Any company that only offers their services on the Windows platform or through technology that must be utilized on the Windows platform... is useless to me. Immediately, it is appearent that they lack the vision and skill of a truly talented and innovative company.
Yeah, a truly innovative company would ignore 90% of the market, and go straight for the odd-balls. Fortunately for them, you're not running their company. Now, repeat after me, "it is a bad business decision to focus your attention on small segments of your target market before your business has had any success."
I'm as disappointed as anyone that it doesn't support my favorite OS/browser, but I'd have to be a friggin moron to expect them to do so right out the gate. Throwing away money at the "edge cases" before you even determine the viability of your business model is just stupid.
What you should be hoping for is that they do succeed. Then, they will have the money and motivation to improve compatibility and quality of service.
If people put their email adress all over the web, its no wonder.
Well, it's nice that you don't need to. But, there are quite a few of us that do business on the 'net, who need to post an email address for potential customers to use to contact us. Yes, I could use a web form instead, but frankly, that's just a good way to cut down on your customer base. I *hate* it when that's the only way I can contact someone to ask a question. I figure I can't be the only one.
I use three RBLs, which average 150 blocks per day (high for the month was 326 in a single day). Spamassassin knocks out maybe 20 spam a day more. Two more per day make it through the filters to my inbox. Unfortunately, I can't just/dev/null the ones spamassassin traps, since every now and again it traps a good one.
Since I started composing this reply, spamassassin trapped two more spam messages, and one slimed it's way into my inbox.
You all are making this too complicated. The easiest way to test if you received the ad is to do a quick compare if your IP did a request for example index.html and also popup.js and that would confirm you got it.
Yup, you've just invented a method for blocking AOL users. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)
See, if you actually had any experience at all in reviewing web logs, you'd notice that most AOL users come through a proxy system that utilises many different IP addresses to retrieve content. On a typical hit to a single page with 6 graphic images, I'll have seven different IP addresses in my log.
Leave the excercises in programming logic to the professionals, you're just embarrasing yourself.
But for the average joe user (me for example), if my DNS server is down, so is my webserver. So nothing is really lost (okay maybe an MX record, so I have a second DNS server on another machine and a backup MX host). This is plenty for me.
True, except if the outage is going to be long-term. Having off-site DNS allows you to move your site to a new location, and get it back up and running in fairly short order.
Otherwise, to move facilities/providers will take up to 72 hours for the NS change, plus the time for the NS entries to clear the cache in variuos DNS servers.
Disclaimer: I used to contract to UltraDNS as a developer.
A couple of other points to outsourcing DNS.
Systems like UltraDNS allow for large firms with multiple DNS administrators to easily maintain their DNS databases.
It also allows for small companies/individuals to have off-site DNS servers at a fairly low cost. Even if you want to maintain your own zone files in BIND, you can use systems like Ultra as secondary DNS servers.
The rationale behind this is simple: the dns boxes get dumb quite quickly when they lose their upstream connection. Once this happens, the dns for everything starts to fail, and even the internal hosts start having problems communicating.
I'd say it's your DNS administrators that are dumb. I've been maintaining DNS systems for years, and I've never had a DNS server so much as hesitate to serve authoritative addresses, no matter what was happening to the upstream connection.
It's not quite as bad. The only jet aircraft are the Harriers, and their intakes are high enough that getting sucked in is not a serious risk. Helicopter rotor blades are also well over your head. The biggest risk comes from the rotor-wash of the CH-53 (Heavy-lift helicopter). I got knocked on my butt when one came in for a fast landing and I wasn't braced for it. I was over 50 feet from the outside of the rotor path at the time. It would be real easy to get blown off the deck by one.
Ironically, the jet column the Harrier rides on when doing verticals is so focused that you could easily stand ten feet from one landing vertically, and all you'd have to do is widen your stance a little bit.
The biggest daily risks come from more mundane things, like tripping over tie-down chains. The non-skid on the carrier deck is like very uneven volcanic rock. Falling on it will tear through clothing and remove a few square inches of skin quite easily.
Re:Creepy...
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Heh, I love this line of thinking.
I spent 6 months on a helicopter carrier. It was often weeks between times I got out on the surface decks, and I was allowed to. Not just any schmuck can waltz out on the weather decks when it pleases them. The vast majority of the time, only those folks whose jobs require it are allowed out there. Most folks spend the entire time inside. Thus, the difference is that the surface ships are almost always pitching and rolling, as opposed to the subs, which are pretty stable unless doing vigorous maneuvering.
I'm really suprised that spam-busting hasn't become a bigger political issue. There realyl isn't a large pro-spam lobby,
Until they finally had a change of heart a couple of weeks ago, there was a very large, and very wealthy pro-spam lobby. It's called the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). They have been a major factor in influencing our government to not regulate spam.
and any senator/rep who campaigned against spam ("I'm going to ban spam! Vote for me") would pick up not only a lot of techie votes, but votes from the general population as well - there isn't really a pro-spam segment of the population, either.
Yeah, but somehow, at the final moment, they always manage to collect enough bribes to change their minds. Here in Arizona, there was a major push to pass an anti-telemarketing law. All the lawmakers were behind it, they were bragging about it to the public, and there was huge public support. Then, one day, it suddenly dropped off the radar. End result? The lawmakers increased their popularity hugely, got paid off and didn't do a damn thing. Our friendly media, who normally would have alerted us to such an outrage, deliberately whitewashed it. Think it's a coincidence that they're one of the bigger users of telemarketing?
People generally are not aware that they need to pay their state a *use* tax for goods purchased from other states, but used in their own state.
Ever actually try to pay this? One of our state representatives (AZ) tested the system by trying to pay the use tax on an item he purchased from out of state. The revenue department had no idea how to deal with it.
The only system in place for paying use tax is for companies with transaction privilege tax licenses who remove items purchased for resale (not taxed) from stock to be used for themselves. There's a line for that on my TPT tax forms that I file every month.
People who order diet cola aren't necessarily under any illusion that doing so is going to magically make them lose weight. (But wouldn't that be nice?) Some people order it because they have sugar problems that make regular soda a bad idea for them. Others want to drink soda, but don't want to take in around 150 calories per 12 ounce serving...
There are some folks (diabetics) who have issues with sugars. However, they really shouldn't be scarfing cheeseburgers either.
There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time.
This kind of thinking gets people in loads of trouble. Sure, a sip a cream or a pat of butter or a piece of bacon once a month wouldn't do anybody any harm. But once these foods are included in the diet, it's easy for them to become habits. When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
No, this kind of thinking mixed with stupidity gets people in loads of trouble. I've lived by that philosophy for a long time without becoming obese. I cook using butter, I just don't use pounds of it. Trust me, you really can taste the difference. The people who abuse this theory are that same wingnuts who order double-cheeseburgers with a diet cola. If you have an over-eating problem, it really doesn't matter what you eat, you're going to be obese.
And lets not even mention the fact that a number of our healthy substitutes have turned out to be worse for us than what they were replacing.
Finally, black holes/black lists/spam filters/etc. aren't solving the problem. The bandwidth is still being chewed up,
Only someone truly ignorant would think so. I use several block lists. These involve blocking at the SMTP protocol layer. Therefore, if you're in the blocklist, you won't even get to the point of transmitting the message to me. The only data transferred is the initial identification. It's the virtual equivalent of slamming the door in the face of the door-to-door salesman before he can start talking.
Considering the amount of "reject" entries in my logs, I'm willing to bet that I'm saving a measurable amount of *my* bandwidth. And I'm only a little guy. A big company or ISP doing connection-level blocking could save a fairly significant amount of bandwidth.
Another thing to try is contacting the owners of the top listened to internet stations on Shoutcast that match your genre. Maybe they would want new stuff to play.
This is a very good suggestion. I've bought several CDs from independent bands I've heard on Internet radio stations.
Another: Find message boards/newsgroups/email lists that are appropriate, and just hang out and post there. Make sure your band's URL is in your sig line. Don't blatantly advertise, unless that's acceptable. Just be part of the community. I've seen web hits on sites skyrocket from things like this.
Man, what slack-jawed moderator scored this as flamebait?
The comments made in the post are dead-on as far as I'm concerned. I run production web-servers, regardless of actual stability, I cannot justify running unsupported software combinations on production machines. I have an obligation to my clients to provide as stable an environment as possible. This means that I cannot upgrade to Apache 2.0 until PHP officially supports it, since I depend heavily on PHP.
It doesn't mean that I'm saying anything bad about either one of them. In fact, it only means exactly what I said, I cannot upgrade until PHP is officially supported on Apache 2. Where in the @#$% does anyone get the idea this is flamebait?
As they say, been there, done that. A little over two years ago, I started a side business doing leatherwork, mostly collars for sighthounds. There's a great satisfaction in working on a project, and being able to hold the completed product in your hands at the end. Then, having someone truly appreciative pay you for doing it. For better or for worse, when I finish a leatherworking project it's done. It will either be sold to a customer, or tossed in the bin. Either way, I won't get dragged into an indefinite period of maintenance, support and upgrades that completely destroys my sense of completion. And, I actually get letters from folks telling me how much they like my product and how wonderful they think it is. As opposed to my day job, where I get bitched at because the app doesn't do X things that weren't on the non-existent spec-sheets we kept begging for.
For those in the IT business who haven't caught on to this. I highly recommend picking up a hobby that lets you create things that you can hold in your hands. It just might keep you sane, and will provide you with something to do when you finally burn out... er... retire.
"I see, you'd like to patent inhaling a Flounder through your nose. Well, I think you need to work on that a bit, it's not really silly enough. Why don't you try singing an Italian opera while inhaling the flounder through one nostril, and blowing a herring out through the other?"
I was an @home tech support agent....so I got info from the inside
Oh yeah, the tech support staff were definitely on the inside track for business strategy. Sounds to me like you were being fed the inside propaganda.
It's funny how all these insiders are blaming those evil, greedy cable companies, while never mentioning @home's asinine business practices of buying up money-losing companies for billions of dollars, then selling them for millions after bleeding out every bit of money put into them.
The only greedy one out there was @home. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, being greedy and stupid is a very bad thing. Too bad no one there understood basic accounting 101.
Re:But what about hot dogs and apple pie?
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 1
Now granted MRE's aren't a steak dinner at an expensive restaurant somewhere, but the food isn't anything worse than the junk we stuff our faces with daily at places like mcdonalds or taco bell.
Those things must be a heck of a lot better than they used to be.
My least favorites:
Ham and Chicken Loaf. Christ, that one was the worst. The isn't ANYTHING you can do to make that one palatable.
Dehydrated pork patty/dehydrated beef patty. If you're on a fast-moving march, these are the pits. You *have* to be able to heat them to re-hydrate them, and since we never got the heating kits with them, that meant filling with water and setting out in the sun for an hour. These got much better when they started putting the little bottles of tabasco in the meals. If you had to eat them dry? Well, think rice-cake with a little meat flavor.
Omelet. These were just nasty. They looked bad, they smelled bad, they tasted bad. Even after you poured the liquid off...
Beef Slices in barbeque sauce. Eh, kinda dry and tasteless, but edible.
Meatballs in barbecue sauce. Weird, but not too bad.
Frankfurters. Yay, two hot dogs, no buns. Who came up with this fucking brain-child?
Chicken ala King. Almost, but not entirely inedible.
Chicken loaf. Bland, strange texture, but better than some others.
And then the "goodies"....
More than once, we thought about the engineering possibilities of building bunkers with the oatmeal cookie bars. They couldn't possibly have wanted us to eat them, could they?
So if you were running a business, you WOULD take mail sent from hotmail, msn or yahoo serious?
I know I do. Blocking the major web-mail providers would have a major impact on my business, and not in a good way. Truthfully, I can't remember the last time I got a spam that originated from a hotmail or yahoo account. Yes, most of them have hotmail and yahoo addresses in the headers, but they're forgeries or reply addresses. The mail itself is coming from Asian or Canadian address blocks.
I see, because you're too ignorant to properly run a mail server, anyone who wants to put you on their list of open relays owes you free technical support?
Tell you what, if I ever bounce an email from you, I'll give you all the help you want, at my standard hourly contracting rates.
Y'know, I might just put that in my bounce messages...
I don't accept ORBS having decided what's permitted and what's not ! Some relaying is permitted and some not.
ORBS didn't decide anything. The owner of the mailserver using ORBS decided what is permitted, and chose to use the ORBS list to help in that goal. You don't have a right to send mail through my server, I choose to allow you to send mail through my server.
I use blacklists. I'm very careful to choose lists that are automated or actively maintained. Yes, I've had legitimate mail to one of my users get bounced because her company was running an open relay. I told them how to secure their server, they told me they had to run it that way because of remote users. To my knowledge, they're still being blocked, no apologies.
Re:Cox on governments adopting open source softwar
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There may be situations where proprietary software is genuinely the right choice.
Ooh, Alan, I hope you aren't expecting a Christmas card from RMS this year. I can practically hear the scratch of the pencil crossing you out.
Slashdot Mirror
Any company that only offers their services on the Windows platform or through technology that must be utilized on the Windows platform ... is useless to me. Immediately, it is appearent that they lack the vision and skill of a truly talented and innovative company.
Yeah, a truly innovative company would ignore 90% of the market, and go straight for the odd-balls. Fortunately for them, you're not running their company. Now, repeat after me, "it is a bad business decision to focus your attention on small segments of your target market before your business has had any success."
I'm as disappointed as anyone that it doesn't support my favorite OS/browser, but I'd have to be a friggin moron to expect them to do so right out the gate. Throwing away money at the "edge cases" before you even determine the viability of your business model is just stupid.
What you should be hoping for is that they do succeed. Then, they will have the money and motivation to improve compatibility and quality of service.
If people put their email adress all over the web, its no wonder.
/dev/null the ones spamassassin traps, since every now and again it traps a good one.
Well, it's nice that you don't need to. But, there are quite a few of us that do business on the 'net, who need to post an email address for potential customers to use to contact us. Yes, I could use a web form instead, but frankly, that's just a good way to cut down on your customer base. I *hate* it when that's the only way I can contact someone to ask a question. I figure I can't be the only one.
I use three RBLs, which average 150 blocks per day (high for the month was 326 in a single day). Spamassassin knocks out maybe 20 spam a day more. Two more per day make it through the filters to my inbox. Unfortunately, I can't just
Since I started composing this reply, spamassassin trapped two more spam messages, and one slimed it's way into my inbox.
You all are making this too complicated. The easiest way to test if you received the ad is to do a quick compare if your IP did a request for example index.html and also popup.js and that would confirm you got it.
Yup, you've just invented a method for blocking AOL users. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)
See, if you actually had any experience at all in reviewing web logs, you'd notice that most AOL users come through a proxy system that utilises many different IP addresses to retrieve content. On a typical hit to a single page with 6 graphic images, I'll have seven different IP addresses in my log.
Leave the excercises in programming logic to the professionals, you're just embarrasing yourself.
But for the average joe user (me for example), if my DNS server is down, so is my webserver. So nothing is really lost (okay maybe an MX record, so I have a second DNS server on another machine and a backup MX host). This is plenty for me.
True, except if the outage is going to be long-term. Having off-site DNS allows you to move your site to a new location, and get it back up and running in fairly short order.
Otherwise, to move facilities/providers will take up to 72 hours for the NS change, plus the time for the NS entries to clear the cache in variuos DNS servers.
Been there, dealt with that....
Disclaimer: I used to contract to UltraDNS as a developer.
A couple of other points to outsourcing DNS.
Systems like UltraDNS allow for large firms with multiple DNS administrators to easily maintain their DNS databases.
It also allows for small companies/individuals to have off-site DNS servers at a fairly low cost. Even if you want to maintain your own zone files in BIND, you can use systems like Ultra as secondary DNS servers.
The rationale behind this is simple: the dns boxes get dumb quite quickly when they lose their upstream connection. Once this happens, the dns for everything starts to fail, and even the internal hosts start having problems communicating.
I'd say it's your DNS administrators that are dumb. I've been maintaining DNS systems for years, and I've never had a DNS server so much as hesitate to serve authoritative addresses, no matter what was happening to the upstream connection.
It's not quite as bad. The only jet aircraft are the Harriers, and their intakes are high enough that getting sucked in is not a serious risk. Helicopter rotor blades are also well over your head. The biggest risk comes from the rotor-wash of the CH-53 (Heavy-lift helicopter). I got knocked on my butt when one came in for a fast landing and I wasn't braced for it. I was over 50 feet from the outside of the rotor path at the time. It would be real easy to get blown off the deck by one.
Ironically, the jet column the Harrier rides on when doing verticals is so focused that you could easily stand ten feet from one landing vertically, and all you'd have to do is widen your stance a little bit.
The biggest daily risks come from more mundane things, like tripping over tie-down chains. The non-skid on the carrier deck is like very uneven volcanic rock. Falling on it will tear through clothing and remove a few square inches of skin quite easily.
Heh, I love this line of thinking.
I spent 6 months on a helicopter carrier. It was often weeks between times I got out on the surface decks, and I was allowed to. Not just any schmuck can waltz out on the weather decks when it pleases them. The vast majority of the time, only those folks whose jobs require it are allowed out there. Most folks spend the entire time inside. Thus, the difference is that the surface ships are almost always pitching and rolling, as opposed to the subs, which are pretty stable unless doing vigorous maneuvering.
I'm really suprised that spam-busting hasn't become a bigger political issue. There realyl isn't a large pro-spam lobby,
Until they finally had a change of heart a couple of weeks ago, there was a very large, and very wealthy pro-spam lobby. It's called the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). They have been a major factor in influencing our government to not regulate spam.
and any senator/rep who campaigned against spam ("I'm going to ban spam! Vote for me") would pick up not only a lot of techie votes, but votes from the general population as well - there isn't really a pro-spam segment of the population, either.
Yeah, but somehow, at the final moment, they always manage to collect enough bribes to change their minds. Here in Arizona, there was a major push to pass an anti-telemarketing law. All the lawmakers were behind it, they were bragging about it to the public, and there was huge public support. Then, one day, it suddenly dropped off the radar. End result? The lawmakers increased their popularity hugely, got paid off and didn't do a damn thing. Our friendly media, who normally would have alerted us to such an outrage, deliberately whitewashed it. Think it's a coincidence that they're one of the bigger users of telemarketing?
People generally are not aware that they need to pay their state a *use* tax for goods purchased from other states, but used in their own state.
Ever actually try to pay this? One of our state representatives (AZ) tested the system by trying to pay the use tax on an item he purchased from out of state. The revenue department had no idea how to deal with it.
The only system in place for paying use tax is for companies with transaction privilege tax licenses who remove items purchased for resale (not taxed) from stock to be used for themselves. There's a line for that on my TPT tax forms that I file every month.
Nice try, but you should have stopped at definition #1 instead of advancing to definition #2
HOLY DAY
Halloween (All Hallow Even) has been a holy day for centuries, predating the Christian religion.
I don't mind pedants, but stupid pedants should be beaten.
Hey, don't tell them to fix their anomalies!
With UUnet, if any traffic makes it to its intended destination, that is the anomaly.
People who order diet cola aren't necessarily under any illusion that doing so is going to magically make them lose weight. (But wouldn't that be nice?) Some people order it because they have sugar problems that make regular soda a bad idea for them. Others want to drink soda, but don't want to take in around 150 calories per 12 ounce serving...
There are some folks (diabetics) who have issues with sugars. However, they really shouldn't be scarfing cheeseburgers either.
For those who are concerned about calories, well, you've got a priorities issue. The most common artificial sweeteners have been shown to have significant health risks. Meanwhile, the only natural non-caloric sweetener has been agressively kept out of this country by the FDA reportedly at the behest of Monsanto (maker of Nutra-Sweet).
There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time.
This kind of thinking gets people in loads of trouble. Sure, a sip a cream or a pat of butter or a piece of bacon once a month wouldn't do anybody any harm. But once these foods are included in the diet, it's easy for them to become habits. When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
No, this kind of thinking mixed with stupidity gets people in loads of trouble. I've lived by that philosophy for a long time without becoming obese. I cook using butter, I just don't use pounds of it. Trust me, you really can taste the difference. The people who abuse this theory are that same wingnuts who order double-cheeseburgers with a diet cola. If you have an over-eating problem, it really doesn't matter what you eat, you're going to be obese.
And lets not even mention the fact that a number of our healthy substitutes have turned out to be worse for us than what they were replacing.
Finally, black holes/black lists/spam filters/etc. aren't solving the problem. The bandwidth is still being chewed up,
Only someone truly ignorant would think so. I use several block lists. These involve blocking at the SMTP protocol layer. Therefore, if you're in the blocklist, you won't even get to the point of transmitting the message to me. The only data transferred is the initial identification. It's the virtual equivalent of slamming the door in the face of the door-to-door salesman before he can start talking.
Considering the amount of "reject" entries in my logs, I'm willing to bet that I'm saving a measurable amount of *my* bandwidth. And I'm only a little guy. A big company or ISP doing connection-level blocking could save a fairly significant amount of bandwidth.
Another thing to try is contacting the owners of the top listened to internet stations on Shoutcast that match your genre. Maybe they would want new stuff to play.
This is a very good suggestion. I've bought several CDs from independent bands I've heard on Internet radio stations.
Another: Find message boards/newsgroups/email lists that are appropriate, and just hang out and post there. Make sure your band's URL is in your sig line. Don't blatantly advertise, unless that's acceptable. Just be part of the community. I've seen web hits on sites skyrocket from things like this.
Man, what slack-jawed moderator scored this as flamebait?
The comments made in the post are dead-on as far as I'm concerned. I run production web-servers, regardless of actual stability, I cannot justify running unsupported software combinations on production machines. I have an obligation to my clients to provide as stable an environment as possible. This means that I cannot upgrade to Apache 2.0 until PHP officially supports it, since I depend heavily on PHP.
It doesn't mean that I'm saying anything bad about either one of them. In fact, it only means exactly what I said, I cannot upgrade until PHP is officially supported on Apache 2. Where in the @#$% does anyone get the idea this is flamebait?
As they say, been there, done that. A little over two years ago, I started a side business doing leatherwork, mostly collars for sighthounds. There's a great satisfaction in working on a project, and being able to hold the completed product in your hands at the end. Then, having someone truly appreciative pay you for doing it. For better or for worse, when I finish a leatherworking project it's done. It will either be sold to a customer, or tossed in the bin. Either way, I won't get dragged into an indefinite period of maintenance, support and upgrades that completely destroys my sense of completion. And, I actually get letters from folks telling me how much they like my product and how wonderful they think it is. As opposed to my day job, where I get bitched at because the app doesn't do X things that weren't on the non-existent spec-sheets we kept begging for.
... er ... retire.
For those in the IT business who haven't caught on to this. I highly recommend picking up a hobby that lets you create things that you can hold in your hands. It just might keep you sane, and will provide you with something to do when you finally burn out
The thing I find amazing is that you find it amazing.
Saying that spammers lie is repetetively redundant. Heck, it's even the first rule:
Well, Python had the Ministry of Silly Walks.
I guess we've got the Ministry of Silly Patents.
"I see, you'd like to patent inhaling a Flounder through your nose. Well, I think you need to work on that a bit, it's not really silly enough. Why don't you try singing an Italian opera while inhaling the flounder through one nostril, and blowing a herring out through the other?"
I was an @home tech support agent....so I got info from the inside
Oh yeah, the tech support staff were definitely on the inside track for business strategy. Sounds to me like you were being fed the inside propaganda.
It's funny how all these insiders are blaming those evil, greedy cable companies, while never mentioning @home's asinine business practices of buying up money-losing companies for billions of dollars, then selling them for millions after bleeding out every bit of money put into them.
The only greedy one out there was @home. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, being greedy and stupid is a very bad thing. Too bad no one there understood basic accounting 101.
Now granted MRE's aren't a steak dinner at an expensive restaurant somewhere, but the food isn't anything worse than the junk we stuff our faces with daily at places like mcdonalds or taco bell.
Those things must be a heck of a lot better than they used to be.
My least favorites:
Ham and Chicken Loaf. Christ, that one was the worst. The isn't ANYTHING you can do to make that one palatable.
Dehydrated pork patty/dehydrated beef patty. If you're on a fast-moving march, these are the pits. You *have* to be able to heat them to re-hydrate them, and since we never got the heating kits with them, that meant filling with water and setting out in the sun for an hour. These got much better when they started putting the little bottles of tabasco in the meals. If you had to eat them dry? Well, think rice-cake with a little meat flavor.
Omelet. These were just nasty. They looked bad, they smelled bad, they tasted bad. Even after you poured the liquid off...
Beef Slices in barbeque sauce. Eh, kinda dry and tasteless, but edible.
Meatballs in barbecue sauce. Weird, but not too bad.
Frankfurters. Yay, two hot dogs, no buns. Who came up with this fucking brain-child?
Chicken ala King. Almost, but not entirely inedible.
Chicken loaf. Bland, strange texture, but better than some others.
And then the "goodies"....
More than once, we thought about the engineering possibilities of building bunkers with the oatmeal cookie bars. They couldn't possibly have wanted us to eat them, could they?
Chocolate-covered brownie bar. Looked good, sounded good, tasted like, well, nothing.
Crackers. We're all healthy young men and women, working hard and sweating our asses off. How about putting some freaking SALT on these things!
So if you were running a business, you WOULD take mail sent from hotmail, msn or yahoo serious?
I know I do. Blocking the major web-mail providers would have a major impact on my business, and not in a good way. Truthfully, I can't remember the last time I got a spam that originated from a hotmail or yahoo account. Yes, most of them have hotmail and yahoo addresses in the headers, but they're forgeries or reply addresses. The mail itself is coming from Asian or Canadian address blocks.
3. They should help you.
I see, because you're too ignorant to properly run a mail server, anyone who wants to put you on their list of open relays owes you free technical support?
Tell you what, if I ever bounce an email from you, I'll give you all the help you want, at my standard hourly contracting rates.
Y'know, I might just put that in my bounce messages...
I don't accept ORBS having decided what's permitted and what's not ! Some relaying is permitted and some not.
ORBS didn't decide anything. The owner of the mailserver using ORBS decided what is permitted, and chose to use the ORBS list to help in that goal. You don't have a right to send mail through my server, I choose to allow you to send mail through my server.
I use blacklists. I'm very careful to choose lists that are automated or actively maintained. Yes, I've had legitimate mail to one of my users get bounced because her company was running an open relay. I told them how to secure their server, they told me they had to run it that way because of remote users. To my knowledge, they're still being blocked, no apologies.
There may be situations where proprietary software is genuinely the right choice.
Ooh, Alan, I hope you aren't expecting a Christmas card from RMS this year. I can practically hear the scratch of the pencil crossing you out.