The 5-10% I'm talking about is only from buggy spam filters
That makes sense -- for some reason, I thought you were relying on your students' statements to come up with that figure... But I still disagree with your point that the email system is "broken".
As a side note, if you're sending mail to a group of people on a regular basis, doesn't it make sense to set up some type of mailing list, instead of putting 40 people on the To: line? Additionally, I've always considered it bad etiquette to disclose other people's email addresses without their permission. Your students might be OK with giving _you_ their email address, but they might not want the entire class to have it... Using a mailing list, or putting all of these people in the BCC is a much more polite way of doing it.
"Properly" is being PUSHED bigger and more expensive by the sheer volume of SPAM
That's a rather severe over-generalization, and you know it. Email traffic (even without the spam) has grown exponentially over the last few years. And don't forget that the nature of email has changed, too -- it's not just people sending text messages back and forth, it's people sending attachments containing 2 MB of movies/pictures to 100 of their closest friends...
So not only has the volume of mail increased, the size of the average mail is increasing, too. Spam is not dictating anything as far as hardware for mail servers -- normal mail is doing a very good job of that on its own...
Here's a simple (if not universal) example: In my domain, I have extensive spam filters and I track the ratio of spam vs. good email. Right now, it runs about 50% on a message by message basis. But when you look at it from a "bytes sent" basis, spam is less than 4% of my totals. Why? Because spam tends to be quite small, and my normal mail has lots of attachments...
So how do you look at the above numbers? If you are a chicken little, or are a commercial vendor of spam filters, you play up the "50% of my mail is spam!" angle... However, from a network capacity angle, you say "Gee, spam is 4% of my mail bandwidth -- I'm certainly not going to upgrade anything just because of spam...."
there's a significant probability (5-10%) that it won't get through, because the e-mail infrastructure is so totally broken
Huh??? That doesn't make any sense at all -- there's nothing wrong with the email infrastructure. If anything, it's quite resiliant; if mail deliver can't be made immediately, the SMTP server keeps trying at regular intervals for up to 5 days! Email is very, very reliable -- sometimes there's a slowdown & your mail gets delayed for a day, but eventually it gets there...
If you're seeing a 5-10% chance that email to your students is not arriving, I'd blame bad/buggy spam filters, people who don't check their mail when they claim to, people who delete mail & forget about it (and later claim to have never received it), or even (gasp!) students who lie about not receiving an email as a way to get mor time to complete an assignment.
What kind of teacher believes anything their students say, anyway? "I never got your email" is really "my dog ate my homework" for the current generation...
Oh yeah. I just love AC's posting rude remarks -- you don't have the guts to put your name to your drivel, do you?
What is wrong with the nickname 'doomdog' ??? You most likely have no idea where it comes from or just how long it's been around (a lot longer than you have, that's for sure..)
If they're spending all of their time with human resources dealing with the problem, then they should probably rethink their procedures. If an ISP is doing _any_ spam filtering at all, it should be pretty limited - maybe use a few rbl blocklists to deny smtp connections from known spammers.
But other than that, any extensive amount of filtering risks catching legitimate mail and most users like to be able to choose between losing mail and getting rid of the most spam possible. The users themselves should be making these choices and employing their own filters -- not the ISP.
On the other hand, if the time wasted dealing with spam comes from the fact that spammers are _using_ his service to send spam, that would point to a failure in his account signup policies -- i.e. letting people sign up for free trial accounts, not requiring a valid credit card (which could be charged for spam cleanup costs, etc.)
I don't see where he could possibly spend that much time... How much "human" intervention do you really need to handle an attack from "hundreds of spamming drones" ??? Either your hardware can keep up with the mail flow, or it can't. No amount of human activity is going to make the mail run faster... And if there are too many connections coming from just a few spammers, it isn't that big of a deal to implement some type of connection limits per IP address (to deal with those spam servers that open 100 different threads ).
As far as I'm concerned, most of the spam problem for ISPs comes down to bandwidth, some CPU time and disk space. There's not much human element there...
"The spammers are calling the shots, the spammers are in charge of my time, and they are in charge of the Internet."
In charge of the internet? Give me a break... Spam is definitely a problem, but spammers are _not_ running the show.
My guess is that the guy hasn't properly upgraded is mail servers (with more CPU power, memory, disk space, etc.) over the past few years and is currently suffering from e-mail overload (and blaming it on the spammers)...
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
You really need to get a copy of the constitution (many copies, actually), and pass them around to everyone you meet. I have a bunch of the Pocket Constition books from the Cato Institute:
I think you'd have a better chance of having the hard drives function in 4-5 (or 10) years if they're used every once in a while, rather than letting them sit for 5 years in a drawer somewhere...
Another issue you have to think about, when dealing with a 10 year time frame for hard drives, is the interface issue. After all, could *you* actually read a disk from 10 years ago, when MFM, RLL and ESDI drives were popular? Can you even buy a controller for those drive types anywhere?
There's the distinct possibility that in 10 years the standard drive interface will not be IDE or SCSI, and the new interface probably won't be backwards compatible.
I have a filter that finds the spam, and replies to it
Please don't do this. In the great majority of cases, the From: and Reply-To: addresses are faked. Spammers don't _want_ you to reply to them. They want you to click on the links they provide in the email itself, or have you reply to a separate email address embedded in the spam...
By sending replies to spam, you are just adding another burden to mail systems and aren't accomplishing anything... Really, you're not.
Oh, and those few cases where your reply to the spam doesn't bounce? Those are usually sent to some poor schmuck who had the misfortune of having his email address misappropriated by the spammers to use as a From: address...
There's a difference between breaking into something "just to see if you can" and "disabling something to cause problems for millions of people".
What if these cretins had actually succeeded? What if the DNS servers had gone offline for days and days? What if they had injected their own trojaned DNS servers (where _every_ domain name resolves to goatse.cx?)
I think you're being lenient on them because they didn't really succeed...
I will stand by my assertion that those who delight in the misery of others are not worthy of life. And no, I don't think that includes most people; many are sympathetic and the rest are just *apathetic* towards the plight of others -- which is as it should be (i.e. you mind your own business, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc.)...
Well of course it's unproductive -- that's the hallmark of crackers, script kiddies and virus developers. These dregs of our society do these things just for the perverse pleasure of seeing how much havoc they can cause...
These people are degenerates, delighting in the misery of others. Such are not worthy of life.
I do find it annoying, though, that people are quick mod something down, and extremely slow to post a response (mainly because a response requires thought and intellect [well, most of the time], while modding a post down is accomplished with a simple click...
Sure you can get gmake for windows. But then you'll need to get bash, cp, cat, rm, etc for Windows too.
No, that's not true. I can run my makefiles on Unix or Windows and I don't need "cat", "rm" and such on the Windows box... If you properly structure your makefile, you can avoid these platform dependencies.
For example, instead of embedding the Unix commands into your targets, like this:
target: dependency
rm -f myfile.ext
you simply write it like this:
target: dependency
$(RM) myfile.ext
at the top of each makefile, I do an "include platform.cfg" which sets up RM to be "rm -f " for Unix, "del" for Windows, etc. Porting the build process to a new platform means writing a platform.cfg file ONCE and then using it on many different projects.. Most of my.cfg files were written many, many years ago and they still work perfectly.
Yes, makefiles are _extremely_ easy to read and understand how the build process will take place, and which dependencies exist for a given component. When you're reading a makefile (on the screen or on paper), you don't really care about the space vs. tab issue -- you only care about the structure of your build process.
It is only an issue if your makefile doesn't work. Makefiles are not constantly edited, so once they're working, you leave them alone. When your dependency rules are properly written, you don't need to modify the makefile everytime you add or remove a class.
By the way, if your editor can't easily tell you the difference between a tab and a space, I suggest you get a new editor...
Slashdot Mirror
If they catapulted CowboyNeal into the audience, I'd definitely consider going to the show :)
Posting a page on ./ that contains a link to a 17 MB .mov file... How long will it take for their server to die?
Is there some reason that virus writers don't create their viruses to modify themselves automatically?
Because that would require effort, intelligence and skill -- none of which are in great supply among your average virus writer...
>> Though, the people who might truly be worried are SCO's customers
Yep, I'll bet both of them are worried!
You know, I'm not sure which is worse: a pathetic attempt at being "First", or wasting mod points on such an unworthy post....
:-)
Just another pathetic attempt at being first :)
I wonder how many Xserves this will take.
:-)
Oh, I'd say at least a Beowolf cluster...
Only 5 posts and the link is already dead. Maybe he should have bought 17 NIC cards instead :-)
The 5-10% I'm talking about is only from buggy spam filters
That makes sense -- for some reason, I thought you were relying on your students' statements to come up with that figure... But I still disagree with your point that the email system is "broken".
As a side note, if you're sending mail to a group of people on a regular basis, doesn't it make sense to set up some type of mailing list, instead of putting 40 people on the To: line? Additionally, I've always considered it bad etiquette to disclose other people's email addresses without their permission. Your students might be OK with giving _you_ their email address, but they might not want the entire class to have it... Using a mailing list, or putting all of these people in the BCC is a much more polite way of doing it.
"Properly" is being PUSHED bigger and more expensive by the sheer volume of SPAM
That's a rather severe over-generalization, and you know it. Email traffic (even without the spam) has grown exponentially over the last few years. And don't forget that the nature of email has changed, too -- it's not just people sending text messages back and forth, it's people sending attachments containing 2 MB of movies/pictures to 100 of their closest friends...
So not only has the volume of mail increased, the size of the average mail is increasing, too. Spam is not dictating anything as far as hardware for mail servers -- normal mail is doing a very good job of that on its own...
Here's a simple (if not universal) example: In my domain, I have extensive spam filters and I track the ratio of spam vs. good email. Right now, it runs about 50% on a message by message basis. But when you look at it from a "bytes sent" basis, spam is less than 4% of my totals. Why? Because spam tends to be quite small, and my normal mail has lots of attachments...
So how do you look at the above numbers? If you are a chicken little, or are a commercial vendor of spam filters, you play up the "50% of my mail is spam!" angle... However, from a network capacity angle, you say "Gee, spam is 4% of my mail bandwidth -- I'm certainly not going to upgrade anything just because of spam...."
there's a significant probability (5-10%) that it won't get through, because the e-mail infrastructure is so totally broken
Huh??? That doesn't make any sense at all -- there's nothing wrong with the email infrastructure. If anything, it's quite resiliant; if mail deliver can't be made immediately, the SMTP server keeps trying at regular intervals for up to 5 days! Email is very, very reliable -- sometimes there's a slowdown & your mail gets delayed for a day, but eventually it gets there...
If you're seeing a 5-10% chance that email to your students is not arriving, I'd blame bad/buggy spam filters, people who don't check their mail when they claim to, people who delete mail & forget about it (and later claim to have never received it), or even (gasp!) students who lie about not receiving an email as a way to get mor time to complete an assignment.
What kind of teacher believes anything their students say, anyway? "I never got your email" is really "my dog ate my homework" for the current generation...
Oh yeah. I just love AC's posting rude remarks -- you don't have the guts to put your name to your drivel, do you?
What is wrong with the nickname 'doomdog' ??? You most likely have no idea where it comes from or just how long it's been around (a lot longer than you have, that's for sure..)
If they're spending all of their time with human resources dealing with the problem, then they should probably rethink their procedures. If an ISP is doing _any_ spam filtering at all, it should be pretty limited - maybe use a few rbl blocklists to deny smtp connections from known spammers.
But other than that, any extensive amount of filtering risks catching legitimate mail and most users like to be able to choose between losing mail and getting rid of the most spam possible. The users themselves should be making these choices and employing their own filters -- not the ISP.
On the other hand, if the time wasted dealing with spam comes from the fact that spammers are _using_ his service to send spam, that would point to a failure in his account signup policies -- i.e. letting people sign up for free trial accounts, not requiring a valid credit card (which could be charged for spam cleanup costs, etc.)
I don't see where he could possibly spend that much time... How much "human" intervention do you really need to handle an attack from "hundreds of spamming drones" ??? Either your hardware can keep up with the mail flow, or it can't. No amount of human activity is going to make the mail run faster... And if there are too many connections coming from just a few spammers, it isn't that big of a deal to implement some type of connection limits per IP address (to deal with those spam servers that open 100 different threads ).
As far as I'm concerned, most of the spam problem for ISPs comes down to bandwidth, some CPU time and disk space. There's not much human element there...
From the article:
"The spammers are calling the shots, the spammers are in charge of my time, and they are in charge of the Internet."
In charge of the internet? Give me a break... Spam is definitely a problem, but spammers are _not_ running the show.
My guess is that the guy hasn't properly upgraded is mail servers (with more CPU power, memory, disk space, etc.) over the past few years and is currently suffering from e-mail overload (and blaming it on the spammers)...
Look at the 4th ammendment:
c gi?page=dicon.html&cart_id=)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
You really need to get a copy of the constitution (many copies, actually), and pass them around to everyone you meet. I have a bunch of the Pocket Constition books from the Cato Institute:
(http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/Web_store/web_store.
I particularly like giving them out to the over-zealous security screeners at the airpoint...
Why insist on calling it laziness? Maybe the switcher ads just work -- and it's always good sense to copy what is known to work well...
If Microsoft knows the ads are working for Apple, they'd be stupid not to use them themselves....
I think you'd have a better chance of having the hard drives function in 4-5 (or 10) years if they're used every once in a while, rather than letting them sit for 5 years in a drawer somewhere...
Another issue you have to think about, when dealing with a 10 year time frame for hard drives, is the interface issue. After all, could *you* actually read a disk from 10 years ago, when MFM, RLL and ESDI drives were popular? Can you even buy a controller for those drive types anywhere?
There's the distinct possibility that in 10 years the standard drive interface will not be IDE or SCSI, and the new interface probably won't be backwards compatible.
I have a filter that finds the spam, and replies to it
Please don't do this. In the great majority of cases, the From: and Reply-To: addresses are faked. Spammers don't _want_ you to reply to them. They want you to click on the links they provide in the email itself, or have you reply to a separate email address embedded in the spam...
By sending replies to spam, you are just adding another burden to mail systems and aren't accomplishing anything... Really, you're not.
Oh, and those few cases where your reply to the spam doesn't bounce? Those are usually sent to some poor schmuck who had the misfortune of having his email address misappropriated by the spammers to use as a From: address...
What if these cretins had actually succeeded? What if the DNS servers had gone offline for days and days? What if they had injected their own trojaned DNS servers (where _every_ domain name resolves to goatse.cx?)
I think you're being lenient on them because they didn't really succeed...
I will stand by my assertion that those who delight in the misery of others are not worthy of life. And no, I don't think that includes most people; many are sympathetic and the rest are just *apathetic* towards the plight of others -- which is as it should be (i.e. you mind your own business, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc.)...
Well of course it's unproductive -- that's the hallmark of crackers, script kiddies and virus developers. These dregs of our society do these things just for the perverse pleasure of seeing how much havoc they can cause...
These people are degenerates, delighting in the misery of others. Such are not worthy of life.
Point taken....
I do find it annoying, though, that people are quick mod something down, and extremely slow to post a response (mainly because a response requires thought and intellect [well, most of the time], while modding a post down is accomplished with a simple click...
The problem is that a lot of people here don't know how to differentiate between flamebait and a strongly held position....
No, that's not true. I can run my makefiles on Unix or Windows and I don't need "cat", "rm" and such on the Windows box... If you properly structure your makefile, you can avoid these platform dependencies.
For example, instead of embedding the Unix commands into your targets, like this:
target: dependency
rm -f myfile.ext you simply write it like this:
target: dependency
$(RM) myfile.ext
at the top of each makefile, I do an "include platform.cfg" which sets up RM to be "rm -f " for Unix, "del" for Windows, etc. Porting the build process to a new platform means writing a platform.cfg file ONCE and then using it on many different projects.. Most of my .cfg files were written many, many years ago and they still work perfectly.
So now I'm modded down as Flamebait for dissing one of the "sacred cows" (open source software) of slashdot? Figures...
Yes, makefiles are _extremely_ easy to read and understand how the build process will take place, and which dependencies exist for a given component. When you're reading a makefile (on the screen or on paper), you don't really care about the space vs. tab issue -- you only care about the structure of your build process.
It is only an issue if your makefile doesn't work. Makefiles are not constantly edited, so once they're working, you leave them alone. When your dependency rules are properly written, you don't need to modify the makefile everytime you add or remove a class.
By the way, if your editor can't easily tell you the difference between a tab and a space, I suggest you get a new editor...