The big guy so far has been Lumileds , e.g. their Luxeon Star is one beast. I think it's now included in the headlight fixtures of some cars. No harm in having more competition, but those luxeon stars really would be tough to beat. Impressive engineering.
Whitelists also eliminate 100% of approaches from potential new customers... it's not entirely clear how I could earn a living if I did that.
I know what you mean. Free tip... SpamProbe (from procmail) with the PBL database option. I have three accounts with SpamProbe running on them, the database size is stable at 15 MB each, with accuracy rates on each account over the past week: 98.7%, 99.2%, and 99.5%. The filter is damn accurate, and very fast.
I think it's really cool that this guy is getting his jollies going after these scum but he may want to tone down his direct involvement with these people or at least do it more quietly
The real risk is getting DDOS's by angry spammers. It is hurtful, costly, and yes it does happen a lot! Remember, spammers already have the zombie networks to conduct the attacks from. Victims to date include monkeys.com, osirusoft.com, SPEWS, Spamhaus, and even SpamCop. The first two services died as a result, but the rest are still running despite the attacks.
This should remind us as network admins why it's important to block access to known spamming/zombie IPs, as they are nothing but trouble. The compromised hosts are used to spam, conduct attacks, and steal information and resources. It's a major problem, do not expect this issue to go away as long as network security takes back seat to business and "convenience".
What if you find some old domain that used to get substantial mail traffic, but hasn't been used in like 5 years or something (expired). Spammers don't stop sending spam when addresses disappear (contrary to intuition), so if you purchased that domain you would start getting a huge amount of spam, using a wildcard. Also, it would be virtually guaranteed pure spam! Would be neat... anybody know of any old domains like this?
My hosting service tried to filter all the viruses with clamav, but they got so many viruses that it was too much of a CPU load
This is why renattach exists. You run that baby in kill mode, and you can handle millions of viruses a day without breaking a sweat (load average wise). This filter just drops mail when certain types of attachments (by file extension or file names inside a ZIP attachment) are found. Not as proper protection as a virus scanner, but coupled with spamassassin it will do the job.
Honeypots are lurking all over the net... spammers don't have a chance. They are so indiscriminate and stupid with their harvesting that they are just announcing their presence through a digital loudspeaker, "I AM A SPAMMER".
Interpreting how much memory an application is using is somewhat difficult. Modern virtual memory operating systems page memory into both physical RAM and disk storage (swap, pagefile, whatever). Next, there are operating system features that try to preserve actual memory by not allocating real chunks of memory on an application's request, until that memory is really made use of. Finally, using some system GUI widgets etc can "increase" the amount of memory use as shown in Task Manager etc where really the memory use is within the OS, not the app.
What this comes down to is: the figure you generally see for memory use of an app is not physical RAM use. It might not even reflect the actual amount of physical+disk memory in use! Finally, memory usage might be overstated due to transient external allocations (e.g. win32 API dialog boxes) that deceivingly appear as memory used by an application.
What you have to look for is how that memory usage figure changes over time. In most cases, it grows until it hits a ceiling - even at that point, it is way overstated (a conservative measure, so to speak). What is bad is if it regularly grows by 50 MB per day, without limit. Then there is a leak:)
My PR Firefox version Firefox/0.9.3 has always had the annoying problem of causing the entire system to "lock up" if left running overnight.
Without exception, a regular (userland) application that leads to global locking up is the operating system's fault, not the application's. The goal of a modern multi-user, multi-process, virtual memory OS (BSD, Linux, WinNT) is to keep each process separate on the system. A single application should crash, or run slowly but it should never crash the entire operating system or use up all the operating system's resources. Such a situation indicates the failure of the OS to manage resources, and maintain control over separate processes.
It's here, it's private. Personally I think that we're going to see all kind of encrypted WANs for various groups, since assholes like the RIAA and MPAA have been playing naughty in the real Internet and ruining it for everyone.
Most succinctly put: WM, iTunes, Real Whateverthefuckthey'recallingitnow, and especially Musicmatch PieceOfShitBox are all bloated pieces of crap.
Yup, that's it right there. Winamp 3.x scared some of us because it started to feel like a bloated piece of crap, but the developers were wise enough to restore the Winamp 2 look and feel into Winamp 5. Here is one piece of software where the latest version leaves me wanting nothing, and regretting nothing as far as upgrading! This is absolutely incredible because almost every other application I have stuck with over several years has become bloated, slowed down, and more confusing.
Winamp, OTOH, has stayed nimble, acquired more features (like streaming video and media library) but without any detrimental effect on performance or stability. This is why Winamp is amazing and the developers are amazing. WinAmp is more stable than a llama suffering rigor mortis. I'm not impressed with iTunes because of its sluggishness and overcomplicated interface for doing something damn simple - playing an audio file or stream. Plus, iTunes and WM friends of mine aren't able to play my ogg vorbis streaming icecast station so I'm not too impressed by that either.
Someone's gonna die
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have no problem with hunting, nor killing animals (mmmm... lamb!) but this guy's idea is just plain idiotic.
It's not a good idea because it poses a significant, and unusual, risk to human life and on top of that, it is going to remove the level of immediacy that is required to allocate legal responsibility for an action (i.e. shooting a gun) with a person (Joe Sixpack).
What if someone is out in the range adjusting some equipment, and the thing that was supposed to disconnect the Internet death trigger malfunctioned... I mean, is he planning on using an OS that is authorized for mission critical / life supporting systems? That won't be Windows or Linux, as you probably know.
The idea is just flawed. We as Engineers go to a lot of trouble to make systems that are safe for humans. This system poses unnecessary and probably significant risk to humans.
I'm one of those myself. I'm a one person software company trying to make it with my own product and services
this is what i do to, my company develops spelling check and gramar programs for business, things have been slow lately but eventualy things will pick up in this post 9-11 marketplace!!
I didn't say it, because I didn't do it. All of the antibiotics I've had were prescribed by qualified physicians who had seen me personally.
Pat, sounds like you have been doing the right things. You have seeked the help of professionals. Keep that up and be very persistent. In the mean time, please get lots of sleep and maintain your intake of fluids, vitamins, and other nutritious foods. This is essential for keeping up your immune system (especially the sleep). Doctors can medicate you, but do what you can to keep your body as strong as possible under the circumstances.
We have doctors for a reason, and this is it! Go to the HOSPITAL or you're going to DIE
I am not a doctor. You're probably right about this, he should at least be under care. Nevertheless it's worth pointing out that there is also substantial risk involved with any duration of hospital stay. Hospitals are a great place to pick up new infections. For elderly people with chronic problems for instance, the chances of picking up a new infection while in hospital or other complications resulting from hospital staff mistakes is substantial. Hospital staff make lots of mistakes on a routine basis - incorrect meds, incorrect doses, lack of precautions, forgetting to pass around documents. In my city, a significant % of deaths in hospitals were attributed to hospital staff error rather than hopeless patient states.
Anyway, what I'm trying to make a point of here is that hospitals are a last resort. Now, I think Patrick might need this. But one should be aware of the risk. Do you know that a bacterial outbreak currently plauging Quebec hospitals has killed more people than SARS in Canada? Hospitals are a dangerous place. But that's more an issue for the elderly or compromised immune systems.
Our only hope in case of an EMP (/nuclear). Vacuum tubes may be ugly and power hungry, but they are much more likely to withstand huge electromagnetic pulses (malicious or otherwise).
It is within your power to make the sharing of files - any file - completely legal
Canadian cousins please visit digital-copyright forums for the equivalent. In Canada, like in the US, all political parties support DMCA-like legislation restricting fair use of digital media. This is because the recording industry has co-opted our politicians, now let's take it back.
We seem to have "progressed" from companies that competed on product (ie free market choice), to those that competed on lock-in (eg. MS anti-trust stuff) to those that compete by making IP roadblocks.
What I find interesting is how far we have come from a real free market. Ask any student of economics... what we have now in America and Europe is not a free market, rather there is government intervention propping up the strong and upsetting the "natural" balance that we would find with free market forces.
Do you consider yourself a capitalist? Do you respect your politicians and trust them to uphold the economic system that made us great? Bad news. Your politicians are failing you, they are using government control to hurt innovation, progress, and competition. Your elected politicians do not believe in the free market, they don't believe in capitalism, and they certainly don't value innovation.
Take as another example the music/video industries . They are being kept alive by the government, not by the market. In a free market economy, we would let them collapse without shedding a tear.
Except all small developers and inventors (IMHO, the backbone of technological innovation) might move to Asia, where they don't have to put up with American/European software patent crap. The patent worshippers can then stew in their stagnant, protectionist filth.
Yes, this is a very important point. On UNIX, my script does mount/unmount around the operation. Under Windows NT I have not figured out how to mount drives from the command line.
Hard drives don't fail at the same times. In my experience, drive failure has been due to the drive internals rather than some kind of giant electrical trauma frying everything inside the computer! Probability of one drive failing is quite low. Probability of two drives failing simultaneously is much, much lower.
Real men (and women) use rsync
on
Creative Data Loss
·
· Score: 2, Informative
After trying many, many techniques over the years (since the DOS v3 days) I have run across the best way to do automated data backups.
Just use rsync to duplicate your local volume to another local, but independent hard disk. Easy enough to do on *NIX with cron, and on Windows use the rsync in cygwin on a scheduled task. Hard disks are cheap these days, and this method gives you a fully local time delayed duplicate (so you can recover deleted files).
Advantages to this method:
The rsync protocol makes sure that only changed data is transferred, so the entire process is quite fast.
Backed up files are on a normal volume, no compression/packaging, easy to access
The backed up volume can be periodically zipped up to form a permanent back-archive
As it is, I wouldn't trust any company (including Google) with total spidering access to my local files, if there is any kind of a link out to the Internet. Here for the first time you are bridging your entire local contents with the greater "marketing" Internet out there.
And on top of it, Microsoft has shown us that they feel things that we know should be user level applications are instead hooked right into parts of the OS. I would definitely not install something like this, I think there would be too many possibilities for my sensitive data to escape where I don't want.
I currently use a local file searching tool, but I'm comfortable using it because it contains NO networking code. There is no way the local information can get to the Internet.
but why do TVs and CRTs (IBM 3270 Terminals, especially) have a most annoying buzz
If you're hearing the same thing I am (and not everyone is capable of hearing this by the way!) this is the very high pitched tone you can hear from most CRTs. It's just at the limit of human hearing. The cause is the electronic circuitry (flyback transformer and capacitors) building the high voltages for the CRT. I'm not 100% sure what makes the noise, but I have heard that it's the transformer vibrating. There's all kinds of rapidly changing electric fields, and likely a pretty massive part (chunk of metal) is vibrating around.
the mirror moves "more than a thousand times per second". Translation: this thing vibrates at approximately 1 KHz. That's probably not only audible, but it probably would cause a noticable vibration in your hand, too.
I doubt it. The mirrors probably have so little mass that there is no detectable physical vibration. Also, I presume that there is MEMS technology involved here, and those things are so small that the mechanical operations are not perceptable on the macro scale.
I could be wrong about this device (I don't know what's inside), but just because physical things are oscillating does not mean they shake around and buzz. Macro scale buzzing requires some serious inertia... atoms and molecules don't buzz:)
Slashdot Mirror
The big guy so far has been Lumileds , e.g. their Luxeon Star is one beast. I think it's now included in the headlight fixtures of some cars. No harm in having more competition, but those luxeon stars really would be tough to beat. Impressive engineering.
This should remind us as network admins why it's important to block access to known spamming/zombie IPs, as they are nothing but trouble. The compromised hosts are used to spam, conduct attacks, and steal information and resources. It's a major problem, do not expect this issue to go away as long as network security takes back seat to business and "convenience".
What if you find some old domain that used to get substantial mail traffic, but hasn't been used in like 5 years or something (expired). Spammers don't stop sending spam when addresses disappear (contrary to intuition), so if you purchased that domain you would start getting a huge amount of spam, using a wildcard. Also, it would be virtually guaranteed pure spam! Would be neat... anybody know of any old domains like this?
Honeypots are lurking all over the net... spammers don't have a chance. They are so indiscriminate and stupid with their harvesting that they are just announcing their presence through a digital loudspeaker, "I AM A SPAMMER".
There might even be some on slashdot! Who knows?!
Interpreting how much memory an application is using is somewhat difficult. Modern virtual memory operating systems page memory into both physical RAM and disk storage (swap, pagefile, whatever). Next, there are operating system features that try to preserve actual memory by not allocating real chunks of memory on an application's request, until that memory is really made use of. Finally, using some system GUI widgets etc can "increase" the amount of memory use as shown in Task Manager etc where really the memory use is within the OS, not the app.
:)
What this comes down to is: the figure you generally see for memory use of an app is not physical RAM use. It might not even reflect the actual amount of physical+disk memory in use! Finally, memory usage might be overstated due to transient external allocations (e.g. win32 API dialog boxes) that deceivingly appear as memory used by an application.
What you have to look for is how that memory usage figure changes over time. In most cases, it grows until it hits a ceiling - even at that point, it is way overstated (a conservative measure, so to speak). What is bad is if it regularly grows by 50 MB per day, without limit. Then there is a leak
Winamp, OTOH, has stayed nimble, acquired more features (like streaming video and media library) but without any detrimental effect on performance or stability. This is why Winamp is amazing and the developers are amazing. WinAmp is more stable than a llama suffering rigor mortis. I'm not impressed with iTunes because of its sluggishness and overcomplicated interface for doing something damn simple - playing an audio file or stream. Plus, iTunes and WM friends of mine aren't able to play my ogg vorbis streaming icecast station so I'm not too impressed by that either.
I have no problem with hunting, nor killing animals (mmmm... lamb!) but this guy's idea is just plain idiotic.
It's not a good idea because it poses a significant, and unusual, risk to human life and on top of that, it is going to remove the level of immediacy that is required to allocate legal responsibility for an action (i.e. shooting a gun) with a person (Joe Sixpack).
What if someone is out in the range adjusting some equipment, and the thing that was supposed to disconnect the Internet death trigger malfunctioned... I mean, is he planning on using an OS that is authorized for mission critical / life supporting systems? That won't be Windows or Linux, as you probably know.
The idea is just flawed. We as Engineers go to a lot of trouble to make systems that are safe for humans. This system poses unnecessary and probably significant risk to humans.
Anyway, what I'm trying to make a point of here is that hospitals are a last resort. Now, I think Patrick might need this. But one should be aware of the risk. Do you know that a bacterial outbreak currently plauging Quebec hospitals has killed more people than SARS in Canada? Hospitals are a dangerous place. But that's more an issue for the elderly or compromised immune systems.
Our only hope in case of an EMP (/nuclear). Vacuum tubes may be ugly and power hungry, but they are much more likely to withstand huge electromagnetic pulses (malicious or otherwise).
Do you consider yourself a capitalist? Do you respect your politicians and trust them to uphold the economic system that made us great? Bad news. Your politicians are failing you, they are using government control to hurt innovation, progress, and competition. Your elected politicians do not believe in the free market, they don't believe in capitalism, and they certainly don't value innovation.
Take as another example the music/video industries . They are being kept alive by the government, not by the market. In a free market economy, we would let them collapse without shedding a tear.
Except all small developers and inventors (IMHO, the backbone of technological innovation) might move to Asia, where they don't have to put up with American/European software patent crap. The patent worshippers can then stew in their stagnant, protectionist filth.
Yes, this is a very important point. On UNIX, my script does mount/unmount around the operation. Under Windows NT I have not figured out how to mount drives from the command line.
Hard drives don't fail at the same times. In my experience, drive failure has been due to the drive internals rather than some kind of giant electrical trauma frying everything inside the computer! Probability of one drive failing is quite low. Probability of two drives failing simultaneously is much, much lower.
Just use rsync to duplicate your local volume to another local, but independent hard disk. Easy enough to do on *NIX with cron, and on Windows use the rsync in cygwin on a scheduled task. Hard disks are cheap these days, and this method gives you a fully local time delayed duplicate (so you can recover deleted files).
Advantages to this method:
As it is, I wouldn't trust any company (including Google) with total spidering access to my local files, if there is any kind of a link out to the Internet. Here for the first time you are bridging your entire local contents with the greater "marketing" Internet out there.
And on top of it, Microsoft has shown us that they feel things that we know should be user level applications are instead hooked right into parts of the OS. I would definitely not install something like this, I think there would be too many possibilities for my sensitive data to escape where I don't want.
I currently use a local file searching tool, but I'm comfortable using it because it contains NO networking code. There is no way the local information can get to the Internet.
I could be wrong about this device (I don't know what's inside), but just because physical things are oscillating does not mean they shake around and buzz. Macro scale buzzing requires some serious inertia... atoms and molecules don't buzz