The naming convention at one of my previous jobs was movie directors, the "client" for the server could choose their favourite director as the server name. The problem? In one case the client's favourite director was Roman Polanski. In these pre-Wikipedia days it was much harder to check names for possible controversies, and the server was duly named. It was only some time after that it was realised that Mr Polanski's alleged sexual activities made it.. difficult.
These days I work in an organisation with thousands of machines and hundreds of servers. We use a boring format of two-digit-ISO-code + machine-type + number + role, so LVS006ISA is a Latvian ISA server. We also use "D"esktop and "L"aptop designators (e.g. NLD0123). It's a helluva lot easier. And much more difficult to name a server after an alleged kiddyfiddler.
Really, the OS is the most important part - the Pre is just a platform to run webOS.. and that looks *really* good, at least on paper. It isn't just eye candy, there's a huge amount of innovation in the interface and the way it manages personal information.
If this had been around 12 months ago then perhaps webOS and the Pre would have been a contender, but since then we've seen Android and MS are polishing up their new versions of Windows for this year.
I guess the question is.. would I buy one? The answer is "no". But only because I prefer the 800 pixel wide display of the Nokia E90. I wouldn't refuse one if someone gave one to me though;)
I don't know the content of these videos, but yeah.. a DMCA notice is a sworn statement. If the information is false then potentially it could be regarded as perjury.
Yes, the beginning of the alphabet gets more spam.. and it's really very simple to explain why.
Spammers work from lists of email addresses, and those email addresses are typically sorted by domain and then alphabetically. So, the receiving domain gets a rush of emails for users with addresses beginning with A, B, C etc. But usually (at some point) many mail systems will detect that there is a spam attack in progress and they will block subsequent messages of the same format or from the attacking IP address (depending on the spam filtering setup in place).
So, but simply the people beginning with "A" get nice new spam that the adaptive filters don't detect. By the time it gets to "Z" a good filter will automatically block the attack.
What's sad is that I watch spam attacks often enough to know this.
It's not about tea - but as the New Scientist says, the exact equivalent to Lyons is something like Pizza hut. Lyons were the absolute masters of logistics in their time - they ran a huge network of outlets to a consistent quality with a very large turnover. So, they were really an ideal company to experiment with this new technology.
Lyon's logistical expertise was such that during the Second World War they ran one of the largest bomb making factories in the world, just a couple of miles from where I live. One in seven bombs dropped on Germany came from the Lyons factory at Elstow.
"..and will lose the rumored MinWin kernel."
So in other words, the only thing really going for Windows 7 has been dropped. I feel that many businesses were holding out for Windows 7 to fix all the problems that Vista introduced.. it looks likely that this is not the case. If this shift is confirmed, then I really suspect that a lot of Microsoft houses will begin to dump the platform altogether.
I've known Chet (in an online sense) for years now. Donotreply.com is a stroke of genius, but I suspect the sheer volume of crud keeps it from being updated more. If you want to have a look at another much more disturbing property of Chet's, check out Portal of Evil. Classy!
Wikipedians say that advertising will compromise their impartiality. But while I appreciate their efforts to keep the content to an NPOV (neutral point of view), they do seem to be missing the point.
The obvious way to monetise Wikipedia is to use Google AdSense or a similar technology. In the case of AdSense, Google chooses that ads and not the editor, so in effect the ads are kept at arms length. And if, having read the encyclopedia article, a visitor chooses to click on an ad, then at least they should have a greater understanding of the product.
I run a site with AdSense, but I never compromise the content to encourage click throughs. People either click, or they don't Enough people click to make it worthwhile, and it certainly covers costs.
FAST used to own AlltheWeb until they sold it in 2003. Up until that point, AlltheWeb was the only search engine that I'd seen that could rival Google for the quality of search results. Eventually, it ended up in the hands of Yahoo! who killed the engine off (as they did with AltaVista).
What made AlltheWeb work was FAST's underlying search technology. What's surprising is that it has taken so long for someone to realise that FAST is more valuable that the AlltheWeb website was. So, if MS can ever get their search results to the quality that AlltheWeb used to provide, then this could well be a smart move. After all, doing it in-house has been pretty unsuccessful.
To paraphrase a certain 90's scifi series "SP1 was Vista's last, best hope for sales. It failed. But in the year of OS X Leopard it became something greater, Apple's last, best hope for victory".
Of course, Microsoft want to force everyone have to buy Vista after June 2008, so Moore's law has got to get a shift on to make sure that PCs are going to be fast enough to actually make it usable. Or perhaps it will encourage Microsoft to extend XP's availability. Or perhaps's it's time to stock up XP licenses if you need to run Windows.
One good reason to remove the "I'm feeling lucky" feature would be Googlewhack Spam. Spammers create a page with a unique phrase on it, and then send out spam with the special "I'm feeling lucky" URL, e.g. the URL http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=coelacanth+sharpener&btnG=Search&btnI= actually takes you to Dave Gorman. Spammers send out emails with the Google URL in which actually redirects to the spammer site - this helps to foil spam filters and also causes problems for spam reporting tools which misidentify the spammer as Google.
It can be pretty easy to foil, as this post on Shoemoney demonstrates.
And yes, you too can have fun in/. with Google queries for goatse.cx, tubgirl and 2girls1cup.
Seriously, I wrote about exactly the same thing here a month ago, although I could identify Doubleclick as the network running the ads. It's quite amusing to see that the fake anti-spyware app claims that you have Windows malware on your Linux box.
Still, griping aside it's good to see this hijack getting a higher profile. However, I had a note from someone who had come across a hijacked banner on Yahoo! just today, so it's clear that the banners are still out there.
Banner hijacks for this type of rich media ad are not a new problem. It's not a problem you generally see with good old fashioned GIF and JPG banners, or plain text ads.
I also started at Birmingham in 1986 and went to the same Computer Club meeting, although we never engineered anything more than software.
Multics was a seriously cool system, but it was absolutely crippled by its reliance on a very limited hardware base, i.e. the Honeywell DPS-8 (by 1986). Incidentally, the DPS-8 processor also found its way into mainframes using the godawful GCOS8 OS.
Multics in some ways very much the antithesis of Unix - when Unix was developed they chose to make it hardware independent and single-processor, for example. In other ways it was very like Unix, but in some ways it's quite unlike most operating systems in that.. well, it sounds strange.. but it's too *modern*. Multicians will understand, but suffice it to say that the underlying architecture has many features that I hope will one day make it to my desktop.
Funny, those were my thoughts too.. not much at the IMDB apart from JMS writing the script.
*That*, incidentally, is surely going to be one hell of an expensive film. Most zombie movies are pretty cheap to make, but World War Z is basically an entire future history made up of awesomely expensive-to-make sequences. I won't give too much away in case there are some/.ers who haven't read the book!
I'll start off by saying that I work with quite a lot of Finns and they're a great bunch of people who I have a great respect for.
However, Finland has a unique relationship with Nazism that Americans and other Europeans don't really know much about. The history of Finland during the Second World War is quite different from any other country. To a certain extent, the Nazis could be argued as the saviours of Finland, because historically Finland's greatest struggle has always been with Russia.. and to that extent, Germany was a natural ally during WW2.
The dichotomy is that the Finns are a democratic and fair-minded people, and the Nazis were exactly the opposite. But as the famous saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" - and this is precisely what happened during the war.
I'm not saying that Finns are fascists, and I'm not even saying that *many* Finns are fascists, but what I am saying is that perhaps Finland is the *only* state that at least partly owes its ongoing independence to co-operation with the Nazis. That's why I'm not completely surprised to read about Auvinen's Nazi obsession.. it's a disturbing secret of Finnish history.
Well, at least it will give the drug smugglers something to diversify into as they try to ship contraband hard drives across the US border. Although I'm not certain how well the "body cavity" approach would work... ouch.
Do a Google search for Ameritrade spam. This isn't a new problem, it's been going on for months and even years where there's clear evidence that the data is being lifted by spammers.
You don't have to look far - this one is particularly damning, and I've seen evidence elsewhere that people set up an email address ONLY for Ameritrade and they've watched the spam come in.
Ah well, that's sort of true but there's more to this story than meets the eye. The rights to build the roadster (yes, lowercase "r") were bought by Project Kimber who intend to build an AC branded variant in Wales. The car will have a new engine, gearbox and a redesigned front end, but it is essentially the same car and maintains the original construction of a tridion safety cage plus plastic panels (as found on the fourtwo).
I own a roadster.. it's a really, really fun car to drive. One bit of trivia is that although "smart" and "roadster" are always spelled in lowercase, I drive a BRABUS modified one.. which is always spelled in uppercase. "smart roadster BRABUS" is an unfortunate mix of capitalisation I know. BRABUS also do fourtwo variants.. 100 bhp in a little car like that is impressive, with new new model fourtwo the handling is much better, so it looks like a very interesting combination.
Soloway also has close ties to other arch-spammers Alex Polyakov
and Leo Kuvayev. Between those three there is a substantial involvement in fraud, money laundering and even child pornography. It's hard to say who is responsible for what.. but I betcha that the Russians are running scared that Soloway will really start to talk. I've documented this connection a couple of times in the past (see here and here.)
There's plenty of evidence around to nail Soloway for a long, long time.. but to be honest he's not even the worst spammer out there. I suspect the possibility of a plea bargain is quite likely, so that international law enforcement can get to the even bigger fish.
Well, seriously an anti-aircraft battery could have at least taken down one of the aircraft after the true nature of the threat became known. One thing that 9/11 demonstrated is that the US was woefully unprepared for hostile action on its own territory.
Reagan famously consulted scifi authors to come up with ideas for SDI (for example, Jerry Pournelle and others. Allegedly, they came up with some of the more interesting ideas which were just plausible enough to gain credibility.. at least for a time. (A strange case of life mirroring art.. or at least mirroring Footfall.
Depending on your interpretation of history, it could be argued that this was one of the things that let to the collapse of the Soviet Union as they couldn't compete with the proposed SDI technologies.
Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that locks on the doors on 9/11 could have been useful, but really some blue sky thinking will do no harm.
Patch Tuesday is in my diary (well, actually the Wednesday because the patches are announced in the evening UK time). I have a change control provisionally made for EVERY post-patch Tuesday Saturday to cover servers, and I also have an entry for the Friday before patch Tuesday when the advanced notification is made.
This is the way it goes..
Friday: Look at the advanced notification to get an idea of the scale of the patches. Once or twice a year there a none.. yippee!
Wednesday: In the morning we closely analyse the patches to figure out the impact on our organisation. Servers and clients are differently impacted so we look at this to see if we will need to patch servers. Patches are tested on some representative computer systems.
Thursday: raise the inevitable paperwork for any system changes and monitor for any issues.
Friday: Check for issues with the patches and then authorise for client distribution via WSUS.
Saturday: If necessary, patch those servers that are vulnerable. Claim overtime. Yippee.
We know in advance when this is coming up. We can make plans. We ensure that someone always looks at the patches on Wednesday morning and does the analysis. It's a monthly event that we don't miss. This works pretty well.
Sure, sometimes you need to apply an out-of-cycle patch.. these are rare but Microsoft seems to understand that they are needed. If we miss it, then we'll alway pick up on it again later.
Yeah, hardcore sysadmins might like patch and reboot PCs every couple of days or so, but most sysadmins have other things to worry about than constant patching and in my view Microsoft have the balance about right. (One of the few things I like about them!)
You have no idea how AdSense works. You can't edit the ads at all, and as a publisher you have very little control over the ads that are shown (only the the extent that you can block specific sites).
Why not carry ads? Most high traffic sites are ad supported. Google AdSense is almost a no-brainer as Google handles the contextualising and geotargetting. In other words, AdSense could deliver highly targetted and relevant advertising which is hardly a bad thing.
Heck, Google aren't the only ad supplier on the block. I guess Wikipedia could pretty much name its own terms.
Slashdot Mirror
The naming convention at one of my previous jobs was movie directors, the "client" for the server could choose their favourite director as the server name. The problem? In one case the client's favourite director was Roman Polanski. In these pre-Wikipedia days it was much harder to check names for possible controversies, and the server was duly named. It was only some time after that it was realised that Mr Polanski's alleged sexual activities made it.. difficult.
These days I work in an organisation with thousands of machines and hundreds of servers. We use a boring format of two-digit-ISO-code + machine-type + number + role, so LVS006ISA is a Latvian ISA server. We also use "D"esktop and "L"aptop designators (e.g. NLD0123). It's a helluva lot easier. And much more difficult to name a server after an alleged kiddyfiddler.
If this had been around 12 months ago then perhaps webOS and the Pre would have been a contender, but since then we've seen Android and MS are polishing up their new versions of Windows for this year.
I guess the question is.. would I buy one? The answer is "no". But only because I prefer the 800 pixel wide display of the Nokia E90. I wouldn't refuse one if someone gave one to me though ;)
I don't know the content of these videos, but yeah.. a DMCA notice is a sworn statement. If the information is false then potentially it could be regarded as perjury.
Spammers work from lists of email addresses, and those email addresses are typically sorted by domain and then alphabetically. So, the receiving domain gets a rush of emails for users with addresses beginning with A, B, C etc. But usually (at some point) many mail systems will detect that there is a spam attack in progress and they will block subsequent messages of the same format or from the attacking IP address (depending on the spam filtering setup in place).
So, but simply the people beginning with "A" get nice new spam that the adaptive filters don't detect. By the time it gets to "Z" a good filter will automatically block the attack.
What's sad is that I watch spam attacks often enough to know this.
It's not about tea - but as the New Scientist says, the exact equivalent to Lyons is something like Pizza hut. Lyons were the absolute masters of logistics in their time - they ran a huge network of outlets to a consistent quality with a very large turnover. So, they were really an ideal company to experiment with this new technology. Lyon's logistical expertise was such that during the Second World War they ran one of the largest bomb making factories in the world, just a couple of miles from where I live. One in seven bombs dropped on Germany came from the Lyons factory at Elstow.
"..and will lose the rumored MinWin kernel." So in other words, the only thing really going for Windows 7 has been dropped. I feel that many businesses were holding out for Windows 7 to fix all the problems that Vista introduced.. it looks likely that this is not the case. If this shift is confirmed, then I really suspect that a lot of Microsoft houses will begin to dump the platform altogether.
So it's a weak organism.. until it mutates. Which these things have a habit of doing..
I've known Chet (in an online sense) for years now. Donotreply.com is a stroke of genius, but I suspect the sheer volume of crud keeps it from being updated more. If you want to have a look at another much more disturbing property of Chet's, check out Portal of Evil. Classy!
The obvious way to monetise Wikipedia is to use Google AdSense or a similar technology. In the case of AdSense, Google chooses that ads and not the editor, so in effect the ads are kept at arms length. And if, having read the encyclopedia article, a visitor chooses to click on an ad, then at least they should have a greater understanding of the product.
I run a site with AdSense, but I never compromise the content to encourage click throughs. People either click, or they don't Enough people click to make it worthwhile, and it certainly covers costs.
What made AlltheWeb work was FAST's underlying search technology. What's surprising is that it has taken so long for someone to realise that FAST is more valuable that the AlltheWeb website was. So, if MS can ever get their search results to the quality that AlltheWeb used to provide, then this could well be a smart move. After all, doing it in-house has been pretty unsuccessful.
Of course, Microsoft want to force everyone have to buy Vista after June 2008, so Moore's law has got to get a shift on to make sure that PCs are going to be fast enough to actually make it usable. Or perhaps it will encourage Microsoft to extend XP's availability. Or perhaps's it's time to stock up XP licenses if you need to run Windows.
It can be pretty easy to foil, as this post on Shoemoney demonstrates.
And yes, you too can have fun in /. with Google queries for goatse.cx, tubgirl and 2girls1cup.
Still, griping aside it's good to see this hijack getting a higher profile. However, I had a note from someone who had come across a hijacked banner on Yahoo! just today, so it's clear that the banners are still out there.
Banner hijacks for this type of rich media ad are not a new problem. It's not a problem you generally see with good old fashioned GIF and JPG banners, or plain text ads.
Multics was a seriously cool system, but it was absolutely crippled by its reliance on a very limited hardware base, i.e. the Honeywell DPS-8 (by 1986). Incidentally, the DPS-8 processor also found its way into mainframes using the godawful GCOS8 OS.
Multics in some ways very much the antithesis of Unix - when Unix was developed they chose to make it hardware independent and single-processor, for example. In other ways it was very like Unix, but in some ways it's quite unlike most operating systems in that.. well, it sounds strange.. but it's too *modern*. Multicians will understand, but suffice it to say that the underlying architecture has many features that I hope will one day make it to my desktop.
*That*, incidentally, is surely going to be one hell of an expensive film. Most zombie movies are pretty cheap to make, but World War Z is basically an entire future history made up of awesomely expensive-to-make sequences. I won't give too much away in case there are some /.ers who haven't read the book!
However, Finland has a unique relationship with Nazism that Americans and other Europeans don't really know much about. The history of Finland during the Second World War is quite different from any other country. To a certain extent, the Nazis could be argued as the saviours of Finland, because historically Finland's greatest struggle has always been with Russia.. and to that extent, Germany was a natural ally during WW2.
The dichotomy is that the Finns are a democratic and fair-minded people, and the Nazis were exactly the opposite. But as the famous saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" - and this is precisely what happened during the war.
I'm not saying that Finns are fascists, and I'm not even saying that *many* Finns are fascists, but what I am saying is that perhaps Finland is the *only* state that at least partly owes its ongoing independence to co-operation with the Nazis. That's why I'm not completely surprised to read about Auvinen's Nazi obsession.. it's a disturbing secret of Finnish history.
Well, at least it will give the drug smugglers something to diversify into as they try to ship contraband hard drives across the US border. Although I'm not certain how well the "body cavity" approach would work... ouch.
You don't have to look far - this one is particularly damning, and I've seen evidence elsewhere that people set up an email address ONLY for Ameritrade and they've watched the spam come in.
I own a roadster.. it's a really, really fun car to drive. One bit of trivia is that although "smart" and "roadster" are always spelled in lowercase, I drive a BRABUS modified one.. which is always spelled in uppercase. "smart roadster BRABUS" is an unfortunate mix of capitalisation I know. BRABUS also do fourtwo variants.. 100 bhp in a little car like that is impressive, with new new model fourtwo the handling is much better, so it looks like a very interesting combination.
There's plenty of evidence around to nail Soloway for a long, long time.. but to be honest he's not even the worst spammer out there. I suspect the possibility of a plea bargain is quite likely, so that international law enforcement can get to the even bigger fish.
Well, seriously an anti-aircraft battery could have at least taken down one of the aircraft after the true nature of the threat became known. One thing that 9/11 demonstrated is that the US was woefully unprepared for hostile action on its own territory.
Depending on your interpretation of history, it could be argued that this was one of the things that let to the collapse of the Soviet Union as they couldn't compete with the proposed SDI technologies.
Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that locks on the doors on 9/11 could have been useful, but really some blue sky thinking will do no harm.
This is the way it goes..
Friday: Look at the advanced notification to get an idea of the scale of the patches. Once or twice a year there a none.. yippee!
Wednesday: In the morning we closely analyse the patches to figure out the impact on our organisation. Servers and clients are differently impacted so we look at this to see if we will need to patch servers. Patches are tested on some representative computer systems.
Thursday: raise the inevitable paperwork for any system changes and monitor for any issues.
Friday: Check for issues with the patches and then authorise for client distribution via WSUS.
Saturday: If necessary, patch those servers that are vulnerable. Claim overtime. Yippee.
We know in advance when this is coming up. We can make plans. We ensure that someone always looks at the patches on Wednesday morning and does the analysis. It's a monthly event that we don't miss. This works pretty well.
Sure, sometimes you need to apply an out-of-cycle patch.. these are rare but Microsoft seems to understand that they are needed. If we miss it, then we'll alway pick up on it again later.
Yeah, hardcore sysadmins might like patch and reboot PCs every couple of days or so, but most sysadmins have other things to worry about than constant patching and in my view Microsoft have the balance about right. (One of the few things I like about them!)
You have no idea how AdSense works. You can't edit the ads at all, and as a publisher you have very little control over the ads that are shown (only the the extent that you can block specific sites).
Heck, Google aren't the only ad supplier on the block. I guess Wikipedia could pretty much name its own terms.