Overpeer.com is getting IP service through Telemerc who, in turn, gets service through Sprintlink.net. Accroding to the Sprintlink.net's Acceptable Use Police , the following are prohibited:
7. Knowingly engage in any activities that will cause a denial-of-service (e.g., synchronized number sequence attacks) to any Sprint customers or end-users whether on the Sprint network or on another provider's network.
and
9. Using Sprint's Services to interfere with the use of the Sprint network by other customers or authorized users.
That's practically a description of overpeer.com's business model. They use their bogus material to interfere with the use of P2P services and to effectively create a Denial of Service attack against P2P services.
I encourage Slashdot readers to contact Telemerc and Sprintlink at helpdesk@telemerc.net and abuse@sprintlink.net respectively and explain (in a civil manner) that you wish them to stop providing services to Overpeer because of the DoS business model.
You put up a lot of things that you don't think would be inconvenient, but you don't actually know how the customers would react, so the convenient/inconvenient argument is pretty moot.
Since I run a domain and have a lot of experience with it, I do know what will cause inconvenience.
So in effect, it is not as direct as you have made it out to be.
Yes it is. If the spammer can't get to a mail server to send his spam, game over. The port 25 block does that.
Wouldn't you only be able to sue a spammer who is based in the same state as you are?
No. AOL has successfully sued many spammers in Virginia courts even though the spammers did not reside in Virginia.
Which ones? None of them prevent you from running mail servers, receiving mail from other mail servers, running a web server, FTP server, etc. If you don't spam, then the only one that would apply to you would be number 4: providing your ISP with proof of identity.
I don't like step 4, as there is no assurance that the ISP will not then sell that information to shady characters
The privacy policy would guarantee that. There is no legitimate reason to falsify your identity when signing up with an ISP. You are entering into a business contract with them and part of entering into a contract is both parties properly identifying themselves.
and I don't like step 6. What exactly would that block?
It would prevent you from using open relays to send e-mail. You could not connect to some open relay in Korea and send mail. You would have to send outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server. Many ISPs already do this type of blocking.
Would that stop someone from having their own mail server?
Absolutely not. Blocking port 25 incoming would, but not outgoing. I have my own mail server and I relay outgoing messages through my ISP's mail server. That way they do the DNS and I don't have to directly connect to other mail servers.
In step 7, would that require that all email sent from an account such as Hotmail go through your servers as well?
Obviously that's not the intent and the wording would have to be something done with more care than I take to put an idea up on Slashdot.
Step 2 could be modified such that the ISP actively searches for open relays and when one is found the owner of the system is contacted with a request to close said open relay within 3 days (and instructions as to how to do so, tailored for that specific situation), and if nothing is done within 3 days his/her connection should be shut down until such time as the open relay problem is fixed.
Do you have any idea of how many hundreds of thousands of pieces of spam can be sent in three days through a broadband connection? It's horrendous. With a risk like that, you can't let someone leave an open relay up. You need to shut it down, tell them, and bring it back up when they fix the problem.
So according to steps 1 and 5, you would fine the spammer literally thousands of dollars and then release his name to his "victims?" That seems just a little harsh.
I believe that recipients of spam have a right to take whatever legal action is appropriate in their state. For instance, Virginia's anti-spam law provides me an avenue to sue spammers (who forge message headers -- most do), but the ISPs protect the identity of spammers better than the Witness Protection Program protects mob informants. I should not have to take a day off of work and pay $150 to get a subpeona so that I can exercise my legal rights.
Spammers will still find some way to get around those and other methods of thwarting them.
Spam is the simplist thing in the world to control. People spam because it's cheap, easy, and relatively risk-free. Make them deal with angry phone calls and lawsuits from the victims, and fines from their ISPs and the level of spam will plummet. If a spam run gets the spammer 58 orders for "herbal Viagra", $7,000 in fines to his ISP, and 3 lawsuits, I think he'll look for legitimate work rather than continuing his life of cyberscamming.
Okay, if you were a reputable ISP, how would you go about shutting down spammers?
Step 1: Create a contract that specifically spells out penalties per spam that are prohibitively expensive (e.g., $1000 + $5 per e-mail). Define spam in clear, uncertain terms.
Step 2: Create a similar open relay penalty. If the customer creates an open relay, all mail sent through it will be treated as if the customer sent it. As a service to the customer, identify, and require the use of, open relay testing services.
Step 3: Create a similar policy prohibiting the customer from advertising his/her web site via third-party spam or using any system within the ISP's IP space as an e-mail drop-box associated with spam.
Step 4. Require that your customer provide you real, complete, and legitimate proof of identity.
Step 5: Contractually spell out that the you will identify the customer by name, address, and phone number to anyone who can prove, to your satisfaction, that they received spam from the customer.
Step 6: Shut down access to port 25 outgoing from the customer's connection.
Step 7: Require that all outgoing e-mail be relayed through the ISP's SMTP server (step 6 pretty much guarantees this).
Step 8: Immediately take down any customer web site advertised via spam and do not allow the site back online until the customer proves that he was not responsible for the spam. If it's a residential connection being used for a for-profit web site, take it down and don't bring it back up.
That will be a damned good start and is unlikely to inconvenience a legitimate customer.
I run my own mail server and firewall. I selectively deny packets to my mail server (port 25) with the firewall. As of this time, I have basically blocked every Asian IP block that I can identify.
Maybe, in a few years, Asians will learn to the rules of the road on the information superhighway and how to operate computers on it, but, until/unless that happens, I'll just keep blocking e-mail from Asia.
What ever happened to Del, Ctrl-C,Ctrl-V(or Shift-Insert)
Well, Del is not the same as cut (Ctrl-X). In answer to your question, they all work, but I've gotten used to cut, copy, and paste keys on the Sun keyboards at work. My little finger would appreciate the rest from repeatedly pushing the CTRL key for everything.
Microsoft! Do something good for the users! Bring back the original Natural keyboard!
I felt the same way that you did and then I got a Natural Pro keyboard. Very nice. Good feel. Same layout on the arrow keys and the Insert/Delete/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown key block. It adds a bunch of keys to do things like bring up e-mail, the web browser, etc. They can all be reprogrammed (can you say "cut, copy, paste"?) and the ones for volume and mute are downright useful as they are. You really should give it a try.
Is there some sort of disadvantage to SCSI going the way of the dinosaur as a standard if IDE moves in to accomodate the same featureset, give or take, as the customers request?
That's a big "if." Right now, SCSI allows many devices per controller. The drives themselves are much more intelligent and respond to a much more advanced command set. The performance of SCSI drives is considerably better and are a genuine "must-have" for many I/O bound server applications. Of course, the IDE drives we have now have better performance than the SCSI drives of a few years ago, so both camps have been moving forwards.
IDE is a real bastard standard that grew out of an emulation of the primitive disk controllers on the IBM PC/XT and AT. Unlike the much more elegant SCSI standard, it's really a kludge. But, through constant improvements, it has become quite the workhorse, with very respectable performance.
What I find so frustrating is that SCSI does not have to cost an arm and a leg. There is nothing in the SCSI interface itself that adds hundreds of dollars to the price of a hard drive. In fact, about a decade ago, there was only a marginal price difference between SCSI and IDE. But drive manufacturers seem to have gotten greedy, charging far too much for SCSI drives. The drives themselves are often a generation behind IDE when it comes to data density. And the limited market caused by the stratospheric pricing means that SCSI is not getting the development that it needs to continue advancing in performance.
If UUNet goes away, then were will the spammers turn? Right now they have UUNet which says 'not our problem because the spammer is our customer's customer.' What happens if UUNet is taken over by a reputable ISP that shuts down spammers and those that harbor them?
I got onto Google, typed "Cindy McCaffrey", and pressed the I'm Feeling Lucky button. It didn't work out nearly as well as I had hoped. No phone number. No candid pics. Not even an e-mail address. I'm disappointed in Google.
Aha, you seem to have changed your tune. First you claimed that first class postage is underpriced and subsidized by BBM.
No, I said that it was a symbiotic relationship with BBM paying for bulk of mail processing and delivery costs.
Thanks, Uncle Sam, for making it possible for bulk mail to reach my residence cheaply by using a monopoly infrastructure required by law to be supplied by homebuilders: the mail box.
The magazines you subscribe to may be BBM. So are newsletters and catalogs you order. Homebuilders are not required by law to supply mailboxes, to the best of my knowledge.
You know, if you want to live in the country, perhaps you should get a PO box instead of expecting everyone else to "amortizedly" (ie socialistically) support your fat ass from having to drive down and pick up your God-given right to a letter at some central location. You're not going to die if you don't get your letters every freaking day of the week.
For well over a century, the federal government subsidized the USPS because they believed that open and affordable communications between citizens was important. I happen to agree and think that the current system of a fixed delivery rate is a fair one.
While you like to refer to the "fat ass" people living "in the country", what about the elderly, disabled, etc.? Are they supposed to "just drive" to some central location that might be 50 or more miles away? Do we want to discourage people from living in vast areas of our country while encouraging them to bunch-up in ever more crowded and polluted cities? I think not and penalizing someone for settling in a remote location is not my idea of good public policy.
UPS could deliver for a buck, I'm sure. They've proven that.
In many cases, UPS Ground shipments to very rural destinations get sent via the USPS (didn't know that, did you?) because delivery costs are too high for UPS to do it.
Ridiculous! Your comment flies in the face of experience and common sense.
I just showed you an example of the USPS delivering overnight cheaper than FedEx. If the USPS had to make a profit on the delivery, I'm sure the rates would have been higher.
Dude. The entire concept of Open Source Software flies in the face of regression testing.
If a firm develops an open-source app and regression tests it, I can trust it. If I change it, then all bets are off. But the goal of United Linux is to make the Linux platform appealing to application developers, including commercial, closed source applications. When you play swap-the-dll on them, you make support more difficult and expensive.
Oh yeah, that's right, you trust that the kernel developers won't break documented features that they expose - the same is true with library developers: a library developer can be trusted to not break functionality between minor versions. A good one anyway.
You may trust them, but I've seen enough problems to know that I want as much control of my app as possible. If I test it with whatever.dll version 6.3.1.4, then I want 6.3.1.4 on the system, not some version that someone thought would work better.
Yeah. Office 2000 and Photoshop 6.0 crash on me all the time. Buggy as hell. You're right.
Well, if you aren't aware of the bugs and if they don't result in a complete crash, then they don't exist, right? Try going to the Microsoft Knowledge Base for, say, Word 2000 and searching for the phrase "Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem". The search maxes out at 150 results. God (and Bill) only knows how many bugs really exist.
Thank fuck someone (SCSI manufacturers) aims for the much smaller former market where size*speed per unit price little importance.
I was running SCSI back in 1984 and have, until recently, always had SCSI hard drives. I've even got a SCSI 700GB autoloader tape drive at home, so forgive me if I'm unimpressed with your supposed high-end tastes.
You ignore the market for a more balanced solution -- something faster and more reliable than run-of-the-mill IDE but not at nosebleed prices of the current crop of SCSI drives. What would be wrong with offering some 7,200rpm SCSI drives at affordable prices? Why cut off that entire segment of the marketplace? Despite your oversimplified claims, there are not just two types of hard drive purchasers. There are many types. And the any factor or combination of factors (speed, reliability, quiet operation, cost, capacity, physical size, vibration resistance, heat dissipation, etc.) could be key to any given purchaser.
IDE is being used more and more where SCSI was once king. Even many of the Sun workstations at my client's facility are IDE now. And the IDE manufacturers are answering the call of those who want more performance. Western Digital has introduced "Special Edition" IDE drives with 8mb caches for the performance-minded. Maxtor has introduced an ATA-133 that permits larger drives to be used on IDE. The story under which we are posting is about Serial ATA with its smaller cables and hot-swap capability. If IDE keeps eroding away the SCSI market, the SCSI market will become too small to be worth servicing. Don't forget other high-performance drive interfaces like SMD and ESDI that went away.
Maybe prices down at something reasonable. I just saw an 80GB Maxtor SCSI drive at Microcenter. The price? $800!!! I can understand a premium for SCSI, but let's be realistic about it. When I can get 80GB ATA100 Maxtor drives for $75-$80 after rebate, $800 is just out of the question. Most users would see more of a performance increase by purchasing an 80GB IDE drive and buying ooh-gobs of RAM with the savings.
And this is coming from someone that used to run an all-SCSI system prior to the prices going through the ceiling. I think that by making SCSI something only used for high-end systems, they have relegated it to a slow death.
Staticically linked libraries are not a 'far superior' development model. Seriously. If you want to use your system efficiently, you really don't want every application completely self-contained. That's a lot of redundancy, and thereofre, al ot of waste.
My last 80GB, 7,200rpm hard drive cost me $75 after rebates. Thus the redundency and waste arguments are just not relevent to most people. I'd much rather buy a larger hard disk than give up system stability.
Not to mention the distribution of bug fixes. Linux or Windows, it's much nicer if I can download/build a new.so or.dll to fix a problem in a library used in a number of applications, without having to rebuild every single one.
And what happens when the "new and improved".dll does not work properly with an existing app? That's happened over and over in the Windows world. Suddenly CD burning stops and it turns out that something replaced one ASPI-related.dll with an older or newer version that is incompatible.
The entire concept of.dll files flies in the face of software regression testing. If the software that I deliver to you can be changed because you installed software from Adobe, Microsoft, or AOL (that replaced a shared.dll), what good was my testing?
Welcome to the world of modern software.
You act like "modern software" is somehow better than older software. In fact, the number of bugs that exist in the typical business application dwarfs its equivalent from a decade ago.
But all of that aside, the shared.dll concept is like disk compression software -- an answer to a problem (expensive, limited disk storage) that no longer exists.
Only relative to milk delivery. Perhaps this shows only that mail delivery was originally very expensive.
I think that you have it backwards if you're trying to show that today's first class mail delivery is expensive now. But feel free to look up information on adjusting for inflation and you will see that mail delivery is probably less than 20% as expensive (adjusted for inflation) as it used to be.
Isn't it illegal for anyone else to do it?
It is only illegal for some other BBM carrier to use your U.S. mailbox for delivery. That's really to protect you so that random people cannot legally rifle through your mail, mix up their deliveries with your outgoing mail, etc. But any private company can deliver printed advertising to your home.
Why not?
Because the cost of delivering mail to very rural areas is subsidized by people sending mail to urban areas. If you let private carriers suck off all of the profitable, high-volume routes, the USPS will be left with a tiny fraction of the mail volume and it will solely be for delivery to extremely rural areas. Then there are only two choices:
1. Direct subsidize with tax dollars to keep postage affordable for those people.
2. $10 first class mail stamps.
The USPS keeps postage reasonable by amortizing costs over large numbers of mail pieces. Reduce the mail volume to 5% of what it is now, and it doesn't reduce the costs an equivalent amount. The cost for fuel to transport 10 lettters is just about the same as to transport 10,000. The carrier is paid the same whether he delivers an average of 10 letters per house or 1. Reduce the mail volume that much and you will have to go back to manual sorting of the mail, which is slow and expensive compared to the automated sorting (automated sorting is economical only with large mail volumes.)
The government is not a good business operator and is not in business to make a profit.
That's an overly generalized statement. When the USPS introduced their overnight delivery service (Express Mail), their rates were cheaper than FedEx. FedEx immediately called foul and complained that the lower rates from the USPS were unfair competition from the government. Result? The USPS was forced to raise its rates for Express Mail so as to not undercut FedEx and other overnight carriers.
Making a profit means that you are charged more than the cost to provide the service. That surely does not make for lower rates.
The original post, annotated for the counting-impaired:
Yes! Yes! Oh God, Yes! And talking with someone [use number 1] so skilled in the use of Google to look up old Usenet postings gets me even wetter!
All sarcasm aside, if someone [use number 2] can't spell simple words like "caliber", can't differentiate between a proposal and actions, and thinks that it's illegal to use the phone late at night, what's the point?
You then go on to say:
Based on what I see, you have a single list seperated[sic] by "and," confusing actions 1 and 3 with action 2.
I admit to being stumped by this one. I have no idea what you are trying to say.
As an aside, in New York, it is illegal to make phone calls with the intent to harass. Article 240 of the New York State Penal Code, Section 240.30, Aggravated harassment in the second degree, a class A misdemeanor punishible by a fine of not more than $1,000 and/or a jail sentence not to exceed one year.
I don't live in New York, but if you do, then you have broken that law numerous times during this exchange since the law states:
A person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm another person, he or she:
1. Communicates, or causes a communication to be initiated by mechanical or electronic means or otherwise, with a person, anonymously or otherwise, by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm;
So, I eagerly await a response from you in which you admit:
1. That you failed to properly count the number of times that I used the pronoun "someone" (two times).
2. That the messages you sent in this thread would be criminalized in New York by the very statute that you cited.
Some ethics would be in place, this guy SOLD it to network associates, it's quite immoral for him to request them to open source it now!
How is it immoral for him to make that request? Suppose that you sold a car to your neighbor. Two years later, you find it rusting on blocks in their front lawn. Would it be immoral of you to politely suggest that they donate it to a worthy charity? I think not.
What possible relevance does the price of milk delivered in 1847 have to the price of a letter delivered today?
It shows the effect of inflation and that letter delivery costs have dropped dramatically in real dollars.
The only thing that BBM people are subsidizing is the infrastructure to send BBM around, from your description.
No, BBM is subsidizing the infrastructure to send first class mail. There is insufficient first class mail to pay for salaries, facilities costs, mail transport, etc. I get, maybe, 3 pieces of first class mail per week and probably 50 pieces of BBM. It's the first class mail that's just going along for the ride.
Anyhow, as long as the Post Office is a monopoly in the original, true sense of the word (a government-mandated single source of first class mail service), I will know that both BBM and first class mail are more expensive than they need to be.
Since BBM is not first class mail, if there was a way to deliver it cheaper, then why is no one doing it?
As to the reasons for government mandated monopolies, the government recognizes that it is important that everyone in the country have mail service. Privatize it and you will find countless companies willing to deliver to New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Of course everyone in rural areas of Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska can forget about ever having mail delivery again.
If the government is going to mandate that the USPS deliver to every home and business in the U.S., they can't very well let FedEx, UPS, and DHL cherry-pick all of the lucrative markets away.
the USPS loses money every year. somewhere around the billion mark. Its basically funded by the government,
Untrue. Congress has decreed that the USPS be an independent, self-supporting agency and that postal rates be based on the costs of delivering the various classes of mail. Congress in 1993 removed its own authority to provide appropriations to subsidize preferential rates. The exception is free mail for the blind.
Congress has retained some preferential rates, but required that rates cover direct costs attributable to each class of preferential mail. The last of six stepped increases to reach this 1993 requirement took effect in the fall of 1998.
Slashdot Mirror
Overpeer.com is getting IP service through Telemerc who, in turn, gets service through Sprintlink.net. Accroding to the Sprintlink.net's Acceptable Use Police , the following are prohibited:
7. Knowingly engage in any activities that will cause a denial-of-service (e.g., synchronized number sequence attacks) to any Sprint customers or end-users whether on the Sprint network or on another provider's network.
and
9. Using Sprint's Services to interfere with the use of the Sprint network by other customers or authorized users.
That's practically a description of overpeer.com's business model. They use their bogus material to interfere with the use of P2P services and to effectively create a Denial of Service attack against P2P services.
I encourage Slashdot readers to contact Telemerc and Sprintlink at helpdesk@telemerc.net and abuse@sprintlink.net respectively and explain (in a civil manner) that you wish them to stop providing services to Overpeer because of the DoS business model.
You put up a lot of things that you don't think would be inconvenient, but you don't actually know how the customers would react, so the convenient/inconvenient argument is pretty moot.
Since I run a domain and have a lot of experience with it, I do know what will cause inconvenience.
So in effect, it is not as direct as you have made it out to be.
Yes it is. If the spammer can't get to a mail server to send his spam, game over. The port 25 block does that.
Wouldn't you only be able to sue a spammer who is based in the same state as you are?
No. AOL has successfully sued many spammers in Virginia courts even though the spammers did not reside in Virginia.
Schwaab said: "We would sort of characterize their mode of transport more along the lines of wallowing."
Hey! That describes a significant number of Slashdot readers. Are we going to poison the basements in which they live next?
A lot of those do seem pretty inconvenient
Which ones? None of them prevent you from running mail servers, receiving mail from other mail servers, running a web server, FTP server, etc. If you don't spam, then the only one that would apply to you would be number 4: providing your ISP with proof of identity.
I don't like step 4, as there is no assurance that the ISP will not then sell that information to shady characters
The privacy policy would guarantee that. There is no legitimate reason to falsify your identity when signing up with an ISP. You are entering into a business contract with them and part of entering into a contract is both parties properly identifying themselves.
and I don't like step 6. What exactly would that block?
It would prevent you from using open relays to send e-mail. You could not connect to some open relay in Korea and send mail. You would have to send outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server. Many ISPs already do this type of blocking.
Would that stop someone from having their own mail server?
Absolutely not. Blocking port 25 incoming would, but not outgoing. I have my own mail server and I relay outgoing messages through my ISP's mail server. That way they do the DNS and I don't have to directly connect to other mail servers.
In step 7, would that require that all email sent from an account such as Hotmail go through your servers as well?
Obviously that's not the intent and the wording would have to be something done with more care than I take to put an idea up on Slashdot.
Step 2 could be modified such that the ISP actively searches for open relays and when one is found the owner of the system is contacted with a request to close said open relay within 3 days (and instructions as to how to do so, tailored for that specific situation), and if nothing is done within 3 days his/her connection should be shut down until such time as the open relay problem is fixed.
Do you have any idea of how many hundreds of thousands of pieces of spam can be sent in three days through a broadband connection? It's horrendous. With a risk like that, you can't let someone leave an open relay up. You need to shut it down, tell them, and bring it back up when they fix the problem.
So according to steps 1 and 5, you would fine the spammer literally thousands of dollars and then release his name to his "victims?" That seems just a little harsh.
I believe that recipients of spam have a right to take whatever legal action is appropriate in their state. For instance, Virginia's anti-spam law provides me an avenue to sue spammers (who forge message headers -- most do), but the ISPs protect the identity of spammers better than the Witness Protection Program protects mob informants. I should not have to take a day off of work and pay $150 to get a subpeona so that I can exercise my legal rights.
Spammers will still find some way to get around those and other methods of thwarting them.
Spam is the simplist thing in the world to control. People spam because it's cheap, easy, and relatively risk-free. Make them deal with angry phone calls and lawsuits from the victims, and fines from their ISPs and the level of spam will plummet. If a spam run gets the spammer 58 orders for "herbal Viagra", $7,000 in fines to his ISP, and 3 lawsuits, I think he'll look for legitimate work rather than continuing his life of cyberscamming.
Okay, if you were a reputable ISP, how would you go about shutting down spammers?
Step 1: Create a contract that specifically spells out penalties per spam that are prohibitively expensive (e.g., $1000 + $5 per e-mail). Define spam in clear, uncertain terms.
Step 2: Create a similar open relay penalty. If the customer creates an open relay, all mail sent through it will be treated as if the customer sent it. As a service to the customer, identify, and require the use of, open relay testing services.
Step 3: Create a similar policy prohibiting the customer from advertising his/her web site via third-party spam or using any system within the ISP's IP space as an e-mail drop-box associated with spam.
Step 4. Require that your customer provide you real, complete, and legitimate proof of identity.
Step 5: Contractually spell out that the you will identify the customer by name, address, and phone number to anyone who can prove, to your satisfaction, that they received spam from the customer.
Step 6: Shut down access to port 25 outgoing from the customer's connection.
Step 7: Require that all outgoing e-mail be relayed through the ISP's SMTP server (step 6 pretty much guarantees this).
Step 8: Immediately take down any customer web site advertised via spam and do not allow the site back online until the customer proves that he was not responsible for the spam. If it's a residential connection being used for a for-profit web site, take it down and don't bring it back up.
That will be a damned good start and is unlikely to inconvenience a legitimate customer.
I run my own mail server and firewall. I selectively deny packets to my mail server (port 25) with the firewall. As of this time, I have basically blocked every Asian IP block that I can identify.
Maybe, in a few years, Asians will learn to the rules of the road on the information superhighway and how to operate computers on it, but, until/unless that happens, I'll just keep blocking e-mail from Asia.
What ever happened to Del, Ctrl-C,Ctrl-V(or Shift-Insert)
Well, Del is not the same as cut (Ctrl-X). In answer to your question, they all work, but I've gotten used to cut, copy, and paste keys on the Sun keyboards at work. My little finger would appreciate the rest from repeatedly pushing the CTRL key for everything.
Microsoft! Do something good for the users! Bring back the original Natural keyboard!
I felt the same way that you did and then I got a Natural Pro keyboard. Very nice. Good feel. Same layout on the arrow keys and the Insert/Delete/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown key block. It adds a bunch of keys to do things like bring up e-mail, the web browser, etc. They can all be reprogrammed (can you say "cut, copy, paste"?) and the ones for volume and mute are downright useful as they are. You really should give it a try.
Is there some sort of disadvantage to SCSI going the way of the dinosaur as a standard if IDE moves in to accomodate the same featureset, give or take, as the customers request?
That's a big "if." Right now, SCSI allows many devices per controller. The drives themselves are much more intelligent and respond to a much more advanced command set. The performance of SCSI drives is considerably better and are a genuine "must-have" for many I/O bound server applications. Of course, the IDE drives we have now have better performance than the SCSI drives of a few years ago, so both camps have been moving forwards.
IDE is a real bastard standard that grew out of an emulation of the primitive disk controllers on the IBM PC/XT and AT. Unlike the much more elegant SCSI standard, it's really a kludge. But, through constant improvements, it has become quite the workhorse, with very respectable performance.
What I find so frustrating is that SCSI does not have to cost an arm and a leg. There is nothing in the SCSI interface itself that adds hundreds of dollars to the price of a hard drive. In fact, about a decade ago, there was only a marginal price difference between SCSI and IDE. But drive manufacturers seem to have gotten greedy, charging far too much for SCSI drives. The drives themselves are often a generation behind IDE when it comes to data density. And the limited market caused by the stratospheric pricing means that SCSI is not getting the development that it needs to continue advancing in performance.
It was sarcasm...
If UUNet goes away, then were will the spammers turn? Right now they have UUNet which says 'not our problem because the spammer is our customer's customer.' What happens if UUNet is taken over by a reputable ISP that shuts down spammers and those that harbor them?
I got onto Google, typed "Cindy McCaffrey", and pressed the I'm Feeling Lucky button. It didn't work out nearly as well as I had hoped. No phone number. No candid pics. Not even an e-mail address. I'm disappointed in Google.
Aha, you seem to have changed your tune. First you claimed that first class postage is underpriced and subsidized by BBM.
No, I said that it was a symbiotic relationship with BBM paying for bulk of mail processing and delivery costs.
Thanks, Uncle Sam, for making it possible for bulk mail to reach my residence cheaply by using a monopoly infrastructure required by law to be supplied by homebuilders: the mail box.
The magazines you subscribe to may be BBM. So are newsletters and catalogs you order. Homebuilders are not required by law to supply mailboxes, to the best of my knowledge.
You know, if you want to live in the country, perhaps you should get a PO box instead of expecting everyone else to "amortizedly" (ie socialistically) support your fat ass from having to drive down and pick up your God-given right to a letter at some central location. You're not going to die if you don't get your letters every freaking day of the week.
For well over a century, the federal government subsidized the USPS because they believed that open and affordable communications between citizens was important. I happen to agree and think that the current system of a fixed delivery rate is a fair one.
While you like to refer to the "fat ass" people living "in the country", what about the elderly, disabled, etc.? Are they supposed to "just drive" to some central location that might be 50 or more miles away? Do we want to discourage people from living in vast areas of our country while encouraging them to bunch-up in ever more crowded and polluted cities? I think not and penalizing someone for settling in a remote location is not my idea of good public policy.
UPS could deliver for a buck, I'm sure. They've proven that.
In many cases, UPS Ground shipments to very rural destinations get sent via the USPS (didn't know that, did you?) because delivery costs are too high for UPS to do it.
Ridiculous! Your comment flies in the face of experience and common sense.
I just showed you an example of the USPS delivering overnight cheaper than FedEx. If the USPS had to make a profit on the delivery, I'm sure the rates would have been higher.
Dude. The entire concept of Open Source Software flies in the face of regression testing.
If a firm develops an open-source app and regression tests it, I can trust it. If I change it, then all bets are off. But the goal of United Linux is to make the Linux platform appealing to application developers, including commercial, closed source applications. When you play swap-the-dll on them, you make support more difficult and expensive.
Oh yeah, that's right, you trust that the kernel developers won't break documented features that they expose - the same is true with library developers: a library developer can be trusted to not break functionality between minor versions. A good one anyway.
You may trust them, but I've seen enough problems to know that I want as much control of my app as possible. If I test it with whatever.dll version 6.3.1.4, then I want 6.3.1.4 on the system, not some version that someone thought would work better.
Yeah. Office 2000 and Photoshop 6.0 crash on me all the time. Buggy as hell. You're right.
Well, if you aren't aware of the bugs and if they don't result in a complete crash, then they don't exist, right? Try going to the Microsoft Knowledge Base for, say, Word 2000 and searching for the phrase "Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem". The search maxes out at 150 results. God (and Bill) only knows how many bugs really exist.
Thank fuck someone (SCSI manufacturers) aims for the much smaller former market where size*speed per unit price little importance.
I was running SCSI back in 1984 and have, until recently, always had SCSI hard drives. I've even got a SCSI 700GB autoloader tape drive at home, so forgive me if I'm unimpressed with your supposed high-end tastes.
You ignore the market for a more balanced solution -- something faster and more reliable than run-of-the-mill IDE but not at nosebleed prices of the current crop of SCSI drives. What would be wrong with offering some 7,200rpm SCSI drives at affordable prices? Why cut off that entire segment of the marketplace? Despite your oversimplified claims, there are not just two types of hard drive purchasers. There are many types. And the any factor or combination of factors (speed, reliability, quiet operation, cost, capacity, physical size, vibration resistance, heat dissipation, etc.) could be key to any given purchaser.
IDE is being used more and more where SCSI was once king. Even many of the Sun workstations at my client's facility are IDE now. And the IDE manufacturers are answering the call of those who want more performance. Western Digital has introduced "Special Edition" IDE drives with 8mb caches for the performance-minded. Maxtor has introduced an ATA-133 that permits larger drives to be used on IDE. The story under which we are posting is about Serial ATA with its smaller cables and hot-swap capability. If IDE keeps eroding away the SCSI market, the SCSI market will become too small to be worth servicing. Don't forget other high-performance drive interfaces like SMD and ESDI that went away.
So, what changes are you expecting?
Maybe prices down at something reasonable. I just saw an 80GB Maxtor SCSI drive at Microcenter. The price? $800!!! I can understand a premium for SCSI, but let's be realistic about it. When I can get 80GB ATA100 Maxtor drives for $75-$80 after rebate, $800 is just out of the question. Most users would see more of a performance increase by purchasing an 80GB IDE drive and buying ooh-gobs of RAM with the savings.
And this is coming from someone that used to run an all-SCSI system prior to the prices going through the ceiling. I think that by making SCSI something only used for high-end systems, they have relegated it to a slow death.
Staticically linked libraries are not a 'far superior' development model. Seriously. If you want to use your system efficiently, you really don't want every application completely self-contained. That's a lot of redundancy, and thereofre, al ot of waste.
.so or .dll to fix a problem in a library used in a number of applications, without having to rebuild every single one.
.dll does not work properly with an existing app? That's happened over and over in the Windows world. Suddenly CD burning stops and it turns out that something replaced one ASPI-related .dll with an older or newer version that is incompatible.
.dll files flies in the face of software regression testing. If the software that I deliver to you can be changed because you installed software from Adobe, Microsoft, or AOL (that replaced a shared .dll), what good was my testing?
.dll concept is like disk compression software -- an answer to a problem (expensive, limited disk storage) that no longer exists.
My last 80GB, 7,200rpm hard drive cost me $75 after rebates. Thus the redundency and waste arguments are just not relevent to most people. I'd much rather buy a larger hard disk than give up system stability.
Not to mention the distribution of bug fixes. Linux or Windows, it's much nicer if I can download/build a new
And what happens when the "new and improved"
The entire concept of
Welcome to the world of modern software.
You act like "modern software" is somehow better than older software. In fact, the number of bugs that exist in the typical business application dwarfs its equivalent from a decade ago.
But all of that aside, the shared
Only relative to milk delivery. Perhaps this shows only that mail delivery was originally very expensive.
I think that you have it backwards if you're trying to show that today's first class mail delivery is expensive now. But feel free to look up information on adjusting for inflation and you will see that mail delivery is probably less than 20% as expensive (adjusted for inflation) as it used to be.
Isn't it illegal for anyone else to do it?
It is only illegal for some other BBM carrier to use your U.S. mailbox for delivery. That's really to protect you so that random people cannot legally rifle through your mail, mix up their deliveries with your outgoing mail, etc. But any private company can deliver printed advertising to your home.
Why not?
Because the cost of delivering mail to very rural areas is subsidized by people sending mail to urban areas. If you let private carriers suck off all of the profitable, high-volume routes, the USPS will be left with a tiny fraction of the mail volume and it will solely be for delivery to extremely rural areas. Then there are only two choices:
1. Direct subsidize with tax dollars to keep postage affordable for those people.
2. $10 first class mail stamps.
The USPS keeps postage reasonable by amortizing costs over large numbers of mail pieces. Reduce the mail volume to 5% of what it is now, and it doesn't reduce the costs an equivalent amount. The cost for fuel to transport 10 lettters is just about the same as to transport 10,000. The carrier is paid the same whether he delivers an average of 10 letters per house or 1. Reduce the mail volume that much and you will have to go back to manual sorting of the mail, which is slow and expensive compared to the automated sorting (automated sorting is economical only with large mail volumes.)
The government is not a good business operator and is not in business to make a profit.
That's an overly generalized statement. When the USPS introduced their overnight delivery service (Express Mail), their rates were cheaper than FedEx. FedEx immediately called foul and complained that the lower rates from the USPS were unfair competition from the government. Result? The USPS was forced to raise its rates for Express Mail so as to not undercut FedEx and other overnight carriers.
Making a profit means that you are charged more than the cost to provide the service. That surely does not make for lower rates.
The original post, annotated for the counting-impaired:
You then go on to say:
Based on what I see, you have a single list seperated[sic] by "and," confusing actions 1 and 3 with action 2.
I admit to being stumped by this one. I have no idea what you are trying to say.
As an aside, in New York, it is illegal to make phone calls with the intent to harass. Article 240 of the New York State Penal Code, Section 240.30, Aggravated harassment in the second degree, a class A misdemeanor punishible by a fine of not more than $1,000 and/or a jail sentence not to exceed one year.
I don't live in New York, but if you do, then you have broken that law numerous times during this exchange since the law states:
So, I eagerly await a response from you in which you admit:
1. That you failed to properly count the number of times that I used the pronoun "someone" (two times).
2. That the messages you sent in this thread would be criminalized in New York by the very statute that you cited.
I didn't say it would be a good idea. I just said it would be an ethical one.
dont forget to take your viagra and prozac!
I understand the Prozac since he's a nut case. But the Viagra has me puzzled. Are you trying to make him into a fucking nut case?
Some ethics would be in place, this guy SOLD it to network associates, it's quite immoral for him to request them to open source it now!
How is it immoral for him to make that request? Suppose that you sold a car to your neighbor. Two years later, you find it rusting on blocks in their front lawn. Would it be immoral of you to politely suggest that they donate it to a worthy charity? I think not.
I'm not anonymous coward.
Nor did I claim you were. I was careful to say "someone" when replying to the AC poster. In fact, I used that pronoun twice in the response, didn't I?
When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
Don't blame me for the way that you are perceived.
What possible relevance does the price of milk delivered in 1847 have to the price of a letter delivered today?
It shows the effect of inflation and that letter delivery costs have dropped dramatically in real dollars.
The only thing that BBM people are subsidizing is the infrastructure to send BBM around, from your description.
No, BBM is subsidizing the infrastructure to send first class mail. There is insufficient first class mail to pay for salaries, facilities costs, mail transport, etc. I get, maybe, 3 pieces of first class mail per week and probably 50 pieces of BBM. It's the first class mail that's just going along for the ride.
Anyhow, as long as the Post Office is a monopoly in the original, true sense of the word (a government-mandated single source of first class mail service), I will know that both BBM and first class mail are more expensive than they need to be.
Since BBM is not first class mail, if there was a way to deliver it cheaper, then why is no one doing it?
As to the reasons for government mandated monopolies, the government recognizes that it is important that everyone in the country have mail service. Privatize it and you will find countless companies willing to deliver to New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Of course everyone in rural areas of Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska can forget about ever having mail delivery again.
If the government is going to mandate that the USPS deliver to every home and business in the U.S., they can't very well let FedEx, UPS, and DHL cherry-pick all of the lucrative markets away.
the USPS loses money every year. somewhere around the billion mark. Its basically funded by the government,
Untrue. Congress has decreed that the USPS be an independent, self-supporting agency and that postal rates be based on the costs of delivering the various classes of mail. Congress in 1993 removed its own authority to provide appropriations to subsidize preferential rates. The exception is free mail for the blind.
Congress has retained some preferential rates, but required that rates cover direct costs attributable to each class of preferential mail. The last of six stepped increases to reach this 1993 requirement took effect in the fall of 1998.