approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (x) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (x) Whitelists suck (x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The contribution to the computer sciences of the Reverend Dodgson are oft overlooked. He was a CS major and his colorful works were IT manuals that take some digesting. It is said that a full understanding of "Alice in Wonderland" will suffice as background for a full IT career.
What I tell you three times is true. This is the rule. A fact that is recorded in three geographically disparate locations (each more than 50 miles apart), did happen. A fact that is not so recorded is open to debate. Often that there is a question, regardless of what the answer is, is a career ending event.
Take both power cords (all HA servers have two power cords) and yank them out in the middle of the day. If anybody at all notices that you did that, it's not an HA server. For extra points hit your Cisco switch with a Tazer first.
You are very close to the truth here, but you're not quite there yet. The difference is the muddled incompetence of Microsoft's phone strategy and the evil competence of their overarching strategy. They really need a phone strategy, and they placed their faith that they could get one in Roz Ho.
They put her in charge of the Premium Media eXperience. Their bad.
So they've got this Zune phone project, and they know that Zune Phone is going to get as much lift as the Zune, ie, lead balloon. They stretch out a half $B to get some smartphone props with the stuggling inventor of the smartphone, SideKick and Danger. They've got to stretch this to their new "Pink" phone but it turns out due diligence doesn't extend to examining the term "exclusive".
They need to knife their bandwidth provider T-Mobile in a Legal sanctioned way to escape the exclusivity of this contract and sell their own-branded phones with own-branded backing services to any and all bandwidth providers, so a good wide outage should do it.
Hence, the need to jerk around a million T-mobile users.
The sad thing is, this strategy is working. Much like their efforts with Sendo, they are carefully worming their way into cellular phones. There is always someone who is desperate enough to deal with them even though they know they're selling their soul to the devil.
Like every other cellular provider T-Mobile sells bandwidth and connectivity and nothing more. It's true they should have inspected their partner more closely, especially when Microsoft acquired them, but the provision of data services is actually not within the scope of the things that they do. Maybe after this bandwidth providers like T-Mobile, QWest, Sprint and AT&T might consider the risks involved in third party data service providers, but that's tomorrow, not today.
It's fair to say that people are bashing Microsoft here, but it's not fair to say that the bashing is unfair. Microsoft bought the company and it's required that they do due diligence. If they overlooked something, at closing it's still their fault. That's what closing is about. It's about transferring responsibility for future issues from the seller to the buyer.
If this issue had arisen shortly after closing there might be some argument about this, but a year and a half is long enough to prove that the system was as advertised at time of sale. So if Microsoft hosed it up afterward, that's their fault. There is some evidence that it was working fine right up until Microsoft decided it needed to run on Microsoft technologies, at which point all indicators pointed south.
I see that the MS blog center is all over this issue and I fully expect to be modded down repeatedly. The hateful beatdown is already in progress on public sites like CNET. Hopefully there's been some education in the blog center about that, because it would be unfortunate to have to make this a crusade.
To the person who said it, that the data was unrecoverable was true. Unfortunately for them the implications of losing a million people's personal data is not a normal case. In that case some heroic data recovery options are available, including engaging every person involved in design and implementation of the storage from the platter up, at whatever rate they ask, for the duration of the emergency. Problems that involve a half-billion dollars merit that level of intervention.
A remarkable job for the MS crew here. Kudos to everybody except the twit that lost everybody's data.
Do I want a MS thin client phone now? Why I'm glad you asked. No. Hell no. Are you freaking kidding? NO!
Google does not rely on outside providers and they're the index case for cloud computing. You can roll your own cloud and Mark Shuttleworth at Ubuntu is working on that for you. If you do it right you can build your own cloud. What third party clouds offer you in that case is on-demand compute resources and bandwidth.
The cloud thing is going to happen but a lot of people don't understand what it is. It doesn't mean giving up control of your data. It doesn't mean giving up control of your interface. What it does is provide on-demand compute and bandwidth resources for spikes in demand. A cloud hosting provider can absorb excess demand for access to your data by absorbing spikes in demand until you have time to buy, receive and provision servers to support that demand. It's like an insurance policy against the sudden growth we all know happens when you do the right stuff.
Nobody in their right mind would host all their data on a third party's cloud. But cloud providers DO provide a valuable and necessary service.
MSFT is on the NYSE and it's tracking the S&P for the last decade so close it may as well be an index fund (a net loss). Since March of 2003 (coincidentally(?)) when the whole SCO thing started MS is up 12%. AAPL for example of a company that doesn't track the S&P is up 2400%. I know which one I'd rather have in my retirement fund - the one that grows faster than stuffing the cash in your mattress.
But, hey, a moribund stock mired antitrust concerns and walled off from new markets by gross incompetence can still break out and be a big winner, amiright? This whole Yahoo partnership could work out well for Microsoft (we all know what's going to happen to Yahoo). Bing could be a huge success. Google could decide to lose everybody's email and documents. Everybody and their brother could decide to migrate to W7 overnight because it does stuff their current OS doesn't do. Microsoft could have a secret phone project that gets over the fact that they've hosed over their relationship with every phone provider on the planet, and a phone OS that isn't WiMo 6.5. They could make a creative alliance with the TV vendors, the movie studios, the music industry and Sony that allows them to take over the consumer electronics space. And monkeys could fly out of my butt.
Back in '81 when the US national debt passed a trillion dollars I did some forecasting and estimated that the debt escaped to infinity in 2012. I was really scared about that for a long time.
It's only with the advancements in 64 bit computing technologies that I can see the error I made: advances in our understanding of numbers allow for ever-more absurd extentions of logarithmic growth. The national debt is not even 11 trillion dollars now, and that's just the debt. The government took on over 8 trillion dollars in unfunded obligations last year alone and it would be even more this year even without the healthcare fix. The total unfunded obligations as of the start of this year were 63.8 trillion dollars, or over half a million dollars per household. But those numbers now fit in my iPhone scientific calculator, so it's all good.
Just like the budget is big numbers, the size of components is small numbers. Sometime between now and 80 years from now we'll discover what the component parts of quarks are, and these quarklets will compose our transistors in some way we don't yet understand. Likewise, by then my great grandkids will each owe nearly a trillion dollars of their own and the US debt will be in the septillions, but those numbers will comfortably fit in their 512bit cybernetic math implants so they'll be fine.
That's just progress. It took some getting used to, but it's not scary any more.
Since he wrote that text computers are far more than a million times as fast. People now type slower, not faster, than they did then. People who use computers get less effective every year on average, not more so. So yeah, for the rare soul who can push a PC to its limits Moore's law gives us awesome progress. For the vast majority it just helps us waste time faster.
One might say that in the wrong hands a modern PC allows the average person to go wrong so quickly as to be beyond human reflex to prevent - it operates so fast that with one wrong click on the Internet your computer can become exploited and send more email in a single hour than you could compose in a lifetime. Now that is progress!
Since Gordon Moore has himself admitted that his own definition of Moore's law has changed over time to apply to different things and to appropriately fit the curve of the data he was describing, to provide a link to what you consider a canonical reference is, well, silly. Moore's law is that progress is a logarithmic progression on the order of 2 to the power of t, where t is a time unit that fits the observed curve of the domain of progress. And it's not a future promise - it's an observation of past trends which may continue. It's also not a smooth curve, it's lumpy. But it remains one of the wisest observations of progress in the modern era. Let's leave it at that.
Now forgive me, but my/. time is up and I have to go feed my Facebook goldfish and check the T-Mobile twitter feed to see if my SideKick data is recovered.
This is a great service. Google should set up an opt-in email notification as well.
It helps the webmasters build better sites and teaches them to check the Google website tools that allow them to groom their site for best indexing on Google. That's great.
It's nice seeing the mass of physicists coming around to the simple concepts I learned at Uncle Bob's knee oh so many decades ago. With a little refinement they may yet advance to pantheistic solipsism - I see it mentioned there, but not prominently.
The tech is a device to allow the viewer to accept that the story happens far away in a different society, so that the underlying social issues can be examined in a way that doesn't threaten the viewer. They're props - they're the functional equivalent of Victorian attire for a vampire movie. The story isn't about the tech, and if it was it wouldn't be any good.
In fact, now that this happened, you can probably be secure now knowing that Microsoft will never let this happen again.
Somehow, I doubt that matters. There are some things in technology that a brand just doesn't recover from. The inability to store significant amounts of data on the device, the inability to download from the device to a PC if the service fails can now be pointed to as inherent disadvantages of the thin client smartphone device that won't change no matter how they attempt to rebuild the brand.
A wiser choice might be to isolate the damage to "just" Danger, before it takes out Azure and Windows Mobile as well.
They may want to change this page then. This looks like a promise:
Data is always synchronized and backed up
Danger-powered devices are always connected to the Danger service. All user data is automatically and securely backed up over-the-air, and emails, photos, and organzier data are automatically synchronized with a Web-based application. All changes that are made on the device are instantly and automatically reflected on the user's computer, and vice versa.
And if you're wondering, yes, archive.org does have a backup copy of that page.
With what they can do with lighting, posing, and post the kindness of Playboy's photographers is legendary. With a little airbrush treatment she's no Leela, but she'll do.
Your distro probably comes with a repository. I just checked and Debian has 932 games listed that are just a click away.
But maybe he's looking for somebody to narrow the scope. I wouldn't know - my favorite games are gcc, blender, POVRAY, DRBL and recently DRBD. Those don't seem like things he would find amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation for credit.
Though I doubt it's close to original work, that's where I got it and fair's fair.
The contribution to the computer sciences of the Reverend Dodgson are oft overlooked. He was a CS major and his colorful works were IT manuals that take some digesting. It is said that a full understanding of "Alice in Wonderland" will suffice as background for a full IT career.
What I tell you three times is true. This is the rule. A fact that is recorded in three geographically disparate locations (each more than 50 miles apart), did happen. A fact that is not so recorded is open to debate. Often that there is a question, regardless of what the answer is, is a career ending event.
Take both power cords (all HA servers have two power cords) and yank them out in the middle of the day. If anybody at all notices that you did that, it's not an HA server. For extra points hit your Cisco switch with a Tazer first.
You are very close to the truth here, but you're not quite there yet. The difference is the muddled incompetence of Microsoft's phone strategy and the evil competence of their overarching strategy. They really need a phone strategy, and they placed their faith that they could get one in Roz Ho.
They put her in charge of the Premium Media eXperience. Their bad.
So they've got this Zune phone project, and they know that Zune Phone is going to get as much lift as the Zune, ie, lead balloon. They stretch out a half $B to get some smartphone props with the stuggling inventor of the smartphone, SideKick and Danger. They've got to stretch this to their new "Pink" phone but it turns out due diligence doesn't extend to examining the term "exclusive".
They need to knife their bandwidth provider T-Mobile in a Legal sanctioned way to escape the exclusivity of this contract and sell their own-branded phones with own-branded backing services to any and all bandwidth providers, so a good wide outage should do it.
Hence, the need to jerk around a million T-mobile users.
The sad thing is, this strategy is working. Much like their efforts with Sendo, they are carefully worming their way into cellular phones. There is always someone who is desperate enough to deal with them even though they know they're selling their soul to the devil.
Like every other cellular provider T-Mobile sells bandwidth and connectivity and nothing more. It's true they should have inspected their partner more closely, especially when Microsoft acquired them, but the provision of data services is actually not within the scope of the things that they do. Maybe after this bandwidth providers like T-Mobile, QWest, Sprint and AT&T might consider the risks involved in third party data service providers, but that's tomorrow, not today.
It's fair to say that people are bashing Microsoft here, but it's not fair to say that the bashing is unfair. Microsoft bought the company and it's required that they do due diligence. If they overlooked something, at closing it's still their fault. That's what closing is about. It's about transferring responsibility for future issues from the seller to the buyer.
If this issue had arisen shortly after closing there might be some argument about this, but a year and a half is long enough to prove that the system was as advertised at time of sale. So if Microsoft hosed it up afterward, that's their fault. There is some evidence that it was working fine right up until Microsoft decided it needed to run on Microsoft technologies, at which point all indicators pointed south.
I see that the MS blog center is all over this issue and I fully expect to be modded down repeatedly. The hateful beatdown is already in progress on public sites like CNET. Hopefully there's been some education in the blog center about that, because it would be unfortunate to have to make this a crusade.
To the person who said it, that the data was unrecoverable was true. Unfortunately for them the implications of losing a million people's personal data is not a normal case. In that case some heroic data recovery options are available, including engaging every person involved in design and implementation of the storage from the platter up, at whatever rate they ask, for the duration of the emergency. Problems that involve a half-billion dollars merit that level of intervention.
A remarkable job for the MS crew here. Kudos to everybody except the twit that lost everybody's data.
Do I want a MS thin client phone now? Why I'm glad you asked. No. Hell no. Are you freaking kidding? NO!
It's not like Microsoft had a history of failed backups and horrible transitions.
Why is this not modded funny?
For now.
HP servers running Unix. Hitachi SAN. Oracle RAC. Java.
To this stable solution add one MCSE engineer. WARNING : Solution may be hypergolic.
Google does not rely on outside providers and they're the index case for cloud computing. You can roll your own cloud and Mark Shuttleworth at Ubuntu is working on that for you. If you do it right you can build your own cloud. What third party clouds offer you in that case is on-demand compute resources and bandwidth.
The cloud thing is going to happen but a lot of people don't understand what it is. It doesn't mean giving up control of your data. It doesn't mean giving up control of your interface. What it does is provide on-demand compute and bandwidth resources for spikes in demand. A cloud hosting provider can absorb excess demand for access to your data by absorbing spikes in demand until you have time to buy, receive and provision servers to support that demand. It's like an insurance policy against the sudden growth we all know happens when you do the right stuff.
Nobody in their right mind would host all their data on a third party's cloud. But cloud providers DO provide a valuable and necessary service.
MSFT is on the NYSE and it's tracking the S&P for the last decade so close it may as well be an index fund (a net loss). Since March of 2003 (coincidentally(?)) when the whole SCO thing started MS is up 12%. AAPL for example of a company that doesn't track the S&P is up 2400%. I know which one I'd rather have in my retirement fund - the one that grows faster than stuffing the cash in your mattress.
But, hey, a moribund stock mired antitrust concerns and walled off from new markets by gross incompetence can still break out and be a big winner, amiright? This whole Yahoo partnership could work out well for Microsoft (we all know what's going to happen to Yahoo). Bing could be a huge success. Google could decide to lose everybody's email and documents. Everybody and their brother could decide to migrate to W7 overnight because it does stuff their current OS doesn't do. Microsoft could have a secret phone project that gets over the fact that they've hosed over their relationship with every phone provider on the planet, and a phone OS that isn't WiMo 6.5. They could make a creative alliance with the TV vendors, the movie studios, the music industry and Sony that allows them to take over the consumer electronics space. And monkeys could fly out of my butt.
Representative democracy will not long survive the discovery that the people can vote for themselves high speed internet porn.
That makes better sense for slashdotters.
/I believe you have my stapler.
Back in '81 when the US national debt passed a trillion dollars I did some forecasting and estimated that the debt escaped to infinity in 2012. I was really scared about that for a long time.
It's only with the advancements in 64 bit computing technologies that I can see the error I made: advances in our understanding of numbers allow for ever-more absurd extentions of logarithmic growth. The national debt is not even 11 trillion dollars now, and that's just the debt. The government took on over 8 trillion dollars in unfunded obligations last year alone and it would be even more this year even without the healthcare fix. The total unfunded obligations as of the start of this year were 63.8 trillion dollars, or over half a million dollars per household. But those numbers now fit in my iPhone scientific calculator, so it's all good.
Just like the budget is big numbers, the size of components is small numbers. Sometime between now and 80 years from now we'll discover what the component parts of quarks are, and these quarklets will compose our transistors in some way we don't yet understand. Likewise, by then my great grandkids will each owe nearly a trillion dollars of their own and the US debt will be in the septillions, but those numbers will comfortably fit in their 512bit cybernetic math implants so they'll be fine.
That's just progress. It took some getting used to, but it's not scary any more.
Since he wrote that text computers are far more than a million times as fast. People now type slower, not faster, than they did then. People who use computers get less effective every year on average, not more so. So yeah, for the rare soul who can push a PC to its limits Moore's law gives us awesome progress. For the vast majority it just helps us waste time faster.
One might say that in the wrong hands a modern PC allows the average person to go wrong so quickly as to be beyond human reflex to prevent - it operates so fast that with one wrong click on the Internet your computer can become exploited and send more email in a single hour than you could compose in a lifetime. Now that is progress!
Since Gordon Moore has himself admitted that his own definition of Moore's law has changed over time to apply to different things and to appropriately fit the curve of the data he was describing, to provide a link to what you consider a canonical reference is, well, silly. Moore's law is that progress is a logarithmic progression on the order of 2 to the power of t, where t is a time unit that fits the observed curve of the domain of progress. And it's not a future promise - it's an observation of past trends which may continue. It's also not a smooth curve, it's lumpy. But it remains one of the wisest observations of progress in the modern era. Let's leave it at that.
Now forgive me, but my /. time is up and I have to go feed my Facebook goldfish and check the T-Mobile twitter feed to see if my SideKick data is recovered.
This is a great service. Google should set up an opt-in email notification as well.
It helps the webmasters build better sites and teaches them to check the Google website tools that allow them to groom their site for best indexing on Google. That's great.
Oh really?
It's nice seeing the mass of physicists coming around to the simple concepts I learned at Uncle Bob's knee oh so many decades ago. With a little refinement they may yet advance to pantheistic solipsism - I see it mentioned there, but not prominently.
The tech is a device to allow the viewer to accept that the story happens far away in a different society, so that the underlying social issues can be examined in a way that doesn't threaten the viewer. They're props - they're the functional equivalent of Victorian attire for a vampire movie. The story isn't about the tech, and if it was it wouldn't be any good.
In fact, now that this happened, you can probably be secure now knowing that Microsoft will never let this happen again.
Somehow, I doubt that matters. There are some things in technology that a brand just doesn't recover from. The inability to store significant amounts of data on the device, the inability to download from the device to a PC if the service fails can now be pointed to as inherent disadvantages of the thin client smartphone device that won't change no matter how they attempt to rebuild the brand.
A wiser choice might be to isolate the damage to "just" Danger, before it takes out Azure and Windows Mobile as well.
They may want to change this page then. This looks like a promise:
Data is always synchronized and backed up
Danger-powered devices are always connected to the Danger service. All user data is automatically and securely backed up over-the-air, and emails, photos, and organzier data are automatically synchronized with a Web-based application. All changes that are made on the device are instantly and automatically reflected on the user's computer, and vice versa.
And if you're wondering, yes, archive.org does have a backup copy of that page.
Daniel Dilger on Roughly Drafted is speculating that it's an inside job.
Couldn't Hugh at least pick someone hot?
With what they can do with lighting, posing, and post the kindness of Playboy's photographers is legendary. With a little airbrush treatment she's no Leela, but she'll do.
Your distro probably comes with a repository. I just checked and Debian has 932 games listed that are just a click away.
But maybe he's looking for somebody to narrow the scope. I wouldn't know - my favorite games are gcc, blender, POVRAY, DRBL and recently DRBD. Those don't seem like things he would find amusing.