Thin clients. The OS runs on a server, the end user has a "dumb terminal" equivalent to connect.
I always thought AOL should have moved to this arrangement. They already had a user-locked interface, now if they could just introduce a platform that wasn't really a full-blown OS-driver computer, put applications like photo editors etc that grandma and grandkids want, et al.
THere's much more refining which could go into this idea, though. In the end, I see a reality of this. I'm not personally experienced with WebTV, but it seems like a similar approach.
In other news, the Dept of Father^H^H^H^H^H^HHomeland Security announced today that there would be no more public coverage of the Mt. St. Helens "incident" as any information on the effects of an eruption, especially the succeptibility of Americans to motlen rock, could be used in the future by terrorists.
MagicWB was/is a full Workbench replacement. Check it out here:
http://www.sasg.com/mwb/index.html
I only used it once on my '030/40MHz Amiga 500. I went back to Workbench. I understand it worked/s and looked/s much better on an AGA system. I have since moved on to a 4000 (sorrowfully only a 40MHz '040) and a 1200 (also only 40MHz '040,) so perhaps it will work and look better than the OS3.9 Workbench. But then, I seem to recall that OS3.9's WB has integrated in a lot of the same features.
In most cases I agree with this statement, you get what you pay for.
I have a Dell UltraSharp 19" LCD (1901, I believe.) Now, according to the rep with whom I spoke about changing my order to the 20" unit, this model is made by Samsung, while the 20" (non-UltraSharp at the time) is/was made by BenQ.
I decided to stick with the 19" supposedly Samsung modem, and I am VERY pleased with this unit, and I got it at a good price for the time.
Now, I *did* just get a STUPID deal on two 20.1" UltraSharps. My understanding from the guy was that the UltraSharp series is made by Samsung. Not so with the 20.1" I just got, according to the packing list which indicates BenQ. What is really unsettling to me is that EACH screen has stuck pixels: four on one and SIX on the other. They are all within the middle zone of the screen, and some are clustered together. I am *NOT* happy.
In conclusion, I got a great deal on a 19" Dell, and got a great monitor. I got a stupid deal on the 20.1" Dell, and *I* turned out to be stupid.:)
"Why is it the ISP's burden to accommodate this theft of services? Because it's only theft if it's stolen from _somebody_, and as an ISP in a competitive market, you'd rather spend the money to provide better quality services than lose customers to other ISPs, so that means it's stolen from _you_. "
Horseshit. That is along the same lines as the police department telling a hotel manager that he should bullet-proof the glass and walls in his establishment to help with the onslaught of drive-by shootings.
A stack of $250 2GHz Celerons is still money spent on a problem which should be stopped at the source. Fighting spam and viruses should not become a competitve-edge industry any more than fighting crime should be. The $250 spent on each machine is not advertising which will turn new customers; it is not increasing the features and usefulness of your product which will turn new customers. Instead we are having to purchase bigger and stronger wedges to keep people out who should not be entering in the first place. We have bought the locks, we lock them, and the intruders still try to get in... when does the burden shift?
In any argument, spam steals resources from the ISP which would normally be allocated for customer use. Even if spam only consumes a little more processing power or bandwidth than normal traffic, it is still an unwanted abuse of our purchased resource. If you look at the situation from the point of those who sell you the bandwidth in the first place, the money you have spent is really not for the bandwidth, or processing power, or storage, or whatever, the money has been spent for the ability to use the full resources. And when that ability has been lessened by incoming garbage, your ability has been reduced, the value of the purchased product has been reduced, and therefor the money you have spent goes down the toilet.
Next month, tally up all of the time you spend deleting spam and viruses, the amount of bandwidth spam and viruses uses in your pipe, and the cost of your anti-virus/anti-spam software, then call up your provider and tell them that you should not have to pay for xx% of your service because it was not useful data to you.
Even better is to try that on per-use providers, or telephone systems. While we are at it, the same should be done with pop-up ads, adware, in-page advertisements, etc. etc. etc...
No wait, call up your ISP and tell them that they should increase your mail box storage space because you get so much spam or viruses.
Nothing doing. We place too much burden on the end user to buy anti-spam software or services, and too much burden on the ISP to accomodate the massive amounts of garbade data coming into their systems. No. The burden should be on those who are unburdened by this scourge. If adequate punishments can be inflicted upon those who ignore the standard of neighborly etiquette, the problem will begin to disappear.
Several years back the local ISP for which I worked had a spammer force us to take our mail server down because his advertising bomb went off in our spool drive and completely filled it. It took a number of hours to manually clean it up, sift through logs to find and block the offender, and bring the server back on-line. Ask our business clients how much not having email available for several hours cost them. Just for illustration, that email was also only about 3k in size, but once it multiplied in the queue it consumed all 2GB of the spool.
More recently, the local ISP for which I often do admin work had to build three new incoming mail servers and purchase spam and virus filter software for each machine at the rate of at least $6000 ea. plus subscription. Without these machines, user mail spools were filling up with spam and viruses; the older the account the worse off it was. Ask these folks how much it costs.
I have seen spam perform the equivalent of DoS floods: causing servers to crash, filling up T1s, causing CPU loads on older but otherwise working machines to hit 98%, and more. I host a domain which sees 28,000 spams per week on average. We employ RBLs in our fight against spam, as well as blocking a number of countries known for delivering nothing legitimate to our servers.
We see the shit come from all directions. In one night I observed a spam run against a hosted domain attempt to deliver 5,821 messages -- all forensically identical -- in less than 100 seconds from roughly 15 sources.
Why should it be the burden of the ISP to provide extra bandwidth, CPU processing power, memory, and storage space just to accomodate what it clearly a theft of services? The dual 66MHz SPARC system that was running an ISP back in 1995 is still running, and in a normal environment handles incoming and outgoing email just fine. Without the introduction of a front-end server, or replacement altogether (money spent no matter how you look at it) the machine often ran at 75% load or more during times when historically it ran no more than 30%.
The attitude of "well, it's going to happen anyway, might as well deal with it" is garbage. Adopting such an attitude in the face of a hurricane, the forces of which cannot be stopped, is fully acceptable. But in the face of spam which should not exist in the first place, this attitude is comparable to rolling over and taking it right up the rectum rather than dealing with the source.
"I still don't care about anything other than "decent-sized ISPs." At this point, THEY are the ones that really matter, not mere enthusiasts who want to act bigger than they are."
And by doing so you have now limited the market to businesses, and added yet another obstacle to the very-small- to medium-sized operations such as local providers. Personally, I give two shits about the local geek who tries to deliver email directly from his ADSL connection (Direct-to-MX.)
"How many potential customers have been told by your customers that your company/ service sucks because tech support or customer service was unresponsive?"
I would like to answer this "None," and I solely base that on never having had a customer leave my services, and never hearing any such complaints from a customer. Since I am a two-man support business, I have the advantage of being able to work much more closely with my clients than a ticketing system. They call me or my assistant directly, or send us emails without the use of a C/R system. And since we do IT support and not training, we do not necessarily want to expend our resources on instrucion where another party should have, namely those who do not know how to properly use Big ISP's whiz-bang anti-spam system.
Your C/R system seems a lot more intuitive and transparent than the broken ones with which I have come into contact. In essense, I would never even know your system exists in the scenario I described. That works a helluva lot better.
And it still does not seem to provide any better means to tell the difference between a server and a user. No, individual users do not need certs, and you also ignore anything other than the "decent-sized ISP." I have worked with a number of business running close enough to the wire that $149, $59, even $29 raises hackles. Hell, there are some times that $5 raises my own hackles.
The balance can be struck without requiring even more of a monetary expendature to use Internet communications. ISPs could block port 25 from their dynamic customers or layer-switch it to their own SMTP servers. ISPs or IHPs which ignore abuses of outside networks (DoS, spam, etc.) could face stiffer penalties.
There are any number of technical resolutions at our disposal which preclude the need for a full standard redesign that would cost its users additional money.
At first glance, I would say because it requires expensive x509 certs signed by a trusted CA. Many people use self-signed certificates because a $29 cert IS too expensive. Even so, sometimes those $29 certs are not as recognized as the $149 Thawte cert. In any case, certificates can be obtained by spammers, so you wind up with authenticated spam.
SPF provides for a way to make sure the owner of a domain listed in the envelope from address permits the connecting server to deliver email on behalf of that domain. Unless I misread the draft, AMTP seems to rely wholy upon the conversation between the two servers, and a trivial rDNS/fDNS validation.
I would like to re-read the spec in a better frame of mind. In the meantime, if my initial analysis is incorrect, please correct me.
I have seen this comment pop up many times, but no one has yet to submit an operable recommendation on how SMTP could be updated to remain a user-to-server and server-to-server protocol without tossing the entire system and saying "nuts" to any semblence of remaining compatible. Therefore, this arguments seems completely flat.
The only partially useful modification is some form of authentication which would certify the origin of the SMTP connection. Just as I can telnet to a POP3 server and make it think I am a real POP3 client, an end user can make an SMTP server believe it is another server.
SPF offers a sleek way of authorizing what machines may deliver mail on behalf of a domain. I could trivialize it by comparing it to a domain owner-controlled authentication system for emails without requiring a central authentication repository or authority.
What is wrong with this implementation? Can you suggest a modification to SMTP that will acheive similar or better results? If not, then drop your argument, that stick, and step back from the dead horse.
postmaster.aol.com offers the "feedback loop" which will inform you of any reports of spam from your system. I have never had the chance to benefit from this, so I cannot personally comment on its usefulness. However, this is supposedly a pro-active way to ensure that such problems do not affect you.
Admitedly, I am normally not a big fan of such systems... why should I have to take the time to inform an ISP of my existence, intent to send email, etc., right? Well, in this case it makes sense since they are 1) giving me the benefit of the doubt at first, and 2) giving me a way to make sure that doubt never enters into our relationship. Quite useful, I think.
As an admin myself, I believe this is a useful tool to help find problems in your userbase before they become bigger problems.
Any time I get a C/R when replying to an email which solicited me in the first place, be it support or otherwise, I immediately delete the email and consider the case closed.
It comes down to knowing the system which you are using. If someone uses a C/R anti-spam system and cannot even be bother to use it correctly, then that person gets nothing in return. I am not spending my time chasing these people down. If and when said person calls, I just explain that I was not able to respond, and he or she needs to contact the ISP to determine the problem.
You cannot always blame these people, either. There are a number of cases where people refuse to become informed -- they just think it should work with no expendature of effort. But in many cases it is the fault of the ISP which provides whiz-bang services and not a drop of intelligent support, information, guidance, or some combination thereof.
I have read many times over that C/R systems are broken, brain-dead, and a Band-Aid approach to the problem. The more I encounter these systems and the people using them, the more I agree.
I had a similar, happy arrangement with the company for which I used to work a few years back. I was part of a two-man administrative team, with a support team of up to five people. I also single-handedly built up the on-site consulting arm of the business. I was almost completely autonomous in my work, so long as I produced and things continued to work, everyone was happy. Being a some-what supervisory position, I had pretty flexible hours, and reasonable access to our servers and Internet resources.
In exchange for practically unlimited run of the place, I was expected to be available in the event of emergencies. Which in many cases I was right on top of right before or immediately after something happened, mostly because I had a lot of personal investment (time, reputation, curiousity) in the setup anyway.
And it was a fun symbiotic relationship between myself, technology, and my managers.
Until one day the insufferable prick, micro-managing shyt-head supposedly VP of the company took exception to my sometimes showing up a couple of hours past business open, or leaving on a half day. Mind you, this might be after having spent 20 hours of the previous day at the office, or on a several days project, and NEVER leaving the office unoccupied or without coverage.
He insisted that I begin to log my hours to make sure I was conforming to a proper work day. I told him right then and there that if I did so, he would wind up paying me a LOT more money, and HR warned of potential problems from labor department over the question of over-time and no lunches. His insistance persisted, and I decided that it was time for me to go on salary.
Why? Simple. I went on salary and began working standard work days. I arrived at 9:00am, and left promptly at 6:00pm. Sometimes 8-5 instead. If a project needed to be completed the same day and 6:00 rolled around, I left whether done or not. I felt that my prior investments in the company had gone unappreciated and for naught, and without further reciprocation; if my bosses were so conerned about me abusing the company, why allow the company to abuse me?
And that was that. A happy IT worker who, on meager pay, ensured that a business was always functioning, even using his own spare time to help grow the business by adding personal experience and knowledge to become used by the company to expand services -- no more.
There were a lot more thing involved in this than JUST the surface things here... there were the constant abuses and unreasonable requirements of employees as well. Once this insufferable prick left, things got a lot better, but never fully recovered.
A number of people in upper-management will (and have) looked at this situation and called me a spoiled primadonna. So be it -- but my shit worked, and whenever it broke, it got fixed. In return I accepted very minimal pay relative to my peers in the industry, and only requested unobtrusive uses of server and network resources. It was never about the money until this jack ass made it that way.
As my own business grows, I look forward to being able to provide a open environment like that to my employees. Like at the old place, certain employees are well-suited to a strict 8-5/9-6 job, so I will have those roles filled nicely. But behind the scenes, the thinkers, tinkerers, and fanatical workers who maintain the framework will be happily accomodated in manners best fitting their investments.
Re:Those results are skewed because of Akamai
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 1
Horseshit, troll. Plenty of other sites use Akamai for CONTENT distribution to save bandwidth at their main sites. Have a look at Akamai's customer list sometime, especially take note of Yahoo!, which runs on some form of Unix.
Those results are skewed because of Akamai
on
Hardening Apache
·
· Score: 1
Already done. Bill G reads these forums, too. Next time you will keep your billion dollar idea quiet!
I think that is actually a pretty neat idea, though it would thoroughly suck in an off-line situation where you NEED those files. Or perhaps the device could have 512MB (or more) storage for the most used files, or a selectable list of files to stay local.
Dunno. I am not a marketter. But I can say that if there is any money to be gained from a service like this, someone will figure it out.
The only thing I can think of right off the top of my head is the search results page could have ads of some nature.
I am pretty much tapped out after that. I think, though, that the possibilities for revenue are just as great as the possibilities for use. The user just needs to be locked into some proprietary Google control, like what the search pages are.
Slashdot Mirror
Chess sets are next?
Thin clients. The OS runs on a server, the end user has a "dumb terminal" equivalent to connect.
I always thought AOL should have moved to this arrangement. They already had a user-locked interface, now if they could just introduce a platform that wasn't really a full-blown OS-driver computer, put applications like photo editors etc that grandma and grandkids want, et al.
THere's much more refining which could go into this idea, though. In the end, I see a reality of this. I'm not personally experienced with WebTV, but it seems like a similar approach.
if it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to undestand.
(I wish I could remember where I read that!)
Oh, and write lots of swear words in your closed source. That way if it's ever leaked people can say how unprofessional you are.
In other news, the Dept of Father^H^H^H^H^H^HHomeland Security announced today that there would be no more public coverage of the Mt. St. Helens "incident" as any information on the effects of an eruption, especially the succeptibility of Americans to motlen rock, could be used in the future by terrorists.
MagicWB was/is a full Workbench replacement. Check it out here:
http://www.sasg.com/mwb/index.html
I only used it once on my '030/40MHz Amiga 500. I went back to Workbench. I understand it worked/s and looked/s much better on an AGA system. I have since moved on to a 4000 (sorrowfully only a 40MHz '040) and a 1200 (also only 40MHz '040,) so perhaps it will work and look better than the OS3.9 Workbench. But then, I seem to recall that OS3.9's WB has integrated in a lot of the same features.
Could be worse... a bunch of us Amiga-zoids could start preaching about the release of OS4, and how AmigaOS could only get better in the next decade.
Now, please excuse me while I go cry a little...
Man, I am glad you said that. PHEW! I was trying to think of something to do with these, and BANG: you nailed it right on the head for me.
Wow. Your insight is incredible. Oh, man. $1500 right back in my pocket thanks to you. Where can I send your share??
</sardonicism>
In most cases I agree with this statement, you get what you pay for.
:)
I have a Dell UltraSharp 19" LCD (1901, I believe.) Now, according to the rep with whom I spoke about changing my order to the 20" unit, this model is made by Samsung, while the 20" (non-UltraSharp at the time) is/was made by BenQ.
I decided to stick with the 19" supposedly Samsung modem, and I am VERY pleased with this unit, and I got it at a good price for the time.
Now, I *did* just get a STUPID deal on two 20.1" UltraSharps. My understanding from the guy was that the UltraSharp series is made by Samsung. Not so with the 20.1" I just got, according to the packing list which indicates BenQ. What is really unsettling to me is that EACH screen has stuck pixels: four on one and SIX on the other. They are all within the middle zone of the screen, and some are clustered together. I am *NOT* happy.
In conclusion, I got a great deal on a 19" Dell, and got a great monitor. I got a stupid deal on the 20.1" Dell, and *I* turned out to be stupid.
"A camera, does this phone have? Yes! Movie messaging I can send to Jedi friends! Kick Dukoo's ass they can watch. Yes!"
"No, no wait... what I'm really doing is stealing from Network Solutions, since I'm not paying them $9/year to hide this information for me. "
Watch out! If someone up there at NSI reads this, they'll get an idea and send the cops knocking on your door for circumventing their service...
"Why is it the ISP's burden to accommodate this theft of services? Because it's only theft if it's stolen from _somebody_, and as an ISP in a competitive market, you'd rather spend the money to provide better quality services than lose customers to other ISPs, so that means it's stolen from _you_. "
Horseshit. That is along the same lines as the police department telling a hotel manager that he should bullet-proof the glass and walls in his establishment to help with the onslaught of drive-by shootings.
A stack of $250 2GHz Celerons is still money spent on a problem which should be stopped at the source. Fighting spam and viruses should not become a competitve-edge industry any more than fighting crime should be. The $250 spent on each machine is not advertising which will turn new customers; it is not increasing the features and usefulness of your product which will turn new customers. Instead we are having to purchase bigger and stronger wedges to keep people out who should not be entering in the first place. We have bought the locks, we lock them, and the intruders still try to get in... when does the burden shift?
In any argument, spam steals resources from the ISP which would normally be allocated for customer use. Even if spam only consumes a little more processing power or bandwidth than normal traffic, it is still an unwanted abuse of our purchased resource. If you look at the situation from the point of those who sell you the bandwidth in the first place, the money you have spent is really not for the bandwidth, or processing power, or storage, or whatever, the money has been spent for the ability to use the full resources. And when that ability has been lessened by incoming garbage, your ability has been reduced, the value of the purchased product has been reduced, and therefor the money you have spent goes down the toilet.
Next month, tally up all of the time you spend deleting spam and viruses, the amount of bandwidth spam and viruses uses in your pipe, and the cost of your anti-virus/anti-spam software, then call up your provider and tell them that you should not have to pay for xx% of your service because it was not useful data to you.
Even better is to try that on per-use providers, or telephone systems. While we are at it, the same should be done with pop-up ads, adware, in-page advertisements, etc. etc. etc...
No wait, call up your ISP and tell them that they should increase your mail box storage space because you get so much spam or viruses.
Nothing doing. We place too much burden on the end user to buy anti-spam software or services, and too much burden on the ISP to accomodate the massive amounts of garbade data coming into their systems. No. The burden should be on those who are unburdened by this scourge. If adequate punishments can be inflicted upon those who ignore the standard of neighborly etiquette, the problem will begin to disappear.
Several years back the local ISP for which I worked had a spammer force us to take our mail server down because his advertising bomb went off in our spool drive and completely filled it. It took a number of hours to manually clean it up, sift through logs to find and block the offender, and bring the server back on-line. Ask our business clients how much not having email available for several hours cost them. Just for illustration, that email was also only about 3k in size, but once it multiplied in the queue it consumed all 2GB of the spool.
More recently, the local ISP for which I often do admin work had to build three new incoming mail servers and purchase spam and virus filter software for each machine at the rate of at least $6000 ea. plus subscription. Without these machines, user mail spools were filling up with spam and viruses; the older the account the worse off it was. Ask these folks how much it costs.
I have seen spam perform the equivalent of DoS floods: causing servers to crash, filling up T1s, causing CPU loads on older but otherwise working machines to hit 98%, and more. I host a domain which sees 28,000 spams per week on average. We employ RBLs in our fight against spam, as well as blocking a number of countries known for delivering nothing legitimate to our servers.
We see the shit come from all directions. In one night I observed a spam run against a hosted domain attempt to deliver 5,821 messages -- all forensically identical -- in less than 100 seconds from roughly 15 sources.
Why should it be the burden of the ISP to provide extra bandwidth, CPU processing power, memory, and storage space just to accomodate what it clearly a theft of services? The dual 66MHz SPARC system that was running an ISP back in 1995 is still running, and in a normal environment handles incoming and outgoing email just fine. Without the introduction of a front-end server, or replacement altogether (money spent no matter how you look at it) the machine often ran at 75% load or more during times when historically it ran no more than 30%.
The attitude of "well, it's going to happen anyway, might as well deal with it" is garbage. Adopting such an attitude in the face of a hurricane, the forces of which cannot be stopped, is fully acceptable. But in the face of spam which should not exist in the first place, this attitude is comparable to rolling over and taking it right up the rectum rather than dealing with the source.
"I still don't care about anything other than "decent-sized ISPs." At this point, THEY are the ones that really matter, not mere enthusiasts who want to act bigger than they are."
And by doing so you have now limited the market to businesses, and added yet another obstacle to the very-small- to medium-sized operations such as local providers. Personally, I give two shits about the local geek who tries to deliver email directly from his ADSL connection (Direct-to-MX.)
"How many potential customers have been told by your customers that your company/ service sucks because tech support or customer service was unresponsive?"
I would like to answer this "None," and I solely base that on never having had a customer leave my services, and never hearing any such complaints from a customer. Since I am a two-man support business, I have the advantage of being able to work much more closely with my clients than a ticketing system. They call me or my assistant directly, or send us emails without the use of a C/R system. And since we do IT support and not training, we do not necessarily want to expend our resources on instrucion where another party should have, namely those who do not know how to properly use Big ISP's whiz-bang anti-spam system.
Your C/R system seems a lot more intuitive and transparent than the broken ones with which I have come into contact. In essense, I would never even know your system exists in the scenario I described. That works a helluva lot better.
And it still does not seem to provide any better means to tell the difference between a server and a user. No, individual users do not need certs, and you also ignore anything other than the "decent-sized ISP." I have worked with a number of business running close enough to the wire that $149, $59, even $29 raises hackles. Hell, there are some times that $5 raises my own hackles.
The balance can be struck without requiring even more of a monetary expendature to use Internet communications. ISPs could block port 25 from their dynamic customers or layer-switch it to their own SMTP servers. ISPs or IHPs which ignore abuses of outside networks (DoS, spam, etc.) could face stiffer penalties.
There are any number of technical resolutions at our disposal which preclude the need for a full standard redesign that would cost its users additional money.
At first glance, I would say because it requires expensive x509 certs signed by a trusted CA. Many people use self-signed certificates because a $29 cert IS too expensive. Even so, sometimes those $29 certs are not as recognized as the $149 Thawte cert. In any case, certificates can be obtained by spammers, so you wind up with authenticated spam.
SPF provides for a way to make sure the owner of a domain listed in the envelope from address permits the connecting server to deliver email on behalf of that domain. Unless I misread the draft, AMTP seems to rely wholy upon the conversation between the two servers, and a trivial rDNS/fDNS validation.
I would like to re-read the spec in a better frame of mind. In the meantime, if my initial analysis is incorrect, please correct me.
I have seen this comment pop up many times, but no one has yet to submit an operable recommendation on how SMTP could be updated to remain a user-to-server and server-to-server protocol without tossing the entire system and saying "nuts" to any semblence of remaining compatible. Therefore, this arguments seems completely flat.
The only partially useful modification is some form of authentication which would certify the origin of the SMTP connection. Just as I can telnet to a POP3 server and make it think I am a real POP3 client, an end user can make an SMTP server believe it is another server.
SPF offers a sleek way of authorizing what machines may deliver mail on behalf of a domain. I could trivialize it by comparing it to a domain owner-controlled authentication system for emails without requiring a central authentication repository or authority.
What is wrong with this implementation? Can you suggest a modification to SMTP that will acheive similar or better results? If not, then drop your argument, that stick, and step back from the dead horse.
postmaster.aol.com offers the "feedback loop" which will inform you of any reports of spam from your system. I have never had the chance to benefit from this, so I cannot personally comment on its usefulness. However, this is supposedly a pro-active way to ensure that such problems do not affect you.
Admitedly, I am normally not a big fan of such systems... why should I have to take the time to inform an ISP of my existence, intent to send email, etc., right? Well, in this case it makes sense since they are 1) giving me the benefit of the doubt at first, and 2) giving me a way to make sure that doubt never enters into our relationship. Quite useful, I think.
As an admin myself, I believe this is a useful tool to help find problems in your userbase before they become bigger problems.
Any time I get a C/R when replying to an email which solicited me in the first place, be it support or otherwise, I immediately delete the email and consider the case closed.
It comes down to knowing the system which you are using. If someone uses a C/R anti-spam system and cannot even be bother to use it correctly, then that person gets nothing in return. I am not spending my time chasing these people down. If and when said person calls, I just explain that I was not able to respond, and he or she needs to contact the ISP to determine the problem.
You cannot always blame these people, either. There are a number of cases where people refuse to become informed -- they just think it should work with no expendature of effort. But in many cases it is the fault of the ISP which provides whiz-bang services and not a drop of intelligent support, information, guidance, or some combination thereof.
I have read many times over that C/R systems are broken, brain-dead, and a Band-Aid approach to the problem. The more I encounter these systems and the people using them, the more I agree.
I had a similar, happy arrangement with the company for which I used to work a few years back. I was part of a two-man administrative team, with a support team of up to five people. I also single-handedly built up the on-site consulting arm of the business. I was almost completely autonomous in my work, so long as I produced and things continued to work, everyone was happy. Being a some-what supervisory position, I had pretty flexible hours, and reasonable access to our servers and Internet resources.
In exchange for practically unlimited run of the place, I was expected to be available in the event of emergencies. Which in many cases I was right on top of right before or immediately after something happened, mostly because I had a lot of personal investment (time, reputation, curiousity) in the setup anyway.
And it was a fun symbiotic relationship between myself, technology, and my managers.
Until one day the insufferable prick, micro-managing shyt-head supposedly VP of the company took exception to my sometimes showing up a couple of hours past business open, or leaving on a half day. Mind you, this might be after having spent 20 hours of the previous day at the office, or on a several days project, and NEVER leaving the office unoccupied or without coverage.
He insisted that I begin to log my hours to make sure I was conforming to a proper work day. I told him right then and there that if I did so, he would wind up paying me a LOT more money, and HR warned of potential problems from labor department over the question of over-time and no lunches. His insistance persisted, and I decided that it was time for me to go on salary.
Why? Simple. I went on salary and began working standard work days. I arrived at 9:00am, and left promptly at 6:00pm. Sometimes 8-5 instead. If a project needed to be completed the same day and 6:00 rolled around, I left whether done or not. I felt that my prior investments in the company had gone unappreciated and for naught, and without further reciprocation; if my bosses were so conerned about me abusing the company, why allow the company to abuse me?
And that was that. A happy IT worker who, on meager pay, ensured that a business was always functioning, even using his own spare time to help grow the business by adding personal experience and knowledge to become used by the company to expand services -- no more.
There were a lot more thing involved in this than JUST the surface things here... there were the constant abuses and unreasonable requirements of employees as well. Once this insufferable prick left, things got a lot better, but never fully recovered.
A number of people in upper-management will (and have) looked at this situation and called me a spoiled primadonna. So be it -- but my shit worked, and whenever it broke, it got fixed. In return I accepted very minimal pay relative to my peers in the industry, and only requested unobtrusive uses of server and network resources. It was never about the money until this jack ass made it that way.
As my own business grows, I look forward to being able to provide a open environment like that to my employees. Like at the old place, certain employees are well-suited to a strict 8-5/9-6 job, so I will have those roles filled nicely. But behind the scenes, the thinkers, tinkerers, and fanatical workers who maintain the framework will be happily accomodated in manners best fitting their investments.
Horseshit, troll. Plenty of other sites use Akamai for CONTENT distribution to save bandwidth at their main sites. Have a look at Akamai's customer list sometime, especially take note of Yahoo!, which runs on some form of Unix.
> nslookup autoupdate.microsoft.com
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: a1076.g.akamai.net
Addresses: 199.44.34.70, 199.44.34.68
Aliases: autoupdate.microsoft.com, codecs.microsoft.com
codecs.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net, codecs.windowsmedia.com.edgesuite.net
MS uses Akamai for distribution, Akamai runs Linux. Side note, thank $_DEITY that MS does not use Connexion any more. Holy dog crap they were SLOW!
Archie... I remember using that a few times. So long ago, and so many layers of crap since that I had just about forgotten.
Good question, though. I wonder if it does still exist.
Already done. Bill G reads these forums, too. Next time you will keep your billion dollar idea quiet!
I think that is actually a pretty neat idea, though it would thoroughly suck in an off-line situation where you NEED those files. Or perhaps the device could have 512MB (or more) storage for the most used files, or a selectable list of files to stay local.
hrmmmmmmm indeed.
Dunno. I am not a marketter. But I can say that if there is any money to be gained from a service like this, someone will figure it out.
The only thing I can think of right off the top of my head is the search results page could have ads of some nature.
I am pretty much tapped out after that. I think, though, that the possibilities for revenue are just as great as the possibilities for use. The user just needs to be locked into some proprietary Google control, like what the search pages are.