It's true, we have plenty of information on the Internet. But don't expect humanity to use it to educate itself in some blissful utopian dream. The Internet already has the main thing people want: PORN.
I like having so much information available on the Internet, and I'm a regular contributor to Distributed Proofreaders, which definitely fits the bill for huge collections of public domain. But I'm under no illusions that most people will not ignore my recently-proofread "Studies in Civics" or "Babylonian and Assyrian Literature" in favor of "Amateur Anal Action" and "Barely Legal Blowjobs".
I notice a bunch of people (the same ones that protest every time a new piece of tech comes out because of the possibility that corporations can further abuse us with it, obviously) complaining that this is going to be bad because it allows chip manufacturers to think it's OK to make hot chips. Nonsense. They're under tremendous pressure to make fast chips (visit any gamer's forum to see who puts the pressure on), and they canna defy the laws of physics, Keptin, so they're going to make hot chips, too.
The fact is, PC cases are still built for that 5MHz IBM PC that stays cold all day. They're still white or beige boxes made of steel, aluminum, and plastic, drives in front, power supply in back, motherboard at the bottom, and cards jammed into the tiniest amount of space possible. Now they're towers, but that's only a desktop model turned sideways so you can fit more drives (which also get hot). Within, they're a thermodynamics nightmare, and it's about time that they're set up for better airflow by default.
Most people, when faced with a machine that continuously crashes because it's burning up inside, will simply stick more fans in all those prepunched holes that their Chinese case maker obligingly put next to the power supply and on the side of the case. Chances are, without the right airflow, the extra fans will be next to useless. They will allow you to know when you're computer is on, no matter what room in the house you're in. Just listen for the loud humming/buzzing/throbbing sound of your fans blowing hot air back onto your chips! BGA will hopefully require fewer case fans.
The other thing is now that VGA cards are getting so high-powered, they too are running hot. First they put heatsinks on them, then fans...and now the card I just bought is going to need a slot blower, because it's stuffed in with all my other cards. A more aerodynamic design would definitely help.
It's true, Netflix has almost every good thing about the previous models. No late fees: you return it when you want to. No crackpot DRM schemes. Millions of selections, as opposed to the the video equivalent of Clear Channel Top 40 on shelves of the local Blockbuster. No interaction with the clerk of said Blockbuster ("Sir have you tried our special offer of buy one DVD for $30 and get two free rentals?").
They've got a great classic-movie, foreign, and anime selection, which works for me and probably many other Slashdotters. Not to sound like I'm Astroturfing here, but unless you want to have dozens of movies at once (you can only have 3 out at once), watch less than 6 movies a month, or need your videos right away, Netflix is hands down the best way to go.
During the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, the ONI (Office of Navel Intelligence) spotted pigeons flying over critical installations on the West Coast. After bringing them down, they found cameras (ingenuously small considering this was the late '30s) with timers, rigged to take pictures of the installations.
Apparently, the Japanese would send out pigeons until they got what they wanted (since, of course, the pigeons might be eaten by predators or just decide to avoid the installation). This was described by Alan Hynd in his 1943 (I think it was '43) book "Betrayal From The East".
You might not be able to find it at your local library if the Political Correctness Police got there first (Hynd, among other things, was an advocate of the internment camps for Japanese-Americans as a security measure), but give it a try anyway.
Everything exploded -- in the world of LXG, hitting the sidewalk with a hammer would probably blow up the entire town!
The title shorthand, "LXG" -- a lame attempt to make it sound "Xtreme".
Long, stilted dialog passages that sounded a hell of a lot like the Twilight Zone play I did in back in 7th grade. Captain Nemo's dialog, especially -- he sounded like he'd taken timing lessons from William Shatner ("I--WILL--KILL--YOU!").
Heroes that were badasses in the books (I never read the comic), most of whom were ordinary men, turned into uncoordinated superheroes who never have to work together. By this I mean that a problem occurs, so one superhero is like "this looks like a job...for _____!" He beats mindlessly at it for a while, then the enemy or problem changes, and another hero says, "Stand back, watch what I can do!" Then she beats at it for a while.
A plot that made no sense. They go to Venice, where their aircraft-carrier-sized submarine slips through canals, and under the Bridge of Sighs. Venice erupts into a giant mushroom cloud, everything explodes, and then they yell out "Venice still stands!" Then they go to Mongolia, or Siberia, somewhere with snow because the producer still had some CGI budget left.
This is possibly one of the worst duds this year -- probably even worse than Matrix: Reloaded. It sounds like you enjoyed seeing the Steampunk world that the artists produced (which was pretty nifty-looking), but art alone does not a movie make. The fact is, this only made it to the big screen because Sean Connery supported it...and even he looked lost and confused in this bomb.
That's the real solution. With a white-collar job, cheap, virtually ubiquitous home computing, and nothing to do but watch company emails fly into (and get deleted from) your inbox, there is no good reason not to telecommute.
The problem, as cubicledrone puts it, is management's fears that they will lose control of their employees' time. At the.gov where I work, telecommuting was widely hyped at one point. People started signing up right and left, especially the ones who have to drive from Vancouver, WA, to Portland, OR (a miserable return drive every 5:00).
Management panicked and put in a new rule. Only one group of employees is now eligible for telecommuting. And of course, that would be...
I can see how your scheme would work in smaller domains with knowledgable users, but in an enterprise-sized domain with thousands of lusers, I think you're going to run into some problems. I've listed a few below.
If the alias is in any way complicated (and in an enterprise environment with multiple aliases per user it must be), isn't it going to be hard to remember without an address book? How are you going to handle the chaos that comes with a change (suddenly your secretary's Aunt Tillie can't send her any more online greeting cards, which, although wished for, were -- surprise -- the cause of the spam in the first place)? What about the suit handing his business card out with his email address on it? How are you going to handle legit mailing lists that your users want newsletters and verification emails from, but which sold their addresses to a legit firm, which sold it to a not-so-legit firm, which sold it to the slimiest creeps on the Internet? You'll have to change the address for them, and chances are your user will not be content with removing himself from their list as punishment for selling his address; he'll still want their newsletter.
The problem with your scheme, as I see it, is not a problem of stopping spam; it will stop spam quite effectively (until the address is compromised, in which case the user will get spam until it is removed). It has the same problem as the "you must send an additional verification email for the user to see the first one" method that some people advocate: That is, it subjects the sender and recipient to more inconvenience than it's worth. If you're thinking a different email address will be issued to everyone (I'm assuming that the user keeps a list for now), that too is feasible, but increases the inconvenience to the senders, most of whom are completely computer-illiterate.
Scanning is a harder road. I admit it is more difficult at first, but since spam emails are essentially mechanized, they always leave a trace of their content and can be caught with a regular expression, checksum, or blacklist. There are only so many ways you can say "Viagra" in a way humans can read it; the space can be mapped. The tactics of spammers are becoming steadily more desperate, and easier to catch -- from gibberish at the end of subject lines, to phrases at the end of emails, to white fonts and garbage HTML tags, to substituting numbers for letters and dumping inconsequential characters into words, to attacks on RBLs. In the end, it is my belief that there will come a day soon when spam opponents will declare victory -- where "victory" is defined as "spammers go back to nailing placards to telephone poles and forget about the Internet."
And if more than half of the spam is coming from MSN/AOL/Yahoo (in my case, it's not -- that's a forgery), you're in luck! Put a higher-weighted score on mail purportedly from there, and SpamAssassin will do the rest.
based on the number of spams that are getting through. It has jumped up again (doubled) in the last 1-2 months.
On which ISP? On one using proper blacklists, some good regexp rules (SpamAssassin) and some site-wide applications of the engine (MailScanner), spam is minimized. You'll get some false negatives, but it's a trickle, not a torrent.
Ever since installing the above at work (it's a.gov whose entire address list has been passed around the Internet like a trading card), spam has decreased to around 3-5 false negatives a day. Life is good.
And BTW, to the people who are moaning about the computing power needed to run SpamAssassin and MailScanner (MailScanner, especially, is a hog, no denying it) -- perhaps you need to think about replacing that 386 running RedHat 6.0 in your parent's basement. It's probably been 0wN3d a couple dozen times anyway.
WHY wasn't ICF turned on by default in XP Home? WHY are so many ports in Windows open by default on Home installations?
AIM. MSNM. ICQ.
Kazaa. Grokster. Morpheus.
Counterstrike. Unreal. Quake.
Personal web servers. Blog software. Update software. File shares.
That's WHY. Much as I hate MS software, don't blame them for saying "the customer is always right." People want to turn their computers into servers (aka traps for every conceivable virus and trojan in existence). They're going to be extremely pissed off if their Aunt Tillie can't see their photos of the new puppy by downloading from their "ZeroSoft NetSharer" webserver, which happened to come packaged with their new ink-jet printer.
Incidentally, I have some personal experience with this thing. A month ago, one of the guys I do freelance work for said his file shares were not working. I looked and found that he had the error "Incorrect function" on those drives. Three hours later, I found out that there was a firewall sitting in memory, autoinstalled by some HP update (no icon, and named like an NT process, of course). That was blocking port 445 and preventing him from connecting to the SMB server. Should have suspected it in the beginning, but who can infer anything from an error message like that?
That cost him $180 in consulting fees, and he'll probably never use a firewall again. To add to his pain, his box had been NATed, so the firewall was almost completely redundant in this case.
Make sure you use the DCC with SpamAssassin rather than merely alone, though (sounds like you don't have this problem, but just for the education of other readers). The shorter and more filled with garbage a message is, the more likely DCC will not be able to form the same fuzzy checksum as a different message.
I called them just now and basically said the stuff above. I own a few domain names bought from them, and will be transferring them to another provider. When I told them why, they read off a script that told me why their service was so great. Here's their answers and my responses:
"Before, the user would get an unhelpful error message. Now, users always know where to go!"
"That's good on paper, but the problem is that DNS is an inappropriate area to conduct that redirection. Yahoo or Google.com are well-known and can supply searches if users don't know where to go. In addition, Microsoft has a search feature in Explorer that redirects users to MSN. Putting this feature in DNS breaks the Internet technical specifications, called RFCs, and damages many processes on the Internet."
"This won't affect your domain names, people will still be able to get to you."
"The main problem is that Internet processes -- mail, DNS, and transfer-related software -- often use the information that no site was found in order to know what to do next. If a domain name always gets resolved, much of it will break."
"Verisign has set this up as a feature to improve the Internet."
"I'm sorry, but I don't believe that; your company has a lot of bright people working for it who know that this is not a feature in any way, shape, or form. It's my opinion that Verisign is trying to grab traffic from well-known search sites by using its control of the.com and.net TLDs to redirect users to a search engine branded by Verisign. I'm not going to transfer my domains yet, because I'm going to wait and see for a week or two, because I'm hoping your company will change their minds and understand that this isn't a good thing for the Internet. But I am going to transfer them if this issue does not get resolved."
Anyway, they gave me this email address: sitefinder@verisign-grs.com . Send 'em an email. And call that number! Be patient -- it's not the call-center people's fault and they won't like being screamed at -- but be firm, because they're reciting from a brochure given them by upper management, and they're going to give you the canned answers found above. The call-center girl sounded pretty tired of answering this, and I figure a lot of people are complaining. If they see half their business disappearing down the tube, maybe they'll see the light.;)
It appears pilots are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with equipment, which they attribute to passengers' portable devices.
In other news, sysadmins are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with computers, which they attribute to lusers' unauthorized programs that just happen to endlessly fork, rm said lusers' important data, and fill up the/tmp dir.
Just because they're used to it, doesn't mean it's OK.
Buying books at Amazon could be exciting if written well. For example, I think the some of the best sci-fi is coming out of the cyberpunk genre, where "buying a book from your cubicle at work" is mentioned in an offhand way that intrigues the reader just because it is so offhand. Look at Neil Stephenson's work; he could be classed as sci-fi. True, it's not talking robots and FTL travel, but it's every bit as exciting. Why? The technology, somewhat; the society, a little bit more; but mostly, because it uses the methods of sci-fi and fantasy. All the feats performed in the genre are used to solve a problem, not "just because". It's also not fully explained -- this is fiction and you're supposed to use your imagination.
As a brief aside, the next time I hear someone bitching about a science fiction movie or book because it didn't fully explain all the technology, I'm going to smack him around in exactly the same manner that a pimp-daddy smacks around his hoes. Back to the rant.
I think the real reason is that the science fiction market has not evolved yet. For us to be continuing with concepts straight from Buck Rogers, Star Trek, or Star Wars makes about as much sense as creating a character such as Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey and using them to solve modern-day crime. They had their day, they made sense for a while, then the world changed and we got cooler, harder, and more realistic characters such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Read Raymond Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder" to see the same change in the murder mystery during the 40s that is appearing now in the sci-fi story.
The language changes. The nineteenth-century novel used long, florid sentences and lots of asides. The 20th-century novel got a lot leaner and more compact. In sci-fi, we don't need any more conversations between characters that explain the whole thing such as some of the old masters used; that worked then, but is just annoying now. We need to hint at it, and let the reader guess it from context.
Finally, the sad fact is that sci-fi is a lot like romance, mystery, and horror, in that there are a few good authors and a lot of talentless, formulaic hacks. You want to write a book that's quick and simple, something that'll put some food on the table perhaps. You have some masters who laid the groundwork: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. You watched a few movies directed by some more contributors: Lucas (yeah, I know it's really "space opera", but let's not be purists about this), Roddenbury. You have all the material they used before, and now you can write your book. It's easy.
This last can only be solved through good writing. I am convinced that science fiction needs no amazing talent in science (look at how much Orson Scott Card knew when he wrote Ender's Game), but like every other genre, it does need good writers, one who is interested in the "craft" of writing, as Stephen King would say. With good writing, even a bad concept can be pretty interesting; with bad writing, it doesn't matter how good the concept is -- the story will still stink.
The protests in Europe struck me as being focused, and maybe that's why they work so much better. In the 60s, they were often focused as well: Civil rights, anti-war, etc. American protesters have perhaps lost that focus.
Consider the recent Iraq-war protests in Portland, OR. I saw signs advocating everything! Signs claiming that Bush cheated in the election -- what does Bush's legitimacy have to do with whether Iraq should be attacked or not? Isn't that a separate issue? Signs decrying corporate media -- yeah, that has a lot to do with bombing Iraq. Signs demanding global equity in trade, better environmental regulations, abolition of the U.S. government....what do they want? What is the protest for?
It's no surprise to me that the majority of Americans view protesters as wackos bent on destruction. Most of the time they give the impression that rather than being concerned citizens protesting because of an interest in their country, they're just trying to make trouble. Stopping traffic, smashing windows, and throwing acid were among the things that went on in the Portland protests.
Protests in the US in the 60s, IIRC, were more peaceful and more focused on whatever issue was at hand. Size simply is not as important as delivering a clear message.
They do now. In the classes I was in at Portland State, they were even taught by idiots so you can understand the challenges facing you when you start communicating with middle management.;)
All those communication classes are completely useless unless your managers listen. Sometimes they don't. If that's the case, it doesn't matter how many outlines, Powerpoint presentations, or 30-page reports you write -- if they consider you to be only the button pusher that they tell what to do, if they don't respect your professional opinion or believe anything you say...it will be a big waste of time. Spoken from experience.
After seeing all the outraged comments on here ("Waddyamean he thinks my copy of Gentoo isn't a distro?!"), I'm surprised, because I think he's right (at least, in terms of corporate distros). Before any holy warriors mod me down for saying this, I should provide a disclaimer...OK...here goes...I am a distro bigot, and I would never use anything but Slackware (if it's my decision to make), because all the major distros are disgustingly bloated. Slackware -- it rocks. RH/SuSE/etc -- they suck. Just the facts, ma'am. *ducks*
Now that we've got that important fact out of the way, let's look at Oracle. Last I checked, Slackware, Gentoo, and other distros that lean further toward the hobbyist/programmer/hacker end of things were not supported by Oracle -- it was only SuSE and RedHat. It's not just Oracle -- as a general rule, if you find some proprietary software that they're trying to make a Linux port of, and they name a distro, it's about 90% likely to "support" RedHat and maybe 40% likely to "support" SuSE.
Reason for the quotes around "support" would be that most of the time, a specific distro is not needed. It's the same kernel and most of the same FS setup (well, Slackware's init scripts are a little bit bett^H^H^H^Hdifferent, since they follow BSD instead of SysV). However, naming the distro supplies a corporation with the perfect ass-covering if it's something their tech-support hasn't been trained on. "What, you don't use RedHat? Well, I'm sorry, but we can't support your software. Even though you paid us $5,000 this quarter for gold-level support. It's broken -- you fix it."
It comes of picking something very specific to train $6.50/hr helpdesk personnel who aren't likely to investigate and learn a new distro. Plus a reason I can sympathize a bit more with: If the customer is breathing down the company's neck to fix this problem that they had with a homebrew distro some BOFH in the customer's IT dept. crafted, it will cost a lot of time, money, and perhaps contracts (as the customer gets more impatient) to get it fixed. Better to go with an extremely common standard, even though they are the lowest common denominator in terms of distros.
So I agree -- to the corporate world, there are only SuSE and RedHat distros. The rest just aren't supported.
This isn't very good, but all I could come up with at short notice.
The movie industry is dying It is official; Independent confirms: **AA is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered **AA community when Independent.co.uk confirmed that **AA blockbuster revenue has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all moviegoers. Coming on the heels of a recent Independent survey which plainly states that **AA has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. **AA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent test of movies that don't suck.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict **AA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: **AA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for **AA because **AA is dying. Things are looking very bad for **AA. As many of us are already aware, **AA continues to turn out some of the worst movies EVER created. Blood flows like a river from the eyeballs of moviegoers who watched "Gigli", "Tombraider 2", and "LXG".
MPAA is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its creativity. The sudden and unpleasant departures of movie quality and any attempt at doing something new only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Hollywood is dying.
. ..
Due to insanely high prices, abysmal plots, and movies that are ALL sequels, spinoffs, remakes, or advertisements for Disney rides, MPAA will go out of business and be taken over by the RIAA who sell another load of dog crap to the increasingly unsatisfied masses. Soon the RIAA will also be dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that **AA has steadily declined in viewers. **AA is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If **AA is to survive at all it will be because of politicians who get bribed by people like Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. **AA continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, **AA is dead.
You know that Vera Katz is losing popularity when she's compared to President Bush by the liberal Portlanders that got her elected.
Katz isn't a Communist or anything, but she's definitely not a neo-con. She got in, and stayed in, because Portland as a whole is left-wing -- no "perceived" about it. She's the one who just praised the "temporary" tax increases in Multnomah Co. that got passed just recently. Does that sound like a fiscal conservative to you? She's also one of the reasons why a section of downtown Broadway's sidewalk is now a permanent camp for homeless protesters.
Don't get me wrong, I think she's been pretty useless as a mayor, she only stayed on this long because of the economic bubble, and we need new blood anyway no matter what the political outlook -- she's been here since I was a kid. But she ain't no George Bush.
Fully agree. Actually, I'd describe myself as fairly right-wing, but I suspect that many conservatives would agree that there's nothing to leech $$$ out of a city like a Major-League team of anything. Not to mention the antics of such people, who in any other walk of life would be spending their time in Salem Correctional instead of the Rose Garden (see "Portland Trailblazers" for more details).
There's no good reason to have a major-league baseball team in Portland, other than the self-aggrandizement of local politicians like Mayor Katz. If you're a Portlander who likes baseball, check out these guys instead.
Already happening. The securicritters who tell us what to do are already talking about how zipfiles could be the next big target of virus writers. They want everyone to use FTP.
Interestingly enough, if they let us download pattern file updates faster (right now it's daily), we wouldn't have to block zips at all. But due to politics being played by a droid whose clutches my department happened to fall into, we're probably not changing a thing.
Apparently, he thinks we could download a bad pattern file if we update every hour instead of daily. The logical problems with this thinking are left as an exercise for the reader.
As an Oregonian, I can tell you that many Oregonians do believe that the money is being spent inefficiently. Almost every year since I was old enough to care, a new tax increase has been presented. It gets refused, and then the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins...threats to close down the schools, to end community programs, to fire large quantities of police and fire fighters, and to release sex offenders from prison are all freely bandied about.
After weeks of putting stick drawings and close-ups of children's faces on TV and billboards, a second special tax increase is proposed, at which point enough of the populace are frightened enough to vote for it. This also occurs if any proposals to curb the slippery slope of "short-term" increases that are amended to be permanent later, or to keep taxes from being increased for a single year, are put forth. In the meantime, the state retirement system, which is about to land in taxpayers' laps with a heavy thud, is desperately in need of reform. For example, "double-dippers" take advantage of a loophole in which they retire (getting a retirement check every month), but actually stay working (getting regular wages as well). There are other abuses of the system, but the root of the problem is a lack of accountability, the treatment of tax money as a slush fund with few clear boundaries, and an inability of the legislature to agree on a solid, pork-free, tax plan.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true, we have plenty of information on the Internet. But don't expect humanity to use it to educate itself in some blissful utopian dream. The Internet already has the main thing people want: PORN.
I like having so much information available on the Internet, and I'm a regular contributor to Distributed Proofreaders, which definitely fits the bill for huge collections of public domain. But I'm under no illusions that most people will not ignore my recently-proofread "Studies in Civics" or "Babylonian and Assyrian Literature" in favor of "Amateur Anal Action" and "Barely Legal Blowjobs".
I notice a bunch of people (the same ones that protest every time a new piece of tech comes out because of the possibility that corporations can further abuse us with it, obviously) complaining that this is going to be bad because it allows chip manufacturers to think it's OK to make hot chips. Nonsense. They're under tremendous pressure to make fast chips (visit any gamer's forum to see who puts the pressure on), and they canna defy the laws of physics, Keptin, so they're going to make hot chips, too.
The fact is, PC cases are still built for that 5MHz IBM PC that stays cold all day. They're still white or beige boxes made of steel, aluminum, and plastic, drives in front, power supply in back, motherboard at the bottom, and cards jammed into the tiniest amount of space possible. Now they're towers, but that's only a desktop model turned sideways so you can fit more drives (which also get hot). Within, they're a thermodynamics nightmare, and it's about time that they're set up for better airflow by default.
Most people, when faced with a machine that continuously crashes because it's burning up inside, will simply stick more fans in all those prepunched holes that their Chinese case maker obligingly put next to the power supply and on the side of the case. Chances are, without the right airflow, the extra fans will be next to useless. They will allow you to know when you're computer is on, no matter what room in the house you're in. Just listen for the loud humming/buzzing/throbbing sound of your fans blowing hot air back onto your chips! BGA will hopefully require fewer case fans.
The other thing is now that VGA cards are getting so high-powered, they too are running hot. First they put heatsinks on them, then fans...and now the card I just bought is going to need a slot blower, because it's stuffed in with all my other cards. A more aerodynamic design would definitely help.
It's true, Netflix has almost every good thing about the previous models. No late fees: you return it when you want to. No crackpot DRM schemes. Millions of selections, as opposed to the the video equivalent of Clear Channel Top 40 on shelves of the local Blockbuster. No interaction with the clerk of said Blockbuster ("Sir have you tried our special offer of buy one DVD for $30 and get two free rentals?").
They've got a great classic-movie, foreign, and anime selection, which works for me and probably many other Slashdotters. Not to sound like I'm Astroturfing here, but unless you want to have dozens of movies at once (you can only have 3 out at once), watch less than 6 movies a month, or need your videos right away, Netflix is hands down the best way to go.
During the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, the ONI (Office of Navel Intelligence) spotted pigeons flying over critical installations on the West Coast. After bringing them down, they found cameras (ingenuously small considering this was the late '30s) with timers, rigged to take pictures of the installations.
Apparently, the Japanese would send out pigeons until they got what they wanted (since, of course, the pigeons might be eaten by predators or just decide to avoid the installation). This was described by Alan Hynd in his 1943 (I think it was '43) book "Betrayal From The East".
You might not be able to find it at your local library if the Political Correctness Police got there first (Hynd, among other things, was an advocate of the internment camps for Japanese-Americans as a security measure), but give it a try anyway.
I'll tell you what's not to like:
Everything exploded -- in the world of LXG, hitting the sidewalk with a hammer would probably blow up the entire town!
The title shorthand, "LXG" -- a lame attempt to make it sound "Xtreme".
Long, stilted dialog passages that sounded a hell of a lot like the Twilight Zone play I did in back in 7th grade. Captain Nemo's dialog, especially -- he sounded like he'd taken timing lessons from William Shatner ("I--WILL--KILL--YOU!").
Heroes that were badasses in the books (I never read the comic), most of whom were ordinary men, turned into uncoordinated superheroes who never have to work together. By this I mean that a problem occurs, so one superhero is like "this looks like a job...for _____!" He beats mindlessly at it for a while, then the enemy or problem changes, and another hero says, "Stand back, watch what I can do!" Then she beats at it for a while.
A plot that made no sense. They go to Venice, where their aircraft-carrier-sized submarine slips through canals, and under the Bridge of Sighs. Venice erupts into a giant mushroom cloud, everything explodes, and then they yell out "Venice still stands!" Then they go to Mongolia, or Siberia, somewhere with snow because the producer still had some CGI budget left.
This is possibly one of the worst duds this year -- probably even worse than Matrix: Reloaded. It sounds like you enjoyed seeing the Steampunk world that the artists produced (which was pretty nifty-looking), but art alone does not a movie make. The fact is, this only made it to the big screen because Sean Connery supported it...and even he looked lost and confused in this bomb.
That's the real solution. With a white-collar job, cheap, virtually ubiquitous home computing, and nothing to do but watch company emails fly into (and get deleted from) your inbox, there is no good reason not to telecommute.
The problem, as cubicledrone puts it, is management's fears that they will lose control of their employees' time. At the .gov where I work, telecommuting was widely hyped at one point. People started signing up right and left, especially the ones who have to drive from Vancouver, WA, to Portland, OR (a miserable return drive every 5:00).
Management panicked and put in a new rule. Only one group of employees is now eligible for telecommuting. And of course, that would be...
Management!
I can see how your scheme would work in smaller domains with knowledgable users, but in an enterprise-sized domain with thousands of lusers, I think you're going to run into some problems. I've listed a few below.
If the alias is in any way complicated (and in an enterprise environment with multiple aliases per user it must be), isn't it going to be hard to remember without an address book? How are you going to handle the chaos that comes with a change (suddenly your secretary's Aunt Tillie can't send her any more online greeting cards, which, although wished for, were -- surprise -- the cause of the spam in the first place)? What about the suit handing his business card out with his email address on it? How are you going to handle legit mailing lists that your users want newsletters and verification emails from, but which sold their addresses to a legit firm, which sold it to a not-so-legit firm, which sold it to the slimiest creeps on the Internet? You'll have to change the address for them, and chances are your user will not be content with removing himself from their list as punishment for selling his address; he'll still want their newsletter.
The problem with your scheme, as I see it, is not a problem of stopping spam; it will stop spam quite effectively (until the address is compromised, in which case the user will get spam until it is removed). It has the same problem as the "you must send an additional verification email for the user to see the first one" method that some people advocate: That is, it subjects the sender and recipient to more inconvenience than it's worth. If you're thinking a different email address will be issued to everyone (I'm assuming that the user keeps a list for now), that too is feasible, but increases the inconvenience to the senders, most of whom are completely computer-illiterate.
Scanning is a harder road. I admit it is more difficult at first, but since spam emails are essentially mechanized, they always leave a trace of their content and can be caught with a regular expression, checksum, or blacklist. There are only so many ways you can say "Viagra" in a way humans can read it; the space can be mapped. The tactics of spammers are becoming steadily more desperate, and easier to catch -- from gibberish at the end of subject lines, to phrases at the end of emails, to white fonts and garbage HTML tags, to substituting numbers for letters and dumping inconsequential characters into words, to attacks on RBLs. In the end, it is my belief that there will come a day soon when spam opponents will declare victory -- where "victory" is defined as "spammers go back to nailing placards to telephone poles and forget about the Internet."
And if more than half of the spam is coming from MSN/AOL/Yahoo (in my case, it's not -- that's a forgery), you're in luck! Put a higher-weighted score on mail purportedly from there, and SpamAssassin will do the rest.
based on the number of spams that are getting through. It has jumped up again (doubled) in the last 1-2 months.
On which ISP? On one using proper blacklists, some good regexp rules (SpamAssassin) and some site-wide applications of the engine (MailScanner), spam is minimized. You'll get some false negatives, but it's a trickle, not a torrent.
Ever since installing the above at work (it's a .gov whose entire address list has been passed around the Internet like a trading card), spam has decreased to around 3-5 false negatives a day. Life is good.
And BTW, to the people who are moaning about the computing power needed to run SpamAssassin and MailScanner (MailScanner, especially, is a hog, no denying it) -- perhaps you need to think about replacing that 386 running RedHat 6.0 in your parent's basement. It's probably been 0wN3d a couple dozen times anyway.
WHY wasn't ICF turned on by default in XP Home? WHY are so many ports in Windows open by default on Home installations?
AIM. MSNM. ICQ.
Kazaa. Grokster. Morpheus.
Counterstrike. Unreal. Quake.
Personal web servers. Blog software. Update software. File shares.
That's WHY. Much as I hate MS software, don't blame them for saying "the customer is always right." People want to turn their computers into servers (aka traps for every conceivable virus and trojan in existence). They're going to be extremely pissed off if their Aunt Tillie can't see their photos of the new puppy by downloading from their "ZeroSoft NetSharer" webserver, which happened to come packaged with their new ink-jet printer.
Incidentally, I have some personal experience with this thing. A month ago, one of the guys I do freelance work for said his file shares were not working. I looked and found that he had the error "Incorrect function" on those drives. Three hours later, I found out that there was a firewall sitting in memory, autoinstalled by some HP update (no icon, and named like an NT process, of course). That was blocking port 445 and preventing him from connecting to the SMB server. Should have suspected it in the beginning, but who can infer anything from an error message like that?
That cost him $180 in consulting fees, and he'll probably never use a firewall again. To add to his pain, his box had been NATed, so the firewall was almost completely redundant in this case.
Make sure you use the DCC with SpamAssassin rather than merely alone, though (sounds like you don't have this problem, but just for the education of other readers). The shorter and more filled with garbage a message is, the more likely DCC will not be able to form the same fuzzy checksum as a different message.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...
I called them just now and basically said the stuff above. I own a few domain names bought from them, and will be transferring them to another provider. When I told them why, they read off a script that told me why their service was so great. Here's their answers and my responses:
"Before, the user would get an unhelpful error message. Now, users always know where to go!"
"That's good on paper, but the problem is that DNS is an inappropriate area to conduct that redirection. Yahoo or Google.com are well-known and can supply searches if users don't know where to go. In addition, Microsoft has a search feature in Explorer that redirects users to MSN. Putting this feature in DNS breaks the Internet technical specifications, called RFCs, and damages many processes on the Internet."
"This won't affect your domain names, people will still be able to get to you."
"The main problem is that Internet processes -- mail, DNS, and transfer-related software -- often use the information that no site was found in order to know what to do next. If a domain name always gets resolved, much of it will break."
"Verisign has set this up as a feature to improve the Internet."
"I'm sorry, but I don't believe that; your company has a lot of bright people working for it who know that this is not a feature in any way, shape, or form. It's my opinion that Verisign is trying to grab traffic from well-known search sites by using its control of the .com and .net TLDs to redirect users to a search engine branded by Verisign. I'm not going to transfer my domains yet, because I'm going to wait and see for a week or two, because I'm hoping your company will change their minds and understand that this isn't a good thing for the Internet. But I am going to transfer them if this issue does not get resolved."
Anyway, they gave me this email address: sitefinder@verisign-grs.com . Send 'em an email. And call that number! Be patient -- it's not the call-center people's fault and they won't like being screamed at -- but be firm, because they're reciting from a brochure given them by upper management, and they're going to give you the canned answers found above. The call-center girl sounded pretty tired of answering this, and I figure a lot of people are complaining. If they see half their business disappearing down the tube, maybe they'll see the light. ;)
If this is just another hoax, how did it make the first page here?
Do we really have to answer that? We do? OK.
It appears pilots are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with equipment, which they attribute to passengers' portable devices.
In other news, sysadmins are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with computers, which they attribute to lusers' unauthorized programs that just happen to endlessly fork, rm said lusers' important data, and fill up the /tmp dir.
Just because they're used to it, doesn't mean it's OK.
Buying books at Amazon could be exciting if written well. For example, I think the some of the best sci-fi is coming out of the cyberpunk genre, where "buying a book from your cubicle at work" is mentioned in an offhand way that intrigues the reader just because it is so offhand. Look at Neil Stephenson's work; he could be classed as sci-fi. True, it's not talking robots and FTL travel, but it's every bit as exciting. Why? The technology, somewhat; the society, a little bit more; but mostly, because it uses the methods of sci-fi and fantasy. All the feats performed in the genre are used to solve a problem, not "just because". It's also not fully explained -- this is fiction and you're supposed to use your imagination.
As a brief aside, the next time I hear someone bitching about a science fiction movie or book because it didn't fully explain all the technology, I'm going to smack him around in exactly the same manner that a pimp-daddy smacks around his hoes. Back to the rant.
I think the real reason is that the science fiction market has not evolved yet. For us to be continuing with concepts straight from Buck Rogers, Star Trek, or Star Wars makes about as much sense as creating a character such as Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey and using them to solve modern-day crime. They had their day, they made sense for a while, then the world changed and we got cooler, harder, and more realistic characters such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Read Raymond Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder" to see the same change in the murder mystery during the 40s that is appearing now in the sci-fi story.
The language changes. The nineteenth-century novel used long, florid sentences and lots of asides. The 20th-century novel got a lot leaner and more compact. In sci-fi, we don't need any more conversations between characters that explain the whole thing such as some of the old masters used; that worked then, but is just annoying now. We need to hint at it, and let the reader guess it from context.
Finally, the sad fact is that sci-fi is a lot like romance, mystery, and horror, in that there are a few good authors and a lot of talentless, formulaic hacks. You want to write a book that's quick and simple, something that'll put some food on the table perhaps. You have some masters who laid the groundwork: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. You watched a few movies directed by some more contributors: Lucas (yeah, I know it's really "space opera", but let's not be purists about this), Roddenbury. You have all the material they used before, and now you can write your book. It's easy.
This last can only be solved through good writing. I am convinced that science fiction needs no amazing talent in science (look at how much Orson Scott Card knew when he wrote Ender's Game), but like every other genre, it does need good writers, one who is interested in the "craft" of writing, as Stephen King would say. With good writing, even a bad concept can be pretty interesting; with bad writing, it doesn't matter how good the concept is -- the story will still stink.
Numerous Taiwanese have already given secrets about American weapons (sold to Taiwan) to Beijing.
With Clinton as president for 8 years, I can assure you that Beijing didn't need to buy from Taiwanese. *ducks*
The protests in Europe struck me as being focused, and maybe that's why they work so much better. In the 60s, they were often focused as well: Civil rights, anti-war, etc. American protesters have perhaps lost that focus.
Consider the recent Iraq-war protests in Portland, OR. I saw signs advocating everything! Signs claiming that Bush cheated in the election -- what does Bush's legitimacy have to do with whether Iraq should be attacked or not? Isn't that a separate issue? Signs decrying corporate media -- yeah, that has a lot to do with bombing Iraq. Signs demanding global equity in trade, better environmental regulations, abolition of the U.S. government....what do they want? What is the protest for?
It's no surprise to me that the majority of Americans view protesters as wackos bent on destruction. Most of the time they give the impression that rather than being concerned citizens protesting because of an interest in their country, they're just trying to make trouble. Stopping traffic, smashing windows, and throwing acid were among the things that went on in the Portland protests.
Protests in the US in the 60s, IIRC, were more peaceful and more focused on whatever issue was at hand. Size simply is not as important as delivering a clear message.
They do now. In the classes I was in at Portland State, they were even taught by idiots so you can understand the challenges facing you when you start communicating with middle management. ;)
All those communication classes are completely useless unless your managers listen. Sometimes they don't. If that's the case, it doesn't matter how many outlines, Powerpoint presentations, or 30-page reports you write -- if they consider you to be only the button pusher that they tell what to do, if they don't respect your professional opinion or believe anything you say...it will be a big waste of time. Spoken from experience.
After seeing all the outraged comments on here ("Waddyamean he thinks my copy of Gentoo isn't a distro?!"), I'm surprised, because I think he's right (at least, in terms of corporate distros). Before any holy warriors mod me down for saying this, I should provide a disclaimer...OK...here goes...I am a distro bigot, and I would never use anything but Slackware (if it's my decision to make), because all the major distros are disgustingly bloated. Slackware -- it rocks. RH/SuSE/etc -- they suck. Just the facts, ma'am. *ducks*
Now that we've got that important fact out of the way, let's look at Oracle. Last I checked, Slackware, Gentoo, and other distros that lean further toward the hobbyist/programmer/hacker end of things were not supported by Oracle -- it was only SuSE and RedHat. It's not just Oracle -- as a general rule, if you find some proprietary software that they're trying to make a Linux port of, and they name a distro, it's about 90% likely to "support" RedHat and maybe 40% likely to "support" SuSE.
Reason for the quotes around "support" would be that most of the time, a specific distro is not needed. It's the same kernel and most of the same FS setup (well, Slackware's init scripts are a little bit bett^H^H^H^Hdifferent, since they follow BSD instead of SysV). However, naming the distro supplies a corporation with the perfect ass-covering if it's something their tech-support hasn't been trained on. "What, you don't use RedHat? Well, I'm sorry, but we can't support your software. Even though you paid us $5,000 this quarter for gold-level support. It's broken -- you fix it."
It comes of picking something very specific to train $6.50/hr helpdesk personnel who aren't likely to investigate and learn a new distro. Plus a reason I can sympathize a bit more with: If the customer is breathing down the company's neck to fix this problem that they had with a homebrew distro some BOFH in the customer's IT dept. crafted, it will cost a lot of time, money, and perhaps contracts (as the customer gets more impatient) to get it fixed. Better to go with an extremely common standard, even though they are the lowest common denominator in terms of distros.
So I agree -- to the corporate world, there are only SuSE and RedHat distros. The rest just aren't supported.
This isn't very good, but all I could come up with at short notice.
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The movie industry is dying It is official; Independent confirms: **AA is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered **AA community when Independent.co.uk confirmed that **AA blockbuster revenue has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all moviegoers. Coming on the heels of a recent Independent survey which plainly states that **AA has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. **AA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent test of movies that don't suck.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict **AA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: **AA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for **AA because **AA is dying. Things are looking very bad for **AA. As many of us are already aware, **AA continues to turn out some of the worst movies EVER created. Blood flows like a river from the eyeballs of moviegoers who watched "Gigli", "Tombraider 2", and "LXG".
MPAA is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its creativity. The sudden and unpleasant departures of movie quality and any attempt at doing something new only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Hollywood is dying.
. .
Due to insanely high prices, abysmal plots, and movies that are ALL sequels, spinoffs, remakes, or advertisements for Disney rides, MPAA will go out of business and be taken over by the RIAA who sell another load of dog crap to the increasingly unsatisfied masses. Soon the RIAA will also be dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that **AA has steadily declined in viewers. **AA is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If **AA is to survive at all it will be because of politicians who get bribed by people like Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. **AA continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, **AA is dead.
You know that Vera Katz is losing popularity when she's compared to President Bush by the liberal Portlanders that got her elected.
Katz isn't a Communist or anything, but she's definitely not a neo-con. She got in, and stayed in, because Portland as a whole is left-wing -- no "perceived" about it. She's the one who just praised the "temporary" tax increases in Multnomah Co. that got passed just recently. Does that sound like a fiscal conservative to you? She's also one of the reasons why a section of downtown Broadway's sidewalk is now a permanent camp for homeless protesters.
Don't get me wrong, I think she's been pretty useless as a mayor, she only stayed on this long because of the economic bubble, and we need new blood anyway no matter what the political outlook -- she's been here since I was a kid. But she ain't no George Bush.
Fully agree. Actually, I'd describe myself as fairly right-wing, but I suspect that many conservatives would agree that there's nothing to leech $$$ out of a city like a Major-League team of anything. Not to mention the antics of such people, who in any other walk of life would be spending their time in Salem Correctional instead of the Rose Garden (see "Portland Trailblazers" for more details).
There's no good reason to have a major-league baseball team in Portland, other than the self-aggrandizement of local politicians like Mayor Katz. If you're a Portlander who likes baseball, check out these guys instead.
I've had enough of draconian legislation that infringes on my rights online. I'm moving to Europe!
Oh...wait...
Already happening. The securicritters who tell us what to do are already talking about how zipfiles could be the next big target of virus writers. They want everyone to use FTP.
Interestingly enough, if they let us download pattern file updates faster (right now it's daily), we wouldn't have to block zips at all. But due to politics being played by a droid whose clutches my department happened to fall into, we're probably not changing a thing.
Apparently, he thinks we could download a bad pattern file if we update every hour instead of daily. The logical problems with this thinking are left as an exercise for the reader.
As an Oregonian, I can tell you that many Oregonians do believe that the money is being spent inefficiently. Almost every year since I was old enough to care, a new tax increase has been presented. It gets refused, and then the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins...threats to close down the schools, to end community programs, to fire large quantities of police and fire fighters, and to release sex offenders from prison are all freely bandied about.
After weeks of putting stick drawings and close-ups of children's faces on TV and billboards, a second special tax increase is proposed, at which point enough of the populace are frightened enough to vote for it. This also occurs if any proposals to curb the slippery slope of "short-term" increases that are amended to be permanent later, or to keep taxes from being increased for a single year, are put forth. In the meantime, the state retirement system, which is about to land in taxpayers' laps with a heavy thud, is desperately in need of reform. For example, "double-dippers" take advantage of a loophole in which they retire (getting a retirement check every month), but actually stay working (getting regular wages as well). There are other abuses of the system, but the root of the problem is a lack of accountability, the treatment of tax money as a slush fund with few clear boundaries, and an inability of the legislature to agree on a solid, pork-free, tax plan.