As lots of people have said, the RF noise floor in the area will increase over time as more "wireless" (especially 2.4GHz, and some 5.8GHz) gear is deployed (especially in the 2.4GHz ISM band, not just "wireless" computer networking, but lots of other stuff). Since the ability to recognise/decode your desired signal is significantly affected by signal to noise ratio, over time the RF environment gets worse.
New equipment generally comes with more sensitive receivers, which can work with a lower signal to noise ratio (over the couple of years I was following it closely, the improvement was something like half an order of magnitude less signal required -- relative to the same noise floor). Newer equipment often comes with new standards too, which also help improve reception (either changing to a less crowded band, eg 802.11A in 5.8 GHz instead of the crowded 2.4 GHz; or by better antennas that "localise" the signal -- eg, 802.11N deployed with multiple antennas and complex decoders to mix what it learns from each together for a better overall decode). So, in general, newly designed equipment is going to work better in the same environment than older equipment using the same standards as everyone else nearby.
It's also technically possible that there is increased resistance in, eg, the connectors between the transmitter/receiver and the radio antenna. This is mostly a risk in outdoor installations (where weather can get at it, particularly water -- usually in the form of water in the air, rather than rain; if you're getting direct rain on bare connectors you've already lost!). Outdoor installations near the sea are particularly at risk. Good weather sealing is critical in out door installations for this reason.
Usually one of the best things you can do to improve your reception and that of your neighbors (ie, encourage them to do it too) is to position your wireless APs as close as possible to where you want to use them (and if you have a large house, use more than one rather than trying to find a super "covers the whole house at once" solution; if they're got the same access credentials and are on the same LAN, modern computers should switch around as needed). RF power drops off rapidly the further you are away from the source, so getting closer to the source gives you a much better connection for the same amount of power. If you have the option to change antennas (at least older consumer wireless gear had that option, as does a lot of business gear), then picking an antenna design that focuses the power you're allowed to use into the area you want to use it will also help significantly (for the same reason). Eg, using a sector antenna to just focus everything into one corner. It'll help if your neighbours do that too. (And if you're talking to them, and they seem to have a clue, try to arrange not to be on overlapping channels.)
The person who filed the bug report doesn't like this and thinks that the package should be in the security fix repository.
FTR, actually that's not the case. Someone else who stumbled onto the problem near the last minute doesn't like the fact that it didn't go into the main repository or security repository. I -- the person who filed the original bug -- am perfectly happy with the fix going into the volatile archive, and patched the servers I manage months ago. (I think it's rather unfortunate it missed the 4.0r1 point release, and unfortunate (but understandable) that there's no patch for Debian Sarge ("oldstable"), but otherwise the situation seems to have been handled fine. For Debian Sarge it works okay to take the NZ or Pacific/Auckland timezone file from a patched Etch system and put it onto the Sarge system.)
The concept of a day is very engrained in us. Today is a Saturday! Imagine if it was also sunday based on my location.
Umm, it _is_ Sunday here (New Zealand), and it was Sunday here when you posted your comment (03:30ish). In fact to the first approximation it's _always_ a day later in New Zealand than it is in the US; there is some overlap but how much depends on what part of the US you are in. It's quite possible to fly out of New Zealand late evenint on the Xth of the month, take 12-13 hours in the air, and arrive in the US on the Xth of the month, often mid-morning; I've done it several times. And you lose a day flying back (US -> New Zealand) due to crossing the date line.
Besides which there already is a universal time zone -- UTC (and formerly GMT). Which gets used for all sorts of things where crossing time zones too much gets confusing.
FWIW, ignoring leap seconds for a while doesn't seem a huge problem to me providing we have a leap minute or something after a few decades. Ignoring the problem for a few centuries might be a little problematic but probably still not that much (noon would be a few minutes off).
It is not as bad as you think at first time, because in the loop there is a "look in POP box" action which occurs at an (apparently configurable) interval. When it would be direct SMTP looping it would melt down pretty quickly.
Last time I ran into this (a couple of weeks back), by the time someone mentioned the problem with our mailserver (which was hosting the vanity domain in one of the addresses in the To: line that forwarded to an offsite pop box, from which the Microsoft product downloaded it) -- only 2-3 hours after it had started looping -- there were literally 60,000 messages waiting to be delivered to this one (remote) POP box. Without considering the number which had been delivered to the POP box over the past few hours (probably another 20,000 or more).
Presumably someone "optimised" the download from POP setting to get their mail quickly, but just for the cost of a POP box, instead of buying a real incoming SMTP connection. I got the impression that towards the end it was looping as fast as the DSL connection would let it.
Mail loops are nasty. Mail loops with exploders in them (eg, one address forwards to many) that end up in the same POP box and going through the same resend treatment are really nasty.
Thank you for the explanation and KB article number. I've seen this happen several times with various organistaions using some Microsoft mail product, but had never managed to identify exactly which Microsoft product was causing it. (Typically those involved in creating such forwarding loops have little clue about email and don't know what products they're using, so the only clue is the Microsoft SMTPSVC listed repeatedly in the Received: headers.)
Given fast enough connections, and if not caught quickly enough, you can end up with tens of thousands of messages in a matter of hours. And if, as happened last time I saw it,there's some expansion going on at some other point in the cycle (eg, one of the addresses forwards to several people), then it can get (literally) exponentially bad very quickly. (It soon overwhelms one or more of the MTAs in the loop which limits the exponential growth.)
Actually 99% of the time when I click into the address bar I want to delete some of the text -- usually at the right of where I click -- and leave the rest. If the whole field isn't selected, then I click, type ctrl-k, and type in the rest of the URL I want. If the whole field is selected then I have to do something to cause it not to be selected, then select/delete the bit I want, then type in the replacement for the rest of the URL.
I really do prefer the unix behaviour, although of course I wouldn't object if it wasn't the default providing there was some way for me to turn my preferred behaviour back on.
But that was pretty much my point. Here you have a class of people that are supposedly going to be the next generation of highly trusted people (ie, lawyers taking care of people's property, money, etc). And they're cheating to get a few meaningless points in a trivial game. Because they can.
Perhaps it was too much to expect that no one in the class even saw a problem with people the public are supposed to trust just cheating because they can.
I've since adjusted my cynacism meter. It reads off-scale less frequently now.
Ewen
PS: I've read (and even own) Dawkin's "The selfish gene", and I'd recommend it too.
Some years ago I was a law student. One class we played this group game whereby cheating (through lying to the group about what you were going to do, then doing something else) would let you win big. Nearly everyone in the class cheated. Some were very proud of the high scores they achieved in the game that way. No one else seemed to see it as a problem; they were disappointed they didn't figure out to cheat sooner.
I'm not sure what this says about our lawyers today. But I don't think it's good.
Ewen
PS: My score was negative. And I'm not a lawyer. Those two things are not completely unrelated.
It sounds like you've been somewhat unlucky. In my attempts to read back in some of the 400+ floppies I've got (of various vintages, mostly from 10-20 years old), I've generally managed to read about three quarters of them without major issues. (Of course in some cases I had to dredge the details of the format used on them out of my nearly-lost memory, but physically reading in the disks was possible.)
Another issue I have found is that almost all the compression techniques that were being used at the time I wrote the floppies have disappeared, and finding decompressors is difficult. (Anyone remember Squish (.?Q?), Crunch (.?Z?), LZH compress (.?Y?), or even.ARC or.ARK? More seriously if anyone has source to a CP/M.?Y? (LZH compress) decompressor, I'm interested -- the one I've found seems to work on only some files.)
AFAICT the only real solution is to (a) store the files uncompressed wherever possible (and if not, keep source to the decompressors around), (b) copy the files onto new media regularly (eg, every 2-5 years), and (c) keep the files online (ie, on an active hard drive) wherever possible. Paper or printed out copies are a good idea too, but you've got to move them around, and they're less easily backed up against a fire or misplacement.
I too have a Sony DSC-P1 with that type of problem with (now) three batteries -- the batteries (with some effort) will usually charge up, often claim "80 minutes" or "90 minutes", but generally will be unusable after a few minutes (a bit longer if the LCD isn't on). The replacement batteries seem to work better for a while, but developed the same problem over the course of 3-6 months.
The impression that I got from the Sony Style shop staff was that "this happens" and that the batteries were only good for a few dozen recharges (which makes usage Rather Expensive (tm) considering they're about $200 a battery here).
I'd pretty much concluded it'd be cheaper to buy a new camera -- and definitely not a Sony one -- until I saw your post. Alas it appears from the link that Sony's offer seems to have ended about 4 months ago, and seems to apply only in the US. Sigh.
I'm curious though. After all the replacement bits did your new battery/charger/etc end up having the same problem after some months?
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that Linux Journal have started sending junk email (ie, spam) to their subscribers who were foolish enough to provide them with an email address?
Or that none of their staff even bother to reply to explain why they started spamming their subscribers?
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And no, I didn't opt in at all; and yes, this does breach their privacy policy, but no one at Linux Journal appears to care.
My opinion of them went down considerably after that spamming started. Particularly since they no one at all there (and I mailed everyone I could find that was vaguely relevant) even bothered to respond to complaints about their actions.
Use a tunnel. IPSec, ssh -- or even GRE in this instance -- can all get your packets from one place to the other.
A particularly handy thing to do for "single use" tunnels is to set up a ssh port forward, and then use your firewall packet rewriting to transparently push packets destined for the remote mail server into the ssh tunnel. (And if you push it all through a ssh tunnel, you can generally get the "authenticate to the mail server" problem down to "comes from the ssh tunnel endpoint".)
Alternatively you could get a better ISP (or at least one willing to make exceptions to their rule for people with a clue who ask).
An expiration date was actually coded into the worm? Seems pretty ironic.
Uh, no.
The expiration date is there because if you're an evil software writer you don't want people running last month's version of your evil software and competing with the All New and Improved version.
Come on, if you're going to write a worm,
do it right.
I think it's pretty obvious that this was a test of a few things:
It was a test of the encryption of the virus executable to see how hard it would be for anti-virus vendors and law enforcement to decipher it (conclusion: they've nearly got it hard enough; law enforcement still don't know exactly what it does).
It was test of how many next-stage sites would be needed in order to ensure that they didn't all get shut down before they were needed (conclusion: 20 is enough (they only shut down 19), 30 would be plenty it seems)
It was a test of how quickly it could spread just relying on user gulliability to get it in the door (conclusion: real quick, I've been seeing 1000+ copies (well, attempts) per day from some IPs, and more than 3000 copies (well, attempts) per day in total)
So next time (and the speculation seems to be next time will be the day after SoBig.F expires on 10 September) will presumably have learnt from the results of these tests.
Oh, and it wouldn't surprise me if next time is a Warhol Worm. I'm guessing they've collected up millions of zombies this time around.
So, yes, this time around it's easy to filter, and it's really only the useless virus notification and other bounce backs which are annoying.
Please do not send virus notifications for any worm or virus which is known to forge email addresses.
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that
viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
Someone on LiveJournal speculated that these messages were actually advertising, for the anti-virus product, and should be treated as spam/unsolicited bulk email.
I certainly agree that where the virus is known to spoof email addresses, it only makes the problem much much worse for everyone if you send a message saying (in effect) "the message you didn't send had a virus, there's nothing you can do about it, but please share the pain". And the anti-virus writers should be... persuaded... not to send out these virus reports to forged email addresses.
The 1000+ copies per day of the virus are easy enough to filter. The gazillons of different formats of useless "virus notifications" are not.
If they stand the 1's up, sure you can fit more because they're skinny. But 0's? They're wide...I don't see a significant amount of savings there...
Ah, but the real trick of it is that you lay the 0s down flat, and stand the 1s up inside the holes in the 0s. Then either lay some more 0s down to cover the bits that stick up, or some more 1s on their side in the gaps.
Why don't I ever see something like this: Pentium III 500MHz 20GB Harddrive 128MB RAM 12 inch screen 4lbs or less
There are laptops in this category (give or take the processor speed) from most major laptop manufacturers (ASUS is the only one I recall seeing that didn't have a model in this category, and that may just be a New Zealand thing).
800MHz to 1000MHz is roughly standard for such a laptop new these days, and expect a Mobile Pentium III rather than a desktop one (to extend the battery life). Older laptops like that do come up second hand from time to time, generally with about 600MHz CPUs these days, but you have to watch closely as they generally get snapped up quickly.
Oh, and expect to pay quite a price premium for 4lb or less laptops. My Acer Travelmate 361EVi (about 3.5lbs -- 1.7kg) sold for about 40% more than a similar traditional laptop (around the 6lb sort of weight). But since I carry it around every day it's easily been worth the extra money.
Finally at 4lbs a long lasting battery is about 3 hours. At 5lbs (eg, weight of a 12" iBook) you might be able to get 5 hours if you sacrifice a bunch of other things to get battery life. To get much longer than that you should expect a lot more weight -- 6 lbs or 7lbs at least -- as it generally involves two batteries. And batteries are heavy.
The article also discusses how Linux is pushing...
Who is this mysterious "Linux"? I know of the OS kernel called Linux, but last I checked, it wasn't concerned about the marketplace for non-Windows OS's,...
I guess the secret is out. Linux is concerned about the marketplace for non-Windows OS. It's also concerned about the War, SARS, and global hunger.
Oh, and it'd like to know when you'll be getting back to it with the details of its benefits plan. It wants a good medical plan, with free dental.
"One thing that is underrated is getting a dedicated water jug and putting it in the FRIDGE to keep it really cold."
I completely agree with this, having done the same thing (bought a water filteration jug) a couple of years back. Tap water with the not-so-nice tasting things filtered out, and chilled, is very nice. (Unchilled and it's no where near as nice.) It's also easy to maintain: take out of the fridge, pour glass of water, top up water in filter jug, put back in fridge. And change the filter every three months.
When I first bought it I figured at worst it didn't cost too much (NZ$50 (about US$25) plus about NZ$15 (US$8 ish) for the filters every few months), but having used it for a couple of years I wonder why I waited so long.
Still the article was very cool in a geeky "why not?" kind of way.
Buyers also must attend a multi-hour training course before the scooter is shipped to them...
I thought one of the main thing about Segway is that it was supposed to be sooooo intuitive like walking? what's up with the multi-hour training?
Personally I'd be very happy to see a multi-hour training course required for "walking in public". It could cover:
Which side of the footpath (sidewalk) to walk on;
Not walking three (or more) abrest if the footpath is narrow (or busy);
Keeping to the edge if you are moving slower than others
Turning (into shops, etc)
Planning ahead
And plenty more stuff. Advanced courses could teach "trolley usage in supermarkets", "what to do if you meet someone you know who is going the other way" (hint: don't just stop in the middle of the footpath and block traffic in both directions), and plenty more.
You might think this is all common sense. But common sense is surprisingly uncommon.
I would like, for example, to allow only slashdot.org and nytimes.com to set persistant cookies. I can do this in explorer by setting it to block all cookies, then putting certain sites in my 'trusted sites' list, but I don't think mozilla works that way.
In Mozilla you can block or unblock cookies on a per-site basis using Tools->Cookie Manger->Block Cookies from this Site and Tools->Cookie Manger->Unblock Cookies from this Site.
I suspect you could achieve what you want in Mozilla by setting the default policy to blocking cookies, and then visiting the sites where you want to allow cookies and using the Unblock Cookies from this Site option to enable cookies for just those sites.
Those choices are stored persistently in cookperm.txt in the mozilla directory, so you could possibly even edit that file manually providing you carefully followed the format of existing entries.
[1000 CDs] Assuming it took only 15 minutes to rip a CD, not counting time to switch CD's, set up the tracks, etc, it would take over 250 hours, or what amounts to a little over 10 days , non-stop, (Yeah... no eating, drinking, sleeping, whatever...) to rip those mp3 tracks...
Having ripped 400 or so CDs over the space of about a week without even trying very hard I think your estimates are somewhat off, because:
It doesn't usually take 15-minutes per CD with a good drive -- more like a quarter of that
Providing you have lots of disk space you can put off the time consuming bit (the encoding) until later (eg, overnight)
You can do other stuff at the same time you know; just change the CD when it ejects, and then go on with what you were doing.
Free hint: it is easy to parallelize the process. (I only used 2 machines, but a friend of mine used about 8 last time he had to rerip his collection.)
Sounds to me that you don't need more time, you need better organisation:-)
Slashdot Mirror
As lots of people have said, the RF noise floor in the area will increase over time as more "wireless" (especially 2.4GHz, and some 5.8GHz) gear is deployed (especially in the 2.4GHz ISM band, not just "wireless" computer networking, but lots of other stuff). Since the ability to recognise/decode your desired signal is significantly affected by signal to noise ratio, over time the RF environment gets worse.
New equipment generally comes with more sensitive receivers, which can work with a lower signal to noise ratio (over the couple of years I was following it closely, the improvement was something like half an order of magnitude less signal required -- relative to the same noise floor). Newer equipment often comes with new standards too, which also help improve reception (either changing to a less crowded band, eg 802.11A in 5.8 GHz instead of the crowded 2.4 GHz; or by better antennas that "localise" the signal -- eg, 802.11N deployed with multiple antennas and complex decoders to mix what it learns from each together for a better overall decode). So, in general, newly designed equipment is going to work better in the same environment than older equipment using the same standards as everyone else nearby.
It's also technically possible that there is increased resistance in, eg, the connectors between the transmitter/receiver and the radio antenna. This is mostly a risk in outdoor installations (where weather can get at it, particularly water -- usually in the form of water in the air, rather than rain; if you're getting direct rain on bare connectors you've already lost!). Outdoor installations near the sea are particularly at risk. Good weather sealing is critical in out door installations for this reason.
Usually one of the best things you can do to improve your reception and that of your neighbors (ie, encourage them to do it too) is to position your wireless APs as close as possible to where you want to use them (and if you have a large house, use more than one rather than trying to find a super "covers the whole house at once" solution; if they're got the same access credentials and are on the same LAN, modern computers should switch around as needed). RF power drops off rapidly the further you are away from the source, so getting closer to the source gives you a much better connection for the same amount of power. If you have the option to change antennas (at least older consumer wireless gear had that option, as does a lot of business gear), then picking an antenna design that focuses the power you're allowed to use into the area you want to use it will also help significantly (for the same reason). Eg, using a sector antenna to just focus everything into one corner. It'll help if your neighbours do that too. (And if you're talking to them, and they seem to have a clue, try to arrange not to be on overlapping channels.)
Ewen
FTR, actually that's not the case. Someone else who stumbled onto the problem near the last minute doesn't like the fact that it didn't go into the main repository or security repository. I -- the person who filed the original bug -- am perfectly happy with the fix going into the volatile archive, and patched the servers I manage months ago. (I think it's rather unfortunate it missed the 4.0r1 point release, and unfortunate (but understandable) that there's no patch for Debian Sarge ("oldstable"), but otherwise the situation seems to have been handled fine. For Debian Sarge it works okay to take the NZ or Pacific/Auckland timezone file from a patched Etch system and put it onto the Sarge system.)
Ewen
Umm, it _is_ Sunday here (New Zealand), and it was Sunday here when you posted your comment (03:30ish). In fact to the first approximation it's _always_ a day later in New Zealand than it is in the US; there is some overlap but how much depends on what part of the US you are in. It's quite possible to fly out of New Zealand late evenint on the Xth of the month, take 12-13 hours in the air, and arrive in the US on the Xth of the month, often mid-morning; I've done it several times. And you lose a day flying back (US -> New Zealand) due to crossing the date line.
Besides which there already is a universal time zone -- UTC (and formerly GMT). Which gets used for all sorts of things where crossing time zones too much gets confusing.
FWIW, ignoring leap seconds for a while doesn't seem a huge problem to me providing we have a leap minute or something after a few decades. Ignoring the problem for a few centuries might be a little problematic but probably still not that much (noon would be a few minutes off).
Ewen
Last time I ran into this (a couple of weeks back), by the time someone mentioned the problem with our mailserver (which was hosting the vanity domain in one of the addresses in the To: line that forwarded to an offsite pop box, from which the Microsoft product downloaded it) -- only 2-3 hours after it had started looping -- there were literally 60,000 messages waiting to be delivered to this one (remote) POP box. Without considering the number which had been delivered to the POP box over the past few hours (probably another 20,000 or more).
Presumably someone "optimised" the download from POP setting to get their mail quickly, but just for the cost of a POP box, instead of buying a real incoming SMTP connection. I got the impression that towards the end it was looping as fast as the DSL connection would let it.
Mail loops are nasty. Mail loops with exploders in them (eg, one address forwards to many) that end up in the same POP box and going through the same resend treatment are really nasty.
Ewen
Thank you for the explanation and KB article number. I've seen this happen several times with various organistaions using some Microsoft mail product, but had never managed to identify exactly which Microsoft product was causing it. (Typically those involved in creating such forwarding loops have little clue about email and don't know what products they're using, so the only clue is the Microsoft SMTPSVC listed repeatedly in the Received: headers.)
Given fast enough connections, and if not caught quickly enough, you can end up with tens of thousands of messages in a matter of hours. And if, as happened last time I saw it,there's some expansion going on at some other point in the cycle (eg, one of the addresses forwards to several people), then it can get (literally) exponentially bad very quickly. (It soon overwhelms one or more of the MTAs in the loop which limits the exponential growth.)
Ewen
Actually 99% of the time when I click into the address bar I want to delete some of the text -- usually at the right of where I click -- and leave the rest. If the whole field isn't selected, then I click, type ctrl-k, and type in the rest of the URL I want. If the whole field is selected then I have to do something to cause it not to be selected, then select/delete the bit I want, then type in the replacement for the rest of the URL.
I really do prefer the unix behaviour, although of course I wouldn't object if it wasn't the default providing there was some way for me to turn my preferred behaviour back on.
Ewen
The problem is that a cubic foot of air is too big to easily carry around. What people really want is something about 1/100th of the size.
Compressed air. It's the new thing I tell you.
Ewen
No, there wasn't any punishment for cheating.
But that was pretty much my point. Here you have a class of people that are supposedly going to be the next generation of highly trusted people (ie, lawyers taking care of people's property, money, etc). And they're cheating to get a few meaningless points in a trivial game. Because they can.
Perhaps it was too much to expect that no one in the class even saw a problem with people the public are supposed to trust just cheating because they can.
I've since adjusted my cynacism meter. It reads off-scale less frequently now.
Ewen
PS: I've read (and even own) Dawkin's "The selfish gene", and I'd recommend it too.
Some years ago I was a law student. One class we played this group game whereby cheating (through lying to the group about what you were going to do, then doing something else) would let you win big. Nearly everyone in the class cheated. Some were very proud of the high scores they achieved in the game that way. No one else seemed to see it as a problem; they were disappointed they didn't figure out to cheat sooner.
I'm not sure what this says about our lawyers today. But I don't think it's good.
Ewen
PS: My score was negative. And I'm not a lawyer. Those two things are not completely unrelated.
It sounds like you've been somewhat unlucky. In my attempts to read back in some of the 400+ floppies I've got (of various vintages, mostly from 10-20 years old), I've generally managed to read about three quarters of them without major issues. (Of course in some cases I had to dredge the details of the format used on them out of my nearly-lost memory, but physically reading in the disks was possible.)
Another issue I have found is that almost all the compression techniques that were being used at the time I wrote the floppies have disappeared, and finding decompressors is difficult. (Anyone remember Squish (.?Q?), Crunch (.?Z?), LZH compress (.?Y?), or even .ARC or .ARK? More seriously if anyone has source to a CP/M .?Y? (LZH compress) decompressor, I'm interested -- the one I've found seems to work on only some files.)
AFAICT the only real solution is to (a) store the files uncompressed wherever possible (and if not, keep source to the decompressors around), (b) copy the files onto new media regularly (eg, every 2-5 years), and (c) keep the files online (ie, on an active hard drive) wherever possible. Paper or printed out copies are a good idea too, but you've got to move them around, and they're less easily backed up against a fire or misplacement.
Ewen
I too have a Sony DSC-P1 with that type of problem with (now) three batteries -- the batteries (with some effort) will usually charge up, often claim "80 minutes" or "90 minutes", but generally will be unusable after a few minutes (a bit longer if the LCD isn't on). The replacement batteries seem to work better for a while, but developed the same problem over the course of 3-6 months.
The impression that I got from the Sony Style shop staff was that "this happens" and that the batteries were only good for a few dozen recharges (which makes usage Rather Expensive (tm) considering they're about $200 a battery here).
I'd pretty much concluded it'd be cheaper to buy a new camera -- and definitely not a Sony one -- until I saw your post. Alas it appears from the link that Sony's offer seems to have ended about 4 months ago, and seems to apply only in the US. Sigh.
I'm curious though. After all the replacement bits did your new battery/charger/etc end up having the same problem after some months?
Ewen
If everyone does that there won't be any afterwards. Besides which SCO will think that all their Christmases have come at once if that happens.
Ewen
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that Linux Journal have started sending junk email (ie, spam) to their subscribers who were foolish enough to provide them with an email address?
Or that none of their staff even bother to reply to explain why they started spamming their subscribers?
And no, I didn't opt in at all; and yes, this does breach their privacy policy, but no one at Linux Journal appears to care.
My opinion of them went down considerably after that spamming started. Particularly since they no one at all there (and I mailed everyone I could find that was vaguely relevant) even bothered to respond to complaints about their actions.
Ewen
Use a tunnel. IPSec, ssh -- or even GRE in this instance -- can all get your packets from one place to the other.
A particularly handy thing to do for "single use" tunnels is to set up a ssh port forward, and then use your firewall packet rewriting to transparently push packets destined for the remote mail server into the ssh tunnel. (And if you push it all through a ssh tunnel, you can generally get the "authenticate to the mail server" problem down to "comes from the ssh tunnel endpoint".)
Alternatively you could get a better ISP (or at least one willing to make exceptions to their rule for people with a clue who ask).
Ewen
Uh, no.
The expiration date is there because if you're an evil software writer you don't want people running last month's version of your evil software and competing with the All New and Improved version.
Just basic economics, really.
Ewen
I think it's pretty obvious that this was a test of a few things:
So next time (and the speculation seems to be next time will be the day after SoBig.F expires on 10 September) will presumably have learnt from the results of these tests.
Oh, and it wouldn't surprise me if next time is a Warhol Worm. I'm guessing they've collected up millions of zombies this time around.
So, yes, this time around it's easy to filter, and it's really only the useless virus notification and other bounce backs which are annoying.
Please do not send virus notifications for any worm or virus which is known to forge email addresses.
But don't expect it to be so easy next time.
Ewen
Someone on LiveJournal speculated that these messages were actually advertising, for the anti-virus product, and should be treated as spam/unsolicited bulk email.
I certainly agree that where the virus is known to spoof email addresses, it only makes the problem much much worse for everyone if you send a message saying (in effect) "the message you didn't send had a virus, there's nothing you can do about it, but please share the pain". And the anti-virus writers should be... persuaded... not to send out these virus reports to forged email addresses.
The 1000+ copies per day of the virus are easy enough to filter. The gazillons of different formats of useless "virus notifications" are not.
Ewen
Ah, but the real trick of it is that you lay the 0s down flat, and stand the 1s up inside the holes in the 0s. Then either lay some more 0s down to cover the bits that stick up, or some more 1s on their side in the gaps.
See it's easy if you only know how...
Ewen
There are laptops in this category (give or take the processor speed) from most major laptop manufacturers (ASUS is the only one I recall seeing that didn't have a model in this category, and that may just be a New Zealand thing).
800MHz to 1000MHz is roughly standard for such a laptop new these days, and expect a Mobile Pentium III rather than a desktop one (to extend the battery life). Older laptops like that do come up second hand from time to time, generally with about 600MHz CPUs these days, but you have to watch closely as they generally get snapped up quickly.
Oh, and expect to pay quite a price premium for 4lb or less laptops. My Acer Travelmate 361EVi (about 3.5lbs -- 1.7kg) sold for about 40% more than a similar traditional laptop (around the 6lb sort of weight). But since I carry it around every day it's easily been worth the extra money.
Finally at 4lbs a long lasting battery is about 3 hours. At 5lbs (eg, weight of a 12" iBook) you might be able to get 5 hours if you sacrifice a bunch of other things to get battery life. To get much longer than that you should expect a lot more weight -- 6 lbs or 7lbs at least -- as it generally involves two batteries. And batteries are heavy.
Ewen
I guess the secret is out. Linux is concerned about the marketplace for non-Windows OS. It's also concerned about the War, SARS, and global hunger.
Oh, and it'd like to know when you'll be getting back to it with the details of its benefits plan. It wants a good medical plan, with free dental.
Ewen
"One thing that is underrated is getting a dedicated water jug and putting it in the FRIDGE to keep it really cold."
I completely agree with this, having done the same thing (bought a water filteration jug) a couple of years back. Tap water with the not-so-nice tasting things filtered out, and chilled, is very nice. (Unchilled and it's no where near as nice.) It's also easy to maintain: take out of the fridge, pour glass of water, top up water in filter jug, put back in fridge. And change the filter every three months.
When I first bought it I figured at worst it didn't cost too much (NZ$50 (about US$25) plus about NZ$15 (US$8 ish) for the filters every few months), but having used it for a couple of years I wonder why I waited so long.
Still the article was very cool in a geeky "why not?" kind of way.
Ewen
Personally I'd be very happy to see a multi-hour training course required for "walking in public". It could cover:
And plenty more stuff. Advanced courses could teach "trolley usage in supermarkets", "what to do if you meet someone you know who is going the other way" (hint: don't just stop in the middle of the footpath and block traffic in both directions), and plenty more.
You might think this is all common sense. But common sense is surprisingly uncommon.
Ewen
The solution to all this blocking is obvious: advertising in each packet. I can see it now...
This packet brought to you by the letters I and P, and the number 4.
Ewen
In Mozilla you can block or unblock cookies on a per-site basis using Tools->Cookie Manger->Block Cookies from this Site and Tools->Cookie Manger->Unblock Cookies from this Site.
I suspect you could achieve what you want in Mozilla by setting the default policy to blocking cookies, and then visiting the sites where you want to allow cookies and using the Unblock Cookies from this Site option to enable cookies for just those sites.
Those choices are stored persistently in cookperm.txt in the mozilla directory, so you could possibly even edit that file manually providing you carefully followed the format of existing entries.
Ewen
Having ripped 400 or so CDs over the space of about a week without even trying very hard I think your estimates are somewhat off, because:
Sounds to me that you don't need more time, you need better organisation :-)