I don't hate spam for the same reasons most people hate spam. I suspect most people are just annoyed with the deluge of crap that ends up in their inbox. I don't care, it gets filtered out 80% of the time and it takes me about a minute each morning to click the "yes, that's spam too" button in thunderbird.
What *I* hate about spam is the fact that there's so much of it that it accounts for a good measurable percentage of the total traffic on the net. Think about it. Spam is usually small messages, sent to thousands of recipients all over the world. So every bit of spam branches out from the spammers local mail relay and induces a small amount of traffic to a great many parts of the network.
There are lots of spammers. They send lots of spam to lots and lots of people. That makes up a huge collection of packets that have to be routed all over the globe, all day long. I heard a figure somewhere saying it might be as high as 60% of total traffic.
My ping times to various game servers are seldom better than 70ms, and quite often over 100ms. I'm willing to bet that if all that crap weren't being flushed all over the net, the overall latency would drop by a good 20ms.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have a nice T3 and be high enough up to not have the extra latency to begin with... but... I can only hold my breath so long.)
Using DDoS attacks against them would just induce even more garbage onto the network, and make it even slower.
The "right" way to deal with it is to (a) change the SMTP protocol so it requires some form of identification (perhaps a public key signature) -- if I don't recognize the caller-id on my phone, it goes to voicemail, why should email be different?, (b) go back to batch processing of email -- why do you NEED email to get there in 30 seconds, use an IM for real-time. Let mail servers send mail every 4 hours so at least that end can be more efficient. Use compression while you're at it. And (c) make spamming a crime, punishable by firebombing of the offenders house *grin*. If (a) happens, it should be possible to locate the spammer's property and eliminate it. That would remove the incentive for spamming, since all that "hard-earned" money would be lost.
That should have been expected. It won't BE "Your" computer when Longhorn is finally released. You'll be leasing it, and everything on it, from Microsoft. At least, that's the plan.:)
I find it hilarious and sad that the two examples given, betamax/vhs and firewire/usb, are both cases where the market decided which standard would become dominant, and in both cases, the market chose the inferior product.
Do we really want the ten million monkeys to decide what's best?
I take it everyone in the US is a robot, and not a cool robot like Bender either. That is to say, you all feel compelled to get up whenever the little mechanical beastie says it's "7 o'clock", and all your employers simply can't imagine having people come to work at other times.
IMO everyone should just change to GMT and stop arguing over nonsense. So, now thos of us in Michigan have to remember to get up for work at noon, and our TV shows start at 1am. But at least when you said the meeting is at 3pm, everyone knows when it is without having to pull out conversion tables. If you doubt me, try working for a company with offices in New York, London, and Tokyo, and try to arrange a conference call.
Scanning for biological virii... clean. Scanning for nanotech virii... WARNING!
MMORPG_p0wn3d virus detected.
p0wn3d nanotech agents embed themselves between the nerve endings of the first three fingers of each hand, thus slowing reflex response time by up to 0.25 seconds. Created by a frsutrated MMORPG player who always lost in every duel, this virus allowed him to win occasionally.
From now on, no motor vehicles will be allowed on United States roads because some tiny percentage of them will crash and kill people.
Why are we a nation of wimps these days? Has anyone ever taken a look at the lunar lander that we actually landed on the moon and somehow got back? I mean, actually looked? It's held together by giant rubber bands!!!
We've gone from doing the impossible with bailing wire and duct tape, and damn the odds... to being afraid to do anything because someone might get a paper cut reviewing the design documents.
I say that we should step down and let other countries who have some balls take over dominance of space. I really don't care who gets up there... as long as the human race has a chance to leave this dirt ball.
You need to make sure you use the services manager to disable the windows update service (and stop it too!). Not only will that prevent it from doing any kind of update... but it prevents a few random crashes that their update utility itself seems to cause (at least, so sayeth the event log).
Also, although it should be obvious, disable all the remote registry stuff and remote administration stuff. If any of that is enabled, it can turn the other services back on. Frequently, MS patches will re-enable things you shut off... so make sure you re-check whenever a patch does get applied.
Having said that, Microsoft is an interesting game. You have to either embrace them and keep your system 100% up to date, or choose a point in time and never update ANYTHING beyond that point. I've found if you update every day, major bugs do get fixed -- just more new ones show up. The show-stoppers usually don't stick around too long. The worst thing you can do is update every few months... because you're likely to exchange one set of bugs for another worse set that you'll have to live with for months.
This shouldn't bother anyone. By 2008, King George will have removed the annoying term limit and set up a dynasty for his children to rule the new American Socialist Society Having Anti-Terrorism Support.
All those who are still free to move around the streets without setting off the RFID coded machine gun nests will undoubtedly be heading to Canada and will probably not be overly concerned with returning.
Of course, those of us loyal citizens who put up with unemployment and gasoline rationing over the last 8 years will be happy to see them go, since it will make the food lines shorter, and if enough of them go away, we may get 2-ply toilet paper like we used to have.
Constitution? Of course, but that requires ultraviolet clearance... Why do you ask, Citizen?
Because BBC America won't even show the new series (or the old one, for that matter), so a new doctor has already bitten the dust before I even got to see him.
Yeah, I could probably download them... but the cardinal rule is that anything new and desireable will get the MPAA/RIAA/BPAA? (What ARE the British Phonograph police called anyways) after me with legal documents printed on wet noodles.
Yes, after google purchased the rights to view all of AFP's news stories and signed the NDA to not further redistribute them....
Errr... no NDA?
Ummm... no purchase?
Oh, that's right! They just loaded their web pages like anyone else in the world could do. Maybe if the French wanted to avoid just anyone reading their stories they might want to -- you know -- require subscriptions to access them?
In a time before time, there was a vision! Dark forces of marketing swarmed over the country, and One Man answered the call, that man was George Lucas. After furiously using his super powers of Film Studentness to produce a classic of our time, he turned to the Dark Side with Ewoks, Jar-Jar, and a Teenage Weresith in Dagobah.
Now, decades later, our hero strives to redeem himself in one last marketing extravaganza! Can the Hype of another Star Wars overcome the budding realization that all the talent was used up in Episode 5? Can Jar-Jar sweep in at the last second and save the senate action-figures? Can the theatrical run produce enough money to pay for the DVD pressings?
I have to agree. I abhorr interfaces like the Gimp (which is a fine program, shackled with a not so fine UI), and find it far too easy to lose the various toolbars under other things. It might not be so bad if clicking on any one UI element would bring the entire thing to the top...
--off topic--
This just reminds me that Linux peope STILL can't develop their own breakthroughs. We STILL feel compelled to try and mimic whatever comes out of Redmond, or those fruity mac people (*grin*, my Mom has one so I feel justified in that jab).
What's the number one complaint people have with Microsoft's GUI? Inconsistancy. What's the one thing Linux (or any Open Source movement for that matter) will never really have? Consistancy. Yeah, call me a doomsayer, but as long as everyone clings to the adage of allowing everyone to code whatever they like, there will never BE a consistant standard interface on the Linux desktop.
Shoot, X is almost (more than?) 20 years old now and we still can't get a single consistant cut-and-paste buffer that works across every X application!
Sorry for the rant, but I'm just horrified that the desktop movement has made so little progress since I started using Linux back in 1994. Back then, an X11R5 desktop on a 486/66 with 16M of ram using TVTWM as a window manager would run circles around the equivalent win95 box. Now, every time I pull up X with KDE and type "free", I cringe seeing how much memory it sucks up. I use linux for my servers, and love it... but I use that other OS for my desktop as I don't have to fight with it every day.
I hate spammers as much as anyone... but bandwidth is not an issue for the vast majority of the internet. Latency is, and will continue to be, the number one problem with moving more things onto the network. What Lycos is doing will, if successfully deployed, increase the number of packets flying around through all those old copper switches and cause network latency to be even worse!
I don't care about email spam... it sits on a disk somewhere until it gets fetched or forwarded. Constant network traffic to eat up bandwidth will also ruin any chance of getting sub 50ms ping times all around the country.
This is like saying you hate having the guy down the street burning garbage, so you get everyone else on the block to burn leaves. Yeah, it might smell a little better, but that's a LOT of smoke to breathe!
You actually have the priviledge to live in a country with non-commercial television that isn't directly controlled by the state either? And you're COMPLAINING????
Come visit the United States and try watching the "news" for a few days. Here in America, we don't need to use primitive guns to control our media, we simply control the airwaves with money. You want funding, say what we want you to say!
If that isn't good enough, sit down and watch the drivel that passes for entertainment here and see how many cans of soda you find yourself craving, or how many trips to fast food joints you seem to need. Hell, even men in America are tempted by the feminine hygene products due to repeated brainwashing during the sitcoms!
You want to trade, just let me know! I'll be happy to fork out $250/year for television I might actually watch -- and I wouldn't mind living in a country that doesn't feel like it's trying to fill the void left by the collapse of the USSR either.
For those who didn't know, the Amiga had a seperate general purpose memory processor, used primarily for moving screen memory around at 28MHz... but it could be used for any memory operations. This was handy for doing matrix calculations since doing a copy of a large array was very fast, and essentially in parallel.
Besides, the Amiga's event system was nothing short of amazing. Object oriented kernel before the term was ever heard (example: you didn't poll the keyboard for keypresses as you did on the PC... you registered yourself with the kernel and it would deliver events at various granularity levels -- depending on how much you wanted to know).
Yeah, the only thing that kept it from blowing windows out of the water was piss-poor marketing (curse you Commodore!) and a lack of real protected memory space (the 68000 didn't support it, and by the time we got 68030's it was too late).
Of course, the Atari ST was a good machine as well... just not as elegant IMHO as the Amiga. It still makes the PC look like a tinker-toy.
For decades now, television and radio networks have been spamming my home, invasively, with high-frequency energy weapons (commonly known as radio and television). These weapons have unknown physical effects on the human body, but the advertisements and pathetic mind-numbing drivel that they call "programs" should be considered a form of psychological warfare when decoded using a standard television or radio receiver.
NOW, we finally have the means to fight back and use the airwaves for our own purposes (via a broad network of low power high-frequency transcievers, commonly called Wi-Fi)... and they want to make it illegal!
I'll stop using public access points when they stop irradiating my home with network commercialism..... or when the people running things get a Clue (TM) and either use encryption (digital library cards anyone?) or go back to lead-based paint to stop signal leakage.
True enough... and I have my own mail server at home that works around my ISP's evil blocking of port 25 by the use of a friend's not-so-evil ISP in another state.
However, while google may get shut down tomorrow, your house could catch fire and burn tomorrow too. I'm willing to bet that Google does a better job of backing up their data than I do, and that I'll have a little warning before they pull the plug (at least once they aren't in BETA).
Besides, what kind of moron MOVES their data... I'd just copy it and keep my own "backup" copy on my own server.
"but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy..."
Since when has the computer game market EVER shrunk, for ANY reason? What kind of drugs do they think we're on to try a line like that, and where can I get some?
The only way piracy hurts the industry is in killing of some individual games that were poorly marketed, or poor enough quality that nobody was willing to fork over $50 to get a new coaster. In just about every other way, piracy serves as free advertising... people who can afford to buy it, will hear about it and go buy it. People who can't, won't anyways.
I buy games and then download no-cd cracks for them, since I already lost one cdrom drive due to Diablo II's copy protection thrashing (it eventually blew the alignment to the point where it wouldn't read anything without multiple retries). I consider this trend of copy protection to be invasive and childish... a CD isn't a game, it's a delivery mechanism.
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I don't hate spam for the same reasons most people hate spam. I suspect most people are just annoyed with the deluge of crap that ends up in their inbox. I don't care, it gets filtered out 80% of the time and it takes me about a minute each morning to click the "yes, that's spam too" button in thunderbird.
What *I* hate about spam is the fact that there's so much of it that it accounts for a good measurable percentage of the total traffic on the net. Think about it. Spam is usually small messages, sent to thousands of recipients all over the world. So every bit of spam branches out from the spammers local mail relay and induces a small amount of traffic to a great many parts of the network.
There are lots of spammers. They send lots of spam to lots and lots of people. That makes up a huge collection of packets that have to be routed all over the globe, all day long. I heard a figure somewhere saying it might be as high as 60% of total traffic.
My ping times to various game servers are seldom better than 70ms, and quite often over 100ms. I'm willing to bet that if all that crap weren't being flushed all over the net, the overall latency would drop by a good 20ms.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have a nice T3 and be high enough up to not have the extra latency to begin with... but... I can only hold my breath so long.)
Using DDoS attacks against them would just induce even more garbage onto the network, and make it even slower.
The "right" way to deal with it is to (a) change the SMTP protocol so it requires some form of identification (perhaps a public key signature) -- if I don't recognize the caller-id on my phone, it goes to voicemail, why should email be different?, (b) go back to batch processing of email -- why do you NEED email to get there in 30 seconds, use an IM for real-time. Let mail servers send mail every 4 hours so at least that end can be more efficient. Use compression while you're at it. And (c) make spamming a crime, punishable by firebombing of the offenders house *grin*. If (a) happens, it should be possible to locate the spammer's property and eliminate it. That would remove the incentive for spamming, since all that "hard-earned" money would be lost.
Nope, I'm an evil cleric. Your spam will do MY bidding, Muahahahahaha!!!!
550 : Recipient address revoked; cleric commands undead.
That should have been expected. It won't BE "Your" computer when Longhorn is finally released. You'll be leasing it, and everything on it, from Microsoft. At least, that's the plan. :)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/episodeguide/i nferno/
I find it hilarious and sad that the two examples given, betamax/vhs and firewire/usb, are both cases where the market decided which standard would become dominant, and in both cases, the market chose the inferior product.
Do we really want the ten million monkeys to decide what's best?
I take it everyone in the US is a robot, and not a cool robot like Bender either. That is to say, you all feel compelled to get up whenever the little mechanical beastie says it's "7 o'clock", and all your employers simply can't imagine having people come to work at other times.
IMO everyone should just change to GMT and stop arguing over nonsense. So, now thos of us in Michigan have to remember to get up for work at noon, and our TV shows start at 1am. But at least when you said the meeting is at 3pm, everyone knows when it is without having to pull out conversion tables. If you doubt me, try working for a company with offices in New York, London, and Tokyo, and try to arrange a conference call.
So yeah... change DST by getting rid of it!
Scanning for biological virii... clean.
Scanning for nanotech virii... WARNING!
MMORPG_p0wn3d virus detected.
p0wn3d nanotech agents embed themselves between the nerve endings of the first three fingers of each hand, thus slowing reflex response time by up to 0.25 seconds. Created by a frsutrated MMORPG player who always lost in every duel, this virus allowed him to win occasionally.
Why would we need regulation?
From now on, no motor vehicles will be allowed on United States roads because some tiny percentage of them will crash and kill people.
Why are we a nation of wimps these days? Has anyone ever taken a look at the lunar lander that we actually landed on the moon and somehow got back? I mean, actually looked? It's held together by giant rubber bands!!!
We've gone from doing the impossible with bailing wire and duct tape, and damn the odds... to being afraid to do anything because someone might get a paper cut reviewing the design documents.
I say that we should step down and let other countries who have some balls take over dominance of space. I really don't care who gets up there... as long as the human race has a chance to leave this dirt ball.
You need to make sure you use the services manager to disable the windows update service (and stop it too!). Not only will that prevent it from doing any kind of update... but it prevents a few random crashes that their update utility itself seems to cause (at least, so sayeth the event log).
Also, although it should be obvious, disable all the remote registry stuff and remote administration stuff. If any of that is enabled, it can turn the other services back on. Frequently, MS patches will re-enable things you shut off... so make sure you re-check whenever a patch does get applied.
Having said that, Microsoft is an interesting game. You have to either embrace them and keep your system 100% up to date, or choose a point in time and never update ANYTHING beyond that point. I've found if you update every day, major bugs do get fixed -- just more new ones show up. The show-stoppers usually don't stick around too long. The worst thing you can do is update every few months... because you're likely to exchange one set of bugs for another worse set that you'll have to live with for months.
This shouldn't bother anyone. By 2008, King George will have removed the annoying term limit and set up a dynasty for his children to rule the new American Socialist Society Having Anti-Terrorism Support.
All those who are still free to move around the streets without setting off the RFID coded machine gun nests will undoubtedly be heading to Canada and will probably not be overly concerned with returning.
Of course, those of us loyal citizens who put up with unemployment and gasoline rationing over the last 8 years will be happy to see them go, since it will make the food lines shorter, and if enough of them go away, we may get 2-ply toilet paper like we used to have.
Constitution? Of course, but that requires ultraviolet clearance... Why do you ask, Citizen?
Because BBC America won't even show the new series (or the old one, for that matter), so a new doctor has already bitten the dust before I even got to see him.
Yeah, I could probably download them... but the cardinal rule is that anything new and desireable will get the MPAA/RIAA/BPAA? (What ARE the British Phonograph police called anyways) after me with legal documents printed on wet noodles.
Yes, after google purchased the rights to view all of AFP's news stories and signed the NDA to not further redistribute them....
Errr... no NDA?
Ummm... no purchase?
Oh, that's right! They just loaded their web pages like anyone else in the world could do. Maybe if the French wanted to avoid just anyone reading their stories they might want to -- you know -- require subscriptions to access them?
Whine and cheese...
In a time before time, there was a vision! Dark forces of marketing swarmed over the country, and One Man answered the call, that man was George Lucas. After furiously using his super powers of Film Studentness to produce a classic of our time, he turned to the Dark Side with Ewoks, Jar-Jar, and a Teenage Weresith in Dagobah.
Now, decades later, our hero strives to redeem himself in one last marketing extravaganza! Can the Hype of another Star Wars overcome the budding realization that all the talent was used up in Episode 5? Can Jar-Jar sweep in at the last second and save the senate action-figures? Can the theatrical run produce enough money to pay for the DVD pressings?
Coming soon.
Does it have a pull tab, or a 10 cent deposit?
I have to agree. I abhorr interfaces like the Gimp (which is a fine program, shackled with a not so fine UI), and find it far too easy to lose the various toolbars under other things. It might not be so bad if clicking on any one UI element would bring the entire thing to the top...
--off topic--
This just reminds me that Linux peope STILL can't develop their own breakthroughs. We STILL feel compelled to try and mimic whatever comes out of Redmond, or those fruity mac people (*grin*, my Mom has one so I feel justified in that jab).
What's the number one complaint people have with Microsoft's GUI? Inconsistancy. What's the one thing Linux (or any Open Source movement for that matter) will never really have? Consistancy. Yeah, call me a doomsayer, but as long as everyone clings to the adage of allowing everyone to code whatever they like, there will never BE a consistant standard interface on the Linux desktop.
Shoot, X is almost (more than?) 20 years old now and we still can't get a single consistant cut-and-paste buffer that works across every X application!
Sorry for the rant, but I'm just horrified that the desktop movement has made so little progress since I started using Linux back in 1994. Back then, an X11R5 desktop on a 486/66 with 16M of ram using TVTWM as a window manager would run circles around the equivalent win95 box. Now, every time I pull up X with KDE and type "free", I cringe seeing how much memory it sucks up. I use linux for my servers, and love it... but I use that other OS for my desktop as I don't have to fight with it every day.
Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.
Internet pr0n is generally better than Skinimax pr0n.
I hate spammers as much as anyone... but bandwidth is not an issue for the vast majority of the internet. Latency is, and will continue to be, the number one problem with moving more things onto the network. What Lycos is doing will, if successfully deployed, increase the number of packets flying around through all those old copper switches and cause network latency to be even worse!
I don't care about email spam... it sits on a disk somewhere until it gets fetched or forwarded. Constant network traffic to eat up bandwidth will also ruin any chance of getting sub 50ms ping times all around the country.
This is like saying you hate having the guy down the street burning garbage, so you get everyone else on the block to burn leaves. Yeah, it might smell a little better, but that's a LOT of smoke to breathe!
You're joking right?
You actually have the priviledge to live in a country with non-commercial television that isn't directly controlled by the state either? And you're COMPLAINING????
Come visit the United States and try watching the "news" for a few days. Here in America, we don't need to use primitive guns to control our media, we simply control the airwaves with money. You want funding, say what we want you to say!
If that isn't good enough, sit down and watch the drivel that passes for entertainment here and see how many cans of soda you find yourself craving, or how many trips to fast food joints you seem to need. Hell, even men in America are tempted by the feminine hygene products due to repeated brainwashing during the sitcoms!
You want to trade, just let me know! I'll be happy to fork out $250/year for television I might actually watch -- and I wouldn't mind living in a country that doesn't feel like it's trying to fill the void left by the collapse of the USSR either.
Be seeing you.
installing BSD from a boot floppy can only result in an undead technolich that will take over the internet with its unholy powers of the grave?
Seriously... good riddance. Hopefully Serial-ATA will take IDE along with them, and their little BIOS too!
Sweet, a chance to blow dust off this holy war! :)
ST = 8MHz
Amiga = 7.2 MHz + 28MHz coprocessor
For those who didn't know, the Amiga had a seperate general purpose memory processor, used primarily for moving screen memory around at 28MHz... but it could be used for any memory operations. This was handy for doing matrix calculations since doing a copy of a large array was very fast, and essentially in parallel.
Besides, the Amiga's event system was nothing short of amazing. Object oriented kernel before the term was ever heard (example: you didn't poll the keyboard for keypresses as you did on the PC... you registered yourself with the kernel and it would deliver events at various granularity levels -- depending on how much you wanted to know).
Yeah, the only thing that kept it from blowing windows out of the water was piss-poor marketing (curse you Commodore!) and a lack of real protected memory space (the 68000 didn't support it, and by the time we got 68030's it was too late).
Of course, the Atari ST was a good machine as well... just not as elegant IMHO as the Amiga. It still makes the PC look like a tinker-toy.
For decades now, television and radio networks have been spamming my home, invasively, with high-frequency energy weapons (commonly known as radio and television). These weapons have unknown physical effects on the human body, but the advertisements and pathetic mind-numbing drivel that they call "programs" should be considered a form of psychological warfare when decoded using a standard television or radio receiver.
.... or when the people running things get a Clue (TM) and either use encryption (digital library cards anyone?) or go back to lead-based paint to stop signal leakage.
NOW, we finally have the means to fight back and use the airwaves for our own purposes (via a broad network of low power high-frequency transcievers, commonly called Wi-Fi)... and they want to make it illegal!
I'll stop using public access points when they stop irradiating my home with network commercialism.
True enough... and I have my own mail server at home that works around my ISP's evil blocking of port 25 by the use of a friend's not-so-evil ISP in another state.
However, while google may get shut down tomorrow, your house could catch fire and burn tomorrow too. I'm willing to bet that Google does a better job of backing up their data than I do, and that I'll have a little warning before they pull the plug (at least once they aren't in BETA).
Besides, what kind of moron MOVES their data... I'd just copy it and keep my own "backup" copy on my own server.
"but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy..."
Since when has the computer game market EVER shrunk, for ANY reason? What kind of drugs do they think we're on to try a line like that, and where can I get some?
The only way piracy hurts the industry is in killing of some individual games that were poorly marketed, or poor enough quality that nobody was willing to fork over $50 to get a new coaster. In just about every other way, piracy serves as free advertising... people who can afford to buy it, will hear about it and go buy it. People who can't, won't anyways.
I buy games and then download no-cd cracks for them, since I already lost one cdrom drive due to Diablo II's copy protection thrashing (it eventually blew the alignment to the point where it wouldn't read anything without multiple retries). I consider this trend of copy protection to be invasive and childish... a CD isn't a game, it's a delivery mechanism.
What is this "non-repetitive job" of which you speak?