Not only have I never seen it documented anywhere, but he was asked about it and replied that he never said that.
Yeah, well *someone* clearly made that decision, and it affected end users and programmers all the way up until windows 95 and direct X came along, since the design of DOS dictated that you had to sacrifice a chicken and chant an incantation every time you used a program that needed more RAM. Which by 1992, was *every* program.
So while I'm sure that Bill Gates isn't lying to us all about that, he was the guy responsible for the design of DOS, and he *did* decide that 640K is enough for everyone.
Let's face it. Our computing devices are going faster year after year. But our laptop batteries don't show the same performance improvement.
It's not the speed of the computing devices that cause problems with battery life - it's the size of the screen, the DVD player, and the hard drive that suck down the battery life. And if you look closely at the ratio of amp-hours to battery life, you'll notice that battery life has remained the same over the past ten years. This is probably because two to three hours of battery life is what we see as "acceptable" and as such every time we make better batteries, we see it as an opportunity to tack on a bigger LCD or a faster hard drive, not as an opportunity to make the batteries last longer.
There are plenty of smaller, more efficient laptops that last for four or five hours (at least), but my guess is that's not what you're looking for.
The point is that his weekends are *that* valuable to him. Work can certainly pay for him to come in on Saturday, so long as they pay him this amount, but you can bet they bloody well won't. This accomplishes two things. It discourages work from calling him in on a Saturday, and should they decide that it was worth it, he gets paid an extra $1000.
This is not his regular wage by any stretch of the imagination.
What's a better idea is what I said, to use a firewall that refers to a RTBL. It's much faster, uses less CPU time and relieves a lot of load from the spamassassin box.
1) ISPs are fighting for market share. They need that 20% of the population that is retarded enough to buy from spammers. 2) If you kick people off for buying from spammers, they will go to some other ISP who will welcome them with open arms. 3) Even without e-mail these idiots will find a way to buy from spammers. 4) As much as we would like an entrance exam for using the internet, it will never happen. It's also an extraordinarily arrogant thing to even consider, you insensitive clod.
More than likely they were using spamassassin, but with all the external checks still turned on. They recommend for large sites to turn these off because checking SPEWS, ORDB and Spamcop takes a few vital seconds per message, and when you're delivering more than about 20K messages per day you start getting a backlog.
I know that we used to do this and while it made spamassassin more effective, it's much faster to do it using a firewall or tcpserver rules. We have a single server delivering 50K+ messages per day and it's all we need. If the load were to double, we could still use the same machine.
It's worth noting that making these changes with spamassassin and qmail is really easy and would only take about ten or fifteen minutes per server if you know how.
We used to run all our servers in our office. When it was too cold in the wintertime, I would joke that we needed more athlons in the office to keep it warm.
In the summer, we would keep the AC on full blast 24/7 and it was still 32C and the servers were overheating.
Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change. This will continue in an endless loop forever. We'll invent a new medium that's just like mail but different, and then the spammers will overwhelm it, and they'll get away with it for 20 years because the old law somehow doesn't apply. Why the hell does the supreme court have to go over this with every single medium? This *exact* *same* *thing* has happened with paper mail, faxes, and now e-mail, and next pagers and wireless text. After that the inter-cranial network of the future will fall under the crushing force of greedy pornographers and snake oil peddlars.
The medium is not what should be at issue here, but the matter of fact that the consumer is being inundated with crap in what is supposed to be private inter-personal communications.
The fact of the matter is that we were too damn nice to the first spammers back in 1993. We slapped them on the wrist and told them never to do it again (even if that telling off was laced with obscenities). We should have sued their asses into the dark ages and used this piece of legislation to draw a correlation to the present. But no, the pioneers of the Internet were too interested in free communications to believe that we needed help from the law, that the Internet should be unregulated. "We can police ourselves" we said. What a bunch of stupid idealists we were.
I happen to have grown up near a forest-service tanker base, and there's two issues here.
1) A 747 can fly at a top speed of about mach.85. This means that while it might not be able to land *near* a fire, it could easily *get* to one in short order. 2) Most of the larger firefighting planes aren't amphibious; they land at a regular airstrip, refuel and refill on fire retardant, then go back to the fire.
The real problem is that at a 747's minimum speed with cargo is entirely too fast to drop fire retardant with any effectiveness. Drop it too high or too fast and you don't get much of anything wet, you just sort of mist it. These things aren't terribly maneuverable either, and that's a serious issue when you're flying into a turbulent air mass with extreme updrafts and downdrafts that come with forest fires.
1) Install a hardware firewall. 2) Install a software firewall. 3) Install a quality antivirus program. 4) Install Ad-Aware - preferably the Pro version with Ad-Watch. 5) Install Spybot.
Besides the 4+ hours of work that this entails, the specialized knowledge and cash required, a five item list like this is hardly what I would term "extremely easy."
In fact, it's more like saying "Any educated person can boost the performance of his car in 5 easy steps! Just install a turbocharger..."
And it's also worth noting that installing two firewalls like that is paranoid and stupid. Especially if the first one isn't even forwarding ports, something some 90% of computer users don't even need to do. And if you are forwarding ports, then what are you going to do on the client machine? Block those ports? What was the point of forwarding them again?
Here's some of the evil and immorality I've participated in as a direct result of IRC:
- Downloaded porn and software from people who rightfully owned it... and wanted to give it away for free! - Joined the Church of Satan! - Discovered my local BDSM chapter! - Met my wife under dubious circumstances, and then lived in sin for two years! - Conspired to commit terrorist acts! - Participated in group sex!
Without IRC, I would never have accomplished any of these evil, evil acts. Instead, I might have had to go outside and even talk to real people in person in dank basements while we plotted our evil. (Not that we didn't do that too, but IRC made it easier to organize our circles of evil.)
I work as the sole sysadmin for a small ISP, which means that I have a pager that can go off any time, any day. Stupid little mistakes like blown semicolons can result in thousands of customers not getting service. And then there's dealing with bonehead customers.
But I'm not stressed out.
My boss admittedly helps a lot as he doesn't ask for deadlines, just to get things done as soon as possible, and when it's done it's done. I cooperate by doing my best to make sure things happen. I naturally desire a finished product, and as such they get done in a reasonable amount of time. I also don't treat the job as if the responsibility for the operation of the universe rests solely on my shoulders. Sure, the pager might go off at 3am, and I might have to get my butt to the server room in 15 minutes flat (this is doable for me), but I don't have to act as if every second counts, and that I should shoot everyone that gets in my way. I still manage 99.9% uptime, which is mostly defined by the design of the system and leaving things be anyway.
My wife works at a Visa call center as a customer service rep. It's a place with high turnover, irritating idiots that ream you out over $5 that they rightfully owe, and high expectations on the part of management. It's also a place where management works hard to make sure they can keep employees longer than two weeks, by offering great benefits, allowing the CSRs to vent about boneheads, bonuses for hard work, and free food. They also have a very clearly defined reward structure for their top performers.
But what she does for her stress is her gym membership. It's good for her health, it's helping her lose weight, but most importantly, she can beat the crap out of the machines instead of the customers, and exercise generally helps a lot with stress anyway.
The first experimental proof of Einstein's general theory
I seem to recall that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was used to explain the irregularities in observations of Mercury's orbit as it passed behind the sun, shortly after his theory was published. And using this theory explained those irregularities with a very high degree of accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only have I never seen it documented anywhere, but he was asked about it and replied that he never said that.
Yeah, well *someone* clearly made that decision, and it affected end users and programmers all the way up until windows 95 and direct X came along, since the design of DOS dictated that you had to sacrifice a chicken and chant an incantation every time you used a program that needed more RAM. Which by 1992, was *every* program.
So while I'm sure that Bill Gates isn't lying to us all about that, he was the guy responsible for the design of DOS, and he *did* decide that 640K is enough for everyone.
Why weren't they this conscientious and forward thinking when spam wasn't a problem yet?
Oh. Heh. Yeah. It's because the little guy was the victim there.
was that he *paid* an ISP in china to relay his crap.
So now it's not just an "unwitting error" but "intentionally irritating".
Let's face it. Our computing devices are going faster year after year. But our laptop batteries don't show the same performance improvement.
It's not the speed of the computing devices that cause problems with battery life - it's the size of the screen, the DVD player, and the hard drive that suck down the battery life. And if you look closely at the ratio of amp-hours to battery life, you'll notice that battery life has remained the same over the past ten years. This is probably because two to three hours of battery life is what we see as "acceptable" and as such every time we make better batteries, we see it as an opportunity to tack on a bigger LCD or a faster hard drive, not as an opportunity to make the batteries last longer.
There are plenty of smaller, more efficient laptops that last for four or five hours (at least), but my guess is that's not what you're looking for.
You don't get it.
The point is that his weekends are *that* valuable to him. Work can certainly pay for him to come in on Saturday, so long as they pay him this amount, but you can bet they bloody well won't. This accomplishes two things. It discourages work from calling him in on a Saturday, and should they decide that it was worth it, he gets paid an extra $1000.
This is not his regular wage by any stretch of the imagination.
What's a better idea is what I said, to use a firewall that refers to a RTBL. It's much faster, uses less CPU time and relieves a lot of load from the spamassassin box.
1) ISPs are fighting for market share. They need that 20% of the population that is retarded enough to buy from spammers.
2) If you kick people off for buying from spammers, they will go to some other ISP who will welcome them with open arms.
3) Even without e-mail these idiots will find a way to buy from spammers.
4) As much as we would like an entrance exam for using the internet, it will never happen. It's also an extraordinarily arrogant thing to even consider, you insensitive clod.
More than likely they were using spamassassin, but with all the external checks still turned on. They recommend for large sites to turn these off because checking SPEWS, ORDB and Spamcop takes a few vital seconds per message, and when you're delivering more than about 20K messages per day you start getting a backlog.
I know that we used to do this and while it made spamassassin more effective, it's much faster to do it using a firewall or tcpserver rules. We have a single server delivering 50K+ messages per day and it's all we need. If the load were to double, we could still use the same machine.
It's worth noting that making these changes with spamassassin and qmail is really easy and would only take about ten or fifteen minutes per server if you know how.
I recall that it was by the actions of an undercover police officer who was lurking on IRC.
This is a lot different from hooking up a wiretap to the ISP's OC3 and scanning *everyone's* internet traffic for "wherez the warez?"
You know when you've been sysadminning too long when...
For a moment there I thought you were referring to W32.Beagle.B@mm.
We used to run all our servers in our office. When it was too cold in the wintertime, I would joke that we needed more athlons in the office to keep it warm.
In the summer, we would keep the AC on full blast 24/7 and it was still 32C and the servers were overheating.
Jesus Christ!
Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change. This will continue in an endless loop forever. We'll invent a new medium that's just like mail but different, and then the spammers will overwhelm it, and they'll get away with it for 20 years because the old law somehow doesn't apply. Why the hell does the supreme court have to go over this with every single medium? This *exact* *same* *thing* has happened with paper mail, faxes, and now e-mail, and next pagers and wireless text. After that the inter-cranial network of the future will fall under the crushing force of greedy pornographers and snake oil peddlars.
The medium is not what should be at issue here, but the matter of fact that the consumer is being inundated with crap in what is supposed to be private inter-personal communications.
The fact of the matter is that we were too damn nice to the first spammers back in 1993. We slapped them on the wrist and told them never to do it again (even if that telling off was laced with obscenities). We should have sued their asses into the dark ages and used this piece of legislation to draw a correlation to the present. But no, the pioneers of the Internet were too interested in free communications to believe that we needed help from the law, that the Internet should be unregulated. "We can police ourselves" we said. What a bunch of stupid idealists we were.
Two words: nuclear weapons.
Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I'd have to wonder how this would go over:
f &f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f
/home/instructors/grades
Name: &f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&f&
cat "100:Thomas A Andersen" >
Allthough writing atll those &f's would be kind of awkward.
I happen to have grown up near a forest-service tanker base, and there's two issues here.
.85. This means that while it might not be able to land *near* a fire, it could easily *get* to one in short order.
1) A 747 can fly at a top speed of about mach
2) Most of the larger firefighting planes aren't amphibious; they land at a regular airstrip, refuel and refill on fire retardant, then go back to the fire.
The real problem is that at a 747's minimum speed with cargo is entirely too fast to drop fire retardant with any effectiveness. Drop it too high or too fast and you don't get much of anything wet, you just sort of mist it. These things aren't terribly maneuverable either, and that's a serious issue when you're flying into a turbulent air mass with extreme updrafts and downdrafts that come with forest fires.
Why does this remind me of a sweatshop mentality?
"Anyone who reports of abuses in this shop will be beaten severely!"
The IRC poll is over there. --->
I'm sorry, are you proposing that I give my cable modem a tinfoil hat?
1) Install a hardware firewall.
2) Install a software firewall.
3) Install a quality antivirus program.
4) Install Ad-Aware - preferably the Pro version with Ad-Watch.
5) Install Spybot.
Besides the 4+ hours of work that this entails, the specialized knowledge and cash required, a five item list like this is hardly what I would term "extremely easy."
In fact, it's more like saying "Any educated person can boost the performance of his car in 5 easy steps! Just install a turbocharger..."
And it's also worth noting that installing two firewalls like that is paranoid and stupid. Especially if the first one isn't even forwarding ports, something some 90% of computer users don't even need to do. And if you are forwarding ports, then what are you going to do on the client machine? Block those ports? What was the point of forwarding them again?
Here's some of the evil and immorality I've participated in as a direct result of IRC:
- Downloaded porn and software from people who rightfully owned it... and wanted to give it away for free!
- Joined the Church of Satan!
- Discovered my local BDSM chapter!
- Met my wife under dubious circumstances, and then lived in sin for two years!
- Conspired to commit terrorist acts!
- Participated in group sex!
Without IRC, I would never have accomplished any of these evil, evil acts. Instead, I might have had to go outside and even talk to real people in person in dank basements while we plotted our evil. (Not that we didn't do that too, but IRC made it easier to organize our circles of evil.)
Ahhhh. But what about the *non* fatal shootings?
I work as the sole sysadmin for a small ISP, which means that I have a pager that can go off any time, any day. Stupid little mistakes like blown semicolons can result in thousands of customers not getting service. And then there's dealing with bonehead customers.
But I'm not stressed out.
My boss admittedly helps a lot as he doesn't ask for deadlines, just to get things done as soon as possible, and when it's done it's done. I cooperate by doing my best to make sure things happen. I naturally desire a finished product, and as such they get done in a reasonable amount of time. I also don't treat the job as if the responsibility for the operation of the universe rests solely on my shoulders. Sure, the pager might go off at 3am, and I might have to get my butt to the server room in 15 minutes flat (this is doable for me), but I don't have to act as if every second counts, and that I should shoot everyone that gets in my way. I still manage 99.9% uptime, which is mostly defined by the design of the system and leaving things be anyway.
My wife works at a Visa call center as a customer service rep. It's a place with high turnover, irritating idiots that ream you out over $5 that they rightfully owe, and high expectations on the part of management. It's also a place where management works hard to make sure they can keep employees longer than two weeks, by offering great benefits, allowing the CSRs to vent about boneheads, bonuses for hard work, and free food. They also have a very clearly defined reward structure for their top performers.
But what she does for her stress is her gym membership. It's good for her health, it's helping her lose weight, but most importantly, she can beat the crap out of the machines instead of the customers, and exercise generally helps a lot with stress anyway.
I seem to have married a woman that's perfect in every way! :)
Start shooting spammers.
The first experimental proof of Einstein's general theory
I seem to recall that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was used to explain the irregularities in observations of Mercury's orbit as it passed behind the sun, shortly after his theory was published. And using this theory explained those irregularities with a very high degree of accuracy.