I'm sure they did it as a business decision. I just think they didn't do it 100% smart. If all the reasons you point out are true and obvious, they shouldn't have attempted in the first place. Of course, it simply may not have been obvious to them at the start.
What is the difference in the wholesale (e.g. the price Dell pays) of Linux plus Star/Open Office, vs Windows XP and Office XP? Just sell the Linux machines that amount less, and the absolute profit on the machine is the same. Of course, people like me would prefer buying the machine naked with the amount paid to Microsoft being deducted. But I do understand Dell wants to have some software they know about on the machine so they can support it without having to point fingers at whatever the end user installed. So for me, the Dell product may not even be appropriate. But for my dad, who lives 1000 miles away from me, who has expressed an interest in trying out Linux and getting online, I'd rather he have something a bit more generic, but with a name attached to it.
When it's finally out, I'll acknowledge it. But that is part of their future. They are moving to consumer electronics, and hardware. Maybe eventually everything will be made by Microsoft? But somehow I doubt they will use the name "Microhard".
Microsoft's biggest underlying fear is that it will become like IBM-a company that still has a strong business but no longer sets computing standards.
Microsoft is not exactly like IBM. IBM's market was in business whereas Microsoft's market combines both business and consumer. IBM sold hardware as well as software. Microsoft sells only software (unless you count those stupid mice and keyboards). IBM sold huge mainframes for huge price that requires months of sales work to get the dotted line signed. Microsoft products can be grabbed in retail stores. That doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft won't run out of steam with its flattening markets, but the mechanisms and potentials will certainly be different than they were with IBM. IBM didn't have a lot of options it could so easily move into. Microsoft has some more, and is more diverse than IBM ever was in a market that can buy things on a whim. So don't count on what happened to IBM necessarily happening to Microsoft. Maybe it will, or maybe it won't.
Re:Emacs 21 annoyances
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
They caused you. So maybe you're right about that causing problems stuff.
Re:Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
So why don't you post a better set of keyboard to edit function mappings? Maybe we will find yours to be better and implement it.
Certain failures in the liver and even kidneys can cause the foul stench. It's just a matter of some extra chemicals in their blood stream, while not particularly toxic, do work their way out through the skin oils or breath. Medical "help" would be in the form of transplants, and those only happen if one's life is at risk. But degraded liver function doesn't always qualify, and there is nothing much else medicine can do.
I for one am sensitive to a lot of these smells, and have met a couple people who were "knockouts". But I've also run into a LOT more people who put on disgusting smells every morning. In a few of those cases I've actually had to leave the room to be able to breath.
I really don't care if Linux takes over against Microsoft Windows or not. It is not my goal to displace Windows in the market place. Instead, my goal is to make my Linux desktop experience complete. I know I can not ever accomplish what I want with Windows, so I use Linux. But I would still like to do a few of the things I cannot now do.
Linux needs better applications. In some areas it has it. In some areas it does not. Consider Visio. There is nothing in Linux that even compares. Programs like xfig are a joke compared to Visio.
Linux needs better hardware support. When a new kind of hardware comes out, driver support needs to be immediate. I want to be able to buy it now, and use it with Linux.
Things like this are not really what we expect of Linus. These things need to be done by other people. Application developers need to do the killer apps, and cover more bases. Hardware manufacturers need to make open source device drivers for their new hardware available, and quit trying to shove their "innovation" into the drivers (I want innovative hardware). But to bring these things about, Linux does need to get some market share, including on the desktop. I want Linux to succeed at this, but not for the purpose of bringing down Microsoft, or Windows, but instead, to let me have what I want on the desktop, and add to it with what I want. Yeah, I'm selfish. But at least I'm honest about it.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000. And that sliver is unlikely to grow in 2001. PC makers are concluding that consumer Linux is too small a market to mess with: Dell Computer recently dropped Linux from its desktops and notebooks.
Dell did not actually offer Linux on their desktops or notebooks. I regularly get snail-spam from Dell, and not once was Linux mentioned for a desktop or notebook. Only occaisionally is it offered for servers. I also visited their web site 5 or 6 times over the past year. Again, no Linux for desktop or notebook. If Dell thinks it didn't sell, maybe Michael should have a talk with his VP of marketing. I find it hard to believe they slipped the entire duration of the Linux campaign in between my web visits.
And you don't expect it to be a mass seller. This kind of thing takes time. XP will come out soon for retail sale (you can get it on whole systems now). That won't make people switch to Linux immediately, because they can just stay with the old version they are running. But eventually the old version won't be supported, and won't do well on new hardware, and the decision will have to be made to either upgrade Windows (to XP) or switch to Linux. As we are seeing in some places, the switch to Linux is starting to happen, in places like certain cities in Florida, and some countries like Thailand and potentially in Germany.
I suspect Dell had other motives for not wanting to sell Linux. We might like to think that it is because of an under the table deal with Microsoft to kick out Linux. But that doesn't have to happen because there is more incentive elsewhere for Dell to not support Linux and pray for it to fail. This is because Linux allows people to keep on being productive with older slower hardware, and not upgrade the hardware as often. This means lost sales to vendors like Dell, and they are hurting a lot right now, even more so than losing Linux customers will do. They see the problem of lack of hardware growth, and see that Linux could only make it worse for them. If Linux were to catch on and be at least significant against Windows, like maybe 1/3 of the market, that would surely mean more lost hardware sales, and Michael understands this you can be sure. Maybe Bill wised him up about this, but I don't think that was even needed.
If the junk snail mail levels were anywhere like the levels in email, I think I would like to have them sort out the junk and toss it. It would save me a lot of time. The question is, how would they do that? The problem is, they don't get mail directly from different distinctive places which can be identified as sources of junk or not. But in email, this does happen, and it makes it very easy to filter fairly accurately. So I believe your scenario simply would not happen because there is no practical means to accomplish with snail mail that which is accomplished fairly effectively in the realm of email.
If they are doing the sorting of the mail from big mailbags arriving from the postoffice, then I'd tell them I'd like to have the junk mail removed, and if anything else is removed, or junk added, I'll move. But if it is not their job to do that, of course I'd have a problem with it. I don't interfere with the IP packets going to the mail servers of customers who do their own. I only do the filtering of email in my own servers.
The user consents when they choose to use an ISP that opts to use blacklisting to satisfy most of their customers.
I'm not opening the mail to see what's inside. I just choose not to allow the mail to be coming from places known to be sources of problems. If the Post Office knew that mail coming from a certain place was costing them more than what they are paid to deliver it, you can be sure they will stop taking the mail from there. That's not interfering with the mail, because that's the post office doing it themselves. I'm sure these days if the package looks suspicious, they're going to check on it. They may not even deliver it right now. But that is not interfering with the Post Office because it is they who are doing it.
I deliver mail in my mail server the way I like, and I don't want interference from outsiders telling me what to do. If you are a potential customer, and prefer a different ISP, then certainly tell me why you don't want my service. If there are enough people like you to justify setting up the service you want, I'd probably do it.
The default is you get no mail at all. That's not just how I think it should be, that is how it actually is before you get on the internet. Now how you do choose to get online is your choice. Want to go with an ISP that subscribes to every blacklist? Want to go with an ISP that subscribes to none? Want to run your own mail server? The choice is yours. Don't go whining because one of the choices happens to be something you would not want.
Yes, you can refuse your own mail for any reason you like. But if you provide a service to other people you have no right to arbitrarily decide to discard their incoming mail.
It is you who have no right to arbitrarily tell me what I can do or not do with my business. I'll make the decision that best reflects the way I want to do business. If you were my customer and didn't want to have your mail filtered the way I do it, you're free to move on to another ISP.
While I am concerned about some of the blacklist policies, I've found they are tremendously effective and have quite little collateral damage. What little I have found I can fix up myself. But I'd certainly like to have a better blacklist, but somehow I doubt you and I could work together to create one.
I am the ISP. My customers complain about spam. They don't want it. So I do what I can to block it. There is some collateral damage, but it is very small compared to the spam that I'm now successfully blocking. If a customer wants spam, they can use another ISP, or run their own MX server, or pay me to run a parallel set of ublocked servers. They have the freedom to choose. The ISPs are not forcing anything on their customers if there is a choice there.
Recently MAPS switched to a paid service, with the option of still being free for hobbyists (lots of/.'ers would qualify for that) willing to sign an agreement. Now I'm running a service which doesn't qualify as a hobby. And I was willing to pay for the service for a while. I wrote to them twice before the cutoff date of 31 July 2001, and twice again afterwards, about arranging services. I have never received a reply. So at this point I'm assuming the people at MAPS simply don't care. It seems to me they have a very arrogant attitude. So I'm just writing them off, and will be cheering when they finally become a dot.com.bomb.
Since I run my own servers, I have a right to choose who I will communicate with, and who I will decline to communicate with. I certainly don't want to receive spam from spammers, so I feel just fine about blocking it. Services like MAPS started out helping me do just that. However, it has turned into something else.
MAPS goes beyond just blocking spam. It attempts to influence other aspects of how business it performed. Examples of this include blocking an entire ISP just because a spammer connects through them, even if the spammer has a dedicated network connection with a static netblock registered via SWIP with ARIN. They also block mail from ISPs that don't host spammers, but host the web site mentioned in spam, even if the site owner was not the sender of the spam. They even go so far as to block things other than mail.
If a spammer is completely cut off, they just move on to the next ISP. They may even falsely represent what they are doing to make sure they get connected. In some cases they start their own ISP front operation to get backbone connections. But they do get back online, and they do evade for a while the information that blocks them, and we end up getting a little more of their spam.
If instead, we simply cut ourselves off from those spammers who we can reliably cut off (those that have a static netblock and stay with it), they won't be motivated to move on (as much), and our efforts to block them will be more effective for a longer time for us.
Some people know me as an avid anti-spammer who really hates spam. I really do hate spam. But I prefer not to have to keep chasing a moving target. If a spammer wants to settle down to a fixed location which I can block from my servers, I'm all for that. This is the way I want to block spammers. The trouble is, finding zone data that limits itself to just this is difficult.
Too many anti-spammers are aiming more to change behaviour and thought, than to just isolate themselves from spammers. As well intentioned as that may be, it is simply not going to work because humans don't really change very much. Most spammers are still spammers at heart (they may have quit for a while, but they are still spammers through and through). Most terrorist are terrorists for life. Most child molestors are child molesters for life. There are simply some bad people and we really can't fix that in most cases, however hard we try.
This doesn't address other kinds of spam like that which comes through open relays and that which comes from dynamic address pools for DSL, Cable, and dialup. Those still need to be dealt with in appropriate ways. The ISPs need to determine who definitely won't spam, and everyone else has to use the ISP mail server for outbound mail. Open relays can be blocked when they are found. Dynamic pools can be blocked when they are found if the ISP doesn't want to do it themselves.
And for sure, web sites with those insecure mailform scripts do need to be cleaned up. I block their outbound mail server.
I also block SMTP connections from servers which do not have valid reverse DNS. This has been very effective in blocking spam, including "spamhaus" operations (who probably can't get a decent admin to come work for them). So far not too many sites sending legitimate mail have this problem. So far this has resulted in 5 cases of legitimate mail being blocked. Of these, 3 fixed the problem, 1 did not answer, and 1 has Qwest for upstream and Qwest isn't delegating things to them correctly.
Postfix does support subject and header based string match blocking. But it is not terribly effective. I do use it for a few terms, but too often I find it rejecting legitimate mail, so I have to keep it lean, making it not so effective. Thus I do have to continue direct blocking mechanisms. I don't expect procmail to be all that effective in blocking spam, either, but it does have the advantage of being customizable to what you don't want to get.
Paypal has lately tried more and more to discourage complainers from contacting them. It seems they are suffering the same financial problems of other dot.coms and the first thing to go is customer service. If you're unhappy, they just don't want to deal with you. Of course if you are happy, there won't be any issue they have to deal with. So the simple way to save money is to just not give a damn. This is why I now no longer use Paypay, and why it's in my signature. Be sure to read here
Claiming it is NOT a cell phone, when in fact it is, gets them off the hook, I suppose. But if they have a normal way to tell if a number is a cell number (shouldn't be that hard) then they should not call it for telemarketing. Anyone who "demands" a land line number instead of a cell phone number must be planning to sell the list to telemarketers. Tell them what you think about that idea.
Since you are the ONLY person who has this problem, maybe you should explain just who THEY really are. Are you dealing with uneducated HR people? Give us exact names. We'll send Vito over to take care of them.
You obviously have a personal problem trying to convince people what your phone number is. Ever heard of "portable" numbers? In many areas you can take your phone number with you when you move. Eventually, this will cross area codes (it may even be now). Just give your cell phone number. If they don't believe it, it is they who have the problem. Explain it to them.
How can I use it if it has no source? If I can't integrate it into my existing programming, it won't do me any good. I run all my music through my own sound server.
If ultimate best sound is the issue, then what you need is something lossless. That rules out MP3 and OGG. And WAV is a waste of space. But there is FLAC, which is lossless sound compression. I haven't tried it yet, as the sound quality is not yet the defining issue for me. But as soon as I get beyond these tiny speakers and this cheap sound card, and have a laboratory grade ultra-linear DAC doing my analog conversion, feeding speakers with more watts than my PC power supply knows about, then quality certainly will be an issue.
Please don't use Redhat as an example of Linux's security potentials. In a sense, Redhat is the "MS Windows" of Linux distributions. It's designed for the masses, and to be "one shoe fits all", which is one of the many factors making Windows itself so problematic. Try porting everything but the kernel from OpenBSD to a Linux environment (including the libraries, which could be a bit of work). Assuming that OpenBSD is all that Theo claims it to be in terms of security, and that Linux (it's just a kernel, remember) is all that Linus claims it is, this should be quite a solid Linux system. There are, of course, other ways to accomplish this. Take a look at some of the secure Linux distributions such as perhaps Engarde Linux.
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I'm sure they did it as a business decision. I just think they didn't do it 100% smart. If all the reasons you point out are true and obvious, they shouldn't have attempted in the first place. Of course, it simply may not have been obvious to them at the start.
What is the difference in the wholesale (e.g. the price Dell pays) of Linux plus Star/Open Office, vs Windows XP and Office XP? Just sell the Linux machines that amount less, and the absolute profit on the machine is the same. Of course, people like me would prefer buying the machine naked with the amount paid to Microsoft being deducted. But I do understand Dell wants to have some software they know about on the machine so they can support it without having to point fingers at whatever the end user installed. So for me, the Dell product may not even be appropriate. But for my dad, who lives 1000 miles away from me, who has expressed an interest in trying out Linux and getting online, I'd rather he have something a bit more generic, but with a name attached to it.
When it's finally out, I'll acknowledge it. But that is part of their future. They are moving to consumer electronics, and hardware. Maybe eventually everything will be made by Microsoft? But somehow I doubt they will use the name "Microhard".
Microsoft is not exactly like IBM. IBM's market was in business whereas Microsoft's market combines both business and consumer. IBM sold hardware as well as software. Microsoft sells only software (unless you count those stupid mice and keyboards). IBM sold huge mainframes for huge price that requires months of sales work to get the dotted line signed. Microsoft products can be grabbed in retail stores. That doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft won't run out of steam with its flattening markets, but the mechanisms and potentials will certainly be different than they were with IBM. IBM didn't have a lot of options it could so easily move into. Microsoft has some more, and is more diverse than IBM ever was in a market that can buy things on a whim. So don't count on what happened to IBM necessarily happening to Microsoft. Maybe it will, or maybe it won't.
They caused you. So maybe you're right about that causing problems stuff.
So why don't you post a better set of keyboard to edit function mappings? Maybe we will find yours to be better and implement it.
Put up a web page that says "This domain is for email purposes". Then include a web form for sending you email.
Anyone have a non-Fraunhofer conversion? The one they have out there is not working very well.
Certain failures in the liver and even kidneys can cause the foul stench. It's just a matter of some extra chemicals in their blood stream, while not particularly toxic, do work their way out through the skin oils or breath. Medical "help" would be in the form of transplants, and those only happen if one's life is at risk. But degraded liver function doesn't always qualify, and there is nothing much else medicine can do.
I for one am sensitive to a lot of these smells, and have met a couple people who were "knockouts". But I've also run into a LOT more people who put on disgusting smells every morning. In a few of those cases I've actually had to leave the room to be able to breath.
I really don't care if Linux takes over against Microsoft Windows or not. It is not my goal to displace Windows in the market place. Instead, my goal is to make my Linux desktop experience complete. I know I can not ever accomplish what I want with Windows, so I use Linux. But I would still like to do a few of the things I cannot now do.
Linux needs better applications. In some areas it has it. In some areas it does not. Consider Visio. There is nothing in Linux that even compares. Programs like xfig are a joke compared to Visio.
Linux needs better hardware support. When a new kind of hardware comes out, driver support needs to be immediate. I want to be able to buy it now, and use it with Linux.
Things like this are not really what we expect of Linus. These things need to be done by other people. Application developers need to do the killer apps, and cover more bases. Hardware manufacturers need to make open source device drivers for their new hardware available, and quit trying to shove their "innovation" into the drivers (I want innovative hardware). But to bring these things about, Linux does need to get some market share, including on the desktop. I want Linux to succeed at this, but not for the purpose of bringing down Microsoft, or Windows, but instead, to let me have what I want on the desktop, and add to it with what I want. Yeah, I'm selfish. But at least I'm honest about it.
Dell did not actually offer Linux on their desktops or notebooks. I regularly get snail-spam from Dell, and not once was Linux mentioned for a desktop or notebook. Only occaisionally is it offered for servers. I also visited their web site 5 or 6 times over the past year. Again, no Linux for desktop or notebook. If Dell thinks it didn't sell, maybe Michael should have a talk with his VP of marketing. I find it hard to believe they slipped the entire duration of the Linux campaign in between my web visits.
And you don't expect it to be a mass seller. This kind of thing takes time. XP will come out soon for retail sale (you can get it on whole systems now). That won't make people switch to Linux immediately, because they can just stay with the old version they are running. But eventually the old version won't be supported, and won't do well on new hardware, and the decision will have to be made to either upgrade Windows (to XP) or switch to Linux. As we are seeing in some places, the switch to Linux is starting to happen, in places like certain cities in Florida, and some countries like Thailand and potentially in Germany.
I suspect Dell had other motives for not wanting to sell Linux. We might like to think that it is because of an under the table deal with Microsoft to kick out Linux. But that doesn't have to happen because there is more incentive elsewhere for Dell to not support Linux and pray for it to fail. This is because Linux allows people to keep on being productive with older slower hardware, and not upgrade the hardware as often. This means lost sales to vendors like Dell, and they are hurting a lot right now, even more so than losing Linux customers will do. They see the problem of lack of hardware growth, and see that Linux could only make it worse for them. If Linux were to catch on and be at least significant against Windows, like maybe 1/3 of the market, that would surely mean more lost hardware sales, and Michael understands this you can be sure. Maybe Bill wised him up about this, but I don't think that was even needed.
If the junk snail mail levels were anywhere like the levels in email, I think I would like to have them sort out the junk and toss it. It would save me a lot of time. The question is, how would they do that? The problem is, they don't get mail directly from different distinctive places which can be identified as sources of junk or not. But in email, this does happen, and it makes it very easy to filter fairly accurately. So I believe your scenario simply would not happen because there is no practical means to accomplish with snail mail that which is accomplished fairly effectively in the realm of email.
If they are doing the sorting of the mail from big mailbags arriving from the postoffice, then I'd tell them I'd like to have the junk mail removed, and if anything else is removed, or junk added, I'll move. But if it is not their job to do that, of course I'd have a problem with it. I don't interfere with the IP packets going to the mail servers of customers who do their own. I only do the filtering of email in my own servers.
Oh, it's you again.
The user consents when they choose to use an ISP that opts to use blacklisting to satisfy most of their customers.
I'm not opening the mail to see what's inside. I just choose not to allow the mail to be coming from places known to be sources of problems. If the Post Office knew that mail coming from a certain place was costing them more than what they are paid to deliver it, you can be sure they will stop taking the mail from there. That's not interfering with the mail, because that's the post office doing it themselves. I'm sure these days if the package looks suspicious, they're going to check on it. They may not even deliver it right now. But that is not interfering with the Post Office because it is they who are doing it.
I deliver mail in my mail server the way I like, and I don't want interference from outsiders telling me what to do. If you are a potential customer, and prefer a different ISP, then certainly tell me why you don't want my service. If there are enough people like you to justify setting up the service you want, I'd probably do it.
The default is you get no mail at all. That's not just how I think it should be, that is how it actually is before you get on the internet. Now how you do choose to get online is your choice. Want to go with an ISP that subscribes to every blacklist? Want to go with an ISP that subscribes to none? Want to run your own mail server? The choice is yours. Don't go whining because one of the choices happens to be something you would not want.
It is you who have no right to arbitrarily tell me what I can do or not do with my business. I'll make the decision that best reflects the way I want to do business. If you were my customer and didn't want to have your mail filtered the way I do it, you're free to move on to another ISP.
While I am concerned about some of the blacklist policies, I've found they are tremendously effective and have quite little collateral damage. What little I have found I can fix up myself. But I'd certainly like to have a better blacklist, but somehow I doubt you and I could work together to create one.
I am the ISP. My customers complain about spam. They don't want it. So I do what I can to block it. There is some collateral damage, but it is very small compared to the spam that I'm now successfully blocking. If a customer wants spam, they can use another ISP, or run their own MX server, or pay me to run a parallel set of ublocked servers. They have the freedom to choose. The ISPs are not forcing anything on their customers if there is a choice there.
Recently MAPS switched to a paid service, with the option of still being free for hobbyists (lots of /.'ers would qualify for that) willing to sign an agreement. Now I'm running a service which doesn't qualify as a hobby. And I was willing to pay for the service for a while. I wrote to them twice before the cutoff date of 31 July 2001, and twice again afterwards, about arranging services. I have never received a reply. So at this point I'm assuming the people at MAPS simply don't care. It seems to me they have a very arrogant attitude. So I'm just writing them off, and will be cheering when they finally become a dot.com.bomb.
Since I run my own servers, I have a right to choose who I will communicate with, and who I will decline to communicate with. I certainly don't want to receive spam from spammers, so I feel just fine about blocking it. Services like MAPS started out helping me do just that. However, it has turned into something else.
MAPS goes beyond just blocking spam. It attempts to influence other aspects of how business it performed. Examples of this include blocking an entire ISP just because a spammer connects through them, even if the spammer has a dedicated network connection with a static netblock registered via SWIP with ARIN. They also block mail from ISPs that don't host spammers, but host the web site mentioned in spam, even if the site owner was not the sender of the spam. They even go so far as to block things other than mail.
If a spammer is completely cut off, they just move on to the next ISP. They may even falsely represent what they are doing to make sure they get connected. In some cases they start their own ISP front operation to get backbone connections. But they do get back online, and they do evade for a while the information that blocks them, and we end up getting a little more of their spam.
If instead, we simply cut ourselves off from those spammers who we can reliably cut off (those that have a static netblock and stay with it), they won't be motivated to move on (as much), and our efforts to block them will be more effective for a longer time for us.
Some people know me as an avid anti-spammer who really hates spam. I really do hate spam. But I prefer not to have to keep chasing a moving target. If a spammer wants to settle down to a fixed location which I can block from my servers, I'm all for that. This is the way I want to block spammers. The trouble is, finding zone data that limits itself to just this is difficult.
Too many anti-spammers are aiming more to change behaviour and thought, than to just isolate themselves from spammers. As well intentioned as that may be, it is simply not going to work because humans don't really change very much. Most spammers are still spammers at heart (they may have quit for a while, but they are still spammers through and through). Most terrorist are terrorists for life. Most child molestors are child molesters for life. There are simply some bad people and we really can't fix that in most cases, however hard we try.
This doesn't address other kinds of spam like that which comes through open relays and that which comes from dynamic address pools for DSL, Cable, and dialup. Those still need to be dealt with in appropriate ways. The ISPs need to determine who definitely won't spam, and everyone else has to use the ISP mail server for outbound mail. Open relays can be blocked when they are found. Dynamic pools can be blocked when they are found if the ISP doesn't want to do it themselves.
And for sure, web sites with those insecure mailform scripts do need to be cleaned up. I block their outbound mail server.
I also block SMTP connections from servers which do not have valid reverse DNS. This has been very effective in blocking spam, including "spamhaus" operations (who probably can't get a decent admin to come work for them). So far not too many sites sending legitimate mail have this problem. So far this has resulted in 5 cases of legitimate mail being blocked. Of these, 3 fixed the problem, 1 did not answer, and 1 has Qwest for upstream and Qwest isn't delegating things to them correctly.
Postfix does support subject and header based string match blocking. But it is not terribly effective. I do use it for a few terms, but too often I find it rejecting legitimate mail, so I have to keep it lean, making it not so effective. Thus I do have to continue direct blocking mechanisms. I don't expect procmail to be all that effective in blocking spam, either, but it does have the advantage of being customizable to what you don't want to get.
Paypal has lately tried more and more to discourage complainers from contacting them. It seems they are suffering the same financial problems of other dot.coms and the first thing to go is customer service. If you're unhappy, they just don't want to deal with you. Of course if you are happy, there won't be any issue they have to deal with. So the simple way to save money is to just not give a damn. This is why I now no longer use Paypay, and why it's in my signature. Be sure to read here
Claiming it is NOT a cell phone, when in fact it is, gets them off the hook, I suppose. But if they have a normal way to tell if a number is a cell number (shouldn't be that hard) then they should not call it for telemarketing. Anyone who "demands" a land line number instead of a cell phone number must be planning to sell the list to telemarketers. Tell them what you think about that idea.
Since you are the ONLY person who has this problem, maybe you should explain just who THEY really are. Are you dealing with uneducated HR people? Give us exact names. We'll send Vito over to take care of them.
You obviously have a personal problem trying to convince people what your phone number is. Ever heard of "portable" numbers? In many areas you can take your phone number with you when you move. Eventually, this will cross area codes (it may even be now). Just give your cell phone number. If they don't believe it, it is they who have the problem. Explain it to them.
How can I use it if it has no source? If I can't integrate it into my existing programming, it won't do me any good. I run all my music through my own sound server.
If ultimate best sound is the issue, then what you need is something lossless. That rules out MP3 and OGG. And WAV is a waste of space. But there is FLAC, which is lossless sound compression. I haven't tried it yet, as the sound quality is not yet the defining issue for me. But as soon as I get beyond these tiny speakers and this cheap sound card, and have a laboratory grade ultra-linear DAC doing my analog conversion, feeding speakers with more watts than my PC power supply knows about, then quality certainly will be an issue.
Please don't use Redhat as an example of Linux's security potentials. In a sense, Redhat is the "MS Windows" of Linux distributions. It's designed for the masses, and to be "one shoe fits all", which is one of the many factors making Windows itself so problematic. Try porting everything but the kernel from OpenBSD to a Linux environment (including the libraries, which could be a bit of work). Assuming that OpenBSD is all that Theo claims it to be in terms of security, and that Linux (it's just a kernel, remember) is all that Linus claims it is, this should be quite a solid Linux system. There are, of course, other ways to accomplish this. Take a look at some of the secure Linux distributions such as perhaps Engarde Linux.