User: gafferted

Re:Before the arguing starts

On: HP Backs Off DMCA Threat

An "Anonymous Coward" writes:

Despite being legally treated as such, corporations are not singular entities.

Some corporations really will sit up and reform themselves if there is sufficient public outcry

You are Bruce Perins and I claim my five dollars.

Andrew

Suitable punnishment for spamming?

On: House OKs Life Sentences For Hackers

The spammers say: "Just hit delete"

If it takes each recipient an average of one second[1] to identify and delete a spam, then sending (60*60*24*365*70) = Two Thousand Million spams will consume a lifetime[2] of time[3] on the part of the recipients.

Could we convince the lawmakers that a life for a lifetime would be an appropriate punishment?

Andrew

[1]Some people read them, some scan them, some deal with them automagically, 1 second average is a guestimate.

[2]Three score years and ten. Seems like a reasonable number.

[3]Of course this ignores the waste of resource and collateral damage, such as an important email junked because it looked like spam or an importand email lost amongst the spam.

To many roads in?

On: Cameras in UK for Toll Enforcement

too many ways into London, can't put tolls on all of them

There are already security checkpoints on every route into the city (chicane, bollards, high mounted light and camera). Adding toll infrastructurewould be an incremental cost.

Andrew

Re:Abstract techno greats

On: Electronic Music 101?

Google Labs would suggest:

Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Plaid, Mu Ziq, Global Communication, Orbital, Jega, Orb, Biosphere, Polygon Window, Underworld, The Orb, KLF, Oval, Leftfield, Eat Static, Seefeel, Vangelis, Electric Company, Juno Reactor, System 7, Spacetime Continuum, DJ Spooky, Drum Club, O Rang, Ultramarine, Disjecta, Jonah Sharp, FFWD, Loop Guru, Vapourspace, 808 State, Air, Eminem, Tori Amos, Mogwai.

Re:Yes, you're dreaming.

On: Collateral Damage in the Spam War

About one in 100 [...] people in the general population is a psychopath.

So why are there never enough psychopaths to assasinate the spammers?

365 days to a year

On: Isn't it Time for Metric Time?

The poster complains: 365 days to a year

I think that perhaps, he underestimates the difficulty involved in slowing the planet down to 100 revolutions per orbit.

Andrew

Worst keyboard?

On: A Selective History Of The Keyboard

Was there ever a keyboard worse than the one that Compaq did with the space-bar split in half, where one half was backspace?

Compiler that can't add

On: Pet Bugs?

My favorite was a C compiler on CP/M back in the 80's which had difficulty adding. The test was:

Start with 0

Add -0.1 gives -0.1

Add -0.1 gives -0.2

Add 0.1 gives -0.1

Add 0.1 gives -0 (note the negative!)

Add 15 gives 12 (?!)

It was in the mid-80's. Sorry I can't remember which C compiler.

How much capacity is 57,000 songs?

On: A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive

How much capacity is required for a song?

• 2Mb? -> 111Gb
• 2.5Mb? -> 139Gb
• 3Mb? -> 167Gb
• 3.5Mb? -> 195Gb
• 4Mb? -> 223Gb

Is there some standard sized song that I don't know about?

Andrew

Slashdotted?

On: What's It Like to be Google's Boss Techie?

Can I have a prize for slashdotting google?

Rackmount cases?

On: Choosing a Good Case

Towers are ugly, even with windows and blue lights.

Would any of the case-mod folk like to get involved in the rackmount game?

Howabout a *nice* 19" rack?

Or puting as much attention and care into rackmount cases?

Andrew

What should be on the ISP CD?

On: What Software Should ISPs Distribute and Support?

As already discussed to death, everyone already has everything that they need to connect and use the net.

So the ISP CD should be have content, not applications.

Help your customers. Fill it with porn.

Paperless PHB

On: The Myth of the Paperless Office

I used to have a boss who couldn't quite grasp the paperless office concept.

When he got an email, he would print it out, then scan it, so that he could store the image in a document management system.

Informing AltaVista engineers about problems

On: Google's Weakness, AltaVista's Strength

In fact, I sometimes was able to alert the engineers at AltaVista about problems before they had noticed them themselves.

Alas, they can no longer be reached. Their search engine is seriously broken. It picks on a site and hits it hard and repeatedly.

They will make 100,000 requests on a site with only 20,000 static items within 24 hours. On our co-operative co-loacted server, we host around 80 sites, many of which are content rich. When Alta Vista choose to visit just one of them, our total bandwidth usage jumps by an order of magnitude.

We have been unable to get past their front line support, I am not prepared to maintain robots.txt on all of our member's sites just to control their broken robot, so we had no alternative but to block their entire subnet at our firewall.

If anyone has evidence that the AV robot is fixed, I'd be happy to let them back in.