Don't be lame. If my friend's mails are only 10KB in size, and he's sending 50,000 of them, then he's on the hook for half a gigabyte of transfer, or about 45 minutes of a dedicated T1. That is managable. Having all 50,000 attempt to download it simultaneously means that his hardware has to multiplex traffic to that many sockets at once and sustain it for the entire time. That is not manageable.
The problem is that IM2000 punishes every mass mailer, whether legitimate or not. The same broken protocol that could possibly stop spammers would also kill honest operators. Again, IM2000 is unscaleable, is poorly conceived, and has exactly zero chance of replacing SMTP. Ever notice that store-and-forward is pretty much the universal pattern for network message transfers, from Usenet to Jabber? There's a reason for that.
One of my associates runs an opt-in mailing list (a newsletter for a largish online store). He typically sends out 50,000 messages in a batch, usually once a week or so. With SMTP, his server can spool out those messages at its convenience. Dan's half-assed concoction, though, would allow 50,000 subscribers to say "hey, let's check the newsletter - yay! - let's download it this instant!". He has plenty of bandwidth to send out 50,000 messages in a given 12-hour window, but nowhere near enough to send out 50,000 copies simultaneously as his customers get to work in the morning and check their email while drinking their coffee.
Similarly, what if you host a mailing list from an intermittenly-connected machine? IM2000 makes that impossible, since if the sending server isn't online, then the recipients can't read their mail. What about a monitoring server that dials in to an ISP via modem in the event that its main broadband connection is down - do you, the network admin, want to have to configure your phone to regularly check to see if that machine's online at a predetermined dynamic hostname in order to get your notifications?
IM2000 transfers pretty much all of the control from the sender to the receiver. That stops sounding like a good idea as soon as you start enumerating the unintended consequences. No, Dan's reputation has nothing to do with the reasons that many mail administrators hate the basic principals of this scheme. It earned that enmity all on its own.
I should have specified "personal servers". We buy Dell PowerEdges at work because they're pretty nice while still relatively cheap. However, my own server at home (serving the site linked under my name) is a $700 Athlon job I built a couple years ago. Since it wasn't meant for desktop use, I diverted money from the graphics, sound, and removable media into memory, memory, more memory, and drives.
I do it at work, and I enjoy putting together slick systems for myself and others I know.
I used to enjoy building systems for friends and family until I realized that they had this mysterious idea that I would be providing free tech support for the next decade.
But, I know Apple makes cash off of very expensive hardware,
No way. It always costs me $700 to build a computer. Always. This has been true since about '96. By the time I research the specs and assemble a parts list, it comes out to be within $50 of $700 each and every time. Apple is now selling a system that is pretty close to as nice as I'd hand-build, except that it comes in a form factor I could never hope to emulate, at a price I can't touch, with an OS that I wish all of my friends and family would switch to so I could cancel my tech support "contracts". I really can't think of a good reason to ever build another workstation (although servers are still fair game).
In Missouri, my voting district required you to show a state-issued voter registration card that was available at no cost. That seems like a reasonable minimum standard.
That's right up there with "you have to use your full name". BS. My full name is Willard Kirk Strauser. I'm proud of "Willard" - it's a family name that goes back about 6 generations and forward at least one - but I have never gone by anything other than my middle name, ever.
My driver's license is signed "Kirk Strauser". The signature card at my bank is signed "Kirk Strauser". My mortgages have said "Kirk Strauser". Still, the occasional oddball will insist that I must use my "full legal signature" and get pissy when I try to do exactly that.
The most recent occurrence was last week when I went to vote in a local election and the nonagenerian lady wouldn't hand me a ballot until I wrote out the whole thing. That was pretty difficult since I've signed my first name maybe 5 times in my entire life and it doesn't exactly come naturally. It's a good thing that she never asked for ID.
But it gets a little tiresome to be expected to constantly and vocally speak out against the idjits (even though I still do so whenever I think it's appropriate). Although I worship the same God they claim to, that's about all we have in common. My degrees are in science. My wife is a doctor. We're currently interviewing prospective schools for our daughter to find the most academically rigorous one available. I believe that evolution is the means God used to create life on Earth. My stand is to be an example to my family and friends, and I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.
I have no desire to be in a counter-movement, to protest the people that I have absolutely nothing to do with at all. I just want to raise my little family into responsible, intelligent, spiritual adults as best as I can. What more do you want from me?
Yeah, I found something like that once. On the other hand, the graph of that post's score vs. time looked a lot like an AM signal. Unfortunately, I think the encoded message was more along the lines of "U R A JACKASS" than anything worth publishing.
The question was asked, a self-proclaimed Christian stepped up to answer, and then you shouted him down for not answering in the way you wanted him to. It wasn't enough for him to defend the movies; you wanted him to assign 100% of the blame to some theoretical group of violent protesters that the article never mentioned or even hinted at.
And yet people wonder why we Christians don't speak up. From my point of view, it's clearly damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. Apparently the only acceptable answer we're allowed to give is "we suck", and anything else is evidence that we're the close-minded, hateful bigots that everyone loves to rant about.
To this day I've yet to come across a "Christian" - ordained or otherwise - that truly understands and practises the teachings of Jesus Christ himself - and I really am looking.
Yet that implies a certaintly, surely no weaker than that of those you speak against, that you know the One True Way and everyone else is mistaken.
For some reason, I still have a bright blue dot at the point of one of my vaccinations. Of course, maybe that's just the corner of the GPS/mind-control chip they embedded in me.
Ideally, it won't make you want to chew your own arm off in a desperate attempt to end the pain. If they can solve that minor issue, this might be a good thing.
It is also harder to edit using command-line tools. It is harder to edit with ANY common unix tool, actually.
I guess I don't see how "tag: value" is inherently easier than "<tag>value</tag>".
By the way, one of the nice things about standardizing on a common file format - be it XML, INI, or whatever - is that you could programmatically roll out those updates with code like:
for host in hostlist: ....config = ConfigParser('sftp://root@%s/etc/foo' % host) ....config['Section1']['serverhost']['port' ] = 587 ....config.write()
which is a lot easier than the current "SSH to each host and execute a one-off custom script to edit the file in-place" method, at least in my opinion.
Say hello to multi-megabyte XML parsers, just to slurp up key/value pairs.
...as opposed to the current situation where each and every program has its own hand-written parser that's not quite compatible with anything else. Frankly, the idea that program foo could become a program that just does bar instead of a bigger program that does bar after reading a foo-formatted config file seems rather Unix-y to me.
Shared libraries are a good thing, right? Then why do we refuse to use them in this one particular area of system administration? After all, we don't all write our own socket code or printf(), so why must we each write our own configuration parser?
I agree, with the exception that I think XML is infinitely preferable to some of the hand-rolled workalikes I've seen, and you can use a standard set of tools to parse any particular XML file sitting around.
except that the latter can be browsed and edited with any editor that understands XML (as opposed to only Vim with the file-format-specific highlighter), can be deterministically validated by generic tools, and doesn't require the program's author to implement his own configuration file parser?
XML isn't a perfect fit everywhere, but/etc is one of the places I think it works brilliantly.
I've been using my.yahoo.com with Mozilla and Konqueror for ages - to my knowledge, I've never once accessed it with Internet Explorer. Is there something magical I've been missing by browsing it with something else all this time, or do you just consider official support to be more important than I ever bothered to?
I've been playing with Gentoo lately and like what I've been seeing. One huge win over Debian is its concept of "USE flags"; you tell the build system what functionality you'd like to use, and every single package that can support it gets it automatically. For example, setting USE="kerberos" gets you Kerberos (hint: Active Directory) support throughout the entire system, from SSH to Evolution. Contrast with Debian's current setup of having "foo" and "foo-krb5" packages, often at different versions and compiled with different options.
Also, I am not a 1337-optimization fan, but adding USE="3dnow mmx" and CFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-3" to my setup actually makes a noticeable difference in how fast many apps run on my little laptop at home. I don't so much care that vi now sits idle 4.5% faster, but I do like the fact that I can make SSH connections a lot more quickly than I could with Debian's "compile for 386" policy.
I certainly don't think Gentoo is the Ultimate Linux Distro, and I still use Debian in a lot of places, but it's certainly worth taking a look at.
If you think having a low-digit ID is protection from being modded down by clueless newbies, then I think you'd be in for a shock. Save your money. Really.
After reading further down in the article and seeing about 15 variations on my witty and original comment that were posted before I wrote it, I wish to officially withdraw my previous post.
Because it is not in the ISP's best (i.e. financial) interests to do so. Finding these machines, teaching users how to clean them up, and then reactivating their access would require a great deal of manpower and money. Since not doing it is consequence-free, there is no incentive to do it.
I don't think it's that bad:
Draft a standard letter / web page explaining why you're disconnecting a customer and how they can get re-connected.
Port scan.
Disconnect.
Get kickbacks from local computer repair shop.
Profit!
which beats the heck out of
Ignore the situation.
Pay $BIGNUM for the bandwidth you're using to broadcast your customers' computers' spam.
Lose legitimate customers who get tired of their outbound mail bouncing because your netblock is listed in every blackhole list on the planet.
Loss!
Either way, you will spend some money on the problem, either by proactively fixing it or by paying to repair the damages. Your call.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that IM2000 punishes every mass mailer, whether legitimate or not. The same broken protocol that could possibly stop spammers would also kill honest operators. Again, IM2000 is unscaleable, is poorly conceived, and has exactly zero chance of replacing SMTP. Ever notice that store-and-forward is pretty much the universal pattern for network message transfers, from Usenet to Jabber? There's a reason for that.
One of my associates runs an opt-in mailing list (a newsletter for a largish online store). He typically sends out 50,000 messages in a batch, usually once a week or so. With SMTP, his server can spool out those messages at its convenience. Dan's half-assed concoction, though, would allow 50,000 subscribers to say "hey, let's check the newsletter - yay! - let's download it this instant!". He has plenty of bandwidth to send out 50,000 messages in a given 12-hour window, but nowhere near enough to send out 50,000 copies simultaneously as his customers get to work in the morning and check their email while drinking their coffee.
Similarly, what if you host a mailing list from an intermittenly-connected machine? IM2000 makes that impossible, since if the sending server isn't online, then the recipients can't read their mail. What about a monitoring server that dials in to an ISP via modem in the event that its main broadband connection is down - do you, the network admin, want to have to configure your phone to regularly check to see if that machine's online at a predetermined dynamic hostname in order to get your notifications?
IM2000 transfers pretty much all of the control from the sender to the receiver. That stops sounding like a good idea as soon as you start enumerating the unintended consequences. No, Dan's reputation has nothing to do with the reasons that many mail administrators hate the basic principals of this scheme. It earned that enmity all on its own.
I should have specified "personal servers". We buy Dell PowerEdges at work because they're pretty nice while still relatively cheap. However, my own server at home (serving the site linked under my name) is a $700 Athlon job I built a couple years ago. Since it wasn't meant for desktop use, I diverted money from the graphics, sound, and removable media into memory, memory, more memory, and drives.
I used to enjoy building systems for friends and family until I realized that they had this mysterious idea that I would be providing free tech support for the next decade.
But, I know Apple makes cash off of very expensive hardware,
No way. It always costs me $700 to build a computer. Always. This has been true since about '96. By the time I research the specs and assemble a parts list, it comes out to be within $50 of $700 each and every time. Apple is now selling a system that is pretty close to as nice as I'd hand-build, except that it comes in a form factor I could never hope to emulate, at a price I can't touch, with an OS that I wish all of my friends and family would switch to so I could cancel my tech support "contracts". I really can't think of a good reason to ever build another workstation (although servers are still fair game).
In Missouri, my voting district required you to show a state-issued voter registration card that was available at no cost. That seems like a reasonable minimum standard.
My driver's license is signed "Kirk Strauser". The signature card at my bank is signed "Kirk Strauser". My mortgages have said "Kirk Strauser". Still, the occasional oddball will insist that I must use my "full legal signature" and get pissy when I try to do exactly that.
The most recent occurrence was last week when I went to vote in a local election and the nonagenerian lady wouldn't hand me a ballot until I wrote out the whole thing. That was pretty difficult since I've signed my first name maybe 5 times in my entire life and it doesn't exactly come naturally. It's a good thing that she never asked for ID.
I have no desire to be in a counter-movement, to protest the people that I have absolutely nothing to do with at all. I just want to raise my little family into responsible, intelligent, spiritual adults as best as I can. What more do you want from me?
Yeah, I found something like that once. On the other hand, the graph of that post's score vs. time looked a lot like an AM signal. Unfortunately, I think the encoded message was more along the lines of "U R A JACKASS" than anything worth publishing.
And yet people wonder why we Christians don't speak up. From my point of view, it's clearly damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. Apparently the only acceptable answer we're allowed to give is "we suck", and anything else is evidence that we're the close-minded, hateful bigots that everyone loves to rant about.
Yet that implies a certaintly, surely no weaker than that of those you speak against, that you know the One True Way and everyone else is mistaken.
Interesting.
For some reason, I still have a bright blue dot at the point of one of my vaccinations. Of course, maybe that's just the corner of the GPS/mind-control chip they embedded in me.
Ideally, it won't make you want to chew your own arm off in a desperate attempt to end the pain. If they can solve that minor issue, this might be a good thing.
We're not all that way, and if you were as smart as me you'd know that.
P.S. It's a joke - laugh.
I guess I don't see how "tag: value" is inherently easier than "<tag>value</tag>".
By the way, one of the nice things about standardizing on a common file format - be it XML, INI, or whatever - is that you could programmatically roll out those updates with code like:
which is a lot easier than the current "SSH to each host and execute a one-off custom script to edit the file in-place" method, at least in my opinion.Say hello to multi-megabyte XML parsers, just to slurp up key/value pairs.
...as opposed to the current situation where each and every program has its own hand-written parser that's not quite compatible with anything else. Frankly, the idea that program foo could become a program that just does bar instead of a bigger program that does bar after reading a foo-formatted config file seems rather Unix-y to me.
Shared libraries are a good thing, right? Then why do we refuse to use them in this one particular area of system administration? After all, we don't all write our own socket code or printf(), so why must we each write our own configuration parser?
What's the conceptual differences between
andexcept that the latter can be browsed and edited with any editor that understands XML (as opposed to only Vim with the file-format-specific highlighter), can be deterministically validated by generic tools, and doesn't require the program's author to implement his own configuration file parser?XML isn't a perfect fit everywhere, but /etc is one of the places I think it works brilliantly.
If he can successfully predict the outcome, does he have to pay himself $1,000,000?
I've been using my.yahoo.com with Mozilla and Konqueror for ages - to my knowledge, I've never once accessed it with Internet Explorer. Is there something magical I've been missing by browsing it with something else all this time, or do you just consider official support to be more important than I ever bothered to?
Question: is RMS singing in this thought experiment? 'cuz I don't think the Geneva Convention would allow that.
Also, I am not a 1337-optimization fan, but adding USE="3dnow mmx" and CFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-3" to my setup actually makes a noticeable difference in how fast many apps run on my little laptop at home. I don't so much care that vi now sits idle 4.5% faster, but I do like the fact that I can make SSH connections a lot more quickly than I could with Debian's "compile for 386" policy.
I certainly don't think Gentoo is the Ultimate Linux Distro, and I still use Debian in a lot of places, but it's certainly worth taking a look at.
Breakfast
* McDonald's breakfast burrito
* Coffee
Lunch
* Taco Bell value menu burrito
* Coffe
Dinner
* Carryout pizza
* Coffee
I think I'll slink away and cry about my lack of grad school.
s/^I /If /
If you think having a low-digit ID is protection from being modded down by clueless newbies, then I think you'd be in for a shock. Save your money. Really.
I like when my clock displays e: 02:71:82. I gotta get that thing fixed.
k-thx-bye
I don't think it's that bad:
- Draft a standard letter / web page explaining why you're disconnecting a customer and how they can get re-connected.
- Port scan.
- Disconnect.
- Get kickbacks from local computer repair shop.
- Profit!
which beats the heck out of- Ignore the situation.
- Pay $BIGNUM for the bandwidth you're using to broadcast your customers' computers' spam.
- Lose legitimate customers who get tired of their outbound mail bouncing because your netblock is listed in every blackhole list on the planet.
- Loss!
Either way, you will spend some money on the problem, either by proactively fixing it or by paying to repair the damages. Your call.