they are attempting to respond to people's concerns.
Amazon feels they have a right to check the links on associate sites, and they put it in the terms. Again, it's really not that unreasonable.
What is unreasonable is the inflamatory summary appearing on the main slashdot page. Yes, timothy and other slashdot "editors" can claim it's all just editorial from "theodp" who submitted the summary. But what kind of editing it that?
The summary concludes with:
... Amazon and any of its corporate affiliates the right to do so, but also to use unstated technical means to overcome any methods that are used to try to block or interfere with such crawling or monitoring. Interesting stance from the folks who called on the Senate to prosecute those who degrade the technical quality of service at web sites.
The link is to Amazon's position on DDOS attacks... there's really no similarity to a well-intentioned 'bot, which clearly identifies itself, limits itself to 0.5 Hz access rate, AND was responsibly taken off-line and reexamined when some people complained that it used too much bandwidth.
... a disruptive (market wise) technology when competiting with telcom's 3G cellular networks and DSL, and cable companies broadband services.
It really has little to do with security, other than the market security the established telcom and cable companies (who participated in those hearings).
The article says that the distance is increased by 600 feet, which translates into an additional coverage of 2.5 square miles, which is a 6% increase over the existing coverage. I'm having a hard time envisioning that, so I decided to do a bit a math, as a quick sanity check.
Let's call the existing distance (not specified in the article), "r". So the original and new coverage areas ought to be (in terms of feet):
orig_coverage = pi * r * r
new_coverage = pi * (r + 600) * (r + 600)
The difference between these is claimed to be 2.5 square miles. Since there's 5280 feet in a mile, the difference between these two is supposed to be:
new_coverage - orig_coverage = 2.5 * 5280 * 5280
So, putting these together, and multiplying out the (r+600)*(r+600) part, it ought to be possible to deduce the original radius:....adding some parens to make it easier to read
So, luckily the r squared terms subtract each other out, so this little bit of math won't requiring using a quadratic equation. Subracting the constant, it turns into:
pi * 2 * 600 * r = 2.5 * 5280 * 5280 - pi * 600 * 600
Now for anyone reading this far who's good at basic algerba, I'm going to appologize for yet a couple more simple steps spelled out....
r * 3769.9 = 69696000 - 1130972.4
r = 68565027.6 / 3769.9
r = 18187.5
So it looks like existing DSL goes 3.44 miles, and this new one goes 3.56 miles, and the increase from 37.276 square mile to 39.776 square miles really is 6% (actually 6.7%).
So it does really work out, and the existing DSL distance of 3.44 miles sounds reasonable.
Of course, it's all a moot point if the FCC allows the cable and baby bells to lock out competition. The only reason almost anyone has DSL within a 3.44 mile radius is because AT&T started rolling out high speed cable. What this new DSL _really_ needs (other than a real increase in distance) is a competing technology/business and a regulatory environment that allows that competition instead of squashing it. How likely is that? Too bad there's no easy formulas there.....
There's one little thing about Rackspace that they, of course, neglect to tell you; They're a spammer nest.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I've been using Verio for the last couple years. Everything has been really good, except for little skirmishs with the blacklists.
When I first signed up, just about two years ago, there were just a couple of the minor blacklists listing a netblock that had my IP number. The listings were for a spammer that Verio had kicked off months ago. I contacted the blacklist maintainers (only one of those lists was could be be called "maintained"). It's remarkably difficult to contact these people. Eventually the better list dropped the block, and that gave me enough leverage to convince the other two to do the same (the spammer had long since moved on for greener pastures).
But in the last year or so, there's been a whole new crop of spammer acusations. I can't verify them... it reads like a whole lot of conspiracy theory. But a couple weeks ago it even got posted as a slashdot story (so it must be true, right?)
I called Verio. Before the slashdot story, they would just deny everything. They didn't admit they were catering to any spammers, but they didn't flat out deny that no spammers were operating on their network.
Verio claims that their hosting business is very separate from their network provision services (T1, T3, OC-something lines.... more bandwidth than I can envision). So far, the more reputable blacklists haven't waged netblocks on Verio's hosting side, or at least the few IP numbers allocated to my little server.
So because of these escalating wars between the spammers and blacklists, if you intend to host a mail server, the ISPs record about hosting spammers should be your top concern. Saddly, there are a lot of mixed messages and it's hard to tell if any particular provider is any good. Two years ago, for example, Verio was listed at the top of SpamCop's page of providers with exemplary anti-abuse policies.
Recently I've been making some tenative plans for jumping ship from Verio. Other than this spammer/blacklist issue, and one little incident where they didn't notify me in advance of (supposedly) scheduled maintainance (they claim they did), the decicated hosting service from Verio has been great.
But hitting blacklists, even occasionally, is a real show-stopper. For my little site, we do a light amount of e-commerce. When a confirmation email to a customer bounces (they placed the order over the web), we look like a little fly-by-night company out to steal their credit card info. Of course, emails bounce for a variety of other reasons, so we've gotten into the practive of picking up the phone and calling them with the tracking number.
The sad news is that there doesn't seem to be any really good way of determining if a provider is hosting or provisioning bandwidth to spammers. Even if everything looks good in advance (as it did 2 years ago with Verio), things change.... and they change more rapidly that you'd want to move providers when everything else is running so smoothly.
I wish I could recommend Verio, as the service, performance and reliability has been excellent. But this spammer problem and the reaction from the blacklisting community is definately something you don't want to get caught in the middle of.
I'm taking Rackspace off my short list of "plan B" options if the Verio/blacklist situation gets worse. Rackspace was actually at the top of my list.
It offers 1280x1024 at 15 frames per second. That's a LOT faster than other network cameras. That in itself is pretty newsworthy for slashdot.
It's also open source. The software, drivers, firmware and hardware HDL code are all open. Even if it didn't have incredible performance, this makes it pretty newsworthy for slashdot. The ability to actually tweak the hardware-level processing and compression of the camera data is intriguing.
The linked web page talks quite openly about the design process and how the thing really works (at least as a high level of abstraction). That in itself is pretty interesting and makes it fairly newsworthy for slashdot... at least as newsworthy as link to various writings describing how certain aspects of modern microprocessors work.
So, call it a "Slashvertisement", just because it's a product for sale and the author stands to sell some.
I think this is one of the coolest things slashdot has posted in quite some time. It's certainly a lot more interesting that yet another "sky is falling" story about privacy or copyright policy.
Filtering is not a solution.
It's still wasting the bandwidth my company pays for.
Filtering is a solution when the problem is stated as "I get about 250-300 spam messages a day..... I'd kill to only be getting ten spams a day".
Filtering does solve THAT problem.
Consumption of bandwitdth and usage of server resources is a DIFFERENT problem.
I just took a peek at my spam folder... (what a lot of obscene junk, glad I don't see that shit every day since installing SpamAssassin). Only 397 messages for during the month of november. I saved all those to a file, and that file is about 4 megs. The average message size is 10374 bytes. That includes quite a bit of stuff added by SpamAssassin about why it filtered each message, but I'll just overlook that rather than putting more work into getting a more accurate (lower) number of bytes per spam message.
So for my inbox, spam used an average of 137 kbytes per day. Even at 300 message per day, that's a daily bandwidth usage of 3 megabytes. By way of comparison, this slashdot discussion, viewed in flat mode with a threshold of 1, gets split into two pages. I saved the first one, and the html is 601k and there are 44k of images. So just viewing one long comments page here on slashdot is over 4 times my daily spam bandwitdh... or in the case of 300 spam/day, viewing five comments pages is the same bandwidth usage as all that spam.
For dial-up users, waiting for 137k or 3M really sucks. But in the context of "bandwidth my company pays for" (nearly all companies have a local mail server), it's really not a lot of bandwidth. A whole day's worth of spam is probably much less than even a light session of web surfing.
let's admit to it, the creativeness required to think up faking an error screen to get users to click on it (think reaction vs. action) is genius
Would it also be genius to put up fake traffic signs directing people to your store, restaurant, or other place of business?
How about sending fake invoices to renew domain registration, yet in the very fine print it's actually a transferal to another provider? That "genius" recently went to court, and NetworkSolutions didn't look so smart then, did they?
Real genius in advertising is what google does. At a time when people have become "banner blind", google went to fast loading text only ads, clearly defined as ads at a time when other search engines compromised their results with paid placement or ads visually similar to search results. People by and large respect that and google's ads are quite effective. That's genius.
Faking windows dialog boxes (and serving win9x look messages to Linux, MacOS, and WinXP clients) isn't genius. It's deception. I hope they go down in flames and others take notice.
That extra minute of having to deal with spam really bothers me
Exactly.
This is one of the really critical factors that people who say "just hit delete" don't understand. It's disheartening to see get rich quick schemes, fake diplomas, and many other types of fraudlent or at least highly distastful messages.
It puts people in sour mood. Not only is it aggrevating, it dilutes one's optimism that other people out there deserve some of your time to help them, to put that little bit of extra time into answering, to go that extra mile and attach a useful file, find a useful link or two, or something along those lines. A session at the computer that's intended to communicate with others begins by first avoiding unwanted and usually very unpleasant communication from spammer.
Even if bandwidth is free, even if you had plenty of time, having to look at ads for beastiality porn, diet pills, pryamid schemes, herbal "viagra"... even only briefly enough to discern them as spam and delete them, is enough to sour ones mood.
Immediately after having briefly encountering filthy messages from the sleeziest, scummiest people on the planent, most people then go on to correspond with friends and family, co-workers, customers, or well-meaning strangers who've contacted them for some legitimate reason.
I get about 250-300 spam messages a day..... I'd kill to only be getting ten spams a day.
No need to get violent. No need to kill. The solution is simple, cheap, and pretty easy.
Just start using SpamAssassin. It's free and installs easily on modern unix systems using either sendmail or procmail. If you're stuck with Outlook on Windows, there's a company selling an installshield-based version for only $30 (considerably less that even the cheapest of murder plots). They claim to be working on support for other windows based clients, so if you're windows based and using another program, relief is probably on the way. They have a 2 week free trial version.
Spamassassin really works. They claim it filters about 95%, which should put your spam level between 12.5 to 15 messages per day.... very close to the desired goal of 10 (and nobody needs to die).
With SpamAssassin, every message gets a spam rating. Legitimate messages usually score under 3 points, and SpamAssassin's default threshold is 5.0 points. You can adjust the threshold where messages get filtered... I personally set mine to 7.0 because I'm a bit paranoid of losing any legit messages. But even 7.0 works great... most spam scores well over 10 points. If all your legit messages are scoring very low (quite likely), you might be able to safely lower the threshold a bit and get under that magical 10 per day. Personally, I find it filters nearly all spams even at 7.0.
Be sure to turn on all the "network" tests including the blacklists and razor. By default, these might be set to 0.0 points each, so they won't get used. They do take some time because they involve communication with other sites (very large ISPs with one mail server for thousands of uses don't want to spend that much time per message, but as an individual you almost certainly do). The blacklists often block legit messages, so give them low scores, but it's safe to set Razor (a database of known spam messages, with "fuzzy" matching) to a high value like 4.0 or even 5.0.
There's been a lot of hype lately about Bayesian filtering... and maybe someday lots of email clients will have it built in. And maybe large numbers of users will go to the trouble to sort their messages properly so the filters on each machine "learn". Maybe.
But right now, you can download SpamAssassin for free (or pay just a bit for a commercial much-easier-to-install-on-windows version), and instantly 95% of your incoming spam will be gone. Well, most people just have SpamAssassin modify the message and then they use their mail client or procmail to deliver the message to a "spam folder" (so you can occasionally look through it and remember the bad-old-days before you finally broke down and went through the not-really-that-difficult process of installing SpamAssassin).
It really works, it's free (or cheap), and it doesn't involve killing anyone.
I think a much simpler solution would be to require any incoming message to contain an anonymous electronic cash stamp in the value of, say, five cents.
Yeah, right. Tell that to Digicash and others who failed miserably as attempts to introduce "electronic cash". Their old site isn't even responding anymore. Anyone remember Mojo Nation? Look what's hosted there now (no, I didn't mis-type that, it redirects there... try typing the URL yourself to see).
These are two high profile companies that come to mind right away. It's pretty clear by this point that digital cash and micropayments have been a miserable failure. A lot can be said about what went wrong and why, but the ultimate unescapable conclusion is that a digital cash system with micropayment-level transactions is anything but a simple solution.
Re:Why we use base 2 instead of base 3
on
Bringing Back the PDP8
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Nowhere in the paper could I find that Brian Hayes claimd "that circuit complexity increases linearily with the number of logic levels."
In the paragraph just above figure 2:
Everything hinges on the assumption that rw is a proper measure of hardware complexity, or in other words that the incremental cost of increasing the radix is the same as the incremental cost of increasing the number of digits.
Scroll back up to figure 1, and the third paragraph up is where the assumption is first made:
By one plausible measure, it is the most efficient of all integer bases; it offers the most economical way of representing numbers.
How do you measure the cost of a numeric representation?
[snip, absurd cases of base 1 and base 1e6]
Evidently we need to optimize some joint measure of a number's width (how many digits it has) and its depth (how many different symbols can occupy each digit position). An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities. In other words, if r is the radix and w is the width in digits, we want to minimize rw while holding rw constant.
So what he's saying is that the "cost" of a representing a number is the cost per digit multiplied by the number of digits required. But he makes the assumption that the cost of each digit is a linear relationship with the radix, which is simply not true in almost any system (certainly not in electonic circuitry nor in telephone menu systems).
Speaking mathematically, r is the radix, and w is the number of digits (or symbols, words, or whatever you call them) required using that radix. The cost is F(r) * w, where F(r) is some model for the cost to implement that radix.
The words "An obvious strategy" are plain wrong. It's not obvious at all. It's simple-minded and ignorant. It's devoid of any anaylsis or thought about any real system. Even from a purely theoretical standpoint, it's academically dishonest to gloss over this critically important point rather than write "r * w" instead of "w * F(r)" and state the assumption of a linearly increasing cost per digit as the radix changes.
Well, maybe that's a bit strong. Who am I to judge what's academically proper. But the paper clearly begins by saying:
People count by tens and machines count by twos... I want to offer three cheers for base 3, the ternary system... They are the Goldilocks choice among numbering systems: When base 2 is too small and base 10 is too big, base 3 is just right.
The general arguement that base-3 is actually superior for computer arithematic is also quite evident in the "Trit by Trit by Trit" section (just below figure 1). I'll avoid quoting much of it, but at the conclusion he writes:
Why did base 3 fail to catch on? One easy guess is that reliable three-state devices just didn't exist or were too hard to develop. And once binary technology became established, the tremendous investment in methods for fabricating binary chips would have overwhelmed any small theoretical advantage of other bases.
Now the rhetorical question "Why did base 3 fail to catch on?" is answered by postulating (not even any real knowledge) that way-back-then it was too tricky to design and base-2 gained so much momentum and became so well established that base-3 never caught on. Notice how he concludes with the words "overwhelmed any small theoretical advantage of other bases", reaffirming once again the standpoint the base-3 has some advantage, if small, over base-2, theoretically speaking. He's clearly talking about implementation of circuitry.
The ugly truth is that rolled up in the theoretical advantage of base-3 for circuitry is that assumption that the "cost" is "r times w" (r for radix, w for number of digits). Any engineer can tell you that cost has units of dollars, and r and w are both unitless quantities. To compute the cost of using a particular number system, you need to use a function (above I called it "F(r)") that transforms the abstract number "r" into the cost of implementing that radix. The unitless number of possible digits needs to be turned unto a quantity in units of dollars (or some other currency) before it can be multiplied by "w" to obtain the cost of implementing that radix.
At the time when things pretty much fell into the currently accepted pattern, word sizes that were even powers of two happened to be convenient:
IBM's EBCDIC (8 bits) and AT&T/ANSI's ASCII (7 bits + parity) has a lot more to do with it than what "happened to be convenient". Before EBCDIC and ASCII, 6 bit encodings were "what was convenient". Both IBM and AT&T were huge monopolies in the 60's, so whatever they implmented was what the rest of the world had to live with. That is why computers today use 8 bit bytes. It's mostly IBM's doing, with some help from AT&T. Luckily, AT&T was generous to take the standard-based route and a fairly good encoding resulted. Heaven forbid we'd all be stuck with EBCDIC otherwise.
Of course, I'm repeating myself (a more detailed explaination awaits if you follow that link).
Before ASCII in the mid-60's, computers represented characters using 6 bits. 12 bit systems were common, since 64 characters are enough to represent A-Z, 0-9, and a handful of symbols and control codes, and a 12 bit number gives enough range for a lot of types of computation.
Here's a really well written history by Tom Jennings of the early character codes and the two ASCII standards in the 60's. AT&T apparantly forced the world to use ASCII. ASCII required 7 bits, which was a huge departure from the previous 6 bit (and 5 bit, 2 set) systems.
Tom's history doesn't mention the real reason we all have 8/16/32/64 bit machines today: IBM's Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) encoding, which spec'd 8 bits per character (how he could leave out EBCDIC is beyond me?) IBM forced the world to 8-bits to represent characters inside the computer, and AT&T forced the world to communicate them with 7 bits. ANSI recommented in the 1967 ASCII spec (X3.4... the one that added lowercase) to use the eigth bit for parity. ASCII was more focused on communication than storage of data.
The thing I find interesting is that the old computer and telcom industry monopolies forced these fundamental architecture decisions on everyone, both discarding lots of established practice with little regard for backwards compatibility. But the modern computer and telcom monopolies have more or less adopted and adapted from existing technologies and have largely failed to push their own "standards" that discard backwards compatability, at least when it comes to how data is stored and communicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, you have a website on the World Wide Web, with contact information for people interested in whatever you've put on it (read "prospective customers" for any business).
Ok, you're "sorrrrrrry" (but in all caps). Doesn't sound so apologetic, does it? You've got lots of reasons why you're not actually wrong, despite clearly being wrong factually.
I had no idea that this many Slashdot readers were so old. :P
Reason #1: Those who pointed out your mistake are "old".
After looking at some of those links though, it looks like those first two games were not id Software games? So why should they be considered "official" Wolfenstein games then?
Reason #2: The original game was made by Br0derbund, and since you don't really believe you're wrong (despite clear factual evidence), you'll now attempt to substitute the word "official" for "original". Yes, it's a desparate attempt, as the parent posts spoke of "original", but maybe, just maybe you can avoid being wrong.
I guess I'll always consider the first one to be Wolf 3D, since it's from id Software and is the one I played as a little kid.
Reason #3: It doesn't matter what the facts really are. It doesn't matter that the plain, undeniable truth might be. Because you played id's 3D version as a "little kid", you'll always consider it the first one. Truth and undisputable facts be damned.
But there are apparently two that are older, whether they are "real" Wolfenstein games depends on your point of view I guess!
Reason #4: If all else failes, as in reason #2, attempt to re-write history, this time subsitution the word "real" for "original".
As you said in the beginning "stop jumping all over me"... perhaps you should step back and look at yourself. I'm "jumping all over" you, not because you were wrong, but because even after being proven wrong, you post this crap claiming that even though you are factually wrong, it's somehow not so wrong, and you're "sorrrrrrry", yet not actually in the least bit sorry.
Since you're too young to remember 8-bit computers, you're probably also too young to have watched the old television sitcom "Happy Days". Briefly, "Fonzie" was one of the main characters who was ultra "cool". He road a bike, had girls hanging all over him, etc. In one famous episode, Fonzie was wrong about something, and he couldn't admit it. Every time he tried to, he'd say "I was wr, wr, wrrr" and couldn't say the word "wrong". It was quite humorous. Here's a page with a brief summary in the first paragraph, and then transitions onto a very christian-oriented sermon, which could do you some good.
Next time, when you respond, rather than telling people to get off your back, and then make a feable attempt to deny that you could have been wrong, try something like this:
Had you posted something along those line, many people including me would not be "jumping all over" you. I hope you can learn to understand this... if not today, perhaps when you grow older and have an opportunity to mature a bit.
Don't forget to deduct your collection costs, and discount your projection for the portion that will evade and never pay up.
Hell, they might even turn around spam you with a "learn to collect money judgements" get-rich-quick scheme.
No. Sorry. Not yet.
It's still FAR too early to say "they have gotten their act together". You might say that when they release a public beta. You could even say that when there's a "teaser" that runs on linux but only has a few character classes, spells, items, maps, etc. You might even say this if it only runs on a limited range of hardware/kernels/libc and has worse bugs than their original 1.10 windows release.
Until there is _something_ available to everyone (like me) that purchased the game in hopes of "soon" being able to play without rebooting into a yucky OS, it's too soon to say they've "gotten their act together".
I've personally only rebooted a couple dozen times to play. I originally thought I would abstain until the linux client... but I got curious, and so did my girlfriend (yep, we picked up a second copy, at approx $50 retail). One thing I can say from experience is that even on the windows client, they really only recent "got their act together" and fixed the last of the crashing bugs, somewhere around 1.25. There were MANY other little bugs... but I can live with some choppy audio on the movies and little things that aren't quite right. On my machine, it would crash on startup about 50% of the time before rev 1.25 or 1.26 (or something like that). Even that is ok.... but in-game crashing is just not acceptable. There was a bug where the game would crash sometimes when you removed your armor (eg, in front the "seedy tavern" to put on the stolen pirate uniform so they'd let you inside).
So opinions may differ... I personally will say "they have gotten their act together" when a playable linux client is released that doesn't suffer from show-stopper bugs like in-game crashing. You may differ, but certainly this recent news means nothing. The original promise of a linux client alongside windows meant nothing. The "within weeks" and "sometime in the fall" didn't mean much. Any excuse could be offered, as we just saw. They could decide to scrap the linux client for any reason.
On the plus, at least it seems Bioware's NWN linux effort has put pressure on Rad to port to linux.
In RIAA spin mathematics, your 45 Mbit/sec T3 is 1562.5 times faster than the "average" user with 28.8k dialup. But they'd still fudge a bit and round it up to 1563.
Why "bust" you for 28x when they could claim 1563x ??? If you're gonna lie, might as well milk it for all it's worth! (sorta like price-fixing CDs between $15 to $20....)
No, but tech news sites like slashdot are. Maybe the several articles about NWN on slashdot contributed nothing to Bioware's sales, but that seems pretty unlikely. There are a LOT of "techie" users out there who don't keep up on the game scene, but buy a game from time to time, and read slashdot daily.
It is a fact the slashdot has a daily readership of at least 100k people... usually more. It is true that a lot of "buzz" was created regarding NWN here, posted due to the promised linux client.
Even if you are correct, that linux users are an insignificant number, it is a well established fact that most people visit slashdot using MSIE. A LOT of people read hype on NWN as a result of slashdot. They would not have, had it not been for the promise of the linux client.
I am not speaking on their keeping with promises, as I really couldn't care less (I play my games in Windows)
Then you are off-topic, as the topic is the fact that they are badly slipping their promised schedule for the late release of the linux client, which was originally promised to be released together with the windows one.
but please, let's not try and rpetend like the Linux gaming community is some huge force.
Let's also try not to pretend that several high profile stories carried here on slashdot and elsewhere in the "linux community" didn't generate a lot of buzz about NWN.
After all, YOU are here, reading and posting at slashdot, and you couldn't care less about the linux client. Even if there are no linux users anywhere in the world at all, YOU and hundreds of thousands of other slashdot "doze-only" readers saw several stories here on slashdot about this cool new upcoming game.
The reason why... Bioware's promises of the linux client, which was originally promised at release (and of course the release was originally promised and delayed many times), and then promised for Fall 2002, and now promised for Winter 2003.
I believe Bioware is trying. I don't believe it's some big conspiracy to simply promote the game and spread the word to "techie types" who don't read news about new games.
But only now, after supposedly working to release it with the windows client and then supposedly "actively" working on it for 4-5 months, at this late stage admit they depend on third party libraries for sound and movies... well, it does indeed give the impression that they have made a half-hearted effort.
But you couldn't care less. If Bioware is lying, if they break their promise, the fact that you don't use linux would make it ok. Moreover, your impression that there are relatively few linux users would make it OK for Bioware to lie about the linux client, or completely reverse couse and break their promises.
You'd be wasting your money, since excellent email and web filtering software are available for free.
These are the two I personally use, and they are very effective. There are many others available. There's even some that apparantly work pretty well for windows users.
There's a sucker born every minute. If you can toss out enough ads, you'll find those people.
Is works for spammers, and it (seems to) work for obnoxiuos webcam, gambling and other web ads. A sad fact, but a fact nonetheless.
Luckily, client side filtering works pretty well.
I personally do not... but from the IAB press release:
So, would the real Rex Briggs please stand up... and tell us who these suc... er, loyal customers really are?
(in case you didn't follow that last link....)
Maybe Rex would be interested in some of the same catalogues and other valuable offers that Alan Ralsky is enjoying?
But it's fully covered in Joe's answer to the question posted by "acehole".
Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...
or put money into researching artificial eyes.
Joe put it very well. You obviously missed it:
I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?
I honestly wonder if you read the answer to the second question, where Joe says that HTML-based sites can take care of much of the accessibility problem by simply using valid HTML with good ALT tags, and including a "skip nav links" link near the top of the page.
Even if you went crazy and did all this stuff, it's all pretty simple and easy things to do. Much of it is just good practice in HTML. Most of the "captioning" (that ordinary IE users never see) is helpful for indexing in google and other search engines, which is pretty good reason to do it anyway.
The key point is that it's not expensive. Almost every single image on every good website involves quite a bit of work, at least croping and scaling. Many times a thumbnail is created and a link made to the larger image, or a dedicated page with the larger image. Fancy drop shadowing and other effects are commonly added, as are rounded corners. Considerable work goes of course goes into creating the image in the first place, wether that's composing it or taking a photo (posing the subject, lighting, transfering from the digital camera or negative, etc).
The effort (and expense) of an ALT tag is so very minor compared to the effort/expense that went into the original preparation of the image and its placement within the site.
Likewise, adding a "skip nav" link into the nav bar is a rather trivial task compared to the design of the nav bar itself. Many sites are built from a template (like mine). All you need to do is add it into the template. Yes, that does take some small amount of work, which is more than doing nothing, but compared to all the work that went into the nav bar, it's really very minor. Sites that don't update from a template STILL go to all the trouble of having navigation links. They're doing it _somehow_, and adding just more more tiny link, that's the same on every page and never even "breaks" because it always points within the same page is really just a very tiny increase.
It's really not hard. I did it to my site today after reading Joe's responses. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it, mostly updating some test pages before updating the live site. Now, I'll admit that I haven't updated the home page and some special pages yet... but the vast majority of pages that are built from the template were very easily updated. Also, I should admit that I checked a several sites and nearly all are using the approach of a small invisible GIF with "skip navigational links" as the ALT text (contrary to Joe's suggestion)... so I went with the established practice used on lots of other major sites that are targeted at people with disabilities.
Nearly all my images (about 630 unique files on pjrc.com) have ALT text already, as that's just a normal part of good HTML practice.
It's really very cheap and easy. I can afford it. I spent no money, 20 minutes on the "skip nav" link, and I just type an ALT tag for every image (which is less work than even the simplest image processing). It costs a LOT less than research to develop artificial organs!
Like the timing of responding publicly quite promptly.
Like the timing where they disabled the 'bot soon after some people posted concerns about it?
If it really were some sinister plot to rob associates of their referal fees (which could be done much more easily by simply making accounting errors, Enron or RIAA style), don't you think they would have remained silent, or at least kept the 'bot running as a lengthy "though investigation" proceeded until the 26th?
Terminate the agreement.
Bill for the bandwidth, or sue for damages.
Various technical measures (which are prohibited by the agreement)
Point out to your contacts at Amazon that this is pointless and dumb in such a manner they actually listen.
Here's an idea.... How about politely posting a question or two about it in the appropriate forums? Who knows, something crazy might happen, like responsible people at Amazon might respond and turn the bot off while they investigate. Then, they might post a reasonable explaination and take reasonable steps to make sure they're not abusing associate's servers.
Here's another idea.... Try reading the pages that slashdot linked to. I know that's a lot of work, so I'll save you a bit of effort by posting each slashdot link, and a brief summary of what you would have found had you bothered to click on it and ACTUALLY READ it (before posting here with a subject advocating actually reading the terms and conditions).
This just isn't that sensational of a story. Yet another 'bot that needs some refinement, but a it IS designed to avoid more than one hit every 2 seconds (and the evidence posted seems to be consistent with that). They at least did respond to people's concerns and they took the bot off-line while they investigated it. Sounds pretty reasonable. It's not clear what might actually be done, and some of it appears that Amazon is claiming the problem isn't so great... but clearly they are attempting to respond to people's concerns.
Amazon feels they have a right to check the links on associate sites, and they put it in the terms. Again, it's really not that unreasonable.
What is unreasonable is the inflamatory summary appearing on the main slashdot page. Yes, timothy and other slashdot "editors" can claim it's all just editorial from "theodp" who submitted the summary. But what kind of editing it that?
The summary concludes with:
The link is to Amazon's position on DDOS attacks... there's really no similarity to a well-intentioned 'bot, which clearly identifies itself, limits itself to 0.5 Hz access rate, AND was responsibly taken off-line and reexamined when some people complained that it used too much bandwidth.
It really has little to do with security, other than the market security the established telcom and cable companies (who participated in those hearings).
And in related news, telemarkers don't waste people's time, as the callers are paid an hourly wage to make all those calls.
Let's call the existing distance (not specified in the article), "r". So the original and new coverage areas ought to be (in terms of feet):
orig_coverage = pi * r * r
new_coverage = pi * (r + 600) * (r + 600)
The difference between these is claimed to be 2.5 square miles. Since there's 5280 feet in a mile, the difference between these two is supposed to be:
new_coverage - orig_coverage = 2.5 * 5280 * 5280
So, putting these together, and multiplying out the (r+600)*(r+600) part, it ought to be possible to deduce the original radius: ....adding some parens to make it easier to read
(pi * r * r) + (pi * 2 * 600 * r) + (pi * 600 * 600) - (pi * r * r) = 2.5 * 5280 * 5280
So, luckily the r squared terms subtract each other out, so this little bit of math won't requiring using a quadratic equation. Subracting the constant, it turns into:
pi * 2 * 600 * r = 2.5 * 5280 * 5280 - pi * 600 * 600
Now for anyone reading this far who's good at basic algerba, I'm going to appologize for yet a couple more simple steps spelled out....
r * 3769.9 = 69696000 - 1130972.4
r = 68565027.6 / 3769.9
r = 18187.5
So it looks like existing DSL goes 3.44 miles, and this new one goes 3.56 miles, and the increase from 37.276 square mile to 39.776 square miles really is 6% (actually 6.7%).
So it does really work out, and the existing DSL distance of 3.44 miles sounds reasonable.
Of course, it's all a moot point if the FCC allows the cable and baby bells to lock out competition. The only reason almost anyone has DSL within a 3.44 mile radius is because AT&T started rolling out high speed cable. What this new DSL _really_ needs (other than a real increase in distance) is a competing technology/business and a regulatory environment that allows that competition instead of squashing it. How likely is that? Too bad there's no easy formulas there.....
I'm glad you mentioned this. I've been using Verio for the last couple years. Everything has been really good, except for little skirmishs with the blacklists.
When I first signed up, just about two years ago, there were just a couple of the minor blacklists listing a netblock that had my IP number. The listings were for a spammer that Verio had kicked off months ago. I contacted the blacklist maintainers (only one of those lists was could be be called "maintained"). It's remarkably difficult to contact these people. Eventually the better list dropped the block, and that gave me enough leverage to convince the other two to do the same (the spammer had long since moved on for greener pastures).
But in the last year or so, there's been a whole new crop of spammer acusations. I can't verify them... it reads like a whole lot of conspiracy theory. But a couple weeks ago it even got posted as a slashdot story (so it must be true, right?)
I called Verio. Before the slashdot story, they would just deny everything. They didn't admit they were catering to any spammers, but they didn't flat out deny that no spammers were operating on their network.
Verio claims that their hosting business is very separate from their network provision services (T1, T3, OC-something lines.... more bandwidth than I can envision). So far, the more reputable blacklists haven't waged netblocks on Verio's hosting side, or at least the few IP numbers allocated to my little server.
So because of these escalating wars between the spammers and blacklists, if you intend to host a mail server, the ISPs record about hosting spammers should be your top concern. Saddly, there are a lot of mixed messages and it's hard to tell if any particular provider is any good. Two years ago, for example, Verio was listed at the top of SpamCop's page of providers with exemplary anti-abuse policies.
Recently I've been making some tenative plans for jumping ship from Verio. Other than this spammer/blacklist issue, and one little incident where they didn't notify me in advance of (supposedly) scheduled maintainance (they claim they did), the decicated hosting service from Verio has been great.
But hitting blacklists, even occasionally, is a real show-stopper. For my little site, we do a light amount of e-commerce. When a confirmation email to a customer bounces (they placed the order over the web), we look like a little fly-by-night company out to steal their credit card info. Of course, emails bounce for a variety of other reasons, so we've gotten into the practive of picking up the phone and calling them with the tracking number.
The sad news is that there doesn't seem to be any really good way of determining if a provider is hosting or provisioning bandwidth to spammers. Even if everything looks good in advance (as it did 2 years ago with Verio), things change.... and they change more rapidly that you'd want to move providers when everything else is running so smoothly.
I wish I could recommend Verio, as the service, performance and reliability has been excellent. But this spammer problem and the reaction from the blacklisting community is definately something you don't want to get caught in the middle of.
I'm taking Rackspace off my short list of "plan B" options if the Verio/blacklist situation gets worse. Rackspace was actually at the top of my list.
It offers 1280x1024 at 15 frames per second. That's a LOT faster than other network cameras. That in itself is pretty newsworthy for slashdot.
It's also open source. The software, drivers, firmware and hardware HDL code are all open. Even if it didn't have incredible performance, this makes it pretty newsworthy for slashdot. The ability to actually tweak the hardware-level processing and compression of the camera data is intriguing.
The linked web page talks quite openly about the design process and how the thing really works (at least as a high level of abstraction). That in itself is pretty interesting and makes it fairly newsworthy for slashdot... at least as newsworthy as link to various writings describing how certain aspects of modern microprocessors work.
So, call it a "Slashvertisement", just because it's a product for sale and the author stands to sell some.
I think this is one of the coolest things slashdot has posted in quite some time. It's certainly a lot more interesting that yet another "sky is falling" story about privacy or copyright policy.
It's still wasting the bandwidth my company pays for.
Filtering is a solution when the problem is stated as "I get about 250-300 spam messages a day ..... I'd kill to only be getting ten spams a day".
Filtering does solve THAT problem.
Consumption of bandwitdth and usage of server resources is a DIFFERENT problem.
I just took a peek at my spam folder... (what a lot of obscene junk, glad I don't see that shit every day since installing SpamAssassin). Only 397 messages for during the month of november. I saved all those to a file, and that file is about 4 megs. The average message size is 10374 bytes. That includes quite a bit of stuff added by SpamAssassin about why it filtered each message, but I'll just overlook that rather than putting more work into getting a more accurate (lower) number of bytes per spam message.
So for my inbox, spam used an average of 137 kbytes per day. Even at 300 message per day, that's a daily bandwidth usage of 3 megabytes. By way of comparison, this slashdot discussion, viewed in flat mode with a threshold of 1, gets split into two pages. I saved the first one, and the html is 601k and there are 44k of images. So just viewing one long comments page here on slashdot is over 4 times my daily spam bandwitdh... or in the case of 300 spam/day, viewing five comments pages is the same bandwidth usage as all that spam.
For dial-up users, waiting for 137k or 3M really sucks. But in the context of "bandwidth my company pays for" (nearly all companies have a local mail server), it's really not a lot of bandwidth. A whole day's worth of spam is probably much less than even a light session of web surfing.
Would it also be genius to put up fake traffic signs directing people to your store, restaurant, or other place of business?
How about sending fake invoices to renew domain registration, yet in the very fine print it's actually a transferal to another provider? That "genius" recently went to court, and NetworkSolutions didn't look so smart then, did they?
Real genius in advertising is what google does. At a time when people have become "banner blind", google went to fast loading text only ads, clearly defined as ads at a time when other search engines compromised their results with paid placement or ads visually similar to search results. People by and large respect that and google's ads are quite effective. That's genius.
Faking windows dialog boxes (and serving win9x look messages to Linux, MacOS, and WinXP clients) isn't genius. It's deception. I hope they go down in flames and others take notice.
Exactly.
This is one of the really critical factors that people who say "just hit delete" don't understand. It's disheartening to see get rich quick schemes, fake diplomas, and many other types of fraudlent or at least highly distastful messages.
It puts people in sour mood. Not only is it aggrevating, it dilutes one's optimism that other people out there deserve some of your time to help them, to put that little bit of extra time into answering, to go that extra mile and attach a useful file, find a useful link or two, or something along those lines. A session at the computer that's intended to communicate with others begins by first avoiding unwanted and usually very unpleasant communication from spammer.
Even if bandwidth is free, even if you had plenty of time, having to look at ads for beastiality porn, diet pills, pryamid schemes, herbal "viagra"... even only briefly enough to discern them as spam and delete them, is enough to sour ones mood.
Immediately after having briefly encountering filthy messages from the sleeziest, scummiest people on the planent, most people then go on to correspond with friends and family, co-workers, customers, or well-meaning strangers who've contacted them for some legitimate reason.
It's just plain wrong.
No need to get violent. No need to kill. The solution is simple, cheap, and pretty easy.
Just start using SpamAssassin. It's free and installs easily on modern unix systems using either sendmail or procmail. If you're stuck with Outlook on Windows, there's a company selling an installshield-based version for only $30 (considerably less that even the cheapest of murder plots). They claim to be working on support for other windows based clients, so if you're windows based and using another program, relief is probably on the way. They have a 2 week free trial version.
Spamassassin really works. They claim it filters about 95%, which should put your spam level between 12.5 to 15 messages per day.... very close to the desired goal of 10 (and nobody needs to die).
With SpamAssassin, every message gets a spam rating. Legitimate messages usually score under 3 points, and SpamAssassin's default threshold is 5.0 points. You can adjust the threshold where messages get filtered... I personally set mine to 7.0 because I'm a bit paranoid of losing any legit messages. But even 7.0 works great... most spam scores well over 10 points. If all your legit messages are scoring very low (quite likely), you might be able to safely lower the threshold a bit and get under that magical 10 per day. Personally, I find it filters nearly all spams even at 7.0.
Be sure to turn on all the "network" tests including the blacklists and razor. By default, these might be set to 0.0 points each, so they won't get used. They do take some time because they involve communication with other sites (very large ISPs with one mail server for thousands of uses don't want to spend that much time per message, but as an individual you almost certainly do). The blacklists often block legit messages, so give them low scores, but it's safe to set Razor (a database of known spam messages, with "fuzzy" matching) to a high value like 4.0 or even 5.0.
There's been a lot of hype lately about Bayesian filtering... and maybe someday lots of email clients will have it built in. And maybe large numbers of users will go to the trouble to sort their messages properly so the filters on each machine "learn". Maybe.
But right now, you can download SpamAssassin for free (or pay just a bit for a commercial much-easier-to-install-on-windows version), and instantly 95% of your incoming spam will be gone. Well, most people just have SpamAssassin modify the message and then they use their mail client or procmail to deliver the message to a "spam folder" (so you can occasionally look through it and remember the bad-old-days before you finally broke down and went through the not-really-that-difficult process of installing SpamAssassin).
It really works, it's free (or cheap), and it doesn't involve killing anyone.
Yeah, right. Tell that to Digicash and others who failed miserably as attempts to introduce "electronic cash". Their old site isn't even responding anymore. Anyone remember Mojo Nation? Look what's hosted there now (no, I didn't mis-type that, it redirects there... try typing the URL yourself to see).
These are two high profile companies that come to mind right away. It's pretty clear by this point that digital cash and micropayments have been a miserable failure. A lot can be said about what went wrong and why, but the ultimate unescapable conclusion is that a digital cash system with micropayment-level transactions is anything but a simple solution.
In the paragraph just above figure 2:
Scroll back up to figure 1, and the third paragraph up is where the assumption is first made:
So what he's saying is that the "cost" of a representing a number is the cost per digit multiplied by the number of digits required. But he makes the assumption that the cost of each digit is a linear relationship with the radix, which is simply not true in almost any system (certainly not in electonic circuitry nor in telephone menu systems).
Speaking mathematically, r is the radix, and w is the number of digits (or symbols, words, or whatever you call them) required using that radix. The cost is F(r) * w, where F(r) is some model for the cost to implement that radix.
The words "An obvious strategy" are plain wrong. It's not obvious at all. It's simple-minded and ignorant. It's devoid of any anaylsis or thought about any real system. Even from a purely theoretical standpoint, it's academically dishonest to gloss over this critically important point rather than write "r * w" instead of "w * F(r)" and state the assumption of a linearly increasing cost per digit as the radix changes.
Well, maybe that's a bit strong. Who am I to judge what's academically proper. But the paper clearly begins by saying:
The general arguement that base-3 is actually superior for computer arithematic is also quite evident in the "Trit by Trit by Trit" section (just below figure 1). I'll avoid quoting much of it, but at the conclusion he writes:
Now the rhetorical question "Why did base 3 fail to catch on?" is answered by postulating (not even any real knowledge) that way-back-then it was too tricky to design and base-2 gained so much momentum and became so well established that base-3 never caught on. Notice how he concludes with the words "overwhelmed any small theoretical advantage of other bases", reaffirming once again the standpoint the base-3 has some advantage, if small, over base-2, theoretically speaking. He's clearly talking about implementation of circuitry.
The ugly truth is that rolled up in the theoretical advantage of base-3 for circuitry is that assumption that the "cost" is "r times w" (r for radix, w for number of digits). Any engineer can tell you that cost has units of dollars, and r and w are both unitless quantities. To compute the cost of using a particular number system, you need to use a function (above I called it "F(r)") that transforms the abstract number "r" into the cost of implementing that radix. The unitless number of possible digits needs to be turned unto a quantity in units of dollars (or some other currency) before it can be multiplied by "w" to obtain the cost of implementing that radix.
IBM's EBCDIC (8 bits) and AT&T/ANSI's ASCII (7 bits + parity) has a lot more to do with it than what "happened to be convenient". Before EBCDIC and ASCII, 6 bit encodings were "what was convenient". Both IBM and AT&T were huge monopolies in the 60's, so whatever they implmented was what the rest of the world had to live with. That is why computers today use 8 bit bytes. It's mostly IBM's doing, with some help from AT&T. Luckily, AT&T was generous to take the standard-based route and a fairly good encoding resulted. Heaven forbid we'd all be stuck with EBCDIC otherwise.
Of course, I'm repeating myself (a more detailed explaination awaits if you follow that link).
Here's a really well written history by Tom Jennings of the early character codes and the two ASCII standards in the 60's. AT&T apparantly forced the world to use ASCII. ASCII required 7 bits, which was a huge departure from the previous 6 bit (and 5 bit, 2 set) systems.
Tom's history doesn't mention the real reason we all have 8/16/32/64 bit machines today: IBM's Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) encoding, which spec'd 8 bits per character (how he could leave out EBCDIC is beyond me?) IBM forced the world to 8-bits to represent characters inside the computer, and AT&T forced the world to communicate them with 7 bits. ANSI recommented in the 1967 ASCII spec (X3.4... the one that added lowercase) to use the eigth bit for parity. ASCII was more focused on communication than storage of data.
The thing I find interesting is that the old computer and telcom industry monopolies forced these fundamental architecture decisions on everyone, both discarding lots of established practice with little regard for backwards compatibility. But the modern computer and telcom monopolies have more or less adopted and adapted from existing technologies and have largely failed to push their own "standards" that discard backwards compatability, at least when it comes to how data is stored and communicated.