So get a Hotmail address for that and swamp Microsoft's servers. Imagine if everyone would do this...
--
Charles E. Hill
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 1
Look at the facts.
I PAY for my internet service. I have a limited amount of space available in my e-mail account. When somebody spams me, they are benefiting from what I have paid.
My ISP is paying for servers and storage space. They are paying for bandwidth. When they have to receive and store all of the spam, they are basically paying for the spammer to use their services.
Everybody in between me and the ISP is paying for the spammers to use their services.
Except that you have no right to speak for everyone upstream or even your ISP, only for yourself so points #2 and #3 are meaningless.
As far as your paying for the space: Internet & Online access costs have done nothing but come down in price since the beginning. They have never been cheaper -- and with all that spam driving your costs up! Oh, my!
Here are 3 simple solutions:
1. Set a filter up in your e-mail client to file anything from ANYONE NOT KNOWN TO YOU in a separate folder. This will leave only e-mail from people you know. Sort through the rest at your leisure.
2. Get an free webmail account with Hotmail and use that e-mail address for anything that "requires" it that you don't want; posting to newsgroups/slashdot/etc. Send your "real" address only to friends and people you know.
3. Convince your ISP that spam is such a damn nuisance they could make a couple extra bucks a month (per subscriber) by offering an optional blocking service. Write the scripts for them and license them out. Make a fortune.
Don't get me wrong: ORBS is a great idea. Anyone running an open relay needs to be slapped and their MCSE taken away. But today's prevalant anti-SPAM kill-em-all attitude is way out of line. --
Charles E. Hill
I think this is lost by most slashdotters. If you're doing nothing wrong, why do you care! These are on the streets, there could easily be undercover cops wandering around looking for evil doers, why is a camera that much different? It's not like they're in your house.
Why? Because gov't (and people in general) have a history of abusing this sort of thing. How long before you read a story about a cop using it to track his girlfriend/wife?
How about the one where a cop tells her friend she saw the friend's husband with another woman and they went into a condo together? He wasn't doing anything illegal. Maybe he was just walking and bumped into a timeshare salesman? He wanted the free cruise you get just for listening to the pitch. Gonna surprise his wife. (It happens in all over Florida's coast.) In a jealous rage, she blows him away.
Finally, consider that Florida has a "Government In The Sunshine" law. This means that most likely the video footage can be deemed public record and should be available to anyone who wants it. (Hmmm, where was my daughter last night at midnight.)
The potential for abuse outweighs the potential benefits.
Oh, yeah. The "Right To Privacy" is enshrined in the Florida Constitution (Article I, Section 23). You can't "give it up".
On August 5, 1999, we acquired Star, by means of a merger transaction pursuant to which all of the shares of Star were converted into the right to receive cash for total consideration of approximately $60 million. Simultaneously with the acquisition of Star, Sun acquired certain assets and liabilities of StarOffice GmbH, a related party of Star, for total cash consideration of approximately $14 million --
Charles E. Hill
>Not a good point since Nortel's stock has been plummeting and they have had huge layoffs in the past few months.
I'm quite familiar with their stock, as I work for their major competitor (Lucent). Out stock has done its own nose-dive as well.
Neither stock price has any bearing on the fact that they both still do about $5-6 Billion each per QUARTER in gross business.
Both use Sparc/Solaris workstations/servers (dependingon capacity) to manage their switches and the switch networks. Both end up selling more than a few low- to mid-range ( If you ever have run a real server, you would know that Linux is just a toy.
Thanks, that is exactly the attitude I am talking about.:-)
I originally received Sun SysAdmin and NetAdmin certification on 2.6 and then took the "upgrade" to 8. I work mostly on workstations, embeded manufacturing systems and low-end servers and have done so consistantly since 2.4. I currently run this stuff in mission-critical environments. I *DO* know what I am talking about.:-)
You are right, on LARGE systems (8+ cpus) Solaris is one of the best OSes around. I've also worked with IRIX on some big boxes and it, too is quite nice.
HOWEVER, given the right hardware, a properly tweaked Linux system is quite capable of handling damn near anything Solaris can do on low- to mid-end ( = 4 cpus ) workstations and servers.
THIS is the market that Sun was taking for granted. If their attitude continues, Linux will sneak up on them in the big-box arena in the next few years and they will be wondering what hit them.
Solaris is still sold (for a lot of money) with the large (16-way+) servers like the E10000.
Sun *DOES* care about the OS, because with Solaris they have a better lock on selling the hardware.
With Linux you can put it on your existing Sparc systems then migrate to (cheaper) Intel systems whenever the need arises. As long as they are low-end ( =4 cpus ) workstations, you won't have a problem. The software should run with just a recompile. Linux is a foot in the door and a nail in the coffin for Sun.
Look at Red Hat's latest PR -- about their quarterly results. Notice the bullet point about Nortel contracting for support to switch from "proprietary Unix" (that is Sun Solaris, BTW) on their Network Management Systems to Red Hat Linux 7.1.
Remember IBM's announcement about Telestra -- the Scandanavian ISP that replaced a room full of Sun Servers with a single S/390 running Linux?
McNealy is so focused on Bill Gates he doesn't realize that the cute little penguin he was so generously helping out is about to rip his leg off.
IBM jumped on the bandwagon; Sun seems to have an "oh, isn't that cute -- a little OS" opinion of Linux.
Sun had it's moment but it is gone. An eclipse is coming.
They have ALWAYS been an enemy of Linux. Sun exists to sell Sparc boxes and Solaris. They wanted to sort-of help Linux to keep it as a buffer against MS. They didn't perceive Linux as a threat and that was their mistake.
Keep in mind that only a few days ago Compaq announced two items of great importance to Sun.
1. The transfer of the Alpha to Intel. Not just the chip, but the entire development group. This will give Intel so badly-needed expertese in the 64-bit arena. While the UltraSPARC isn't a match for the Alpha, they had Intel beated hands-down. This also kills the Alpha -- leaving only the Sparc and PPC as competitors for Intel (AMD, etc.) Sun is feeling the heat.
2. The impending release of their Sun migration tools. These allow much easier conversion of Solaris programs using the Solaris threading model to the Linux threading model.
IBM has been going great guns for Sun -- remember the Telestra announcement? Replacing how many Sun servers with a single IBM Mainframe running Linux S/370?
Sun is in everyone's sights. Their problem is McNealy's ego only allows him to perceive Microsoft (Bill Gates, actually) as the only possible enemy. The rest are unworthy of his attention.
That cute little penguin is going to cause a serious eclipse in the near future. World Domination doesn't mean just Microsoft.
Raytracing is only necessary in reflection and refraction -- which can be faked pretty damn good now.
Other shading methods (radiosity for proper lighting) are used elsewhere.
Real-time rendering CAN be achieved by using the proper methods and not just throwing the entire ball of wax at any scene.
The idea is SMART rendering: Z-culling (so you only render pixels that affect the scene); polygon reduction (so you don't bother with a 10,000 poly item that is so far away in the frame it is a single pixel); variable mapping (using environmental maps for reflections when appropriate (like fly-thrus where there are only "background" objects).
Think Hollywood set -- build (and shoot) only what the camera will see, nothing else.
Actually, you are both right. The textures are critical for the look, but many of the best effects use motion capture (look at FF) because non-mocap motion is too damn difficult to get right on things we "know".
By "things we know" I mean human motion and things that we see every day and notice subconciously. Dinosaurs and spaceships are easy to fake since most people only see those in the movies -- and that is Hollywood motion, not reality anyway.
If you notice, it isn't that uncommon to see a rendered STILL that is indistinguishable from reality. However, rendered MOTION is still a bitch.
What are you talking about? The article I read stated they would not pay ANYTHING as their existing contracts with Sun covered install fees and that the software cost was $0.
You were going to pay for what? An optical add-drop multiplexer? One that covered just you or the entire neighborhood?
The equipment to hook those fibers up is EXPENSIVE. Most of it is switched ATM and those switches are not cheap. A good Lucent or Nortel ATM switch is $200,000+ (easily) for the central office and an add-drop mux is not chump change, either.
(BTW, most DSL is simply concatenated into ATM for transport and thus hooks into most central office switches just like the fiber would. The access point is just a lot cheaper. This also fixes the "last mile" problem in that they can trunk fiber but use the copper to the houses.) --
Charles E. Hill
Well, several kernel updates (like 2.2.19) are heavily suggested as upgrades -- 'cause they fix security holes. Anyone running a 2.2.x less that.19 is crazy if it is in anyway connected to the 'net.
The big difference is that MS usually holds SPs and you get about 1 every 6 months to a year (sometimes longer) with an occasional hotfix for serious ("highly publicized") problems. Point releases for the Linux kernel usually are out much quicker and don't encompass as much.
Frequently there are updated/new device drivers. In the cases of.3,.4 and.5 the big one would be lots of additions/changes/fixes to various things USB.
Aside from that, if you use any of the hardware that has been updated/changed (I have an AIC7xxx controller) or use ReiserFS (there are several minor patches/updates/fixes to this).
But you are right -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I can make strong arguments for using 2.2.19 instead. On several machines at my last job they are still running (happily) 2.2.x kernels. [I suggested to the new SysAdmin to update to 2.2.19 due to security.] I wouldn't recommend an upgrade beyond that 'cause they don't need anything or gain significant advantage with 2.4.x.
There are still many places in the world where having/using crypto is against the law. In some cases, it is a capital offense.
Many of these places (developing nations) are places Linux would do well in. Including crypto as standard would rule a lot of that out.
Also, there are still a few hangups in the U.S. about the distribution of crypto. They might not have all the paperwork ironed out, yet. (They might not want to go through the hassle.)
Well, you could always use a translation layer like BIOS does with big hard drives to convert CHS, LBA and all that.
Disk compression has been around since the good old days of DOS 3.21 with the likes of Stacker, DoubleSpace and a few others. (Possibly much sooner, but those are what I can remember off the top of my head.) The algorithms are probably all worked out and on file somewhere.
Disk/file/drive compression was real big until Microsoft included the function in an OS upgrade.
re: Viruses in plug-ins -- No more or less so than kernel modules.
re: Third-party bad code -- Then don't use it until it is tested stable by a third party. Back up your data. Don't run beta code on production systems. Etc.
--
Charles E. Hill
Re:Geez, Ford couldn't buy publicity like that.
on
2600 v. Ford Motors
·
· Score: 1
Reasonable person? We're talking about lawyers and corporate executives, here.
--
Charles E. Hill
Re:Geez, Ford couldn't buy publicity like that.
on
2600 v. Ford Motors
·
· Score: 1
Ford is suing for "tarnishment" -- by linking to their domain it can imply they are behind it or a part of it.
GM might realize that "spoofs" and this sort of thing are a tough case to win against -- when you are the spoofee. (Or they could be oblivious, or revving up their lawyers, or...)
Think of it like setting a whole row of coins on their edge -- neither heads nor tails.
Yes, it takes energy to put them their in the first place -- just like it takes energy to create an entangled pair of photons to begin with.
Whack the table they are sitting on, and they drop over onto one side -- heads or tails. Measure the outcome.
In the normal Universe, whacking the table constitutes energy and your thus is your power source.
Your confusion arises from the fact that Quantum isn't the normal Universe. The act of observing the states causes the result.
In the end, technically, you are right. The act of observing itself imparts energy to the system -- thus is the power source. However, it is so small as to be unable to be measured by our current abilities. This results in the scientists not wanting to turn a 1-page article into a 30-page explanation of superposition, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and other techno babble. --
Charles E. Hill
Slashdot Mirror
So get a Hotmail address for that and swamp Microsoft's servers. Imagine if everyone would do this...
--
Charles E. Hill
I PAY for my internet service. I have a limited amount of space available in my e-mail account. When somebody spams me, they are benefiting from what I have paid.
My ISP is paying for servers and storage space. They are paying for bandwidth. When they have to receive and store all of the spam, they are basically paying for the spammer to use their services.
Everybody in between me and the ISP is paying for the spammers to use their services.
Except that you have no right to speak for everyone upstream or even your ISP, only for yourself so points #2 and #3 are meaningless.
As far as your paying for the space: Internet & Online access costs have done nothing but come down in price since the beginning. They have never been cheaper -- and with all that spam driving your costs up! Oh, my!
Here are 3 simple solutions:
1. Set a filter up in your e-mail client to file anything from ANYONE NOT KNOWN TO YOU in a separate folder. This will leave only e-mail from people you know. Sort through the rest at your leisure.
2. Get an free webmail account with Hotmail and use that e-mail address for anything that "requires" it that you don't want; posting to newsgroups/slashdot/etc. Send your "real" address only to friends and people you know.
3. Convince your ISP that spam is such a damn nuisance they could make a couple extra bucks a month (per subscriber) by offering an optional blocking service. Write the scripts for them and license them out. Make a fortune.
Don't get me wrong: ORBS is a great idea. Anyone running an open relay needs to be slapped and their MCSE taken away. But today's prevalant anti-SPAM kill-em-all attitude is way out of line.
--
Charles E. Hill
Why? Because gov't (and people in general) have a history of abusing this sort of thing. How long before you read a story about a cop using it to track his girlfriend/wife?
How about the one where a cop tells her friend she saw the friend's husband with another woman and they went into a condo together? He wasn't doing anything illegal. Maybe he was just walking and bumped into a timeshare salesman? He wanted the free cruise you get just for listening to the pitch. Gonna surprise his wife. (It happens in all over Florida's coast.) In a jealous rage, she blows him away.
Finally, consider that Florida has a "Government In The Sunshine" law. This means that most likely the video footage can be deemed public record and should be available to anyone who wants it. (Hmmm, where was my daughter last night at midnight.)
The potential for abuse outweighs the potential benefits.
Oh, yeah. The "Right To Privacy" is enshrined in the Florida Constitution (Article I, Section 23). You can't "give it up".
--
Charles E. Hill
FYI (from the Sun 2000 Annual Report):
On August 5, 1999, we acquired Star, by means of a merger transaction pursuant to which all of the shares of Star were converted into the right to receive cash for total consideration of approximately $60 million. Simultaneously with the acquisition of Star, Sun acquired certain assets and liabilities of StarOffice GmbH, a related party of Star, for total cash consideration of approximately $14 million
--
Charles E. Hill
>Not a good point since Nortel's stock has been plummeting and they have had huge layoffs in the past few months.
:-)
:-)
I'm quite familiar with their stock, as I work for their major competitor (Lucent). Out stock has done its own nose-dive as well.
Neither stock price has any bearing on the fact that they both still do about $5-6 Billion each per QUARTER in gross business.
Both use Sparc/Solaris workstations/servers (dependingon capacity) to manage their switches and the switch networks. Both end up selling more than a few low- to mid-range ( If you ever have run a real server, you would know that Linux is just a toy.
Thanks, that is exactly the attitude I am talking about.
I originally received Sun SysAdmin and NetAdmin certification on 2.6 and then took the "upgrade" to 8. I work mostly on workstations, embeded manufacturing systems and low-end servers and have done so consistantly since 2.4. I currently run this stuff in mission-critical environments. I *DO* know what I am talking about.
You are right, on LARGE systems (8+ cpus) Solaris is one of the best OSes around. I've also worked with IRIX on some big boxes and it, too is quite nice.
HOWEVER, given the right hardware, a properly tweaked Linux system is quite capable of handling damn near anything Solaris can do on low- to mid-end ( = 4 cpus ) workstations and servers.
THIS is the market that Sun was taking for granted. If their attitude continues, Linux will sneak up on them in the big-box arena in the next few years and they will be wondering what hit them.
--
Charles E. Hill
Solaris is still sold (for a lot of money) with the large (16-way+) servers like the E10000.
Sun *DOES* care about the OS, because with Solaris they have a better lock on selling the hardware.
With Linux you can put it on your existing Sparc systems then migrate to (cheaper) Intel systems whenever the need arises. As long as they are low-end ( =4 cpus ) workstations, you won't have a problem. The software should run with just a recompile. Linux is a foot in the door and a nail in the coffin for Sun.
Look at Red Hat's latest PR -- about their quarterly results. Notice the bullet point about Nortel contracting for support to switch from "proprietary Unix" (that is Sun Solaris, BTW) on their Network Management Systems to Red Hat Linux 7.1.
Remember IBM's announcement about Telestra -- the Scandanavian ISP that replaced a room full of Sun Servers with a single S/390 running Linux?
McNealy is so focused on Bill Gates he doesn't realize that the cute little penguin he was so generously helping out is about to rip his leg off.
IBM jumped on the bandwagon; Sun seems to have an "oh, isn't that cute -- a little OS" opinion of Linux.
Sun had it's moment but it is gone. An eclipse is coming.
Linux. Join us or die.
--
Charles E. Hill
They have ALWAYS been an enemy of Linux. Sun exists to sell Sparc boxes and Solaris. They wanted to sort-of help Linux to keep it as a buffer against MS. They didn't perceive Linux as a threat and that was their mistake.
Keep in mind that only a few days ago Compaq announced two items of great importance to Sun.
1. The transfer of the Alpha to Intel. Not just the chip, but the entire development group. This will give Intel so badly-needed expertese in the 64-bit arena. While the UltraSPARC isn't a match for the Alpha, they had Intel beated hands-down. This also kills the Alpha -- leaving only the Sparc and PPC as competitors for Intel (AMD, etc.) Sun is feeling the heat.
2. The impending release of their Sun migration tools. These allow much easier conversion of Solaris programs using the Solaris threading model to the Linux threading model.
IBM has been going great guns for Sun -- remember the Telestra announcement? Replacing how many Sun servers with a single IBM Mainframe running Linux S/370?
Sun is in everyone's sights. Their problem is McNealy's ego only allows him to perceive Microsoft (Bill Gates, actually) as the only possible enemy. The rest are unworthy of his attention.
That cute little penguin is going to cause a serious eclipse in the near future. World Domination doesn't mean just Microsoft.
--
Charles E. Hill
Raytracing is only necessary in reflection and refraction -- which can be faked pretty damn good now.
Other shading methods (radiosity for proper lighting) are used elsewhere.
Real-time rendering CAN be achieved by using the proper methods and not just throwing the entire ball of wax at any scene.
The idea is SMART rendering: Z-culling (so you only render pixels that affect the scene); polygon reduction (so you don't bother with a 10,000 poly item that is so far away in the frame it is a single pixel); variable mapping (using environmental maps for reflections when appropriate (like fly-thrus where there are only "background" objects).
Think Hollywood set -- build (and shoot) only what the camera will see, nothing else.
--
Charles E. Hill
Actually, you are both right. The textures are critical for the look, but many of the best effects use motion capture (look at FF) because non-mocap motion is too damn difficult to get right on things we "know".
By "things we know" I mean human motion and things that we see every day and notice subconciously. Dinosaurs and spaceships are easy to fake since most people only see those in the movies -- and that is Hollywood motion, not reality anyway.
If you notice, it isn't that uncommon to see a rendered STILL that is indistinguishable from reality. However, rendered MOTION is still a bitch.
-chill
--
Charles E. Hill
What are you talking about? The article I read stated they would not pay ANYTHING as their existing contracts with Sun covered install fees and that the software cost was $0.
Where did you read that price?
--
Charles E. Hill
You were going to pay for what? An optical add-drop multiplexer? One that covered just you or the entire neighborhood?
The equipment to hook those fibers up is EXPENSIVE. Most of it is switched ATM and those switches are not cheap. A good Lucent or Nortel ATM switch is $200,000+ (easily) for the central office and an add-drop mux is not chump change, either.
(BTW, most DSL is simply concatenated into ATM for transport and thus hooks into most central office switches just like the fiber would. The access point is just a lot cheaper. This also fixes the "last mile" problem in that they can trunk fiber but use the copper to the houses.)
--
Charles E. Hill
Or Lucent, rather. Pipelines (formerly Ascend) are quite nice and reliable.
--
Charles E. Hill
Well, several kernel updates (like 2.2.19) are heavily suggested as upgrades -- 'cause they fix security holes. Anyone running a 2.2.x less that .19 is crazy if it is in anyway connected to the 'net.
The big difference is that MS usually holds SPs and you get about 1 every 6 months to a year (sometimes longer) with an occasional hotfix for serious ("highly publicized") problems. Point releases for the Linux kernel usually are out much quicker and don't encompass as much.
--
Charles E. Hill
Frequently there are updated/new device drivers. In the cases of .3, .4 and .5 the big one would be lots of additions/changes/fixes to various things USB.
Aside from that, if you use any of the hardware that has been updated/changed (I have an AIC7xxx controller) or use ReiserFS (there are several minor patches/updates/fixes to this).
But you are right -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I can make strong arguments for using 2.2.19 instead. On several machines at my last job they are still running (happily) 2.2.x kernels. [I suggested to the new SysAdmin to update to 2.2.19 due to security.] I wouldn't recommend an upgrade beyond that 'cause they don't need anything or gain significant advantage with 2.4.x.
--
Charles E. Hill
There are still many places in the world where having/using crypto is against the law. In some cases, it is a capital offense.
Many of these places (developing nations) are places Linux would do well in. Including crypto as standard would rule a lot of that out.
Also, there are still a few hangups in the U.S. about the distribution of crypto. They might not have all the paperwork ironed out, yet. (They might not want to go through the hassle.)
--
Charles E. Hill
The line about "solving the robosexual problem" should have been a bit of a give-away. :-)
--
Charles E. Hill
Congratulations. Nice troll.
--
Charles E. Hill
Wait for a situation like the day the next Lord of the Rings trailer is released.
Say, 10,000 active nodes at once? (And I'm being conservative.)
It should hum nicely, then.
--
Charles E. Hill
Well, you could always use a translation layer like BIOS does with big hard drives to convert CHS, LBA and all that.
Disk compression has been around since the good old days of DOS 3.21 with the likes of Stacker, DoubleSpace and a few others. (Possibly much sooner, but those are what I can remember off the top of my head.) The algorithms are probably all worked out and on file somewhere.
Disk/file/drive compression was real big until Microsoft included the function in an OS upgrade.
--
Charles E. Hill
re: Viruses in plug-ins -- No more or less so than kernel modules.
re: Third-party bad code -- Then don't use it until it is tested stable by a third party. Back up your data. Don't run beta code on production systems. Etc.
--
Charles E. Hill
Reasonable person? We're talking about lawyers and corporate executives, here.
--
Charles E. Hill
Ford is suing for "tarnishment" -- by linking to their domain it can imply they are behind it or a part of it.
GM might realize that "spoofs" and this sort of thing are a tough case to win against -- when you are the spoofee. (Or they could be oblivious, or revving up their lawyers, or...)
--
Charles E. Hill
Get a grip.
"Free" in this case (Linux) means "Free", not "Free if you use it like I say you should and not any other way" like you are espousing.
That would be Apple's or Microsoft's or Sun's definition of "Free".
Who the hell are you to dictate who as to pay and who doesn't? Who appointed you Linus (or Richard)?
--
Charles E. Hill
Not really.
Think of it like setting a whole row of coins on their edge -- neither heads nor tails.
Yes, it takes energy to put them their in the first place -- just like it takes energy to create an entangled pair of photons to begin with.
Whack the table they are sitting on, and they drop over onto one side -- heads or tails. Measure the outcome.
In the normal Universe, whacking the table constitutes energy and your thus is your power source.
Your confusion arises from the fact that Quantum isn't the normal Universe. The act of observing the states causes the result.
In the end, technically, you are right. The act of observing itself imparts energy to the system -- thus is the power source. However, it is so small as to be unable to be measured by our current abilities. This results in the scientists not wanting to turn a 1-page article into a 30-page explanation of superposition, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and other techno babble.
--
Charles E. Hill
Oops, the "Plain Old Text" setting stripped out all of my [company] tags where I replaced the real name. [Lucent -- it seems I also missed one. :-)
--
Charles E. Hill