So what ? You can make some fine bucks in Romania as a hitman for the local mob version, but that doesn't make it legal or moral either.
Yet this is precisely the problem. There exist economic strata in parts of the world where the percentage of people who would take a job as a hitman is far higher than around your comfy dorm/office/neighborhood. Whatever is being done that doesn't reduce that percentage certainly won't reduce spam from those same types of people.
MS had a contract with Apple (just like they had with Sun regarding Java). Apple's contention was not just that MS provided a GUI, but that they violated their contract.
I remember that - they just flat-out stole the Mac interface.
Not quite. They were allowed access to the MacOS prototype 2 years before it shipped (to develop MS/Basic et.al., and maybe something to do with the AppleSoft license extension), and had a contract allowing them to use certain portions of the technology after some time delay (3 years?). Jobs thought that Apple would have the market wrapped up by then.
Sender pays does not have to be universal for it to work. Whitelisting senders (including lists), who use signed email or some other form of secure or traceable transport, for free email receipt provides very little room for abuse by your listed mechanisms, assuming your whitelist is private and finite in size.
Unknown bulk emailers and long lost friends will incur costs, but if the cost is only a nickel, that's much less that your friend would have had to pay for a postcard.
Liberals go the other way. Luck, circumstance, and opportunity play huge roles in where you are. Poor people are poor because of luck and circumstance. People get hit by trains because they might have just plain been unlucky. Your situation is a result of your environment, including dumb luck.
I tend to think the opposite about Liberals: Liberals don't seem to believe in probability distributions. They think that poor people could only be poor because rich people screwed them. That group X could only be under-represented because there's a vast conspiracy to blackball them. They also assume that probability distributions can be made to go-away simply by taking away from one tail of the distribution and giving to the other. A historical analysis of the welfare state and other policies shows that things aren't that simple.
Conservatives tend to think you are where you are because you deserved it.... Your situation is a result of your disposition.
Although not stictly related, there are some correlations between how one lives (honesty, relationships, etc.) and ones situation.
On the other hand, I don't want to pay for email, I already get it for free.
Just set it up so either they pay a penny, or pay nothing if they are already on your whitelist. Only spammers and long-lost friends will have to pay a penny. Maybe I don't need to hear so badly from friends who don't think I'm worth a penny to contact the first time.
Mailing lists can require you send them a penny first, or put them on your whitelist before subscribing.
There's still the problem of forging "From" addresses to solve though...
The problem with spam is that it's almost free to send in massive quantities. Anything that adds cost will reduce spam.
I like whitelists. If all the major ISP's (AOL, MSN, etc.) added manditory whitelists, plus anything that adds cost to unknown parties getting on the whitelists (in money or time per "To" address: micropayments, adding up 2 jpeg numerals on a web page, etc.) the reach of spam would decrease and the cost would increase. Old college buddies would still go to the web page to figure out how to get on your whitelist, or even pay the micropayment if it's less than the cost of a postcard or stamp. The major hassle will be due to idiots who can't figure out how to configure their whielists for the mailing lists to which they've actually subscribed.
Note that whitelisting is not a complete solution, spammers will just start forging "From" addresses (using harvested To/From pairs) until some sort of user/server authentication or secure transport mechanism is also overlayed on the email system.
the only reasonable metric is performance normalized to a particular process technology.
Only if you don't care about heat dissapation or power density. At some point watts per cubic nanosecond*c becomes the limiting factor. P4's are not optimal if you want to pack a bunch of them in a box small enough that the interconnect distances are short.
How is C's or Perl's learning curve any steeper than the learning curve of a typical recent BASIC environment [microsoft.com]?
Actually, an easy to use Basic programming environment is still included with the majority of personal computers. It's the vbscript that comes with Windows versions of the Internet Explorer web browser. A kid can still write short Basic programs using wordpad and run them in the web browser. Fortunately, javascript is even more common (available in more web browsers).
Most anyone who's actually taught programming to a room full of kids will realize that some languages are easier for the average kid to pick up than others. The success rate is far higher for Basic and Logo, than for C or Perl.
The American missionaries who converted the tribe in the 1950s taught them Christian modesty, and they now favour shorts and T-shirts, largely supplied by visitors and aid agencies. The footwear of choice is the plastic flip-flop.
No comment necessary?
Across the river there is an overgrown area where there once lived another tribe. In a little know accident involving an illegal time machine, Richard Stallman was sent back in time to visit this tribe. During his short stay, he converted many of them of into being true believers of free software. After he left, the men of the tribe spent much time rigging logic elements out of many pullys, rope and levers, so they might themselves experience the rapture of emacs. The women however, left to find places where there were less geeky men. Eventually the reproduction rate of this tribe dropped below the level necessary for their primative agricultural subsistance. The jungle grew back over their land, returning the it to the butterflies and the termites.
Re:Just to remind people why more bits is good..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 1
There will be no performance or precision boost for floating-point math from moving the rest of the chip to 64-bit registers/datapaths.
IEEE doubles only have 52 bits of mantissa, so 64-bit scaled integers actually have more precision (though less dynamic range). 64-bit long longs are also very useful for building quad/oct precision integer or floating point math libraries.
The contribution of many innovative products is not in the invention of a single basic technology, but often in the combinations of multiple pre-existing technologies.
The Amiga combined:
game machine sprite graphics (from the Atari 2600 designer)
hardware bit-blit (from a VLSI design course)
a unified memory system and software decoded disk format (from the Apple II design)
video output (the Apple II could display on a TV, but its output could not be recorded on a standard NTSC VCR. There was, however, an expensive S100 board that could do this before the Amiga archtecture was started.)
multivoice waveform audio (similar to an existing Apple II peripheral board).
a multitasking OS (from the (HP and Sun) Unix experiences of the software team.
a GUI (from a Mac designer and Lisa users).
Even the weird stuff, like hold-and-modify colors, was a modification of a difference-coding compression algorithm.
The trademark "Amiga" is still in use; and the Amiga computer patents have been licensed (to Gateway and others). However, Amiga, Inc. (formerly HiToro, Inc.) was purchased by Commodore, which went bankrupt many years ago.
Please differentiate between source code that is open (I can look at it, but perhaps under a very restrictive license), and Open Source Software (under GPL, MPL, BSD, etc. licenses). Most of your examples could be handled perfectly well under Microsoft's open look-at-but-now-your-contaminated license.
I assume you're talking about software choosen by Joe User, and not by a CS major or sysadmins. The OSS application closest to being chosen by average users might be the AOL browser when they finish their migration to Mozilla technology.
Joe User buys stuff because of advertising. No OSS vendor ('cept maybe RedHat) does any significant advertising.
OSS developers write stuff for themselves and for recognition (an audience of very experienced users). Closed-source developers can develop stuff merely for profit. And lots of profits come from average, or even dumb, users. There is very little OSS recognition is designing an email program which even an elderly aol-clueless-newbie with poor eyesight can use.
Programmers are morally obligated to give the code to their users and allow their users to freely modify and redistribute the code.
Yes, but no one is morally oblgated to write code in the first place; and a huge percentage of the code that the world runs on is so boring that no one would write it without bribery, that bribery often including legal restrictions on other perceived obligations.
I don't mean to sound flippant.. but i'm in a line of work where, when i work during the day, i assume that that work is done, and that tomorrow, i'm going to get paid for working tomorrow.. and not to keep getting paid and repaid for the work i did last week.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead?
In almost any real businesses, yes. The cost of R&D and tooling depends of almost any product (cars, graphics chips, loaves of bread, etc.) is dependant on the probability of future sales, not current payments. If you were a baker, the number of loaves you spend time kneading in the early morning is far greater than your prepaid sales, and more likely depends on your forcast of how many people will walk into your shop during the day. Furthermore you must charge more than your time and money was worth on good days in order to cover the risk of poor sales on bad days.
People who don't take risks are not business... more like serfs.
When your market consists entirely of people waiting with 'bated breath for the next release of the latest and greatest gee gaw you're ok, but when your market moves to Walmart and the nations grannies it's a whole new ball game. Granny just wants to buy it, take it home, and have it work, and if it does. . . well, that's pretty much it for her, she's done.
Many granny types with money still buy some very nice cars (not because of the horsepower) and very fashionable purses (clearly not because of the low cost). The specs have become less important than lifestyle and image issues. I think MHz will become less important in driving the PC upgrade cycle, and fashion will become more important. Apple understands this. That's one reason why their market share is increasing even while they fall behind in pure MHz.
MHz will still maintain some importance, but mainly to niche markets, such as gamers and computational scientists.
A hard disk is the cheapest backup media. Find a trusted buddy in another geological and geographic area, and buy each other a larger hard disk drive (cheap these days). Periodically ftp each other encrypted archives of your home directories (overnight on slower links). If you don't have an out-of-state buddy whom you trust, then just buy some disk space on an out-of-state web hosting facility and ftp there. Also keep a backup version or two locally on a portable and removable hard disk so you don't have to bother your buddy for accidentally deleted files, etc.
>It requires the intervention of a large, government-sponsored, Big Brother company (or the government itself) to enforce.
Nope. Paypal-like micro-pay mediation services would work just fine. You micro-pay per recipient to get on a particular recipients greylist. Your email agent responds to unknown senders with the URL to your chosen micropay gateway service. Everything that isn't either greylisted, whitelisted, or otherwise stamped by a trusted payment or certification server would be assumed to be worthless spam by most peoples incoming mail agents. The cost of the greylisting service has to just be slightly higher than what most spammers make from their 0.001% response rate. Normal people will pay a few pennies to try an contact an old school buddy; same with legitimate businesses. Large mailing lists could be supported by you micro-paying them first to get on their greylist. After an initial email exchange you move an email address from the greylist to your whitelist, and emailing each-other becomes free. The system could be further stengthened by some sort of lightweight numeric signature in the headers, just enough to prevent spammers from trying to harvest whitelist-pairs of email addresses. Real businesses could up the lightweight signature to real digital signatures.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet this is precisely the problem. There exist economic strata in parts of the world where the percentage of people who would take a job as a hitman is far higher than around your comfy dorm/office/neighborhood. Whatever is being done that doesn't reduce that percentage certainly won't reduce spam from those same types of people.
MS had a contract with Apple (just like they had with Sun regarding Java). Apple's contention was not just that MS provided a GUI, but that they violated their contract.
History still seems to repeat itself.
Not quite. They were allowed access to the MacOS prototype 2 years before it shipped (to develop MS/Basic et.al., and maybe something to do with the AppleSoft license extension), and had a contract allowing them to use certain portions of the technology after some time delay (3 years?). Jobs thought that Apple would have the market wrapped up by then.
Xerox was a part owner of Apple at the time.
Sender pays does not have to be universal for it to work. Whitelisting senders (including lists), who use signed email or some other form of secure or traceable transport, for free email receipt provides very little room for abuse by your listed mechanisms, assuming your whitelist is private and finite in size.
Unknown bulk emailers and long lost friends will incur costs, but if the cost is only a nickel, that's much less that your friend would have had to pay for a postcard.
Join him. The above poster didn't specify whether it was a mean, median or modal average, nor the digits of accuracy of the number 50.
My experience is that the hypothesis about stupidity is true, even for very large values of 50 (50%).
I tend to think the opposite about Liberals: Liberals don't seem to believe in probability distributions. They think that poor people could only be poor because rich people screwed them. That group X could only be under-represented because there's a vast conspiracy to blackball them. They also assume that probability distributions can be made to go-away simply by taking away from one tail of the distribution and giving to the other. A historical analysis of the welfare state and other policies shows that things aren't that simple.
Conservatives tend to think you are where you are because you deserved it. ... Your situation is a result of your disposition.
Although not stictly related, there are some correlations between how one lives (honesty, relationships, etc.) and ones situation.
Doesn't the statistical payoff factor make this gambling under some state and local laws?
Just set it up so either they pay a penny, or pay nothing if they are already on your whitelist. Only spammers and long-lost friends will have to pay a penny. Maybe I don't need to hear so badly from friends who don't think I'm worth a penny to contact the first time.
Mailing lists can require you send them a penny first, or put them on your whitelist before subscribing.
There's still the problem of forging "From" addresses to solve though...
Yes, but exactly how are you going to put your 3" diskette into the 5.25" floppy drive?
Neither of the Steve's were employee #1 at Apple. Dan Kottke got employee number 1 because he was the first person to draw a paycheck...
The problem with spam is that it's almost free to send in massive quantities. Anything that adds cost will reduce spam.
I like whitelists. If all the major ISP's (AOL, MSN, etc.) added manditory whitelists, plus anything that adds cost to unknown parties getting on the whitelists (in money or time per "To" address: micropayments, adding up 2 jpeg numerals on a web page, etc.) the reach of spam would decrease and the cost would increase. Old college buddies would still go to the web page to figure out how to get on your whitelist, or even pay the micropayment if it's less than the cost of a postcard or stamp. The major hassle will be due to idiots who can't figure out how to configure their whielists for the mailing lists to which they've actually subscribed.
Note that whitelisting is not a complete solution, spammers will just start forging "From" addresses (using harvested To/From pairs) until some sort of user/server authentication or secure transport mechanism is also overlayed on the email system.
Only if you don't care about heat dissapation or power density. At some point watts per cubic nanosecond*c becomes the limiting factor. P4's are not optimal if you want to pack a bunch of them in a box small enough that the interconnect distances are short.
Actually, an easy to use Basic programming environment is still included with the majority of personal computers. It's the vbscript that comes with Windows versions of the Internet Explorer web browser. A kid can still write short Basic programs using wordpad and run them in the web browser. Fortunately, javascript is even more common (available in more web browsers).
Most anyone who's actually taught programming to a room full of kids will realize that some languages are easier for the average kid to pick up than others. The success rate is far higher for Basic and Logo, than for C or Perl.
No comment necessary?
Across the river there is an overgrown area where there once lived another tribe. In a little know accident involving an illegal time machine, Richard Stallman was sent back in time to visit this tribe. During his short stay, he converted many of them of into being true believers of free software. After he left, the men of the tribe spent much time rigging logic elements out of many pullys, rope and levers, so they might themselves experience the rapture of emacs. The women however, left to find places where there were less geeky men. Eventually the reproduction rate of this tribe dropped below the level necessary for their primative agricultural subsistance. The jungle grew back over their land, returning the it to the butterflies and the termites.
IEEE doubles only have 52 bits of mantissa, so 64-bit scaled integers actually have more precision (though less dynamic range). 64-bit long longs are also very useful for building quad/oct precision integer or floating point math libraries.
The Amiga combined:
game machine sprite graphics (from the Atari 2600 designer)
hardware bit-blit (from a VLSI design course)
a unified memory system and software decoded disk format (from the Apple II design)
video output (the Apple II could display on a TV, but its output could not be recorded on a standard NTSC VCR. There was, however, an expensive S100 board that could do this before the Amiga archtecture was started.)
multivoice waveform audio (similar to an existing Apple II peripheral board).
a multitasking OS (from the (HP and Sun) Unix experiences of the software team.
a GUI (from a Mac designer and Lisa users).
Even the weird stuff, like hold-and-modify colors, was a modification of a difference-coding compression algorithm.
Amiga founder and employee #11.
Please differentiate between source code that is open (I can look at it, but perhaps under a very restrictive license), and Open Source Software (under GPL, MPL, BSD, etc. licenses). Most of your examples could be handled perfectly well under Microsoft's open look-at-but-now-your-contaminated license.
Joe User buys stuff because of advertising. No OSS vendor ('cept maybe RedHat) does any significant advertising.
OSS developers write stuff for themselves and for recognition (an audience of very experienced users). Closed-source developers can develop stuff merely for profit. And lots of profits come from average, or even dumb, users. There is very little OSS recognition is designing an email program which even an elderly aol-clueless-newbie with poor eyesight can use.
Yes, but no one is morally oblgated to write code in the first place; and a huge percentage of the code that the world runs on is so boring that no one would write it without bribery, that bribery often including legal restrictions on other perceived obligations.
Is the concept of "pay me for work" completely dead?
In almost any real businesses, yes. The cost of R&D and tooling depends of almost any product (cars, graphics chips, loaves of bread, etc.) is dependant on the probability of future sales, not current payments. If you were a baker, the number of loaves you spend time kneading in the early morning is far greater than your prepaid sales, and more likely depends on your forcast of how many people will walk into your shop during the day. Furthermore you must charge more than your time and money was worth on good days in order to cover the risk of poor sales on bad days.
People who don't take risks are not business... more like serfs.
It's not "Open Source(tm)", but it is a form of open source according to many non-cultish usages to that phrase.
Many granny types with money still buy some very nice cars (not because of the horsepower) and very fashionable purses (clearly not because of the low cost). The specs have become less important than lifestyle and image issues. I think MHz will become less important in driving the PC upgrade cycle, and fashion will become more important. Apple understands this. That's one reason why their market share is increasing even while they fall behind in pure MHz.
MHz will still maintain some importance, but mainly to niche markets, such as gamers and computational scientists.
A hard disk is the cheapest backup media. Find a trusted buddy in another geological and geographic area, and buy each other a larger hard disk drive (cheap these days). Periodically ftp each other encrypted archives of your home directories (overnight on slower links). If you don't have an out-of-state buddy whom you trust, then just buy some disk space on an out-of-state web hosting facility and ftp there. Also keep a backup version or two locally on a portable and removable hard disk so you don't have to bother your buddy for accidentally deleted files, etc.
>It requires the intervention of a large, government-sponsored, Big Brother company (or the government itself) to enforce.
Nope. Paypal-like micro-pay mediation services would work just fine. You micro-pay per recipient to get on a particular recipients greylist. Your email agent responds to unknown senders with the URL to your chosen micropay gateway service. Everything that isn't either greylisted, whitelisted, or otherwise stamped by a trusted payment or certification server would be assumed to be worthless spam by most peoples incoming mail agents. The cost of the greylisting service has to just be slightly higher than what most spammers make from their 0.001% response rate. Normal people will pay a few pennies to try an contact an old school buddy; same with legitimate businesses. Large mailing lists could be supported by you micro-paying them first to get on their greylist. After an initial email exchange you move an email address from the greylist to your whitelist, and emailing each-other becomes free. The system could be further stengthened by some sort of lightweight numeric signature in the headers, just enough to prevent spammers from trying to harvest whitelist-pairs of email addresses. Real businesses could up the lightweight signature to real digital signatures.