Earth to Redmond: In addition to being obnoxious, the "tight fisted" comment can be read as an anti-Semitic slur.
As far as I could see, that was entirely a Register invention. What Microsoft is quoted as saying is "The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at the best close to Office 97."
There may be an anti-OO slur there, but nothing anti-Semitic.
... for their next election, which seems to be the best option to me. Voter gets a piece of paper (anonymous) which records his/her vote. The slip has to be left at the polling station in a sealed container, and in the event of "it screwed up", the slips get counted...
What happens if the voter doesn't return the slip? It could be that the real winner is different from the paper winner if the vote still gets counted.
What they should do is to use the touch screen to print a completed ballot, and count those, either automatically or (in case of a recount) by hand.
I want to be elected, and I want you to vote for me. I offer you a bribe to vote (or threaten to break your legs if you don't). Now I can verify that you did vote for me.
Voting needs to be secure, but it also needs to be anonymous.
Spam filters work only for those able to configure them. For the vast majority of Internet users, they are just a dream.
I think the vast majority of Internet users already use filters, but they are configured by the user's ISP, not by the user.
Spam blacklists are unsustainable in a world where most net connections come across DHCP, and most spam is/will be sent from owned home computers.
Updates of the dial-up list will stop this. Don't accept incoming email connections from machines using DHCP. It's hard on people who set up their own SMTP servers because their ISPs can't cope (e.g. sympatico.ca), but there are workarounds.
Note I'm not saying this policy is "wrong" or "right"; and I agree organizations can block whatever they want. I just think blocking large address ranges does as much to create false-positives than to block spam.
But that's the point: the target is the ISP that provides hosting to the spammer. By blacklisting large parts of its address space, it's going to lose legitimate customers. This is supposed to create pressure on it to reform.
I prefer blocking actual spammers, but even that's going to create false positives: if they highjack a user's machine to send spam and I block it, I'll also block that user's email, and probably the email from whoever inherits that IP address after the user logs off.
You might be right, I don't know what people are using these days.
However, if you ask Google about "Visual Basic for Linux", you get taken to a Sourceforge page where this was written in October, 2000:
"We've decided that VB4Linux will be programmed in C. We will probably be beginning sometime within the next week or so... Still looking for developers! Thx!"
And down below:
"This Project Has Not Released Any Files".
My comment was about Delphi and that's how you answered it, but the original article was about Kylix, and I think my "Not C" comment applies pretty strongly to its failure. (The "Not Microsoft" comment probably doesn't!)
VB is not C either, and Basic was more regarded
as a toy.
Yes, VB is not C. That's part of the reason why VB is not as popular as C/C++.
Duncan Murdoch
Re:Not surprised
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Once Visual Basic came along, it really stole a lot of their thunder in terms of making it easy to write windows programs.
Actually, Visual Basic came out before Delphi did. Delphi was designed later and was for many years a better product than VB, but:
- It was based on Pascal, not C, so lots of people thought it was a toy.
- It wasn't standard Pascal, so Pascal bigots didn't like it either.
- It wasn't a Microsoft product, so people didn't think it would stay around a long time.
There were lots of other problems too: Borland financial mismanagement, MS hiring away designers, etc., but I think "Not C" and "Not Microsoft" were the big ones.
I'm a spamcop member but I realized that whenever I reported spam, I'd start getting more emails a few days later. I stopped reporting them and the number of messages went down a few weeks later.
I had exactly the opposite experience. I've been a regular Spamcop user since last year. For about a month this spring I was too busy, and stopped reporting, and the amount of spam I was receiving doubled. It's kept fairly steady since then.
I suspect that my name is listwashed by some spammers, and added to other lists. When I stopped reporting, they stopped listwashing.
False, but not falsified. They gave a phone number which was later disconnected, and they forgot to update their registration. Falsified would mean they did what spammers do, and gave fake details from the beginning.
Spam blacklists, Bayesian filters, and Challenge-Response systems will handle the vast majority of spam, if not all of it.
Spam blacklists and filters will catch non-spam. There's no way to make the tests perfect.
Challenge-response systems send out their own spam whenever some idiot gets infected with the latest email virus, and starts forging "From" addresses.
Blacklists and filters would work a lot better if there was less spam. A multi-pronged approach (filtering PLUS regulation PLUS private legal action PLUS community cooperation PLUS...) is better than thinking any single solution will work.
Great system, unfortunately is/spamcop's/ software (wrt to their DNSBl) which makes the error - not the reporter. Eg, Spamcop put far too much faith in their chaintest.
It's both the Spamcop and the user who made errors. Spamcop tells its users to check the parsing and confirm that it's been done correctly. It's up to the user to send the report.
If Spamcop makes an error and the user doesn't notice, then the wrong server gets blacklisted. If either one does their job correctly, then things are fine.
Spamcop list on a statistical basis, based on headers of spam reports they receive. This means they also blacklist the upstreams of regular spamcop users (because if all of spamcop user X's mail comes to him via ISP Foo, then ISP Foo's mail server will be in all of user X's spamcop reports).
That's close, but not quite right. Spamcop tries to identify the source of the spam (or the open proxy where it was inserted). When things work, your upstream mail server won't get blacklisted.
Unfortunately, things don't always work, and that was probably the most common way a system is mistakenly listed, up until last week. Now I think the most common way to get a false listing is to bounce a Sobig virus message back to the From: address. Those useless bounces (which don't go to the infected machine) are really irritating, and some people are reporting them as spam.
When someone at Spamcop notices an error, they send a warning message to the person who sent in the false report. If too many errors arise from one reporter, then their account is suspended.
Light bulbs aren't evacuated, they contain inert gases (so the filament won't burn). But the filament gradually evaporates away, depositing the material on the inside of the glass. If the bulb was smaller, they'd darken too much and not be as efficient.
Halogen bulbs use some sort of chemical reaction to stop the deposition on the glass, so they can be smaller. The deposition happens on the filament itself, so they last longer at higher temperatures (and emit more UV and less IR, because of the higher temps).
Twenty-five years ago, the communists on campus held up Albania as a paradigm of socialist virtue. Since nobody knew anything about it, so you could make up statistics and nobody would be able to refute them.
In Iceland, children can work part-time at 8. Yes, 8. 50% of the money earned must be put aside for education. But Iceland has higher literacy and lower crime than the vast majority of Western nations, as well as excellent health and almost full employment. Certainly, you'd have to provide some pretty strong evidence to refute the Icelandic approach.
The "anti-spam crowd" are those that firmly believe that email is for their personal communications only. Any commercial use violates the terms of how the Internet was created and that is exclusively for the benefit of the user community.
I believe that there are people like that, but calling them the "anti-spam crowd" is bizarre. Look on the anti-spam websites listed on Spamlinks. I haven't looked at all of them, but I still doubt you'll find *anyone* there espousing the view above.
What a lot of people have suggested (and some have implemented) is to whitelist their incoming email. If you aren't on the list, they aren't interested.
Unfortunately, that does precisely what the anti-spam crowd wants.
Huh? The anti-spam crowd wants to make email useless? That's nonsense. For one thing, "the anti-spam crowd" is meaningless: *everybody* is anti-spam. Even spammers are anti-spam: they just claim that their spam isn't spam.
If you're talking about anti-spam activists, then you're right that some people suggest whitelisting, but I think a lot more activists are in favour of blacklisting and various methods of filtering. They're activists because they want to use email, and spam is making that harder.
Good blacklists and filters make it a lot better. For example, I get around 50 spams a day to my inbox, but only 2-3 a week make it past the SpamAssassin filter and SpamCop filtering service. SpamAssassin gets a few false positives each week; SpamCop gets almost none.
That specifically excludes the largest source of greenhouse gasses - domestic animal farts, aka "methane", of which India & china are huge sources.
As romantic as that sounds, it's just not true. Rice cultivation is a bigger source of methane than animal farts, and carbon dioxide emissions in India are a lot bigger than methane emissions. See this ref for the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Earth to Redmond: In addition to being obnoxious, the "tight fisted" comment can be read as an anti-Semitic slur.
As far as I could see, that was entirely a Register invention. What Microsoft is quoted as saying is "The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at the best close to Office 97."
There may be an anti-OO slur there, but nothing anti-Semitic.
... for their next election, which seems to be the best option to me. Voter gets a piece of paper (anonymous) which records his/her vote. The slip has to be left at the polling station in a sealed container, and in the event of "it screwed up", the slips get counted...
What happens if the voter doesn't return the slip? It could be that the real winner is different from the paper winner if the vote still gets counted.
What they should do is to use the touch screen to print a completed ballot, and count those, either automatically or (in case of a recount) by hand.
Your system doesn't preserve the secret ballot.
For example:
I want to be elected, and I want you to vote for me. I offer you a bribe to vote (or threaten to break your legs if you don't). Now I can verify that you did vote for me.
Voting needs to be secure, but it also needs to be anonymous.
Spam filters work only for those able to configure them. For the vast majority of Internet users, they are just a dream.
I think the vast majority of Internet users already use filters, but they are configured by the user's ISP, not by the user.
Spam blacklists are unsustainable in a world where most net connections come across DHCP, and most spam is/will be sent from owned home computers.
Updates of the dial-up list will stop this. Don't accept incoming email connections from machines using DHCP. It's hard on people who set up their own SMTP servers because their ISPs can't cope (e.g. sympatico.ca), but there are workarounds.
Note I'm not saying this policy is "wrong" or "right"; and I agree organizations can block whatever they want. I just think blocking large address ranges does as much to create false-positives than to block spam.
But that's the point: the target is the ISP that provides hosting to the spammer. By blacklisting large parts of its address space, it's going to lose legitimate customers. This is supposed to create pressure on it to reform.
I prefer blocking actual spammers, but even that's going to create false positives: if they highjack a user's machine to send spam and I block it, I'll also block that user's email, and probably the email from whoever inherits that IP address after the user logs off.
VB is actually more popular than C/C++.
You might be right, I don't know what people are using these days.
However, if you ask Google about "Visual Basic for Linux", you get taken to a Sourceforge page where this was written in October, 2000:
"We've decided that VB4Linux will be programmed in C. We will probably be beginning sometime within the next week or so... Still looking for developers! Thx!"
And down below:
"This Project Has Not Released Any Files".
My comment was about Delphi and that's how you answered it, but the original article was about Kylix, and I think my "Not C" comment applies pretty strongly to its failure. (The "Not Microsoft" comment probably doesn't!)
Duncan Murdoch
I've written tons of programs in delphi, and no other IDE/language comes close to being so easy to use and so clean.
I agree with this, I've also written lots of Delphi programs.
Duncan Murdoch
VB is not C either, and Basic was more regarded
as a toy.
Yes, VB is not C. That's part of the reason why VB is not as popular as C/C++.
Duncan Murdoch
Once Visual Basic came along, it really stole a lot of their thunder in terms of making it easy to write windows programs.
Actually, Visual Basic came out before Delphi did. Delphi was designed later and was for many years a better product than VB, but:
- It was based on Pascal, not C, so lots of people thought it was a toy.
- It wasn't standard Pascal, so Pascal bigots didn't like it either.
- It wasn't a Microsoft product, so people didn't think it would stay around a long time.
There were lots of other problems too: Borland financial mismanagement, MS hiring away designers, etc., but I think "Not C" and "Not Microsoft" were the big ones.
I'm a spamcop member but I realized that whenever I reported spam, I'd start getting more emails a few days later. I stopped reporting them and the number of messages went down a few weeks later.
I had exactly the opposite experience. I've been a regular Spamcop user since last year. For about a month this spring I was too busy, and stopped reporting, and the amount of spam I was receiving doubled. It's kept fairly steady since then.
I suspect that my name is listwashed by some spammers, and added to other lists. When I stopped reporting, they stopped listwashing.
SpamCops registration data was falsified
False, but not falsified. They gave a phone number which was later disconnected, and they forgot to update their registration. Falsified would mean they did what spammers do, and gave fake details from the beginning.
Spam blacklists, Bayesian filters, and Challenge-Response systems will handle the vast majority of spam, if not all of it.
...) is better than thinking any single solution will work.
Spam blacklists and filters will catch non-spam. There's no way to make the tests perfect.
Challenge-response systems send out their own spam whenever some idiot gets infected with the latest email virus, and starts forging "From" addresses.
Blacklists and filters would work a lot better if there was less spam. A multi-pronged approach (filtering PLUS regulation PLUS private legal action PLUS community cooperation PLUS
...it will just put them into its back pocket, and save them for the next time it wants to shut down the State Department.
Great system, unfortunately is /spamcop's/ software (wrt to their DNSBl) which makes the error - not the reporter. Eg, Spamcop put far too much faith in their chaintest.
It's both the Spamcop and the user who made errors. Spamcop tells its users to check the parsing and confirm that it's been done correctly. It's up to the user to send the report.
If Spamcop makes an error and the user doesn't notice, then the wrong server gets blacklisted. If either one does their job correctly, then things are fine.
Spamcop list on a statistical basis, based on headers of spam reports they receive. This means they also blacklist the upstreams of regular spamcop users (because if all of spamcop user X's mail comes to him via ISP Foo, then ISP Foo's mail server will be in all of user X's spamcop reports).
That's close, but not quite right. Spamcop tries to identify the source of the spam (or the open proxy where it was inserted). When things work, your upstream mail server won't get blacklisted.
Unfortunately, things don't always work, and that was probably the most common way a system is mistakenly listed, up until last week. Now I think the most common way to get a false listing is to bounce a Sobig virus message back to the From: address. Those useless bounces (which don't go to the infected machine) are really irritating, and some people are reporting them as spam.
When someone at Spamcop notices an error, they send a warning message to the person who sent in the false report. If too many errors arise from one reporter, then their account is suspended.
Light bulbs aren't evacuated, they contain inert gases (so the filament won't burn). But the filament gradually evaporates away, depositing the material on the inside of the glass. If the bulb was smaller, they'd darken too much and not be as efficient.
Halogen bulbs use some sort of chemical reaction to stop the deposition on the glass, so they can be smaller. The deposition happens on the filament itself, so they last longer at higher temperatures (and emit more UV and less IR, because of the higher temps).
Surely 'millions', plural, must mean at least two million.
That's a common mistake. In English, singular forms are used for "one", and all other numbers (e.g. zero) are plural.
For example, we would say "there are zero lines of SCO code in Linux".
It's unusual to use this construction without the number in front, but SCO is being grammatically correct.
I'm Sorry.
You forgot the URL: Colin Mochrie as Reporter Anthony St. George offers a public apology to America.
The reports about the Albanian worker's paradise were based on first-hand evidence too.
Twenty-five years ago, the communists on campus held up Albania as a paradigm of socialist virtue. Since nobody knew anything about it, so you could make up statistics and nobody would be able to refute them.
In Iceland, children can work part-time at 8. Yes, 8. 50% of the money earned must be put aside for education. But Iceland has higher literacy and lower crime than the vast majority of Western nations, as well as excellent health and almost full employment. Certainly, you'd have to provide some pretty strong evidence to refute the Icelandic approach.
Iceland, the new Albania.
Hand calculate Newtonian psychics equations involving mass and acceleration.
Newtonian psychics don't need equations to work out accelerations, they just *know* the answer.
The iMic also works with PCs. I use it on a laptop that doesn't have stereo input.
The software I like is Wave Repair (for Windows). Lots of control over your repairs.
The "anti-spam crowd" are those that firmly believe that email is for their personal communications only. Any commercial use violates the terms of how the Internet was created and that is exclusively for the benefit of the user community.
I believe that there are people like that, but calling them the "anti-spam crowd" is bizarre. Look on the anti-spam websites listed on Spamlinks. I haven't looked at all of them, but I still doubt you'll find *anyone* there espousing the view above.
Duncan Murdoch
What a lot of people have suggested (and some have implemented) is to whitelist their incoming email. If you aren't on the list, they aren't interested.
Unfortunately, that does precisely what the anti-spam crowd wants.
Huh? The anti-spam crowd wants to make email useless? That's nonsense. For one thing, "the anti-spam crowd" is meaningless: *everybody* is anti-spam. Even spammers are anti-spam: they just claim that their spam isn't spam.
If you're talking about anti-spam activists, then you're right that some people suggest whitelisting, but I think a lot more activists are in favour of blacklisting and various methods of filtering. They're activists because they want to use email, and spam is making that harder.
Good blacklists and filters make it a lot better. For example, I get around 50 spams a day to my inbox, but only 2-3 a week make it past the SpamAssassin filter and SpamCop filtering service. SpamAssassin gets a few false positives each week; SpamCop gets almost none.
That specifically excludes the largest source of greenhouse gasses - domestic animal farts, aka "methane", of which India & china are huge sources.
As romantic as that sounds, it's just not true. Rice cultivation is a bigger source of methane than animal farts, and carbon dioxide emissions in India are a lot bigger than methane emissions. See this ref for the numbers.