if dig camera manufacturers did not LIE and count the colors seperately RGBG (two greens per blue and red) then the megapixels would not be 400% inflated.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
a primitive 33mm negative is 8,000 "pels" wid in resolution.
digital cameras will take years to reach that.
Umm... the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Make a, say, 11x17 print from a film negative. Then make the same-sized print from a digital file produced by one of the current crop of digital SLRs (e.g. Canon's 1Ds or 1D Mark II). Put the prints side-by-side and look at them.
Now tell me again that digital cameras will take years to catch up with 35mm film...
A sense of humor is a wonderful thing, in case you were wondering...
And I associate the word "snort" with two things: either a sarcastic disbelieving chuckle, or an angry rhino. Umm... maybe you have something there about wanting to distance myself from...:-)
Doesn't anyone around here remember the short but exciting life of the tag?
The idea was that this tag would be very useful for searching purposes and for tagging the page with keywords. This idea went down in flames really quickly -- guess why? Because people cheated and put "attractive" keywords into their meta tags regardless of what the page was about.
I still haven't seen anyone explain why the Semantic Web wouldn't be completely full of umm... syllogisms on the lines of "Buy Viagra here" and "Hot Sluts Want Your Dick".
Different people have different situations. I am explicitly arguing against the one-size-fits-all approach.
My situation is quite tolerable. I really don't have spam problems, but none of my email addresses is older than a couple of years and I try to be a bit careful about exposing them.
Your situation is noticeably worse:-) but then you have to read mail addressed to postmaster (an address usually guaranteed to exist for each domain). Still, I find it strange that you still get 28 false positives per day...
So maybe a whitelist is an appropriate solution for *you*. Clearly, *I* don't need one. That's all perfectly fine. Choice is good.
What I do NOT want is a restrictive universal system forced on everyone whether they like it or not.
I don't find unauthenticated email reasonable. It used to be so, but the spammers ruined it for us.
Frankly speaking, I am much more afraid of the current misguided efforts that can kill the whole idea of email (payment for email, anyone?) rather than of the spammers.
I don't see spam as a problem big enough to destroy over it my ability to send pseudonymous messages to other people. For example, the ability to keep my private email and business email strictly separate is very valuable to me. I very much do NOT want to show my GUID every time I send a packet somewhere...:-)
I have multiple email addresses. I get about 50-70 spam messages a day. 99% of them my filter sends to the spam folder which I empty out once a week. The remaining one percent amounts to at most one spam email a day which I have to delete manually. Big deal.
All spam did for me was to make me install a spam filter. It certainly didn't make email unusable...
Where did I ever imply that I was making arbitrary rules?
Um, right here. Let me quote you:
However, understand that as a mailserver administrator, I'm not terribly interested that you don't want to provide your "real" identifying information to my server or my customers. If you want to contact me or my users, then I want to know your "real" name.
You didn't say "my customers don't want email from non-authorized sources". You said that you "as a mailserver administrator" want to know my "real name" if I am sending an email to your users.
I claim the right and responsibility to only deliver mail that was sent from an authorized MTA IP of the sender domain
Umm... where did you get this right, if I may ask?
If that's the company policy then sure, no problem, they have the right to do this.
But if you, a regular paid employee, decided that you know better which email should be delivered and which should not, who exactly gave you the authority to do that?
Now, considering that well over 70% of the messages coming into my domains are spam, I have every right to reject mail that I believe is unwelcome.
I am sorry, where exactly did you get this right?
The fact that you think you are acting in the best interests of the users is irrelevant. For example, I do NOT want my mail server to filter my mail for spam. I can do it myself, thank you very much. And my email correspondence is weird enough so that I have to have special rules to fish out valid emails from what my Bayesian filter considers to be spam. If my mail provider filtered my mail, they would be lost.
Let's say you're a doctor working in a hospital and it's winter, there is a lot of flu going around. Do you think you have a right to forcibly inject every person in the hospital with a flu vaccine regardless of whether they want it or not?
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The mailserver admin is acting on behalf or (or may be in fact) the owners of the hardware that the mail in question is travelling through. That gives them every right to decide, by any standards they like, what mail they accept or don't accept.
Owners of the hardware, sure, they have a right. But I saw no implication that the admin was just implementing the company policy. The way I read it was "I am god, I know what's better for the stupid lusers, I do what I think is necessary and they'd better suck it down".
A company which offers the mail service can implement whatever policies they like. As you correctly point out, the market will take care of such things. But a mailserver admin, who is usually just a regular employee, has no discretion to make such decisions on his own.
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
I don't like this idea. At all.
The main problem from my point of view has to do with ownership and control. Generally speaking, what's physically on my machine(s) is *mine*, that is subject to my total control (we'll leave aside intellectual property issues). I can add, change, delete, etc.
Still generally speaking, what's on some machine I access over the net is *not mine* in the sense that my control is reduced. Usually other people can do something with that information (again, add, change, delete) and if the machnine is taken offline, I have no access and no control at all.
As a simple example, consider a web page. In one case I make a local copy of it on my machine. In the other case I just have a bookmark. The difference in control is fairly obvious...
Now, what happens if we make users believe there's no difference between their local hard drive and Internet? That we drill into their heads that they are the same?
Well, you still have no control over information stored on the 'net. Thus, if you were trained to think that the local drive and the 'net are basically the same, then you would expect to have no control over information stored on your hard drive.
Note that by an amazing coincidence, that's also the goal of DRM -- that you have no control over information (that they call content) stored on your hard drive.
Also note that the flip side of the coin -- making your hard drive irrelevant by switching to a subscription service for everything, from OS to applications to content, is also a highly popular idea in Redmond and elsewhere.
So color me highly suspicious with regard to that idea...
You probably already have one email address: the one your ISP gave you. For all intents and purposes, that's your canonical identity when you're on the Internet.
Umm, no, not even close.
I have an address at ISP (foo@isp.net). I never use it, since it's incovenient to access, plus it gets a ton of spam.
I have several addresses at my domain (foo@mydomain.com, bar@mydomain.com, etc.). I do use them actively.
I have a work address (foo@company.com) which I also use actively.
I have a couple of yahoo addresses (foo@yahoo.com) which I regularly use to talk to people that I don't feel should know about my domain and website.
Not to mention that I do NOT have a "canonical identity", whatever it is, on the 'net. What I have is several nyms. And even if I had one identity, why would it have to be tied to a single email address, anyway?
However, understand that as a mailserver administrator, I'm not terribly interested that you don't want to provide your "real" identifying information to my server or my customers. If you want to contact me or my users, then I want to know your "real" name.
That's arrogant and stupid.
The job of a mailserver admin is NOT to decide who's allowed to send mail to the users and who's not. If a user asks (e.g. block all but this whitelist), sure. But absent a request from the user, you have no rights to decide which email goes through and which is blocked (with obvious exceptions for things like viruses).
You are a mailserver admin -- that's a SUPPORT position. You don't decide what your users are allowed to see and you have no rights to demand to know the real name of people who are not even your users, but are just sending email to them.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced last week that they were going to start using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments for the following reasons:
The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form for a lawyer.
Judging by the phenomenal rate of increase of the lawyer population, lawyers breed faster.
Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won't jump all over you no matter what you're studying.
There are some things even a rat won't do.
In contrast, there was only one foreseen disadvantage:
With lawyers, it may be more difficult to extrapolate test results to human beings.
Textamerica is an interesting site. It claims ownership of everything posted to it, which is, umm... unusual for a blog-hosting place.
I am guessing the great majority of people with accounts at Textamerica never read the Terms of Service and don't know that they don't own the images and text they posted to their own blogs there any more...
Quotes from their ToS:
"14. Textamerica.com may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text.
...
17. Textamerica.com and any images and comments on this website are intended for personal use only and may not be used except by Textamerica.com for commercial purposes."
When I listened to a presentation about RFID, the presenters said to totally destroy an RFID tag takes a machine much larger than one you could take into a Walmart without looking suspicious.
Did he also mention that DRM is uncrackable, by any chance?:-)
That's not exactly an unbiased source of information, you know...
Anytime you step into a Walmart, you're already trading away a piece of your soul for lower prices. You're buying cheap foreign goods, often made in sweatshops. You're supporting a store that is starving your town of local independent retailers. And a big chunk of your money leaves the local community.
LOL. You want to live inside a little closed community, never poking your nose out, convinced that every time you buy something made by foreign devils you are trading a piece of your soul for it -- be my guest.
I am living in a global world. Most of the stuff I buy, both cheap and expensive, comes from different countries -- Japan, China, Germany, Mexico, etc. Periodically -- oh, horrors! -- I actually go on trips to foreign countries and leave a chunk on money there, paid for hotels, and food, and services, and what not.
Local independent retailers? What's that? Ah, those horse-and-buggy guys who had, basically, no selection at all and strangely high prices? I am not sorry to see them go. For example, am quite happy to have a Home Depot in my town -- the local hardware store never had what I needed and charged around three bucks for a pair of nails...
Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
Sun wants a price war? With Linux? ROTFLMAO
Somebody is smoking some good shit...
And a quote from the linked article from the Reg: "Sun is hoping that Solaris x86 becomes the standard Unix option on x86 boxes."
Now that's not even smoking the good shit, that's direct evidence of massive brain damage...
Re:Sun Microsystems != typical "technology company
on
Should Sun Just Fold Now?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space.
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future. It was when listening to a story about a tour of Google facilites -- the Google CEO pointed to the rows and rows and rows of cheap and semi-obsolete hardware which is Google server farm and said that Google will never buy expensive servers again.
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
if dig camera manufacturers did not LIE and count the colors seperately RGBG (two greens per blue and red) then the megapixels would not be 400% inflated.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
a primitive 33mm negative is 8,000 "pels" wid in resolution.
digital cameras will take years to reach that.
Umm... the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Make a, say, 11x17 print from a film negative. Then make the same-sized print from a digital file produced by one of the current crop of digital SLRs (e.g. Canon's 1Ds or 1D Mark II). Put the prints side-by-side and look at them.
Now tell me again that digital cameras will take years to catch up with 35mm film...
A sense of humor is a wonderful thing, in case you were wondering...
:-)
And I associate the word "snort" with two things: either a sarcastic disbelieving chuckle, or an angry rhino. Umm... maybe you have something there about wanting to distance myself from...
Doesn't anyone around here remember the short but exciting life of the tag?
The idea was that this tag would be very useful for searching purposes and for tagging the page with keywords. This idea went down in flames really quickly -- guess why? Because people cheated and put "attractive" keywords into their meta tags regardless of what the page was about.
I still haven't seen anyone explain why the Semantic Web wouldn't be completely full of umm... syllogisms on the lines of "Buy Viagra here" and "Hot Sluts Want Your Dick".
Umm... That subpoena was signed on Nov 5, 2003. It's more than half a year old by now. This is news?
Different people have different situations. I am explicitly arguing against the one-size-fits-all approach.
:-) but then you have to read mail addressed to postmaster (an address usually guaranteed to exist for each domain). Still, I find it strange that you still get 28 false positives per day...
My situation is quite tolerable. I really don't have spam problems, but none of my email addresses is older than a couple of years and I try to be a bit careful about exposing them.
Your situation is noticeably worse
So maybe a whitelist is an appropriate solution for *you*. Clearly, *I* don't need one. That's all perfectly fine. Choice is good.
What I do NOT want is a restrictive universal system forced on everyone whether they like it or not.
I don't find unauthenticated email reasonable. It used to be so, but the spammers ruined it for us.
:-)
Frankly speaking, I am much more afraid of the current misguided efforts that can kill the whole idea of email (payment for email, anyone?) rather than of the spammers.
I don't see spam as a problem big enough to destroy over it my ability to send pseudonymous messages to other people. For example, the ability to keep my private email and business email strictly separate is very valuable to me. I very much do NOT want to show my GUID every time I send a packet somewhere...
I have multiple email addresses. I get about 50-70 spam messages a day. 99% of them my filter sends to the spam folder which I empty out once a week. The remaining one percent amounts to at most one spam email a day which I have to delete manually. Big deal.
All spam did for me was to make me install a spam filter. It certainly didn't make email unusable...
Um, right here. Let me quote you:
You didn't say "my customers don't want email from non-authorized sources". You said that you "as a mailserver administrator" want to know my "real name" if I am sending an email to your users.
Somehow I don't find this position reasonable.
I claim the right and responsibility to only deliver mail that was sent from an authorized MTA IP of the sender domain
Umm... where did you get this right, if I may ask?
If that's the company policy then sure, no problem, they have the right to do this.
But if you, a regular paid employee, decided that you know better which email should be delivered and which should not, who exactly gave you the authority to do that?
Now, considering that well over 70% of the messages coming into my domains are spam, I have every right to reject mail that I believe is unwelcome.
I am sorry, where exactly did you get this right?
The fact that you think you are acting in the best interests of the users is irrelevant. For example, I do NOT want my mail server to filter my mail for spam. I can do it myself, thank you very much. And my email correspondence is weird enough so that I have to have special rules to fish out valid emails from what my Bayesian filter considers to be spam. If my mail provider filtered my mail, they would be lost.
Let's say you're a doctor working in a hospital and it's winter, there is a lot of flu going around. Do you think you have a right to forcibly inject every person in the hospital with a flu vaccine regardless of whether they want it or not?
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The mailserver admin is acting on behalf or (or may be in fact) the owners of the hardware that the mail in question is travelling through. That gives them every right to decide, by any standards they like, what mail they accept or don't accept.
Owners of the hardware, sure, they have a right. But I saw no implication that the admin was just implementing the company policy. The way I read it was "I am god, I know what's better for the stupid lusers, I do what I think is necessary and they'd better suck it down".
A company which offers the mail service can implement whatever policies they like. As you correctly point out, the market will take care of such things. But a mailserver admin, who is usually just a regular employee, has no discretion to make such decisions on his own.
From the article:
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
I don't like this idea. At all.
The main problem from my point of view has to do with ownership and control. Generally speaking, what's physically on my machine(s) is *mine*, that is subject to my total control (we'll leave aside intellectual property issues). I can add, change, delete, etc.
Still generally speaking, what's on some machine I access over the net is *not mine* in the sense that my control is reduced. Usually other people can do something with that information (again, add, change, delete) and if the machnine is taken offline, I have no access and no control at all.
As a simple example, consider a web page. In one case I make a local copy of it on my machine. In the other case I just have a bookmark. The difference in control is fairly obvious...
Now, what happens if we make users believe there's no difference between their local hard drive and Internet? That we drill into their heads that they are the same?
Well, you still have no control over information stored on the 'net. Thus, if you were trained to think that the local drive and the 'net are basically the same, then you would expect to have no control over information stored on your hard drive.
Note that by an amazing coincidence, that's also the goal of DRM -- that you have no control over information (that they call content) stored on your hard drive.
Also note that the flip side of the coin -- making your hard drive irrelevant by switching to a subscription service for everything, from OS to applications to content, is also a highly popular idea in Redmond and elsewhere.
So color me highly suspicious with regard to that idea...
You probably already have one email address: the one your ISP gave you. For all intents and purposes, that's your canonical identity when you're on the Internet.
Umm, no, not even close.
I have an address at ISP (foo@isp.net). I never use it, since it's incovenient to access, plus it gets a ton of spam.
I have several addresses at my domain (foo@mydomain.com, bar@mydomain.com, etc.). I do use them actively.
I have a work address (foo@company.com) which I also use actively.
I have a couple of yahoo addresses (foo@yahoo.com) which I regularly use to talk to people that I don't feel should know about my domain and website.
Not to mention that I do NOT have a "canonical identity", whatever it is, on the 'net. What I have is several nyms. And even if I had one identity, why would it have to be tied to a single email address, anyway?
However, understand that as a mailserver administrator, I'm not terribly interested that you don't want to provide your "real" identifying information to my server or my customers. If you want to contact me or my users, then I want to know your "real" name.
That's arrogant and stupid.
The job of a mailserver admin is NOT to decide who's allowed to send mail to the users and who's not. If a user asks (e.g. block all but this whitelist), sure. But absent a request from the user, you have no rights to decide which email goes through and which is blocked (with obvious exceptions for things like viruses).
You are a mailserver admin -- that's a SUPPORT position. You don't decide what your users are allowed to see and you have no rights to demand to know the real name of people who are not even your users, but are just sending email to them.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced last week that they were going to start using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments for the following reasons:
The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form for a lawyer.
Judging by the phenomenal rate of increase of the lawyer population, lawyers breed faster.
Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won't jump all over you no matter what you're studying.
There are some things even a rat won't do.
In contrast, there was only one foreseen disadvantage:
With lawyers, it may be more difficult to extrapolate test results to human beings.
some equivalent system that would interact with the windshield of the car to visibly plot lanes etc...
Anything that can be hacked will be hacked.
Do you really want to see a picture of the goatse man on your windshield as you are driving on the highway?
I currently have the Wireless Gateway that they are discussing ...
Both interfaces use the same password by default.
User: comcast
Pass: 1234
That's the default. They also recommend at install time that you don't change that.
What??
They want NOT to change default passwords on a WiFi access point?
Are they completely and utterly nuts? Did they ever hear the word "wardriving"? Or, perhaps, they think that WEP is viable security mechanism?
Boggle...
It seems that not only human jobs are outsourced to India, but Perl script jobs as well.
Next time one of my Perl programs starts giving me problems I'll tell it to behave or it'll get replaced by an Indian worker.
Seems like the classic "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" T-shirt now gets a sequel!
I am guessing the great majority of people with accounts at Textamerica never read the Terms of Service and don't know that they don't own the images and text they posted to their own blogs there any more...
Quotes from their ToS:
When I listened to a presentation about RFID, the presenters said to totally destroy an RFID tag takes a machine much larger than one you could take into a Walmart without looking suspicious.
:-)
Did he also mention that DRM is uncrackable, by any chance?
That's not exactly an unbiased source of information, you know...
Anytime you step into a Walmart, you're already trading away a piece of your soul for lower prices. You're buying cheap foreign goods, often made in sweatshops. You're supporting a store that is starving your town of local independent retailers. And a big chunk of your money leaves the local community.
LOL. You want to live inside a little closed community, never poking your nose out, convinced that every time you buy something made by foreign devils you are trading a piece of your soul for it -- be my guest.
I am living in a global world. Most of the stuff I buy, both cheap and expensive, comes from different countries -- Japan, China, Germany, Mexico, etc. Periodically -- oh, horrors! -- I actually go on trips to foreign countries and leave a chunk on money there, paid for hotels, and food, and services, and what not.
Local independent retailers? What's that? Ah, those horse-and-buggy guys who had, basically, no selection at all and strangely high prices? I am not sorry to see them go. For example, am quite happy to have a Home Depot in my town -- the local hardware store never had what I needed and charged around three bucks for a pair of nails...
My local community is the world.
OK, I want a hand-held device, made out of Radio Shack parts, that will burn out RFIDs at close range (say, under 1 foot).
Any EEs out there want to comment on the feasability, complexity, and possible cost of such a device?
(I think a microwave oven works fine, but it's hardly portable...)
It was spur of the moment invention for this particular post. And I like the MRCH sound, vowels would just spoil it :-)
"Learning BASIC causes permanent brain damage." -- E.Dijkstra
Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
Sun wants a price war? With Linux? ROTFLMAO
Somebody is smoking some good shit...
And a quote from the linked article from the Reg: "Sun is hoping that Solaris x86 becomes the standard Unix option on x86 boxes."
Now that's not even smoking the good shit, that's direct evidence of massive brain damage...
a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space.
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future. It was when listening to a story about a tour of Google facilites -- the Google CEO pointed to the rows and rows and rows of cheap and semi-obsolete hardware which is Google server farm and said that Google will never buy expensive servers again.
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.
E-mail, as we know it today, has got to go.
Speak for yourself. Nobody forces you to use email, right? You want to use a "tigher protocol", be my guest.
Oh, you want ME to stop using email..? Umm... how do you say "fuck off" in a polite way?