All programming is a craft. Some of it may be crap, and some may be outstanding, but nonetheless, it is craft. Think of it like woodwork. Some pieces are shoddy little boxes nailed togather with scrap. Others are beautiful and extremely strong, with joints so tightly fit that the only way you even know they are there is by the change of the wood-grain.
*Some* programming is art. (Not much in my opinion.)
In addition to being a programmer, I'm a leatherworker. Most of what I do is pure craft, but not necessarily art. Belts, straps, repairs, pouches, etc.
*Sometimes* what I do is art. These are functional pieces with elaborate carving, painting and even occasionally gold leaf and such. They are one-of-a kind pieces that even if another craftsman copied them, would never be quite the same as the original.
That said, the vast majority of code out there is not even up to journeyman standards, let alone master-craftsman level.
The company I work for uses VOIP primarily for internal use. We have offices in various locations, plus individuals travelling. However, the quality of the calls can be a real problem, especially in one of our offices, where the bandwidth is often saturated because of *very* large files being transferred in and out. Quite often during conference calls, we have people end up calling back on cell phones or regular land-lines.
I like VOIP for it's relative convenience and cost. However, in a lot of ways, it's like going back to the days when a pigeon landing on the telephone line outside your house could thoroughly garble the call.
Even so, when you look at the cost of component's businesses buy, $500 isn't that far out there. It's kind of like saying it's not worth it to buy high-end RAID cards because base-level IDE cards are so cheap. Not to mention that first-gen devices of any type tend to be expensive. You don't want to know what I had to pay for 100mbit *hubs* back in the day.
Also keep in mind that these are server-class gigabit cards, which tend to price in the $500 range *anyway*.
Businesses only question the cost if the benefit is questionable. If these cards live up to their promise, the benefit may very well be worth the cost to employers like mine, who have to deal with massive data throughput issues.
I highly doubt they're aiming these cards at the general public. The kind of folks who worry about this kind of performance aren't buying $500 computers, they're buying $5,000 + computers, and trying to tweak every ounce of performance out of them. I'm willing to bet my employer is going to look pretty seriously at these cards for some of our heavy-use systems.
Sometimes you can't"split all your services onto smaller boxen and have a load balancing switch/router". Not everything on the network is a web server.
How many of US have workplaces that provide those kinds of amenities, though?
Probably none any more.
But they used to. Just look back to the late 19th century and early 20th century. Hershey Pennsylvania comes to mind as one of the nicer "company towns". It wasn't at all unusual in that time to have a company build entire towns to support their factories.
This is great--IF you have the leverage to do it. If you're a large (six figures a year in spending and up) customer, you can get the ISP to jump at your command. Likewise, if you're dealing with a small local ISP, you have a significant amount of leverage even if your spending is low.
I'm here to tell you, you don't have to be huge, and you don't have to be dealing with a mom-n-pop either. I lease a half-rack in a colocation facility, grand total of about $450/month. This same colo facility is a major peering point, with plenty of customers spending 5-6 figures/month.
What it took was being loud, persistent, and absolutely willing to pull my equipment if they didn't clean up their act.
As for being "difficult, if not impossible" to move? No, it's not. I've had to do it several times over the years for various reasons. It's a pain in the butt sometimes, but it's not a good reason for continuing to pay money to a spammer-supporting operation.
As any fule kno, the most notorious spam blacklist is SPEWS. ~
Actually, MAPS and ORBS are the most notorious in my book. Why? Because they got caught listing folks for reasons not specified in the listing criteria. (personal agendas) For that reason, they are the only two lists I know of to have lost legal challenges. MAPS cleaned up its act, and ORBS was shut down.
As far as I'm concerned, listing all even-numbered IP addresses is valid, so long as it is clearly stated in the list criteria. That way, sysadmins can decide whether the list is practical for them or not.
Love or hate SPEWS, they follow their own listing criteria to the letter. I have seen a few mistakes happen, but I've also seen them get cleared very quickly. Most of the folks claiming they are listed "by mistake", do fit the criteria for listing as stated in the SPEWS guidelines. Usually, because they are getting their service from an ISP that is knowingly harboring spammers. I have no sympathy for this, if you don't want to be lumped in with the spammers, don't support an ISP that allows spamming.
And I'm here to say, it's NOT impossible to get off an RBL. I got caught in a SPEWS listing, because my ISP got lax and allowed a spammer to stay on their network. It took six months for that listing to expand wide enough to cover my addresses. When I found out, I raised royal heck with my ISP, and told them in no uncertain circumstances that I would pull my service if they didn't clean up. They kicked the spammer, the Spamhaus listings were gone the next day, and within a week, the SPEWS listing covering me had been reduced so that I was no longer affected.
Having spammers on your ISP is like having a crack-house on your street. Can you blame folks for not wanting to come visit you?
It's not so much that PR work interested me. It's that I felt strongly about the welfare of retired racing Greyhounds, and figured that doing PR work was going to be what did the most good. I'd done some instructor work before, but had never done educational work with the public before.
I'm still not anything close to what you'd call a socialite. I have a few good friends, and I tend to spend most of my time at home. Truth is, I rarely spend time in public *except* when I am doing PR work for Greyhounds. But, when I do, I meet a lot of people, and most of the few friends I have, I have met through these events.
How do I find a hobby that involves socializing... that isn't "getting drunk at the bar" or "displaying my incredible lack of prowess at sports"?
Well, one possibility is working for a charity doing PR-type work. I do a lot of work with Greyhound adoption/rescue groups, promoting adoption.
The trick isn't to look for something to do to meet women. The trick is to find something that interests you, that will force you to interact with people, and develop your interpersonal skills. If you do that, you *will* meet women. And even better, the odds are that you will meet someone with a common interest.
Too bad it's all wasted on me.:) I've been married now for twenty years. But doing charity work involving animal rescue? Man, I meet *tons* of eligible women who all think I'm a great guy because of what I'm doing.
You know, it amazes me that anyone thinks this is something new.
Some of the oldest companies I've worked for have HUGE "special pricing" books, that list special prices on specific items for certain customers. Heck, sometimes the pricing was even specific to certain projects.
The only thing new about this is that it can be automated, which is bringing it to the consumer level. Which means that once you reach a certain level of business, you may get special pricing without having to *ask* for it. In the "old days", if you wanted special pricing, you generally had to negotiate for it.
Hehe, reminds me of how I was treated at car dealerships.
The sales folks take one look at me, and send out the most junior salesman to deal with me. Which is cool, since mostly I've found that the junior guys don't have so much of a bias, and treat me quite nicely. At one dealership,the guy was literally on his first week on the job. In 18 months, he sold me three cars. I liked him well enough to go back to the dealer and ask for him by name.
Really funny part was the first time, when it became apparent that not only was I going to buy a car, but it wasn't going to be a stripped-out cheapy, my salesman's "supervisor" tried to take over from him. After ten minutes of listening to this pompous jerk, I looked at the junior salesman and told him that if the senior salesman didn't clear out of the room in ten seconds, I was going to walk out the door. The looks on their faces were priceless, shock and offense on one face, surprise and a bit of a smirk on the other.:) I got my way though.
the furthest it's gotten is xm included in hyundais
XM was an option in my 2003 Avalanche, so GM has been offering it at *least* that long. Easy enough to spot, just look for the GM vehicles with *two* stubby little antennas on the roof (the other is for OnStar).
I'd be willing to bet that XM has been an option for Ford and Chrysler as well...
What I am after is a reliable email service. One that doesn't treat collateral damage as an acceptable cost of spam, and that doesn't force me to change my email address due to someone else's incompetence (either sending or failing to stop spam).
Then find an ISP that does not tolerate spammers.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no collateral damage when an ISP gets listed. It's not OK to sit on the fence anymore. You are either anti-spam or pro-spam, and an anti-spam person would *never* consider it OK to do business with a company that tolerates spam. Since you *are* willing to do so, by association, you are pro-spam.
#1 My ISP got careless, and got listed. #2 The listing expanded to cover my address range. (level 2) #3 I raised a huge ruckus with my sales rep and the tech staff. #4 They kicked the spammer, modified their AUP and generally cleaned up. #5 They posted to NANAB, explaining the actions they took, and their plans on staying clean. #6 The listing was cleared.
If your ISP is not willing to do what it takes to get rid of their spammers, then they are part of the spam problem. If you are still willing to give them money, then you are part of the spam problem.
The KDE team should be happy that they have the huge investment that Apple has given them.
I must be missing something here. What "huge investment" did Apple give to KDE? Throwing a couple of big lumps of code at them that are likely unuseable doesn't seem like much of an "investment" to me.
Apple forked KDE's code, and *said* they would work with KDE to help backport changes. In reality, that help is turning out to be of questionable value. Seems to me KDE helped Apple a lot more than Apple has helped KDE.
All of which is beside the point in a way. The KDE developers are frustrated with Apple, but they seem to understand that Apple has no obligation to them other than to lob huge tarballs at them. What they're pissed about is Apple getting credit for "improving" things for KDE when they are not deserving of the credit. Instead, the KDE developers are getting flak from the community for being slow and lazy because they're not implementing all the "wonderful" things Apple has given them.
I've worked on big projects before. Having someone throw a full set of revised source at you that has fixes/improvements/additions for dozens-hundreds of items is for most intents useless if you have also been developing the same codebase over time. Yeah, you can diff it, but that 20 line change in file foobar.c may represent fixes for 5 different issues out of 100, how do you know which ones? If you can only port for 3 of those 5 issues, what changes do you need to make to those 20 lines to make it just support those 3? Now, multiply that times 200+ source files...
Sounds like the folks at GNU are trying to pick up on Darl's strategy at SCO.
The whole point of OS is to make it a community project. In the case of most big projects, there are so many contributors that compensating all of them fairly would be nearly impossible. So again, the question is asked, who does the money go to?
I've licensed things under GPL before, I did so with the absolute expectation that I would never be monetarily compensated for it, regardless of who used it. I did NOT do it so someone else could profit from it by shaking down end-users.
In my mind, it doesn't matter if Google is profiting by using Linux to provide content on their servers, or if Joe Sixpack is profiting by creating artwork with GIMP on his desktop. They both have every right to do so.
Most states require phone companies to maintain dial tone for 911 on any line connected to them.
So, there is a dial tone, you just can't dial anything except 911. Dialing any other number will get you a nice recording telling you the line is not in service.
you should pick one which defines a VERY narrow criteria with NO collateral damage.
Your opinion of course. In my opinion (and my paying customers), "collateral damage" is perfectly acceptable if it significantly reduces the spam load.
Time and time again, I see people trying to enforce someone else's terms of service (usually poorly, and without room for any exception), getting blacklisted for non-spam activities (e.g. using a provider that hosts a spammer willingly), etc, etc.
And time and again, I see network providers and ISPs finally cleaning up their act, because their entire IP space has been blocklisted and is hurting them financially. Verio is the best example that comes to mind. A few years ago, they were a spam sewer. Now, they are relatively clean.
These are attacks on the nature of the Internet as a network of peers.
No, it is not. It is a network of peers in action. ISPs that provide services to spammers are not my peers, and therefore their traffic is not permitted to traverse my network. "My network, my rules." If they want to be a peer of mine, they have to keep their users from abusing my network.
Spamhaus does a very good job with XBL of listing just systems that are known zombies, relays, etc.
Yup, they're just one of four lists I use on my servers, not including my own private lists.
SpamAssassin, of course, makes this a moot point by combining and weighting several sources.
Spamassassin is a useful tool, but it is absolutely useless for preventing the theft of my bandwidth by spammers, since it requires that I accept the mail before I can score it. I prefer to not let it in the door to begin with. IMO, Spamassassin should only be needed for the 10% or so of spam that manages to slip through the cracks.
In five years, I've only had one client ask me to not use blocklists for her mail. Two weeks later, she *begged* me to go back to using them.
In a one-week period, one of my two mail servers rejected 19,868 connections due to the sending address being in a block list. That's over 2,800 spam messages per day that did not make it to its intended victim. That's a lot of saved bandwidth, both network, and human.
Proud member #2738 of The Lumber Cartel (There is no Lumber Cartel).
this supposition that the only reason anyone could ever want high performance in their PC is to play games.
Agreed.
I don't play computer games, I don't even *own* any. None of my systems have ever had a game installed on them (yes, this includes solitare). All of my systems are used for work, and non-work related research. Yet, over half of my systems are dual-cpu. I multi-task, a lot. I often have graphics filters chewing away, or CDs burning, while I'm doing something else. On my servers, I want to know that if I need to compile something, archive something or do some other processor-intensive task, that there's enough processor power left to continue with the server's normal tasks.
I read reviews, but they account for less than 20% of the weight I give to my purchasing decisions. The only reviews I will pay close attention to are the *bad* reviews. They're so rare that one has to believe the product must have been truly hideous.
What would really be effective in the long run is site-specific javascript/images/plugins rules.
You mean like Internet Explorer?
I hate to say it, but since switching from IE to FF, this is the only feature I really, really miss. The ability to declare certain sites in various states of restriction.
I don't need to be able to set a zillion rules for each individual site, all I need is three or four security levels I can set, and the ability to put individual sites into one of those levels, as well as set which level is the default.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I agree with Richard on something.
All programming is a craft. Some of it may be crap, and some may be outstanding, but nonetheless, it is craft. Think of it like woodwork. Some pieces are shoddy little boxes nailed togather with scrap. Others are beautiful and extremely strong, with joints so tightly fit that the only way you even know they are there is by the change of the wood-grain.
*Some* programming is art. (Not much in my opinion.)
In addition to being a programmer, I'm a leatherworker. Most of what I do is pure craft, but not necessarily art. Belts, straps, repairs, pouches, etc.
*Sometimes* what I do is art. These are functional pieces with elaborate carving, painting and even occasionally gold leaf and such. They are one-of-a kind pieces that even if another craftsman copied them, would never be quite the same as the original.
That said, the vast majority of code out there is not even up to journeyman standards, let alone master-craftsman level.
The company I work for uses VOIP primarily for internal use. We have offices in various locations, plus individuals travelling. However, the quality of the calls can be a real problem, especially in one of our offices, where the bandwidth is often saturated because of *very* large files being transferred in and out. Quite often during conference calls, we have people end up calling back on cell phones or regular land-lines.
I like VOIP for it's relative convenience and cost. However, in a lot of ways, it's like going back to the days when a pigeon landing on the telephone line outside your house could thoroughly garble the call.
Even so, when you look at the cost of component's businesses buy, $500 isn't that far out there. It's kind of like saying it's not worth it to buy high-end RAID cards because base-level IDE cards are so cheap. Not to mention that first-gen devices of any type tend to be expensive. You don't want to know what I had to pay for 100mbit *hubs* back in the day.
Also keep in mind that these are server-class gigabit cards, which tend to price in the $500 range *anyway*.
Businesses only question the cost if the benefit is questionable. If these cards live up to their promise, the benefit may very well be worth the cost to employers like mine, who have to deal with massive data throughput issues.
Companies that plan on being in business for more than a week generally don't buy $500 crappy desktop systems and use them as servers.
Even for my own personal side business, I spend 3-4 times that much for a server.
I highly doubt they're aiming these cards at the general public. The kind of folks who worry about this kind of performance aren't buying $500 computers, they're buying $5,000 + computers, and trying to tweak every ounce of performance out of them. I'm willing to bet my employer is going to look pretty seriously at these cards for some of our heavy-use systems.
Sometimes you can't "split all your services onto smaller boxen and have a load balancing switch/router". Not everything on the network is a web server.
How many of US have workplaces that provide those kinds of amenities, though?
Probably none any more.
But they used to. Just look back to the late 19th century and early 20th century. Hershey Pennsylvania comes to mind as one of the nicer "company towns". It wasn't at all unusual in that time to have a company build entire towns to support their factories.
This is great--IF you have the leverage to do it. If you're a large (six figures a year in spending and up) customer, you can get the ISP to jump at your command. Likewise, if you're dealing with a small local ISP, you have a significant amount of leverage even if your spending is low.
I'm here to tell you, you don't have to be huge, and you don't have to be dealing with a mom-n-pop either. I lease a half-rack in a colocation facility, grand total of about $450/month. This same colo facility is a major peering point, with plenty of customers spending 5-6 figures/month.
What it took was being loud, persistent, and absolutely willing to pull my equipment if they didn't clean up their act.
As for being "difficult, if not impossible" to move? No, it's not. I've had to do it several times over the years for various reasons. It's a pain in the butt sometimes, but it's not a good reason for continuing to pay money to a spammer-supporting operation.
Actually, MAPS and ORBS are the most notorious in my book. Why? Because they got caught listing folks for reasons not specified in the listing criteria. (personal agendas) For that reason, they are the only two lists I know of to have lost legal challenges. MAPS cleaned up its act, and ORBS was shut down.
As far as I'm concerned, listing all even-numbered IP addresses is valid, so long as it is clearly stated in the list criteria. That way, sysadmins can decide whether the list is practical for them or not.
Love or hate SPEWS, they follow their own listing criteria to the letter. I have seen a few mistakes happen, but I've also seen them get cleared very quickly. Most of the folks claiming they are listed "by mistake", do fit the criteria for listing as stated in the SPEWS guidelines. Usually, because they are getting their service from an ISP that is knowingly harboring spammers. I have no sympathy for this, if you don't want to be lumped in with the spammers, don't support an ISP that allows spamming.
And I'm here to say, it's NOT impossible to get off an RBL. I got caught in a SPEWS listing, because my ISP got lax and allowed a spammer to stay on their network. It took six months for that listing to expand wide enough to cover my addresses. When I found out, I raised royal heck with my ISP, and told them in no uncertain circumstances that I would pull my service if they didn't clean up. They kicked the spammer, the Spamhaus listings were gone the next day, and within a week, the SPEWS listing covering me had been reduced so that I was no longer affected.
Having spammers on your ISP is like having a crack-house on your street. Can you blame folks for not wanting to come visit you?
how did you realize that PR work interested you?
It's not so much that PR work interested me. It's that I felt strongly about the welfare of retired racing Greyhounds, and figured that doing PR work was going to be what did the most good. I'd done some instructor work before, but had never done educational work with the public before.
I'm still not anything close to what you'd call a socialite. I have a few good friends, and I tend to spend most of my time at home. Truth is, I rarely spend time in public *except* when I am doing PR work for Greyhounds. But, when I do, I meet a lot of people, and most of the few friends I have, I have met through these events.
How do I find a hobby that involves socializing ... that isn't "getting drunk at the bar" or "displaying my incredible lack of prowess at sports"?
:) I've been married now for twenty years. But doing charity work involving animal rescue? Man, I meet *tons* of eligible women who all think I'm a great guy because of what I'm doing.
Well, one possibility is working for a charity doing PR-type work. I do a lot of work with Greyhound adoption/rescue groups, promoting adoption.
The trick isn't to look for something to do to meet women. The trick is to find something that interests you, that will force you to interact with people, and develop your interpersonal skills. If you do that, you *will* meet women. And even better, the odds are that you will meet someone with a common interest.
Too bad it's all wasted on me.
It's now possible to write 100% ANSI compliant systems in Oracle
Really? Did Oracle finally change from the bizarre, proprietary syntax they use for outer joins?
You know, it amazes me that anyone thinks this is something new.
Some of the oldest companies I've worked for have HUGE "special pricing" books, that list special prices on specific items for certain customers. Heck, sometimes the pricing was even specific to certain projects.
The only thing new about this is that it can be automated, which is bringing it to the consumer level. Which means that once you reach a certain level of business, you may get special pricing without having to *ask* for it. In the "old days", if you wanted special pricing, you generally had to negotiate for it.
Hehe, reminds me of how I was treated at car dealerships.
:) I got my way though.
The sales folks take one look at me, and send out the most junior salesman to deal with me. Which is cool, since mostly I've found that the junior guys don't have so much of a bias, and treat me quite nicely. At one dealership,the guy was literally on his first week on the job. In 18 months, he sold me three cars. I liked him well enough to go back to the dealer and ask for him by name.
Really funny part was the first time, when it became apparent that not only was I going to buy a car, but it wasn't going to be a stripped-out cheapy, my salesman's "supervisor" tried to take over from him. After ten minutes of listening to this pompous jerk, I looked at the junior salesman and told him that if the senior salesman didn't clear out of the room in ten seconds, I was going to walk out the door. The looks on their faces were priceless, shock and offense on one face, surprise and a bit of a smirk on the other.
the furthest it's gotten is xm included in hyundais
XM was an option in my 2003 Avalanche, so GM has been offering it at *least* that long. Easy enough to spot, just look for the GM vehicles with *two* stubby little antennas on the roof (the other is for OnStar).
I'd be willing to bet that XM has been an option for Ford and Chrysler as well...
What I am after is a reliable email service. One that doesn't treat collateral damage as an acceptable cost of spam, and that doesn't force me to change my email address due to someone else's incompetence (either sending or failing to stop spam).
Then find an ISP that does not tolerate spammers.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no collateral damage when an ISP gets listed. It's not OK to sit on the fence anymore. You are either anti-spam or pro-spam, and an anti-spam person would *never* consider it OK to do business with a company that tolerates spam. Since you *are* willing to do so, by association, you are pro-spam.
I see no problem.
#1 My ISP got careless, and got listed.
#2 The listing expanded to cover my address range. (level 2)
#3 I raised a huge ruckus with my sales rep and the tech staff.
#4 They kicked the spammer, modified their AUP and generally cleaned up.
#5 They posted to NANAB, explaining the actions they took, and their plans on staying clean.
#6 The listing was cleared.
If your ISP is not willing to do what it takes to get rid of their spammers, then they are part of the spam problem. If you are still willing to give them money, then you are part of the spam problem.
No sympathy here.
The KDE team should be happy that they have the huge investment that Apple has given them.
I must be missing something here. What "huge investment" did Apple give to KDE? Throwing a couple of big lumps of code at them that are likely unuseable doesn't seem like much of an "investment" to me.
Apple forked KDE's code, and *said* they would work with KDE to help backport changes. In reality, that help is turning out to be of questionable value. Seems to me KDE helped Apple a lot more than Apple has helped KDE.
All of which is beside the point in a way. The KDE developers are frustrated with Apple, but they seem to understand that Apple has no obligation to them other than to lob huge tarballs at them. What they're pissed about is Apple getting credit for "improving" things for KDE when they are not deserving of the credit. Instead, the KDE developers are getting flak from the community for being slow and lazy because they're not implementing all the "wonderful" things Apple has given them.
I've worked on big projects before. Having someone throw a full set of revised source at you that has fixes/improvements/additions for dozens-hundreds of items is for most intents useless if you have also been developing the same codebase over time. Yeah, you can diff it, but that 20 line change in file foobar.c may represent fixes for 5 different issues out of 100, how do you know which ones? If you can only port for 3 of those 5 issues, what changes do you need to make to those 20 lines to make it just support those 3? Now, multiply that times 200+ source files...
Sounds like the folks at GNU are trying to pick up on Darl's strategy at SCO.
The whole point of OS is to make it a community project. In the case of most big projects, there are so many contributors that compensating all of them fairly would be nearly impossible. So again, the question is asked, who does the money go to?
I've licensed things under GPL before, I did so with the absolute expectation that I would never be monetarily compensated for it, regardless of who used it. I did NOT do it so someone else could profit from it by shaking down end-users.
In my mind, it doesn't matter if Google is profiting by using Linux to provide content on their servers, or if Joe Sixpack is profiting by creating artwork with GIMP on his desktop. They both have every right to do so.
Who said there was no dial tone?
Most states require phone companies to maintain dial tone for 911 on any line connected to them.
So, there is a dial tone, you just can't dial anything except 911. Dialing any other number will get you a nice recording telling you the line is not in service.
But christian tv etc... are BIG money, or at lest BIG audiences.
Right away you have 1.1 billion customers
1.1 Billion might be christian, but I doubt even 10% would pay for premium content christian tv.
Lets face it, the odds-on favorite for the first major user will be the same one that has always pioneered new media. Porn.
Yup, I can see it now:
Aide: Sir, have you looked at the bill on genetic research?
Shrub: Yes, and I vetoed it.
Aide: Um, why sir? It would have cured cancer?
Shrub: It said a side-effect of the research might be immorality, and I won't STAND for that!
Aide: (slaps forehead) No sir, it didn't say immorality, it said immortality.
Shrub: (looks confused)
It is not illegal to be a monopoly.
It is illegal to use your position as a monopoly to stifle competition.
you should pick one which defines a VERY narrow criteria with NO collateral damage.
Your opinion of course. In my opinion (and my paying customers), "collateral damage" is perfectly acceptable if it significantly reduces the spam load.
Time and time again, I see people trying to enforce someone else's terms of service (usually poorly, and without room for any exception), getting blacklisted for non-spam activities (e.g. using a provider that hosts a spammer willingly), etc, etc.
And time and again, I see network providers and ISPs finally cleaning up their act, because their entire IP space has been blocklisted and is hurting them financially. Verio is the best example that comes to mind. A few years ago, they were a spam sewer. Now, they are relatively clean.
These are attacks on the nature of the Internet as a network of peers.
No, it is not. It is a network of peers in action. ISPs that provide services to spammers are not my peers, and therefore their traffic is not permitted to traverse my network. "My network, my rules." If they want to be a peer of mine, they have to keep their users from abusing my network.
Spamhaus does a very good job with XBL of listing just systems that are known zombies, relays, etc.
Yup, they're just one of four lists I use on my servers, not including my own private lists.
SpamAssassin, of course, makes this a moot point by combining and weighting several sources.
Spamassassin is a useful tool, but it is absolutely useless for preventing the theft of my bandwidth by spammers, since it requires that I accept the mail before I can score it. I prefer to not let it in the door to begin with. IMO, Spamassassin should only be needed for the 10% or so of spam that manages to slip through the cracks.
In five years, I've only had one client ask me to not use blocklists for her mail. Two weeks later, she *begged* me to go back to using them.
In a one-week period, one of my two mail servers rejected 19,868 connections due to the sending address being in a block list. That's over 2,800 spam messages per day that did not make it to its intended victim. That's a lot of saved bandwidth, both network, and human.
Proud member #2738 of The Lumber Cartel (There is no Lumber Cartel).
this supposition that the only reason anyone could ever want high performance in their PC is to play games.
Agreed.
I don't play computer games, I don't even *own* any. None of my systems have ever had a game installed on them (yes, this includes solitare). All of my systems are used for work, and non-work related research. Yet, over half of my systems are dual-cpu. I multi-task, a lot. I often have graphics filters chewing away, or CDs burning, while I'm doing something else. On my servers, I want to know that if I need to compile something, archive something or do some other processor-intensive task, that there's enough processor power left to continue with the server's normal tasks.
I read reviews, but they account for less than 20% of the weight I give to my purchasing decisions. The only reviews I will pay close attention to are the *bad* reviews. They're so rare that one has to believe the product must have been truly hideous.
What would really be effective in the long run is site-specific javascript/images/plugins rules.
You mean like Internet Explorer?
I hate to say it, but since switching from IE to FF, this is the only feature I really, really miss. The ability to declare certain sites in various states of restriction.
I don't need to be able to set a zillion rules for each individual site, all I need is three or four security levels I can set, and the ability to put individual sites into one of those levels, as well as set which level is the default.