Yes. Thank you! This isn't just a small nitpick. In the last 5 years people have started to make the word "literal" mean its opposite. It is not a word that you can simply use for emphasis! Now when someone says something and needs to clarify that they are not being figurative but literal, they'll have to think of some other word. Can't you see we're running out of words?? Please think of the children. No really, it bugs me when people don't know what literal means.
I agree. The ones to worry are the people who got into IT / Computer Science because it looked like a good money-maker- not because they had a passion for it. Everyone can look around their office and see the difference. If you have a passion for the field in the first place and are looking for an excuse to jump in- I say jump in. Write great code and make a difference. I know it sounds cliche, but if you're doing something you love, you're simply that much more likely to succeed. There's always room for someone with the love for solving problems. CS in my opinion is problem-solving in a kind of pure medium- the ultimate flexibility on how you can get them solved. You'll be able to move those skills around no matter what happens with industry trends.
And the real way to increase system performance is to focus on the current bottleneck. Just like optimizing code, you look for the weakest link in the chain and work on that first. I wish someone would put a performance review together where they really put things into perspective. Something like: 1st best leveraged enhancement: Disk access- once you get something to such-and-such speed, then the next important step is: Bus speed. Once you get this to speed x: Video card. then RAM latency... (and of course CPU clock speed is in there somewhere)
At some point if the graphics card and the HDD access are fast enough and maybe some other things, low latency memory will give very big system improvements (percentage-wise. Of course there is always the law of diminishing returns).
And if you're going to be doing AJAX with Firefox, then you may as well use XUL. I'm very excited for the day when we see intensive XUL/AJAX applications. THAT's going to be slick.
On the other hand- I've downloaded it probably a dozen times on various machines with apt-get, which I'm sure didn't go toward the count... I think while the actual number might not mean much, the rate does, in my opinion. Well done, seriously.
Like other posters, I take your point too. Throwing the word hero around is just as silly as throwing the word terrorist around- it minimizes the original meaning.
That said, though, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I would say that anyone who is consumed by their passions and ends up affecting the lives of hundreds or millions of people for good is probably a hero- or at least something we can aspire to. And I do believe that lives are improved- I know my standard of living has improved, for example, by simply switching to an OSS OS. I know it sounds silly in the context of firefighters and police, because no-one has really had to sacrifice their life for a piece of software (that I know of?), but I don't think it's inconsequential. And I add my own salute to Open Source programmers.
Spam Justice (part of EmailCop) does this automatically. In addition to suing spammers, all the spam that gets routed to them is processed through 'fight back.' This first of all opens the email, and then opens the site(s) pointed to in the email. Additionally, if there is a form on that site, it fills it out with random junk and submits (it tries a couple of times). It only does this for verified spamming sites as well. And it does it in proportion to the spam sent, since it only ends up being 3 or 4 requests per spam (a graphic loading in the email, the site, and submitting the form a couple of times). If more people used EmailCop (my plug), this would be happening automatically all the time.
We tried implementing it as a part of our anti-spam product (unabashed plug: www.email-cop.com - please check it out) but it had a number of drawbacks. First- too many smtp servers were broken and wouldn't try to resend. Actually, we found that it was usually stuff like PHP scripts trying to send emails etc. that would never try again (we lost a lot of CVS commit messages...). The bigger problem, though, from our point of view, was that many smtp servers wouldn't try sending it again for sometimes up to an hour or two. That annoyed the crap out of our beta testers (and me). To cap it off, a bunch of spam that had routed through other servers did end up coming through anyway (yah, the 10% you mentioned).
It's true he didn't really hit on the real battle going on between blogs and MSM (main-stream-media, as he puts it). Blogs have the _potential_ to be what journalism purists always wanted to be- journalism without conflicts of interest (note I didn't say without bias). Then people can put their trust in a journalist (blogger) because that person has truly won the right to be trusted, not because of a network/cable brand or viewership watching it (I'm thinking Geraldo Rivera in Iraq...) In short, the time is coming when a blogger, for better or for worse, will be judged much more on merits than any MSM could be, because they won't be influenced by who knows what. A blogger can't survive a major credibility setback- networks can, because millions of people keep on turning on CNN because I mean, come on, what else is there? A blogger, therefore, is going to need to be a lot more careful, and, in the end, will end up being better than MSM. Not because their cool or hip or new, but because we have a direct link to credibility.
That is, there are two ends that constantly reverse polarity and the magnatism turns the motor (like a mag-lev train, but in a circle).. I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted, so I'm probably missing the news here...
The scenario I would like to see is spammers simply puting "Advertisement" on the subject line (as per the legislation). They will still get all their repeat buyers and guys like this one, and filtering for those who don't want it will be a breaze. ISP's won't have to do anything anymore, which will remove the incentive for spammers to trick them in some way. And all the cool filter methods like the bayes can turn around and be used to filter ads into categories that they are most interested in (and we can still make fun of them, but it will be light-hearted, because it's not effecting our inboxes anymore:)
There are two problems with this. The first is the percentage of buyers who are not repeat buyers, and who hate spam. It's the person who hates spam, but when he was tricked into looking at the spam that was selling those Iraqi most wanted cards, broke down and got some, and then swore off spam from then on. This wedge of income for spammers is what marketing types are always counting on. The philosophy is: "They don't know they want it yet- they need me to tell them that they want it before they buy it." This isn't a major cache cow for most business people, but it's the wedge of income that marketers, including spammers, spend the most effort on. What could be done to remove this incentive from marketers? Beats me.
The second challenge is Microsoft (though it's not a challenge yet- it could become one). They would much rather be in control of the whole solution- they could have stamps or push their passports or do something like that that would bring in more revenue or cement their hold on the email market etc.- we all know the routine. To their high level corporate strategy, all the spammers simply saying "advertisement" would ruin an excellent opportunity to... extend the empire, so to speak. So, I don't know all the arguments yet, but you can bet they'll be making some in the next year or so that try to defeat the simplest solution.
So the lesson is, as much as I hate to say it, ISP's need to reward spammers who say "Advertisement" on the subject line, IMO. They need to let their spam through into some box for those who want to receive it. I believe you would see a slow, steady trickle of spammers resorting to this, because they would get the best response rates from it.
Hi. I'm a paralegal for the city hall here in Laguna Niguel, CA. Could someone please verify the varacity of the points above? I've been doing some research along similar lines. Thanks!
I agree. in re: interpretation challenge, I think the biggest leap I see here is that the spammers must become reactive instead of the anti-spammers. Filters for example, by their very nature, are reactive. Filters, no matter how brilliant, and with the exception of white-lists (if you categorize them as filters like the author), are adapting ex post facto to the spam. The spammers by the very nature of the thing are always a step ahead and the best a filter can hope for is to be so super-reactive that it seems almost proactive.
In this case, though, like you pointed out, the spammer must be constantly reactive to the turing challenge. And I must say, the tables will have turned significantly, because the producers of challenge response systems can change them very easily, whereas most spammers rely on black-market software that takes a few months to make the rounds and update
At this year's MIT spamconference there was a presentation I really enjoyed (Spamconference - 1st morning session) that talked about the timeline of feature adoption in spam (for example, when most spam started spelling viagra funny, etc.). You can see in the graph that there are new sets of spam features that occur every few months or so, all of a sudden, all at once. The presenter theorized that the evolutionary jumps in features that are a consequence of a new version of spamming software being released. The point being, spammers proper aren't the smartest guys around and won't be able (IMO) to be very reactive. The only reason they've been able to stay ahead is our favorite solution to date has been reactive. (For the record, though, I think filters are very fun to program and play with).
Could we be creating generations... all feeding one another's egos for the sole purpose of eliminating all competition?
I would say that capitalism in its most raw form did exactly that. Hence we had (and some countries still have) problems with child labor, destructive monopolies (ahem), etc. etc. The thing is, when groups of right-brainers as you call them get too large, even capitalism spits them out. All the advances we've made in capitalism, from child-labor laws to employee-stock ownership plans, to new SEC oversight and laws that make Enron-type things not happen, are all the public reacting and plugging up another hole that greed exploited. It's comforting to know that capitalism + democracy patches those holes up, and while it will never eliminate greed, it does keep things in equilibrium more or less.
But as for the individual that suffers from it... That's the travesty.
Slashdot's reaction to this guy is a perfect example how society tolerates that right-braindness to a degree, but once they feel someone has crossed a line, it's a steep, slippery slope, and their 'friends' don't tend to stick with them, even if they're involved in the fall.
What kind of strange alternate reality is this company living in?
The reality of greed. I've known people like this. I agree completely with you- it's very, very sad. There is a kind of personality that craves "luxeries." Even before they have made any money, if they go on a business trip, they like to be in the nice hotel, to sit in the hot-tub, to eat expensive chocolates. Then they get some money, usually through some fluke or because some other greedy person has been duped, and then for the rest of their lives, they feel like they deserve that kind of income. So then they spend the rest of their lives (or until they have a real life changing experience *cross fingers*) doing everything they can to maintain it. They sponsor nascars, they buy stock in airlines, they blow through venture capital without any accountability or sense of responsibility- it's simply the money they deserve. A lot of criminals (of the enron sort) are made this way.
It's worse than a drug habit, because the whole world is telling them on some level that what they're doing is "success." As inneffective as it often is, it is good that society in general can tell a person "your drug habit is destroying your life." In the world of greed, though, this rarely happens. Instead, the person is circled by his greedy lawyers (tm) and business friends and political friends in high places. (I'm not saying those professions are all greedy- it's just that the greedy among them clump together).
Anyway, whether you make money or not, if you feel you would ever be susceptible to that feeling/habit, the one thing that we as humans can do despite popular culture's teachings is change our own character and personality with concious effort. The reason "Riches Don't Make you Happy" sounds so cliche is because it's true. And yet how many of us can actually be honest with ourselves and admit we believe that money will make us happier. Anyway, now I'm rambling. That's my brief overview of the altered reality of greed.
For the record- I LOVE INFINIUM LABS! Those terrible things the journalists said about you can't be true, and nothing I said in this post should in any way be construed to be referencing any of your noble founders.
Slashdot Mirror
nah, just kidding.
Yes. Thank you! This isn't just a small nitpick. In the last 5 years people have started to make the word "literal" mean its opposite. It is not a word that you can simply use for emphasis! Now when someone says something and needs to clarify that they are not being figurative but literal, they'll have to think of some other word. Can't you see we're running out of words?? Please think of the children. No really, it bugs me when people don't know what literal means.
... then I lost my virtue a long time ago. ;)
Or here you can read some guidelines that are actually insightful (or 'really for nerds', depending on how you look at it):
hcibib
I agree. The ones to worry are the people who got into IT / Computer Science because it looked like a good money-maker- not because they had a passion for it. Everyone can look around their office and see the difference. If you have a passion for the field in the first place and are looking for an excuse to jump in- I say jump in. Write great code and make a difference. I know it sounds cliche, but if you're doing something you love, you're simply that much more likely to succeed. There's always room for someone with the love for solving problems. CS in my opinion is problem-solving in a kind of pure medium- the ultimate flexibility on how you can get them solved. You'll be able to move those skills around no matter what happens with industry trends.
Looks like some employees are getting the axe for everything from purchasing abuse to time fraud.
Hi, I'd like to buy an argument please.
And the real way to increase system performance is to focus on the current bottleneck. Just like optimizing code, you look for the weakest link in the chain and work on that first. I wish someone would put a performance review together where they really put things into perspective. Something like:
1st best leveraged enhancement: Disk access- once you get something to such-and-such speed, then the next important step is:
Bus speed. Once you get this to speed x:
Video card.
then RAM latency...
(and of course CPU clock speed is in there somewhere)
At some point if the graphics card and the HDD access are fast enough and maybe some other things, low latency memory will give very big system improvements (percentage-wise. Of course there is always the law of diminishing returns).
Ditto. From TFA
" I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn't uninstall. Now I was mad."
And if you're going to be doing AJAX with Firefox, then you may as well use XUL. I'm very excited for the day when we see intensive XUL/AJAX applications. THAT's going to be slick.
On the other hand- I've downloaded it probably a dozen times on various machines with apt-get, which I'm sure didn't go toward the count... I think while the actual number might not mean much, the rate does, in my opinion. Well done, seriously.
Let's not let them get away with it, then. Please let them know how you feel.
contactus
Like other posters, I take your point too. Throwing the word hero around is just as silly as throwing the word terrorist around- it minimizes the original meaning.
That said, though, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I would say that anyone who is consumed by their passions and ends up affecting the lives of hundreds or millions of people for good is probably a hero- or at least something we can aspire to. And I do believe that lives are improved- I know my standard of living has improved, for example, by simply switching to an OSS OS. I know it sounds silly in the context of firefighters and police, because no-one has really had to sacrifice their life for a piece of software (that I know of?), but I don't think it's inconsequential. And I add my own salute to Open Source programmers.
Spam Justice (part of EmailCop) does this automatically. In addition to suing spammers, all the spam that gets routed to them is processed through 'fight back.' This first of all opens the email, and then opens the site(s) pointed to in the email. Additionally, if there is a form on that site, it fills it out with random junk and submits (it tries a couple of times). It only does this for verified spamming sites as well. And it does it in proportion to the spam sent, since it only ends up being 3 or 4 requests per spam (a graphic loading in the email, the site, and submitting the form a couple of times). If more people used EmailCop (my plug), this would be happening automatically all the time.
Speaking of Google commercializing, looks like they've still got a bit of it to do:
Google Shares Fall on Fourth Quarter Revenue Warning
-----------------------
www.email-cop.com
We tried implementing it as a part of our anti-spam product (unabashed plug: www.email-cop.com - please check it out) but it had a number of drawbacks. First- too many smtp servers were broken and wouldn't try to resend. Actually, we found that it was usually stuff like PHP scripts trying to send emails etc. that would never try again (we lost a lot of CVS commit messages...). The bigger problem, though, from our point of view, was that many smtp servers wouldn't try sending it again for sometimes up to an hour or two. That annoyed the crap out of our beta testers (and me). To cap it off, a bunch of spam that had routed through other servers did end up coming through anyway (yah, the 10% you mentioned).
It's true he didn't really hit on the real battle going on between blogs and MSM (main-stream-media, as he puts it). Blogs have the _potential_ to be what journalism purists always wanted to be- journalism without conflicts of interest (note I didn't say without bias). Then people can put their trust in a journalist (blogger) because that person has truly won the right to be trusted, not because of a network/cable brand or viewership watching it (I'm thinking Geraldo Rivera in Iraq...) In short, the time is coming when a blogger, for better or for worse, will be judged much more on merits than any MSM could be, because they won't be influenced by who knows what. A blogger can't survive a major credibility setback- networks can, because millions of people keep on turning on CNN because I mean, come on, what else is there? A blogger, therefore, is going to need to be a lot more careful, and, in the end, will end up being better than MSM. Not because their cool or hip or new, but because we have a direct link to credibility.
Q: What's green, and if it falls out of a tree and lands on you it could kill you?
A: A pool table.
That is, there are two ends that constantly reverse polarity and the magnatism turns the motor (like a mag-lev train, but in a circle)..
I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted, so I'm probably missing the news here...
I was looking forward to "Licrosoft"
The scenario I would like to see is spammers simply puting "Advertisement" on the subject line (as per the legislation). They will still get all their repeat buyers and guys like this one, and filtering for those who don't want it will be a breaze. ISP's won't have to do anything anymore, which will remove the incentive for spammers to trick them in some way. And all the cool filter methods like the bayes can turn around and be used to filter ads into categories that they are most interested in (and we can still make fun of them, but it will be light-hearted, because it's not effecting our inboxes anymore :)
There are two problems with this. The first is the percentage of buyers who are not repeat buyers, and who hate spam. It's the person who hates spam, but when he was tricked into looking at the spam that was selling those Iraqi most wanted cards, broke down and got some, and then swore off spam from then on. This wedge of income for spammers is what marketing types are always counting on. The philosophy is: "They don't know they want it yet- they need me to tell them that they want it before they buy it." This isn't a major cache cow for most business people, but it's the wedge of income that marketers, including spammers, spend the most effort on. What could be done to remove this incentive from marketers? Beats me.
The second challenge is Microsoft (though it's not a challenge yet- it could become one). They would much rather be in control of the whole solution- they could have stamps or push their passports or do something like that that would bring in more revenue or cement their hold on the email market etc.- we all know the routine. To their high level corporate strategy, all the spammers simply saying "advertisement" would ruin an excellent opportunity to... extend the empire, so to speak. So, I don't know all the arguments yet, but you can bet they'll be making some in the next year or so that try to defeat the simplest solution.
So the lesson is, as much as I hate to say it, ISP's need to reward spammers who say "Advertisement" on the subject line, IMO. They need to let their spam through into some box for those who want to receive it. I believe you would see a slow, steady trickle of spammers resorting to this, because they would get the best response rates from it.
Hi. I'm a paralegal for the city hall here in Laguna Niguel, CA. Could someone please verify the varacity of the points above? I've been doing some research along similar lines. Thanks!
I agree. in re: interpretation challenge, I think the biggest leap I see here is that the spammers must become reactive instead of the anti-spammers. Filters for example, by their very nature, are reactive. Filters, no matter how brilliant, and with the exception of white-lists (if you categorize them as filters like the author), are adapting ex post facto to the spam. The spammers by the very nature of the thing are always a step ahead and the best a filter can hope for is to be so super-reactive that it seems almost proactive.
In this case, though, like you pointed out, the spammer must be constantly reactive to the turing challenge. And I must say, the tables will have turned significantly, because the producers of challenge response systems can change them very easily, whereas most spammers rely on black-market software that takes a few months to make the rounds and update
At this year's MIT spamconference there was a presentation I really enjoyed (Spamconference - 1st morning session) that talked about the timeline of feature adoption in spam (for example, when most spam started spelling viagra funny, etc.). You can see in the graph that there are new sets of spam features that occur every few months or so, all of a sudden, all at once. The presenter theorized that the evolutionary jumps in features that are a consequence of a new version of spamming software being released. The point being, spammers proper aren't the smartest guys around and won't be able (IMO) to be very reactive. The only reason they've been able to stay ahead is our favorite solution to date has been reactive. (For the record, though, I think filters are very fun to program and play with).
Could we be creating generations... all feeding one another's egos for the sole purpose of eliminating all competition?
I would say that capitalism in its most raw form did exactly that. Hence we had (and some countries still have) problems with child labor, destructive monopolies (ahem), etc. etc. The thing is, when groups of right-brainers as you call them get too large, even capitalism spits them out. All the advances we've made in capitalism, from child-labor laws to employee-stock ownership plans, to new SEC oversight and laws that make Enron-type things not happen, are all the public reacting and plugging up another hole that greed exploited. It's comforting to know that capitalism + democracy patches those holes up, and while it will never eliminate greed, it does keep things in equilibrium more or less.
But as for the individual that suffers from it... That's the travesty.
Slashdot's reaction to this guy is a perfect example how society tolerates that right-braindness to a degree, but once they feel someone has crossed a line, it's a steep, slippery slope, and their 'friends' don't tend to stick with them, even if they're involved in the fall.
What kind of strange alternate reality is this company living in?
The reality of greed. I've known people like this. I agree completely with you- it's very, very sad. There is a kind of personality that craves "luxeries." Even before they have made any money, if they go on a business trip, they like to be in the nice hotel, to sit in the hot-tub, to eat expensive chocolates. Then they get some money, usually through some fluke or because some other greedy person has been duped, and then for the rest of their lives, they feel like they deserve that kind of income. So then they spend the rest of their lives (or until they have a real life changing experience *cross fingers*) doing everything they can to maintain it. They sponsor nascars, they buy stock in airlines, they blow through venture capital without any accountability or sense of responsibility- it's simply the money they deserve. A lot of criminals (of the enron sort) are made this way.
It's worse than a drug habit, because the whole world is telling them on some level that what they're doing is "success." As inneffective as it often is, it is good that society in general can tell a person "your drug habit is destroying your life." In the world of greed, though, this rarely happens. Instead, the person is circled by his greedy lawyers (tm) and business friends and political friends in high places. (I'm not saying those professions are all greedy- it's just that the greedy among them clump together).
Anyway, whether you make money or not, if you feel you would ever be susceptible to that feeling/habit, the one thing that we as humans can do despite popular culture's teachings is change our own character and personality with concious effort. The reason "Riches Don't Make you Happy" sounds so cliche is because it's true. And yet how many of us can actually be honest with ourselves and admit we believe that money will make us happier. Anyway, now I'm rambling. That's my brief overview of the altered reality of greed.
For the record- I LOVE INFINIUM LABS! Those terrible things the journalists said about you can't be true, and nothing I said in this post should in any way be construed to be referencing any of your noble founders.
One word - Blades
Blade Servers