Well at least the conspiracy theorists will be silenced a bit. Sounds like hes getting what he deserved. Its one thing to try and dig up dirt, its another to make it personal and try to ruin a guys family.
Oh country air! This is just the thing to fuel conspiracy theorists. Can't you see how preposterous and convoluted this tale is? It's like something out of TV, ffs! The Man jumped the shark by having it cooked up by a former hollywood hack writer. All this to keep Rambam from speaking.
In all seriousness I think this does sounds a bit far fetched.
Sophos estimates that 15 percent of all spam emails are now pump-and-dump scams
and that's been my personal experience in the inbox as well; I haven't gotten a farmapseudical spam in months! Now there is no money to follow, half of my spam is giffed pump-and-dump stock scamms and the other half is gibberish.
Amazing how their 15% translates into 50% for you. While you were typing that up, didn't a little voice in the back of your mind tap gently at your conscience and suggest the there's a bit of a difference between the two? It might also have pointed out that we could also be on different spammers mailing lists, not representative of Sophos sample.
The volume has significantly ramped up in the last 3 weeks. On Sunday my ISP sent me a polite note that my spam-filter-box was now 4% over my quota of 50MB of space. My breakdown is about like this:
50% pr0n
25% d1scr33t ph4rm4cy
10% UK (or other lottery winning notification)
10% Banks/eGold/PayPal phishing scams
2% Nigerian scams
1% Ancient Virus/Worms still making the rounds
1% h0t st0cks
1% Other
These are largely the proceedes of posting anything on USENET and perhaps a few stolen address books.
I have a gmail account which seems to attract 100% chinese/korean spam, no clue what it's content is. I posted a note to a blog somewhere using the account and apparently that was how the spammers obtained that address.
Another address was listed on my web page, now removed or made less harvestable, and has achieved a significantly smaller following along the lines of the prior list.
My business address seems to garner exclusively PayPal phishing i.e. "Hey when are you going to pay (some piddly amount which looks a great bargain, hence the sucker bait) for this Dell Laptop?"
Isn't that completely amazing when different accounts can receive differently targeted spam? Golly!
What's so hard here? The US has pushed for having banks and financial service companies to be more open with governments on who is doing what with transactions.
There's always the content, too. Just look in the emails and they have telephone numbers, web sites, the various means of seeing what these scumbags have to offer and how
to contact them.
Educating the public is failing. Why? How many public service ads have you seen advising people how to protect themselves from being scammed, preventing
identity theft, etc.? I've seen none. I see private ads OF the voice overs of the big dude with the girl's voice, where his identity has been
stolen, I think it was for a paper shreader of all things.
Sophos must be with the terrorists as they are not proclaiming victory in the war on terror. Enough has been made of the
suspicion (has anything been proved?) that terrorists raise funds this way. I wouldn't put it past them, but I also wouldn't
put it past some russian teenagers with limited career potential in Putin's New And Improved USSR.
Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
Rather than go on about the many diverse users who make up that 99% you could have just said cattle, because this is what they mostly are. All in the same herd which doesn't care about custom installs or dual boots. Most of this herd just expect a computer in front of them to turn on and look and behave in a certain, very non-confusing (yeah, I know there's a tonne of irony there, but we'll leave it for now) manner. Someone else, the vendor or a tech weasel, installs the OS for them and defaults all the fiddly bits.
Given the opportunity to perfom an OS install most of the herd would panic and stampede towards calling Microsoft Support or the nearest suspected tech savvy person they know and plead with them to do it for them. As they just don't know or ever want to know how much disk space they would like for a primary partition or what SWAP is all about.
Perhaps image based install is the little bit of hand holding the more adventurous could cope with, but in the event it still is too much for their faint hearts, leave your phone off the hook for the next 3 years.
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
Although you know it doesn't run on linux. Knowing slashdot, if it ran on linux it would say so in the title of the article or at least in the description.
This being slashdot you're more likely to see: To run Windows you'll need a bigger mirror.
The hubris is Microsoft's assumption anyone getting business is taking food off of their plate, or something they consider rightfully theirs...
You bastard! Your post denied Microsoft from making a compatible post which is their right!
From now on all posts to/. regarding Microsoft will come from Microsoft, however in the interest of fair competition, you may forward your post to Microsoft for inclusion in their post to ensure compatibility.
Now with 50% more junk preinstalled with every PC.
Typically laptop users suffer more than desktop, from bloat. Oddly, my laptop drive crapped out and I'm borrowing a desktop of approximately the same CPU clockage but the delay in loading during boot up is considerably longer on the desktop. Both HP-Compaq. Odd that.
(The reason being laptops usually use lower power north-south bridge and thus run a bit slower clock.
Is there any requirement that we won't see a replay of the Opera-Bork-Bork-Bork fiasco in Microsoft ensuring competitor's components are noticeably more clunky than their own?
i still don't like it, keep the playing field a bit tilted
As much as I like AMD, where are you getting that 370Watts for an Intel CPU stat?
My bad, I remembered wrongly, it's from ~120 watts on idle to ~220 under full load. That's still far too much power consumption for me to justify for a desktop system unless I'm running a business and can expense the power bills. The CPU I'm currently using is considerably cooler than the Athlon 2600+ I started out with, which helps keep the electric under control for those days I can't get off my arse and remain on the computer for 4 or more hours.
In a couple of years we'll be wondering how we ever survived with puny quad core systems...and anything with just a measly single core will be referred to as a dinosaur.
Of course the underlying question is: What are you gonna do with all that power?
Aside from whatever waste there is with the operating system (Windows XP is using about 380 MB of my 1GB of system memory to do NOTHING, but all those DLLs and Active X thingies are there, just in case I should ever need them) If you're into audio, video, engineering, artwork or heavy game play, great. If you are into just dinking around with web surfing and some home office stuff, the computer of 4 years ago is just the thing for you, if not overkill.
My trusty laptop had the HD flake out and I'm on a desktop system right now. I had Office 2000 on there and as little as I have to do with it, I was OK with it. This box has 2003. Let me be the first to say: If you don't need some feature of 2003, don't get it. Just more crap, geez, what a cow it is. I guess you need it for XML files, though as I don't think 2000 knew what they were.
Unfortunately, looking at some of those benchmarks for Conroe, HEAT is the word. 370+ watts for a CPU? Shit. who needs a home heater when you could just run your computer. Seriously, one of the reasons for my last upgrade was to get a CPU which consumed 38W rather than 70+ Powerbill may be a factor on whatever Intel is shipping, screw the initial purchase price.
So I'm pricing a new mobo+CPU combo for a friend. I bought an AMD64 about 14 months ago for $350. Now I see I can't even get that model anymore unless I buy the parts separately as "replacements" A few steps up from what I run is now $150. It's a good thing.
Maybe in a couple years I'll consider a Conroe or AMD 4x4 type system if I need any heavy rendering done, but for now It's astounding the bang for buck we get.
18 months on average. Gotta grab all you can while you can, I guess.
I've known some very good CIOs, they obviously pin down the upper end of the bell curve. Some of those toward the middle are mostly there as a stepping stone to their next stint. Rather a Peter Principle through stepping stones. Eventually they catch up to their level of incompetence and zoom right on past it to the place they actually can get away with as little as possible.
How about those who come in, implement large changes and in the midst of which you notice a copy of their resume at the FAX machine with a coversheet to where they plan to get to as soon as they declare "Mission Accomplished." The rationale is, they don't want to be around when it goes tits up. That's the next guys look out.
I've got to get me one of these jobs! I figure i'd be pretty bad at it, so that would justify a 9 million dollar paycheck.
Where else can you get well compensated for poor or mediocre performance?
I think you have to have the kind of personality where you really don't give a fsck about anyone but yourself to rise to these kinds of position and do badly, but don't mind at all telling people you have things going very well and deserve a raise.
We had a guy who took a job, changed the numbers on a report to show his predecessor sucked, and then faked his numbers to look good.
Yeah, Lies, damn lies and statistics. Without oversight it's amazing what you can make metrics say. Don't like what one measure says? Come up with one that does!
"Hmm. The department costs too much in overtime, but we can't cut it or work won't get done and people will notice more problems since I took over. I know I'll show how much in Fringe Benefits we are saving by exhausting our current workforce rather than adding more headcount!"
Why the disconnect? Jack Dolmat-Connell, founder and president of the firm, cites the phenomenon of 'chasing the median': Companies benchmark their executive compensation figures on peers instead of looking at factors related to performance.
How about the former CIO where I worked? You could swear his primary motivation was to get himself more money, however he did it, by
making his performance look good, the long-term problem is determining if that appearance of 'good performance' really was as
good as it looked on paper and how it enabled the business the grow or trim costs effectively.
"If I make all those guys putting in 16 hour days wear suits and ties, we'll look more professional and I'll get compliments on what
a tight ship I run! That should get me $100,000 more per year."
to see porn and all its flavors, casiono/poker scams, spyware, popups, circle jerks, top20 gateways and all the other scum that floats on the bottom of the warez scene
All they'd need to do is post a few messages here and there on blogs or newsgroups with their email addresses and the filth will come to them. Just find the stuff hosted in China and Bob will be their great uncle!
Slashdot Mirror
Well at least the conspiracy theorists will be silenced a bit. Sounds like hes getting what he deserved. Its one thing to try and dig up dirt, its another to make it personal and try to ruin a guys family.
Oh country air! This is just the thing to fuel conspiracy theorists. Can't you see how preposterous and convoluted this tale is? It's like something out of TV, ffs! The Man jumped the shark by having it cooked up by a former hollywood hack writer. All this to keep Rambam from speaking.
In all seriousness I think this does sounds a bit far fetched.
Amazing how their 15% translates into 50% for you. While you were typing that up, didn't a little voice in the back of your mind tap gently at your conscience and suggest the there's a bit of a difference between the two? It might also have pointed out that we could also be on different spammers mailing lists, not representative of Sophos sample.
The volume has significantly ramped up in the last 3 weeks. On Sunday my ISP sent me a polite note that my spam-filter-box was now 4% over my quota of 50MB of space. My breakdown is about like this:
These are largely the proceedes of posting anything on USENET and perhaps a few stolen address books.
I have a gmail account which seems to attract 100% chinese/korean spam, no clue what it's content is. I posted a note to a blog somewhere using the account and apparently that was how the spammers obtained that address.
Another address was listed on my web page, now removed or made less harvestable, and has achieved a significantly smaller following along the lines of the prior list.
My business address seems to garner exclusively PayPal phishing i.e. "Hey when are you going to pay (some piddly amount which looks a great bargain, hence the sucker bait) for this Dell Laptop?"
Isn't that completely amazing when different accounts can receive differently targeted spam? Golly!
And, of course, you are the rampant bull.
I see myself more as a march hare.
"Follow the money"
What's so hard here? The US has pushed for having banks and financial service companies to be more open with governments on who is doing what with transactions.
There's always the content, too. Just look in the emails and they have telephone numbers, web sites, the various means of seeing what these scumbags have to offer and how to contact them.
Educating the public is failing. Why? How many public service ads have you seen advising people how to protect themselves from being scammed, preventing identity theft, etc.? I've seen none. I see private ads OF the voice overs of the big dude with the girl's voice, where his identity has been stolen, I think it was for a paper shreader of all things.
Sophos must be with the terrorists as they are not proclaiming victory in the war on terror. Enough has been made of the suspicion (has anything been proved?) that terrorists raise funds this way. I wouldn't put it past them, but I also wouldn't put it past some russian teenagers with limited career potential in Putin's New And Improved USSR.
Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
Rather than go on about the many diverse users who make up that 99% you could have just said cattle, because this is what they mostly are. All in the same herd which doesn't care about custom installs or dual boots. Most of this herd just expect a computer in front of them to turn on and look and behave in a certain, very non-confusing (yeah, I know there's a tonne of irony there, but we'll leave it for now) manner. Someone else, the vendor or a tech weasel, installs the OS for them and defaults all the fiddly bits.
Given the opportunity to perfom an OS install most of the herd would panic and stampede towards calling Microsoft Support or the nearest suspected tech savvy person they know and plead with them to do it for them. As they just don't know or ever want to know how much disk space they would like for a primary partition or what SWAP is all about.
Perhaps image based install is the little bit of hand holding the more adventurous could cope with, but in the event it still is too much for their faint hearts, leave your phone off the hook for the next 3 years.
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
No, no, no. Windows likes to break stuff so running it on a mirror would be really stupid.
So running Windows on your Mirror would bring you 7 years bad luck?
i've already had 7 years hard luck running it on my pc's.
Although you know it doesn't run on linux. Knowing slashdot, if it ran on linux it would say so in the title of the article or at least in the description.
This being slashdot you're more likely to see: To run Windows you'll need a bigger mirror.
Mirror, mirror am I stoned?
Your image is now goatse.cx guy,
My home security must be pwn3d
The hubris is Microsoft's assumption anyone getting business is taking food off of their plate, or something they consider rightfully theirs...
You bastard! Your post denied Microsoft from making a compatible post which is their right!
From now on all posts to /. regarding Microsoft will come from Microsoft, however in the interest of fair competition, you may forward your post to Microsoft for inclusion in their post to ensure compatibility.
Now with 50% more junk preinstalled with every PC.
Typically laptop users suffer more than desktop, from bloat. Oddly, my laptop drive crapped out and I'm borrowing a desktop of approximately the same CPU clockage but the delay in loading during boot up is considerably longer on the desktop. Both HP-Compaq. Odd that.
(The reason being laptops usually use lower power north-south bridge and thus run a bit slower clock.
Is there any requirement that we won't see a replay of the Opera-Bork-Bork-Bork fiasco in Microsoft ensuring competitor's components are noticeably more clunky than their own?
i still don't like it, keep the playing field a bit tilted
As much as I like AMD, where are you getting that 370Watts for an Intel CPU stat?
My bad, I remembered wrongly, it's from ~120 watts on idle to ~220 under full load. That's still far too much power consumption for me to justify for a desktop system unless I'm running a business and can expense the power bills. The CPU I'm currently using is considerably cooler than the Athlon 2600+ I started out with, which helps keep the electric under control for those days I can't get off my arse and remain on the computer for 4 or more hours.
In a couple of years we'll be wondering how we ever survived with puny quad core systems...and anything with just a measly single core will be referred to as a dinosaur.
Of course the underlying question is: What are you gonna do with all that power?
Aside from whatever waste there is with the operating system (Windows XP is using about 380 MB of my 1GB of system memory to do NOTHING, but all those DLLs and Active X thingies are there, just in case I should ever need them) If you're into audio, video, engineering, artwork or heavy game play, great. If you are into just dinking around with web surfing and some home office stuff, the computer of 4 years ago is just the thing for you, if not overkill.
My trusty laptop had the HD flake out and I'm on a desktop system right now. I had Office 2000 on there and as little as I have to do with it, I was OK with it. This box has 2003. Let me be the first to say: If you don't need some feature of 2003, don't get it. Just more crap, geez, what a cow it is. I guess you need it for XML files, though as I don't think 2000 knew what they were.
The great hardware war heats up once again.
Unfortunately, looking at some of those benchmarks for Conroe, HEAT is the word. 370+ watts for a CPU? Shit. who needs a home heater when you could just run your computer. Seriously, one of the reasons for my last upgrade was to get a CPU which consumed 38W rather than 70+ Powerbill may be a factor on whatever Intel is shipping, screw the initial purchase price.
So I'm pricing a new mobo+CPU combo for a friend. I bought an AMD64 about 14 months ago for $350. Now I see I can't even get that model anymore unless I buy the parts separately as "replacements" A few steps up from what I run is now $150. It's a good thing.
Maybe in a couple years I'll consider a Conroe or AMD 4x4 type system if I need any heavy rendering done, but for now It's astounding the bang for buck we get.
I'm guessing those who get the Powder Room Player sit down for number one.
18 months on average. Gotta grab all you can while you can, I guess.
I've known some very good CIOs, they obviously pin down the upper end of the bell curve. Some of those toward the middle are mostly there as a stepping stone to their next stint. Rather a Peter Principle through stepping stones. Eventually they catch up to their level of incompetence and zoom right on past it to the place they actually can get away with as little as possible.
How about those who come in, implement large changes and in the midst of which you notice a copy of their resume at the FAX machine with a coversheet to where they plan to get to as soon as they declare "Mission Accomplished." The rationale is, they don't want to be around when it goes tits up. That's the next guys look out.
I've got to get me one of these jobs! I figure i'd be pretty bad at it, so that would justify a 9 million dollar paycheck. Where else can you get well compensated for poor or mediocre performance?
I think you have to have the kind of personality where you really don't give a fsck about anyone but yourself to rise to these kinds of position and do badly, but don't mind at all telling people you have things going very well and deserve a raise.
Step 1. Leave conscience at the door.
We had a guy who took a job, changed the numbers on a report to show his predecessor sucked, and then faked his numbers to look good.
Yeah, Lies, damn lies and statistics. Without oversight it's amazing what you can make metrics say. Don't like what one measure says? Come up with one that does!
"Hmm. The department costs too much in overtime, but we can't cut it or work won't get done and people will notice more problems since I took over. I know I'll show how much in Fringe Benefits we are saving by exhausting our current workforce rather than adding more headcount!"
Well, duh! They have to buy the sheet music, don't they?
Their CEOs made a lot of money while their companies went down the drain.
Ashton-Tate when down the toilet because Dbase 4 was a pile of crap and all they put their money into was suing their competition.
Why the disconnect? Jack Dolmat-Connell, founder and president of the firm, cites the phenomenon of 'chasing the median': Companies benchmark their executive compensation figures on peers instead of looking at factors related to performance.
How about the former CIO where I worked? You could swear his primary motivation was to get himself more money, however he did it, by making his performance look good, the long-term problem is determining if that appearance of 'good performance' really was as good as it looked on paper and how it enabled the business the grow or trim costs effectively.
"If I make all those guys putting in 16 hour days wear suits and ties, we'll look more professional and I'll get compliments on what a tight ship I run! That should get me $100,000 more per year."
to see porn and all its flavors, casiono/poker scams, spyware, popups, circle jerks, top20 gateways and all the other scum that floats on the bottom of the warez scene
All they'd need to do is post a few messages here and there on blogs or newsgroups with their email addresses and the filth will come to them. Just find the stuff hosted in China and Bob will be their great uncle!