Great, I'm very happy for you, have you established that there is any rational reason to do this, or are you just confirming that people who talk about Spam a lot have lost all sense of proportion and should be ignored by the mainstream IT industry?
It's Host Europe, 217.199.x.x is one of their ranges. Do tell me what you find, I think you will discover that their reputation is pretty good, so the 'bitch slapping' was unnecessary and counterproductive.
If people want to block IP ranges, fine. That'll work until one of your corporate customers loses a major contract because he can't establish a reliable email connection to his potential customer, at which point you are one customer down, and possibly seeking career guidance.
I don't like spam, but I have to admit that the thought of someone seriously inconveniencing SPEWS doesn't upset me too much.
Our server ended up on their blacklist despite never having sent a spam, because someone else in the 16-bit IP range had. 16 bits, that's up to 65K machines with maybe half a million users...
Our machine is in a server park. Of course spammers operate from such places. The SPEWS argument that you block thousands of innocent users to get at one guilty one is just plain immoral, and, at least in my case, has the effect of making me opposed to any centralised anti-spam measures, whereas previously I would have been favourable.
If it ever happens again, I'll buy myself a clean SMTP server, or find another solution, but the one thing I'm never going to do is contact my ISP (who, incidentally, enforces a strict anti-spam policy), because I object on principle to being dictated to by people who treat my company's reputation as 'collateral damage' as part of their quixotic campaign.
As for the 'change ISP every three weeks' advice, that just isn't a viable option when you have a few dozen domains, many of them interacting with third party mail filtering, Exchange servers etc.
If SPEWS dropped that one policy of punishing the innocent in an attempt to get at the guilty, it would have my support. Until then, I expect SPEWS to continue to alienate the people who should be on the anti-spam campaign's side.
I don't have figures to back this up, but my impression is that the "Suse is European" thing is a bit simplistic. Just looking at the latest catalogue from a major German computer mail order company, also present in France, who edit several Linux magazines, and they offer a choice of Debian, Mandrake or Red Hat. No Suse. Sure, your average corporate customer isn't going to use that catalogue, but the widespread use of Red Hat in the US obviously adds to its appeal elsewhere, simply because of the tendency of third party programmers to test with RH rather than Suse. Our company switched from Suse to RH for exactly that reason: we just got fed up with messing around with sources when there was always a RH rpm available.
Absolutely. The GPL community has to get its story straight.
If the Open Source way of producing software is self-evidently going to produce better results, as we are repeatedly told, it doesn't actually matter much if a company nicks a bit and hides it in a proprietary product, as, by doing this, according to OS logic, they will immediately start to fall behind the OS fork of the code.
If that's what we believe, who cares about copyleft violation? If it isn't what we believe, can we please change our propaganda accordingly?
That sounds reasonable for the tax, but if the idea is to push people onto other energy sources, which currently cost more than oil, that has to reduce our standard of living, doesn't it, especially as energy costs affect the cost of just about everything? Actually, thinking about it, wouldn't one effect be to make imports more interesting, because of their cheaper energy (as opposed to their cheap labour)?
Surely the problem with all these wonderful schemes is that they involve a reduction in our standard of living, at least in the short and medium term, if only due to increased taxation, and there is little evidence that this is a vote-winning idea. Sure, we can blame the politicians, but if the electorate was begging for higher taxes on fuel, I suspect they would be happy to deliver.
For those who remember Acorn computers, their A5000 4 to 8 Mb upgrade has to rate as the most kludgy memory upgrade ever sanctioned by the manufacturer. I took my machine to a component-level dealer (a portacabin on four sets of bricks in a suburban back garden), and there were 3 people fitting these things. They took out the motherboard, put on the 4 layers of socket, wood, plastic, more socket, lined it all up carefully (the components on the motherboard apparently drifted by several mm), and then belted the thing with a huge rubber mallet.
You could make a shorter loop by posting the letters to yourself, and increase the packet size (DVD). But these are the kind of trivial implementational issues that are always thrown up by late-adopters in the face of a paradigm shift. If your office gets hit by lightning, chances are that your 40GB HD is a gonner, whereas in my system all your data will still be safe, providing the fire brigade let you put up a provisional post box.
Just burn a CD a day and post it to a non-existant address on the other side of the world. That way you can probably keep a terabyte of data int he air without taking any space in your office, and, unlike TCP/IP, you may be able to reuse the wrappers.
The solution, as in many other cases of antisocial behaviour, is to cut the revenue stream. Has legislation and armed intervention stopped the drugs trade?
So we need to reduce the return rate on spam to a point where it is no longer worth doing. If people stopped clicking on spam links the advertisers would stop using it.
Actually, it would be perfectly reasonable, and technologically possible AFAICS, for an ISP to share the cost of handling spam among those who click on the links. That way, whatever bandwidth is used is paid for, and, I suspect, most users would stop clicking on the links very very quickly. And if they don't, who cares, they are paying for the service they are using...
In any case, it isn't a question of making the user pay when he didn't before, the user pays now, whatever his behaviour wrt spam. Making people responsible for their actions is usually a good plan. At the end of the day, it is the link-clicker who pays the spammer, and I don't see why I should subsidise him.
Grep is OK, although personally I usually hang the clock cycles and use perl from the command line. But if all you want to do is, say, change the character encoding option somewhere from turkish to serbocroat, any menu solution will have done the job while you are still checking the hyphenation of the appropriate ISO name.
I'm getting a bit bored with this "my distos is cooler than yours" discussion every week, but I can't resist taking you up on the graphical tools thing.
I can do that stuff from the command line, and sometimes I do, but there are occasions where a graphical interface makes more sense, even if all it does is prepare and execute a command. GUIs are generally good for picking from a large and possibly dynamic list of options for example. Command line is good for tasks with a richer syntax, and it's good to have it there in all cases, but some things are easier to click on than to type correctly in full.
I did that, and the result is that half my applications don't run anymore unless I set the session language to American (even Perl seg faults, which is quite an achievement), and my server kernel panics every x times I try to mount a floppy disc. I think the latter problem is a dual processor kernel problem, but the point is that if I was running a mission-critical server rather than a cybercafe I would be reinstalling RH7, and if that wasn't supported I would be looking for another distro.
JPL and NASA use open source for alot of their work, if it is
good enough for them, it is good enough to build cars.
I have not problem at all with open source, it's the bit where an 18 year-old window cleaner designs his car on the web after a night of heavy drinking, 15 websites have a chat about the plans, program the robots, deliver the machine 2 weeks later, and someone insures it as roadworthy. I don't think that's how NASA designs space shuttles...
The problem: Discerning between.NET features that are available today in tools such as VisualStudio.NET, and those that remain concepts years from mainstream corporate adoption. "We're peeling back and taking a look and asking if the risk is worth the reward," says Lele, who adds he is still conducting due diligence on.NET.
In fact, I think it kinda makes you wonder what you would want to use.Net for. There are applications where half a dozen other solutions exist already, and there are ones like this which are just too scary to think about. Who is going to insure a car built this way?!
In fact, even the Gates example of printing to your local copy shop like you currently print to a local printer gives me the heebie geebies. I have enough trouble getting customers to take responsibility for pressing the print button when the paper comes out of a noisy printer in the corner of the room. Imagine the fun when it is in another block, and.Net is debiting the company credit card for you. "But I thought I had selected the local printer, and it didn't come out, so I just kept clicking, and now you say you can't pay my salary..."
From your comments, you seem to be suffering from the same misconception as whoever posted the article. Web accesibility is not in its infancy, it was strangled whilst learning to walk during Browser Wars, by a couple of greedy companies and a load of graphic designers, most of whom appear(ed) to know nothing about traditional publishing, let alone machine markup. What is happening now is Web Accessibility Reloaded.
If we want an Internet page description language, various options exist, including the newish SVG standard. But trying to force html into the role of Postscript just doesn't work. Leaving the blind and disabled to one side for a moment, how many websites even print properly with IE?
Legislation seems like a less than ideal way to get web designers to start behaving like professionals, but maybe it had to come to this. Multimedai implies that there is more than one medium, and websites should take this into account.
I think we've just jumped several threads sideways:
I know quite a lot about running flash and Java with linux. I've been doing it for 2 years in my cybercafe, and I think I've' done it just about every way possible, including crossover plugins, and went through all the 'flash 5 over remote X' problems step by step. But that wasn't the original question. The question was about the relative merits of XP and Linux on PII233s with 32Mb of RAM. Anyone tried running Flash and Java with Mozilla under X on such a system? If so, has it loaded yet?
Yes, I do occasionally produce my own documents in OO, but, as I said several times, I was talking about the experiences of my customers in a cybercafe. Now I know the/. solution would be to mail drop 10 million OO CDs, but, in the real world, 99% of the people who walk in with a disc in their hand have put.doc or.xls files on it, and expect it to work blind. Sorry, it's just the truth. And, in any case, the original point was actually that OO is so much better than the less bloaty OSS alternatives at doing this, but that it still isn't good enough. (BTW, I can show you plenty of documents that open in xpdf but not acroread or vice versa.)
I know every thread on/. has to turn into a piece of MS paranoia, but it does get boring. I've just bought a new server after 2 years because of the needs of Linux. I also have Windows 2000, which runs very nicely thank-you on the old hardware. Having set up a lot of old machines to run Linux, I reckon you need at least 192M of RAM to run a modern distro at anything like a useable speed. And I am willing to state as a matter of fact that using OO on any machine with less than 64Mb is all but impossible, and that even 128Mb is going to be extremely painful (ie 10-30 second delays on occasions). Sorry, but I don't think MS has anything to do with any of the above.
We weren't talking about schools, but, if we had been, I would have suggested our cybercafe solution, which is to use the old machines as diskless terminals running LTSP, connected to one fast server. I suspect that most schools can stretch to, say, one pretty standard spec machine per 80 keyboards. But telling schools that they can teach anything useful on standalone linux machines with 32Mb of RAM is just insane: if the kid clicks on the OO icon at 9am, he might get a window by lunchtime, assuming the old and flakey hard disc hasn't vaporised by then.
This "MS=bloaty, Linux = compact" myth has to go. To run XP plus Office sensibly, you need more or less the same spec machine as you need to run Redhat 9 plus some office apps sensibly, at least in processor and RAM terms. XP probably needs more disc space, but then disc space for new machines costs nothing at all, and a lot of machines that were delivered running W98 don't have a hard disc big enough for XP or RH9.
All of which is to say that there are lots of good reasons to run Linux, but I don't think you are describing any of them.
If your system has 64Mb of RAM, I simply don't believe that you can use OO on it. The binary alone takes most of that. I once installed SO 5.2 on a machine with 48Mb of RAM, and it thrashed the hard disc for 2 hours before I got an empty document.
I use OO on my laptop, a P233, and, as you say, it is slow but useable. But I do have 192Mb of RAM. And even Mozilla was pretty well unusable with less than 128Mb
Well, for that matter, I guess you could do it all from the command line. We're playing with an embedded Linux system that fits onto a 32Mb CF at the moment(see here). Very neat.
But I also run a cybercafe, which is a pretty good place to see what end users make of Linux, and your proposed setup wouldn't do it for most of them. There's no point connecting to the net nowadays unless you can run flash and java, and even OO doesn't keep up with all the fonts and layout quirks of Office well enough to be able to print, say, a 100-page dissertation blind without finding that half the page breaks are in the wrong place.
As it happens, our terminals are P200s, mostly with 32Mb of RAM, but the server they run off is a 2x2GHz monster with 1Gb of RAM, and 4 copies of Yahoo Billiards still slow it down. Our previous server, a mere 1GHz, regularly ground almost to a halt with 3 or 4 customers and a few badly behaved java applets.
The people with the old hardware tend to either be techies - in which case they can look after themselves - or very conservative end users, in which case the sort of solution you are describing often isn't appropriate.
I think that, increasingly, my tip would be "throw the old hardware in a skip and get a new PC".
Yes, for the client, but can you log the traffic centrally? I think a logging system that required each user to hand over the incriminating data at the end of each session would be considered inadequate, even in corporate America.
Have you tried running Open Office and KDE on that kind of spec machine? I reckon the hardware requirements to give sensible performance with a modern Linux release and OO are about the same as for XP.
It's not hard, it's just cheaper than putting your car on a Channel Ferry over the summer. I suspect his kids are flying over next week, with carbon miniwings, buckets and spades...
Here, for example? It's embedded Linux, you can buy it in a neat little box, or install it on vanilla hardware, and as well as doing the hotspot stuff you can use several together to build a mesh out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, I'm very happy for you, have you established that there is any rational reason to do this, or are you just confirming that people who talk about Spam a lot have lost all sense of proportion and should be ignored by the mainstream IT industry?
It's Host Europe, 217.199.x.x is one of their ranges. Do tell me what you find, I think you will discover that their reputation is pretty good, so the 'bitch slapping' was unnecessary and counterproductive.
If people want to block IP ranges, fine. That'll work until one of your corporate customers loses a major contract because he can't establish a reliable email connection to his potential customer, at which point you are one customer down, and possibly seeking career guidance.
I don't like spam, but I have to admit that the thought of someone seriously inconveniencing SPEWS doesn't upset me too much.
Our server ended up on their blacklist despite never having sent a spam, because someone else in the 16-bit IP range had. 16 bits, that's up to 65K machines with maybe half a million users...
Our machine is in a server park. Of course spammers operate from such places. The SPEWS argument that you block thousands of innocent users to get at one guilty one is just plain immoral, and, at least in my case, has the effect of making me opposed to any centralised anti-spam measures, whereas previously I would have been favourable.
If it ever happens again, I'll buy myself a clean SMTP server, or find another solution, but the one thing I'm never going to do is contact my ISP (who, incidentally, enforces a strict anti-spam policy), because I object on principle to being dictated to by people who treat my company's reputation as 'collateral damage' as part of their quixotic campaign.
As for the 'change ISP every three weeks' advice, that just isn't a viable option when you have a few dozen domains, many of them interacting with third party mail filtering, Exchange servers etc.
If SPEWS dropped that one policy of punishing the innocent in an attempt to get at the guilty, it would have my support. Until then, I expect SPEWS to continue to alienate the people who should be on the anti-spam campaign's side.
I don't have figures to back this up, but my impression is that the "Suse is European" thing is a bit simplistic. Just looking at the latest catalogue from a major German computer mail order company, also present in France, who edit several Linux magazines, and they offer a choice of Debian, Mandrake or Red Hat. No Suse. Sure, your average corporate customer isn't going to use that catalogue, but the widespread use of Red Hat in the US obviously adds to its appeal elsewhere, simply because of the tendency of third party programmers to test with RH rather than Suse. Our company switched from Suse to RH for exactly that reason: we just got fed up with messing around with sources when there was always a RH rpm available.
Absolutely. The GPL community has to get its story straight.
If the Open Source way of producing software is self-evidently going to produce better results, as we are repeatedly told, it doesn't actually matter much if a company nicks a bit and hides it in a proprietary product, as, by doing this, according to OS logic, they will immediately start to fall behind the OS fork of the code.
If that's what we believe, who cares about copyleft violation? If it isn't what we believe, can we please change our propaganda accordingly?
That sounds reasonable for the tax, but if the idea is to push people onto other energy sources, which currently cost more than oil, that has to reduce our standard of living, doesn't it, especially as energy costs affect the cost of just about everything? Actually, thinking about it, wouldn't one effect be to make imports more interesting, because of their cheaper energy (as opposed to their cheap labour)?
Surely the problem with all these wonderful schemes is that they involve a reduction in our standard of living, at least in the short and medium term, if only due to increased taxation, and there is little evidence that this is a vote-winning idea. Sure, we can blame the politicians, but if the electorate was begging for higher taxes on fuel, I suspect they would be happy to deliver.
It might produce buggy code, but it's certainly fast code.
If the bug involves a memory leak, as in this case, I guess that means that your server falls over faster than would otherwise be the case.
For those who remember Acorn computers, their A5000 4 to 8 Mb upgrade has to rate as the most kludgy memory upgrade ever sanctioned by the manufacturer. I took my machine to a component-level dealer (a portacabin on four sets of bricks in a suburban back garden), and there were 3 people fitting these things. They took out the motherboard, put on the 4 layers of socket, wood, plastic, more socket, lined it all up carefully (the components on the motherboard apparently drifted by several mm), and then belted the thing with a huge rubber mallet.
You could make a shorter loop by posting the letters to yourself, and increase the packet size (DVD). But these are the kind of trivial implementational issues that are always thrown up by late-adopters in the face of a paradigm shift. If your office gets hit by lightning, chances are that your 40GB HD is a gonner, whereas in my system all your data will still be safe, providing the fire brigade let you put up a provisional post box.
Just burn a CD a day and post it to a non-existant address on the other side of the world. That way you can probably keep a terabyte of data int he air without taking any space in your office, and, unlike TCP/IP, you may be able to reuse the wrappers.
The solution, as in many other cases of antisocial behaviour, is to cut the revenue stream. Has legislation and armed intervention stopped the drugs trade?
So we need to reduce the return rate on spam to a point where it is no longer worth doing. If people stopped clicking on spam links the advertisers would stop using it.
Actually, it would be perfectly reasonable, and technologically possible AFAICS, for an ISP to share the cost of handling spam among those who click on the links. That way, whatever bandwidth is used is paid for, and, I suspect, most users would stop clicking on the links very very quickly. And if they don't, who cares, they are paying for the service they are using...
In any case, it isn't a question of making the user pay when he didn't before, the user pays now, whatever his behaviour wrt spam. Making people responsible for their actions is usually a good plan. At the end of the day, it is the link-clicker who pays the spammer, and I don't see why I should subsidise him.
Grep is OK, although personally I usually hang the clock cycles and use perl from the command line. But if all you want to do is, say, change the character encoding option somewhere from turkish to serbocroat, any menu solution will have done the job while you are still checking the hyphenation of the appropriate ISO name.
I'm getting a bit bored with this "my distos is cooler than yours" discussion every week, but I can't resist taking you up on the graphical tools thing.
I can do that stuff from the command line, and sometimes I do, but there are occasions where a graphical interface makes more sense, even if all it does is prepare and execute a command. GUIs are generally good for picking from a large and possibly dynamic list of options for example. Command line is good for tasks with a richer syntax, and it's good to have it there in all cases, but some things are easier to click on than to type correctly in full.
Upgrade to 9.0
I did that, and the result is that half my applications don't run anymore unless I set the session language to American (even Perl seg faults, which is quite an achievement), and my server kernel panics every x times I try to mount a floppy disc. I think the latter problem is a dual processor kernel problem, but the point is that if I was running a mission-critical server rather than a cybercafe I would be reinstalling RH7, and if that wasn't supported I would be looking for another distro.
JPL and NASA use open source for alot of their work, if it is good enough for them, it is good enough to build cars .
I have not problem at all with open source, it's the bit where an 18 year-old window cleaner designs his car on the web after a night of heavy drinking, 15 websites have a chat about the plans, program the robots, deliver the machine 2 weeks later, and someone insures it as roadworthy. I don't think that's how NASA designs space shuttles...
I think that's a little unfair: see for example
In fact, I think it kinda makes you wonder what you would want to use .Net for. There are applications where half a dozen other solutions exist already, and there are ones like this which are just too scary to think about. Who is going to insure a car built this way?!
In fact, even the Gates example of printing to your local copy shop like you currently print to a local printer gives me the heebie geebies. I have enough trouble getting customers to take responsibility for pressing the print button when the paper comes out of a noisy printer in the corner of the room. Imagine the fun when it is in another block, and .Net is debiting the company credit card for you. "But I thought I had selected the local printer, and it didn't come out, so I just kept clicking, and now you say you can't pay my salary..."
From your comments, you seem to be suffering from the same misconception as whoever posted the article. Web accesibility is not in its infancy, it was strangled whilst learning to walk during Browser Wars, by a couple of greedy companies and a load of graphic designers, most of whom appear(ed) to know nothing about traditional publishing, let alone machine markup. What is happening now is Web Accessibility Reloaded.
If we want an Internet page description language, various options exist, including the newish SVG standard. But trying to force html into the role of Postscript just doesn't work. Leaving the blind and disabled to one side for a moment, how many websites even print properly with IE?
Legislation seems like a less than ideal way to get web designers to start behaving like professionals, but maybe it had to come to this. Multimedai implies that there is more than one medium, and websites should take this into account.
I think we've just jumped several threads sideways:
This "MS=bloaty, Linux = compact" myth has to go. To run XP plus Office sensibly, you need more or less the same spec machine as you need to run Redhat 9 plus some office apps sensibly, at least in processor and RAM terms. XP probably needs more disc space, but then disc space for new machines costs nothing at all, and a lot of machines that were delivered running W98 don't have a hard disc big enough for XP or RH9.
All of which is to say that there are lots of good reasons to run Linux, but I don't think you are describing any of them.
The start of this bit of the thread said
If your system has 64Mb of RAM, I simply don't believe that you can use OO on it. The binary alone takes most of that. I once installed SO 5.2 on a machine with 48Mb of RAM, and it thrashed the hard disc for 2 hours before I got an empty document.
I use OO on my laptop, a P233, and, as you say, it is slow but useable. But I do have 192Mb of RAM. And even Mozilla was pretty well unusable with less than 128Mb
Well, for that matter, I guess you could do it all from the command line. We're playing with an embedded Linux system that fits onto a 32Mb CF at the moment(see here). Very neat.
But I also run a cybercafe, which is a pretty good place to see what end users make of Linux, and your proposed setup wouldn't do it for most of them. There's no point connecting to the net nowadays unless you can run flash and java, and even OO doesn't keep up with all the fonts and layout quirks of Office well enough to be able to print, say, a 100-page dissertation blind without finding that half the page breaks are in the wrong place.
As it happens, our terminals are P200s, mostly with 32Mb of RAM, but the server they run off is a 2x2GHz monster with 1Gb of RAM, and 4 copies of Yahoo Billiards still slow it down. Our previous server, a mere 1GHz, regularly ground almost to a halt with 3 or 4 customers and a few badly behaved java applets.
The people with the old hardware tend to either be techies - in which case they can look after themselves - or very conservative end users, in which case the sort of solution you are describing often isn't appropriate.
I think that, increasingly, my tip would be "throw the old hardware in a skip and get a new PC".
Yes, for the client, but can you log the traffic centrally? I think a logging system that required each user to hand over the incriminating data at the end of each session would be considered inadequate, even in corporate America.
Have you tried running Open Office and KDE on that kind of spec machine? I reckon the hardware requirements to give sensible performance with a modern Linux release and OO are about the same as for XP.
It's not hard, it's just cheaper than putting your car on a Channel Ferry over the summer. I suspect his kids are flying over next week, with carbon miniwings, buckets and spades...
Here, for example? It's embedded Linux, you can buy it in a neat little box, or install it on vanilla hardware, and as well as doing the hotspot stuff you can use several together to build a mesh out of the box.