What it does is allow server admins to decide to not accept mail that is anonymously mailed.
The problem is that noone wants anonymously sent e-mail. Why? Because 99.99999% (without a shadow of a doubt, and quite possibly more 9s) of anonymously sent e-mail is spam and/or viruses. There are probably about 1000 geeks out of the millions of e-mail users who care enough about the privacy of their e-mail, to both encrypt it and forge the headers to everyone they send e-mail to.
It would be enough just to get a yahoo account under an assumed name and encrypt every message you send. So what if they can track you back to your yahoo account? It's good enough to frustrate anyone's attempts at finding out who you are, unless they're *really* determined to find you, like if you've been acting like a complete asshole and blowing up buildings.
People who buy laptops have lots of money to spend on something they could get somewhat larger and faster at a quarter the price. They pay this extra cash for the ability to cart it around easily. To some, this looks like a good trade-off.
However, laptop manufacturers use this as an excuse to make their products completely proprietary, meaning that if you want to replace/upgrade part X, you have to go directly to them. And you will pay a premium to them as well.
This also applies to accessories. For instance, a laptop bag is $100. A laptop power supply (which is also needlessly proprietary... they basically just make the plug-in look different from their competitors) costs $100. A laptop network card costs $80 and a replacement dongle (which is of a spectacularly poor design and needs replacement every 2.5 weeks) costs $70.
A regular backpack (which does a much better job of disguising the fact that you are carrying something really expensive and easy to steal) costs about $30. A regular power supply that puts out 17.5 volts and 1.2 amps costs nothing when you buy an ADSL modem for $69.95. A regular network card costs $30 if you want to buy a 3com, and there aren't any retardedly-easy-to-break parts.
Our ADSL is way cheaper and way faster than yours. And more importantly, the big providers are trying to kill each other at any cost. So they're selling a $45 service for only $30, funded primarily by their shareholders and their respective monopolies on cable and telephone service.
You mean in much the same way that thousands of students learned Japanese in the 80s because that's who ruled the world at the time?
And now that amounts to exactly... what now? Now you can work as a translator for Sony (in Japan) or an English instructor (in Japan) where before you were promised the moon because it meant that you could talk to your corporate masters.
Sound familiar yet? The pilot's term for what you're doing is "chasing the guages," where you react to the current situation, rather than the situation that is plainly coming your way just outside your window. Five years ago this entailed following the industry men who were begging for qualified programmers, despite the fact that their ships were obviously steaming towards Niagra Falls, full speed ahead. Instead of packing yourself into a classroom with a full-to-overflowing waitlist, it would have been a better idea to sign up for a well-paying trade where there were still plenty of seats left. There's many more autobody shops than there are tech companies, and a good many of them make a lot more money, just for one example.
When people ask you to do something for you, just because they're family doesn't mean that you can't charge for them, or even just swap services.
What do your family units do for a living? Fix cars? Sell groceries? Work for the government? Bake? In that case, you sure *can* fix their computers... if they'd be interested in changing your oil, give you a discount, cut red tape, or bake you a cake.
Either that or you can give them a cut rate on how much you charge. They would still think they're getting a great deal, and you will still be getting compensated for your time.
Simple navigation for starters. Doskey doesn't even exist anymore. Bash-like features would be basically essential for anyone who spends more than 30 seconds at a command prompt.
Maybe the scripting has gotten better, but that's not saying much either. I gave up on it a long, long time ago.
Maybe, if they've been paying attention to the infinite number of rants out there on the web, they'd already know the reasons why, instead of groping around in the dark. Slashdot is but one source of information about Why We Don't Like Windows. This looks like more of a PR move than anything, something they can point at and say "Look! We're trying to listen to the consumers here!" It's like the government holding a referendum once the populace have been openly revolting.
At any rate, if they truly want to know why I don't like Windows and why I as a sysadmin would refuse to run it on any of our servers, here it is (again):
Our customers hate downtime. The time it takes to reboot a server counts as downtime. Therefore, I shouldn't have to reboot the server just to change a few settings, I should at most only have to restart the service, and I should expect that that will only take about 3 seconds at most.
When my boss pays $4000+ for a piece of software, he actually expects it to work as promised, he expects to be able to rework it to fit his peculiar needs, and do it without waiving all legal rights by opening a box that could very well be filled with air.
I would like it very much if you would stop introducing spectacularly huge, spectacularly obvious, and spectacularly stupid security holes into software that comes with Windows (or in Windows). There's only, oh, a billion people using Outlook Express, and yes, if by default you automatically run any and all attachments that come in e-mail from un-trusted parties, you're going to have a few viruses.
The corallary of this of course is "don't create a scripting language for e-mail please." It's not the hacker's fault for taking advantage of the security holes any half-baked 12 year old with two brain cells to rub together can see. Would you trust an engineering company that built bridges which could be toppled by any miscreant with a rowboat and a can of spray paint?
Real sysadmins use a command line. As a result of this, they can work real magic instead of just keeping things going. You have been actively taking steps backwards with your command line.
I want to be able to run programs automatically in the middle of the night and make them do whatever I want them to. With Windows I can't even use the CD player to act as an alarm clock. This is a result of having a crappy command line and windows programs that don't use command line switches.
What do you think historians will think of.doc format? I like open formats thank you very much.
I'm not going to submit it to their damn survey. I'd rather do it this way. It's called an open letter. But then I guess they just don't like *anything* that's open.
I work for a small Canadian ISP, and this ruling would affect us directly. There's actually more to the insanity of this lawsuit than we get from this article.
They also want to grandfather this ruling, so that not only would we pay 10% *after* the ruling, but also 10% of revenues for the past 8 years. This is a massive problem. Not only does it mean we'd have to increase our prices (ISPs work on such small margins that 10% would probably eat up all our profits and then some. In fact, some ISPs like Shaw Cable and Telus are actually operating at an enormous loss, propped up by revenue from their respective monopolies) but this bill would bankrupt a good many of us.
More interesting is that only about 10% (perhaps a bit more) of our customers are even tech savvy enough to know what file sharing is, let alone use it. The vast majority of our customers still use dialup, and the vast majority of those use less than 30 hours a month. While the number of broadband customers is growing, it still doesn't make up for more than a third of our customer base.
So what does this mean for that little tax they intend to impose? It means that they'll be charging us approximately 100% of our revenues generated by the file sharers. So when the average Canadian slashdotter pays their ISP bill, they won't be paying for Internet access, they'll be paying the music industry directly. Is this fair? Moreover, is it fair to tax the other 90% of ISP users who don't even have basic word processing skills, let alone know how and where to pirate music?
That's where the true insanity of their claim lies.
Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy.
Yeah, you can say that again. With the typing skills I got in high school, plus the basic computer literacy they gave me, this is the number of jobs I could get: 0. As much as I tried to get a job in data entry or secretarial work, it just wasn't there, and I didn't have the skills to qualify.
Perhaps the sort of jobs that exist for the computer literate are the same kinds of jobs that have always existed before. It's just that now if you want to work in a grocery store or a warehouse, you have to know how to at least use a computer. But getting work that purely deals with computers? Forget it. Welders and mechanics are paid more than sysadmins, especially with how those fields are in demand and aren't flooded with qualified applicants. A lot of people of my generation bought the hype that we were fed in the 80's about 14 year old whiz-kid millionaires, followed by the hype we were fed in the 90's about a critical shortage of computer techs. In the meantime, the wrenchheads that took mechanics in high school and went on that path instead are getting paid twice what I am.
And those slashdotters who are so spectacularly stupid as to try drinking seawater will quickly discover that it tastes utterly vile, and will likely never drink it again.
Actually, what makes this new development exciting is the fact that the ion engine used on the Deep Space 1 probe produced much less than 0.3 Newtons of force... I don't recall the actual thrust, but it was roughly analagous to the amount of force a single piece of paper exerts on your hand if you were to hold it up near the earth's surface. So probably somewhere around 0.01 N. And yet, they were still able to measure the amount of acceleration due to the engine.
I'm the sysadmin for a small ISP. Some of our customers (namely, the corporate ones with lots of cash) already have this on a smaller scale. Their firewall/router checks to see if VirusScan is running on the end-users' computer, and if it's not, it installs it. At least, if you've bought enough licenses to cover all the workstations you have. Excess workstations don't get antivirus, and they also don't get online - at least until you shut that feature off for that IP. Of course, it's desirable to upgrade the number of licenses. It's pretty scary to be running a corporate network with only one computer not virus scanning when you see headlines like this one.
So that's our corporate customers. We also have qmailscanner filtering all our mail using F-prot (they have per-server licenses for decent rates, not the retarded per-client ones that would quickly bankrupt any ISP), which cuts problems on our ADSL network by about 75% or more. It's worth noting however that even with a 2.3 Ghz CPU, the server load is typically about 2.5 or 3.0 at any given time. This kind of scanning for the 150,000 messages a day we get would have been impossible only three years ago.
Would we start using a router like the one Cisco came out with? Hell no. 10% of our customers actually have a clue, and they usually pay for a more expensive internet account. To lose hundreds of our best customers over something like this would be stupid. As well, if we used a router that required a specific virus scanner (like our corporate customers have), it could alienate as much as 60% of the people who have already bought a virus scanner that *isn't* the virus scanner the router requires.
No. This is not something you subject the general public to.
It's so nice to see Microsoft bringing new inventions to the marketplace. Things that they dreamed up *all by themselves* and are *totally unique* to Microsoft. I think they should apply for patents right away. After all, they should be rewarded for taking a risk by offering something so totally new that noone else has even conceived of the idea.
This is of course, part of a long history of such great innovations. The web browser. On-the-fly Disk compression. The recycle bin. Pretty icons instead of their old ugly ones. Minesweeper. And of course, who could forget the invention of the GUI? Because of these great innovations, Microsoft well deserves their throne as the monopolists they are!
What's really funny is when the HR people start to complain about the lack of qualified personnel. Would they even recognize a qualified person if it showed up on their doorstep?
You sound like you're busy. With nothing but technical stuff no less.
Here's what I do:
Senior systems administrator for a small ISP, with a heterogenous network of FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS and Win2k. On these servers is DNS, RADIUS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, Frontpage, HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and our accounting database running (ew!) Filemaker. SSH is on everything.
The languages I need to know and use on a daily basis are sh, perl and C. I also need to know how to work with routers, firewalls, (Cisco, 3com, and FreeBSD) and flaky PC hardware (the company is too cheap to run anything more reliable).
There are no benefits, overtime is unpaid (and as such I refuse to do it, even if it would mean that I could get something done in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time). I get paid $13.12 an hour.
But this is the real kicker. I get to do tech support for the end users too - setting up joe sixpack's Outhouse Express, walking geriatric old ladies through setting up a dialup account, and wrestling with the local telco over ADSL trouble tickets[1].
On regular days, my real work (setting things up for customers, or automating setting things up for customers, for instance) is interrupted every 5 or 10 minutes with another phone call from a customer. On busy days, my phone calls are interrupted by more phone calls. My boss says that he doesn't like having tech support people sitting around and doing nothing, so we all have something else to do (besides working hard to do the things the customers ask for when they're talking to us on the phone) when we're not on the phone.
So while it may suck to be working hard for shitty pay, it sure beats working your ass off trying to swim up a fast moving river. In your case, there's at least a warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment instead of the desperate feeling of being swept away to your doom and being completely helpless to do anything about it.
[1] It's bad enough when it takes a friggin' week for them to get around to fixing phone lines for *our* customers. But if you had ever in your life tried to use their trouble ticket database, you would point and laugh at how spectacularly badly written it is, then start to cry when you realized YOU were forced to use it, then scream at the morons who made the decision to use it, then slit your wrists so that you would never have to use it again. As an example, once everything is ready and you're on the page to actually input the data, it takes a whole 4 minutes (I timed it) to fill in a total of 5 fields, with less than 80 bytes of data. For some gawdawful reason that seems to involve exceptionally slow server-side visual basic for error checking and data reformatting (all it does is insert - and () into phone numbers for that one field that requires phone numbers), it pauses no less than 30 seconds to switch between fields. My theory is that it was programmed by a finite number of monkeys. An infinite number of course, would produce much better results.
Is anyone looking for a developer (or hardware engineer for that matter)?
I'd recommend working for the company that's responsible for the massive disaster that is the database I just described, but somehow I get the feeling that they're not interested in making things better.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost any cd by Anal Cunt.
:)
A cd with one meaningless song broken up into 60 30 second tracks.
It seems they haven't only broken the idea of 1 track = 1 song, but they've broken the puretracks idea.
What it does is allow server admins to decide to not accept mail that is anonymously mailed.
The problem is that noone wants anonymously sent e-mail. Why? Because 99.99999% (without a shadow of a doubt, and quite possibly more 9s) of anonymously sent e-mail is spam and/or viruses. There are probably about 1000 geeks out of the millions of e-mail users who care enough about the privacy of their e-mail, to both encrypt it and forge the headers to everyone they send e-mail to.
It would be enough just to get a yahoo account under an assumed name and encrypt every message you send. So what if they can track you back to your yahoo account? It's good enough to frustrate anyone's attempts at finding out who you are, unless they're *really* determined to find you, like if you've been acting like a complete asshole and blowing up buildings.
No no, you're missing the point.
People who buy laptops have lots of money to spend on something they could get somewhat larger and faster at a quarter the price. They pay this extra cash for the ability to cart it around easily. To some, this looks like a good trade-off.
However, laptop manufacturers use this as an excuse to make their products completely proprietary, meaning that if you want to replace/upgrade part X, you have to go directly to them. And you will pay a premium to them as well.
This also applies to accessories. For instance, a laptop bag is $100. A laptop power supply (which is also needlessly proprietary... they basically just make the plug-in look different from their competitors) costs $100. A laptop network card costs $80 and a replacement dongle (which is of a spectacularly poor design and needs replacement every 2.5 weeks) costs $70.
A regular backpack (which does a much better job of disguising the fact that you are carrying something really expensive and easy to steal) costs about $30. A regular power supply that puts out 17.5 volts and 1.2 amps costs nothing when you buy an ADSL modem for $69.95. A regular network card costs $30 if you want to buy a 3com, and there aren't any retardedly-easy-to-break parts.
Our ADSL is way cheaper and way faster than yours. And more importantly, the big providers are trying to kill each other at any cost. So they're selling a $45 service for only $30, funded primarily by their shareholders and their respective monopolies on cable and telephone service.
You mean in much the same way that thousands of students learned Japanese in the 80s because that's who ruled the world at the time?
And now that amounts to exactly... what now? Now you can work as a translator for Sony (in Japan) or an English instructor (in Japan) where before you were promised the moon because it meant that you could talk to your corporate masters.
Sound familiar yet? The pilot's term for what you're doing is "chasing the guages," where you react to the current situation, rather than the situation that is plainly coming your way just outside your window. Five years ago this entailed following the industry men who were begging for qualified programmers, despite the fact that their ships were obviously steaming towards Niagra Falls, full speed ahead. Instead of packing yourself into a classroom with a full-to-overflowing waitlist, it would have been a better idea to sign up for a well-paying trade where there were still plenty of seats left. There's many more autobody shops than there are tech companies, and a good many of them make a lot more money, just for one example.
You aren't properly taking advantage of this.
When people ask you to do something for you, just because they're family doesn't mean that you can't charge for them, or even just swap services.
What do your family units do for a living? Fix cars? Sell groceries? Work for the government? Bake? In that case, you sure *can* fix their computers... if they'd be interested in changing your oil, give you a discount, cut red tape, or bake you a cake.
Either that or you can give them a cut rate on how much you charge. They would still think they're getting a great deal, and you will still be getting compensated for your time.
Heh. So have tablet computers.
Thing is that for some weird reason Microsoft (and others, but mostly Microsoft this time) insists on trying to bring it back again and again.
I run a mail server that gets 100K+ messages a day.
All the spam that bounces back to the sender bounces back to me.
Nuff said.
Linus naked and drinking beer
Mmmm. Geek porn.
What backward steps are you talking about?
Simple navigation for starters. Doskey doesn't even exist anymore. Bash-like features would be basically essential for anyone who spends more than 30 seconds at a command prompt.
Maybe the scripting has gotten better, but that's not saying much either. I gave up on it a long, long time ago.
Wow. That was fun. And it only took me about two minutes to complete the survey!
:)
It's amazing how quickly you can get through it if you don't read the questions.
That's not the point. The point is that important documents are written in .doc format. Historians will hate us for using that.
At any rate, if they truly want to know why I don't like Windows and why I as a sysadmin would refuse to run it on any of our servers, here it is (again):
I'm not going to submit it to their damn survey. I'd rather do it this way. It's called an open letter. But then I guess they just don't like *anything* that's open.
Or more importantly, I want my diary to be readable in 20 years, thank you very much.
I work for a small Canadian ISP, and this ruling would affect us directly. There's actually more to the insanity of this lawsuit than we get from this article.
They also want to grandfather this ruling, so that not only would we pay 10% *after* the ruling, but also 10% of revenues for the past 8 years. This is a massive problem. Not only does it mean we'd have to increase our prices (ISPs work on such small margins that 10% would probably eat up all our profits and then some. In fact, some ISPs like Shaw Cable and Telus are actually operating at an enormous loss, propped up by revenue from their respective monopolies) but this bill would bankrupt a good many of us.
More interesting is that only about 10% (perhaps a bit more) of our customers are even tech savvy enough to know what file sharing is, let alone use it. The vast majority of our customers still use dialup, and the vast majority of those use less than 30 hours a month. While the number of broadband customers is growing, it still doesn't make up for more than a third of our customer base.
So what does this mean for that little tax they intend to impose? It means that they'll be charging us approximately 100% of our revenues generated by the file sharers. So when the average Canadian slashdotter pays their ISP bill, they won't be paying for Internet access, they'll be paying the music industry directly. Is this fair? Moreover, is it fair to tax the other 90% of ISP users who don't even have basic word processing skills, let alone know how and where to pirate music?
That's where the true insanity of their claim lies.
Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy.
Yeah, you can say that again. With the typing skills I got in high school, plus the basic computer literacy they gave me, this is the number of jobs I could get: 0. As much as I tried to get a job in data entry or secretarial work, it just wasn't there, and I didn't have the skills to qualify.
Perhaps the sort of jobs that exist for the computer literate are the same kinds of jobs that have always existed before. It's just that now if you want to work in a grocery store or a warehouse, you have to know how to at least use a computer. But getting work that purely deals with computers? Forget it. Welders and mechanics are paid more than sysadmins, especially with how those fields are in demand and aren't flooded with qualified applicants. A lot of people of my generation bought the hype that we were fed in the 80's about 14 year old whiz-kid millionaires, followed by the hype we were fed in the 90's about a critical shortage of computer techs. In the meantime, the wrenchheads that took mechanics in high school and went on that path instead are getting paid twice what I am.
I think I just got 0wn3d.
THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. Please DO NOT try this.
And those slashdotters who are so spectacularly stupid as to try drinking seawater will quickly discover that it tastes utterly vile, and will likely never drink it again.
But thanks for the warning anyway.
Actually, what makes this new development exciting is the fact that the ion engine used on the Deep Space 1 probe produced much less than 0.3 Newtons of force... I don't recall the actual thrust, but it was roughly analagous to the amount of force a single piece of paper exerts on your hand if you were to hold it up near the earth's surface. So probably somewhere around 0.01 N. And yet, they were still able to measure the amount of acceleration due to the engine.
I'm the sysadmin for a small ISP. Some of our customers (namely, the corporate ones with lots of cash) already have this on a smaller scale. Their firewall/router checks to see if VirusScan is running on the end-users' computer, and if it's not, it installs it. At least, if you've bought enough licenses to cover all the workstations you have. Excess workstations don't get antivirus, and they also don't get online - at least until you shut that feature off for that IP. Of course, it's desirable to upgrade the number of licenses. It's pretty scary to be running a corporate network with only one computer not virus scanning when you see headlines like this one.
So that's our corporate customers. We also have qmailscanner filtering all our mail using F-prot (they have per-server licenses for decent rates, not the retarded per-client ones that would quickly bankrupt any ISP), which cuts problems on our ADSL network by about 75% or more. It's worth noting however that even with a 2.3 Ghz CPU, the server load is typically about 2.5 or 3.0 at any given time. This kind of scanning for the 150,000 messages a day we get would have been impossible only three years ago.
Would we start using a router like the one Cisco came out with? Hell no. 10% of our customers actually have a clue, and they usually pay for a more expensive internet account. To lose hundreds of our best customers over something like this would be stupid. As well, if we used a router that required a specific virus scanner (like our corporate customers have), it could alienate as much as 60% of the people who have already bought a virus scanner that *isn't* the virus scanner the router requires.
No. This is not something you subject the general public to.
It's so nice to see Microsoft bringing new inventions to the marketplace. Things that they dreamed up *all by themselves* and are *totally unique* to Microsoft. I think they should apply for patents right away. After all, they should be rewarded for taking a risk by offering something so totally new that noone else has even conceived of the idea.
This is of course, part of a long history of such great innovations. The web browser. On-the-fly Disk compression. The recycle bin. Pretty icons instead of their old ugly ones. Minesweeper. And of course, who could forget the invention of the GUI? Because of these great innovations, Microsoft well deserves their throne as the monopolists they are!
How about:
Heywood Jablowme
Alotta Bukkake
D. P. Freely
Ian Swallow (Mr. I. Swallow "for anonymity" at the airport)
It's recommended by many that your teenagers need a door with a lock on it.
Why?
Because their room is private. They do private things in there. Like masturbate and write in their diaries.
If you don't want them to keep their online activities private, I would recommend that their computers don't go in their rooms.
What's really funny is when the HR people start to complain about the lack of qualified personnel. Would they even recognize a qualified person if it showed up on their doorstep?
You sound like you're busy. With nothing but technical stuff no less.
Here's what I do:
Senior systems administrator for a small ISP, with a heterogenous network of FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS and Win2k. On these servers is DNS, RADIUS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, Frontpage, HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and our accounting database running (ew!) Filemaker. SSH is on everything.
The languages I need to know and use on a daily basis are sh, perl and C. I also need to know how to work with routers, firewalls, (Cisco, 3com, and FreeBSD) and flaky PC hardware (the company is too cheap to run anything more reliable).
There are no benefits, overtime is unpaid (and as such I refuse to do it, even if it would mean that I could get something done in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time). I get paid $13.12 an hour.
But this is the real kicker. I get to do tech support for the end users too - setting up joe sixpack's Outhouse Express, walking geriatric old ladies through setting up a dialup account, and wrestling with the local telco over ADSL trouble tickets[1].
On regular days, my real work (setting things up for customers, or automating setting things up for customers, for instance) is interrupted every 5 or 10 minutes with another phone call from a customer. On busy days, my phone calls are interrupted by more phone calls. My boss says that he doesn't like having tech support people sitting around and doing nothing, so we all have something else to do (besides working hard to do the things the customers ask for when they're talking to us on the phone) when we're not on the phone.
So while it may suck to be working hard for shitty pay, it sure beats working your ass off trying to swim up a fast moving river. In your case, there's at least a warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment instead of the desperate feeling of being swept away to your doom and being completely helpless to do anything about it.
[1] It's bad enough when it takes a friggin' week for them to get around to fixing phone lines for *our* customers. But if you had ever in your life tried to use their trouble ticket database, you would point and laugh at how spectacularly badly written it is, then start to cry when you realized YOU were forced to use it, then scream at the morons who made the decision to use it, then slit your wrists so that you would never have to use it again. As an example, once everything is ready and you're on the page to actually input the data, it takes a whole 4 minutes (I timed it) to fill in a total of 5 fields, with less than 80 bytes of data. For some gawdawful reason that seems to involve exceptionally slow server-side visual basic for error checking and data reformatting (all it does is insert - and () into phone numbers for that one field that requires phone numbers), it pauses no less than 30 seconds to switch between fields. My theory is that it was programmed by a finite number of monkeys. An infinite number of course, would produce much better results.
Is anyone looking for a developer (or hardware engineer for that matter)?
I'd recommend working for the company that's responsible for the massive disaster that is the database I just described, but somehow I get the feeling that they're not interested in making things better.
Slashdot requires some text in the body, so I'm supplying some.