RE: that British bank scandal, the courts there determined that banks were breaking the law. This was then reported by the news (such as BBC) who published handy tips on reclaiming unfair fees.
Is it thus fair to call a press which publishes information about this issue, along with all the people who makes use of that information, an "advocate mob" out to bully corporations out of their profits? In fact, who is the more organized here? The private companies with enough funds to hire PR agents, attorneys, and lobbyists, or those citizens who assert their rights as legislated by parliament and enforced by the courts?
Laws regulating conduct cannot possibly be enforced in an anonymous public sphere. What's needed is a trusted computing system that tracks who uses a computer, when, and what they're doing. Then software could limit activities to what's legal and appropriate! We're almost there...
- Unique hardware identifiers on all CPUs and motherboards
- Laws that make it illegal to circumvent security systems
- Laws which force ISPs to track customer communications
Don't worry. We'll make the Internet safe for you and your children. And the SonyBMIMicrosoftUniversalMGM corpglomerate.
We have a responsibility to teach our animal friends basic human rights. If we could, perhaps, show those chimps what REALLY happens with meat, perhaps we could convince them to go back to vegetarianism. Ya know, eat a banana like they're supposed to. We have perverted chimps. They see us, with our corndogs, beef jerky, egg mcmuffins and -- of course -- monkey see monkey do. We have to set an example.
To that end I've been feeding my cat oats and corn. The result is that she's thinner and healthier than ever! She was twenty two pounds before -- a total blubber cat -- yet now on this new diet she's down to less than five pounds and friendlier than ever! I mean -- like, duh -- of course cats want to join in with man and help the environment! Eating meat KILLS!!!
All we have to do is turn the animal kingdom vegetarian and not only will we have 'uplifted' them to ethical eating, but mother earth will love us back too. Hey, don't you love your mother?
It's a good plan. RAM density and processor speed has mostly followed Moore's law in transistor density. While disk storage density has followed suit, the I/O path hasn't followed suit. The typical SATA drive might burst ~70MB/s, but it still sustains ~40MB/s just like good 'old PATA.
All modern OS's load huge executables compared with the good 3M workstation days (1 Megabyte, 1 Megapixel, 1 MIP). Microsoft is doing the right thing by aggressively caching commonly run items. And I note, they're late to the party: 'NIX does this too.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
Used, yes. Supported, no. So in all honesty, I do not have commercial experience with X400. I've read some docs and that's about it. *shrug* All I know is that SMTP is borked. It's costing my IT department a bunch more money than it offers in value. And boy, is email getting worse *fast*.
Yeah. SPF is only one facet of a complete solution.
The problem I have with all of these solutions is that they bandaid a protocol solution on top of SMTP that neither solves the SPAM problem, nor enforces the new standard across the board. So we still have massive SMTP abuse by spammers and other criminals.
This is why I think a whole new protocol is the best solution. Simply dump SMTP and move everyone to a whole new standard. X400 would be fine by me, though it was never really designed with eithernet or IP as part of the network stack in mind. *shrug*
As for Bayesian filtering solutions: they don't work. It's just a failed arms race. And my problem is that as the responsible party for a mailserver that handles critical business / academic communications, that I cannot afford the loss of even a single email. I have users who absolutely rely on email - except that email is now inherently unreliable.
This is why I want to dump our email server. I see that spam and SMTP abuse has hit a threshold tipping point whereby it is now more expensive to maintain than the benefits it offers. Thus, while I have a whole community of users dependent on this broken protocol, better that someone else (bigger fish, with lawyers handy) deal with the whole mess.
Yeah. The cert authorities are a real problem right now. X400 is a reasonable alternative.
Some in this thread have argued that spammers will simply obtain proper certs and go their merry spamming way. However, I think that the formality of purchasing a cert means that records of the purchase would be available for subpoena. At that point, it's up to a state prosecutor of US Attorney to take the next step.
Damn straight. I'm working on it. Have to remove all those bullshit client nfs mounts of the mail spool first. They all expect INBOX. Once that's done - boom! - to email sanity I come!
Great solution for a personal mail server. But when you're responsible for systems that handle mail for VIPs like Nobel Prize winners and scientists regularly interviewed on television... things change.
I've been running large mail servers for a decade and a half. It's not about skill. The problem is that the protocol can't confirm the basics of what it means to safely communicate. One must confirm that the sender and recipient are who they say they are. One must confirm that the communication is private. One must finally confirm delivery and receipt of the message.
Try supporting 500 users using traditional unix INBOX file format. Clients must perform a linear extraction to cull out headers, which leads to tremendous scalability problems. The solution is to implement a db which creates an index of headers for clients.
Then things get better. But that still doesn't solve all the problems with excessive spam.
I'm shutting down our lab mail server and migrating a large userbase to central university mail services because of all the problems we're experiencing with supporting an internal mail server. Everything from excessive spam (and it's well over 90% of all incoming connections), people using email as for storing files (as if it were a home directory), and recent rulings demanding that IT offices track email and IMs.
I worked out how much staff time we spend maintaining and supporting our mail server and was shocked. For a service that's commoditized and available for free from any number of vendors (never mind our uni's central IT service we're already paying for), and I worked out that last year we had spent ~100 hrs/yr of staff time. Looking back I realized that in years previous we had spent far less on a per year basis. IOW: staff consumption on mail service was growing while prices for commodity email service was plummeting (all the way down to near free).
Dumping email support is the only rational solution.
Where will this go? I think email (as in RFC822, etc) is doomed. The protocol is broken. It has no safeguards to confirm the legitimacy of the sender or recipient, no mechanism to secure the communication during transmission (like a real envelope), and as a result the protocol begs to be exploited by Internet fucktards. Which is exactly what's happening. Time to toss SMTP and start from scratch.
Sorry it took me so long to respond. OK, so the upshot is that we're experiencing a big migration off of Linux to MacOS X. Over the last year about 30 Linux desktops transitioned over to the Mac. Windows users are primarily confined to fiscal admins.
This is in a physics lab at a major technical university.
Of course some people are having compatibility problems with their upgrades. This is no major surprise. Speaking as one who works in a large NIX shop (university lab), I must say that we've been evaluating Vista and I kindof like it. I still have a Mac and a Linux box on my desk, but I'm expecting us to support Vista by early '08. Also, I will say there is real pent up demand for upgrading both Windows and Office here in our shop. Windows users here are primarily fiscal admins, and I've had several ask me about supporting the Vista and Office 08. All the Mac users (me included) are looking forward to an Intel build for the next Office.
Vista may be having a slow start, but I think that within a year or so it will be a big winner. I like it (and I haven't had much good to say about Win since forever).
PITTSBURGH, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Scientists have long questioned the validity of "string theory" and now U.S. physicists have created a test for the controversial "theory of everything."
And frankly, that's fine by me. It's got some bullshit problems due to excessive DRM, but it also has some nice new features. We're testing Vista in the office and I have to say that compared to XP, it's a *big* improvement. I'm going to hold back on deployment for a good year, but I'm also going to recommend that once a major service pack is released (say SP1), we'll migrate our Windows desktops (and junk older machines that can't handle Vista).
Most of our lab desktops run Linux, but there has also been a big migration to MacOS X. I don't expect Vista to affect that migration. Grad students, postdocs, and most professors seem to still prefer Unix. But most of the administrators are used to Windows and badly want an upgrade.
I think that even in the academic world there is real pent up demand for a new Windows. And from what I've seen, Vista is a pretty damn good. (though I still prefer nix on my home box)
Slashdot Mirror
What campaign is that?
My Xbox 360 consumes:
~2 watts while turned off
~130 watts while idle at the xbox live dashboard
~165 watts while playing Gears of War
These meter readings do not include the display device (obviously)
RE: that British bank scandal, the courts there determined that banks were breaking the law. This was then reported by the news (such as BBC) who published handy tips on reclaiming unfair fees.
Is it thus fair to call a press which publishes information about this issue, along with all the people who makes use of that information, an "advocate mob" out to bully corporations out of their profits? In fact, who is the more organized here? The private companies with enough funds to hire PR agents, attorneys, and lobbyists, or those citizens who assert their rights as legislated by parliament and enforced by the courts?
You'll have to use a Pentium II or less. You should also avoid any commercial UNIX workstations as they've been embedding CPU IDs since the 1980s.
Laws regulating conduct cannot possibly be enforced in an anonymous public sphere. What's needed is a trusted computing system that tracks who uses a computer, when, and what they're doing. Then software could limit activities to what's legal and appropriate! We're almost there...
- Unique hardware identifiers on all CPUs and motherboards
- Laws that make it illegal to circumvent security systems
- Laws which force ISPs to track customer communications
Don't worry. We'll make the Internet safe for you and your children. And the SonyBMIMicrosoftUniversalMGM corpglomerate.
We have a responsibility to teach our animal friends basic human rights. If we could, perhaps, show those chimps what REALLY happens with meat, perhaps we could convince them to go back to vegetarianism. Ya know, eat a banana like they're supposed to. We have perverted chimps. They see us, with our corndogs, beef jerky, egg mcmuffins and -- of course -- monkey see monkey do. We have to set an example.
To that end I've been feeding my cat oats and corn. The result is that she's thinner and healthier than ever! She was twenty two pounds before -- a total blubber cat -- yet now on this new diet she's down to less than five pounds and friendlier than ever! I mean -- like, duh -- of course cats want to join in with man and help the environment! Eating meat KILLS!!!
All we have to do is turn the animal kingdom vegetarian and not only will we have 'uplifted' them to ethical eating, but mother earth will love us back too. Hey, don't you love your mother?
It's a good plan. RAM density and processor speed has mostly followed Moore's law in transistor density. While disk storage density has followed suit, the I/O path hasn't followed suit. The typical SATA drive might burst ~70MB/s, but it still sustains ~40MB/s just like good 'old PATA.
All modern OS's load huge executables compared with the good 3M workstation days (1 Megabyte, 1 Megapixel, 1 MIP). Microsoft is doing the right thing by aggressively caching commonly run items. And I note, they're late to the party: 'NIX does this too.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
...Crunchy frog.
Used, yes. Supported, no. So in all honesty, I do not have commercial experience with X400. I've read some docs and that's about it. *shrug* All I know is that SMTP is borked. It's costing my IT department a bunch more money than it offers in value. And boy, is email getting worse *fast*.
Yeah. SPF is only one facet of a complete solution.
The problem I have with all of these solutions is that they bandaid a protocol solution on top of SMTP that neither solves the SPAM problem, nor enforces the new standard across the board. So we still have massive SMTP abuse by spammers and other criminals.
This is why I think a whole new protocol is the best solution. Simply dump SMTP and move everyone to a whole new standard. X400 would be fine by me, though it was never really designed with eithernet or IP as part of the network stack in mind. *shrug*
As for Bayesian filtering solutions: they don't work. It's just a failed arms race. And my problem is that as the responsible party for a mailserver that handles critical business / academic communications, that I cannot afford the loss of even a single email. I have users who absolutely rely on email - except that email is now inherently unreliable.
This is why I want to dump our email server. I see that spam and SMTP abuse has hit a threshold tipping point whereby it is now more expensive to maintain than the benefits it offers. Thus, while I have a whole community of users dependent on this broken protocol, better that someone else (bigger fish, with lawyers handy) deal with the whole mess.
Yeah. The cert authorities are a real problem right now. X400 is a reasonable alternative.
Some in this thread have argued that spammers will simply obtain proper certs and go their merry spamming way. However, I think that the formality of purchasing a cert means that records of the purchase would be available for subpoena. At that point, it's up to a state prosecutor of US Attorney to take the next step.
Damn straight. I'm working on it. Have to remove all those bullshit client nfs mounts of the mail spool first. They all expect INBOX. Once that's done - boom! - to email sanity I come!
Great solution for a personal mail server. But when you're responsible for systems that handle mail for VIPs like Nobel Prize winners and scientists regularly interviewed on television... things change.
I've been running large mail servers for a decade and a half. It's not about skill. The problem is that the protocol can't confirm the basics of what it means to safely communicate. One must confirm that the sender and recipient are who they say they are. One must confirm that the communication is private. One must finally confirm delivery and receipt of the message.
SMTP does none of that.
Try supporting 500 users using traditional unix INBOX file format. Clients must perform a linear extraction to cull out headers, which leads to tremendous scalability problems. The solution is to implement a db which creates an index of headers for clients.
Then things get better. But that still doesn't solve all the problems with excessive spam.
Time to dump smtp for something better.
Now try to implement your suggestions on a mail server that supports 500 users or more. Good luck.
I'm shutting down our lab mail server and migrating a large userbase to central university mail services because of all the problems we're experiencing with supporting an internal mail server. Everything from excessive spam (and it's well over 90% of all incoming connections), people using email as for storing files (as if it were a home directory), and recent rulings demanding that IT offices track email and IMs.
I worked out how much staff time we spend maintaining and supporting our mail server and was shocked. For a service that's commoditized and available for free from any number of vendors (never mind our uni's central IT service we're already paying for), and I worked out that last year we had spent ~100 hrs/yr of staff time. Looking back I realized that in years previous we had spent far less on a per year basis. IOW: staff consumption on mail service was growing while prices for commodity email service was plummeting (all the way down to near free).
Dumping email support is the only rational solution.
Where will this go? I think email (as in RFC822, etc) is doomed. The protocol is broken. It has no safeguards to confirm the legitimacy of the sender or recipient, no mechanism to secure the communication during transmission (like a real envelope), and as a result the protocol begs to be exploited by Internet fucktards. Which is exactly what's happening. Time to toss SMTP and start from scratch.
Sorry it took me so long to respond. OK, so the upshot is that we're experiencing a big migration off of Linux to MacOS X. Over the last year about 30 Linux desktops transitioned over to the Mac. Windows users are primarily confined to fiscal admins.
This is in a physics lab at a major technical university.
Of course some people are having compatibility problems with their upgrades. This is no major surprise. Speaking as one who works in a large NIX shop (university lab), I must say that we've been evaluating Vista and I kindof like it. I still have a Mac and a Linux box on my desk, but I'm expecting us to support Vista by early '08. Also, I will say there is real pent up demand for upgrading both Windows and Office here in our shop. Windows users here are primarily fiscal admins, and I've had several ask me about supporting the Vista and Office 08. All the Mac users (me included) are looking forward to an Intel build for the next Office.
Vista may be having a slow start, but I think that within a year or so it will be a big winner. I like it (and I haven't had much good to say about Win since forever).
I'm soooo tired!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=I8B3pf3mOh0
Testing String Theory:
Physicists create string theory test
PITTSBURGH, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Scientists have long questioned the validity of "string theory" and now U.S. physicists have created a test for the controversial "theory of everything."
[... click link to read article]
And frankly, that's fine by me. It's got some bullshit problems due to excessive DRM, but it also has some nice new features. We're testing Vista in the office and I have to say that compared to XP, it's a *big* improvement. I'm going to hold back on deployment for a good year, but I'm also going to recommend that once a major service pack is released (say SP1), we'll migrate our Windows desktops (and junk older machines that can't handle Vista).
Most of our lab desktops run Linux, but there has also been a big migration to MacOS X. I don't expect Vista to affect that migration. Grad students, postdocs, and most professors seem to still prefer Unix. But most of the administrators are used to Windows and badly want an upgrade.
I think that even in the academic world there is real pent up demand for a new Windows. And from what I've seen, Vista is a pretty damn good. (though I still prefer nix on my home box)
It's the crazy game save locations and the ridiculous time constraints for each of the missions. Gears of War was a snap in comparison.
PLEASE! Get out of the closet!!!
The problem is, it didn't entertain me. *shrug*