Is Mr Slippery from True Names? If that is the case, wouldn't you want to avoid anything related to mailman?
True Names by Vernor Vinge is a story that starts out with a guy being questioned by the police since he had to be up to no good since he had more CPU and storage than normal people.
Or just keep it in mbox files and use grep to filter your searches. I have over 200,000 email messages in my archive and sometimes I do need to find a message from several years back but the cool imap and email programs aren't very good at helping me find just what I want most of the time.
There have been 2 patches that we needed to apply to our Solaris 9 servers in the past 5 or so years because we run so few of the SUNW packages. Both of them could be done without reboots. There is another patch that requires unloading the routing system and reload it or a reboot but that patch fixes a timing attack that simply can't be done on our network. If you buy the right support, the last Solaris 9 patches were released about a month ago.
In Victoria, you can get a speeding ticket for 3.1% over the limit which is well outside of the 5 or 0 that speed limits currently end with. If that logic is extended, then there should be speed limits of say 57 (take your pick of km/hr or miles/hr). Neither makes sense for humans who have to comply.
The state government recently decided that 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 km speed limits were too many so now they are reducing them to just the 40, 60 and 80. This is interesting on roads like one near my house which would be 80 if it wasn't so hilly to cause cars to easily coats 10 km faster. Back in the days of speed limits of being 5 km + 10%, it made sense that if you didn't want people driving faster than 80 at the bottom of the hills you stick a 70 speed limit on it Now that a ticket could be issued at 72.17 km/hr or faster, it goes against what the traffic engineers tried to fix decades ago.
Much fun can be had by convincing a Solaris machine that the date is in the 1800s since it appears that dynamic libraries don't work then due to a bug in the dynamic linker. I'm guessing that bug will show up sometime in the future too. The interesting part is there doesn't appear to be a way to put the kernel into the 1800s via any standard API. The FORTH boot loader can be told to play games with the hardware clocks on some machines which can then be used to simulate these time travelling machines.
If you do manage to get speed limit compliance up, I expect you will follow what happened in Victoria Australia (which has the highest speed limit compliance in the world). The roads are congested so badly that we have not seen any of the advantages of a newer fleet and the total number km driven has gone down. You are now more likely to die per km driven than you were 10 years ago and you are more likely to die per hour on the road than you were 10 years ago. The "road toll" stats are now messed with nearly yearly to reduce them yet they don't go down. A decade ago if you fell asleep and drove off the road, you were counted as a traffic fatality, now you will most likely be counted at a sleep apnea related death.
Adjusting speed limits assumes everyone has computer control speed. Many modern speedometers are not compatible with speed limits of say 57 when you figure humans have to read them.
Many states and the federal government used to have rules that would fine your company if the profit exceeded 25%. The fine of a 26% profit margin was about 10%. At 27.5% the fine would break even with the profit. Maybe it is time to bring back those kinds of rules or enforce them when they are still in the law books.
I've got a few SPARCStation 20s that can replace the servers running the core business. Sure they aren't fast but they can still do the job. I think they are about 19 years old. I also have a pair of SPARCServer 1000 that could take over loads they use so much power they are only good as space heater or if I need a power supply to jump start a car. There was a time when my web site was running on a SPARCStation 1
The Aussie power plug is the most likely case for things to cost more. Anything that can be plugged in need a C-tick which is just like the FCC testing but it requires more paperwork and the standard is very slightly different. Other things have unique standards such as a kitchen faucet has to be certified to the local standard. Many of these standards are voluntary in the US under the UL approval process but are a legal requirement to follow an expensive, unique AS or ASNZ standard. Cars have to be crash tested for the local market.
Local sales and support costs are far higher since local staff costs are much higher than in the US since minimum wage jobs there are often $20 to $30 an hour here. The cost of everything is higher so staff that can demand it, do want far more money. Construction costs are some of the highest in the world.
Local inflation is driven by a requirement that 9% of all employees money gets dumped into mutual fund like retirement funds that are simply trying to out gamble everyone else and not really invest so they are throwing around money like crazy.
The real issue is that land prices are hyper inflated and simply insane. The makers of Autocad have an office an hour drive away from down town sitting on land worth 10s of millions yet the same office in a almost rural area in a US city might cost nearly a million dollars. The land prices mean rent is very high and there are examples where the 2rd largest mall in town spent over a billion dollars to upgrade so basic economics say the rent of the smaller stores need to increase by at least $20,000 a month. The Costco built in Melbourne was the most expensive one in the world and far more expensive than the ones they have built in Tokyo.
The distributed authentication tools that use cryptography that would be required to be deployed are illegal in many parts of the world so I don't see that as a decent solution to the problem.
MX are for inbound delivery. SPF are for outbound authentication so it is even a different concept. MX records are nearly required for mail yet SPF isn't and will never be so the only authoritative way to find out if a server is involved with mail at this point in time is to look at an MX record... which is pointless for any real verification of an outbound message.
The asymmetrical nature of email has always been the problem that will always allow spam. The only real fix is to force the inbound mail servers (which can be determined via MX records) to verify a given message that it may not have any info about. There were proposals for things like looking up example.com._.user.message-id or even just example.com._.user to see if they are approved to send messages. The problem is that if you do not centralize outbound email, you can not stop spam. That is one reason why X.400 mail systems worked they way they did.
SPF was broken from the start but it was a step towards a better solution.
I liked the idea of using dns or snmp to ask the server that should have sent the message "did you send message id foo_xyz? That alone would have fixed a massive amount of spam if you tie it back to mx records of what should be sending the messages.
You know that very little of this stuff was on the web (which doesn't change its copyright status at all) since there are 16,77,217 1x1 images and someone had to invent the 1x1 pixel expansion stuff and well equipped computer at the time had 68 meg of disk. I was working creating images for evaluating if 24 bit RGB systems were good enough. The conclusion at the time is that 8 bits of R, G & B weren't but 8 bits of H, S & I would produce much more lifelike images and you might even find that discussion showing up on/. in the past. It turns out that at least 75% of the colors your computer can display are brown or grey and it isn't very good at doing simple orange. The gradient stuff is very interesting since one would expect that there are about 2^64 nice linear gradients but when you figure that there are only about 4 million useful colors and a limited number of other colors on complementary side of the color wheel (which humans seem to find ascetically pleasing) and you end up dropping lots of them when you do a gradient, there aren't that many useful gradients in use. Once you figure that most gradients are subsets of others, there is a shockingly small number of useful ones. If you want you can get a 4d matrix of Blue, Green -> Blue, Green of both 65536 starting values and find the slash dot banner gradient right there with all the other useful ones and most of them can fit on a 9 track tape. If you map that into a 2d image for colors people will describe as color (and not grey, white or black), you will find that there too.
Nearly every modern web site includes images that derive from my early work with 24 bit images. Everybody would just copy and extend and the web would not exist if that IP had been protected the way the laws claim it should be. If I hit NZ with it, other countries may find a way around it as a response. I'm wondering if I shouldn't assign the copyright to some appropriate group but I'm not sure what to do yet. It will be an excellent way to make man politically connected enemies.
Apple has reported that 55% of the people who can run Lion are not running Lion. For most users, there is no reason to upgrade between major versions of OS X and since the change between 10.5.8 and 10.6.3 is about the change between the first 50 patches to service pack 2 for XP, I find it odd that a version isn't built since all it should take is not using xcodes default settings.
NNTP newsgroups can remain on just your own private server too. Innd is a good database engine for forums and can outperform any sql based solution and it already has the remote backup built in. There are already news to email gateways and plenty of open source web based readers.
In the mid 80's the Jr highschool had maybe 6 apple ][ and about 8 TRS-80 model 1. The high school had two punch card machines and the cards were taken over to the local oil company to run on their Cyber. They didn't want to give us a terminal since they said we would try to hack their system. They were paying something like $750 a month for those keypunch machines. I have never used a keyboard with better feedback.
Since you had a one day turnaround on your assignment, it taught you to be very careful about getting things to run the first time.
At some point we ended up with an IBM PC (not an XT) and one of the music students was doing a report on computer music. I helped her write "99 bottles of beer on the wall", loaded it up with a large starting point and let it go early in the morning. At lunch time I was asked if I knew how to stop it since they were worried about breaking their newest computer.
About 1983 the high school ended up with the TRS-80s model 1 and few model 3 and networked apples running UCSD Pascal. At that point they started running 3 beginning classes a day as well as and advanced class and the other two times were used as an intro where they would being in some class like history or home ec they would use the computer for something that was mostly a waste of time.
The intro classes were in basic and would start out with "write a program to count from 20 to 4 with only even numbers" and later would involve a check balance program where you had to enter how many of each type of coin you had as well as any deposits and checks and it would give you a grand total. They were simple enough that by the time I graduated, I had a basic program that would complete all of the assignments once the description was entered.
The advanced class would do group projects. One project was a computer matching system that was used as a fund raiser. The problem is the 2nd guy in the team (and id #1) knew how to answer the questions so he matched most girls. I was user id #0 and an off by one bug led to some embarrassing results.
Victoria Australia has been doing this experiment with a 3% tolerance on speeding. The result is accident counts have not decreased since they started it, congestion has gone up , the deaths per km driven is increasing and the deaths per hour while traveling are also going up. The increased congestion seems to be killing pedestrians at a might higher rate too. We are not seeing any of the advantages that newer cars should be providing to the accident rates. The roads are moving fewer people and injuring more of them. If they didn't change the way they count the victims, all stats would be significantly worse but they are moving more medical related crashes out of the crash stats.
I was called yesterday. I expect this will never go away since it works well enough.
This scam was unique in its early days since it used legitimate call centers to make the outbound calls which pre-screened the suckers. The call center would get paid when they handed off the call to the real scammers.
There are counter scripts floating around for people who want to waste their time.
Some of these things are related to what used to be called "the local water cycle". That lead to a theory called "the rain follows the plow" which turned out to be not true and as a result, funding for local water cycle research died somewhere about the 1920s.
There are a few interesting facts about this smart meter rollout here in Victoria. First of all they require a patent encumbered implementation that is specified in the law. You can't buy the chips to do that anymore since the new chips have the patent problems removed. A friend who owns a patent on some of the technology hasn't seen any payments and he know of about 20 other patents they are violating.
Power bills are going up but wholesale power generation costs are now about $.025 per kWH. About 1/4 of a bill is the generation, about 1/4 is the distribution and the rest goes to the guys who print the bills and take the money. The typical bill is now about US$.25 to $.40/kwh.
There are rumors that there has been some torrent traffic on the wimax backbone network.
Several houses have burned down after new meters were installed since the old insulation came off.
The new meters cope with bad power factor. That means the very cheap CFLs that don't have power factor correction are billed at a rate of several hundred times what the oldest mechanical meters were recording.
There are many 40+ year old meters that had worn out and when they get replaced, peoples bills go up.
The power companies currently pay about $1 per meter read which happens about every two months. There seems to be a 10% fiction rate on meter readings. The ROI on the meter rollout is indeterminate but could be fractions of centuries.
A typical town will have a few transformers unlike the US system where 8 or fewer houses will be on one transformer. It tends to mean local monitoring of power usage upstream doesn't match the house meter records very well.
I still don't know why they don't put the smart meters on the poles away from houses so the home owner doesn't have any idea they are even there. It decreases the liability and allows the customer to cross check using the old meters.
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Is Mr Slippery from True Names? If that is the case, wouldn't you want to avoid anything related to mailman?
True Names by Vernor Vinge is a story that starts out with a guy being questioned by the police since he had to be up to no good since he had more CPU and storage than normal people.
Or just keep it in mbox files and use grep to filter your searches. I have over 200,000 email messages in my archive and sometimes I do need to find a message from several years back but the cool imap and email programs aren't very good at helping me find just what I want most of the time.
There have been 2 patches that we needed to apply to our Solaris 9 servers in the past 5 or so years because we run so few of the SUNW packages. Both of them could be done without reboots. There is another patch that requires unloading the routing system and reload it or a reboot but that patch fixes a timing attack that simply can't be done on our network. If you buy the right support, the last Solaris 9 patches were released about a month ago.
In Victoria, you can get a speeding ticket for 3.1% over the limit which is well outside of the 5 or 0 that speed limits currently end with. If that logic is extended, then there should be speed limits of say 57 (take your pick of km/hr or miles/hr). Neither makes sense for humans who have to comply.
The state government recently decided that 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 km speed limits were too many so now they are reducing them to just the 40, 60 and 80. This is interesting on roads like one near my house which would be 80 if it wasn't so hilly to cause cars to easily coats 10 km faster. Back in the days of speed limits of being 5 km + 10%, it made sense that if you didn't want people driving faster than 80 at the bottom of the hills you stick a 70 speed limit on it Now that a ticket could be issued at 72.17 km/hr or faster, it goes against what the traffic engineers tried to fix decades ago.
Much fun can be had by convincing a Solaris machine that the date is in the 1800s since it appears that dynamic libraries don't work then due to a bug in the dynamic linker. I'm guessing that bug will show up sometime in the future too. The interesting part is there doesn't appear to be a way to put the kernel into the 1800s via any standard API. The FORTH boot loader can be told to play games with the hardware clocks on some machines which can then be used to simulate these time travelling machines.
If you do manage to get speed limit compliance up, I expect you will follow what happened in Victoria Australia (which has the highest speed limit compliance in the world). The roads are congested so badly that we have not seen any of the advantages of a newer fleet and the total number km driven has gone down. You are now more likely to die per km driven than you were 10 years ago and you are more likely to die per hour on the road than you were 10 years ago. The "road toll" stats are now messed with nearly yearly to reduce them yet they don't go down. A decade ago if you fell asleep and drove off the road, you were counted as a traffic fatality, now you will most likely be counted at a sleep apnea related death.
Adjusting speed limits assumes everyone has computer control speed. Many modern speedometers are not compatible with speed limits of say 57 when you figure humans have to read them.
Many states and the federal government used to have rules that would fine your company if the profit exceeded 25%. The fine of a 26% profit margin was about 10%. At 27.5% the fine would break even with the profit. Maybe it is time to bring back those kinds of rules or enforce them when they are still in the law books.
Just for that comment, I've marked you as a "foe" on the /. comment system.
Now where is my defence money?
I've got a few SPARCStation 20s that can replace the servers running the core business. Sure they aren't fast but they can still do the job. I think they are about 19 years old. I also have a pair of SPARCServer 1000 that could take over loads they use so much power they are only good as space heater or if I need a power supply to jump start a car. There was a time when my web site was running on a SPARCStation 1
The Aussie power plug is the most likely case for things to cost more. Anything that can be plugged in need a C-tick which is just like the FCC testing but it requires more paperwork and the standard is very slightly different. Other things have unique standards such as a kitchen faucet has to be certified to the local standard. Many of these standards are voluntary in the US under the UL approval process but are a legal requirement to follow an expensive, unique AS or ASNZ standard.
Cars have to be crash tested for the local market.
Local sales and support costs are far higher since local staff costs are much higher than in the US since minimum wage jobs there are often $20 to $30 an hour here. The cost of everything is higher so staff that can demand it, do want far more money. Construction costs are some of the highest in the world.
Local inflation is driven by a requirement that 9% of all employees money gets dumped into mutual fund like retirement funds that are simply trying to out gamble everyone else and not really invest so they are throwing around money like crazy.
The real issue is that land prices are hyper inflated and simply insane. The makers of Autocad have an office an hour drive away from down town sitting on land worth 10s of millions yet the same office in a almost rural area in a US city might cost nearly a million dollars. The land prices mean rent is very high and there are examples where the 2rd largest mall in town spent over a billion dollars to upgrade so basic economics say the rent of the smaller stores need to increase by at least $20,000 a month. The Costco built in Melbourne was the most expensive one in the world and far more expensive than the ones they have built in Tokyo.
The distributed authentication tools that use cryptography that would be required to be deployed are illegal in many parts of the world so I don't see that as a decent solution to the problem.
MX are for inbound delivery. SPF are for outbound authentication so it is even a different concept. MX records are nearly required for mail yet SPF isn't and will never be so the only authoritative way to find out if a server is involved with mail at this point in time is to look at an MX record... which is pointless for any real verification of an outbound message.
The asymmetrical nature of email has always been the problem that will always allow spam. The only real fix is to force the inbound mail servers (which can be determined via MX records) to verify a given message that it may not have any info about. There were proposals for things like looking up example.com._.user.message-id or even just example.com._.user to see if they are approved to send messages. The problem is that if you do not centralize outbound email, you can not stop spam. That is one reason why X.400 mail systems worked they way they did.
SPF was broken from the start but it was a step towards a better solution.
I liked the idea of using dns or snmp to ask the server that should have sent the message "did you send message id foo_xyz? That alone would have fixed a massive amount of spam if you tie it back to mx records of what should be sending the messages.
Will they make one with an esata interface?
You know that very little of this stuff was on the web (which doesn't change its copyright status at all) since there are 16,77,217 1x1 images and someone had to invent the 1x1 pixel expansion stuff and well equipped computer at the time had 68 meg of disk. I was working creating images for evaluating if 24 bit RGB systems were good enough. The conclusion at the time is that 8 bits of R, G & B weren't but 8 bits of H, S & I would produce much more lifelike images and you might even find that discussion showing up on /. in the past. It turns out that at least 75% of the colors your computer can display are brown or grey and it isn't very good at doing simple orange. The gradient stuff is very interesting since one would expect that there are about 2^64 nice linear gradients but when you figure that there are only about 4 million useful colors and a limited number of other colors on complementary side of the color wheel (which humans seem to find ascetically pleasing) and you end up dropping lots of them when you do a gradient, there aren't that many useful gradients in use. Once you figure that most gradients are subsets of others, there is a shockingly small number of useful ones. If you want you can get a 4d matrix of Blue, Green -> Blue, Green of both 65536 starting values and find the slash dot banner gradient right there with all the other useful ones and most of them can fit on a 9 track tape. If you map that into a 2d image for colors people will describe as color (and not grey, white or black), you will find that there too.
Nearly every modern web site includes images that derive from my early work with 24 bit images. Everybody would just copy and extend and the web would not exist if that IP had been protected the way the laws claim it should be. If I hit NZ with it, other countries may find a way around it as a response. I'm wondering if I shouldn't assign the copyright to some appropriate group but I'm not sure what to do yet. It will be an excellent way to make man politically connected enemies.
They have several images on their web site that count as "derived works" of my work under US copyright law and they haven't payed me anything.
Can I send them 3 take down notices and then pull their internet access and get them fined $15,000?
Apple has reported that 55% of the people who can run Lion are not running Lion. For most users, there is no reason to upgrade between major versions of OS X and since the change between 10.5.8 and 10.6.3 is about the change between the first 50 patches to service pack 2 for XP, I find it odd that a version isn't built since all it should take is not using xcodes default settings.
It won't run on about 55% of the macs out there.
NNTP newsgroups can remain on just your own private server too. Innd is a good database engine for forums and can outperform any sql based solution and it already has the remote backup built in. There are already news to email gateways and plenty of open source web based readers.
In the mid 80's the Jr highschool had maybe 6 apple ][ and about 8 TRS-80 model 1. The high school had two punch card machines and the cards were taken over to the local oil company to run on their Cyber. They didn't want to give us a terminal since they said we would try to hack their system. They were paying something like $750 a month for those keypunch machines. I have never used a keyboard with better feedback.
Since you had a one day turnaround on your assignment, it taught you to be very careful about getting things to run the first time.
At some point we ended up with an IBM PC (not an XT) and one of the music students was doing a report on computer music. I helped her write "99 bottles of beer on the wall", loaded it up with a large starting point and let it go early in the morning. At lunch time I was asked if I knew how to stop it since they were worried about breaking their newest computer.
About 1983 the high school ended up with the TRS-80s model 1 and few model 3 and networked apples running UCSD Pascal. At that point they started running 3 beginning classes a day as well as and advanced class and the other two times were used as an intro where they would being in some class like history or home ec they would use the computer for something that was mostly a waste of time.
The intro classes were in basic and would start out with "write a program to count from 20 to 4 with only even numbers" and later would involve a check balance program where you had to enter how many of each type of coin you had as well as any deposits and checks and it would give you a grand total. They were simple enough that by the time I graduated, I had a basic program that would complete all of the assignments once the description was entered.
The advanced class would do group projects. One project was a computer matching system that was used as a fund raiser. The problem is the 2nd guy in the team (and id #1) knew how to answer the questions so he matched most girls. I was user id #0 and an off by one bug led to some embarrassing results.
Victoria Australia has been doing this experiment with a 3% tolerance on speeding. The result is accident counts have not decreased since they started it, congestion has gone up , the deaths per km driven is increasing and the deaths per hour while traveling are also going up. The increased congestion seems to be killing pedestrians at a might higher rate too. We are not seeing any of the advantages that newer cars should be providing to the accident rates. The roads are moving fewer people and injuring more of them. If they didn't change the way they count the victims, all stats would be significantly worse but they are moving more medical related crashes out of the crash stats.
I was called yesterday. I expect this will never go away since it works well enough.
This scam was unique in its early days since it used legitimate call centers to make the outbound calls which pre-screened the suckers. The call center would get paid when they handed off the call to the real scammers.
There are counter scripts floating around for people who want to waste their time.
Some of these things are related to what used to be called "the local water cycle". That lead to a theory called "the rain follows the plow" which turned out to be not true and as a result, funding for local water cycle research died somewhere about the 1920s.
There are a few interesting facts about this smart meter rollout here in Victoria. First of all they require a patent encumbered implementation that is specified in the law. You can't buy the chips to do that anymore since the new chips have the patent problems removed. A friend who owns a patent on some of the technology hasn't seen any payments and he know of about 20 other patents they are violating.
Power bills are going up but wholesale power generation costs are now about $.025 per kWH. About 1/4 of a bill is the generation, about 1/4 is the distribution and the rest goes to the guys who print the bills and take the money. The typical bill is now about US$.25 to $.40/kwh.
There are rumors that there has been some torrent traffic on the wimax backbone network.
Several houses have burned down after new meters were installed since the old insulation came off.
The new meters cope with bad power factor. That means the very cheap CFLs that don't have power factor correction are billed at a rate of several hundred times what the oldest mechanical meters were recording.
There are many 40+ year old meters that had worn out and when they get replaced, peoples bills go up.
The power companies currently pay about $1 per meter read which happens about every two months. There seems to be a 10% fiction rate on meter readings. The ROI on the meter rollout is indeterminate but could be fractions of centuries.
A typical town will have a few transformers unlike the US system where 8 or fewer houses will be on one transformer. It tends to mean local monitoring of power usage upstream doesn't match the house meter records very well.
I still don't know why they don't put the smart meters on the poles away from houses so the home owner doesn't have any idea they are even there. It decreases the liability and allows the customer to cross check using the old meters.