No, I don't think it was a dictionary attack. If anything, the other guy to reply might be right...it might have been some spammer just thinking "hey, I'll try dell@[a bunch of domains]... some might take". If it were a dictionary attack then I would have started receiving spam at a number of other common words around the same time. I did not.
Why is there no front page Slashdot story about this? Maybe because people like you don't believe it. Maybe it's happening alot. Maybe even to you. But you don't know it or believe it.
You don't believe Dell would ever do something so incredibly stupid? Then, you haven't been following the other recent news stories about Dell, have you? Oh man... naive-ola.
Who is embarrassing whom? I didn't say anything about the nature of those communications other than the Dell folks embarrassed themselves. I didn't say in what way. You are quick to jump to conclusions; including that I am mistaken, when it's very possible that I'm not.
Keep in mind that when people post stuff here, even when they are quick typists and able to post something lengthy...it's only ever just a snapshot of the situation. You have no idea of the details. Somehow I bet you miscommunicate in emails at work, too, and right now there are a good number of fellow co-workers that think you're arrogant. Oh well!
Not only that, but Dell is a source of Spam email. In fact, they are currently my largest source of spam.
Here's how I know. Whenever I begin any "relationship", or line of communication, with any commercial entity (actually, basically anyone other than close friends), I tell them that my email address is "[entity-name]@[my-real-domain].com". I use a combination of Virtualmail and Procmail for this. Then, I *always* communicate with any entity with the virtual email address corresponding to them, and I *never* use it for any other purpose. It's a hassle finding a good MUA/POP3-client that will support "personalities" in a convenient way to manage the "From:" header, but it's doable. Eudora works OK for this (although it has really annoying bugs, in particular with pathetic multithreading code).
So, this helps me to understand who is selling or leaking or giving or trading (etc) my address to spammers.
I've bought things from Dell for maybe 2 years now. About 3 months ago I began getting spam addressed to "dell@...".
Was it a deliberate thing they did to provide customer email addresses to spammers? Was it an employee smuggling customer data out? Was it an outsource employee doing as much? If smuggled out, what other data went, too? Credit card info? Address info? Hmm...
TechSupport and CustomerService were absolutely clueless, but that's not surprising; although it was funny to see how well they can embarrass themselves.
Conveniently, it's a simple matter to redirect all of my "dell@..." email to something like "csd@dell.com", lol. They can keep it!
A $1mil campaign to change it's image with regards to piracy? Who cares?!
Kazaa is the satan of virus and crap. It'll take them $100mil campaign to convince me otherwise.
Like everyone else here, I'm the "tech-support" for my circle of friends and family. Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's a huge bummer. So, I've learned over the years how to draw certain lines. For example, if someone asks me to help fix a computer problem and I learn that they've so much as installed Kazaa... forget it; they're on their own... No need to waste my time where sheer stupidity has preceeded my friendly efforts.
By the time this is all over... I suspect that only me and my dog will not have been subpoenad.
At least this county-clerk-job-creation program should help the economy.
GFS is pretty cool. I wasn't aware of the OpenGFS, so thanks for mentioning that. At Infospace we used Sistina GFS on a project and found the GPL GFS to be a bit painful and unreliable. We later spent the big cash on the non-Free flavor and were happy.
One problem with things that are considered "safe, simple and cheap" is that suddenly people find themselves trusting Homer Simpson to be in charge of it.
Kivera.com is better than Mapquest. Same base data, but you have to understand how the various data cost models work and therefore why one company will (while trying for lower cost data) have better or worse data. Kivera's data selection algorithm gives customers a better mix of excellent results for lower cost. However, last I spoke with them, their mode of operation required their servers in your Data Center with periodic stats collection for billing. MapQuest, on the other hand, does everything via HTTP ASP model.
"I will be moving to Taxcut permanently from now on."
I'm not sure if TaxCut will be my choice permanently, but I am sure that I'll forever look for something other than Intuit.
Call me a jerk about it, or whatever. I just don't see why I ever need to give a business a second chance after they've been a ball-muncher. I just say "good bye" and never look back.
The protection of free speech has nothing to do with this. They are still protected in their right to say what they will... but does that mean that I am obligated to listen???
Free speech does NOT mean forced audience.
It's a bogus thing, and any judge that can't see this wants nothing but 15 minutes of fame.
The RBL needs to be distributed widely. Maybe if those Kazaa dorks could stop pushing worms for a minute they could integrate positive stuff, such as RBL, into their massively distributed P2P application.
Just my opinion. I decided some time ago that if I had to pick one class of people that I would never hire it would be the PhD folks.
Before you flame, I'll go further. In my experience interviewing folks, I've come to the opinion that I'd much rather hire a person without any college degree over someone with a PhD.
People with a Bachelors or Masters are fine and make up the larger range of random levels of qualification.
But, PhDs are entirely academic and lack all real-world experience. I've saved code test "solutions" offered up by PhDs as good humor more than any other.
Hire a PhD as your architect and you're guaranteed that you'll chase an academic goose that might be an interesting problem, but it will never be finished and well never generate revenue. Worse still, instead of borrowing judiciously from various trends, you'll likely be forced too far into the time wasting aspects of Extreme Programming. Or everything will be rewritten in Erlang. Or whatever...such that you waste time and put your workers into niche areas and they can no longer market their skills.
I also wouldn't hire someone that went to UC Berkeley.
I'm 35 now, been doing this a long time. And only recently have I thought much about what I'll be doing around retirement age, and when that will be. I've always kinda dreaded thinking about that and figure I'll worry about it later. But this job market makes one think. Also, a friend recently asked "will you be coding at 65?". Probably not...so, then, what??
It's good you're thinking about this stuff now. Before you become bored and/or bitter.
I mentioned i'm 35. You might find it surprising to know that 35 is plenty old in SW for age descrimination. Another friend tells me his theory is that 35-45 is the worst range. Too old to be a long-hours creative young thinker...but too young to be a wise ripe seasoned guy of valuable business perspective.
I don't agree with that assumption. I really like what I do. A lot. But, I often have a similar problem with procrastination. In my case it's often because I enjoy thinking about the problem and solving it in my mind. Implementation is a long boring part that I sometimes even dread. Documentation is even worse.
I noticed this kind of problem started with me in about 1995. I was a Mac dev at the time and was suddenly finding myself exhausted by Apple's continuous cycle of producing massive huge API's for devs to learn...all just to abandon them shortly thereafter. PowerTalk was one such example. If you want to build a world-class product it's going to need to have all 1 million checklist items finished as features in it. Which means you have to follow all the trends and respond accordingly. Trouble is, each one trend is a huge job.
It used to be that a single person could produce a great work in the computer field as a hobbiest. Commercial software wasn't a whole lot more impressive than shareware. Now days it's tough to go alone. You can do it if your application targets a niche. But, imagine writing a shareware word processor alone today? Who would bother? Why? OSS gives us a way to deal with this by removing the "alone" factor, replacing it with ad-hoc teams, or virtual teams, or even real teams. But, OSS is starting to really piss me off. Maybe people that still support OSS haven't been out of a job for enough months.
So, today, there is just so much to know and learn and follow. It's too easy to start feeling that it's all just a bunch of crap trivia and lose interest entirely. I have long-time (18+ years) dev friends that now sell cars and hope to never touch a computer again. At my last job I'd look out the window at a construction crew and wish I could be shovelling dirt, too. Of course, they looked up at the building and wished they could be out of the rain.
How do you keep up your C++ skills, and your Perl skills, and your Java skills...while learning UML, trying out Struts, contributing to Mozilla, developing on opinion on Rebol, D, or Erlang... offering "tech support" to all your family and friends,... the list goes on.... How do you do this and not begin to be exhausted by it?
Another poster suggested exercise. He might be right. I used to run a *lot* and play inline skate hockey. But, all that ended about 1995. So, for me at least...it's either lack of exercise, or the fact that CS is more complicated chock full of trivia than ever before, or the combination of both.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two bucks that I'll donate towards the effort to port to the Timex Sinclair.
Maybe we can pool together the loose change after buying those beers...
Does anyone other than CmdrFlake-o ever post dupes?
What a maroon.
No, I don't think it was a dictionary attack. If anything, the other guy to reply might be right...it might have been some spammer just thinking "hey, I'll try dell@[a bunch of domains]... some might take". If it were a dictionary attack then I would have started receiving spam at a number of other common words around the same time. I did not.
Why is there no front page Slashdot story about this? Maybe because people like you don't believe it. Maybe it's happening alot. Maybe even to you. But you don't know it or believe it.
You don't believe Dell would ever do something so incredibly stupid? Then, you haven't been following the other recent news stories about Dell, have you? Oh man... naive-ola.
Who is embarrassing whom? I didn't say anything about the nature of those communications other than the Dell folks embarrassed themselves. I didn't say in what way. You are quick to jump to conclusions; including that I am mistaken, when it's very possible that I'm not.
Keep in mind that when people post stuff here, even when they are quick typists and able to post something lengthy...it's only ever just a snapshot of the situation. You have no idea of the details. Somehow I bet you miscommunicate in emails at work, too, and right now there are a good number of fellow co-workers that think you're arrogant. Oh well!
Not only that, but Dell is a source of Spam email. In fact, they are currently my largest source of spam.
Here's how I know. Whenever I begin any "relationship", or line of communication, with any commercial entity (actually, basically anyone other than close friends), I tell them that my email address is "[entity-name]@[my-real-domain].com". I use a combination of Virtualmail and Procmail for this. Then, I *always* communicate with any entity with the virtual email address corresponding to them, and I *never* use it for any other purpose. It's a hassle finding a good MUA/POP3-client that will support "personalities" in a convenient way to manage the "From:" header, but it's doable. Eudora works OK for this (although it has really annoying bugs, in particular with pathetic multithreading code).
So, this helps me to understand who is selling or leaking or giving or trading (etc) my address to spammers.
I've bought things from Dell for maybe 2 years now. About 3 months ago I began getting spam addressed to "dell@...".
Was it a deliberate thing they did to provide customer email addresses to spammers? Was it an employee smuggling customer data out? Was it an outsource employee doing as much? If smuggled out, what other data went, too? Credit card info? Address info? Hmm...
TechSupport and CustomerService were absolutely clueless, but that's not surprising; although it was funny to see how well they can embarrass themselves.
Conveniently, it's a simple matter to redirect all of my "dell@..." email to something like "csd@dell.com", lol. They can keep it!
Cash.
A $1mil campaign to change it's image with regards to piracy? Who cares?!
Kazaa is the satan of virus and crap. It'll take them $100mil campaign to convince me otherwise.
Like everyone else here, I'm the "tech-support" for my circle of friends and family. Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's a huge bummer. So, I've learned over the years how to draw certain lines. For example, if someone asks me to help fix a computer problem and I learn that they've so much as installed Kazaa... forget it; they're on their own... No need to waste my time where sheer stupidity has preceeded my friendly efforts.
By the time this is all over... I suspect that only me and my dog will not have been subpoenad. At least this county-clerk-job-creation program should help the economy.
GFS is pretty cool. I wasn't aware of the OpenGFS, so thanks for mentioning that. At Infospace we used Sistina GFS on a project and found the GPL GFS to be a bit painful and unreliable. We later spent the big cash on the non-Free flavor and were happy.
One problem with things that are considered "safe, simple and cheap" is that suddenly people find themselves trusting Homer Simpson to be in charge of it.
Kivera.com is better than Mapquest. Same base data, but you have to understand how the various data cost models work and therefore why one company will (while trying for lower cost data) have better or worse data. Kivera's data selection algorithm gives customers a better mix of excellent results for lower cost. However, last I spoke with them, their mode of operation required their servers in your Data Center with periodic stats collection for billing. MapQuest, on the other hand, does everything via HTTP ASP model.
"I will be moving to Taxcut permanently from now on."
I'm not sure if TaxCut will be my choice permanently, but I am sure that I'll forever look for something other than Intuit.
Call me a jerk about it, or whatever. I just don't see why I ever need to give a business a second chance after they've been a ball-muncher. I just say "good bye" and never look back.
I agree.
The protection of free speech has nothing to do with this. They are still protected in their right to say what they will... but does that mean that I am obligated to listen???
Free speech does NOT mean forced audience.
It's a bogus thing, and any judge that can't see this wants nothing but 15 minutes of fame.
The RBL needs to be distributed widely. Maybe if those Kazaa dorks could stop pushing worms for a minute they could integrate positive stuff, such as RBL, into their massively distributed P2P application.
So how long before someone develops a cell phone that can be dunked in alcohol or run through the autoclave to sterilize it?
I'm sure that will happen.... shortly after someone invents a ziplock baggy.
Oh great!
All I need is another Kazaa-devil virus crapper. What now? Call Jim Jimson using this VOIP and get Sally Salson instead?
What's a popup in VOIP? What's a virus in VOIP? What's Spyware in VOIP?
We're sure to find out...
Very interesting... look closely at all three pictures again.
You'll notice that only in SCO's version of the picture was there any attempt to digitally remove the man's RedHat.
Hmmmmm......
The disks are specially encoded ~3 inch audio CDs
That must be some very special encoding of audio...which deserves the name "VideoNow"!
I swear that sounded funny a when I started typing...
What? Has George Broussard joined MS? "It'll ship when it's ready!" My were'd I put my DN4ever CD??? It's gotta be around here somewhere...
Oh boy... here we go with another group of things named after Dr. Seuss characters.
If you travelled to Planet Grox, would your space craft be called The Grox Box?
Just my opinion. I decided some time ago that if I had to pick one class of people that I would never hire it would be the PhD folks.
Before you flame, I'll go further. In my experience interviewing folks, I've come to the opinion that I'd much rather hire a person without any college degree over someone with a PhD.
People with a Bachelors or Masters are fine and make up the larger range of random levels of qualification.
But, PhDs are entirely academic and lack all real-world experience. I've saved code test "solutions" offered up by PhDs as good humor more than any other.
Hire a PhD as your architect and you're guaranteed that you'll chase an academic goose that might be an interesting problem, but it will never be finished and well never generate revenue. Worse still, instead of borrowing judiciously from various trends, you'll likely be forced too far into the time wasting aspects of Extreme Programming. Or everything will be rewritten in Erlang. Or whatever...such that you waste time and put your workers into niche areas and they can no longer market their skills.
I also wouldn't hire someone that went to UC Berkeley.
Luckily it's only a microorganism. At first glance I thought scientists might have discovered a real-life rust monster.
Well, maybe if they stand on each other's shoulders...
Now, the only thing in my life not involving the esteemed XML is my electric toilet!
I'll keep you posted...
we'll all burn up because of global warming.
or, we'll have nothing to eat because of mass extinctions of edible species.
or, we won't be able to care for our young because of carpel tunnel
or, some other assortment of fantasy crap.
You are wise beyond your years.
I'm 35 now, been doing this a long time. And only recently have I thought much about what I'll be doing around retirement age, and when that will be. I've always kinda dreaded thinking about that and figure I'll worry about it later. But this job market makes one think. Also, a friend recently asked "will you be coding at 65?". Probably not...so, then, what??
It's good you're thinking about this stuff now. Before you become bored and/or bitter.
I mentioned i'm 35. You might find it surprising to know that 35 is plenty old in SW for age descrimination. Another friend tells me his theory is that 35-45 is the worst range. Too old to be a long-hours creative young thinker...but too young to be a wise ripe seasoned guy of valuable business perspective.
I don't agree with that assumption. I really like what I do. A lot. But, I often have a similar problem with procrastination. In my case it's often because I enjoy thinking about the problem and solving it in my mind. Implementation is a long boring part that I sometimes even dread. Documentation is even worse.
... the list goes on.... How do you do this and not begin to be exhausted by it?
I noticed this kind of problem started with me in about 1995. I was a Mac dev at the time and was suddenly finding myself exhausted by Apple's continuous cycle of producing massive huge API's for devs to learn...all just to abandon them shortly thereafter. PowerTalk was one such example. If you want to build a world-class product it's going to need to have all 1 million checklist items finished as features in it. Which means you have to follow all the trends and respond accordingly. Trouble is, each one trend is a huge job.
It used to be that a single person could produce a great work in the computer field as a hobbiest. Commercial software wasn't a whole lot more impressive than shareware. Now days it's tough to go alone. You can do it if your application targets a niche. But, imagine writing a shareware word processor alone today? Who would bother? Why? OSS gives us a way to deal with this by removing the "alone" factor, replacing it with ad-hoc teams, or virtual teams, or even real teams. But, OSS is starting to really piss me off. Maybe people that still support OSS haven't been out of a job for enough months.
So, today, there is just so much to know and learn and follow. It's too easy to start feeling that it's all just a bunch of crap trivia and lose interest entirely. I have long-time (18+ years) dev friends that now sell cars and hope to never touch a computer again. At my last job I'd look out the window at a construction crew and wish I could be shovelling dirt, too. Of course, they looked up at the building and wished they could be out of the rain.
How do you keep up your C++ skills, and your Perl skills, and your Java skills...while learning UML, trying out Struts, contributing to Mozilla, developing on opinion on Rebol, D, or Erlang... offering "tech support" to all your family and friends,
Another poster suggested exercise. He might be right. I used to run a *lot* and play inline skate hockey. But, all that ended about 1995. So, for me at least...it's either lack of exercise, or the fact that CS is more complicated chock full of trivia than ever before, or the combination of both.