So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.
As far as I could tell, stonecypher appeared to be using overwhelming, excessive, way-over-the-top sarcasm to make a point. And you still missed it:-).
The point of stonecypher's statement(s) is that while you could write "a massively OO object exchange system in assembly"... or indeed implement any other kind of software development project in an utterly inappropriate programming language... it would be ludicrous to do so.
Implying that all programming languages are equally powerful because they're all Turing equivalent is - well, it's nonsense. Paul Graham explains it much better than I can in his article Beating the Averages. Focus on the section labelled "The Blub Paradox", although the rest of the article is also good.
Essentially, just because two programming languages are Turing equivalent, that doesn't mean anything about how powerful they are. Similarly, just because two human-controllable vehicles both have wheels and travel along the ground doesn't mean you can equate a skateboard to a car.
A good line I've heard a few times about these sort of language non-comparisons is something like "yeah, you can do this in C, but only by writing a Lisp interpreter in C and then writing the rest in Lisp!" Codified (slightly) more formally as Greenspun's Tenth Law/Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Pete.
Re:Streaks of brilliance drowned in genius
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Not a little hyperbolic there, are you?
Actually... no. No, I don't believe I am:).
Martin definitely follows in the "Fantasy Russian Novelist" sub-genre which Robert Jordan adopted so successfully.
Definitely? How would you know? You said yourself that you didn't get beyond chapter 10 of the first book!
If you don't mind a book with scores of characters and near a thousand pages, if skipping between 20 different points of view is fine by you,
Scores of characters? Check. Near a thousand pages? Close enough. 20 different points of view?... well, try eight in the first book, ten in the second and eleven in the third.
Martin is above average, and he's done a good job adapting the Wars of the Roses for a fantasy audience. But that's all it is... a
good job, not a great job.
How would you know? You said yourself that you didn't get beyond chapter 10 of the first book!!:-)
If, however, you believe that brevity is the soul of wit [...]
This is the criticism usually levelled at Robert Jordan (usually less indirectly) and with more than a little justification in that case. RJ's WoT series is quite badly bloated and I'd never pretend otherwise.
ASOIAF, however, simply isn't. GRRM is actually a pretty tight writer - it's just that ASOIAF is a story with a huge scope - it has to be of a decent size, but nothing is there unnecessarily. GRRM said of the ASOIAF project that he was sick of cutting content (presumably worthwhile content:-) to fit the confines of TV shows (he wrote for a couple of television series in the eighties and early nineties) - he wanted to do something with a genuinely huge scale, and a series of novels was the only option that gave him that freedom.
BTW, you really can't compare ASOIAF to Vonnegut or Hammet, for the same reason that you can't compare a fish to a bicycle. They're not in the same ball park, they're not even the same sport. Those guys simply don't approach the scale of what Martin is doing with ASOIAF.
[...] beyond the level of "acceptable", it's all personal taste. And your tastes are not everyone's tastes. Get it?
Actually, no, I don't believe that. I think it's a bit of a cop-out, actually - to imply that there's no real way to compare works of literature, it's all just how it makes you feeeeel (insert gratuitous hand-waving). It's not anywhere near as simple as comparing the length of two pieces of string, but there are reasonable ways to compare two works without taking too much account of unpredicatable variables like "personal taste". Admittedly it's going to be fuzzy, but so is judging figure skating or ballroom dancing or gymnastics - it certainly doesn't mean that it can't be done reasonably accurately. Though of course it helps if you've actually read all of the book(s) you're trying to judge...:-)
No, when you compare ASOIAF with other competitors in the same genre, with somewhere remotely close to the same scope (hint: LOTR only barely qualifies), I don't think you're going to find one that matches ASOIAF, judging on any level that makes sense. Though if you do, I'd sure as hell like to find out about that series:-).
Pete.
Re:Not for the more experienced reader
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Re: Robin Hobb - there's another author I need to hunt down. I've heard a few good things about her.
Re: George being a stage magician - well, yeah, to some extent. I wouldn't describe any of it as crude though (except where appropriate:).
Remember that he did write for TV for ten years or so.
Re: TRW - well, it might have seemed inevitable to you. I sure as hell didn't see it coming. And youknowwho didn't really have a great deal of choice in the matter, a point which I thought was pretty thoroughly hammered home in the buildup.
And given the environment and the cultural/social rules they live with, youknowwho couldn't realistically have foreseen what actually happened.
Re: the "little people" all being mean and nasty - how about (AGoT): Maester Luwin, Jorah Mormont, the Winterfell master-at-arms, the bastard girl at the Eyrie, the top knight guy at the Eyrie, Maester Aemon, Barristan Selmy, Daenerys' maids,
Jeyne Poole, Jory, Arya's "dancing master"... hell, even Septa Mordane (Sansa/Arya's governess)?
There are a lot of decent people about the place, it may just be that the nastier people stand out a bit more...
Thanks for the author/title tips, much appreciated - I've made a note of them. I've read the Thomas Covenant series, but none of the others - and aside from wanting to kick the living crap out of Thomas Covenant every time he spoke, I thought that series reasonably decent:). I'll certainly check out Erikson and Hobb as soon as I can.
Pete.
Re:Streaks of brilliance drowned in genius
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Oh man... you're one of those who missed the forest for the trees, eh?;-)
BTW - note all reading this, if you're not already aware: there is a newsgroup devoted to George R. R. Martin and his works (primarily the Song of Ice and Fire series) at
alt.fan.grrm.
Come join us if you're interested in discussing this series (there is, of course, a hell of a lot to discuss:-).
Anyway, Thag/Jon (hey! another 4-digit slashdotID!:) - as soon as you started on with the "I wanted to find out what happened to the two or three characters I actually cared about, but that meant wading through hundreds of pages of other subplots, most of which I frankly didn't want to read."... I knew your story.
The funny thing is, I can actually understand it, because I felt like that at the end of almost every single chapter of the book. "Oh no - he's leaving this character! I don't want to leave and move somewhere completely different, I want to go on with this story!" However, once I (reluctantly) started the next chapter, I happily sank back into the new POV (point-of-view) storyline... until that chapter ended...:-)
The thing to (try to) remember is that this series is not like so many other fantasy novels and series. There's not just one hero/heroine and his/her hangers-on. There's not just one Big Bad Guy that is irredeemably bad and we don't really know (or care) why. In fact, there isn't even that clear a line between "good" guys and "bad" guys. There aren't any magic amulets or wands... or even magic swords.
And, most importantly - no-one (especially not the "good" guys) is invulnerable, and no-one (especially not the "bad" guys) is guaranteed to die. Of course, there's also the minor detail that there aren't any clear boundaries between good and bad. We get shades of grey - real shades of grey, not the artificial pissweak kind used by Robert Jordan and his ilk. Lies. Ugly, ugly compromises. Deceit. Betrayal. Corruption. And sometimes with the best of intentions...
We had a guy posting on alt.fan.grrm (note: for god's sake DON'T follow that link if you haven't read "A Game Of Thrones", it contains major spoilers for the first book (in fact, probably best to avoid the thread entirely if you haven't read the entire series, Google doesn't handle spoiler space very well *wry grin*)) a little while ago that made a number of similar comments - I can only say to you much the same I (and others on the group) said to him. Don't give it up. You've already missed so much of the sheer depth of the first book, but once you start reading the second (and later, hopefully, the third) you'll probably go straight back to the first and reread it, this time "getting" some of the stuff that you skimmed over on your first reading.
Really, seriously, I'm not kidding. I'm not an idiot (well, not all the time). The other people who have raved and drooled and gibbered about this series aren't idiots either (well, not all of them;-). If you don't read any more then you are doing yourself a terrible wrong - you'll be missing out on what future generations will look back on as the greatest fantasy series of all time.
Go on, suck back your pride and admit to yourself that you might have been wrong... (trust me, it's not that hard, I do it all the time *grin*). Go acquire yourself a copy of "A Clash of Kings" and find yourself a quiet place you can be undisturbed for a few hours and start realising that yes, ther
Re:Not for the more experienced reader
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Wow. Aanallein, I'm almost tempted to label you a shameless
troll, but that would be uncouth of me.:)
Although Martin writes very decently, and I love the history of his
world, A Song of Ice and Fire does have a few major flaws.
Major flaws? Really? Okay, lay 'em down...
The main one of these is that Martin writes purely for effect. When
the shock-effect of something happened is largest, that is when you
know beyond a doubt that it will happen.
That sentence doesn't actually make sense, but I'll take a stab at it
and presume you meant "stuff always happens when the shock-effect (of
that stuff) will be felt the most by the reader."
Well... I mean... of course the author is going to try to
write stuff that has a strong emotional effect on the reader. But if
you're trying to imply that you could predict every event
that happened in the book simply by thinking "what would shock me most
at this point?"... then I can only say that you're deluding yourself:). And I don't think he abuses the shock effect by overuse
(which you also seem to be implying), but I'll admit that that's more
of a personal judgement thing.
Besides which, there are a lot of cases where I can think of things
that would have shocked me quite a bit more than what actually
did happen.
Actually, I don't think I do understand whatever it was you were
trying to say. My guessed interpretation (of your words) seems
inherently nonsensical.
No matter how stupid his characters will have to act because of it.
Well, you do sound like an opinionated chap. How about you pop over
and join us on alt.fan.grrm
and we can discuss it:-)... with a somewhat reduced risk of spoiling
the experience for those on slashdot who haven't read the books. I'd
certainly like to hear just one example where you think a
character behaves stupidly for no reason other than to provide a
"shock effect".
And no, you can't just point to an example of a character acting
stupidly and say "there's no other reason for that character to act this
stupidly." There's always a reason.:)
For people who haven't read all that much fantasy (yes, generalizing,
I know there are exceptions), a lot of this comes as complete
surprises, and he seems to do a lot of things that are completely
innovative;
It's not so much that he does innovative stuff - it's that he does it
so goddamn well - he simply raises the standard several
notches and makes all the usual fantasy tripe seem even worse in
comparison.
I mean, I never really thought anything much of the more cringable
fantasy works out there like the Dragonlance series *spit*, but I
could usually cruise through them with my brain mostly switched off
and tune out for an hour or so. But post-GRRM, I can't even stand to
read them at all! I borrowed the first book of the Janny Wurts
"Alliance of Light" series from the library a few days ago - but I
just couldn't put up with the atrocious writing for more than a few
pages. Argh.
[... ] but people who've read fantasy beyond
Tolkien/Eddings/Jordan/Goodkind(*shudders*)/Weis, etc and have instead
explored fantasy from the late 70s and early 80s will recognize a lot
of what's happening - and see that it's not all that special.
Want to back up your comment by naming a few specific authors and/or a
few specific works of said authors? Quite seriously, I really would
like to know.
I've encountered a couple of fantasy/scifi authors that come
close to GRRM's stuff (eg. Dan Simmons), but none better - and certainly none
s
I would be shocked if anyone tried to claim that the software ESR has written is even comparable in importance to the software RMS has written.
Then prepare to be shocked:). This puzzles me a bit - why is it that you (and quite a few others) seem to think that fetchmail is the only piece of software ESR has written?
I mean, it doesn't take that much effort to have a look at
his software list, and his
projects list. Note the "past projects" - especially "I was heavily involved in the GNU Emacs 19 development (in fact, I was the primary Emacs-lisp library person for about two years during 1991-1993)." The software page also has this quote: "According to RMS's credit list, I appear to have more Emacs Lisp code in the standard Emacs distribution than anyone else but him."
He was also a primary developer on
ncurses, and nethack... he's contributed to python... he's
contributed quite a bit to the GNU/FSF project in general. Note: "I was one of the original GNU contributors back in 1982-83, and I've been at it ever since." And fetchmail
and CML2
are by no means insignificant.
Fetchmail vs. the entire GNU collection [snip]; it's clear which is more important.
Did you seriously think that RMS wrote all of the GNU software himself???? The two most important projects that I believe RMS originated were GCC and of course
Emacs (and probably GLibc and the GDB).
But a hell of a lot of people have contributed to those (including ESR) - and I don't think RMS has done anything significant on most of them for a while.
I know it's nice and easy to give one high-profile developer all the credit for projects they originated... but that's just not the case here.
RMS is an uber-hacker and has worked on a hell of a lot of great stuff - but so has ESR. I think the main distinction between the two is that while RMS originated more major software projects than ESR, Raymond's probably contributed to more.
I saw ESR speak a few years ago. [...] He was an absolute dickhead. I asked him simply why he didn't include computer security experts in his definition of hacker and he went off on me for 20 minutes. [...]
Well... your incident description doesn't really have much detail. It'd be fairly harsh for anyone to judge ESR negatively based just on that. I
strongly suspect that his version of events would likely be very different (if indeed he remembered it at all;-)). I mean, seriously, was it really twenty minutes that he "went off" on you? Or did it just feel like that?:)
I know that it's pretty easy to misunderstand people sometimes, though I would be surprised if an experienced public speaker like Raymond could have got pissed enough to rant at a single questioner - at a public meeting, even a small one - for that long. It sounds a bit strange.
Was there anything in your question (or the tone of your question) that might have led him to believe you were hanging shit on him?
BTW, just to clarify - I'm not trying to say you've completely made this story up. I'm just saying that I wouldn't want to accept your perspective on the event completely without qualification.
And of course, even if your first question to him could have been percieved as rude in some way, that wouldn't excuse him from ranting at you... someone of his experience should know how to dismiss an apparent heckler with a smile and a few witty remarks.
He is also the most self-centered geek I've encountered.
All I can say here is that you must not have encountered that many geeks then. And I can't even bring myself to put a smiley at the end of that last sentence.
I can remember vividly a few years ago that he published "10 Sex Tips for Geeks" on Valentines day. If you have ever layed eyes on the man, you know that he is the last person you would ever want to be accepting sex tips from.
Erm... flash of the bleeding obvious here... I don't think you should judge the quality of his "sex tips" by how he looks. Although, if anything, the tips of an ugly man who is successful with women should be taken much more seriously than a good-looking man with a similar success rate.
Not that ESR is particularly ugly by any reasonable person's standards, so your slur at his looks sounds rather like a cheap shot at someone you don't like.
If we want this open source movement to take off,
[...]
Um... seriously, how much further do you think the open-source movement needs to go before you consider it's "taken off"? Personally, I think it's going along pretty nicely.
Don't even get me started on how outrageous the whole bazaar and geek-gift culture are.
If you've written up a decent analysis/critique of the concepts raised in CatB, etc., I'd be interested in reading them. Or if you can point to one of the other critiques available online that summarises your views, that'd be good. I find this sort of stuff interesting:).
Okay, this is pretty bizarre - the second paragraph in the article:
"We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients.
Okay... I did a Google on "Jerry Jelusich" (note quoting) and it returns only one result. However, when looking at the (strangely small) PDF document the Google link points to, the twoword "Jerry Jelusich" doesn't appear at all. Looking at Google's PDF-to-HTML conversion results, however:
Google search on Jerry Jelusich result, gives the text
"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: jerry jelusich" at the top.
So if the quoted text only appears in links pointing to this PDF... and yet the PDF
is the only result for this quoted text...
argh, I think my brain is broken *grin*.
On the other hand, googling for "Franna Hathaway", (the other person quoted in the news story) gives heaps of Google results, most of which seem relevant.
Anyway, it's a strange story already, I just thought that some might find this sort of odd Googleresult to be interesting.;-)
Pete.
PS. It's not a valid Googlewhack
if the twoword is quoted, apparently. Oh well.
It's probably a bit late for those who were reading the comments initially, but you would be advised to stay well away from SpamArrest. They're spammers.:)
(and no, that smiley is just to indicate irony - I'm absolutely serious about SpamArrest being spammers)
I'm likewise very happy with my Happy Hacking (Lite) keyboards (yes, I have two - the original beige and the newer black one with the little arrow keys, which I'm typing on now). These keyboards rock, seriously. If you use a vi-type or and emacs-type editor, or even if you just get pissed off with the "control" and "escape" keys being way off in the distance somewhere - and the useless "capslock" key taking up valuable space - you should try a HHK. See
the main PFUCA store, although if you search around on their "Resellers" page, you'll probably be able to find a reseller that might be more convenient for you.
Man, I would so love to get a laptop with a HHK layout. Ahhhhh.:)
But with regard to your comment (MikeFM) about key order not doing anything, you might find this particular article interesting - I think there was a Slashdot story on this a while back:
It's essentially about an experiment to see if using genetic algorithms (with a computer) could help to "evolve" a more effective/efficient keyboard layout than Dvorak. The most interesting bit (to me at least) was how the guy adjusted his scoring rules. Note this quote in particular (just after he'd tried the first run and was testing the first "winning" keyboard layout):
The next step was to actually try using the layout. I spent a couple days with it, and learned that my layout evaluation function was just too smart for its own good. Too many words required complicated patterns using the fingers of the right hand. The word bottom convinced me that Dvorak was on to something when he designed a keyboard that maximized alternation between the hands.
(The insight is that hand alternation increases parallelism. When the fingers of one hand are hitting keys, the fingers on the other are getting into position atop the next keys. This should have been obvious, but it wasn't until I started the third experiment and saw some empirical timing data that I realized how much faster things are with high rates of hand alternation.)
Being a two-fingered typist yourself, you may simply not realise how important these factors are for a ten-fingered typist (BTW - no offense meant, but there's no way in hell I'd believe anyone could do even close to 100wpm with only two fingers. Try using a typing tester program of some kind and see just how far off you are;-)).
I think the only people that would find an "alphabetical" keyboard layout helpful would be "hunt-and-peck" typists (ie. they have to stop and look for every key, for every keystroke) - and even they might not find it that helpful.
Re: the Twiddler - I presume you're referring to this - http://www.handykey.com/?
Looks interesting... I'd love to try one of those sometime and see how usable they are. But I agree, the price is a little off-putting at the moment.:)
eadint, I have to agree with the other guy responding to your post who mentioned your atrocious grammar and spelling. Okay, I know this is Slashdot, but goddamn... you can spell "strategically", but you can't spell "easier"??:-)
Anyway, I'm puzzled that you didn't like the NetBSD install - and as a couple of others said regarding their experiences with the NetBSD install, I found it the cleanest and simplest OS install process I've ever used. Just beautiful. Now if you were talking about OpenBSD, I could maybe understand you - I don't particularly like their install process, especially the disk partitioning part (though once you have it installed it's great).
And as regards your comment... "it took me three weeks to figure out how to get apache, perl, sendmail and gcc working. and that was just figuring out how to install them." - well, erm, two of those four (gcc and sendmail) should be included in the default install! The others - well, you could certainly install them from source (which works fine), or you could read the documentation and find out how the NetBSD packaging system works. It's not really that hard - or at least it shouldn't be.
Which version of NetBSD (for which architecture) did you try using? Note that for the question you asked (ie. "has it improved since I used it before?") this sort of information is kind of critical, so it's a little suspicious that you didn't include it originally. And I now realise that you didn't specifically say you were using NetBSD - just "a bsd", so you should probably clarify that point as well.
If you don't respond, it's probably fairly safe to consider you a fairly lame troll. Though perhaps slightly more subtle than the good 'ol "BSD is dying" guy. *grin*
realdpk: I'm sure you'll be happy to provide at least three specific SPEWS records that are more than six months out of date, and explain exactly how you know that they're more than six months out of date.
Because otherwise people might think that you were just pulling unsupportable assertions out of your arse, and I'm sure you wouldn't want that, would you?
MrDingusMcGee responded (regarding my question "how long did it take you to terminate them?"):
They were called the day complaints came in and terminated at the end of the next day.
Okay, to give you fair credit, that does sound like you responded pretty quickly.
Our entire class C was simply seen as part of their growing network.
Well, you're listed as one of the ISPs that provided support (hosting and email and DNS, in your case). You can see from the listing that Cobra Networks first bounced the spammer through five different IP addresses. Then for some reason hotticker.com moved to Netsville (strange, as the other sites like stockrumors.com and streamingquotes.tv are still up at Cobra) after the SPEWS blocklist was increased to cover part of Cobra's parent ISP, 9NetAve.
Now this is the tricky bit - you see, once a domain name (eg. hotticker.com) is known to be associated with a spammer, it generally becomes list-on-sight. You actually did get rid of them fairly quickly once you realised what they were, but - and I know this may sound cold and uncaring *wry grin* - you should have realised what they were before you signed them up. I suspect you didn't do any research on them before signing them up - I gather from your comments below that you now realise this might be a good idea in future.:-)
If it'd been a case where you signed up a client that was not a known spammer and then that client started spamming, you'd have the situation shown in the earlier part of S716 - complaints sent to your abuse contact and possibly single IPs listed. And with a relatively quick response as you demonstrated in the case of hotticker.com, you probably wouldn't get listed at all.
But the "rules" (such as I understand them) are different for known spammers.
The issue comes down to more than "Is SPEWS bad?". It is a matter of legitimate emails being blocked by uninformed sysadmins who don't realize they are NOT solving their spam problem,
It's interesting that you feel compelled to characterise all sysadmins using the SPEWS list as "uninformed".
I certainly think that every network admin that uses the SPEWS list as a basis for rejecting mail should understand what they're dealing with, and the policy behind SPEWS. There are other blocklists with different policies that may have lower legit-mail lossage.
I think one of the major misunderstandings behind SPEWS is the belief that it's primarily intended to "block" spam email. That's certainly a major goal, but I believe the primary goal is to apply pressure to spam-supporting ISPs. When ISPs stop hosting spammers, everybody benefits (including those that don't use blocklists or filters to defend themselves from spam). Conversely, if an ISP continues to host spammers and all of their non-spammer clients leave, then everyone can happily reject email from them and everybody benefits.
Read up a bit about shunning as a social technique for dealing with troublemakers in a community.... in fact, this article is pretty good.
Having your servers on as level 1 for months and your class C as a level 2 for 6 months is absolutely absurd for ONE case of ONE mailing of spam.
*raised eyebrow* How many millions of messages were sent out in that "one" spam run? How many days in total were you hosting hotticker.com? Note that even if they hadn't made a spam run from your mailserver, you're still considered responsible for hosting the website.
How long have you been listed on SPEWS as level 1? How long ago did you pull the metaphorical plug on hotticker.com and kick them off your netspace? Seriously, if you really have been listed on level 1 for "months" despite booting the spammer within two days of the first abuse report, I think you've got a pretty damn good case to ask SPEWS to at least downgrade and possibly unlist you completely. Post to news.admin.net-abuse.email and ask. Politely, remember - you may disapprove of SPEWS, but being belligerent and rude will get you absolutely nowhere fast.:)
Anyway, SPEWS does not recommend blocking on level 2. If you get mail rejected from a server that's blocking on your level 2 record, contact them and ask them to either change their policy or whitelist you. With regard to your mailserver being in the level1 list, the obvious solution would be to move it to one of your spare level2-listed IP addresses. Or just wait until SPEWS downgrades them to level 2, which shouldn't take all that long (theoretically). A polite message to nanae explaining the situation might speed up the downgrading.
Yes we should have looked into their history, and we now do with new clients.
From the perspective of someone who uses email, I'm glad. You're now part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Mistakes are made, you learn from them, and SPEWS is there to rape you in the ass and [...]
Sigh. I just wish that if you're going to badmouth SPEWS and/or similar blocklists, try not to grossly misrepresent reality. If you think SPEWS is a poor solution to the "problem", you're certainly free to not use it. But I'd suggest you (along with far too many others) may have subtly misunderstood what problem they're actually trying to solve (see above re: shunning).
They block IPs based soley on the fact your upstream provider hosts or has hosted in the past, someone the SPEWS "admins" (and I use that term losely) believe to be spammers.
MrDingusMcGee responded:
As a sysadmin for an ISP I can assure you that this is absolutely the case. There is no human contact at Spews, the entire system is automated.
Of course SPEWS are going to automate what processes they can. But they can't automate everything. Most especially not the bit where they read posts to nanae and sometimes act on them.
A hosting provider should be responsible for the domains they host. But there is rarely anything a provider can do to pre-emptively stop a spammer.
There are certainly some things you can do. Ask potential clients about their 'net history before signing them up. Ask some minimally intrusive questions about the nature of their business. Ask why they left their last provider. Do a search for their domain name on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings and/or nana.email.
Do a search for their company name - and their company director's names - on ROKSO.
Do a search on SPEWS or the Spamhaus Block List or Spamcop for whatever IPs they might previously have used.
Very few spammers will stand up under even minimal investigation like that, which takes only a few minutes. This is basic stuff which any hosting provider should conscientiously do before taking on new clients, in the interests of their current clients!
Just recently, my company signed up a new company for Co-Location.
You signed up hotticker.com.
Another thing I forgot to mention above. You should really have a look at the domain name your client-to-be uses. You can often spot a disreputable business just from the domain name.
Within a week, this company sent out a huge spam mailing. The moment we saw spam complaints come in we called the company and demanded proof that their mailing list consisted solely of opt-in addresses. They had no proof and their contract was immediately terminated for violating our Acceptable Use Policy.
Immediately terminated???
How long exactly did it take from the time the first complaints hit your mailserver for you to realise hotticker was responsible, call and ask them for evidence about their mailing list, wait for their response, deem their response nowhere near good enough and then pull the plug? If it was less than 24 hours then I might agree that having your/24 listed is perhaps a tad harsh. But I suspect it was in fact much longer than that, perhaps as much as a week or more.
I notice on your SPEWS record that your/24 has been downgraded to level 2. Your three webhosting machines (io, colossus and jupiter) are still at level 1, but any mail they want to send can be smarthosted through your level-2'd mailserver.
Apparently this company had, in the past, under a different name, been blacklisted as a spammer. We were now added to the list of their hosting providers and could not, despite our best effort, contact a single human at SPEWS to explain our situation.
Erm... just what would you have said? "Please take us off your damn blocklist, we've terminated the spammer we signed up and we promise to be more careful in future." SPEWS' generic response would be "Once we can tell you're not providing any more services to $SPAMMER - which may take a little time - we'll downgrade you to level 2, where you'll stay for six months or so, then you'll be removed entirely.
And yes, you bloody well should be more careful."
This is covered in the SPEWS FAQ.
I ask you, how does that make the internet a better place?
Hopefully it teaches ISPs like yours to be more careful about who it signs up as clients. I imagine that in a year or two it will be considered common practise for ISPs to go through a similar process with new clients as landlords do with potential new tenants. A bad client can easily do as much damage to an ISP as a bad tenant can to a landlord.
The company I work for was affected by the infinite wisdom of Spews. Apparently a spammer once sent email from an address that happens to share the same leading 16-bits of address space with us.
So you were paying money (whether directly or indirectly) to the same ISP that was hosting a spammer. And that ISP had ignored abuse reports about that spammer for a significant period of time.
Because of their escalation procedures, a full 8192 sites have been placed on their "spam" list because of a single incident.
Ah yes, the "escalation" procedures... those would be the things they do when a spam-supporting ISP ignores abuse reports and refuses to terminate spamming clients.
Generally SPEWS will list a single IP address first. Then, over a period of time, as long as the spammer stays up at that ISP, they'll gradually increase the range of IPs listed. If in your case they listed a/16 - well, some ISPs can be very hard of hearing. Or perhaps I should say that some ISPs are very reluctant to terminate their lucrative spamming clients, and so will refuse to terminate them until said clients are costing them more than they're making (eg. by having to deal with complaints from non-spammer customers and/or having non-spammer customers leave).
I don't think [...]
Obviously.
[...] Spews provides any useful service.
Gee, this is easy. Don't use them then. *roll of eyes*
I think what you meant to say is "SPEWS accurately listed (part of?) my ISP for spam support. I refuse to accept any responsibility for my part in paying money to keep that rogue ISP in business, and I also refuse to complain to my ISP
about their spam support. I, in fact, do not acknowledge any problem other than me (or my company) having some email rejected, and I'm quite happy to blame SPEWS for this problem rather than correctly assign blame a little closer to home."
Substitute "the company I work for" for "I" where appropriate in the above.
They are a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Now I think you might have clued into the reason why they're anonymous and not directly contactable. Idiot spammers all over the USA and the world (and, embarassingly, one in my home city) will (ab)use the law as a tool to harass antispammers. Even though such a lawsuit would have little or no legal merit, they can be used as a very effective harassment tool, taking a disproportionate amount of time and money to defend.
SPEWS avoids this problem entirely by remaining anonymous. They don't need to be identified - the administrators who use SPEWS judge them by the quality of the information they provide.
IANAL, [...]
Obviously.
[...] but I'd be looking at Spews with $$'s in my eyes.
See above re: anonymity. It's a little tricky to file a frivolous (SLAPP) lawsuit when you don't know who you're trying to harass.
I am writing in regard to the issues related to the Phoenix Web Browser as discussed in this Slashdot.org story [... ]
I hope you didn't really embarass yourself by sending that to the phoenix.com people. If so, all you've done is stand up and wave a big metaphorical placard saying "I have absolutely no understanding of this issue, but I'm going to complain anyway!"
Of course, you're not by any means the only one... *sigh*.
It doesn't matter that the word "phoenix" is used in other ways, by other organisations, for other purposes. It doesn't matter that there is a city called Phoenix (any more than that there's an Indonesian island called Java as well as the Sun-developed programming language Java), nor that there is a mythological bird called the Phoenix.
You see, the mythological bird Phoenix does not produce and sell a web browser (or a computer BIOS). The US city Phoenix does not produce and sell a web browser (or a computer BIOS).
One of those web-browser-producing organisations has a trademark on the use of the word "Phoenix" in the area of that product. The other one does not.
I'm sure you can connect the remaining dots.
You might want to consider sending a follow-up email to phoenix.com apologising for your mistake and withdrawing your comments. Well, that would be the polite thing to do, in any case *wry grin*[0].
Pete.
[0]...and you're a Slashdot poster, so the odds of you backing down and admitting you're wrong (even in the face of overwhelming evidence), let alone apologising, are pretty small;-).
It doesn't matter that the name of Phoenix's web browser product is not just the word "Phoenix". It could be anything. For a valid trademark defense, the only thing necessary is for the allegedly violating name to be "confusingly similar" to the trademarked use of the name.
Let me just ask you this: if I asked you "Have you ever used the Phoenix web browser?", what would you think I was referring to?
If you (or anyone) thought it possible that I might have been referring to the open-source XUL-based web browser built on the Mozilla project (and, quite bluntly, every person reading this Slashdot article would have), then that's it. Game over. Confusingly similar - that's all they need.
Phoenix (the company) would seem to have a perfectly justifiable position. And please remember, they don't actually have much of a choice about this - if they don't defend themselves against trademark violations, they could lose their trademark (or at least have it so weakened that it's effectively useless). They've done the appropriate thing in explaining the position to the browser-formerly-known-as-Phoenix developers, and those developers appear to have understood the issue and accepted that they need to change the name. Thankfully:). I think everyone would lose if this thing went through an expensive/slow/painful legal resolution.
Pete.
Re:One solution for spam in your inbox
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just briefly, anyone intrigued with AntiNorm's suggestion but lacking their own domain (or unable to try it for some other reason), SpamGourmet
offers a very similar service for free.
You sign up as, for example, fred, supply SpamGourmet with your real email address, then whenever you need to give out an email address to anyone you don't trust, give them something like: kazaa.10.fred@spamgourmet.com . SpamGourmet will relay 10 (and only 10) messages sent to that address though to your real address... any more will just get chomped. Maximum of 20 relays.
Very, very cool service. The fact that the basic model is free just rocks. I have no relation to them other than as a happy user.
Pete.
Re:Way to make the internet more useful
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 1
But the point that I take issue with is this; you say I'm 'perfectly free' to move to another ISP if mine's blocked or subscribes to a block list.
Do you realize that in practice it's not usually that simple?
Of course I recognise that it's not necessarily a simple, nor a cheap, exercise. It's almost certainly going to cost something, both in cold hard cash and time (and of course time spent generally translates directly to cold hard cash). And in many cases (though certainly not in all) it's going to cost you more to buy service from a non-spam-supporting ISP, because (while you may not have realised it) your fees at the spam-supporting ISP were effectively subsidised by the extra fees spammer clients paid.
I also recognise that it's generally the not-always-entirely-innocent people caught in a blocklist who grossly overestimate the costs of them changing ISPs. Sometimes they really overdramatise it and make out like they have no choice - when of course they do. You always have a choice, even when you don't want to take it (for whatever reason).
The main thing I object to is those not-always-entirely-innocent people blaming the operator of whatever blocklist they're on, rather than blaming their ISP (ie. confusing the symptoms with the cause). Or perhaps taking some tiny degree of responsibility for their own actions and apportioning at least a little bit of the blame to themselves.
"Why, what did they do wrong?" you might ask. Well, in some cases, they might not have made a reasonable effort to research an ISP before signing up. In some cases, they might have thought "Hey! These guys are really cheap!" without making any effort to work out why. In some cases, they may have known that said ISP was a spam-supporter and simply didn't care. In far too many cases, they may have not made a reasonable effort to understand the situation when they first discovered they were on a blocklist.
And finally (regardless of whether
they understand the situation or not), if they continue to use and fund a spam-supporting ISP even after they've had every opportunity to work out why this is morally wrong, then they qualify as spam-supporters themselves and are no longer even remotely innocent. You make your choices and you live with the results.
On the other hand, installing a package like Spamassassin rids me of far more spam than a blacklist ever could,
Good for you. You keep on using it then. But always remember that you're still paying (albeit probably a trivially small amount (I mean, how much spam do you personally receive? I'm guessing something tiny and inconsequential like a hundred messages a day?)) for the bandwidth, storage space and CPU processing time incurred by that email. Just because you're not seeing it doesn't mean it never existed and never cost you anything.
And most importantly, just because you're not seeing it doesn't mean that others aren't - nor does it mean that others aren't paying the recipient cost of spam, whether they are or aren't seeing it.
Spam has to be stopped at the source, not (haphazardly and unreliably) at the destination.
The best way to achieve this is for all ISPs to act responsibly and simply forbid/prevent spamming. But since we're dealing with imperfect human beings here, there will always be some incompetent (eg. Verio), amoral (eg. Verio) or simply greedy (eg. Verio) ISPs that will not take their responsibilities seriously.
Blocking such rogue providers is a last resort, and it has one of three effects, all good:
Legitimate users complain to the rogue provider and it changes its ways,
Legitimate users leave the rogue provider, usually leading back to 1. or straight on to 3.,
The rogue provider goes out of business,
If the rogue provider somehow stays in business by only hosting spammers, everyone else in the world blocklists them and they are effectively no longer part of the Internet.
How many mailservers do you operate? How many users rely on you not to make decisions that will impact their ability to receive e-mail?
One, and one. I'm not a professional sysadmin now (though I have masqueraded as one in the past). Look at my CV (linked from my website) if you're really interested about my background, though most of it is not directly relevant to my views on spam and spamfighting.
You, and any other people who read this post,
can take that into consideration when evaluating my post(s) if you wish.
Before you write off my opinion merely because I don't agree with you, answer that.
If I wrote off people's opinion merely because they didn't agree with mine, I'd be writing off a hell of a lot of opinions:-). The only references I made to the value of your opinion(s) were:
If you still think Steve Linford has his head up his ass, even after reading up about him and his background, then I think your opinion on him is worthless.
If you were completely unaware of the history and reputation of Verio as a spam-friendly provider, then I think your background knowledge of spam is severely lacking, and thus any opinion you might have about spam in general is not worth much.
Pete.
Re:Way to make the internet more useful
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 1
Blackhole operators like this are just as bad as the spammers themselves; both groups take great pride in having their head firmly shoved up their ass.
I was about to just moderate you down as flamebait, but then noticed your low userid# and thought "nah, buggerit, I'll just respond."
If you still think he "takes great pride in having his head firmly shoved up his ass", then, well, the value of your opinion should be pretty clear.
Blocking all of _Verio_? Thanks for doing your part along with the spammers to make e-mail that much less useful.
It's not making email as a communications medium even slightly less useful to you, unless:
(a) your mailserver uses the SBL (or one of the many other blocklists that list all or part of Verio) - in which case you are perfectly free to move to another one that doesn't, or
(b) your mailserver is in a range listed by the SBL. In which case you are also perfectly free to use another mailserver that isn't.
If it's not affecting you directly, then it's
really none of your business. Except that if
Verio either goes out of business OR gets rid of all its spammers (note: first option much more likely), then the load of spam that you are currently receiving will decrease.
Pete.
PS. Seriously, this has been coming for a loooong time. Verio is, and has been for a while, one of the worst (if not the worst) spam supporting ISPs on the Internet (and if you were completely unaware of this, then your opionion is worth even less than I thought it was). Their management are knowingly hosting spammers, and deliberately refusing to disconnect said spammers. They will never
stop doing this as long as they profit by it.
And they do profit by it, and will continue to do so until most (if not all) of their non-spammer customers leave.
Being shunned by the wider Internet is the only
effective punishment. And it is effective. Don't fool yourself. Verio are not a responsible Internet citizen, and they will continue to be punished for it until they either mend their ways or die.
I'm now a much more mature reader, and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters.
I'll then presume you haven't read the "Song
of Ice and Fire" series
(by George R. R. Martin) yet (if you're
implying that fantasy/SF are always immature:-).
If you haven't, and you like stuff with serious, multidimensional, GREY characters (ie. not
obviously Good(tm) or Evil(tm)), you'll love
this series. There are very, very few writers
I've read that even come close to George's standard. He fucking rules.
See GRRM's homepage (no, I'm not giving
an amazon or BN link, you can find those yourself
- though the reader comments on amazon at least
are worth reading... and the
preview chapter(s) (okay, I will give a link then, dammit:-)).
Our friendly little AC scrawled upon Slashdot with his crayons:
Consulting for several large companies,
...with no names...
Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work
...about which you give not the slightest detail...
using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards
...about which you give not the slightest detail...
which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Gotcha. You'd be able to modify the kernel which you're unable to do with Microsoft's products. Noted.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically,
Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system),
You've been trying very hard so far, but this is the most obvious troll pointer - unless your "company" you must have just not noticed this
and this.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer
...with no name...
Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
The GPL specifically mentions the Linux kernel (only one of thousands of projects licensed under the GPL), does it?
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux
...to meet your "exacting" standards, yes... (sorry, having difficulty keeping the face straight here...:-)
to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Bugger, eh?
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers
...who still don't have names...
advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools
- such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
I've also been told by special voices (that only I can hear) that because the US President's name starts
with "G", the world is doomed to nuclear annihilation sometime next week. This is simply unacceptable to me.
He needs to change his name, and fast.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this
company
Hell, preferably noone inside the company either, I'd hope!
to
ever use,
I mean, you don't want people using your product, do you? Shit, were would be
be if we had that situation? Just imagine what the world would be like if software producers had people
using the software they create...
let alone see the source code, we were now put
in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution.
"...We tried contacting the Good Software Group
to help us out with our difficult position, but they haven't returned any of our phone calls yet."
Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite
the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
Despite the fact that you were unable to
modify the Windows 2000 kernel to meet your exacting standards, as you previously mentioned...
I think
...despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL.
Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be
able to use it.
No doubt it virtually does - in your virtual world - just like it has with
your virtual company and virtual lawyers and virtual clients like the aforementioned virtual investment
firm.
After my experience with Linux,
"...an experience strangely akin to the last twenty minutes of 2001: A
Space Odyssey, if I remember correctly, which I don't..."
I won't be recommending it to any of my
...virtual...
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Whoopee.
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
"THAT WAS A PUNE, OR PLAY ON WORDS, ALBERT. I DON'T KNOW IF YOU NOTICED." "I'm laughing like hell deep down, sir." "HO. HO. HO." -- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather".
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I could tell, stonecypher appeared to be using overwhelming, excessive, way-over-the-top sarcasm to make a point. And you still missed it :-).
The point of stonecypher's statement(s) is that while you could write "a massively OO object exchange system in assembly"... or indeed implement any other kind of software development project in an utterly inappropriate programming language... it would be ludicrous to do so.
Implying that all programming languages are equally powerful because they're all Turing equivalent is - well, it's nonsense. Paul Graham explains it much better than I can in his article Beating the Averages. Focus on the section labelled "The Blub Paradox", although the rest of the article is also good.
Essentially, just because two programming languages are Turing equivalent, that doesn't mean anything about how powerful they are. Similarly, just because two human-controllable vehicles both have wheels and travel along the ground doesn't mean you can equate a skateboard to a car.
A good line I've heard a few times about these sort of language non-comparisons is something like "yeah, you can do this in C, but only by writing a Lisp interpreter in C and then writing the rest in Lisp!" Codified (slightly) more formally as Greenspun's Tenth Law/Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Pete.Actually... no. No, I don't believe I am :).
Definitely? How would you know? You said yourself that you didn't get beyond chapter 10 of the first book!
Scores of characters? Check. Near a thousand pages? Close enough. 20 different points of view?... well, try eight in the first book, ten in the second and eleven in the third.
How would you know? You said yourself that you didn't get beyond chapter 10 of the first book!! :-)
This is the criticism usually levelled at Robert Jordan (usually less indirectly) and with more than a little justification in that case. RJ's WoT series is quite badly bloated and I'd never pretend otherwise.
ASOIAF, however, simply isn't. GRRM is actually a pretty tight writer - it's just that ASOIAF is a story with a huge scope - it has to be of a decent size, but nothing is there unnecessarily. GRRM said of the ASOIAF project that he was sick of cutting content (presumably worthwhile content :-) to fit the confines of TV shows (he wrote for a couple of television series in the eighties and early nineties) - he wanted to do something with a genuinely huge scale, and a series of novels was the only option that gave him that freedom.
BTW, you really can't compare ASOIAF to Vonnegut or Hammet, for the same reason that you can't compare a fish to a bicycle. They're not in the same ball park, they're not even the same sport. Those guys simply don't approach the scale of what Martin is doing with ASOIAF.
Actually, no, I don't believe that. I think it's a bit of a cop-out, actually - to imply that there's no real way to compare works of literature, it's all just how it makes you feeeeel (insert gratuitous hand-waving). It's not anywhere near as simple as comparing the length of two pieces of string, but there are reasonable ways to compare two works without taking too much account of unpredicatable variables like "personal taste". Admittedly it's going to be fuzzy, but so is judging figure skating or ballroom dancing or gymnastics - it certainly doesn't mean that it can't be done reasonably accurately. Though of course it helps if you've actually read all of the book(s) you're trying to judge... :-)
No, when you compare ASOIAF with other competitors in the same genre, with somewhere remotely close to the same scope (hint: LOTR only barely qualifies), I don't think you're going to find one that matches ASOIAF, judging on any level that makes sense. Though if you do, I'd sure as hell like to find out about that series :-).
Pete.Re: Robin Hobb - there's another author I need to hunt down. I've heard a few good things about her.
Re: George being a stage magician - well, yeah, to some extent. I wouldn't describe any of it as crude though (except where appropriate :).
Remember that he did write for TV for ten years or so.
Re: TRW - well, it might have seemed inevitable to you. I sure as hell didn't see it coming. And youknowwho didn't really have a great deal of choice in the matter, a point which I thought was pretty thoroughly hammered home in the buildup. And given the environment and the cultural/social rules they live with, youknowwho couldn't realistically have foreseen what actually happened.
Re: the "little people" all being mean and nasty - how about (AGoT): Maester Luwin, Jorah Mormont, the Winterfell master-at-arms, the bastard girl at the Eyrie, the top knight guy at the Eyrie, Maester Aemon, Barristan Selmy, Daenerys' maids, Jeyne Poole, Jory, Arya's "dancing master"... hell, even Septa Mordane (Sansa/Arya's governess)? There are a lot of decent people about the place, it may just be that the nastier people stand out a bit more...
Thanks for the author/title tips, much appreciated - I've made a note of them. I've read the Thomas Covenant series, but none of the others - and aside from wanting to kick the living crap out of Thomas Covenant every time he spoke, I thought that series reasonably decent :). I'll certainly check out Erikson and Hobb as soon as I can.
Pete.Oh man... you're one of those who missed the forest for the trees, eh? ;-)
BTW - note all reading this, if you're not already aware: there is a newsgroup devoted to George R. R. Martin and his works (primarily the Song of Ice and Fire series) at alt.fan.grrm. Come join us if you're interested in discussing this series (there is, of course, a hell of a lot to discuss :-).
Anyway, Thag/Jon (hey! another 4-digit slashdotID! :) - as soon as you started on with the "I wanted to find out what happened to the two or three characters I actually cared about, but that meant wading through hundreds of pages of other subplots, most of which I frankly didn't want to read." ... I knew your story.
The funny thing is, I can actually understand it, because I felt like that at the end of almost every single chapter of the book. "Oh no - he's leaving this character! I don't want to leave and move somewhere completely different, I want to go on with this story!" However, once I (reluctantly) started the next chapter, I happily sank back into the new POV (point-of-view) storyline... until that chapter ended... :-)
The thing to (try to) remember is that this series is not like so many other fantasy novels and series. There's not just one hero/heroine and his/her hangers-on. There's not just one Big Bad Guy that is irredeemably bad and we don't really know (or care) why. In fact, there isn't even that clear a line between "good" guys and "bad" guys. There aren't any magic amulets or wands... or even magic swords.
And, most importantly - no-one (especially not the "good" guys) is invulnerable, and no-one (especially not the "bad" guys) is guaranteed to die. Of course, there's also the minor detail that there aren't any clear boundaries between good and bad. We get shades of grey - real shades of grey, not the artificial pissweak kind used by Robert Jordan and his ilk. Lies. Ugly, ugly compromises. Deceit. Betrayal. Corruption. And sometimes with the best of intentions...
We had a guy posting on alt.fan.grrm (note: for god's sake DON'T follow that link if you haven't read "A Game Of Thrones", it contains major spoilers for the first book (in fact, probably best to avoid the thread entirely if you haven't read the entire series, Google doesn't handle spoiler space very well *wry grin*)) a little while ago that made a number of similar comments - I can only say to you much the same I (and others on the group) said to him. Don't give it up. You've already missed so much of the sheer depth of the first book, but once you start reading the second (and later, hopefully, the third) you'll probably go straight back to the first and reread it, this time "getting" some of the stuff that you skimmed over on your first reading.
Really, seriously, I'm not kidding. I'm not an idiot (well, not all the time). The other people who have raved and drooled and gibbered about this series aren't idiots either (well, not all of them ;-). If you don't read any more then you are doing yourself a terrible wrong - you'll be missing out on what future generations will look back on as the greatest fantasy series of all time.
Go on, suck back your pride and admit to yourself that you might have been wrong... (trust me, it's not that hard, I do it all the time *grin*). Go acquire yourself a copy of "A Clash of Kings" and find yourself a quiet place you can be undisturbed for a few hours and start realising that yes, ther
Major flaws? Really? Okay, lay 'em down...
That sentence doesn't actually make sense, but I'll take a stab at it and presume you meant "stuff always happens when the shock-effect (of that stuff) will be felt the most by the reader."
Well... I mean... of course the author is going to try to write stuff that has a strong emotional effect on the reader. But if you're trying to imply that you could predict every event that happened in the book simply by thinking "what would shock me most at this point?" ... then I can only say that you're deluding yourself :). And I don't think he abuses the shock effect by overuse
(which you also seem to be implying), but I'll admit that that's more
of a personal judgement thing.
Besides which, there are a lot of cases where I can think of things that would have shocked me quite a bit more than what actually did happen.
Actually, I don't think I do understand whatever it was you were trying to say. My guessed interpretation (of your words) seems inherently nonsensical.
Well, you do sound like an opinionated chap. How about you pop over and join us on alt.fan.grrm and we can discuss it :-)... with a somewhat reduced risk of spoiling
the experience for those on slashdot who haven't read the books. I'd
certainly like to hear just one example where you think a
character behaves stupidly for no reason other than to provide a
"shock effect".
And no, you can't just point to an example of a character acting stupidly and say "there's no other reason for that character to act this stupidly." There's always a reason. :)
It's not so much that he does innovative stuff - it's that he does it so goddamn well - he simply raises the standard several notches and makes all the usual fantasy tripe seem even worse in comparison.
I mean, I never really thought anything much of the more cringable fantasy works out there like the Dragonlance series *spit*, but I could usually cruise through them with my brain mostly switched off and tune out for an hour or so. But post-GRRM, I can't even stand to read them at all! I borrowed the first book of the Janny Wurts "Alliance of Light" series from the library a few days ago - but I just couldn't put up with the atrocious writing for more than a few pages. Argh.
Want to back up your comment by naming a few specific authors and/or a few specific works of said authors? Quite seriously, I really would like to know.
I've encountered a couple of fantasy/scifi authors that come close to GRRM's stuff (eg. Dan Simmons), but none better - and certainly none s
Then prepare to be shocked :). This puzzles me a bit - why is it that you (and quite a few others) seem to think that fetchmail is the only piece of software ESR has written?
I mean, it doesn't take that much effort to have a look at
his software list, and his
projects list. Note the "past projects" - especially "I was heavily involved in the GNU Emacs 19 development (in fact, I was the primary Emacs-lisp library person for about two years during 1991-1993)." The software page also has this quote: "According to RMS's credit list, I appear to have more Emacs Lisp code in the standard Emacs distribution than anyone else but him."
He was also a primary developer on ncurses, and nethack... he's contributed to python... he's contributed quite a bit to the GNU/FSF project in general. Note: "I was one of the original GNU contributors back in 1982-83, and I've been at it ever since." And fetchmail and CML2 are by no means insignificant.
Did you seriously think that RMS wrote all of the GNU software himself???? The two most important projects that I believe RMS originated were GCC and of course Emacs (and probably GLibc and the GDB). But a hell of a lot of people have contributed to those (including ESR) - and I don't think RMS has done anything significant on most of them for a while.
I know it's nice and easy to give one high-profile developer all the credit for projects they originated... but that's just not the case here. RMS is an uber-hacker and has worked on a hell of a lot of great stuff - but so has ESR. I think the main distinction between the two is that while RMS originated more major software projects than ESR, Raymond's probably contributed to more.
Pete.
Well... your incident description doesn't really have much detail. It'd be fairly harsh for anyone to judge ESR negatively based just on that. I strongly suspect that his version of events would likely be very different (if indeed he remembered it at all ;-)). I mean, seriously, was it really twenty minutes that he "went off" on you? Or did it just feel like that? :)
I know that it's pretty easy to misunderstand people sometimes, though I would be surprised if an experienced public speaker like Raymond could have got pissed enough to rant at a single questioner - at a public meeting, even a small one - for that long. It sounds a bit strange. Was there anything in your question (or the tone of your question) that might have led him to believe you were hanging shit on him?
BTW, just to clarify - I'm not trying to say you've completely made this story up. I'm just saying that I wouldn't want to accept your perspective on the event completely without qualification.
And of course, even if your first question to him could have been percieved as rude in some way, that wouldn't excuse him from ranting at you... someone of his experience should know how to dismiss an apparent heckler with a smile and a few witty remarks.
All I can say here is that you must not have encountered that many geeks then. And I can't even bring myself to put a smiley at the end of that last sentence.
Erm... flash of the bleeding obvious here... I don't think you should judge the quality of his "sex tips" by how he looks. Although, if anything, the tips of an ugly man who is successful with women should be taken much more seriously than a good-looking man with a similar success rate.
Not that ESR is particularly ugly by any reasonable person's standards, so your slur at his looks sounds rather like a cheap shot at someone you don't like.
Um... seriously, how much further do you think the open-source movement needs to go before you consider it's "taken off"? Personally, I think it's going along pretty nicely.
If you've written up a decent analysis/critique of the concepts raised in CatB, etc., I'd be interested in reading them. Or if you can point to one of the other critiques available online that summarises your views, that'd be good. I find this sort of stuff interesting :).
Pete.
Okay... I did a Google on "Jerry Jelusich" (note quoting) and it returns only one result. However, when looking at the (strangely small) PDF document the Google link points to, the twoword "Jerry Jelusich" doesn't appear at all. Looking at Google's PDF-to-HTML conversion results, however: Google search on Jerry Jelusich result, gives the text "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: jerry jelusich" at the top.
So if the quoted text only appears in links pointing to this PDF... and yet the PDF is the only result for this quoted text... argh, I think my brain is broken *grin*.
On the other hand, googling for "Franna Hathaway", (the other person quoted in the news story) gives heaps of Google results, most of which seem relevant.
Anyway, it's a strange story already, I just thought that some might find this sort of odd Googleresult to be interesting. ;-)
Pete.
PS. It's not a valid Googlewhack if the twoword is quoted, apparently. Oh well.
It's probably a bit late for those who were reading the comments initially, but you would be advised to stay well away from SpamArrest. They're spammers. :)
(and no, that smiley is just to indicate irony - I'm absolutely serious about SpamArrest being spammers)
See
Pete.
Man, I would so love to get a laptop with a HHK layout. Ahhhhh. :)
But with regard to your comment (MikeFM) about key order not doing anything, you might find this particular article interesting - I think there was a Slashdot story on this a while back:
http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html
It's essentially about an experiment to see if using genetic algorithms (with a computer) could help to "evolve" a more effective/efficient keyboard layout than Dvorak. The most interesting bit (to me at least) was how the guy adjusted his scoring rules. Note this quote in particular (just after he'd tried the first run and was testing the first "winning" keyboard layout):
Being a two-fingered typist yourself, you may simply not realise how important these factors are for a ten-fingered typist (BTW - no offense meant, but there's no way in hell I'd believe anyone could do even close to 100wpm with only two fingers. Try using a typing tester program of some kind and see just how far off you are ;-)).
I think the only people that would find an "alphabetical" keyboard layout helpful would be "hunt-and-peck" typists (ie. they have to stop and look for every key, for every keystroke) - and even they might not find it that helpful.
Re: the Twiddler - I presume you're referring to this - http://www.handykey.com/? Looks interesting... I'd love to try one of those sometime and see how usable they are. But I agree, the price is a little off-putting at the moment. :)
Pete.
Anyway, I'm puzzled that you didn't like the NetBSD install - and as a couple of others said regarding their experiences with the NetBSD install, I found it the cleanest and simplest OS install process I've ever used. Just beautiful. Now if you were talking about OpenBSD, I could maybe understand you - I don't particularly like their install process, especially the disk partitioning part (though once you have it installed it's great).
And as regards your comment... "it took me three weeks to figure out how to get apache, perl, sendmail and gcc working. and that was just figuring out how to install them." - well, erm, two of those four (gcc and sendmail) should be included in the default install! The others - well, you could certainly install them from source (which works fine), or you could read the documentation and find out how the NetBSD packaging system works. It's not really that hard - or at least it shouldn't be.
Which version of NetBSD (for which architecture) did you try using? Note that for the question you asked (ie. "has it improved since I used it before?") this sort of information is kind of critical, so it's a little suspicious that you didn't include it originally. And I now realise that you didn't specifically say you were using NetBSD - just "a bsd", so you should probably clarify that point as well.
If you don't respond, it's probably fairly safe to consider you a fairly lame troll. Though perhaps slightly more subtle than the good 'ol "BSD is dying" guy. *grin*
Pete.
Because otherwise people might think that you were just pulling unsupportable assertions out of your arse, and I'm sure you wouldn't want that, would you?
Pete.
Okay, to give you fair credit, that does sound like you responded pretty quickly.
Well, you're listed as one of the ISPs that provided support (hosting and email and DNS, in your case). You can see from the listing that Cobra Networks first bounced the spammer through five different IP addresses. Then for some reason hotticker.com moved to Netsville (strange, as the other sites like stockrumors.com and streamingquotes.tv are still up at Cobra) after the SPEWS blocklist was increased to cover part of Cobra's parent ISP, 9NetAve.
Now this is the tricky bit - you see, once a domain name (eg. hotticker.com) is known to be associated with a spammer, it generally becomes list-on-sight. You actually did get rid of them fairly quickly once you realised what they were, but - and I know this may sound cold and uncaring *wry grin* - you should have realised what they were before you signed them up. I suspect you didn't do any research on them before signing them up - I gather from your comments below that you now realise this might be a good idea in future. :-)
If it'd been a case where you signed up a client that was not a known spammer and then that client started spamming, you'd have the situation shown in the earlier part of S716 - complaints sent to your abuse contact and possibly single IPs listed. And with a relatively quick response as you demonstrated in the case of hotticker.com, you probably wouldn't get listed at all.
But the "rules" (such as I understand them) are different for known spammers.
It's interesting that you feel compelled to characterise all sysadmins using the SPEWS list as "uninformed".
I certainly think that every network admin that uses the SPEWS list as a basis for rejecting mail should understand what they're dealing with, and the policy behind SPEWS. There are other blocklists with different policies that may have lower legit-mail lossage.
I think one of the major misunderstandings behind SPEWS is the belief that it's primarily intended to "block" spam email. That's certainly a major goal, but I believe the primary goal is to apply pressure to spam-supporting ISPs. When ISPs stop hosting spammers, everybody benefits (including those that don't use blocklists or filters to defend themselves from spam). Conversely, if an ISP continues to host spammers and all of their non-spammer clients leave, then everyone can happily reject email from them and everybody benefits.
Read up a bit about shunning as a social technique for dealing with troublemakers in a community.... in fact, this article is pretty good.
*raised eyebrow* How many millions of messages were sent out in that "one" spam run? How many days in total were you hosting hotticker.com? Note that even if they hadn't made a spam run from your mailserver, you're still considered responsible for hosting the website.
How long have you been listed on SPEWS as level 1? How long ago did you pull the metaphorical plug on hotticker.com and kick them off your netspace? Seriously, if you really have been listed on level 1 for "months" despite booting the spammer within two days of the first abuse report, I think you've got a pretty damn good case to ask SPEWS to at least downgrade and possibly unlist you completely. Post to news.admin.net-abuse.email and ask. Politely, remember - you may disapprove of SPEWS, but being belligerent and rude will get you absolutely nowhere fast. :)
Anyway, SPEWS does not recommend blocking on level 2. If you get mail rejected from a server that's blocking on your level 2 record, contact them and ask them to either change their policy or whitelist you. With regard to your mailserver being in the level1 list, the obvious solution would be to move it to one of your spare level2-listed IP addresses. Or just wait until SPEWS downgrades them to level 2, which shouldn't take all that long (theoretically). A polite message to nanae explaining the situation might speed up the downgrading.
From the perspective of someone who uses email, I'm glad. You're now part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Sigh. I just wish that if you're going to badmouth SPEWS and/or similar blocklists, try not to grossly misrepresent reality. If you think SPEWS is a poor solution to the "problem", you're certainly free to not use it. But I'd suggest you (along with far too many others) may have subtly misunderstood what problem they're actually trying to solve (see above re: shunning).
Pete.
MrDingusMcGee responded:
This is simply false. Of course there are humans behind SPEWS. Do you seriously think that the SPEWS record (S716) your ISP (Netsville) is covered by was written by a bot?
Of course SPEWS are going to automate what processes they can. But they can't automate everything. Most especially not the bit where they read posts to nanae and sometimes act on them.
There are certainly some things you can do. Ask potential clients about their 'net history before signing them up. Ask some minimally intrusive questions about the nature of their business. Ask why they left their last provider. Do a search for their domain name on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings and/or nana.email. Do a search for their company name - and their company director's names - on ROKSO. Do a search on SPEWS or the Spamhaus Block List or Spamcop for whatever IPs they might previously have used.
Very few spammers will stand up under even minimal investigation like that, which takes only a few minutes. This is basic stuff which any hosting provider should conscientiously do before taking on new clients, in the interests of their current clients!
You signed up hotticker.com.
Another thing I forgot to mention above. You should really have a look at the domain name your client-to-be uses. You can often spot a disreputable business just from the domain name.
Immediately terminated???
How long exactly did it take from the time the first complaints hit your mailserver for you to realise hotticker was responsible, call and ask them for evidence about their mailing list, wait for their response, deem their response nowhere near good enough and then pull the plug? If it was less than 24 hours then I might agree that having your /24 listed is perhaps a tad harsh. But I suspect it was in fact much longer than that, perhaps as much as a week or more.
I notice on your SPEWS record that your /24 has been downgraded to level 2. Your three webhosting machines (io, colossus and jupiter) are still at level 1, but any mail they want to send can be smarthosted through your level-2'd mailserver.
Erm... just what would you have said? "Please take us off your damn blocklist, we've terminated the spammer we signed up and we promise to be more careful in future." SPEWS' generic response would be "Once we can tell you're not providing any more services to $SPAMMER - which may take a little time - we'll downgrade you to level 2, where you'll stay for six months or so, then you'll be removed entirely. And yes, you bloody well should be more careful." This is covered in the SPEWS FAQ.
Hopefully it teaches ISPs like yours to be more careful about who it signs up as clients. I imagine that in a year or two it will be considered common practise for ISPs to go through a similar process with new clients as landlords do with potential new tenants. A bad client can easily do as much damage to an ISP as a bad tenant can to a landlord.
Pete.
So you were paying money (whether directly or indirectly) to the same ISP that was hosting a spammer. And that ISP had ignored abuse reports about that spammer for a significant period of time.
Ah yes, the "escalation" procedures... those would be the things they do when a spam-supporting ISP ignores abuse reports and refuses to terminate spamming clients.
Generally SPEWS will list a single IP address first. Then, over a period of time, as long as the spammer stays up at that ISP, they'll gradually increase the range of IPs listed. If in your case they listed a /16 - well, some ISPs can be very hard of hearing. Or perhaps I should say that some ISPs are very reluctant to terminate their lucrative spamming clients, and so will refuse to terminate them until said clients are costing them more than they're making (eg. by having to deal with complaints from non-spammer customers and/or having non-spammer customers leave).
Obviously.
Gee, this is easy. Don't use them then. *roll of eyes*
I think what you meant to say is "SPEWS accurately listed (part of?) my ISP for spam support. I refuse to accept any responsibility for my part in paying money to keep that rogue ISP in business, and I also refuse to complain to my ISP about their spam support. I, in fact, do not acknowledge any problem other than me (or my company) having some email rejected, and I'm quite happy to blame SPEWS for this problem rather than correctly assign blame a little closer to home."
Substitute "the company I work for" for "I" where appropriate in the above.
Now I think you might have clued into the reason why they're anonymous and not directly contactable. Idiot spammers all over the USA and the world (and, embarassingly, one in my home city) will (ab)use the law as a tool to harass antispammers. Even though such a lawsuit would have little or no legal merit, they can be used as a very effective harassment tool, taking a disproportionate amount of time and money to defend.
SPEWS avoids this problem entirely by remaining anonymous. They don't need to be identified - the administrators who use SPEWS judge them by the quality of the information they provide.
Obviously.
See above re: anonymity. It's a little tricky to file a frivolous (SLAPP) lawsuit when you don't know who you're trying to harass.
Pete.
In Rod We Trust.
Pete.
I hope you didn't really embarass yourself by sending that to the phoenix.com people. If so, all you've done is stand up and wave a big metaphorical placard saying "I have absolutely no understanding of this issue, but I'm going to complain anyway!"
Of course, you're not by any means the only one... *sigh*.
It doesn't matter that the word "phoenix" is used in other ways, by other organisations, for other purposes. It doesn't matter that there is a city called Phoenix (any more than that there's an Indonesian island called Java as well as the Sun-developed programming language Java), nor that there is a mythological bird called the Phoenix.
You see, the mythological bird Phoenix does not produce and sell a web browser (or a computer BIOS). The US city Phoenix does not produce and sell a web browser (or a computer BIOS).
The only two web browser products associated with the "Phoenix" name are Phoenix FirstView Connect and the Phoenix web browser project based on Mozilla.
One of those web-browser-producing organisations has a trademark on the use of the word "Phoenix" in the area of that product. The other one does not.
I'm sure you can connect the remaining dots.
You might want to consider sending a follow-up email to phoenix.com apologising for your mistake and withdrawing your comments. Well, that would be the polite thing to do, in any case *wry grin*[0].
Pete.
[0] ...and you're a Slashdot poster, so the odds of you backing down and admitting you're wrong (even in the face of overwhelming evidence), let alone apologising, are pretty small ;-).
Let me just ask you this: if I asked you "Have you ever used the Phoenix web browser?", what would you think I was referring to?
If you (or anyone) thought it possible that I might have been referring to the open-source XUL-based web browser built on the Mozilla project (and, quite bluntly, every person reading this Slashdot article would have), then that's it. Game over. Confusingly similar - that's all they need.
Phoenix (the company) would seem to have a perfectly justifiable position. And please remember, they don't actually have much of a choice about this - if they don't defend themselves against trademark violations, they could lose their trademark (or at least have it so weakened that it's effectively useless). They've done the appropriate thing in explaining the position to the browser-formerly-known-as-Phoenix developers, and those developers appear to have understood the issue and accepted that they need to change the name. Thankfully :). I think everyone would lose if this thing went through an expensive/slow/painful legal resolution.
Pete.
You sign up as, for example, fred, supply SpamGourmet with your real email address, then whenever you need to give out an email address to anyone you don't trust, give them something like: kazaa.10.fred@spamgourmet.com . SpamGourmet will relay 10 (and only 10) messages sent to that address though to your real address... any more will just get chomped. Maximum of 20 relays.
Very, very cool service. The fact that the basic model is free just rocks. I have no relation to them other than as a happy user.
Pete.
Of course I recognise that it's not necessarily a simple, nor a cheap, exercise. It's almost certainly going to cost something, both in cold hard cash and time (and of course time spent generally translates directly to cold hard cash). And in many cases (though certainly not in all) it's going to cost you more to buy service from a non-spam-supporting ISP, because (while you may not have realised it) your fees at the spam-supporting ISP were effectively subsidised by the extra fees spammer clients paid.
I also recognise that it's generally the not-always-entirely-innocent people caught in a blocklist who grossly overestimate the costs of them changing ISPs. Sometimes they really overdramatise it and make out like they have no choice - when of course they do. You always have a choice, even when you don't want to take it (for whatever reason).
The main thing I object to is those not-always-entirely-innocent people blaming the operator of whatever blocklist they're on, rather than blaming their ISP (ie. confusing the symptoms with the cause). Or perhaps taking some tiny degree of responsibility for their own actions and apportioning at least a little bit of the blame to themselves.
"Why, what did they do wrong?" you might ask. Well, in some cases, they might not have made a reasonable effort to research an ISP before signing up. In some cases, they might have thought "Hey! These guys are really cheap!" without making any effort to work out why. In some cases, they may have known that said ISP was a spam-supporter and simply didn't care. In far too many cases, they may have not made a reasonable effort to understand the situation when they first discovered they were on a blocklist.
And finally (regardless of whether they understand the situation or not), if they continue to use and fund a spam-supporting ISP even after they've had every opportunity to work out why this is morally wrong, then they qualify as spam-supporters themselves and are no longer even remotely innocent. You make your choices and you live with the results.
Good for you. You keep on using it then. But always remember that you're still paying (albeit probably a trivially small amount (I mean, how much spam do you personally receive? I'm guessing something tiny and inconsequential like a hundred messages a day?)) for the bandwidth, storage space and CPU processing time incurred by that email. Just because you're not seeing it doesn't mean it never existed and never cost you anything.
And most importantly, just because you're not seeing it doesn't mean that others aren't - nor does it mean that others aren't paying the recipient cost of spam, whether they are or aren't seeing it.
Spam has to be stopped at the source, not (haphazardly and unreliably) at the destination. The best way to achieve this is for all ISPs to act responsibly and simply forbid/prevent spamming. But since we're dealing with imperfect human beings here, there will always be some incompetent (eg. Verio), amoral (eg. Verio) or simply greedy (eg. Verio) ISPs that will not take their responsibilities seriously.
Blocking such rogue providers is a last resort, and it has one of three effects, all good:
One, and one. I'm not a professional sysadmin now (though I have masqueraded as one in the past). Look at my CV (linked from my website) if you're really interested about my background, though most of it is not directly relevant to my views on spam and spamfighting.
You, and any other people who read this post, can take that into consideration when evaluating my post(s) if you wish.
If I wrote off people's opinion merely because they didn't agree with mine, I'd be writing off a hell of a lot of opinions :-). The only references I made to the value of your opinion(s) were:
Pete.
I was about to just moderate you down as flamebait, but then noticed your low userid# and thought "nah, buggerit, I'll just respond."
I'd suggest you read up about the Spamhaus Block List and perhaps after that, have a look at some of the many posts by Steve on news.admin.net-abuse.email.
If you still think he "takes great pride in having his head firmly shoved up his ass", then, well, the value of your opinion should be pretty clear.
It's not making email as a communications medium even slightly less useful to you, unless:
(a) your mailserver uses the SBL (or one of the many other blocklists that list all or part of Verio) - in which case you are perfectly free to move to another one that doesn't, or
(b) your mailserver is in a range listed by the SBL. In which case you are also perfectly free to use another mailserver that isn't.
If it's not affecting you directly, then it's really none of your business. Except that if Verio either goes out of business OR gets rid of all its spammers (note: first option much more likely), then the load of spam that you are currently receiving will decrease.
Pete.
PS. Seriously, this has been coming for a loooong time. Verio is, and has been for a while, one of the worst (if not the worst) spam supporting ISPs on the Internet (and if you were completely unaware of this, then your opionion is worth even less than I thought it was). Their management are knowingly hosting spammers, and deliberately refusing to disconnect said spammers. They will never stop doing this as long as they profit by it. And they do profit by it, and will continue to do so until most (if not all) of their non-spammer customers leave.
Being shunned by the wider Internet is the only effective punishment. And it is effective. Don't fool yourself. Verio are not a responsible Internet citizen, and they will continue to be punished for it until they either mend their ways or die.
Personally I'd prefer the latter.
FOTR Trailer part 1
FOTR Trailer part 2
Note: it should be obvious, but you'll need to be able to handle animated gifs to view these properly.
I hope the guy does a rendition of the "Two Towers" trailer soon. ;-)
Pete.
Thank you, ymgve. :-))
Pete, still giggling.
PS. Moderators, I think the above comment needs at least a "Score:4, Witty Sarcasm". :)
I'll then presume you haven't read the "Song of Ice and Fire" series (by George R. R. Martin) yet (if you're implying that fantasy/SF are always immature :-).
If you haven't, and you like stuff with serious, multidimensional, GREY characters (ie. not obviously Good(tm) or Evil(tm)), you'll love this series. There are very, very few writers I've read that even come close to George's standard. He fucking rules.
See GRRM's homepage (no, I'm not giving an amazon or BN link, you can find those yourself - though the reader comments on amazon at least are worth reading... and the preview chapter(s) (okay, I will give a link then, dammit :-)).
Pete.
...with no names...
...about which you give not the slightest detail...
...about which you give not the slightest detail...
Gotcha. You'd be able to modify the kernel which you're unable to do with Microsoft's products. Noted.
You've been trying very hard so far, but this is the most obvious troll pointer - unless your "company" you must have just not noticed this and this.
...with no name...
The GPL specifically mentions the Linux kernel (only one of thousands of projects licensed under the GPL), does it?
Bugger, eh?
I've also been told by special voices (that only I can hear) that because the US President's name starts with "G", the world is doomed to nuclear annihilation sometime next week. This is simply unacceptable to me. He needs to change his name, and fast.
Hell, preferably noone inside the company either, I'd hope!
I mean, you don't want people using your product, do you? Shit, were would be be if we had that situation? Just imagine what the world would be like if software producers had people using the software they create...
"...We tried contacting the Good Software Group to help us out with our difficult position, but they haven't returned any of our phone calls yet."
Despite the fact that you were unable to modify the Windows 2000 kernel to meet your exacting standards, as you previously mentioned...
...despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
Not Microsoft's army of evil monkeys? Wow.
No doubt it virtually does - in your virtual world - just like it has with your virtual company and virtual lawyers and virtual clients like the aforementioned virtual investment firm.
"...an experience strangely akin to the last twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, if I remember correctly, which I don't..."
...virtual...
Whoopee.
"THAT WAS A PUNE, OR PLAY ON WORDS, ALBERT. I DON'T KNOW IF YOU NOTICED." "I'm laughing like hell deep down, sir." "HO. HO. HO." -- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather".
No problem.
Pete.
PS. Sigh.