Qmail lets you add extra stuff to the end of your email addresses, so if I have an address like rob@foo.org, I can set it up to accept stuff like rob-slashdot@foo.org for when I set up and account with a company. Then I know where it originated when spam starts coming in and I can redirect it to/dev/null or bounce it.
This has the advantage of not requiring any setup on your end at all beyond the intial.qmail-default file. And besides, qmail tends to be more secure than sendmail so I would rather run it on my boxes.
>The linked page says that the "HTTP Software", "Operating System", and "Supplemetal System" (whatever that is) will be available in August 2000, so it does sound a bit vaprous.
Why does this sound vaprous? August is next month and since Dell is demoing it (and it is kicking Win2K ass) it must be very nearly ready for prime time. They are probably just ironing out some small problems so they don't pull a Microsoft and release a bug ridden product.
In my case (which started this thread) I didn't move. The invoice had my correct address, it just arrived at my door a month after the due date printed on the invoice. The same thing happened with two domains that I purchased at nearly the same time.
You are right in that it is difficult to manage 10 Million customers, but 10,000,000 x $75 is enough money to invest in a system that at least notifies people on time. I spend the time to keep all of the records for the domains that I own and control up to date, so there is no exuse.
Saying that I should know when my bills are due is wrong. Companies with many more customers manage to bill on time. I do not have to remember that I owe the phone company money, they send me a bill. Plus NSI removed that information from whois, so I no longer have convenient access to it.
While I agree that they probably have a right to do whatever they can to recoup losses for delinguent accounts, with their past record of billing on time, this could cause problems. I own several domains. For a couple, I didn't receive the invoices for them until weeks after they were due. What if I had lost these domains to an auction where it was Network Solutions' fault?
Also, what about the case where a disgruntled employee who was fired or quit is still the billing contact? Sure, the company should have changed it, but with companies with many domains, it may get overlooked. Sure, I'll probably get flamed saying that is the company's responsibility, but I think there should be some checks and balances in the process.
I checked out the www.appleinsider.com website and it looks like Micro$oft has done the same thing. The review of Office 2001 and Word 2001 for the Mac has been pulled "By the Demand of Microsoft Corp, Inc."
It seems like every day I read about another Microsoft security hole. When will it become obvious to the managers who force Micro$oft products down our throats that they are compromising their companies security? If I forced everyone at my office to use software that is full of security holes and we got hit bad by it, I would be fired. When are IT managers going to be forced to face the consequences of their decisions?
#undef RANT
Seriously though, I guess we can't expect the masses of ignorant users to give up their beloved paperclips and fancy email attachments. They want everything and Micro$oft tries to give it to them without regard to the security risks.
That was a good account of what happened, but in part two, we want to hear what you are doing to track the bastards down. Knowing how you go about fixing the problem and then tracking down the culprits may help other people who run into the same problem in the future. We would understand if you need to keep the info secret until you have finished tracking them down, or for legal reasons, but at least tell us so.
Is it worth reading? The stuff on the website looks interesting, but you never can tell with books like this...
It is worth reading. I read it a number of years ago alongside several other religious works. The Satanic bible is nothing like it is portrayed by the Christian right. It is a well thought out book that makes a number of valid points and is alot less extremist than most other religious works. It should at least be read so that you can filter the information that the media feeds you instead of just judging it based on its title.
Seems like the Slashdot effect has taken down another web site. Multics' ISP has shut them down because they have exceeded their bandwidth/hits limit. Luckily there are mirrors in the US and England.
I can't currently get to the US mirror either, so I am not including the link here.
It is interesting to see that CNN's quick poll shows that 70% of users have Linux running on their desktop. This may have something to do with the/. effect, but it is good news anyways.
Tim, thanks for pursuing this issue. As a developer, it is one that concerns me a great deal. Jeff has some very valid points. I often work for months coming up with new innovations which once produced are easily copied. My company puts a great deal of time and money into this research to maintain a competitive advantage. When other companies come along and copy these inovations without having to develop them, it puts us at a disadvantage and discourages further development.
Even though the idea is distastful to me, I have often considered patenting some of our ideas in order to defend our company. In a perfect world, my inovations would inspire further development and visa-versa, but when other parasitic companies leech our ideas with out contributing themselves, we need defences.
My NT box started crashing repeatedly after I installed IE 5. Internet Explorer is an application (even though it is now intertwined with the OS), but no application crashing should bring down the entire machine.
Admittedly, Friday was a bad day, it usually only crashes once a day;-) Also, IIS web servers that I used to manage became flaky after a week if you did not reboot them. Monday morning ritual, reboot the NT servers just in case.
I work for a major international ISP based in Europe. We use Sun boxes for nearly everything, but have a few NT boxes still in service from previous bad decisions.
My NT box crashed 5 times on Friday.
Today, I log into one of my Sun Ultra 250's and run uptime. It has been up for 72 days now. 72 days ago we rebooted it to make sure all of our startup scripts were working correctly as we had been making major changes.
I just picked up an IBM Thinkpad i-Series as my desktop replacement while I'm on the go. It is rather large, but a great value for the price. I also looked at the various Sony and Toshiba machines and they were all at least $1000 more for a comparible machine.
My priorities are slightly different than most peoples, I need screen real-estate and memory more than anything for programming. The IBM has a 14.1" display and runs at 1024x768 at 16 million colours. This makes it great to work on. Plus it has a DVD player and an S-video out so I can watch DVD's on my TV now!
The only thing it is lacking is 3D acceleration. I can only run half-life at 320x240 or something like that:-( Anything more and the frame rate sucks. But if you can do without your games, I would highly recommend it. It will just force me to get more work done;-)
Everyone seems to be complaining that the drivers may not be open source and raising other objections. What about the old saying, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
This is a great thing for Linux. First of all, we will finally have better driver support for hardware that most of us have in our systems. Second, with a major hardware manufacturer like Creative Labs jumping on the Linux bandwagon, other companies will take notice.
The street signs show up as black because they have very little ambient heat unlike the background. This system projects what it sees on the windshield, so if the signs are black, you can see straight through them and see the sign with your headlights.
Also, there is a control that adjust the brightness of the projected image and the vertical position. This will help keep the projection lined up with reality, at least until you get tired and start to slouch;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Qmail lets you add extra stuff to the end of your email addresses, so if I have an address like rob@foo.org, I can set it up to accept stuff like rob-slashdot@foo.org for when I set up and account with a company. Then I know where it originated when spam starts coming in and I can redirect it to /dev/null or bounce it.
.qmail-default file. And besides, qmail tends to be more secure than sendmail so I would rather run it on my boxes.
This has the advantage of not requiring any setup on your end at all beyond the intial
Why does this sound vaprous? August is next month and since Dell is demoing it (and it is kicking Win2K ass) it must be very nearly ready for prime time. They are probably just ironing out some small problems so they don't pull a Microsoft and release a bug ridden product.
You are right in that it is difficult to manage 10 Million customers, but 10,000,000 x $75 is enough money to invest in a system that at least notifies people on time. I spend the time to keep all of the records for the domains that I own and control up to date, so there is no exuse.
Saying that I should know when my bills are due is wrong. Companies with many more customers manage to bill on time. I do not have to remember that I owe the phone company money, they send me a bill. Plus NSI removed that information from whois, so I no longer have convenient access to it.
While I agree that they probably have a right to do whatever they can to recoup losses for delinguent accounts, with their past record of billing on time, this could cause problems. I own several domains. For a couple, I didn't receive the invoices for them until weeks after they were due. What if I had lost these domains to an auction where it was Network Solutions' fault?
Also, what about the case where a disgruntled employee who was fired or quit is still the billing contact? Sure, the company should have changed it, but with companies with many domains, it may get overlooked. Sure, I'll probably get flamed saying that is the company's responsibility, but I think there should be some checks and balances in the process.
These guys just aren't having any luck are they.
#define RANT
It seems like every day I read about another Microsoft security hole. When will it become obvious to the managers who force Micro$oft products down our throats that they are compromising their companies security? If I forced everyone at my office to use software that is full of security holes and we got hit bad by it, I would be fired. When are IT managers going to be forced to face the consequences of their decisions?
#undef RANT
Seriously though, I guess we can't expect the masses of ignorant users to give up their beloved paperclips and fancy email attachments. They want everything and Micro$oft tries to give it to them without regard to the security risks.
That was a good account of what happened, but in part two, we want to hear what you are doing to track the bastards down. Knowing how you go about fixing the problem and then tracking down the culprits may help other people who run into the same problem in the future. We would understand if you need to keep the info secret until you have finished tracking them down, or for legal reasons, but at least tell us so.
It is worth reading. I read it a number of years ago alongside several other religious works. The Satanic bible is nothing like it is portrayed by the Christian right. It is a well thought out book that makes a number of valid points and is alot less extremist than most other religious works. It should at least be read so that you can filter the information that the media feeds you instead of just judging it based on its title.
I can't currently get to the US mirror either, so I am not including the link here.
It is interesting to see that CNN's quick poll shows that 70% of users have Linux running on their desktop. This may have something to do with the /. effect, but it is good news anyways.
Tim, thanks for pursuing this issue. As a developer, it is one that concerns me a great deal. Jeff has some very valid points. I often work for months coming up with new innovations which once produced are easily copied. My company puts a great deal of time and money into this research to maintain a competitive advantage. When other companies come along and copy these inovations without having to develop them, it puts us at a disadvantage and discourages further development.
Even though the idea is distastful to me, I have often considered patenting some of our ideas in order to defend our company. In a perfect world, my inovations would inspire further development and visa-versa, but when other parasitic companies leech our ideas with out contributing themselves, we need defences.
My NT box started crashing repeatedly after I installed IE 5. Internet Explorer is an application (even though it is now intertwined with the OS), but no application crashing should bring down the entire machine.
;-) Also, IIS web servers that I used to manage became flaky after a week if you did not reboot them. Monday morning ritual, reboot the NT servers just in case.
Admittedly, Friday was a bad day, it usually only crashes once a day
Which would you rather babysit?
I just picked up an IBM Thinkpad i-Series as my desktop replacement while I'm on the go. It is rather large, but a great value for the price. I also looked at the various Sony and Toshiba machines and they were all at least $1000 more for a comparible machine.
:-( Anything more and the frame rate sucks. But if you can do without your games, I would highly recommend it. It will just force me to get more work done ;-)
My priorities are slightly different than most peoples, I need screen real-estate and memory more than anything for programming. The IBM has a 14.1" display and runs at 1024x768 at 16 million colours. This makes it great to work on. Plus it has a DVD player and an S-video out so I can watch DVD's on my TV now!
The only thing it is lacking is 3D acceleration. I can only run half-life at 320x240 or something like that
Everyone seems to be complaining that the drivers may not be open source and raising other objections. What about the old saying, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
This is a great thing for Linux. First of all, we will finally have better driver support for hardware that most of us have in our systems. Second, with a major hardware manufacturer like Creative Labs jumping on the Linux bandwagon, other companies will take notice.
The street signs show up as black because they have very little ambient heat unlike the background. This system projects what it sees on the windshield, so if the signs are black, you can see straight through them and see the sign with your headlights.
;-)
Also, there is a control that adjust the brightness of the projected image and the vertical position. This will help keep the projection lined up with reality, at least until you get tired and start to slouch