A two-second gap at 70 MPH is about 315 feet, or about 24 car lengths Err, no. A two second gap at 70 mph is 205 feet. Following through on the rest of your calculations this means that 2 seconds is not enough. Your assumption of 2/5 of a second to respond is also horribly optimistic and assumes that drivers are at all times alert and on the look out for trouble ahead. Just a little bit of observation of typical motorway/freeway traffic would tell you that the opposite is true - most drivers are miles away and giving the road far less attention than it deserves.
There's a lovely clip which crops up from time to time on those "Police action!" style programs. Filmed from a police car it shows a a small car (metro or Renault 5 or similar) in lane three which resolutely fails to notice the jam sandwich on its tail, despite the sirens, red lights, blue lights and oscillating headlights. The police car is trying to get to an earlier accident which is ahead on the motorway and is being held up by the small car. Then as they approach the blocked road the police car slows, which gives the appearance of the small car suddenly accelerating away (although it isn't) and then it finally smashes into the back of the stationary traffic queue. The driver of the small car had 20 to 30 seconds to bring his or her attention to bear on the odd things happening around, and failed miserably.
A two second gap is the absolute minimum that any sane driver would contemplate in fast heavy traffic. Unfortunately there are a lot of insane drivers around.
What did Windows 95 actually add? W95 actually followed on from W3.1 rather than W3.0. The main feature which it added (and the thing which drove Microsoft to release it) was incompatibility with OS/2. Because IBM had licensed access to the W3.1 source they were able to achieve first-rate compatibility for OS/2 running W3.1 programs, plus much better stability, multi-tasking etc. A crashing W3.1 program running on OS/2 simply took itself out rather than the whole system. Microsoft saw themselves potentially losing market share in a big way, so rushed W95 out.
This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links? Nothing in the definition of Spam requires it to be commercial in nature. The term originated on Usenet and referred to the constant repetition of a message - as in the Monty Python Spam sketch. For a long time a distinction was made between Spam (repeated messages) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail). Alas, such a distinction is too subtle for your average journalist to comprehend so now the one term is used for both.
Some people, particulary those unfamiliar with maths, when they encounter "0.50" read it as "Nought point fifty". This leads to confusion, hence the preceding thread.
That's outrageously cheap and obviously not correct. It's not outrageously cheap at all. Compared to most bandwidth deals it would fall into a category of "sort of OK-ish". I pay far less than that for my bandwidth.
The problem here is their normal rate (the one they intended to charge, but got wrong) is outlandishly expensive. If you don't go into it expecting this kind of extortionate rate then the rate which was wrongly given sounds perfectly reasonable.
I suspect that this is why we were taught very firmly (at least when I was at school) never to say "point fifty" or "point forty five" but always "point five oh" or "point four five".
Nowadays I teach maths myself and emphasise the same point to my students.
Damn, I know the dollar is weak and all, but $5 a quid seems a bit extreme:P If you read literature from the early part of the twentieth century you'll find that 5 dollars to 1 pound was about the going rate back then. When I was a boy in the 1960s it had slipped to around $2.40 to the pound, which meant that one cent was almost exactly the same as one (old) UK penny. Handy when buying American comics.
They'll notice when they can't connect to their work mail servers (for example).
You'll notice I said "The vast majority..." The vast majority of users don't do that sort of thing and so won't notice. They buy their PC at PC-World or Dell, plug it in and think that's all they should ever have to do to it.
The solution for those who *do* want to connect to their work mail servers has already been covered in the thread. Depending on their technical saviness (and that of their employer's IT people) they either use port 587 or they phone up their ISP and say, "Why can't I connect?" The ISP help-line (and this is the hard part because of the level of cluelessness of your average ISP support droid) says, "Can you use port 587 instead?" and if the customer can't, or one or both of them don't understand the suggestion then the ISP enables port 25 outbound for that customer.
Yes, you'll still get a small percentage of users who are a) clueless and so have bots running and b) need to access a remote SMTP server, but you'll still have made a big dent in the problem.
It does however depend on getting the use of port 587 more widely adopted. OTOH, there's no particular overhead in doing that - it can easily be implemented alongside current practice.
A lot could be achieved if ISPs adopted a policy of "We block port 25, unless you ask us not to". The vast majority of the net-using population don't know the difference between port 25 and a hole in the head. They'll never notice it's been blocked, except that the 'bots on their computers won't be able to spew so much spam. Those who do know the difference and ask for it to be un-blocked will also tend to coincide with those who know how to make sure they're *not* bot-infected.
Yes, it isn't perfect, but it would do a hell of a lot. The hardest part would be getting ISP-employed droids to understand the rules.
The problem with this approach seems to be one that could be addressed by separating the two different ways in which SMTP is used.
1) It's used by MUAs to pass mail to some sort of parent system for delivery.
2) It's used by MTAs to pass mail around between themselves - typically passing from the originator's MTA to the recipient's MTA.
If the first function was switched to a different port number (i.e. not 25) and made authenticated, then port 25 could be blocked by default for dial-up-style users without inconveniencing anyone. They would still be able to use any MTA with which they had an arrangement (subscription, work server, etc.) to take their mail for delivery but bots wouldn't be able to spew vast amounts of mail out by direct SMTP connection.
The distinction is a bit like that between a DNS query sent from a client to a resolving host, and the recursive DNS query sent from the resolving host to its peers in the DNS pool.
Please think about this before responding with vitriol.
The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines
One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.
ISTR from when I lived there that you don't actually have to vote - you just have to turn up and be counted. Having appeared at the polling station you're free to vote or not as you prefer.
I don't know what the penalties are for not appearing, but I have a vague recollection that you can be fined.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here...
There's a lovely clip which crops up from time to time on those "Police action!" style programs. Filmed from a police car it shows a a small car (metro or Renault 5 or similar) in lane three which resolutely fails to notice the jam sandwich on its tail, despite the sirens, red lights, blue lights and oscillating headlights. The police car is trying to get to an earlier accident which is ahead on the motorway and is being held up by the small car. Then as they approach the blocked road the police car slows, which gives the appearance of the small car suddenly accelerating away (although it isn't) and then it finally smashes into the back of the stationary traffic queue. The driver of the small car had 20 to 30 seconds to bring his or her attention to bear on the odd things happening around, and failed miserably.
A two second gap is the absolute minimum that any sane driver would contemplate in fast heavy traffic. Unfortunately there are a lot of insane drivers around.
Only three comments and already the site seems to have been totally jammed up by a single Slashdot article in too much of a hurry.
This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.
Some people, particulary those unfamiliar with maths, when they encounter "0.50" read it as "Nought point fifty". This leads to confusion, hence the preceding thread.
The problem here is their normal rate (the one they intended to charge, but got wrong) is outlandishly expensive. If you don't go into it expecting this kind of extortionate rate then the rate which was wrongly given sounds perfectly reasonable.
I suspect that this is why we were taught very firmly (at least when I was at school) never to say "point fifty" or "point forty five" but always "point five oh" or "point four five".
Nowadays I teach maths myself and emphasise the same point to my students.
Damn, I know the dollar is weak and all, but $5 a quid seems a bit extreme
It's always worked in the past. Why change a winning formula?
And badly named! It's not the inverse square root (which would simply be the square); it's the reciprocal of the square root.
That's a film with Kristin Scott-Thomas isn't it?
So now a London bobby's greeting will be, "Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello"?
Not 7.5GB/sec. It was 7.5Gb/sec - that's gigabits per second.
John
You'll notice I said "The vast majority..." The vast majority of users don't do that sort of thing and so won't notice. They buy their PC at PC-World or Dell, plug it in and think that's all they should ever have to do to it.
The solution for those who *do* want to connect to their work mail servers has already been covered in the thread. Depending on their technical saviness (and that of their employer's IT people) they either use port 587 or they phone up their ISP and say, "Why can't I connect?" The ISP help-line (and this is the hard part because of the level of cluelessness of your average ISP support droid) says, "Can you use port 587 instead?" and if the customer can't, or one or both of them don't understand the suggestion then the ISP enables port 25 outbound for that customer.
Yes, you'll still get a small percentage of users who are a) clueless and so have bots running and b) need to access a remote SMTP server, but you'll still have made a big dent in the problem.
It does however depend on getting the use of port 587 more widely adopted. OTOH, there's no particular overhead in doing that - it can easily be implemented alongside current practice.
John
A lot could be achieved if ISPs adopted a policy of "We block port 25, unless you ask us not to". The vast majority of the net-using population don't know the difference between port 25 and a hole in the head. They'll never notice it's been blocked, except that the 'bots on their computers won't be able to spew so much spam. Those who do know the difference and ask for it to be un-blocked will also tend to coincide with those who know how to make sure they're *not* bot-infected.
Yes, it isn't perfect, but it would do a hell of a lot. The hardest part would be getting ISP-employed droids to understand the rules.
John
ERR2051: Failed to read (or at least, to comprehend) the article you're responding to error at line 3.
The problem with this approach seems to be one that could be addressed by separating the two different ways in which SMTP is used.
1) It's used by MUAs to pass mail to some sort of parent system for delivery.
2) It's used by MTAs to pass mail around between themselves - typically passing from the originator's MTA to the recipient's MTA.
If the first function was switched to a different port number (i.e. not 25) and made authenticated, then port 25 could be blocked by default for dial-up-style users without inconveniencing anyone. They would still be able to use any MTA with which they had an arrangement (subscription, work server, etc.) to take their mail for delivery but bots wouldn't be able to spew vast amounts of mail out by direct SMTP connection.
The distinction is a bit like that between a DNS query sent from a client to a resolving host, and the recursive DNS query sent from the resolving host to its peers in the DNS pool.
Please think about this before responding with vitriol.
Cheers,
John
Good job Brunel only had to route his line through the flat prairies of Cornwall then.
One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.
John
ISTR from when I lived there that you don't actually have to vote - you just have to turn up and be counted. Having appeared at the polling station you're free to vote or not as you prefer.
I don't know what the penalties are for not appearing, but I have a vague recollection that you can be fined.
John