Paul got his start in high school, finding vulnerabilities on our local Novell network and in some of the bulletin boards run by other, less technically savvy high school kids.
Our high school CS teacher, Mr. Corliss, used to challenge people to get his password. It never seemed to take Paul long to do so. What really set him apart from the pack, though, was that he'd unfailingly go straight to Mr. Corliss, prove that he had done it, and then explain in detail how he did it and if it was preventable. This was in 1990-91. (I definitely recall him setting up a packet sniffer at one point, among other tricks.)
It was pretty clear that he was operating on a different level and mindset than the wanna-be hackers (mostly, the ones running the BBSs.) If they got someone's password, they'd delete files or send obnoxious mail or the like. Paul just told you, 'You should change your password, it's too obvious.' It was clear that his motivation was to find out what the security holes were, much more than to cause mayhem.
So, it was no surprise to find out, years later, that he'd gone on to become a luminary in the security field. It's the same stuff he's been doing since he was 16.
-- Kirby (Corvallis High School, class of '92. Paul Kocher is Corvallis High School, class of '91.)
Anime is literally the japanese word for 'animation'. Typically, it's used to mean all animation made in Japan, from Pokemon to Akira. Much like in America, there are several major schools of art, and many of them do have the big eyes, small mouth conventions, which are actually a derivative of early Disney cartoons that inspired early Anime. But there are certainly a number of shows that don't match these conventions. (And even more variety if you try and genre-stereotype - that perception is strongly tied to which shows get translated. There's a lot of anime that has no giant robots or ultra violence or graphic sex!)
Japanimation is a tricky word. Much like 'trekkie', it's hardly ever used in a positive fashion within the fan community. Commonly, it's used by people who don't know the word anime, and think they're more 'hip' than they really are - the calling card of a poser, per se. While I don't recommend judging people too strongly based on them not knowing the nuances of any fannish vocabulary, I do recommend dropping the phrase 'japanimation' from your personal vocabulary entirely, as it's likely to turn some fans against you in an a priori fasion.
And, to muddy the waters, there's a rising number of animated and comic titles made outside of Japan that are strongly in the tradition of anime and manga. (Manga is the Japanese word for Comic Book, though without some of the juvenile implications that we (erroneously) attack to the medium.) Like this Matrix. Or, to really walk the line, the fine comic Usagi Yojimbo, written by Stan Sakai. Despite a Japanese Title, and written by an author who is ethnically Japanse, Mr. Sakai is an American. The comic is written in English, and published in the U.S., but artistically and thematically, it's more kindred with Manga than most Manga.
My feeling is that it's hard to waste time more than arguing over whether or not something is, or is not, anime or manga. There's some content in describing something as in an Anime-style, and even more if one can tell what shows it is similar to, but beyond that, I really want to know if it's good or not. I'd rather spend my time watching great animated work, like Watership Down or Princess Mononoke, than trying to figure out the correct nomenclature. But, geeks love to argue over trivial details, so don't expect good sense to prevail.
Or, the short version: No, it's not technically anime, but it probably appeals to a similar audience.
Living in Washington State, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon. And so, I frequently browse their site to make purchasing decisions (thanks to the good interface and often useful customer reviews) and then go to an out-of-state competitor to dodge the sales tax, which is usually higher than the price difference even if you get the free shipping Amazon bonus.
If I had to pay sales tax in other states, I'd do this less - but for some purchases, start buying internationally to save money. It just seems wrong that such a thing would work.
It does make me miss living in Oregon, the land without sales tax at all. (But not really, given that WA has no state income tax.)
Correct. Starship Troopers: The Movie is to Starship Troopers: The Book like Linux is to Windows. Sit someone down at a desktop for each, and you'll find lots of similarities, but one of them has a whole lot more depth.
I actually read Starship Troopers and Forever War back-to-back, intentionally to pick up on the contrast. I do feel like it's a fair and interesting comparison. There are a number of very similar scenes, with different slants (ie, the similar device of loading in military knowledge directly into the brain of each protagonist, but the profoundly different experience of each with it.) They work as comparisons because they're both very good books using similar situations to make a vastly different conclusion.
I wish I were still in the position of taking English classes - there's a great paper in here!
Ultimately, I find I agree with Haldeman's view of war as pointless and self-propogating over Heinlein's view of it being a foundation for cultural value, but the arguments are strong enough that one could argue either way. And that makes them both worth reading.
At least one of the major shipping companies (FedEx, Postal Service, or UPS, I can't recall) has a special 'shock' detector option. It's basically a little vial stuck onto (or inside?) the package that has well known properties, and if it's broken by the time the package arrives, they'll pay for damages.
And yes, for goodness sake, any time you're shipping anything worth more than $100, BUY THE INSURANCE. And you have to declare a value. We learned this at Tuxtops, back in the day - if a laptop was damaged and we didn't fill this out, we had to pay for shipping damages. (Which happened rarely, given that we were using factory packaging, but it did happen. And we strongly suspected some of the damage happened post-shipping, but it's impossible to prove that sort of thing.)
I'd suggest instead buying the games you think you'd like to play, and not buying the ones you won't.
I don't fully understand the idea of supporting a company on principle, or based on who is in charge. If they produce quality product that I want, I'll buy it.
I can see arguments for not buying from companies whose owners have political or ethical stances you disagree with, like Dave Thomas of Wendy's (outspoken anti-homosexual). But because their president has poor business sense? That's the sort of thing that either they'll straigten out, or the market will straighten out for them, but doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of, effectively, a boycott. But hey, if you have moral and ethical issues with people who can't manage a company and its debts, knock yourself out.
Some of you may remember Tuxtops, a linux laptop company. We stopped selling laptops at the beginning of the year, and I no longer work for them, but dealing with laptops and support issues on a larger scale has given me at least more data than most people have. Here's some observations:
* Our best model was the Obsidian (Premium) 30w. This is the same as the Dell Inpsiron 5000, made by a Taiwanese company called Compal (the biggest laptop manufacturer in the world.) I'm actually typing this on one right now. It has a nice-sized keyboard, big screen, powerful components. It isn't lightweight (as far as modern laptops go), but they were by far the most reliable model.
* The really cheap model we sold, made by ASUS, used mostly desktop parts to cut costs. It was inexpensive, but you paid the price. The units would easily overheat - when we started doing overnight cpu-heavy burn-in tests, it became apparant what the drawbacks of this approach were. For the sales-guy who does email and demos on the road, it'd be okay, but for anyone who knows what a makefile is, avoid these kinds of laptops. They're likely to go into Thermal Shutdown with virtually no notice.
* We had a really cool model show up last year that was ultralight, with a detachable bay where the CD-ROM and floppy sat. If you could leave that behind, it was a phenomenal design. However, in practice, we found that there were frequently problems with the docking, and many systems were very delicate. Getting it to dock properly could be difficult, moreso than it should be.
* We had one model that we sold for our first few months that had almost all the pressure from the lid on one hinge. Unsurprisingly, the case cracked easily through regular use - we lost money overall on this unit with all the replacements, and stopped selling it as soon as we saw the trend. This was just poor engineering.
* An early ultralight we sold had a really awful keyboard and was also prone to heat problems.
The morals? The quality of a piece of laptop hardware can vary greatly, much more so than in desktops. Our best experiences were with the more traditional designs (I know my current company is also going away from VAIOs and towards the Dell/Thinkpad designs, due to reliability problems in the field.) There are design tradeoffs to make things ultra-light and ultra-cheap, and in my experience, they weren't worth it.
Go for the big brick with the big screen. Buy from someone who has good tech support - you can't replace parts if they go bad yourself, like with a desktop. Pay attention to what people are saying in places like this thread - laptop models are definitely susceptible to design flaws. From my experience, physical flaws (ie, cracked cases) and overheating are issues to be very sensitive to. (Note: getting warm is different than overheating. Most laptops get warm. Most of them do not regularly go into Thermal Shutdown. That's what you want to avoid.)
Lots of people have already pointed out the main differences. Another thing to be aware of is that what a various degree is, even in just Computer Science, varies a lot from school to school.
In my school (Oregon State), it was part of the College of Engineering. There wasn't a separate Computer Engineering degree. As a result, we had to take several hardware courses, with more as possible electives. The emphasis was definitely on software, however. There were a lot of computer-types in Electrical Engineering, which was very hardware heavy. There were classes required for both CS and EE in both hardware and software - it actually did work out that the EE teachers assumed a lot of background that the CS students didn't have, and we struggled to get a C - and the CS professors did the same thing right back at the EE students later, with the same results.:-)
However, in many schools (particularly Liberal Arts schools), Computer Science is in the college of Arts and Sciences, NOT Engineering. You take a lot more math, and a lot more non-science courses, if you end up at one of these. You might not have to do any hardware at these schools.
And there are definitely different schools of thought for both of these. A big one is: Do they teach you theory and general principles, or do they teach you useful real skills? The former can be noticed by courses in Algorithms, Data Structures, and teachers that don't care what language you submit your assignments in. The latter has courses on System Administration, particular languages, and pays a lot of attention to current technology and trends. I attended a theoretical school - there are advantages to both! It is true that having a solid background in the science of programming makes it much easier to pick up new skills, but they also graduate a lot of smart people who don't know how to actually do anything on their first job.
Also, I'll reiterate what others have said - be true to yourself. Take a minor in a non-technical field, if you want to. Learn a foreign language - it'll never be this convenient again! Or, if you are the kind of person that likes to completely be immersed in one thing (like programming), do it! Get a part-time job on campus, and come out with some actual experience, which you won't regret.
Another thing I wish I'd considered when choosing schools - networking is a Real Thing. Most of my college friends ended up in a different geographical area than I did, which is too bad. Nearly every job I've been at has a couple of Universities that have a lot of alumni that have sucked each other in - particularly tech-heavy schools. Yes, the competition will be tougher, but if you can handle it, you will have very valuable people who will vouch for you to get you interviews, and as someone who is involved in hiring decisions, that counts for a lot. Get to know the other people in your major. Don't be the kid who sits in the last row and never sees any of those people outside of lectures. It's worth it.
I can easily think of reasons why Frodo was chosen to be the Ringbearer.
(WARNING: SPOILERS)
From a story perspective, this is an item that practically embodies corruption. In the Tolkein world, powerful figures are very given to corruption, eg Saruman. It's quite reasonable to think that Gandalf was afraid of possessing the ring, that he might give into its temptations. Only someone with a humble heart and no great love of power could stand a chance. (And, indeed, it took the help of someone even more humble than Frodo to ultimately triumph.)
From a literary point of view, Frodo relates very well to the readers. The Shire is in many ways a metaphor for England. Frodo is a person from a mostly familiar and mundane landscape, with a bit of an eye for the fantastic. Much like most readers. The fact that this everyman goes on the epic quest makes it mean more to the average reader than if Aragorn had just taken over from the beginning.
Not to say that the Lord of the Rings is a perfect story. It definitely has a unique style, and has a lot more in common with a Norse Mythological Epic than the modern Fantasy genre. I don't expect it to naturally appeal to Fantasy readers - no more or less so than, say, Shakespeare. It is slow-paced in places, particularly (and unfortunately) the first half of book 1.
And it has the disadvantage that most of the good ideas have been distilled and redistributed, so that if someone is familiar with Modern Fantasy at all, it appears derivitive. Which is unfortunate. It does seem cliche'd in parts, and often the cliche originated in these books as an original idea. Such is often the fate of influential works. (Sort of like Romeo & Juliet - someone who had somehow no direct knowledge of the play would probably expect the ending, because that's how those stories go. And the go like that - because of Romeo & Juliet, mostly.)
I'm looking forward to the movies. It's possible for a book to be well-translated to a movie, albeit somewhat rare. Still, worth my $10 to find out - it's quite possible that the language and pacing issues that make it difficult for many readers to appreciate this story will finally be overcome.
(And not to sound elitist - there's lots of Authors I find difficult to appreciate for stylistic reasons. Such as Dickens, or James Joyce. And Shakespeare, while I enjoy, isn't something I dive into casually.)
There's a billboard on the 101, near Palo Alto, that says (IIRC):
If you're going to join a revolution, choose carefully.
http://www.microsoft.com/jobs
I certainly interpret this to be appealing to people curious about Linux, given some of the local companies ad copy (eg, Linuxcare: At the Center of the Revolution.)
I happened to be talking to my brother yesterday, who is getting his PhD at the University of South Carolina in Chemical Engineering, and it's pretty much exactly on this topic. I don't know the technical details (I'm not a chemist), but basically, they already can make cheap fuel cells that run at room temperature based on hydrogen. Obviously, Hydrogen has some drawbacks. His project is trying to get the process to work with natural gas.
It's a very neat process - it runs at room temperatures, instead of the mega-heat of combustion engines, the by-product is steam, it's cheaper, it's very lightweight, and it's using a more renewable resource. So, researchers are hard at work!
(And if anyone wants a Chemical Engineer/Materials Scientist just out of grad school with a background in this kind of thing, feel free to send me email, he's looking!:-)
Here's some of my favorite series, coming from someone who has pretty different opinions than it seems most of you do. I hated Akira, don't like Dragonball Z, and am in general not to fond of most Shounen series.
Anyway, my list:
Escaflowne: Just finished re-watching this one. It has beautiful art, a strong candidate for best music in any series, and an interesting setting. A young japanese school girl gets sucked into a magical world (yeah, again), filled with Newtonion steam-power style fighting robots, swordsmen, dragons, and romance.
Utena: My top pick. A very surreal story about a young girl who has dedicated her life to becoming a prince. Very surreal and artistic in places - it gets a lot weirder in the later seasons, which aren't commercially available in the US yet.
Evangelion: Lots of people have discussed this - a mecha anime that, for once, is really focused on the characters. It ends strangely, but worth watching anyway.
Fushigi Yuugi (aka The Mysterious Play): More Magical Girl anime (which is a genre I happen to like), heavy on interesting and fun characters and romance. It has more humor than most series, but it gets really dark in places too.
There's also a whole lot of great series available only in fansubs, like Marmalade Boy, Kodomo no Omocha, Hani Yuri Dango - a lot of the ones that don't make it over here aren't science fiction or fantasy related. This probably has a lot to do with marketability - it's harder to sell Americans on a story of Japanese students finding their way through tangled relationships. But they can be a lot of fun, particularly if you want to learn more about Japanese culture.
Our laptops currently are coming from Arm Computers. They primarily do business with resellers, so they're somewhat bigger than the lack of name recognition might imply. We're pretty pleased with the laptop quality - those of you going to Linux World Expo are welcome to come test them out!
We've actually talked with the fellow who ran linuxlaptops.com. We have a pretty different business model than he did, which hopefully will do better. There's very clearly a demand for Linux Laptops, which has become increasingly obvious the more we've talked to people about this.
I don't want to imply that Dell is bad for the Linux community - Linux Care is a really cool company, and we're working closely with them ourselves. In fact, there's really no concept in 'competition' as far as giving back to the community - if Dell provides some device driver we need, we're free to put the money we would have on that to support WinModems, which they're free to use, and develop some good DVD software instead... and so forth. While I worry about competition for sales, competition for writing open source code just doesn't hurt anyone, especially us.
The hope is that our product is high enough quality that we can find a niche, much like Penguin and VA Linux and others compete nicely against the tier one Windows companies that have added Linux. Time will tell.
For an alternative, Tuxtops is now taking preorders for Linux on Laptops, with an expected ship date of February 15th.
A note on pricing, from a somewhat informed view - while Linux is free, there are costs associated with it. The LinuxCare certification, for one. We're in the process of certification right now. It costs $1000/system for a one-time certification, or $10000/system for a lifetime certification, where they'll test upgrades periodically. (I think the second is more useful for a company without a lot of in-house Linux talent.)
Additionally, we've got a deal to offer a free hour of LinuxCare support with our laptops, which costs us $50/system. I'm pretty sure Dell has a similar deal - maybe a better price, since they have more volume, but it's likely comparable to their windows cost. Of course, they don't need to pay support staff for Linux, either. I don't know if they pay MS for systems shipped with Linux as part of a blanket deal. (I do know that we don't pay MS anything at all.)
Why are we better? I haven't yet had my hands on a Dell Linux setup, so I don't know if the product is better or not. Dell has a good reputation and some Linux experience from desktops, so I expect them to be reasonably comparable technically. We ship with things like X, Sound, IR support, and APM working out of the box - I'd be surprised if Dell didn't.
What we _do_ plan on doing, that I doubt dell does, is contributing back to the Open Source community. We want to fund projects that are released under the GPL, including device drivers and good support for winmodems, as well as software that improves mobile computing for linux like a good location manager. We want to offer non-Red Hat distributions - some flavor of Debian, first, in the near future. We'd like to offer a BSD flavor, eventually.
I'd recommend checking out Alexandria Digital Literature. They have a really cool service, where you rate books you've read, and it matches you to neighbors and recommends things you might like. And, unlike Amazon, it really works well. That's what's convinced me to read Bujold, and boy was it right!
They also sell electronic stories, mostly short stories, which is sort of interesting. You can get things in a format to put them on your palmpilot immediately, which is useful for trips and stuff. Is this the future of publishing? I don't know.
Definitely worth checking out for anyone who likes to read as a hobby, which most people reading this topic probably do.
I picked up the commercial version of this about a month ago, and have spent far too many hours locked in its entrancing spell.
Technically, this is a solid achievement. I haven't had a single crash. It looks and sounds as good as in Windows.
And gameplay is superb. It isn't dramatically different than HOMM2, really - but that's not much of a complaint. This is, no doubt, one of the premiere strategy games on the market, regardless of platform.
Another nice note - if you do the full install (which is, I grant, huge), you don't need the CD to play. You could probably play it remotely over X, if you want to. It put an icon in KDE under games, which I thought it should do. I installed it as root, and can play as myself - which is better than some things, like Star Office.
Kudos for Loki for an exceptional port of an unusually addicting game. I'm becoming decreasingly interested in even keeping a windows box around for any reason.
It's a bit premature, but I'm part of a startup that's working on providing real linux on laptop solutions. It's cool that dell is doing something, but our goals are very different than what theirs will be. We really want to make linux into the premier OS for laptops, and do things like write drivers and software to support a lot of the tricky things (like the strange monitor types you get, sound, suspend/resume, power management, mobile network configuration managers, and stuff like that.) Which is something Dell will never care about doing, and companies that would (such as VALinux or RedHat) aren't focused on the needs of the laptop. We believe this is a real niche that the linux community needs filled, and by people who understand open source software. We plan on doing product launch at linux world expo, the first week in February. Online ordering should be up right around then. The company name is Tuxtops. I'd, of course, love it if people who wanted Linux Laptops waited eagerly until we open our doors.:-) We're busy getting our first set of laptops configured right now. Yes, this is a blatent commercial plug, albeit relevant to the topic at hand. We might be hiring people in the near future, if anyone has particular expertise in linux on the laptop, particularly in device drivers, feel free to send resumes to info@tuxtops.com. Stop by our boot at Linux World Expo, if you can.
Caveat: I worked for WebTV in operations until early December (when I quit to start up a linux-related company. Yay.) I'm not going to reveal any deep company secrets, though.
This is not terribly surprising to me. WebTV is a very unusual ISP. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes tricks and features that take advantage of the fact that they control the hardware and software of their users. Some of them are very good. (For example, on each connect each box reports data on failed dialing attempts. By aggregating these, they have a really interesting picture of all the pops that their ISP partners are letting WebTV boxes into, including when busy signals occur, when outages occur (since the WebTV box gets in through a different pop on failure and can still report), when there are radius authentication issues, and so on. It's not uncommon for WebTV to know a pop is down before the ISP that owns it is - which is no knock on the ISP, it's kudos for making a powerful feature that normal computers don't have.)
But while some of the features are really useful, and most are innocuous, there's a fair amount of stuff out there, like this, that was never intended for the public at large and can be easily abused. There are certainly WebTV users that are far more clever and malicious than one would expect, and they've exploited a number of bugs throughout the years.
Historically, WebTV has actually been pretty good internally about fixing these things. The operations team really does care, from experience, and beats on engineering until they get a fix. It is easy to distribute patches to the service (the internal machines.) It's a bit more work, but not a big deal, to offer users a patch that automatically installs to their own boxes if something needs to be done on that end, but those kind of bug fixes tend to be put on hold until features are being rolled out unless it's a serious bug, since users complain A LOT if they download an upgrade and don't see anything different.
I don't think this means much to the slashdot crowd, other than some cheap Microsoft bashing. It's a real bug, which is a product of a complicated proprietary system, and will almost assuredly be fixed pretty easily. (Don't ask me why someone thought this feature was a grand idea, mind you.)
I personally don't think the set-top box has much life left in it as a replacement for a personal computer. PC prices have plummeted since 1996, when WebTV looked much more attractive. The ease of use and maintenance of an appliance is nice, but only goes so far. However, don't think that WebTV doesn't know this. They're really strongly pushing interactive television (both in ads, and back on the TV industry to create more of it.) They've already got digital VCR capability in the sattelite models (much like TiVo and replay tv. It was actually almost on the market for WebTV when these showed up.) I speculate wildly that it makes sense to have something WebTV going along with Microsoft's X-Box when it ships - WebTV was part of the Dreamcast in Japan (but not in the US.) WebTV also really wants to be in cable boxes - they've announced a deal with Rogers in Canada.
The bad news is that if they win, we won't have a likelihood of open standards, and the interactive television market will be another Microsoft market. But the game is certainly just beginning. It'll be interesting to watch. It's clear to me that interactive TV will be a Big Thing, and pretty soon, and WebTV will be a player, and has a good chance at being the big player.
Ironically enough, we got a copy of this and watched it at a Christmas party just on Sunday. It was an experience.
Not a good one, mind you.
This is bad. Not Jar-Jar Binks bad. Much, much worse. Apocalyptically bad. There was some debate as to whether it was better or worse than _Manos, the Hands of Fate_. We were mixed on that, but all considered it comparable.
The elements of it don't sound that bad - it was the remarkable execution that made us long for, well, execution. Seeing Chewbacca's family, sounds okay, right? Picture multiple 10-minute segments of unsubtitled wookie dialogue. There's some musical interludes, ala a 70s variety show. Not too bad, right? Well, the highlight was an unremarkable and long Jefferson Starship number. We were treated to Bea Arthur 'singing' in the Cantina (for an extended period of time), a ten minute long Cirque-de-Wookie using the holographic chess type technology from the Falcon, Wookie Porn (I Kid You Not) featuring disco diva Dihann Caroll, and Carrie Fisher on almost enough drugs to enjoy the thing. (She has admitted in interviews later that she was high for the special. You can tell. Easily.)
Wookies grunting. Wookies standing around in ceremonial robes, holding glowing globes. Art Carney. Lots of Art Carney. No visible jokes, of course. Some strange cross-dressed man teaching Chewbacca's wife how to cook Bantha Rump. (I don't have to make this stuff up.) Mark Hamill wearing quite a bit more makeup than Bea Arthur. This show has it all.
And a rancid little cartoon that is the first appearance of Boba Fett, where Han and Luke contract a disease that makes it so that they must be hung upside down, for no discernable reason. It was poorly drawn, confusingly plotted, and the best part of the show.
If you are in a position to see this movie, I strongly urge rethinking your options. It will suck the life force out of you. I would rather watch two hours of Jar-Jar Binks having anal sex with an Ewok than see this special again. I will have nightmares forever about Wookies in my apartment grunting and doing nothing of discernable value all night while I am forced to watch.
Then again, if there really is a Y2K apocalypse, at least it will be an improvement. After all, what's the end of civilization, in the grand scheme of things, compared to the wretchedness of the Star Wars Holiday Special?
Just a bit of trivia - a few years back, Sun was trying to push its ill-fated Javastation network computer. While the project is quite dead now, GraphON was involved with this, and adapted their product for the Javastation's X-view. It worked okay, for the most part - running X entirely remotely, with very little client-side work, is by nature a tricky thing and very dependant on network latency.
This patent would probably be a lot scarier if that had taken off, as they'd have lots of money. There's probably a strong connection between this patent and that project, though.
-- Kirby, who was a contractor at Sun during the Javastation days.
Of course, in reality, not much spam gets sent from hotmail's actual mailservers. (I have quite a bit of data on spam complaints here at WebTV. I'm not making this up.) What does happen is that people use random open relays, and use hotmail (or yahoo or aol or any other free email) for the From or Reply-To headers. It may look like it's coming from hotmail, but they didn't have anything to do with it, and couldn't have prevented it. That's part of the nature of being a free email provider - spammers will put your name on things, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. All that a site can responsibly do to prevent creating spam is to make sure they're not an open relay. (see this link for information on closing an open relay.) You could also get creative and put some throttling limits on outgoing email - particularly on dialup ports. Most spam comes from either dialups where people set up mailservers and blast out spam, then disconnect into the night, or from open relays. Very little spam comes from actual ISP mailservers.
I've heard this proposal before. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work in the real world of spam.
Most spam does not come from individuals on their home ISP anymore. Nor does it come from bulk-email houses that don't forge headers - those are very easily blocked.
It comes through open relays, with forged headers. Most (nearly all) of these are not in the United States - I see a lot of.jp,.tw,.de, and such.
So, where do you send the bill? To some random person in Japan, that will just throw it away, and has no clue what you're talking about? Do you try and track down the fulfillment information in the spam (ie, URL, phone number, address)? That could be difficult, would often be time consuming, and they'd also just throw the bill away. Which would mean you'd have to employ lawyers, which is very expensive.
This idea just isn't feasible. And even if you did track down the actual spammers, and did get them into court, there's no guarantee that your fee would hold up.
Just for the record, WebTV is already using RBL (and ORBS, and our own self-maintained blacklist.) We've definitely found that legitimate sites that we block notice, and we've educated more than a few on how to close their open relays.
The vast majority of sites that spam comes through these days are foreign open relays, mostly in Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. It's pretty rare that these people ever do anything to get themselves unblocked.
Collateral damage is the other half of the coin in spam fighting. (Like when my grandmother can't send me email because a spammer hit through her system.) At WebTV, we've had a fortunate amount of support from the higher levels, and been able to tolerate more of this than some ISPs can. Users do have the ability to opt out of spam filters (though it's an all-or-none approach) which does provide a workaround if someone really needs mail from a blocked site whose sysadmins won't fix things.
(It also helps us a lot that it's very difficult to send spam _from_ an actual WebTV box. They're not computers running a standard OS, you can't buy BulkMail 3.0 and start spewing. We may have dumb users, and we may have a lot of spammers forge a from webtv address, but very little spam actually originates from our sites. If Netcom wanted to be as aggressive in their actions, people would mock them.)
We're also doing some interesting things with watching the rate of incoming mail from sites, that seems to catch a lot of spams in the act. This obviously only works if your site is big enough, but often we can have a spam hit a few hundred people rather than 20,000 people.
It's probably horribly dated (I haven't looked in years) but the old de facto standard was the Emily Postnews post, seen regularly in news.announce.newusers.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, instead? Am I the only one who's playing Super Mario Sunshine or Zelda: Wind Walker?
:-)
Try, in addition to pumping out new games, they're also rehashing old games.
Nintendo isn't Microsoft, we don't have to bash them just because it's a thread about them.
And Disney does release a new movie every summer, in addition to all the mostly-awful direct to video crud. I quite enjoyed Lilo & Stitch.
Paul got his start in high school, finding vulnerabilities on our local Novell network and in some of the bulletin boards run by other, less technically savvy high school kids.
Our high school CS teacher, Mr. Corliss, used to challenge people to get his password. It never seemed to take Paul long to do so. What really set him apart from the pack, though, was that he'd unfailingly go straight to Mr. Corliss, prove that he had done it, and then explain in detail how he did it and if it was preventable. This was in 1990-91. (I definitely recall him setting up a packet sniffer at one point, among other tricks.)
It was pretty clear that he was operating on a different level and mindset than the wanna-be hackers (mostly, the ones running the BBSs.) If they got someone's password, they'd delete files or send obnoxious mail or the like. Paul just told you, 'You should change your password, it's too obvious.' It was clear that his motivation was to find out what the security holes were, much more than to cause mayhem.
So, it was no surprise to find out, years later, that he'd gone on to become a luminary in the security field. It's the same stuff he's been doing since he was 16.
-- Kirby (Corvallis High School, class of '92. Paul Kocher is Corvallis High School, class of '91.)
Anime is literally the japanese word for 'animation'. Typically, it's used to mean all animation made in Japan, from Pokemon to Akira. Much like in America, there are several major schools of art, and many of them do have the big eyes, small mouth conventions, which are actually a derivative of early Disney cartoons that inspired early Anime. But there are certainly a number of shows that don't match these conventions. (And even more variety if you try and genre-stereotype - that perception is strongly tied to which shows get translated. There's a lot of anime that has no giant robots or ultra violence or graphic sex!)
Japanimation is a tricky word. Much like 'trekkie', it's hardly ever used in a positive fashion within the fan community. Commonly, it's used by people who don't know the word anime, and think they're more 'hip' than they really are - the calling card of a poser, per se. While I don't recommend judging people too strongly based on them not knowing the nuances of any fannish vocabulary, I do recommend dropping the phrase 'japanimation' from your personal vocabulary entirely, as it's likely to turn some fans against you in an a priori fasion.
And, to muddy the waters, there's a rising number of animated and comic titles made outside of Japan that are strongly in the tradition of anime and manga. (Manga is the Japanese word for Comic Book, though without some of the juvenile implications that we (erroneously) attack to the medium.) Like this Matrix. Or, to really walk the line, the fine comic Usagi Yojimbo, written by Stan Sakai. Despite a Japanese Title, and written by an author who is ethnically Japanse, Mr. Sakai is an American. The comic is written in English, and published in the U.S., but artistically and thematically, it's more kindred with Manga than most Manga.
My feeling is that it's hard to waste time more than arguing over whether or not something is, or is not, anime or manga. There's some content in describing something as in an Anime-style, and even more if one can tell what shows it is similar to, but beyond that, I really want to know if it's good or not. I'd rather spend my time watching great animated work, like Watership Down or Princess Mononoke, than trying to figure out the correct nomenclature. But, geeks love to argue over trivial details, so don't expect good sense to prevail.
Or, the short version: No, it's not technically anime, but it probably appeals to a similar audience.
Living in Washington State, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon. And so, I frequently browse their site to make purchasing decisions (thanks to the good interface and often useful customer reviews) and then go to an out-of-state competitor to dodge the sales tax, which is usually higher than the price difference even if you get the free shipping Amazon bonus.
If I had to pay sales tax in other states, I'd do this less - but for some purchases, start buying internationally to save money. It just seems wrong that such a thing would work.
It does make me miss living in Oregon, the land without sales tax at all. (But not really, given that WA has no state income tax.)
Correct. Starship Troopers: The Movie is to Starship Troopers: The Book like Linux is to Windows. Sit someone down at a desktop for each, and you'll find lots of similarities, but one of them has a whole lot more depth.
I actually read Starship Troopers and Forever War back-to-back, intentionally to pick up on the contrast. I do feel like it's a fair and interesting comparison. There are a number of very similar scenes, with different slants (ie, the similar device of loading in military knowledge directly into the brain of each protagonist, but the profoundly different experience of each with it.) They work as comparisons because they're both very good books using similar situations to make a vastly different conclusion.
I wish I were still in the position of taking English classes - there's a great paper in here!
Ultimately, I find I agree with Haldeman's view of war as pointless and self-propogating over Heinlein's view of it being a foundation for cultural value, but the arguments are strong enough that one could argue either way. And that makes them both worth reading.
At least one of the major shipping companies (FedEx, Postal Service, or UPS, I can't recall) has a special 'shock' detector option. It's basically a little vial stuck onto (or inside?) the package that has well known properties, and if it's broken by the time the package arrives, they'll pay for damages.
And yes, for goodness sake, any time you're shipping anything worth more than $100, BUY THE INSURANCE. And you have to declare a value. We learned this at Tuxtops, back in the day - if a laptop was damaged and we didn't fill this out, we had to pay for shipping damages. (Which happened rarely, given that we were using factory packaging, but it did happen. And we strongly suspected some of the damage happened post-shipping, but it's impossible to prove that sort of thing.)
I hope this guy kept backups!
I'd suggest instead buying the games you think you'd like to play, and not buying the ones you won't.
I don't fully understand the idea of supporting a company on principle, or based on who is in charge. If they produce quality product that I want, I'll buy it.
I can see arguments for not buying from companies whose owners have political or ethical stances you disagree with, like Dave Thomas of Wendy's (outspoken anti-homosexual). But because their president has poor business sense? That's the sort of thing that either they'll straigten out, or the market will straighten out for them, but doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of, effectively, a boycott. But hey, if you have moral and ethical issues with people who can't manage a company and its debts, knock yourself out.
Some of you may remember Tuxtops, a linux laptop company. We stopped selling laptops at the beginning of the year, and I no longer work for them, but dealing with laptops and support issues on a larger scale has given me at least more data than most people have. Here's some observations:
* Our best model was the Obsidian (Premium) 30w. This is the same as the Dell Inpsiron 5000, made by a Taiwanese company called Compal (the biggest laptop manufacturer in the world.) I'm actually typing this on one right now. It has a nice-sized keyboard, big screen, powerful components. It isn't lightweight (as far as modern laptops go), but they were by far the most reliable model.
* The really cheap model we sold, made by ASUS, used mostly desktop parts to cut costs. It was inexpensive, but you paid the price. The units would easily overheat - when we started doing overnight cpu-heavy burn-in tests, it became apparant what the drawbacks of this approach were. For the sales-guy who does email and demos on the road, it'd be okay, but for anyone who knows what a makefile is, avoid these kinds of laptops. They're likely to go into Thermal Shutdown with virtually no notice.
* We had a really cool model show up last year that was ultralight, with a detachable bay where the CD-ROM and floppy sat. If you could leave that behind, it was a phenomenal design. However, in practice, we found that there were frequently problems with the docking, and many systems were very delicate. Getting it to dock properly could be difficult, moreso than it should be.
* We had one model that we sold for our first few months that had almost all the pressure from the lid on one hinge. Unsurprisingly, the case cracked easily through regular use - we lost money overall on this unit with all the replacements, and stopped selling it as soon as we saw the trend. This was just poor engineering.
* An early ultralight we sold had a really awful keyboard and was also prone to heat problems.
The morals? The quality of a piece of laptop hardware can vary greatly, much more so than in desktops. Our best experiences were with the more traditional designs (I know my current company is also going away from VAIOs and towards the Dell/Thinkpad designs, due to reliability problems in the field.) There are design tradeoffs to make things ultra-light and ultra-cheap, and in my experience, they weren't worth it.
Go for the big brick with the big screen. Buy from someone who has good tech support - you can't replace parts if they go bad yourself, like with a desktop. Pay attention to what people are saying in places like this thread - laptop models are definitely susceptible to design flaws. From my experience, physical flaws (ie, cracked cases) and overheating are issues to be very sensitive to. (Note: getting warm is different than overheating. Most laptops get warm. Most of them do not regularly go into Thermal Shutdown. That's what you want to avoid.)
Good luck!
Lots of people have already pointed out the main differences. Another thing to be aware of is that what a various degree is, even in just Computer Science, varies a lot from school to school.
:-)
In my school (Oregon State), it was part of the College of Engineering. There wasn't a separate Computer Engineering degree. As a result, we had to take several hardware courses, with more as possible electives. The emphasis was definitely on software, however. There were a lot of computer-types in Electrical Engineering, which was very hardware heavy. There were classes required for both CS and EE in both hardware and software - it actually did work out that the EE teachers assumed a lot of background that the CS students didn't have, and we struggled to get a C - and the CS professors did the same thing right back at the EE students later, with the same results.
However, in many schools (particularly Liberal Arts schools), Computer Science is in the college of Arts and Sciences, NOT Engineering. You take a lot more math, and a lot more non-science courses, if you end up at one of these. You might not have to do any hardware at these schools.
And there are definitely different schools of thought for both of these. A big one is: Do they teach you theory and general principles, or do they teach you useful real skills? The former can be noticed by courses in Algorithms, Data Structures, and teachers that don't care what language you submit your assignments in. The latter has courses on System Administration, particular languages, and pays a lot of attention to current technology and trends. I attended a theoretical school - there are advantages to both! It is true that having a solid background in the science of programming makes it much easier to pick up new skills, but they also graduate a lot of smart people who don't know how to actually do anything on their first job.
Also, I'll reiterate what others have said - be true to yourself. Take a minor in a non-technical field, if you want to. Learn a foreign language - it'll never be this convenient again! Or, if you are the kind of person that likes to completely be immersed in one thing (like programming), do it! Get a part-time job on campus, and come out with some actual experience, which you won't regret.
Another thing I wish I'd considered when choosing schools - networking is a Real Thing. Most of my college friends ended up in a different geographical area than I did, which is too bad. Nearly every job I've been at has a couple of Universities that have a lot of alumni that have sucked each other in - particularly tech-heavy schools. Yes, the competition will be tougher, but if you can handle it, you will have very valuable people who will vouch for you to get you interviews, and as someone who is involved in hiring decisions, that counts for a lot. Get to know the other people in your major. Don't be the kid who sits in the last row and never sees any of those people outside of lectures. It's worth it.
I can easily think of reasons why Frodo was chosen to be the Ringbearer.
(WARNING: SPOILERS)
From a story perspective, this is an item that practically embodies corruption. In the Tolkein world, powerful figures are very given to corruption, eg Saruman. It's quite reasonable to think that Gandalf was afraid of possessing the ring, that he might give into its temptations. Only someone with a humble heart and no great love of power could stand a chance. (And, indeed, it took the help of someone even more humble than Frodo to ultimately triumph.)
From a literary point of view, Frodo relates very well to the readers. The Shire is in many ways a metaphor for England. Frodo is a person from a mostly familiar and mundane landscape, with a bit of an eye for the fantastic. Much like most readers. The fact that this everyman goes on the epic quest makes it mean more to the average reader than if Aragorn had just taken over from the beginning.
Not to say that the Lord of the Rings is a perfect story. It definitely has a unique style, and has a lot more in common with a Norse Mythological Epic than the modern Fantasy genre. I don't expect it to naturally appeal to Fantasy readers - no more or less so than, say, Shakespeare. It is slow-paced in places, particularly (and unfortunately) the first half of book 1.
And it has the disadvantage that most of the good ideas have been distilled and redistributed, so that if someone is familiar with Modern Fantasy at all, it appears derivitive. Which is unfortunate. It does seem cliche'd in parts, and often the cliche originated in these books as an original idea. Such is often the fate of influential works. (Sort of like Romeo & Juliet - someone who had somehow no direct knowledge of the play would probably expect the ending, because that's how those stories go. And the go like that - because of Romeo & Juliet, mostly.)
I'm looking forward to the movies. It's possible for a book to be well-translated to a movie, albeit somewhat rare. Still, worth my $10 to find out - it's quite possible that the language and pacing issues that make it difficult for many readers to appreciate this story will finally be overcome.
(And not to sound elitist - there's lots of Authors I find difficult to appreciate for stylistic reasons. Such as Dickens, or James Joyce. And Shakespeare, while I enjoy, isn't something I dive into casually.)
There's a billboard on the 101, near Palo Alto, that says (IIRC):
If you're going to join a revolution, choose carefully.
http://www.microsoft.com/jobs
I certainly interpret this to be appealing to people curious about Linux, given some of the local companies ad copy (eg, Linuxcare: At the Center of the Revolution.)
I happened to be talking to my brother yesterday, who is getting his PhD at the University of South Carolina in Chemical Engineering, and it's pretty much exactly on this topic. I don't know the technical details (I'm not a chemist), but basically, they already can make cheap fuel cells that run at room temperature based on hydrogen. Obviously, Hydrogen has some drawbacks. His project is trying to get the process to work with natural gas.
:-)
It's a very neat process - it runs at room temperatures, instead of the mega-heat of combustion engines, the by-product is steam, it's cheaper, it's very lightweight, and it's using a more renewable resource. So, researchers are hard at work!
(And if anyone wants a Chemical Engineer/Materials Scientist just out of grad school with a background in this kind of thing, feel free to send me email, he's looking!
Anyway, my list:
Escaflowne: Just finished re-watching this one. It has beautiful art, a strong candidate for best music in any series, and an interesting setting. A young japanese school girl gets sucked into a magical world (yeah, again), filled with Newtonion steam-power style fighting robots, swordsmen, dragons, and romance.
Utena: My top pick. A very surreal story about a young girl who has dedicated her life to becoming a prince. Very surreal and artistic in places - it gets a lot weirder in the later seasons, which aren't commercially available in the US yet.
Evangelion: Lots of people have discussed this - a mecha anime that, for once, is really focused on the characters. It ends strangely, but worth watching anyway.
Fushigi Yuugi (aka The Mysterious Play): More Magical Girl anime (which is a genre I happen to like), heavy on interesting and fun characters and romance. It has more humor than most series, but it gets really dark in places too.
There's also a whole lot of great series available only in fansubs, like Marmalade Boy, Kodomo no Omocha, Hani Yuri Dango - a lot of the ones that don't make it over here aren't science fiction or fantasy related. This probably has a lot to do with marketability - it's harder to sell Americans on a story of Japanese students finding their way through tangled relationships. But they can be a lot of fun, particularly if you want to learn more about Japanese culture.
Our laptops currently are coming from Arm Computers. They primarily do business with resellers, so they're somewhat bigger than the lack of name recognition might imply. We're pretty pleased with the laptop quality - those of you going to Linux World Expo are welcome to come test them out!
We've actually talked with the fellow who ran linuxlaptops.com. We have a pretty different business model than he did, which hopefully will do better. There's very clearly a demand for Linux Laptops, which has become increasingly obvious the more we've talked to people about this.
I don't want to imply that Dell is bad for the Linux community - Linux Care is a really cool company, and we're working closely with them ourselves. In fact, there's really no concept in 'competition' as far as giving back to the community - if Dell provides some device driver we need, we're free to put the money we would have on that to support WinModems, which they're free to use, and develop some good DVD software instead... and so forth. While I worry about competition for sales, competition for writing open source code just doesn't hurt anyone, especially us.
The hope is that our product is high enough quality that we can find a niche, much like Penguin and VA Linux and others compete nicely against the tier one Windows companies that have added Linux. Time will tell.
For an alternative, Tuxtops is now taking preorders for Linux on Laptops, with an expected ship date of February 15th.
A note on pricing, from a somewhat informed view - while Linux is free, there are costs associated with it. The LinuxCare certification, for one. We're in the process of certification right now. It costs $1000/system for a one-time certification, or $10000/system for a lifetime certification, where they'll test upgrades periodically. (I think the second is more useful for a company without a lot of in-house Linux talent.)
Additionally, we've got a deal to offer a free hour of LinuxCare support with our laptops, which costs us $50/system. I'm pretty sure Dell has a similar deal - maybe a better price, since they have more volume, but it's likely comparable to their windows cost. Of course, they don't need to pay support staff for Linux, either. I don't know if they pay MS for systems shipped with Linux as part of a blanket deal. (I do know that we don't pay MS anything at all.)
Why are we better? I haven't yet had my hands on a Dell Linux setup, so I don't know if the product is better or not. Dell has a good reputation and some Linux experience from desktops, so I expect them to be reasonably comparable technically. We ship with things like X, Sound, IR support, and APM working out of the box - I'd be surprised if Dell didn't.
What we _do_ plan on doing, that I doubt dell does, is contributing back to the Open Source community. We want to fund projects that are released under the GPL, including device drivers and good support for winmodems, as well as software that improves mobile computing for linux like a good location manager. We want to offer non-Red Hat distributions - some flavor of Debian, first, in the near future. We'd like to offer a BSD flavor, eventually.
You can read our press release on Linux Today.
I'd recommend checking out Alexandria Digital Literature. They have a really cool service, where you rate books you've read, and it matches you to neighbors and recommends things you might like. And, unlike Amazon, it really works well. That's what's convinced me to read Bujold, and boy was it right!
They also sell electronic stories, mostly short stories, which is sort of interesting. You can get things in a format to put them on your palmpilot immediately, which is useful for trips and stuff. Is this the future of publishing? I don't know.
Definitely worth checking out for anyone who likes to read as a hobby, which most people reading this topic probably do.
I picked up the commercial version of this about a month ago, and have spent far too many hours locked in its entrancing spell.
Technically, this is a solid achievement. I haven't had a single crash. It looks and sounds as good as in Windows.
And gameplay is superb. It isn't dramatically different than HOMM2, really - but that's not much of a complaint. This is, no doubt, one of the premiere strategy games on the market, regardless of platform.
Another nice note - if you do the full install (which is, I grant, huge), you don't need the CD to play. You could probably play it remotely over X, if you want to. It put an icon in KDE under games, which I thought it should do. I installed it as root, and can play as myself - which is better than some things, like Star Office.
Kudos for Loki for an exceptional port of an unusually addicting game. I'm becoming decreasingly interested in even keeping a windows box around for any reason.
It's a bit premature, but I'm part of a startup that's working on providing real linux on laptop solutions. It's cool that dell is doing something, but our goals are very different than what theirs will be. We really want to make linux into the premier OS for laptops, and do things like write drivers and software to support a lot of the tricky things (like the strange monitor types you get, sound, suspend/resume, power management, mobile network configuration managers, and stuff like that.) Which is something Dell will never care about doing, and companies that would (such as VALinux or RedHat) aren't focused on the needs of the laptop. We believe this is a real niche that the linux community needs filled, and by people who understand open source software. We plan on doing product launch at linux world expo, the first week in February. Online ordering should be up right around then. The company name is Tuxtops. I'd, of course, love it if people who wanted Linux Laptops waited eagerly until we open our doors. :-) We're busy getting our first set of laptops configured right now. Yes, this is a blatent commercial plug, albeit relevant to the topic at hand. We might be hiring people in the near future, if anyone has particular expertise in linux on the laptop, particularly in device drivers, feel free to send resumes to info@tuxtops.com. Stop by our boot at Linux World Expo, if you can.
Caveat: I worked for WebTV in operations until early December (when I quit to start up a linux-related company. Yay.) I'm not going to reveal any deep company secrets, though.
This is not terribly surprising to me. WebTV is a very unusual ISP. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes tricks and features that take advantage of the fact that they control the hardware and software of their users. Some of them are very good. (For example, on each connect each box reports data on failed dialing attempts. By aggregating these, they have a really interesting picture of all the pops that their ISP partners are letting WebTV boxes into, including when busy signals occur, when outages occur (since the WebTV box gets in through a different pop on failure and can still report), when there are radius authentication issues, and so on. It's not uncommon for WebTV to know a pop is down before the ISP that owns it is - which is no knock on the ISP, it's kudos for making a powerful feature that normal computers don't have.)
But while some of the features are really useful, and most are innocuous, there's a fair amount of stuff out there, like this, that was never intended for the public at large and can be easily abused. There are certainly WebTV users that are far more clever and malicious than one would expect, and they've exploited a number of bugs throughout the years.
Historically, WebTV has actually been pretty good internally about fixing these things. The operations team really does care, from experience, and beats on engineering until they get a fix. It is easy to distribute patches to the service (the internal machines.) It's a bit more work, but not a big deal, to offer users a patch that automatically installs to their own boxes if something needs to be done on that end, but those kind of bug fixes tend to be put on hold until features are being rolled out unless it's a serious bug, since users complain A LOT if they download an upgrade and don't see anything different.
I don't think this means much to the slashdot crowd, other than some cheap Microsoft bashing. It's a real bug, which is a product of a complicated proprietary system, and will almost assuredly be fixed pretty easily. (Don't ask me why someone thought this feature was a grand idea, mind you.)
I personally don't think the set-top box has much life left in it as a replacement for a personal computer. PC prices have plummeted since 1996, when WebTV looked much more attractive. The ease of use and maintenance of an appliance is nice, but only goes so far. However, don't think that WebTV doesn't know this. They're really strongly pushing interactive television (both in ads, and back on the TV industry to create more of it.) They've already got digital VCR capability in the sattelite models (much like TiVo and replay tv. It was actually almost on the market for WebTV when these showed up.) I speculate wildly that it makes sense to have something WebTV going along with Microsoft's X-Box when it ships - WebTV was part of the Dreamcast in Japan (but not in the US.) WebTV also really wants to be in cable boxes - they've announced a deal with Rogers in Canada.
The bad news is that if they win, we won't have a likelihood of open standards, and the interactive television market will be another Microsoft market. But the game is certainly just beginning. It'll be interesting to watch. It's clear to me that interactive TV will be a Big Thing, and pretty soon, and WebTV will be a player, and has a good chance at being the big player.
Okay, I rambled.
Ironically enough, we got a copy of this and watched it at a Christmas party just on Sunday. It was an experience.
Not a good one, mind you.
This is bad. Not Jar-Jar Binks bad. Much, much worse. Apocalyptically bad. There was some debate as to whether it was better or worse than _Manos, the Hands of Fate_. We were mixed on that, but all considered it comparable.
The elements of it don't sound that bad - it was the remarkable execution that made us long for, well, execution. Seeing Chewbacca's family, sounds okay, right? Picture multiple 10-minute segments of unsubtitled wookie dialogue. There's some musical interludes, ala a 70s variety show. Not too bad, right? Well, the highlight was an unremarkable and long Jefferson Starship number. We were treated to Bea Arthur 'singing' in the Cantina (for an extended period of time), a ten minute long Cirque-de-Wookie using the holographic chess type technology from the Falcon, Wookie Porn (I Kid You Not) featuring disco diva Dihann Caroll, and Carrie Fisher on almost enough drugs to enjoy the thing. (She has admitted in interviews later that she was high for the special. You can tell. Easily.)
Wookies grunting. Wookies standing around in ceremonial robes, holding glowing globes. Art Carney. Lots of Art Carney. No visible jokes, of course. Some strange cross-dressed man teaching Chewbacca's wife how to cook Bantha Rump. (I don't have to make this stuff up.) Mark Hamill wearing quite a bit more makeup than Bea Arthur. This show has it all.
And a rancid little cartoon that is the first appearance of Boba Fett, where Han and Luke contract a disease that makes it so that they must be hung upside down, for no discernable reason. It was poorly drawn, confusingly plotted, and the best part of the show.
If you are in a position to see this movie, I strongly urge rethinking your options. It will suck the life force out of you. I would rather watch two hours of Jar-Jar Binks having anal sex with an Ewok than see this special again. I will have nightmares forever about Wookies in my apartment grunting and doing nothing of discernable value all night while I am forced to watch.
Then again, if there really is a Y2K apocalypse, at least it will be an improvement. After all, what's the end of civilization, in the grand scheme of things, compared to the wretchedness of the Star Wars Holiday Special?
Just a bit of trivia - a few years back, Sun was trying to push its ill-fated Javastation network computer. While the project is quite dead now, GraphON was involved with this, and adapted their product for the Javastation's X-view. It worked okay, for the most part - running X entirely remotely, with very little client-side work, is by nature a tricky thing and very dependant on network latency.
This patent would probably be a lot scarier if that had taken off, as they'd have lots of money. There's probably a strong connection between this patent and that project, though.
-- Kirby, who was a contractor at Sun during the Javastation days.
Of course, in reality, not much spam gets sent from hotmail's actual mailservers. (I have quite a bit of data on spam complaints here at WebTV. I'm not making this up.) What does happen is that people use random open relays, and use hotmail (or yahoo or aol or any other free email) for the From or Reply-To headers. It may look like it's coming from hotmail, but they didn't have anything to do with it, and couldn't have prevented it. That's part of the nature of being a free email provider - spammers will put your name on things, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. All that a site can responsibly do to prevent creating spam is to make sure they're not an open relay. (see this link for information on closing an open relay.) You could also get creative and put some throttling limits on outgoing email - particularly on dialup ports. Most spam comes from either dialups where people set up mailservers and blast out spam, then disconnect into the night, or from open relays. Very little spam comes from actual ISP mailservers.
I've heard this proposal before. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work in the real world of spam.
.jp, .tw, .de, and such.
Most spam does not come from individuals on their home ISP anymore. Nor does it come from bulk-email houses that don't forge headers - those are very easily blocked.
It comes through open relays, with forged headers. Most (nearly all) of these are not in the United States - I see a lot of
So, where do you send the bill? To some random person in Japan, that will just throw it away, and has no clue what you're talking about? Do you try and track down the fulfillment information in the spam (ie, URL, phone number, address)? That could be difficult, would often be time consuming, and they'd also just throw the bill away. Which would mean you'd have to employ lawyers, which is very expensive.
This idea just isn't feasible. And even if you did track down the actual spammers, and did get them into court, there's no guarantee that your fee would hold up.
-- Kirby, WebTV Spamfighter
Just for the record, WebTV is already using RBL (and ORBS, and our own self-maintained blacklist.) We've definitely found that legitimate sites that we block notice, and we've educated more than a few on how to close their open relays.
The vast majority of sites that spam comes through these days are foreign open relays, mostly in Japan, Taiwan, and Germany. It's pretty rare that these people ever do anything to get themselves unblocked.
Collateral damage is the other half of the coin in spam fighting. (Like when my grandmother can't send me email because a spammer hit through her system.) At WebTV, we've had a fortunate amount of support from the higher levels, and been able to tolerate more of this than some ISPs can. Users do have the ability to opt out of spam filters (though it's an all-or-none approach) which does provide a workaround if someone really needs mail from a blocked site whose sysadmins won't fix things.
(It also helps us a lot that it's very difficult to send spam _from_ an actual WebTV box. They're not computers running a standard OS, you can't buy BulkMail 3.0 and start spewing. We may have dumb users, and we may have a lot of spammers forge a from webtv address, but very little spam actually originates from our sites. If Netcom wanted to be as aggressive in their actions, people would mock them.)
We're also doing some interesting things with watching the rate of incoming mail from sites, that seems to catch a lot of spams in the act. This obviously only works if your site is big enough, but often we can have a spam hit a few hundred people rather than 20,000 people.
- Kirby, WebTV spamfighter
It's probably horribly dated (I haven't looked in years) but the old de facto standard was the Emily Postnews post, seen regularly in news.announce.newusers.