The story goes that at the height of the cold war DARPA was working on some machine language translation software. English to Russian and Russian to English. When the felt that they had finally got it right they set the system up to take a phrase in English, translate it to Russian, and then translate that back to English to see how closely the phrases matched.
The first researcher stepped up to the console and typed in: "Out of sight, out of mind." The computer returned: "An invisible lunatic."
Sorry, seemed like the right time to tell that one...
I've been here for a long time. It used to be that I would very rarely if ever read comments submitted by other Slashdotters as I was far more interested in TFA. But as time has gone on I find I am more interested in what others here have to say. Everybody has the same news stories now and it is the insights and comments from the people in this community that are the real value.
Not certain how you're planning to define "sponsors", but if you're planning to accept money from people who would like to mine this community for information I would caution you to tread carefully. You may be trying this on the wrong group of people...
This is a common problem with ancient religious texts as often they are fragmented, scattered, and in some cases the bits exists in different parts of the world. A type of recognition tech was used to help piece together parts of the dead sea scrolls:
I recall copying some of the original texts myself, and frankly, I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did in the earthenware jars we made for them.
Looks awesome, but it seems like it is only a matter of time before something fails on the communication end of things and the suit rips an arm or leg off or beats the operator senseless. I'll be watching for the youtube video.
That said, I plan to live to a very VERY old age and wear one of these to help me get around. They didn't mention the elderly as a possible target market, but I can see it.
Seriously, it is true when they say that "All the money in the world can't buy an ounce of class." If these thugs had any, they'd get a Conquest Vehicle like the Knight XV. It's put together on a Freightliner chassis and fore and aft night vision is standard. This thing makes a hummer look like a toy.
Understood - in terms of accounts you are correct. But my point is that with a typical daily maximum of simultaneous users, 15k represents about 33%. In other words, 1 out of every 3 ships you encounter is being piloted by a machine (at the best of times).
As for your assertion that it is players the world over that are accounting for the 15k on-line number, I was in the same boat as you. My play time was typically between 4am EST and 7am (on either side of DT). It wasn't very often that I ran into another human being while playing. Sure, maybe nobody wanted to speak English with me. And maybe they were really good about running back and forth from the asteroids to the stations, or from the stations to the planets. Was your experience different?
I don't envy CCP's position on this. Most of those macros are not owned by "gold farmers", they are owned by real players who use macros to get ahead in the game. If you kill them off you're going to lose those accounts and then some. If you don't kill them off then people who don't cheat are always at a disadvantage.
And how much of that as a direct or indirect result of the use of macros? There are 15,000 users on-line all the time in Eve. Moments after DT they are back. They're bots. And CCP can't afford to get rid of them.
Swear to me that neither you nor your corp benefit by macros. You can't. Even if your corp has a strict policy about it (which is probably doesn't) you can't say for sure that some of your members are cheating, nor can you say that outside organizations that you rely on for resources aren't cheating.
Eve is a simulation. It's fun in the same way that Sim City is fun. But to the point of TFA -- Eve is dying a slow death because while a Sim City MMO may seem like a good idea over a few beers, the challenges of implementing that genre in an MMO are high. Too high for the likes of CCP. At some point they've realized that and are pumping their money into other projects and giving their Eve user base only small expansions and bug fixes.
What will eventually happen to Eve and/or CCP? Probably not much (I don't think CCP is leveraged). But you may eventually find that you're flying around in a universe where the bots outnumber the players and you'll come to the realization that you're not actually playing an MMO anymore...
"If you have a 'smart meter' it is collecting data that can reveal when you wake up, when you leave for work and come home, when you go on vacation and when you take a shower"
No, my "smart" meter has been combined with TOU (Time of Use) billing, so naturally I installed 7 day programmable timers on everything. My ground source heat pump only comes on at night and brings the temperature up on my radiant floor heating system. My AC only comes on and cools the house when it is cheap to do so. My hot water tank heats up at night and provides me with enough hot water for the day. My dishwasher comes on in the middle of the night as well.
If they are gleaning any statistics from watching my energy usage, they might as well be using the slashdot poll results as well.
Good point. I warrant that the Slashdot crowd probably uses a cell phone in this manner less frequently than the general public. May be a good topic for a poll.
Does anyone actually hold a cell phone up to their head anymore? I certainly did from the early 1990s to about 2005 or so. But now? Using it in the car where I am is illegal so I've got a hands-free there. Often when I am travelling I will communicate via e-mail or text message (because they are the cheaper options). And when I am at my desk I use Skype more than anything else for both chat and calls (so I can still have both hands free for taking notes). I can't remember the last time I used my cell phone in the traditional sense (holding it up to my head for a call).
I have two teenagers both with cell phones and I haven't seen either one of them actually on a "phone call" in years. I rather suspect the practice is coming to and end for the next generation anyway.
Honestly, how much of our current problems would go away if we just stopped buying the cheapest crap we can find? Trade imbalances? Global pollution? Landfill? We really have to get away from the whole "I want it right now, and I want it cheap, and I don't care how crappy it is if it just makes me happy for a few minutes." Here is an idea: Do some research. Buy a quality product that will last you the rest of your life instead of one you have to throw away next week. And if you can't afford it right now? Save up until you have the money for it. Trust me. You'll appreciate it more.
I suppose it is true that the DSA test is going to fail if the sender doesn't exist. In that case you will have either a sending IP or a hostname and it will never match null. The point of the exercise is that the more suspicious you look, the more I'm going to penalize you (and the harder I'm going to make it for you to get me mail). I was trying to mimic what I would do if I was looking at the connection information myself.
Sending host IP doesn't resolve? Not good. No sender address? Not good. Sending host and sender domains don't match? Not good. Each time I find something wrong with your connection to me I increment acl_m6. Can you still send me mail if you've got a really broken setup? Yep, but it's going to make you work for it.
And if you're a spammer who's flaunting the law (maybe depending on where they are set up) and have set up your own mail server so you can easily get through all the checks? Spamhause will get you and it stops being my problem.:)
The following is a variant of greylisting. You can comment on it from your soapbox if you wish but I've been running it for about three years now and it works great. I put it together for my own use and I have no desire to document it, support it, or in any way promote it. I'm posting it here because I'm tiring of hearing people whine about spam. It uses Exim and mysql to get around some of the inherent limitations of greylisting as it was originally defined (specifically the mandatory "delay" in receiving e-mail from a new source and the requirement to roll-up large senders (like google) into an IP range. Everything is automatic and I don't have problems with mail delays.
Let me be clear. I don't care if you like it or not, or use it or not. It's just data if you want it or are interested.
I've thrown the rest of my posting into a journal entry as Slashdot nixed my posting here with "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." Seems as though Slashdot is making comments about my coding abilities... This is already more effort than I was hoping for.
Parkinson's Law, theorized by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British Royal Navy historian and author, explains this phenomenon by stating that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" and in bureaucratic organizations, the number of people required to do the work will continually rise whether the actual volume of work stays the same, increases, decreases or disappears.
The question is how much do Canadian artists get handed from the government in the existing "tax the media" scheme? I'd warrant they don't get anything and that the government keeps track of what they collect and injects "money into supporting artists, including more money for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Music Fund." (from TFA). I mean, what else could they do? Say I was a terrible artist (not too much of a stretch) and I put out a terrible album with nothing on it that anybody would want. Do I have my hand out for the MP3 tax? How much would the government give me? How would they determine that?
They can't. And they don't. This is a stupid idea based on another stupid idea.
Canada Music Fund They help you be successful as an artist. Oh the irony...
So they tax our media. Then they give it to bureaucratic organizations that consume themselves. And the indy rock band gets? You guessed it. The shaft.
And we are proposing to extend this to new media. Excellent. Let me just get out my wallet...
As usual the answer is not as straightforward as you might think, and judging by the posts on this thread nobody seems to know how EvE really works.
The "sandbox" aspect of EvE where everyone is in everyone else's universe is not actually one giant "realm" as it were. It is actually thousands of individual servers which control and manage distinct areas of the game world. As you move through the universe you actually move from server to server. There are, of course, central servers which need to understand common aspects of the game such as market and pilot information.
This is an architecture that is not shared by WoW in general. I'm not sure how what Blizzard has released with 3.3 differs from a "battleground" except that a "battlegroup" is a pre-defined entity where in this new instance you have no idea where people are going to come from. To me all this sounds like is a BG without a battlegroup.
So in summary:
WoW: Many isolated worlds connected by queued instances.
EvE: Distributed single world connected by central database and networking.
So to answer your question, no, EvE would not burn to the ground if even half the number of users tried to use it. But it would require a careful expansion of the known universe to ensure that there was an even distribution of world resources and thus pilots in its space.
Throw the thing into a canoe and start mapping waterways. Some of the most amazing scenery in the world is only accessible by water (still). If people saw it on-line perhaps they would be motivated to rent a canoe or kayak and get out on the water.
Practically, that thing won't fit in a canoe (unless it is a voyageur canoe), you would probably need the camera mounted on some sort of steadycam, and your going to have to pay attention to battery life. But I think that would be a very cool project.
My experience has been quite the opposite of the story summary. I've been on a line-of-sight wireless connection for two and a half years now, with two different providers and two different frequencies (900 MHz and 2.4 GHz). I have found the service to be slow and unreliable, and I live on farmland (no trees, mountains, large buildings, etc. To get in the way). The most I can say about my current provider is the service sucks less than the first one. In that case it was so bad I was able to get out of a 3yr contract.
The speed (as mentioned in a previous post) is very slow - VPN access to the office is *just* do-able, but don't try to do anything else at the same time. You can play on-line games such as WoW and Eve without much trouble from a latency standpoint, but having your link go down is not fun.
I have an unlimited cellular data plan I keep as a backup and I am working with my local council to get better broadband penetration in my area.
I recently purchased a MacBook Pro with an SSD (my first SSD), and I noticed that when it was booting or when I was loading applications I was making the hard drive chattering sounds with my mind -- sub'ing them in where they were supposed to be.
Odd, yes. But after 20 years of hard drive noises I *expect* them to be there. I wonder how long it will be before I find the noises on laptops with hard drives odd. "Hey, what's that sound...."
And no, so far the hard drive noises in my mind haven't told me to do anything...
Thank you. My Mother-in-law just evacuated from her place near Crestline, and not being from California, or even the U.S. I was having trouble getting the kind of information you just provided. Thank you thank you thank you.
She's checked into a motel half way to Palm Springs and has e-mail us to let us know she is okay. Again, much like the original article she is using Internet technology to get the word out.
Cheers!
Thanks for your response. I just sent your counterpart at IBM a lengthy probing e-mail about this which I can summarize as:
1. Real stream or fake stream? 2. Points for cost effectiveness? 3. Points for scalable/redundant architecture?
I applaud what you are doing and I wish you the best success (contests like this are good at stimulating inventiveness). I've been racking by brain trying to figure out how you could do this in a way that wouldn't be discriminatory. The best I could come up with would be to create a bunch of new domains (ceas-t1.org to ceas-t1000.org or whatever), then seed e-mail addresses on these domains with the spamming community. During the contest you insert legitimate e-mails into the stream by sending them from previously-undisclosed servers. The problem is how do you gauge success if you don't know what junk e-mail has been sent to the domain. You can't relay it because that instantly makes the test invalid. This technique would require previous statistics and a long lead time. Even then it would be possible for rival competitors to sabotage other entrants tests if you knew the domains being used...
Alternatively you would have to use an existing domain with known stats and perform the contest in a sequential fashion. Again, this becomes very time consuming and there are risks associated with doing it fairly. In short, I cannot think of a good way to do this.
I have developed a technique called GDSA which is quite effective, scalable, cost effective, but which in part relies on spammers needs to remain anonymous. This technique will not work in your contest (despite its effectiveness in the real world), and I will be unable to enter (unfortunately).
That said, it is easy to criticize, but difficult to be constructive. If I can think of a legitimate technique I will let you know.
"This ought to be a sweeps week television spectacular." This ought to be ignored as the contest is flawed.
"Ha ha, silly admin. My money's on greylisting." They're sending a stream of spam from where? Sounds like a real mail server...
From TFA: "Live email stream, delivered by standard protocols (SMTP, IMAP, POP)" [One wonders how else they would deliver e-mail if it was not from standard protocols. I also wonder how they plan on delivering e-mail using POP... The mind boggles...]
In any case if I read this correctly this effectively eliminates anti-spam technologies which work on the premise that the spam is coming from illegitimate mail servers. One of these techniques is greylisting. Meaning, greylisting will not work. So if I were you, I wouldn't put your money on it.
GENERAL JUNK E-MAIL FILTERING RANT (You've been warned): If you're using an anti-spam technique which takes more cpu cycles to execute than it takes for the spammer to send the damn spam in the first place, you've already lost this war. In other words, as long as it's costing you more than it is costing him/her you will always be on the losing end of the deal.
And I would like to add that despite my post above, I agree with you that greylisting and its derivatives when properly deployed are excellent techniques for eliminating UBE. But I think this contest is engineered to ignore that fact.
I didn't mention bootcamp, but in fact I did use that along with and in addition to parallels (parallels has the ability to use the bootcamp Windows partition which is really nice, but it also means you need to put a call into Microsoft to re-activate Windows and try to explain to the guy what it is you are trying to do). My wife and I talked about the idea of just having her use bootcamp and booting into XP (which I purchased to try to fix this issue) until Microsoft came out with a natively-compiled version of Office. In the end, however, we decided that since Apple was under no obligation to continue to support the Windows drivers that come with bootcamp, and that bootcamp is in fact still beta software, that it was at least somewhat risky. You have to put all of this in the context of an individual who absolutely MUST get her work done without issue.
This was further complicated by the fact that at one point Bootcamp went south (I don't understand how this happens) and she was no longer able to boot the Windows partition until she went back into OS X and re-installed Bootcamp.
It is true that you can do what you say. The decision that must be made is do you live a little on the edge, or do you stick to a situation where things are built and supported with each other. In my case, I am an enterprise architect and I use Visio under VMware fusion. But I am a geek (albeit an old one) and I don't have any issue with that. In her case, it doesn't make sense to risk it. It depends on the individual.
In all my years on Slashdot I never imagined that anybody would accuse me of making something up... I'm having a hard time imagining why I would do that. You should respect your elders.:-)
I recently switched my wife back from OS X to Windows (Vista). She is a language geek and works as an editor and occasional writer in the financial sector. The experience of having her as a Mac user was completely maddening, something you wouldn't expect given her profession. She lasted almost two full months as a Mac user. There were two deciding factors to the switch back:
Microsoft Word was not fast enough on the Mac
Microsoft Word was not 100% completely compatible with Microsoft Word on the PC
Let me tackle each of these in turn (put down your flamethrowers right now).
The current version of Word on the Mac is compiled for the PPC and runs through Rosetta. While most people report that Word runs "just fine" through Rosetta, the fact is, it doesn't for people who work like my wife does. Fast. Demanding. Has a lot of work and isn't going to wait around patiently for her last action to complete. Yes, I did all of the tweaks to speed up her Mac (the best MacBook Pro money could buy (2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB disk)). Yes, I even allocated more RAM for Rosetta.
And before you ask, yes, I ran Word 2003 in Parallels. Yes, I ran it under VMware Fusion. And yes, I ran in under Crossover for Mac. The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC (in this case a brand new Vaio which I had to buy to replace the MacBook Pro). Both of these computers had exactly the same specs.
As for the second problem, it cannot be over-emphasized. You cannot submit a report back to a client which looks like trash in *their* version of Word. Word 2003 is *not* Word 2004. And the upcoming Word 2008 will *not* be Word 2007. Any alteration in a document which is advising investors to spend billions on a particular equity is not acceptable. No, she couldn't use Open Office. Or anything else. And yes, she also tried to save the document using compatibility mode.
RANT: ON
We both hated to go back. She loved the Mac. Anybody who thinks that Microsoft should be really worried about Apple is a little delusional. Microsoft doesn't make software, they make money (which explains why their software sucks - ask me about this sometime). They've also invested heavily in Apple (when Apple makes money, Microsoft makes money). And they are releasing and continuing to develop Office for the Mac, because it is profitable for them. And will continue to be. Sure, Microsoft would like to own every single aspect of the computing market, because that would make them the most money. But when they can't, they hedge their bets (Corel, Apple, most recently Novel).
RANT: OFF
By the way, moving from Microsoft Entourage to Microsoft Outlook is a total pain. You would think this would be straightforward, but no. And if you're one of those who think Micosoft tries to make it hard to move from the PC to Mac on purpose, just try moving back. It's even worse. Ultimately I just set her up with IMAP and had her re-create all her folders (she had hundreds) and copy her mail up to one of my mail servers. Mail is better that way anyway...
As for the MacBook Pro, I'm downloading FC6 right now:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The story goes that at the height of the cold war DARPA was working on some machine language translation software. English to Russian and Russian to English. When the felt that they had finally got it right they set the system up to take a phrase in English, translate it to Russian, and then translate that back to English to see how closely the phrases matched.
The first researcher stepped up to the console and typed in: "Out of sight, out of mind."
The computer returned: "An invisible lunatic."
Sorry, seemed like the right time to tell that one...
I've been here for a long time. It used to be that I would very rarely if ever read comments submitted by other Slashdotters as I was far more interested in TFA. But as time has gone on I find I am more interested in what others here have to say. Everybody has the same news stories now and it is the insights and comments from the people in this community that are the real value.
Not certain how you're planning to define "sponsors", but if you're planning to accept money from people who would like to mine this community for information I would caution you to tread carefully. You may be trying this on the wrong group of people...
Hope it boots!
This is a common problem with ancient religious texts as often they are fragmented, scattered, and in some cases the bits exists in different parts of the world. A type of recognition tech was used to help piece together parts of the dead sea scrolls:
http://www.livescience.com/16620-digitized-cairo-genizah-texts.html
I recall copying some of the original texts myself, and frankly, I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did in the earthenware jars we made for them.
Looks awesome, but it seems like it is only a matter of time before something fails on the communication end of things and the suit rips an arm or leg off or beats the operator senseless. I'll be watching for the youtube video.
That said, I plan to live to a very VERY old age and wear one of these to help me get around. They didn't mention the elderly as a possible target market, but I can see it.
Seriously, it is true when they say that "All the money in the world can't buy an ounce of class." If these thugs had any, they'd get a Conquest Vehicle like the Knight XV. It's put together on a Freightliner chassis and fore and aft night vision is standard. This thing makes a hummer look like a toy.
As for your assertion that it is players the world over that are accounting for the 15k on-line number, I was in the same boat as you. My play time was typically between 4am EST and 7am (on either side of DT). It wasn't very often that I ran into another human being while playing. Sure, maybe nobody wanted to speak English with me. And maybe they were really good about running back and forth from the asteroids to the stations, or from the stations to the planets. Was your experience different?
I don't envy CCP's position on this. Most of those macros are not owned by "gold farmers", they are owned by real players who use macros to get ahead in the game. If you kill them off you're going to lose those accounts and then some. If you don't kill them off then people who don't cheat are always at a disadvantage.
Have you ever used macros in the game?
Swear to me that neither you nor your corp benefit by macros. You can't. Even if your corp has a strict policy about it (which is probably doesn't) you can't say for sure that some of your members are cheating, nor can you say that outside organizations that you rely on for resources aren't cheating.
Eve is a simulation. It's fun in the same way that Sim City is fun. But to the point of TFA -- Eve is dying a slow death because while a Sim City MMO may seem like a good idea over a few beers, the challenges of implementing that genre in an MMO are high. Too high for the likes of CCP. At some point they've realized that and are pumping their money into other projects and giving their Eve user base only small expansions and bug fixes.
What will eventually happen to Eve and/or CCP? Probably not much (I don't think CCP is leveraged). But you may eventually find that you're flying around in a universe where the bots outnumber the players and you'll come to the realization that you're not actually playing an MMO anymore...
"If you have a 'smart meter' it is collecting data that can reveal when you wake up, when you leave for work and come home, when you go on vacation and when you take a shower" No, my "smart" meter has been combined with TOU (Time of Use) billing, so naturally I installed 7 day programmable timers on everything. My ground source heat pump only comes on at night and brings the temperature up on my radiant floor heating system. My AC only comes on and cools the house when it is cheap to do so. My hot water tank heats up at night and provides me with enough hot water for the day. My dishwasher comes on in the middle of the night as well. If they are gleaning any statistics from watching my energy usage, they might as well be using the slashdot poll results as well.
Good point. I warrant that the Slashdot crowd probably uses a cell phone in this manner less frequently than the general public. May be a good topic for a poll.
I have two teenagers both with cell phones and I haven't seen either one of them actually on a "phone call" in years. I rather suspect the practice is coming to and end for the next generation anyway.
Honestly, how much of our current problems would go away if we just stopped buying the cheapest crap we can find? Trade imbalances? Global pollution? Landfill? We really have to get away from the whole "I want it right now, and I want it cheap, and I don't care how crappy it is if it just makes me happy for a few minutes." Here is an idea: Do some research. Buy a quality product that will last you the rest of your life instead of one you have to throw away next week. And if you can't afford it right now? Save up until you have the money for it. Trust me. You'll appreciate it more.
Monitor the results.
Sending host IP doesn't resolve? Not good. No sender address? Not good. Sending host and sender domains don't match? Not good. Each time I find something wrong with your connection to me I increment acl_m6. Can you still send me mail if you've got a really broken setup? Yep, but it's going to make you work for it.
And if you're a spammer who's flaunting the law (maybe depending on where they are set up) and have set up your own mail server so you can easily get through all the checks? Spamhause will get you and it stops being my problem. :)
Let me be clear. I don't care if you like it or not, or use it or not. It's just data if you want it or are interested.
I've thrown the rest of my posting into a journal entry as Slashdot nixed my posting here with "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." Seems as though Slashdot is making comments about my coding abilities... This is already more effort than I was hoping for.
Parkinson's Law, theorized by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British Royal Navy historian and author, explains this phenomenon by stating that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" and in bureaucratic organizations, the number of people required to do the work will continually rise whether the actual volume of work stays the same, increases, decreases or disappears.
The question is how much do Canadian artists get handed from the government in the existing "tax the media" scheme? I'd warrant they don't get anything and that the government keeps track of what they collect and injects "money into supporting artists, including more money for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Music Fund." (from TFA). I mean, what else could they do? Say I was a terrible artist (not too much of a stretch) and I put out a terrible album with nothing on it that anybody would want. Do I have my hand out for the MP3 tax? How much would the government give me? How would they determine that?
They can't. And they don't. This is a stupid idea based on another stupid idea.
Want to see what they do with the money?
So they tax our media. Then they give it to bureaucratic organizations that consume themselves. And the indy rock band gets? You guessed it. The shaft. And we are proposing to extend this to new media. Excellent. Let me just get out my wallet...
The "sandbox" aspect of EvE where everyone is in everyone else's universe is not actually one giant "realm" as it were. It is actually thousands of individual servers which control and manage distinct areas of the game world. As you move through the universe you actually move from server to server. There are, of course, central servers which need to understand common aspects of the game such as market and pilot information.
This is an architecture that is not shared by WoW in general. I'm not sure how what Blizzard has released with 3.3 differs from a "battleground" except that a "battlegroup" is a pre-defined entity where in this new instance you have no idea where people are going to come from. To me all this sounds like is a BG without a battlegroup.
So in summary:
So to answer your question, no, EvE would not burn to the ground if even half the number of users tried to use it. But it would require a careful expansion of the known universe to ensure that there was an even distribution of world resources and thus pilots in its space.
Practically, that thing won't fit in a canoe (unless it is a voyageur canoe), you would probably need the camera mounted on some sort of steadycam, and your going to have to pay attention to battery life. But I think that would be a very cool project.
My experience has been quite the opposite of the story summary. I've been on a line-of-sight wireless connection for two and a half years now, with two different providers and two different frequencies (900 MHz and 2.4 GHz). I have found the service to be slow and unreliable, and I live on farmland (no trees, mountains, large buildings, etc. To get in the way). The most I can say about my current provider is the service sucks less than the first one. In that case it was so bad I was able to get out of a 3yr contract.
The speed (as mentioned in a previous post) is very slow - VPN access to the office is *just* do-able, but don't try to do anything else at the same time. You can play on-line games such as WoW and Eve without much trouble from a latency standpoint, but having your link go down is not fun.
I have an unlimited cellular data plan I keep as a backup and I am working with my local council to get better broadband penetration in my area.
Odd, yes. But after 20 years of hard drive noises I *expect* them to be there. I wonder how long it will be before I find the noises on laptops with hard drives odd. "Hey, what's that sound...."
And no, so far the hard drive noises in my mind haven't told me to do anything...
Thank you. My Mother-in-law just evacuated from her place near Crestline, and not being from California, or even the U.S. I was having trouble getting the kind of information you just provided. Thank you thank you thank you. She's checked into a motel half way to Palm Springs and has e-mail us to let us know she is okay. Again, much like the original article she is using Internet technology to get the word out. Cheers!
that "Black holes are outta-sight!"
- Shamefully ripped off from 'Contact' by Carl Sagan
Gordon,
Thanks for your response. I just sent your counterpart at IBM a lengthy probing e-mail about this which I can summarize as:
1. Real stream or fake stream?
2. Points for cost effectiveness?
3. Points for scalable/redundant architecture?
I applaud what you are doing and I wish you the best success (contests like this are good at stimulating inventiveness). I've been racking by brain trying to figure out how you could do this in a way that wouldn't be discriminatory. The best I could come up with would be to create a bunch of new domains (ceas-t1.org to ceas-t1000.org or whatever), then seed e-mail addresses on these domains with the spamming community. During the contest you insert legitimate e-mails into the stream by sending them from previously-undisclosed servers. The problem is how do you gauge success if you don't know what junk e-mail has been sent to the domain. You can't relay it because that instantly makes the test invalid. This technique would require previous statistics and a long lead time. Even then it would be possible for rival competitors to sabotage other entrants tests if you knew the domains being used...
Alternatively you would have to use an existing domain with known stats and perform the contest in a sequential fashion. Again, this becomes very time consuming and there are risks associated with doing it fairly. In short, I cannot think of a good way to do this.
I have developed a technique called GDSA which is quite effective, scalable, cost effective, but which in part relies on spammers needs to remain anonymous. This technique will not work in your contest (despite its effectiveness in the real world), and I will be unable to enter (unfortunately).
That said, it is easy to criticize, but difficult to be constructive. If I can think of a legitimate technique I will let you know.
Thanks.
"This ought to be a sweeps week television spectacular."
This ought to be ignored as the contest is flawed.
"Ha ha, silly admin. My money's on greylisting."
They're sending a stream of spam from where? Sounds like a real mail server...
From TFA: "Live email stream, delivered by standard protocols (SMTP, IMAP, POP)"
[One wonders how else they would deliver e-mail if it was not from standard protocols. I also wonder how they plan on delivering e-mail using POP... The mind boggles...]
In any case if I read this correctly this effectively eliminates anti-spam technologies which work on the premise that the spam is coming from illegitimate mail servers. One of these techniques is greylisting. Meaning, greylisting will not work. So if I were you, I wouldn't put your money on it.
GENERAL JUNK E-MAIL FILTERING RANT (You've been warned): If you're using an anti-spam technique which takes more cpu cycles to execute than it takes for the spammer to send the damn spam in the first place, you've already lost this war. In other words, as long as it's costing you more than it is costing him/her you will always be on the losing end of the deal.
And I would like to add that despite my post above, I agree with you that greylisting and its derivatives when properly deployed are excellent techniques for eliminating UBE. But I think this contest is engineered to ignore that fact.
I didn't mention bootcamp, but in fact I did use that along with and in addition to parallels (parallels has the ability to use the bootcamp Windows partition which is really nice, but it also means you need to put a call into Microsoft to re-activate Windows and try to explain to the guy what it is you are trying to do). My wife and I talked about the idea of just having her use bootcamp and booting into XP (which I purchased to try to fix this issue) until Microsoft came out with a natively-compiled version of Office. In the end, however, we decided that since Apple was under no obligation to continue to support the Windows drivers that come with bootcamp, and that bootcamp is in fact still beta software, that it was at least somewhat risky. You have to put all of this in the context of an individual who absolutely MUST get her work done without issue.
:-)
This was further complicated by the fact that at one point Bootcamp went south (I don't understand how this happens) and she was no longer able to boot the Windows partition until she went back into OS X and re-installed Bootcamp.
It is true that you can do what you say. The decision that must be made is do you live a little on the edge, or do you stick to a situation where things are built and supported with each other. In my case, I am an enterprise architect and I use Visio under VMware fusion. But I am a geek (albeit an old one) and I don't have any issue with that. In her case, it doesn't make sense to risk it. It depends on the individual.
In all my years on Slashdot I never imagined that anybody would accuse me of making something up... I'm having a hard time imagining why I would do that. You should respect your elders.
Thanks for catching me on the bootcamp issue.
- Microsoft Word was not fast enough on the Mac
- Microsoft Word was not 100% completely compatible with Microsoft Word on the PC
Let me tackle each of these in turn (put down your flamethrowers right now).The current version of Word on the Mac is compiled for the PPC and runs through Rosetta. While most people report that Word runs "just fine" through Rosetta, the fact is, it doesn't for people who work like my wife does. Fast. Demanding. Has a lot of work and isn't going to wait around patiently for her last action to complete. Yes, I did all of the tweaks to speed up her Mac (the best MacBook Pro money could buy (2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB disk)). Yes, I even allocated more RAM for Rosetta.
And before you ask, yes, I ran Word 2003 in Parallels. Yes, I ran it under VMware Fusion. And yes, I ran in under Crossover for Mac. The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC (in this case a brand new Vaio which I had to buy to replace the MacBook Pro). Both of these computers had exactly the same specs.
As for the second problem, it cannot be over-emphasized. You cannot submit a report back to a client which looks like trash in *their* version of Word. Word 2003 is *not* Word 2004. And the upcoming Word 2008 will *not* be Word 2007. Any alteration in a document which is advising investors to spend billions on a particular equity is not acceptable. No, she couldn't use Open Office. Or anything else. And yes, she also tried to save the document using compatibility mode.
RANT: ON
We both hated to go back. She loved the Mac. Anybody who thinks that Microsoft should be really worried about Apple is a little delusional. Microsoft doesn't make software, they make money (which explains why their software sucks - ask me about this sometime). They've also invested heavily in Apple (when Apple makes money, Microsoft makes money). And they are releasing and continuing to develop Office for the Mac, because it is profitable for them. And will continue to be. Sure, Microsoft would like to own every single aspect of the computing market, because that would make them the most money. But when they can't, they hedge their bets (Corel, Apple, most recently Novel).
RANT: OFF
By the way, moving from Microsoft Entourage to Microsoft Outlook is a total pain. You would think this would be straightforward, but no. And if you're one of those who think Micosoft tries to make it hard to move from the PC to Mac on purpose, just try moving back. It's even worse. Ultimately I just set her up with IMAP and had her re-create all her folders (she had hundreds) and copy her mail up to one of my mail servers. Mail is better that way anyway...
As for the MacBook Pro, I'm downloading FC6 right now :-)