Do you think you can get everyone to change into a new email protocol when you cant even get them to patch and configure their servers?
Yeah, remember that time Tim Berners-Lee and those guys at CERN wanted everybody to use that hyper-ftp protocol of theirs? I forget the exact name, "Hyper File Transport Protocol (HFTP)" or something. You had to reformat your data to use something called "Hyper File Markup Language" that was supposed to allow device neutral data display or something.
Sure ftp has its drawbacks, but it works well enough and does everything you need, and besides there's no way -- as those guys at CERN demonstrated -- you'll get people in the real world to abandon a proven technology like ftp, and reformat all their data in a markup language, for some academic's idea of an "InterWeb".
If you were suggesting a vast, global conspiracy of physicists has organized itself to fraudulently claim the existance of a particle which is of interest mostly only to them- then I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.
Yeah, that's simply ridiculous. That would be like positing a world-wide organization of people who proclaimed, and attempted to convince their followers to believe in, the existence of a ghost in the sky who created and controls the entire universe.
In the systems (I am not sure if it is only in advanced systems), there is a requirement for actual sweat to run into the machine
I hope Joey Slowy, the illiterate and not-so-bright thief with the crack habit and the carving knife, is fully apprised of the safeguards in place to prevent him from using my severd thumb, before it occurs to him that my thumb is the answer to his temporary lack of his preferred illegal intoxicant.
Be so good as to travel to the local homeless encampment, interrupt his crack-induced reveries, and inform him so, will you?
Plus, the real person they call will likely bitch them out (because it is a cold call). Hey, they might even be on the Do Not Call list.
And, unless you're the one who is answering the phone, you're morally no different than the spammer.
Slightly more moral: give the phone number of a telephone solicitor. Then everyone is happy: the telephone solicitor gets to try to sell long distance service (or whatever) to the mortgage broker, and the mortgage broker gets to inquire whether the telephone solicitor wants a second mortgage.
Or maybe it's more like putting two scorpians in a shoe box.
Realise that it's an automated near-instant process for the spammer to submit leads and days/weeks/months of worker-hours of doing followups to discover there's a lot of bad leads.
Well, not necessarily. The trick is to craft "leads" that are obviously bogus to a human at the mortgage company, but aren't easily filtered by a machine.
What makes this especially interesting is that, in other words, it's precisely like creatng spam designed to get around spam filters.
With names that are obviously bogus to people, but mot machine, the bogus "lead" is either
sent to the mortgage company, which realizes immediately that the "lead" leads nowhere, and pretty soon that too many of the spammer's leads are bogus;
or, you make the spammer himself weed out the bogus "leads" so as to keep the mortgage company as a client.
The mortgage company (or the spammer, if he's weeding) will quickly realize that "Felix Thecat" and "Kiss M'Ass" are bogus. "Heywood Jablowme" might get by a weeder, but won't last too long at the mortgage ccompany. "Gloria Mundi" probably gets several calls before somebody at the mortgage company remembers high school Latin or a Roman Catholic upbringing.
While a dictionary of first names will allow some machine weeding, could a 95% coverage of last names be built? What percent coverage of last names is needed to keep a mortgage spammer from being dumped by the mortgage spammer? What's the distribution of last names? Help me out, Slashdot.
Results 1-15 of about 1136552 containing "freebsd"
Results 1-15 of about 341343 containing "openbsd"
# Results 1-15 of about 40 containing "mysql"
It is official; MSN confirms: MySQL is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MySQL community when MSN confirmed that MySQL market share has dropped yet again, now to ZERO PERCENT of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MySQL has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MySQL is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MySQL's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MySQL faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MySQL because MySQL is dying. Things are looking very bad for MySQL. As many of us are already aware, MySQL continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
don't expect him to give away the details that you would expect in a CS class
Let me quibble with you a bit.
There are no details to "give away". The knowledge isn't a secret.
I'm reminded of Robert Heinlein's book Starman Jones, where guilds, using Intellectual Property laws, had made all scientific and technical knowledge proprietary (much as guilds did in the Middle Ages).
Fortunately, in our world, we are moving away from that model. Scientific and technical knowledge is available to anyone with the tenacity and aptitude to learn it.
Certainly, all the knowledge to be learned in an introductory Computer Science course is available -- free -- on the web. For other disciplines, there's still the cost of $100 textbooks -- but more and more free alternatives are becoming available.
the venerable Project Gutenberg offers e-texts of public domain books
The University of Pennsylvania complements Gutenberg with the Online Books Page
and numerous other authors, universities, and organizations are jumping on the bandwagon
And that's not even mentioning all the free and open software (even a whole OS!) out there to use as examples.
What's lacking is not the knowledge, or the software; what's lacking are tutors able to explain the tough bits, smooth the rough bits, and challenge their students to make the knowledge their own. Somebody to demonstrate adding a node to a linked list to the puzzled; someone to review the basic math for those of us (like me) who got a bit intimidated by Big O notation. that's the next problem, and the problem I want to address.
But the knowledge is a click away -- and no Sphinx is guarding any "secrets".
We came to the conclusion that the wild herd doesn't pay for stuff...and then proceed to suggest that he offer what is basically a college CS course for free.
Good point.
I suppose I could counter with "Doesn't he use any open source software? Think of the course as giving back for the kernel" or something, but that would be disingenuous.
But I do have an idea about payment.
Unfortunately, my idea won't put any money in his pocket. (No, it doesn't involve collecting underpants, either.)
It's more a pay it forward type idea: train people, and then send them forth to train others.
It's a good model for accelerating a meme, but perhaps too envangelistic for the Intellectual Property world.
I'd like to set up some form of co-operative education, where small and easily learned skills (not as complex as what our OP proposes to teach) are taught to small groups, with each learner undertaking to teach another small class to pay his "tuition".
I think there are some advantages to this model, not the least being that the best way to learn something -- to really learn it and make it part of yourself -- is to teach it.
There are some problems with it too, but I've got a sketch of some ideas to overcome of the obvious problems.
Of course, it's not a new idea: it's how cults have always spread. The question is, can it propel mundane learning as well as it propels sacred ideas.
But it's not really a payment scheme. It won't pay the grocery bill.
I ponder if we made a list of oh say 'n' of these if the typical/.er would read them.... We came to the conclusion that the wild herd [on Slashdot]... generally thinks that education is mostly worthless.... If I were working this space (putting my teaching hat back on) I'd cover:....
So put your money (time is money) where your mouth is.
Seriously. Email one of the Slashdot editors, get a section called "Slashdot Tells", and post your first lecture, along with assigned reading.
Let the/. "wild herd" post questions and comments, and let them moderate up the ten or fifteen most important questions for your perusal.
Come back the next week, post your answers and your next lecture, and let those who can demonstrate mastery of your earlier lecture and the assigned reading go through the cycle again.
I'll take part in whatever you care to teach, and I'd wager you'd get a core group who would follow the lecture series through.
Use a free e-text (such as the MIT open courseware), or some GFDL book, as your text.
What's in it for you? Well, teaching is the best way to learn (or re-learn). Keeps the mind supple. Not to mention the satisfaction of passing on what you know.
And telling your collegues you've learned to herd cats.
[Lovely geek fanatasy that ends with the geek's ability to provide tech support getting him laid:] "I noticed your tag got hacked, need some help? Can I buy you a drink?".
As I said in my parent post, to which you so helpfully replied: "[o]nce again, text messaging [and] imagination" is where the geek gets his satisfaction.
Thanks for your excellent example of the geek tendency to seek solace in his text messaged (or in this case posted) imagination!
But I actually like the idea, if you goto a bar and are looking for a 1 night stand the device can automatically hook you up with another person, or if you're walking down the street and have your device set to lonely it can alert other people to your presence and make some new friends.
Or more likely, a gaggle of cute girls get the alert on their badges and play "spot the pathethic geek". Then they all point at "Mr. Lonely and I want a One-Night Stand" and point and giggle. The bolder of them make obscene gestures and mockingly grind their hips.
Geek-boy slinks out of the bar, his face burning in shame -- yet again -- and returns home to Mom's basement for some IRC. Because on IRC, "he" is buff, still has all his hair, and doesn't have the spare tire around his middle. Once again, text messaging, imagination, and his right hand are a better deal for geek-boy.
It's only a matter of time before these sorts of badges are cheap enough to become everyday-use items. Imagine wearing a smart badge when you go out on the town, that tells other badges what you're looking for
Imagine wearing a smart badge that tells the local authorities you're on John Ashcroft's watch list for complaining about RFID tags on Slashdot.
Seriously, Slashdot gets up in arms about RFID and privacy, and now we want to shell out "$40 to $100 per badge per day" to make it trivially easy to track us at even longer ranges than the humble RFID tag?
Whatever else the badge is transmitting -- "hey babeee, I'm a lonely geek with a big 401K" --, it's also transmitting an ID number that can be linked back to you.
Anybody remember that big wooden horse the Greeks gave as a gift to the Trojans? Maybe it had one of these badges too.
Never before have I seen a Slashdot article with so many underage Slashdotters commenting and giving their ages.
I'm sure the submitter is a real father with the best of intentions, but I also can't help thinking that if a pederast wanted to troll for forbidden Slashdot fruits, he hardly could have crafted a better lure than this Ask Slashdot.
If you're worried about sticky keyboards and such, do this. If male, provide condoms. If female, I don't know what would work, I don't know that anatomy personally.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually SCO will have no clothes left and die of exposure.
I think most of us came long ago to the conclusion that Emperor Darl has no clothes.
Do you think you can get everyone to change into a new email protocol when you cant even get them to patch and configure their servers?
Yeah, remember that time Tim Berners-Lee and those guys at CERN wanted everybody to use that hyper-ftp protocol of theirs? I forget the exact name, "Hyper File Transport Protocol (HFTP)" or something. You had to reformat your data to use something called "Hyper File Markup Language" that was supposed to allow device neutral data display or something.
Sure ftp has its drawbacks, but it works well enough and does everything you need, and besides there's no way -- as those guys at CERN demonstrated -- you'll get people in the real world to abandon a proven technology like ftp, and reformat all their data in a markup language, for some academic's idea of an "InterWeb".
1 b4n63d my h34d 0n 4 c0mpu73r 4nd n0w 4|| my 4cc3n7 4r3 Pwn3d |1k3 7h15.
If you were suggesting a vast, global conspiracy of physicists has organized itself to fraudulently claim the existance of a particle which is of interest mostly only to them- then I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.
Yeah, that's simply ridiculous. That would be like positing a world-wide organization of people who proclaimed, and attempted to convince their followers to believe in, the existence of a ghost in the sky who created and controls the entire universe.
I guess you'd think that organization secured for its leaders influence over politics and broadcasting and political leaders. You might even think that this organization has its own country, and a leader who claims infallible knowledge of morality.
Clearly, if you believe such a conspiracy exists, you need to adjust your tin-foil hat.
In the systems (I am not sure if it is only in advanced systems), there is a requirement for actual sweat to run into the machine
I hope Joey Slowy, the illiterate and not-so-bright thief with the crack habit and the carving knife, is fully apprised of the safeguards in place to prevent him from using my severd thumb, before it occurs to him that my thumb is the answer to his temporary lack of his preferred illegal intoxicant.
Be so good as to travel to the local homeless encampment, interrupt his crack-induced reveries, and inform him so, will you?
Slightly more moral: give the phone number of a telephone solicitor. Then everyone is happy: the telephone solicitor gets to try to sell long distance service (or whatever) to the mortgage broker, and the mortgage broker gets to inquire whether the telephone solicitor wants a second mortgage.
Or maybe it's more like putting two scorpians in a shoe box.
Eh, whatever.
Well, not necessarily. The trick is to craft "leads" that are obviously bogus to a human at the mortgage company, but aren't easily filtered by a machine.
What makes this especially interesting is that, in other words, it's precisely like creatng spam designed to get around spam filters.
With names that are obviously bogus to people, but mot machine, the bogus "lead" is either
- sent to the mortgage company, which realizes immediately that the "lead" leads nowhere, and pretty soon that too many of the spammer's leads are bogus;
- or, you make the spammer himself weed out the bogus "leads" so as to keep the mortgage company as a client.
The mortgage company (or the spammer, if he's weeding) will quickly realize that "Felix Thecat" and "Kiss M'Ass" are bogus. "Heywood Jablowme" might get by a weeder, but won't last too long at the mortgage ccompany. "Gloria Mundi" probably gets several calls before somebody at the mortgage company remembers high school Latin or a Roman Catholic upbringing.While a dictionary of first names will allow some machine weeding, could a 95% coverage of last names be built? What percent coverage of last names is needed to keep a mortgage spammer from being dumped by the mortgage spammer? What's the distribution of last names? Help me out, Slashdot.
fr1st ps0t
by Anonymous Coward on 19:13 Monday 17 November 2003 (#7497894)
w00t!!!!!
I'm replying to this in hopes of "attacking [Anonymous Coward's] business model" by drowning him in responses.
If just 1% of Slashdotters would do this, "first posts" would be worth... wait a minute. Nevermind.
The article sux0r5, and so does the author, MIKE WENDLAND!
MIKE WENDLAND, I've got embarrassing pictures of you!
And I know where you work, MIKE WENDLAND!
I'll be watching to see if you write any more of your "columns", MIKE WENDLAND!
Yeah, don't you forget it MIKE WENDLAND. I'll be watching every Monday and Friday, and alternate Tuesdays and Thurdays.
Let's get this out of the way.
Can it scan for, uh, backdoors and block abnormally widened orifices?
And yes, it's a goatse link. You know what's behind that link. Restrain yourself and don't click.
This has got to be the first time I've heard the number 8898833 called "about 16".
It's true for sufficiently large values of "16".
- Results 1-15 of about 1136552 containing "freebsd"
- Results 1-15 of about 341343 containing "openbsd"
- # Results 1-15 of about 40 containing "mysql"
It is official; MSN confirms: MySQL is dying.One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MySQL community when MSN confirmed that MySQL market share has dropped yet again, now to ZERO PERCENT of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MySQL has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MySQL is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MySQL's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MySQL faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MySQL because MySQL is dying. Things are looking very bad for MySQL. As many of us are already aware, MySQL continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let me quibble with you a bit.
There are no details to "give away". The knowledge isn't a secret.
I'm reminded of Robert Heinlein's book Starman Jones, where guilds, using Intellectual Property laws, had made all scientific and technical knowledge proprietary (much as guilds did in the Middle Ages).
Fortunately, in our world, we are moving away from that model. Scientific and technical knowledge is available to anyone with the tenacity and aptitude to learn it.
Certainly, all the knowledge to be learned in an introductory Computer Science course is available -- free -- on the web. For other disciplines, there's still the cost of $100 textbooks -- but more and more free alternatives are becoming available.
- The Wikipedia project has spun off the Wikibooks, the free textbook project.
- MIT offers the OpenCourseWare initiative
- the venerable Project Gutenberg offers e-texts of public domain books
- The University of Pennsylvania complements Gutenberg with the Online Books Page
- and numerous other authors, universities, and organizations are jumping on the bandwagon
And that's not even mentioning all the free and open software (even a whole OS!) out there to use as examples.What's lacking is not the knowledge, or the software; what's lacking are tutors able to explain the tough bits, smooth the rough bits, and challenge their students to make the knowledge their own. Somebody to demonstrate adding a node to a linked list to the puzzled; someone to review the basic math for those of us (like me) who got a bit intimidated by Big O notation. that's the next problem, and the problem I want to address.
But the knowledge is a click away -- and no Sphinx is guarding any "secrets".
How is this funny? It seems like everyday is "Give Mod Points to Idiots" day on Slashdot.
Mod parent up!
The idiot.
Travel the world for two years, or space ghost desk.
Hundred dollar hooker everyday for a year, and a big orgy at Christmas time with the $3495.00 left over.
Oh wait. Maybe I missed the spirit of the parent post.
You forgot to quote
...and then proceed to suggest that he offer what is basically a college CS course for free.
We came to the conclusion that the wild herd doesn't pay for stuff
Good point.
I suppose I could counter with "Doesn't he use any open source software? Think of the course as giving back for the kernel" or something, but that would be disingenuous.
But I do have an idea about payment.
Unfortunately, my idea won't put any money in his pocket. (No, it doesn't involve collecting underpants, either.)
It's more a pay it forward type idea: train people, and then send them forth to train others.
It's a good model for accelerating a meme, but perhaps too envangelistic for the Intellectual Property world.
I'd like to set up some form of co-operative education, where small and easily learned skills (not as complex as what our OP proposes to teach) are taught to small groups, with each learner undertaking to teach another small class to pay his "tuition".
I think there are some advantages to this model, not the least being that the best way to learn something -- to really learn it and make it part of yourself -- is to teach it.
There are some problems with it too, but I've got a sketch of some ideas to overcome of the obvious problems.
Of course, it's not a new idea: it's how cults have always spread. The question is, can it propel mundane learning as well as it propels sacred ideas.
But it's not really a payment scheme. It won't pay the grocery bill.
Maybe we should sell tickets?
I ponder if we made a list of oh say 'n' of these if the typical /.er would read them....
/. "wild herd" post questions and comments, and let them moderate up the ten or fifteen most important questions for your perusal.
We came to the conclusion that the wild herd [on Slashdot]... generally thinks that education is mostly worthless....
If I were working this space (putting my teaching hat back on) I'd cover:....
So put your money (time is money) where your mouth is.
Seriously. Email one of the Slashdot editors, get a section called "Slashdot Tells", and post your first lecture, along with assigned reading.
Let the
Come back the next week, post your answers and your next lecture, and let those who can demonstrate mastery of your earlier lecture and the assigned reading go through the cycle again.
I'll take part in whatever you care to teach, and I'd wager you'd get a core group who would follow the lecture series through.
Use a free e-text (such as the MIT open courseware), or some GFDL book, as your text.
What's in it for you? Well, teaching is the best way to learn (or re-learn). Keeps the mind supple. Not to mention the satisfaction of passing on what you know.
And telling your collegues you've learned to herd cats.
[Lovely geek fanatasy that ends with the geek's ability to provide tech support getting him laid:] "I noticed your tag got hacked, need some help? Can I buy you a drink?".
As I said in my parent post, to which you so helpfully replied: "[o]nce again, text messaging [and] imagination" is where the geek gets his satisfaction.
Thanks for your excellent example of the geek tendency to seek solace in his text messaged (or in this case posted) imagination!
The loud, twitchy, obnoxious, guy everyone is trying to stay away from
Ah, what our British cousins call "the nutter on the bus". Try to arrange your seating so he doesn't sit by you and talk you up the entire trip.
But I actually like the idea, if you goto a bar and are looking for a 1 night stand the device can automatically hook you up with another person, or if you're walking down the street and have your device set to lonely it can alert other people to your presence and make some new friends.
Or more likely, a gaggle of cute girls get the alert on their badges and play "spot the pathethic geek". Then they all point at "Mr. Lonely and I want a One-Night Stand" and point and giggle. The bolder of them make obscene gestures and mockingly grind their hips.
Geek-boy slinks out of the bar, his face burning in shame -- yet again -- and returns home to Mom's basement for some IRC. Because on IRC, "he" is buff, still has all his hair, and doesn't have the spare tire around his middle. Once again, text messaging, imagination, and his right hand are a better deal for geek-boy.
It's only a matter of time before these sorts of badges are cheap enough to become everyday-use items. Imagine wearing a smart badge when you go out on the town, that tells other badges what you're looking for
Imagine wearing a smart badge that tells the local authorities you're on John Ashcroft's watch list for complaining about RFID tags on Slashdot.
Seriously, Slashdot gets up in arms about RFID and privacy, and now we want to shell out "$40 to $100 per badge per day" to make it trivially easy to track us at even longer ranges than the humble RFID tag?
Whatever else the badge is transmitting -- "hey babeee, I'm a lonely geek with a big 401K" --, it's also transmitting an ID number that can be linked back to you.
Anybody remember that big wooden horse the Greeks gave as a gift to the Trojans? Maybe it had one of these badges too.
Never before have I seen a Slashdot article with so many underage Slashdotters commenting and giving their ages.
I'm sure the submitter is a real father with the best of intentions, but I also can't help thinking that if a pederast wanted to troll for forbidden Slashdot fruits, he hardly could have crafted a better lure than this Ask Slashdot.
ornography is addictive, as much so as many drugs....
I have ten children.
Apparently the real thing's pretty addictive too, huh?
If you're worried about sticky keyboards and such, do this. If male, provide condoms. If female, I don't know what would work, I don't know that anatomy personally.
Finally, an honest Slashdotter!
it's the thought of kids looking at a midget and a trans-sexual fucking a donkey in the ass that disturbs most parents.
I agree! That's very very disturbing. Nobody should be looking at that stuff.
Uh, what exactly is the url to that midget transexual donkey-butt fucker? So, um, I can block it in my kids' browsers, of course.