The load time of IE6 is irrelevant. It's a nearly 8-year old browser, service packs notwithstanding. Lynx starts up faster than just about anything, but you don't see people bringing it up, because it doesn't belong in this discussion.
Apart from the fact that Windows Mobile has had album art and gapless playback (then again, it only had the latter if the stack and hardware was set up correctly) even before the iPhone hype existed.
Of course, the rest of the Windows Mobile media player need a fair bit of work, but it was hardly a leading edge feature unless you came from an earlier generation iPod.
That more or less proves Apple's case, though. They got the fundamentals right first with the iPod, and added the fluff afterward. Interestingly, this is the complete opposite of what they're normally accused of doing.
Not that I really care about whether one commenter takes me seriously, but you raise an interesting point.
I can only assume by this that you're referring to the way that PHP's creators insist that they're adhering to function over form, stealing and borrowing ideas from other languages and APIs, and often exposing the functions of the underlying libraries without modification.
I guess all I can really say to that is that when you take that approach to an extreme, then you're left with nothing approaching a programming language at all.
I can only speak to the reasons for going with PHP and JAVA in our company. For one, PHP is really maturing as a development language, JAVA is well supported, and maybe over the years I kept running into some of that poorly designed PERL and it left a bad taste.
I keep hearing this comment about PHP, but every time I look at the language I come away unimpressed. A typical PHP install can have as many as 4000 functions in the global namespace, and there's not even a clear naming convention to be found.
Really: addcslashes, count_chars, str_getcsv, str_shuffle, strlen, chunk_split -- this is just a small selection of the functions dealing with strings.
A brief aside: I used to live near Pittsburgh, PA. It's a great city, with great people. But it has bridges. LOTS of bridges. 446, to be exact. More bridges than Venice, Italy. I used to joke that it was like we built a small town at the center of three rivers when rivers were a primary means of transporting goods, then were taken completely by surprise when it grew.
I only mention this because that's kind of how I think of PHP. A good community, with a ton of nice people who have nothing but the best of intentions. Yet, when I compare PHP to something like Perl or Ruby, I always come away feeling like PHP just kept tossing up bridges as it grew, without taking a step back and looking at the big picture.
There's an error in the quote from this story. The Codex Sinaiticus doesn't have any post-resurrection stories, but it does mention the resurrection. It ends at Mark 16:8, but just two verses prior in 16:6-7 we have:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.' "
MySpace, though, is the anti-thesis of government. It's about freedom. People don't necessarily realize that, but that's the end result from allowing people to freely communicate, gather and entertain.
You may want to find a new line of reasoning. I think that argument is more likely to turn someone against freedom than it is to win someone over to MySpace.
You misunderstood my comment. I was referring to the presentation of WiFi as an alternative to the nonexistent support of 3G in the existing iPhone being a stall tactic.
Of course WiFi is extremely relevant for use in the enterprise, on corporate LANs/WANs, as a substitute for a bulkier tablet PC that doctors could carry in their coat pocket in a hospital, etc. The question asked was specifically "Now, if such large areas in the US can't justify 3G then how could they justify WiFi as an alternative?" I was simply looking to establish that it isn't a real alternative to 3G support for the consumer market on the basis of coverage area, but was being used to stall for time to address that issue (in the consumer segment). That has no relevance to WiFi's long-term viability for the platform as a whole.
If you look at a coverage map, you'll see those areas you just listed are covered quite well.
I realize it's quite tempting for people inside the US and out to play these kind of one-upsmanship games, but let's not assume that market forces aren't working here the same way they work everywhere. I'm not sure if that was sarcasm about the Greenland coverage, but according to the only coverage map I could find, there's no "densely populated area" with that little coverage. If there was a way to expand coverage with the types of efficiency enjoyed by geographically smaller areas, we'd be doing the same.
They can't. That was a stall tactic by Apple to be able to give users very good performance in some limited situations while waiting on the 3G chips with lower battery drain to come out. I love my iPhone, but I'm not about to claim Apple really expected WiFi to be the primary network access method any time in the near future. But it sure does improve tech demos.
Most providers do offer it in major metropolitan areas. AT&T Wireless, the carrier for the iPhone, for instance, shows their data coverage here. A subset of these areas supports 3G, as shown here. It's pretty easy to take a look at the data map, though, and get a feel for where there is population density that supports the rollout of the tech. If you go here you can see a similar coverage map for Verizon Wireless -- click "Broadband & V CAST" and look at the dark blue areas.
what a lot of North American (like myself) readers don't seem to understand is that while we just got 3G services and phones rolled out within the last 2 years by the likes of Sprint, Verizon, etc., here in the States, abroad, they've had 3G for quite sometime and are completely spoiled by it. In the EU, any smartphone that's not 3G is immediately destined for failure, especially since they're already rolling out '3.5G' and '4G' in Europe, while we think 3G is the newest thing, Europe is already moving on. What a lot of North American readers (like yourself) don't seem to understand is that the population density in the countries where 3G coverage is widespread justifies that widespread deployment of 3G technology by giving companies a speedier return on their investment.
Such is the case for most of the connectivity technologies that see more rapid adoption overseas. There are large areas of the USA that are simply not densely populated enough to justify the expense of rolling out cutting-edge networks there. It isn't a matter of the US simply being behind the technological curve, as some like to assume.
Pardon the PHB nature of this next statement, but these are the types of differences that turn a 3 year ROI into a 10 year ROI, and slow down adoption.
Not interested in entering the article's debate, really, but I think the whole 1 day vs 1,000 years thing is intended to try to explain the irrelevance of time to an entity that exists outside of, but can enact change within, the dimension of time.
You're right, of course, about Perl not having been developed from the ground up for db-driven websites... But then again, if I wanted to pick nits, I could say neither was PHP (at least not the first time around)... It was designed to be used in Personal Home Pages, for counters and stuff...
Of course, later, they did redesign it from the ground up, and decide to make PHP stand for something different and much more impressive-sounding, but still... I guess my point is that few languages were designed to do terribly specific things from the ground up, because to do so limits their usefulness as a programming language to specific areas. Rewrites happen when focus is deemed necessary. PHP has had one, and I'm sure Perl will too with version 6.0.
To paraphrase the Apple Jacks commercial: Use what you like!:) --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
I'm a big fan of the show, but I'm sure no disrespect was meant by the guy's posting the question without a reference to where he got it from... In fact, this is a very common discussion in philosophical circles, and it wasn't like the people that brought us Dark Angel were the first to come up with the thought.
Why do I get the feeling I'm just feeding a troll... --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Correct me if I'm wrong though -- I'm genuinely curious, because I'm considering picking one of these babies up just to brush up on Solaris on its native platform... We have several Sun boxes, and during bootup they report having PC100 RAM (50ns)....
So, all you're really paying for with vendor-supplied RAM is the assurance it will work from the vendor, right? THere's no proprietary modification to the system that specifically prevents it from running with standard DIMMs, right? --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
As the author, I have to admit I dropped the ball on that... the session timeouts will make this fairly difficult to pull off unless you can be watching a webserver's logs at the time a user reads a boobytrapped mail and hijack the session before the user logs out or a timeout expires, though.
With all due respect, though, if you read the code and found a bug and didn't report it, then shame on you. That's the whole point of open source, isn't it?
Like I said though, still, a mistake on my part.. Bugs happen. I was much more focused on validating input to avoid server compromises than someone reading someone else's mail... I do my best to think deviously when coding, to catch stuff people may try, but something slipped by my radar because I got tunnel vision.
Feel free to fire off an e-mail to me to discuss this further, though. I'm interested in hearing what about my code makes you think it's so awful, because it had one bug. I'm only human, ya know. You've gotta tell me when I screw up!:) --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
...the real problem would lie in establishing relationships between articles to group them in this memespace (as I'd call it), not coming up with the coordinate system described here.
I know of no way for an algorithm to examine a post's content and reliably (this is key) assign it values to place it at given coordinates in memespace. Keyword-based systems will be fooled, and further, if a site gained Slashdot-like popularity,, there'd be a segment of your userbase that delighted in making a game of fooling recognition algorithms, like the ones who battle lameness filters now.
While a user's input can be trusted to map his/her own location in memespace, they cannot be trusted to (through moderation or voting on comments) alter the position of posts in memespace, because public opinon will again be the governing force on what gets placed where (assuming that each post starts its life at the dead center of the memespace).
This tide can be fought a bit by applying some sort of gradiated "honor" weight to user's ratings based on other's opinions, but you're really only making small changes overall in how this works, much the way metamoderation only removes the source of bias by a second degree, and meta-meta--moderation would only do so slightly more,etc.
I know, I'm offering no solutions here, just a discussion of some of the problems sure to be encountered, but hopefully it's helpful nonetheless. The real issue at stake is that there is NO net-wide notoriety system. I can't honestly advocate such a thing, as I appreciate the necessity of anonymity in the current landscape of the 'net. However, until a user's actions on a single website actually affect what people think of them on a much broader scale, people will not stop acting irresponsibly on some forums, leading multiple lives and being thought of differently at every 'net community they visit. I don't even know that they should, just thinking out loud here. --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Gotta go with you on this one... Too many people inherently freak out when they hear suid. It got so bad for me for a while that I had to put a special section on my software's homepage addressing precisely this question. --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that since their own personal download time for spam messages is next to nothing in comparison to regular browsing traffic, it can't be costing them much.
As a sysadmin for an ISP, I'd have to disagree. Spam in general raises operating costs quite a bit, ad that's what a customer's bill pays for. What users aren't thinking about is that it isn't just a few users that get spammed. Let's say a mid-sized ISP, with maybe 40,000 customers, suffers a spam attack in which 50% of their customers receive a 5k e-mail. You're looking at almost 100 MB of traffic generated by just one spammer in a short period of time.
This isn't the worst of it, though. It used to be that spammers used lists of valid e-mail addresses to send their spam from... Now, going by what I've seen lately on our mail servers, spammers have taken up what I've coined as "shotgun spamming." They fire off e-mails alphabetically, from multiple sources simultaneously, choosing common last names and pairing them up with first initials, first names with last initials, etc, knowing full well that the bulk of their mail won't get anywhere, but be bounced back. During such an attack it is not uncommon for a server to get hammered with several thousand messages a minute assuming the hardware can handle it without deferring connections. By the time the attack is over, a server will have received somewhere along the lines of 100,000 to 200,000 messages.
The problem that makes this sort of spamming worse: MTAs will attempt to send a bounce message back to the sender if an address doesn't exist on a given server. The spammers know this, and don't want to catch all that traffic themselves, so guess what? They use an address that doesn't exist as well, causing the attacking server to bounce the bounce message our victim server sends right back again. This is known as a double bounce, and once it occurs, the message does finally die... But let's look at what damage has been done:
Using the hypothetical ISP outlined above, let's assume a fairly small attack of 100,000 5 kilobyte messages, of which 50% of the 40,000 customers end up receiving a mail... This results in the aforementioned 100 MB of traffic, and leaves us with 80,000 bounce messages to send. These bounces generally include the contents of the original message plus some additonal text describing the problem, so they'll be a little larger than 5k, but we'll ignore that.
Now, we've got another 400MB of traffic in bounce messages to send, to which we'll get another 400MB of double-bounces in reply. This results in 900MB (that's bytes, not bits, for hose of you counting at home) of total traffic from one such salvo of spam, not counting the endless amount of resends on each side since both servers will likely be deferring acceptance of messages by about halfway through, causing a buildup in each server queue and wasting HD space to boot. This is a fairly tame example.
I personally spent an entire week recently monitoring the mail queue of a mail server being shotgun spammed ("TURNKEY E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS"), and shutting down acceptance of messages from their sources -- It was disgusting to see the Net's lowest life form next to child pornographers (spammers) sink to a new low in their tactics. Automated spam-blocking tools can't fully alleviate this problem, no matter how well designed. Heck, even non-automated attempts can't. As I was shutting down acceptance from one relaying machine, another would pop up and start spamming, taking the place of the one just blocked... It was like trying to fight a DDoS being done through SMTP!
Anyway -- in short, spam will cost you, not matter who you are. I'd recommend http://www.cauce.org for more information on this issue. --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Nope, Jerry O'Connell he isn't... I don't know the actor's name off the top of my head, but he played Jimmy on TV's "Lois & Clark." --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
The domain isn't what's being disputed, it's the trademark. You're precisely right in the statement you made about domain name usage, though.:) --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Remember, I'm not opposed to someone who rightfully deserves the NeoMail name getting it, I'm opposed to the injustice being done by NeoPets. When I did my checking back in Feb., these guys had some korean/chinese site, and that was it, as best I could find. I wasn't 100% sure at the time what was being offered as I couldn't read the language, but since they weren't based in the US (and still aren't) and didn't have an international trademark pending, I felt pretty safe assuming there'd be no conflict between us. Still, if they were to get it because they had used it in the US first, or some international common law I'm unaware of kicked in, I'd have no problem with it, as it'd be rightfully theirs. --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
I'd have to agree with you, I don't think the OS itself is all that slow... I think people do, however, perceive it that way. Sun is interested in keeping a certain level of purity in their codebase, as best I can tell.
When I was first feeling my way around Solaris for instance, I was shocked to find out that there were apps I'd grown accustomed to having that weren't in the default PATH. Only after feeling my way around for a while did I even notice that a good portion of the "missing" binaries were in/usr/ucb or/usr/5bin.
They're serious about making sure stuff that's "not invented here" is given due credit by being segregated into its own directory. I think because of this they use some older or less efficient versions of programs (grep comes to mind, as the version that ships with Solaris is horrendously slow, even running on Enterprise servers) and this is what elicits that public opinion of the OS. The OS is not slow, some of the apps that come with it however could be a bit more snappy. --
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Slashdot Mirror
The load time of IE6 is irrelevant. It's a nearly 8-year old browser, service packs notwithstanding. Lynx starts up faster than just about anything, but you don't see people bringing it up, because it doesn't belong in this discussion.
Apart from the fact that Windows Mobile has had album art and gapless playback (then again, it only had the latter if the stack and hardware was set up correctly) even before the iPhone hype existed.
Of course, the rest of the Windows Mobile media player need a fair bit of work, but it was hardly a leading edge feature unless you came from an earlier generation iPod.
That more or less proves Apple's case, though. They got the fundamentals right first with the iPod, and added the fluff afterward. Interestingly, this is the complete opposite of what they're normally accused of doing.
Not that I really care about whether one commenter takes me seriously, but you raise an interesting point.
I can only assume by this that you're referring to the way that PHP's creators insist that they're adhering to function over form, stealing and borrowing ideas from other languages and APIs, and often exposing the functions of the underlying libraries without modification.
I guess all I can really say to that is that when you take that approach to an extreme, then you're left with nothing approaching a programming language at all.
Heheh, nice. ;)
I can only speak to the reasons for going with PHP and JAVA in our company. For one, PHP is really maturing as a development language, JAVA is well supported, and maybe over the years I kept running into some of that poorly designed PERL and it left a bad taste.
I keep hearing this comment about PHP, but every time I look at the language I come away unimpressed. A typical PHP install can have as many as 4000 functions in the global namespace, and there's not even a clear naming convention to be found.
Really: addcslashes, count_chars, str_getcsv, str_shuffle, strlen, chunk_split -- this is just a small selection of the functions dealing with strings.
A brief aside: I used to live near Pittsburgh, PA. It's a great city, with great people. But it has bridges. LOTS of bridges. 446, to be exact. More bridges than Venice, Italy. I used to joke that it was like we built a small town at the center of three rivers when rivers were a primary means of transporting goods, then were taken completely by surprise when it grew.
I only mention this because that's kind of how I think of PHP. A good community, with a ton of nice people who have nothing but the best of intentions. Yet, when I compare PHP to something like Perl or Ruby, I always come away feeling like PHP just kept tossing up bridges as it grew, without taking a step back and looking at the big picture.
There's an error in the quote from this story. The Codex Sinaiticus doesn't have any post-resurrection stories, but it does mention the resurrection. It ends at Mark 16:8, but just two verses prior in 16:6-7 we have:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.' "
MySpace, though, is the anti-thesis of government. It's about freedom. People don't necessarily realize that, but that's the end result from allowing people to freely communicate, gather and entertain.
You may want to find a new line of reasoning. I think that argument is more likely to turn someone against freedom than it is to win someone over to MySpace.You misunderstood my comment. I was referring to the presentation of WiFi as an alternative to the nonexistent support of 3G in the existing iPhone being a stall tactic.
Of course WiFi is extremely relevant for use in the enterprise, on corporate LANs/WANs, as a substitute for a bulkier tablet PC that doctors could carry in their coat pocket in a hospital, etc. The question asked was specifically "Now, if such large areas in the US can't justify 3G then how could they justify WiFi as an alternative?" I was simply looking to establish that it isn't a real alternative to 3G support for the consumer market on the basis of coverage area, but was being used to stall for time to address that issue (in the consumer segment). That has no relevance to WiFi's long-term viability for the platform as a whole.
If you look at a coverage map, you'll see those areas you just listed are covered quite well.
I realize it's quite tempting for people inside the US and out to play these kind of one-upsmanship games, but let's not assume that market forces aren't working here the same way they work everywhere. I'm not sure if that was sarcasm about the Greenland coverage, but according to the only coverage map I could find, there's no "densely populated area" with that little coverage. If there was a way to expand coverage with the types of efficiency enjoyed by geographically smaller areas, we'd be doing the same.
They can't. That was a stall tactic by Apple to be able to give users very good performance in some limited situations while waiting on the 3G chips with lower battery drain to come out. I love my iPhone, but I'm not about to claim Apple really expected WiFi to be the primary network access method any time in the near future. But it sure does improve tech demos.
Most providers do offer it in major metropolitan areas. AT&T Wireless, the carrier for the iPhone, for instance, shows their data coverage here. A subset of these areas supports 3G, as shown here. It's pretty easy to take a look at the data map, though, and get a feel for where there is population density that supports the rollout of the tech. If you go here you can see a similar coverage map for Verizon Wireless -- click "Broadband & V CAST" and look at the dark blue areas.
Such is the case for most of the connectivity technologies that see more rapid adoption overseas. There are large areas of the USA that are simply not densely populated enough to justify the expense of rolling out cutting-edge networks there. It isn't a matter of the US simply being behind the technological curve, as some like to assume.
Pardon the PHB nature of this next statement, but these are the types of differences that turn a 3 year ROI into a 10 year ROI, and slow down adoption.
Not interested in entering the article's debate, really, but I think the whole 1 day vs 1,000 years thing is intended to try to explain the irrelevance of time to an entity that exists outside of, but can enact change within, the dimension of time.
You're right, of course, about Perl not having been developed from the ground up for db-driven websites... But then again, if I wanted to pick nits, I could say neither was PHP (at least not the first time around)... It was designed to be used in Personal Home Pages, for counters and stuff...
:)
Of course, later, they did redesign it from the ground up, and decide to make PHP stand for something different and much more impressive-sounding, but still... I guess my point is that few languages were designed to do terribly specific things from the ground up, because to do so limits their usefulness as a programming language to specific areas. Rewrites happen when focus is deemed necessary. PHP has had one, and I'm sure Perl will too with version 6.0.
To paraphrase the Apple Jacks commercial: Use what you like!
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
I'm a big fan of the show, but I'm sure no disrespect was meant by the guy's posting the question without a reference to where he got it from... In fact, this is a very common discussion in philosophical circles, and it wasn't like the people that brought us Dark Angel were the first to come up with the thought.
Why do I get the feeling I'm just feeding a troll...
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Correct me if I'm wrong though -- I'm genuinely curious, because I'm considering picking one of these babies up just to brush up on Solaris on its native platform... We have several Sun boxes, and during bootup they report having PC100 RAM (50ns).... So, all you're really paying for with vendor-supplied RAM is the assurance it will work from the vendor, right? THere's no proprietary modification to the system that specifically prevents it from running with standard DIMMs, right?
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
As the author, I have to admit I dropped the ball on that... the session timeouts will make this fairly difficult to pull off unless you can be watching a webserver's logs at the time a user reads a boobytrapped mail and hijack the session before the user logs out or a timeout expires, though.
:)
With all due respect, though, if you read the code and found a bug and didn't report it, then shame on you. That's the whole point of open source, isn't it?
Like I said though, still, a mistake on my part.. Bugs happen. I was much more focused on validating input to avoid server compromises than someone reading someone else's mail... I do my best to think deviously when coding, to catch stuff people may try, but something slipped by my radar because I got tunnel vision.
Feel free to fire off an e-mail to me to discuss this further, though. I'm interested in hearing what about my code makes you think it's so awful, because it had one bug. I'm only human, ya know. You've gotta tell me when I screw up!
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
...the real problem would lie in establishing relationships between articles to group them in this memespace (as I'd call it), not coming up with the coordinate system described here.
I know of no way for an algorithm to examine a post's content and reliably (this is key) assign it values to place it at given coordinates in memespace. Keyword-based systems will be fooled, and further, if a site gained Slashdot-like popularity,, there'd be a segment of your userbase that delighted in making a game of fooling recognition algorithms, like the ones who battle lameness filters now.
While a user's input can be trusted to map his/her own location in memespace, they cannot be trusted to (through moderation or voting on comments) alter the position of posts in memespace, because public opinon will again be the governing force on what gets placed where (assuming that each post starts its life at the dead center of the memespace).
This tide can be fought a bit by applying some sort of gradiated "honor" weight to user's ratings based on other's opinions, but you're really only making small changes overall in how this works, much the way metamoderation only removes the source of bias by a second degree, and meta-meta--moderation would only do so slightly more,etc.
I know, I'm offering no solutions here, just a discussion of some of the problems sure to be encountered, but hopefully it's helpful nonetheless. The real issue at stake is that there is NO net-wide notoriety system. I can't honestly advocate such a thing, as I appreciate the necessity of anonymity in the current landscape of the 'net. However, until a user's actions on a single website actually affect what people think of them on a much broader scale, people will not stop acting irresponsibly on some forums, leading multiple lives and being thought of differently at every 'net community they visit. I don't even know that they should, just thinking out loud here.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Gotta go with you on this one... Too many people inherently freak out when they hear suid. It got so bad for me for a while that I had to put a special section on my software's homepage addressing precisely this question.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Hi all,
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that since their own personal download time for spam messages is next to nothing in comparison to regular browsing traffic, it can't be costing them much.
As a sysadmin for an ISP, I'd have to disagree. Spam in general raises operating costs quite a bit, ad that's what a customer's bill pays for. What users aren't thinking about is that it isn't just a few users that get spammed. Let's say a mid-sized ISP, with maybe 40,000 customers, suffers a spam attack in which 50% of their customers receive a 5k e-mail. You're looking at almost 100 MB of traffic generated by just one spammer in a short period of time.
This isn't the worst of it, though. It used to be that spammers used lists of valid e-mail addresses to send their spam from... Now, going by what I've seen lately on our mail servers, spammers have taken up what I've coined as "shotgun spamming." They fire off e-mails alphabetically, from multiple sources simultaneously, choosing common last names and pairing them up with first initials, first names with last initials, etc, knowing full well that the bulk of their mail won't get anywhere, but be bounced back. During such an attack it is not uncommon for a server to get hammered with several thousand messages a minute assuming the hardware can handle it without deferring connections. By the time the attack is over, a server will have received somewhere along the lines of 100,000 to 200,000 messages.
The problem that makes this sort of spamming worse: MTAs will attempt to send a bounce message back to the sender if an address doesn't exist on a given server. The spammers know this, and don't want to catch all that traffic themselves, so guess what? They use an address that doesn't exist as well, causing the attacking server to bounce the bounce message our victim server sends right back again. This is known as a double bounce, and once it occurs, the message does finally die... But let's look at what damage has been done:
Using the hypothetical ISP outlined above, let's assume a fairly small attack of 100,000 5 kilobyte messages, of which 50% of the 40,000 customers end up receiving a mail... This results in the aforementioned 100 MB of traffic, and leaves us with 80,000 bounce messages to send. These bounces generally include the contents of the original message plus some additonal text describing the problem, so they'll be a little larger than 5k, but we'll ignore that.
Now, we've got another 400MB of traffic in bounce messages to send, to which we'll get another 400MB of double-bounces in reply. This results in 900MB (that's bytes, not bits, for hose of you counting at home) of total traffic from one such salvo of spam, not counting the endless amount of resends on each side since both servers will likely be deferring acceptance of messages by about halfway through, causing a buildup in each server queue and wasting HD space to boot. This is a fairly tame example.
I personally spent an entire week recently monitoring the mail queue of a mail server being shotgun spammed ("TURNKEY E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS"), and shutting down acceptance of messages from their sources -- It was disgusting to see the Net's lowest life form next to child pornographers (spammers) sink to a new low in their tactics. Automated spam-blocking tools can't fully alleviate this problem, no matter how well designed. Heck, even non-automated attempts can't. As I was shutting down acceptance from one relaying machine, another would pop up and start spamming, taking the place of the one just blocked... It was like trying to fight a DDoS being done through SMTP!
Anyway -- in short, spam will cost you, not matter who you are. I'd recommend http://www.cauce.org for more information on this issue.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Nope, Jerry O'Connell he isn't... I don't know the actor's name off the top of my head, but he played Jimmy on TV's "Lois & Clark."
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
The domain isn't what's being disputed, it's the trademark. You're precisely right in the statement you made about domain name usage, though. :)
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Remember, I'm not opposed to someone who rightfully deserves the NeoMail name getting it, I'm opposed to the injustice being done by NeoPets. When I did my checking back in Feb., these guys had some korean/chinese site, and that was it, as best I could find. I wasn't 100% sure at the time what was being offered as I couldn't read the language, but since they weren't based in the US (and still aren't) and didn't have an international trademark pending, I felt pretty safe assuming there'd be no conflict between us. Still, if they were to get it because they had used it in the US first, or some international common law I'm unaware of kicked in, I'd have no problem with it, as it'd be rightfully theirs.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
I'd have to agree with you, I don't think the OS itself is all that slow... I think people do, however, perceive it that way. Sun is interested in keeping a certain level of purity in their codebase, as best I can tell.
/usr/ucb or /usr/5bin.
When I was first feeling my way around Solaris for instance, I was shocked to find out that there were apps I'd grown accustomed to having that weren't in the default PATH. Only after feeling my way around for a while did I even notice that a good portion of the "missing" binaries were in
They're serious about making sure stuff that's "not invented here" is given due credit by being segregated into its own directory. I think because of this they use some older or less efficient versions of programs (grep comes to mind, as the version that ships with Solaris is horrendously slow, even running on Enterprise servers) and this is what elicits that public opinion of the OS. The OS is not slow, some of the apps that come with it however could be a bit more snappy.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
And as for this imposter Bowie, I'm not quite sure what his/her aim is, but if it's humor, hope he doesn't quit his day job.
Besides, the real Bowie does a fine job of making himself look like a jerk, without the fake one's help.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.