Keep your life simple. Use email as an IQ test. If they can't get your email address correct or you can't provide links on web pages, then there shouldn't be any email communication between you and them.
Put it into perspective: Would you like to have a dummy phone number to catch all the incorrectly dialed phone numbers in your area code and send them to your home 24 x 7? You're basically asking for the same thing only with email.
Back in the 1970's there was a kid in my junior high school who hacked the schools computer to see what he could do in a few hours.
As soon as he was done, he went to the office and turned over all his information on how he did it and what he was able to access.
You know what they did? They expelled him on the spot. And you think it's going to be a kinder more reasonable world 30 years later in a more socialistic country than here? Say what you will about the University, but these kids are street-stupid for even attempting something like this without some insider acknowledgement before hand.
Sorry, but I have to agree with him. DVD's are too delicate to survive for any period of time. Especially when you consider Rentals.
Every time I rent a DVD I have to visually inspect it for damage and typically have to clean it before it will work. Compare that with the VHS tapes that you could toss at the dog and still play.
DVD disks are for shit. People don't know how to handle them and one stupid mistake renders the disk useless. I've already watched a lot of Music CD's die because they were mishandled or dropped and again, these don't compare well to the audio tapes of yester-decade.
They sell us stuff that's supposed to sound better, but you can't tell over the traffic noise anyways. Now you have a disk you drop on the floor and it's dead plastic from that point forward. But you can't record it only an audio tape, backup CD, MP3 file to play in the harsher environments. So you have a bunch of music CD's you get to stress about.
DVD's and CD's are the same media. Same problems will prevail. Keep an eye on vehicles. When you get the DVD player in the car, you will have to worry about damaging those Barney and Wiggles DVD's in the back seat. And you won't be able to record those onto any back-up media for use in these harsher environments either.
OK, someone asked me to send them the link on this CERT advisory. It's option Four of Four on one of their many MSIE/LookOUT exploit advisories.
Seriously, while I'll be one of the first to scream out in a room full of people that Microsoft sucks canal water I'm having a hard time finding any documented evidence that I can wave in someone's face showing them that it's a PoS.
This is the wrong approach to a feul efficient hybrid design.
You are supposed to drive off the electric motor and batteries all of the time and utilize a gasoline engine only as a charger to the electrical system. In the city you would rarely run the gasoline engine until the batteries dropped below a threshold (30%?) and it would run continuously at a fixed RPM until the batteries reached an upper threshold (70%?). On the highway, the power consumption would be equal to that of the gasoline engine generation and so the engine would run continuously, but at a fixed RPM. You'll also find that the Prius and Insight do not have external charging plugs -- you cant charge your car while sitting in the garage.
The notion of always running at a fixed RPM would allow you vehicle manufacturers to tune the engines to run at only that speed and optimize the heck out of it for efficiency.
Of course, this would also mean that a charging engine would probably run on it's own for several minutes after you turned off the car, just like your radiator fans do today. But this might be avoided easily enough with a kill switch on the ignition.
But the current designs of switching power plants as you drive means that you are running your gasoline at a variety of RPM speeds and therefore cannot be as efficient as possible. I seem to recall that Ford tried something along these lines with a Ford Taurus back in the 1980's or something like that and they were able to hit 200 MPG by limiting the gasoline engine to only running as an auxilary battery charger rather than a primary power plant for the vehicle.
I think this would be a much simpler design to utilize as well. You'll find some electric vehicle manufacturers are already building out poney carts that attach to the car and provide additional driving range through the use of an external gas powered electric generator.
Of course, if you really want to go with high efficiency, then diesel power cannot be beat if you are designing to a single rate of speed for the engine
First impression is, "What's the point?" I mean, it's not going to do anything to make my desktop more efficient or effective. If I want eye-candy I'll change my wallpaper.
But the one thing that I think would be useful would be able to shrink a window, not into a small box with everything scroll-barred up the whazoo, but make it 10% or 30% original size with everything squished accordingly. It provides a complete picture of the application window, but with a great reduction of details. But the details could be sufficient to be useful. For example, with experience you can recognize patterns in log text from a distance.
I don't believe that is the direction we will be moving in. I believe you will find clients with much less CPU capabilities. A thin-client with a good graphics chipset can anything on a fast ethernet connection short of full-screen video and gaming.
Combine this with the notion that if everything is web-centric then there's even less problems encountered when you attempt to upgrade your computer from one OS to another. Right now, migration through Windows to Windows typically means that a lot of your personal information is lost or unsuitable for the new OS. Especially if you're not following current trends. How much do you keep if you migrate from Windows 95 to Windows XP?
I think that most of the people who do these kind of "offshore ventures" are not doing it just for the money. There are a lot of other valuable things you can receive from a job besides money.
Statistically speaking, I think you have a better chance of getting killed in America through one of our favorites (heart disease, automobile, gunshot) then you do getting beheaded in the Middle East. However, if you are killed in the Middle East you will probably enable your loved ones a brighter future through public sympathy donations and potential gigs on television.
But the people who do this kind of work are doing it because they are trying to make a difference in the world and they believe that they are on the side of GOOD.
If you do this, do it not because of your wallet, but because of your conscience. Think who you might become as the result of this experience.
My first post instinct was to ask why anyone would bother trying to get anything that's buggy windows to run on anything Linux. But then I read the second post.. and the third... and so on...
There is a lot of software out there that doesn't run on linux natively that only runs on windows.
But you have to keep in mind why Microsoft killed Netscape and tried to kill Java. The desktop application environment is being replaced by the webtop application environment and there isn't anything they can do about it.
So, if there is some project/application that you want to run under Linux that only runs in Windows, don't rewrite it first to run under Linux as in Gnome or KDE, but write it to run under Apache plus whatever you need. It might be more appropriate to run it under web pages.
Good examples of these are anything to do with corporate financials, email, or planning/scheduling. Bad examples of this are going to be anything that isn't really shared, like Instant Messages, IRC, or other personal user specific applications.
How many people realized that the US ISP actually came back with some questions and confirmation before taking action?
Regardless of all the crummy things that are said about the US, and I'm not exactly a zealot here, it should be of significance that this little test did bear one thing out.
The US still has some attempt at considering your right to free speech somewhere in their bones. All this despite our rapidly building demonstrations on the international circuit of Human Rights Violations through censorship and McCarthyism tactics of condemnation by the government.
I'm actually encouraged that there is still some hope for Free Speech in the world
I love it because it allows me to save the RAM for actually doing work. When I had to max out the RAM on my notebook, just to get KDE loaded without swapping, I wondered if this KDE development was going in the right direction.
Who cares if you're cute when you weigh in at 400 pounds?
I reconfigured the default to windowmaker and I routinely have >400MB of RAM for doing other things, like OpenOffice or Mozilla. And these rarely run out of memory!
32W per machine. Measured with a 'kill-a-watt' meter that reads the actual power consumption in real time and the KWh over time. Peak Power was 40W during boot.
It would have been nicer if the article was reasonably serious about the topic. I think that much of his sarcasm was exactly the point that needed to be made. We fucked the planet pretty good and there's no correct way to get out of this situation. But nuclear energy may be the best alternative that we have available today. But this guy really came off sounding like a dick.
When you consider that the typical nuclear power plant of the 1950's design is rather dangerous, and there are better alternatives available, it would make more sense. For example: Nuclear material doesn't need to be in such high purity that exposure means near instant death. Many years ago there were proposals to create a cell (like an oversized scuba tank) that was filled with ceramic balls. Each ball had a concentration of material sufficient to generate a lot of heat. But overall, the cell didn't release heat/radiation sufficient to destroy itself.
Bury these into the ground (about 100-200 feet or better) and hook up pipes to them. Eventually the material decays to a point it where it will not longer create steam and you pull the pipes and walk away. It will take 10,000 years or better before these cylinders are exposed to the surface and can easily be made, by design, to survive 10,000 years underground.
I have two of the EPIA 533 fanless machines. One is my mail/web server for the internet, the other is my NFS/web server for my home use. These things are awesome at only a measured 32W power consumption with everything running (hard drive included). This 32W is using old 3.5 inch hard drives and a case fan. I expect to have done better if I went with the 2.5 inch lower power hard drives and external power supply.
But what I find really amazing about all of this is that I got these little low power boxes and they are doing as much as many people dedicate on a 140W+ machine. There's really no need for that. If you find 533MHz too slow, then move up to a higher machine. But I was going for the silent/fanless models.
I can't claim to have the fastest set up in the world, but for 99.9% of you with a home mail/web server, you really don't need to run it on that big of a box. And for 32W of power, it makes for a cool summer.
In time, I think people will realize that the benefit of having a 3.2GHz mail server isn't that great. Sure, there might be exceptions and I might not survive a slashdot effect, but not many of us will.
If I ask for a data element that is of the form "123.234.345.567" in response to a DNS lookup, and you go to XML, the response will be along the lines of:
<IP:123.234.345.456> or <IP Address>123.234.345.456</IP Address>
Both of which require more data to be transmitted. If you consider the HTML code generated by MSFT applications, this will probably turn into a 1K data transmittal.
It's the same as asking for someone's phone number and they have two responses:
"My telephone number is 1-123-555-4567" or
"1235554567"
You've already admitted the problem when you say wouldn't add much to it. You are looking at a HUGE resource load application and anything that's not much when multiplied by the number of DNS queiries going on every day turns into a much.
Don't forget to consider the added network overhead of the additional bits in additon to the added overhead of not being able to use UDP and forced to use TCP instead. Now you've compounded the problem even further.
How big does not much have to be before we are all forced to upgrade to gigabit ethernet from our current PPP connections?
It's simple really. DNS is one of the highest areas of traffic and hits out there. Every web page generates multiple DNS hits and so does email and P2P and everything else.
XML, is a bunch of text that wraps around a bunch of data and is called meta data. It's not the data you need, but data about the data you need. In DNS, you already know what you need, so the "meta" is silly.
Point being, you add a lot of extra characters to the data transmissions. UDP won't support it anymore so we have to to with TCP, which has even more overhead being added to the process.
Compound this with MSFT's tendency to send shitloads of data across every network they touch just because they can, and you've DDOSed the Internet.
XML may have a place, but DNS sure as hell isn't it.
How will this effect dynamic DNS users who send email? I'm not talking about some rogue spammer, but the people who have legitimate servers running on real IP addresses with domain names that are managed by the likes of dyndns.org
In the past, these DHCP hosted addresses have been under a lot of grief with people erroneously RBLing them simply because they are DHCP (like it ever really expires!!!) managed IP addresses.
Much of the workaround for this has been to RELAY all the email up to the ISP for delivery from a non DHCP hosted IP address. But some people block these because they show evidence of being relayed by anyone and hence must be evil.
So what will have to do in order to get my mail server considered acceptable for sending email under this SPF/CallerID scheme?
I'm also really curious to see how this can be a good thing at the same time that it involved Microsoft, but I'm trying to keep an open mind on this one...
I read throught this briefly and have one question. What do they mean by 2821 and 2822 checking? Validating the email against RFC's?
From the sounds of the article, that alone would accomodate most of the trapping that they need to do. If that's true, then why don't we just reconfigure the mail servers to be fully RFC compliant in their expectations and if you're email isn't going to be fully RFC compliant then you get bounced?
Why don't we just have the mail senders do what they are expected to do for starters?
It doesn't claim that the source of spam is 71% China. It claims that the indicated web server in the spam is located in China 71% of the time.
You can blacklist the entire Asian world and you won't guarantee any reduction in spam itself.
Challenge - Response is the most fucked up solution I've ever seen. I tried and it got spammed heavily for using it. It doesn't work. It's a resource pig and it pisses a lot of people off.
The problem isn't Asia or anyone else. The problem is that SPAM makes people money to the tune of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR. There is no way you will ever turn the tide of that financial force with an RBL or a Challenge-Response solution. It will take more than that.
Unfortunately it will probably cost all of us a lot of money and a lot of freedoms. I hope I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep your life simple. Use email as an IQ test. If they can't get your email address correct or you can't provide links on web pages, then there shouldn't be any email communication between you and them.
Put it into perspective: Would you like to have a dummy phone number to catch all the incorrectly dialed phone numbers in your area code and send them to your home 24 x 7? You're basically asking for the same thing only with email.
Back in the 1970's there was a kid in my junior high school who hacked the schools computer to see what he could do in a few hours.
As soon as he was done, he went to the office and turned over all his information on how he did it and what he was able to access.
You know what they did? They expelled him on the spot. And you think it's going to be a kinder more reasonable world 30 years later in a more socialistic country than here? Say what you will about the University, but these kids are street-stupid for even attempting something like this without some insider acknowledgement before hand.
Sorry, but I have to agree with him. DVD's are too delicate to survive for any period of time. Especially when you consider Rentals.
Every time I rent a DVD I have to visually inspect it for damage and typically have to clean it before it will work. Compare that with the VHS tapes that you could toss at the dog and still play.
DVD disks are for shit. People don't know how to handle them and one stupid mistake renders the disk useless. I've already watched a lot of Music CD's die because they were mishandled or dropped and again, these don't compare well to the audio tapes of yester-decade.
They sell us stuff that's supposed to sound better, but you can't tell over the traffic noise anyways. Now you have a disk you drop on the floor and it's dead plastic from that point forward. But you can't record it only an audio tape, backup CD, MP3 file to play in the harsher environments. So you have a bunch of music CD's you get to stress about.
DVD's and CD's are the same media. Same problems will prevail. Keep an eye on vehicles. When you get the DVD player in the car, you will have to worry about damaging those Barney and Wiggles DVD's in the back seat. And you won't be able to record those onto any back-up media for use in these harsher environments either.
Get a book. They don't crash.
Why not? It would make it pretty secure wouldn't it?
Next you know they'll be suggesting you put your Windows PC into a concrete sarcophogus!
OK, someone asked me to send them the link on this CERT advisory. It's option Four of Four on one of their many MSIE/LookOUT exploit advisories.
Seriously, while I'll be one of the first to scream out in a room full of people that Microsoft sucks canal water I'm having a hard time finding any documented evidence that I can wave in someone's face showing them that it's a PoS.
2004: Over 1 Billions pages searched...
2006: Over 100 Trillions pages searched...
2007: DuoDectillions Searched...
This is the wrong approach to a feul efficient hybrid design.
You are supposed to drive off the electric motor and batteries all of the time and utilize a gasoline engine only as a charger to the electrical system. In the city you would rarely run the gasoline engine until the batteries dropped below a threshold (30%?) and it would run continuously at a fixed RPM until the batteries reached an upper threshold (70%?). On the highway, the power consumption would be equal to that of the gasoline engine generation and so the engine would run continuously, but at a fixed RPM. You'll also find that the Prius and Insight do not have external charging plugs -- you cant charge your car while sitting in the garage.
The notion of always running at a fixed RPM would allow you vehicle manufacturers to tune the engines to run at only that speed and optimize the heck out of it for efficiency.
Of course, this would also mean that a charging engine would probably run on it's own for several minutes after you turned off the car, just like your radiator fans do today. But this might be avoided easily enough with a kill switch on the ignition.
But the current designs of switching power plants as you drive means that you are running your gasoline at a variety of RPM speeds and therefore cannot be as efficient as possible. I seem to recall that Ford tried something along these lines with a Ford Taurus back in the 1980's or something like that and they were able to hit 200 MPG by limiting the gasoline engine to only running as an auxilary battery charger rather than a primary power plant for the vehicle.
I think this would be a much simpler design to utilize as well. You'll find some electric vehicle manufacturers are already building out poney carts that attach to the car and provide additional driving range through the use of an external gas powered electric generator.
Of course, if you really want to go with high efficiency, then diesel power cannot be beat if you are designing to a single rate of speed for the engine
First impression is, "What's the point?" I mean, it's not going to do anything to make my desktop more efficient or effective. If I want eye-candy I'll change my wallpaper.
But the one thing that I think would be useful would be able to shrink a window, not into a small box with everything scroll-barred up the whazoo, but make it 10% or 30% original size with everything squished accordingly. It provides a complete picture of the application window, but with a great reduction of details. But the details could be sufficient to be useful. For example, with experience you can recognize patterns in log text from a distance.
Military forces working over the civilians they are intended to protect. Sounds like the Gestapo, KGB, and many others.
This is bad.
Historically Bad.
I don't believe that is the direction we will be moving in. I believe you will find clients with much less CPU capabilities. A thin-client with a good graphics chipset can anything on a fast ethernet connection short of full-screen video and gaming.
Combine this with the notion that if everything is web-centric then there's even less problems encountered when you attempt to upgrade your computer from one OS to another. Right now, migration through Windows to Windows typically means that a lot of your personal information is lost or unsuitable for the new OS. Especially if you're not following current trends. How much do you keep if you migrate from Windows 95 to Windows XP?
I think that most of the people who do these kind of "offshore ventures" are not doing it just for the money. There are a lot of other valuable things you can receive from a job besides money.
Statistically speaking, I think you have a better chance of getting killed in America through one of our favorites (heart disease, automobile, gunshot) then you do getting beheaded in the Middle East. However, if you are killed in the Middle East you will probably enable your loved ones a brighter future through public sympathy donations and potential gigs on television.
But the people who do this kind of work are doing it because they are trying to make a difference in the world and they believe that they are on the side of GOOD.
If you do this, do it not because of your wallet, but because of your conscience. Think who you might become as the result of this experience.
My first post instinct was to ask why anyone would bother trying to get anything that's buggy windows to run on anything Linux. But then I read the second post.. and the third... and so on...
There is a lot of software out there that doesn't run on linux natively that only runs on windows.
But you have to keep in mind why Microsoft killed Netscape and tried to kill Java. The desktop application environment is being replaced by the webtop application environment and there isn't anything they can do about it.
So, if there is some project/application that you want to run under Linux that only runs in Windows, don't rewrite it first to run under Linux as in Gnome or KDE, but write it to run under Apache plus whatever you need. It might be more appropriate to run it under web pages.
Good examples of these are anything to do with corporate financials, email, or planning/scheduling. Bad examples of this are going to be anything that isn't really shared, like Instant Messages, IRC, or other personal user specific applications.
How many people realized that the US ISP actually came back with some questions and confirmation before taking action?
Regardless of all the crummy things that are said about the US, and I'm not exactly a zealot here, it should be of significance that this little test did bear one thing out.
The US still has some attempt at considering your right to free speech somewhere in their bones. All this despite our rapidly building demonstrations on the international circuit of Human Rights Violations through censorship and McCarthyism tactics of condemnation by the government.
I'm actually encouraged that there is still some hope for Free Speech in the world
ditto
I love it because it allows me to save the RAM for actually doing work. When I had to max out the RAM on my notebook, just to get KDE loaded without swapping, I wondered if this KDE development was going in the right direction.
Who cares if you're cute when you weigh in at 400 pounds?
I reconfigured the default to windowmaker and I routinely have >400MB of RAM for doing other things, like OpenOffice or Mozilla. And these rarely run out of memory!
grep -i todo foobar.c
bogofilter was released as follows: from their web page
Imagine how much effort the companies will put into this free hardware to make sure that it's of any Quality.
I see a big business in data backup and fried hard drive recovery in the future.
I would rather have to pay for the hardware and get free software. At least that way I can choose between cheap, loud, and hot versus cool and quiet.
32W per machine. Measured with a 'kill-a-watt' meter that reads the actual power consumption in real time and the KWh over time. Peak Power was 40W during boot.
It would have been nicer if the article was reasonably serious about the topic. I think that much of his sarcasm was exactly the point that needed to be made. We fucked the planet pretty good and there's no correct way to get out of this situation. But nuclear energy may be the best alternative that we have available today. But this guy really came off sounding like a dick.
When you consider that the typical nuclear power plant of the 1950's design is rather dangerous, and there are better alternatives available, it would make more sense. For example: Nuclear material doesn't need to be in such high purity that exposure means near instant death. Many years ago there were proposals to create a cell (like an oversized scuba tank) that was filled with ceramic balls. Each ball had a concentration of material sufficient to generate a lot of heat. But overall, the cell didn't release heat/radiation sufficient to destroy itself.
Bury these into the ground (about 100-200 feet or better) and hook up pipes to them. Eventually the material decays to a point it where it will not longer create steam and you pull the pipes and walk away. It will take 10,000 years or better before these cylinders are exposed to the surface and can easily be made, by design, to survive 10,000 years underground.
Nuclear Energy isn't rocket science anymore.
I have two of the EPIA 533 fanless machines. One is my mail/web server for the internet, the other is my NFS/web server for my home use. These things are awesome at only a measured 32W power consumption with everything running (hard drive included). This 32W is using old 3.5 inch hard drives and a case fan. I expect to have done better if I went with the 2.5 inch lower power hard drives and external power supply.
But what I find really amazing about all of this is that I got these little low power boxes and they are doing as much as many people dedicate on a 140W+ machine. There's really no need for that. If you find 533MHz too slow, then move up to a higher machine. But I was going for the silent/fanless models.
I can't claim to have the fastest set up in the world, but for 99.9% of you with a home mail/web server, you really don't need to run it on that big of a box. And for 32W of power, it makes for a cool summer.
In time, I think people will realize that the benefit of having a 3.2GHz mail server isn't that great. Sure, there might be exceptions and I might not survive a slashdot effect, but not many of us will.
Benchmarks aren't required. Just think about it.
If I ask for a data element that is of the form "123.234.345.567" in response to a DNS lookup, and you go to XML, the response will be along the lines of:
<IP:123.234.345.456> or <IP Address>123.234.345.456</IP Address>
Both of which require more data to be transmitted. If you consider the HTML code generated by MSFT applications, this will probably turn into a 1K data transmittal.
It's the same as asking for someone's phone number and they have two responses:
"My telephone number is 1-123-555-4567"
or
"1235554567"
You've already admitted the problem when you say wouldn't add much to it. You are looking at a HUGE resource load application and anything that's not much when multiplied by the number of DNS queiries going on every day turns into a much.
Don't forget to consider the added network overhead of the additional bits in additon to the added overhead of not being able to use UDP and forced to use TCP instead. Now you've compounded the problem even further.
How big does not much have to be before we are all forced to upgrade to gigabit ethernet from our current PPP connections?
It's simple really. DNS is one of the highest areas of traffic and hits out there. Every web page generates multiple DNS hits and so does email and P2P and everything else.
XML, is a bunch of text that wraps around a bunch of data and is called meta data. It's not the data you need, but data about the data you need. In DNS, you already know what you need, so the "meta" is silly.
Point being, you add a lot of extra characters to the data transmissions. UDP won't support it anymore so we have to to with TCP, which has even more overhead being added to the process.
Compound this with MSFT's tendency to send shitloads of data across every network they touch just because they can, and you've DDOSed the Internet.
XML may have a place, but DNS sure as hell isn't it.
How will this effect dynamic DNS users who send email? I'm not talking about some rogue spammer, but the people who have legitimate servers running on real IP addresses with domain names that are managed by the likes of dyndns.org
In the past, these DHCP hosted addresses have been under a lot of grief with people erroneously RBLing them simply because they are DHCP (like it ever really expires!!!) managed IP addresses.
Much of the workaround for this has been to RELAY all the email up to the ISP for delivery from a non DHCP hosted IP address. But some people block these because they show evidence of being relayed by anyone and hence must be evil.
So what will have to do in order to get my mail server considered acceptable for sending email under this SPF/CallerID scheme?
I'm also really curious to see how this can be a good thing at the same time that it involved Microsoft, but I'm trying to keep an open mind on this one...
I read throught this briefly and have one question. What do they mean by 2821 and 2822 checking? Validating the email against RFC's?
From the sounds of the article, that alone would accomodate most of the trapping that they need to do. If that's true, then why don't we just reconfigure the mail servers to be fully RFC compliant in their expectations and if you're email isn't going to be fully RFC compliant then you get bounced?
Why don't we just have the mail senders do what they are expected to do for starters?
You didn't read the article did you?
It doesn't claim that the source of spam is 71% China. It claims that the indicated web server in the spam is located in China 71% of the time.
You can blacklist the entire Asian world and you won't guarantee any reduction in spam itself.
Challenge - Response is the most fucked up solution I've ever seen. I tried and it got spammed heavily for using it. It doesn't work. It's a resource pig and it pisses a lot of people off.
The problem isn't Asia or anyone else. The problem is that SPAM makes people money to the tune of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR. There is no way you will ever turn the tide of that financial force with an RBL or a Challenge-Response solution. It will take more than that.
Unfortunately it will probably cost all of us a lot of money and a lot of freedoms. I hope I'm wrong.