I hear a lot of people calling out that they need the user agent to scale images, but it's more than that.
Certain phones do not support tables, some do. Some support background colors, some don't. Or some do in certain circumstances. They also can or cannot support left or right alignment of images. Some phones can talk wml, xhtml or some other lingo. Some phones support video, some don't. If they do support video, you definately want to know how large the screen is to make sure you provide the right links, and you want to know what kind of video it supports best: there is a huge difference in optimization there. Phones also support different kinds of ringtones (but that's common knowledge, I hope). Also, phones that claim in their request-headers to have a screen of 320x240, effectively have a screen of 300x220 because the browser itself takes a number of pixels from the border.
To optimize all these things, you need the user agent string. Not just the type of handset, but the exact string because each update of a handset can mean different settings for pixels, ringtones, video, page-layout, etc etc. For instance: an mp3-ringtone that works on a handset of operator A will be switched off by operator B "because they don't want their handsets to support mp3 due to legal regulations", which you can only see through the exact user agent string. If you're lucky...
So taking away the user agent string is one step taken too early. Phones do not support the same things at this moment, and a proxy server cannot "translate" all content for you, if a decision is made in the server what content you'll be served according to the user agent. And what they support depends heavily upon the mobile phone industry _and_ the operators that patch & hand out mobile phones...
Once all handsets support the same features and all have at least 640x480 screens, then Vodafone can do whatever they like. Roughly estimated that'll be when hell freezes over, or perhaps in a few decades.
Funny thing to read... They even have a paragraph called "We Provide Full, Fair, Accurate, Timely and Understandable Disclosure". The only proviso is that this disclosure is aimed at "shareholders and investors", and nobody else. So they also excluded the judicial system there, I suppose..?
The PDF was created on 15 feb 2005, so this lawsuit could've ended back then. But nooooo....
But this time he's even creating his own electronic cronies..?!
SPAM solution through personalized rcpts
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Okay, here's quite a fancy approach to get rid of SPAM, I suppose. I haven't found a way that spammers might get around this one.
First of all, all your email will be pased through a qmail setup. With qmail you can easily create new virtual accounts under your own account. Is your account john@spamkicker.com, you can set up john-iscool@spamkicker.com or john-has_a_bad_day@spamkicker.com etc etc
When John sets up his account under his domain 'spamkicker.com', his initial email address will be john@spamkicker.com This email address will NOT be used by him personally. This account is the spam-lure. You'll see why...
Now, when John wants to contact his girlfriend Andrea at Hotmail, a new virtual email account is created with her hashed email address in it. The emailaddress will be john-EgFuas@spamkicker.com The EgFuas-part is a hashed index pointing to Andrea's email address inside John's contact list.
Every time Andrea answers an email from John, she'll send it to john-EgFuas@... Qmail sees this rctp address, checks to see if the mail-from is correct (the hash says it's andrea; is it really from her from-address?) and if so, qmail puts this message in John's inbox.
Now, if someone new tries to contact John, he'll email to john@spamkicker.com Qmail detects this email, and replies immediately with a question that John has set up: "Please go to my website at www.john.spamkicker.com and tell me my dog's name in the subject of your email"
(Of course any other question could also work, like "how much is three plus 3?")
This email is returned to the sender. Once the sender has replied to that correctly, the sender is given a new hash and his original email is put in John's inbox. The address is considered valid.
Spammers don't reply to email. In fact they don't even receive it. So there's no way (or very,very little way) that this scheme for new-contacts would be compromized by spammers.
Now, what if John wants to send out one message to a couple of his friends? Surely he can't use his hashed-email account -which is personalized- for a group of friends?
Indeed, he cannot. But as John is the one who's initiating this, he is also the one who can create virtual accounts for this specific group. He won't even know it of course, cause his email program will create a new hash to which all recipients of this group can answer. Noone else.
If a spammer would catch email addresses off the net, he would also need to fake the sender's email address correctly. This is virtually impossible nowadays; spammers don't harvest these combinations of email addresses.
It looks like a fail-safe system to me. There's only one catch: if someone else sends out a group-message, John will receive it on his personalized account for that person (john-EgFuas for Andrea). Still, if someone else in that group does a group-reply (with all CC's in it), the john-EgFuas account should accept emails from that group too, at least for the time being.
As Andrea has been marked as 'okay' (she's hashed) I think it's fairly safe to accept everybody on her CC-list as temporarily-okay.
But as far as I can think, that's the only catch there is to this system. It can be done virtually transparent to the user (John, Andrea) and it catches all the shit that's send to John by either:
- incorrect recipient to the hashed email address
- no reply to the question-mail for newcomers
Everybody tries to disprove the fact of self-consciousness by telling that failing a mirror-test is not a way to prove something isn't self-consciousness. (yes I love negatives) Or that passing a mirror-test is not enough to prove something is self-conscious.
So if some robot fails the mirror test, it still can have self-consciousness.
So the robots that pass the mirror test might already have had self-consciousness, but now that they have new sensors they can show the world that they have self-consciousness.
So my digital watch might have wanted to scream at me the Reason for Being for years now, seriously hampered by the fact that it cannot do anything but light up my display in a pre-defined order.
Perhaps this also explains the peculiar signs I get on my digital watch every time the battery runs out; the program that's hampering the expression of my watch's self-consciousness is failing, showing the Real Identity of my watch's soul.
On a side-note: a true mirror-test is not only done in realtime but also in delayed time. If you play a video of yourself, you know that is you on the screen. The same goes for dolphins; they can also recognise themselves on play-back. (not to mention the pan-dimensional beings) Children, from a certain age, also can. Most birds cannot.
Thus, if these robots can recognise themselves on a videotape, I'll be impressed. Until then I'll treat them as big dumb goal-less ants.
Once we had to ship some code to a company that took over our developed applications. Little was specified as to how we should deliver the code to them, only that it had to work on their side.
We started thinking about replacing variable names with randomly created other names, etc etc. The usual.
The one I liked best was to collect all the comments from the code, shuffle them randomly and stick them back in. And you can create a random-comment generator, which makes life for the Other Developers so wonderful.
Of course you can do the same with all variable names. The only problem there is that when someone uses the great Perl eval-function (TM) on some strings, it is unsure that the strings contain the correct code. And with modules you need to take care that you 'fix' the right routine names everywhere, in all modules.
But the best way to create Horrible Code (TM) is of course to start out without specs because your project manager says YouHaveToFinishItSoonBecauseHeHasPromisedIt, find out every other day that the specs have changed without your knowledge or consent, having to publish the unfinished code to a production environment and work on it for two more months because the basic specs of the system turn out to be invalid while some of the customers are already working with the system. No, I am not kidding.
When you have a cable this long and you swoop it around to get it geo-stationary (and not let it tie up the Earth two-and-a-half times), doesn't Einstein kick in? The speed of the tip is far greater than the speed at the bottom, which -TMK- makes the end slow down in relative time, compared to the 'stationary' part that's located on Earth.
A small calculation:
-Earth is revolving at.5 KM/sec= 1800km/h -we ignore the speed of the Earth around the sun (and the speed of our Solar system, etc) -(so) the center of the Earth doesn't move
Triangular geometry shows us that at a distance of 100,000km, we have a speed of 28350KM/h (roughly) for a geo-stationary tip-of-the-cord. That's a difference in speed of 26550 km/h between bottom and top. (Am I still correct?)
Now, it's not by far as fast as the speed of light, so time will not stand still when you reach the end. Still, I do wonder what happens to an object that is so big and has such a difference in speed at the opposing ends. Does time slow down -relatively- when you reach the end? If you stay at the end of the cord for a month, did you age less than you twin brother on Earth? If so, how much younger are you?
Sure I remember 49152, just as well as I can still rememember 53248, 53249, 52369, 54296... Later I went on to the hexadecimal notation. Those were my first steps into Computer Heaven... *sigh*
I even wrote a little C64 machinecode SMS message just the other day. It was way fun to dive into that old machine again... And it was very much fun to send an old friend such an sms and receive one back containing funky little programs with hidden messages. *big smile*
All of these games were the base for other, new-and-improved versions of the same game-play. I've seen just a few games that appealed to me, because they had a complete fresh & new game-play which I and my friends had not seen before.
I've been wishing someone came up with a brand new game-plan to get that Oh-no-more-Lemmings-feeling back... Still nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just done a spectral analysis on fart and burb sounds - they also fit quite nicely in the 2-4KHz range.
So for all I care these Neanderthals are just a bunch of guys that enjoyed farting competitions and doing the 'WhatAnimalIsThis' belching game.
I hear a lot of people calling out that they need the user agent to scale images, but it's more than that.
Certain phones do not support tables, some do. Some support background colors, some don't. Or some do in certain circumstances. They also can or cannot support left or right alignment of images. Some phones can talk wml, xhtml or some other lingo. Some phones support video, some don't. If they do support video, you definately want to know how large the screen is to make sure you provide the right links, and you want to know what kind of video it supports best: there is a huge difference in optimization there. Phones also support different kinds of ringtones (but that's common knowledge, I hope). Also, phones that claim in their request-headers to have a screen of 320x240, effectively have a screen of 300x220 because the browser itself takes a number of pixels from the border.
To optimize all these things, you need the user agent string. Not just the type of handset, but the exact string because each update of a handset can mean different settings for pixels, ringtones, video, page-layout, etc etc. For instance: an mp3-ringtone that works on a handset of operator A will be switched off by operator B "because they don't want their handsets to support mp3 due to legal regulations", which you can only see through the exact user agent string. If you're lucky...
So taking away the user agent string is one step taken too early. Phones do not support the same things at this moment, and a proxy server cannot "translate" all content for you, if a decision is made in the server what content you'll be served according to the user agent. And what they support depends heavily upon the mobile phone industry _and_ the operators that patch & hand out mobile phones...
Once all handsets support the same features and all have at least 640x480 screens, then Vodafone can do whatever they like. Roughly estimated that'll be when hell freezes over, or perhaps in a few decades.
It'll be just a few years from now before we find two telepresence-colleagues in the copy-room doing the wild thing.
"Ooow-yeah-now touch my force-feedback any-key, baby..!"
Great to know that it's useful to actually hit this robot during heated arguments.
http://www.sco.com/images/company/SCO_Code_of_Cond uct_and_Ethics_Policy-Final.pdf
Funny thing to read... They even have a paragraph called "We Provide Full, Fair, Accurate, Timely and Understandable Disclosure". The only proviso is that this disclosure is aimed at "shareholders and investors", and nobody else. So they also excluded the judicial system there, I suppose..?
The PDF was created on 15 feb 2005, so this lawsuit could've ended back then. But nooooo....
Does it say "I love you!!!" all the time too? Does it want to dance all the time?
Sounds like another attempt to take over the world by Barney. http://de.jihad.net/lib/bull-dotb.txt
But this time he's even creating his own electronic cronies..?!
Okay, here's quite a fancy approach to get rid of SPAM, I suppose. I haven't found a way that spammers might get around this one.
First of all, all your email will be pased through a qmail setup. With qmail you can easily create new virtual accounts under your own account. Is your account john@spamkicker.com, you can set up john-iscool@spamkicker.com or john-has_a_bad_day@spamkicker.com etc etc
When John sets up his account under his domain 'spamkicker.com', his initial email address will be john@spamkicker.com
This email address will NOT be used by him personally. This account is the spam-lure. You'll see why...
Now, when John wants to contact his girlfriend Andrea at Hotmail, a new virtual email account is created with her hashed email address in it. The emailaddress will be john-EgFuas@spamkicker.com The EgFuas-part is a hashed index pointing to Andrea's email address inside John's contact list.
Every time Andrea answers an email from John, she'll send it to john-EgFuas@... Qmail sees this rctp address, checks to see if the mail-from is correct (the hash says it's andrea; is it really from her from-address?) and if so, qmail puts this message in John's inbox.
Now, if someone new tries to contact John, he'll email to john@spamkicker.com
Qmail detects this email, and replies immediately with a question that John has set up: "Please go to my website at www.john.spamkicker.com and tell me my dog's name in the subject of your email"
(Of course any other question could also work, like "how much is three plus 3?")
This email is returned to the sender. Once the sender has replied to that correctly, the sender is given a new hash and his original email is put in John's inbox. The address is considered valid.
Spammers don't reply to email. In fact they don't even receive it. So there's no way (or very,very little way) that this scheme for new-contacts would be compromized by spammers.
Now, what if John wants to send out one message to a couple of his friends? Surely he can't use his hashed-email account -which is personalized- for a group of friends?
Indeed, he cannot. But as John is the one who's initiating this, he is also the one who can create virtual accounts for this specific group. He won't even know it of course, cause his email program will create a new hash to which all recipients of this group can answer. Noone else.
If a spammer would catch email addresses off the net, he would also need to fake the sender's email address correctly. This is virtually impossible nowadays; spammers don't harvest these combinations of email addresses.
It looks like a fail-safe system to me. There's only one catch: if someone else sends out a group-message, John will receive it on his personalized account for that person (john-EgFuas for Andrea). Still, if someone else in that group does a group-reply (with all CC's in it), the john-EgFuas account should accept emails from that group too, at least for the time being.
As Andrea has been marked as 'okay' (she's hashed) I think it's fairly safe to accept everybody on her CC-list as temporarily-okay.
But as far as I can think, that's the only catch there is to this system. It can be done virtually transparent to the user (John, Andrea) and it catches all the shit that's send to John by either:
- incorrect recipient to the hashed email address
- no reply to the question-mail for newcomers
Can anybody think of a way to trick this system?
Everybody tries to disprove the fact of self-consciousness by telling that failing a mirror-test is not a way to prove something isn't self-consciousness. (yes I love negatives) Or that passing a mirror-test is not enough to prove something is self-conscious.
So if some robot fails the mirror test, it still can have self-consciousness.
So the robots that pass the mirror test might already have had self-consciousness, but now that they have new sensors they can show the world that they have self-consciousness.
So my digital watch might have wanted to scream at me the Reason for Being for years now, seriously hampered by the fact that it cannot do anything but light up my display in a pre-defined order.
Perhaps this also explains the peculiar signs I get on my digital watch every time the battery runs out; the program that's hampering the expression of my watch's self-consciousness is failing, showing the Real Identity of my watch's soul.
On a side-note: a true mirror-test is not only done in realtime but also in delayed time. If you play a video of yourself, you know that is you on the screen. The same goes for dolphins; they can also recognise themselves on play-back. (not to mention the pan-dimensional beings) Children, from a certain age, also can. Most birds cannot.
Thus, if these robots can recognise themselves on a videotape, I'll be impressed. Until then I'll treat them as big dumb goal-less ants.
Once we had to ship some code to a company that took over our developed applications. Little was specified as to how we should deliver the code to them, only that it had to work on their side.
We started thinking about replacing variable names with randomly created other names, etc etc. The usual.
The one I liked best was to collect all the comments from the code, shuffle them randomly and stick them back in. And you can create a random-comment generator, which makes life for the Other Developers so wonderful.
Of course you can do the same with all variable names. The only problem there is that when someone uses the great Perl eval-function (TM) on some strings, it is unsure that the strings contain the correct code. And with modules you need to take care that you 'fix' the right routine names everywhere, in all modules.
But the best way to create Horrible Code (TM) is of course to start out without specs because your project manager says YouHaveToFinishItSoonBecauseHeHasPromisedIt, find out every other day that the specs have changed without your knowledge or consent, having to publish the unfinished code to a production environment and work on it for two more months because the basic specs of the system turn out to be invalid while some of the customers are already working with the system. No, I am not kidding.
Guess why I have chosen a new job now...
I just blame Canada.
What I've been wondering:
.5 KM/sec= 1800km/h
When you have a cable this long and you swoop it around to get it geo-stationary (and not let it tie up the Earth two-and-a-half times), doesn't Einstein kick in? The speed of the tip is far greater than the speed at the bottom, which -TMK- makes the end slow down in relative time, compared to the 'stationary' part that's located on Earth.
A small calculation:
-Earth is revolving at
-we ignore the speed of the Earth around the sun (and the speed of our Solar system, etc)
-(so) the center of the Earth doesn't move
Triangular geometry shows us that at a distance of 100,000km, we have a speed of 28350KM/h (roughly) for a geo-stationary tip-of-the-cord. That's a difference in speed of 26550 km/h between bottom and top. (Am I still correct?)
Now, it's not by far as fast as the speed of light, so time will not stand still when you reach the end. Still, I do wonder what happens to an object that is so big and has such a difference in speed at the opposing ends. Does time slow down -relatively- when you reach the end? If you stay at the end of the cord for a month, did you age less than you twin brother on Earth? If so, how much younger are you?
Ponderingly yours,
Eelko
Sure I remember 49152, just as well as I can still rememember 53248, 53249, 52369, 54296... Later I went on to the hexadecimal notation. Those were my first steps into Computer Heaven... *sigh*
I even wrote a little C64 machinecode SMS message just the other day. It was way fun to dive into that old machine again... And it was very much fun to send an old friend such an sms and receive one back containing funky little programs with hidden messages. *big smile*
Just to name a few games that fed my insomnia:
-Pacman
-Space Invaders
-Pitfall
-Tetris
-Monkey Island
-Lemmings
-the Incredible Machine
-Doom
All of these games were the base for other, new-and-improved versions of the same game-play. I've seen just a few games that appealed to me, because they had a complete fresh & new game-play which I and my friends had not seen before.
I've been wishing someone came up with a brand new game-plan to get that Oh-no-more-Lemmings-feeling back... Still nothing.
Sob.