MS seems to fairly regularly confuse say "this is good/bad for consumers" when it really means "this is good/bad for Microsoft". Do they knowingly take MS-internal-only presentations and show them to the public as normal business?
A statement such as "With open source, there is no way to make more software" may make sense to a bunch of coders inside of Microsoft, but it's so obviously stupid outside of that context that it doesn't even survive cursory analysis.
Could they actually define at what point this "no way to make more software" statement has/will kick in? Was it after Linux was released in 1991? After Apache was released a year or so later? Maybe OOo was the last piece of software that could be produced? Is it happening right now, and the code that's being developed at the moment can't be finished? Maybe it's in the future sometime; I'd really like to know the date that it's gonna occur so I can get into another industry beforehand.
10. Tell all my mates. Note the names of the one or two who don't laugh at me, and remember to send them, and only them, Xmas cards this year
9. Get a really really fast sniffer, so I can make sure there's no porn traffic going through my router
8. Write out 92Tb as a decimal number, just because I know it'll look really impressive
7. Use it to pick up chicks. Revert to old story about being in astronaut training program, as it would be just as successful and slightly less geeky
6. It's optical, right? See what happens when I cross the beams...
5. Sleep with it under my bed. Less painful than a vasectomy, and probably just as effective
4. Paint go-fast stripes on it, put a "Turbo" sticker on it, then track down and razz anyone who spent $450k on the "old, non-turbo version" by mistake
3. Use it to beat the living daylights out of everyone associated with "Big Brother". I really really hate that show
2. Advertise it on eBay with a photo, no reserve, and a description of "some sort of computer network thingy"
1. Buy 2 and see if they'll reproduce in captivity
Most supercomputer users aren't going to want to plonk down literally millions of dollars in software licences to Microsoft - they'd rather be spending this money on either plugging in more hardware or on building and refining their analysis engine.
What could MS conceivably offer that would counter this?
Yep, that's a good approach, provided you're prepared to write a good deal of code in your abstraction layer to support MySQL's "differences" compared to other database products.
On the other hand, if MySQL is going to be 50%+ of your user base, then it might not be the worth the effort.
If you're prepared to accept dBase II as a relational database, then I'd submit that IBM's ISAM/VSAM files have been around a good deal longer than that and they're fairly similar in terms of capability. No transaction level support, no ACID compliance, etc.
In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066.
Without wanting to be nasty, I'd say from a FOSS perspective you'd probably focus on: - MySQL (because it's so ubiquitous, fast and solid, although missing some features that would make it a better fit for some uses) - Postgres (because it's mature, reasonably fast, solid, been available for a while and broadly comparable with Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 in terms of capability) - Oracle/DB2/SQL Server (subject to whether you wanted to deal with commercial databases or not)...and that's about it.
Other, totally viable, databases options exist, but unless you're particularly enamoured with e.g. SAP DB, I'd say you'd probably be better off leaving support of such products to the one or two users who really want to use them. I'm assuming GPL here - supposedly development is shared between "owners" and users, with users kicking their enhancements back to the base product for inclusion.
I'm sure IT managers in India must chuckle to themselves when they see discussion of the dreaded "Slashdot effect".
A one-off hit of 100,000 SMS hits per hour on a site would be newsworthy and probably site-melting just about anywhere else, but in India it's just another day at the office.
If it isn't already, Indian IT infrastructure should be THE reference testing ground for application scalability and load testing. Doesn't matter if it's systems for voting in elections, distributing exam results, traffic information, drought/flood information - if your system works in India, it's pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere else in the world from a load/stress perspective.
If a bunch of us could cart all our crap over to this hypothetical garage, and we had a gentlemen's agreement between all of us that we were all free to dip in to the big pile at any time for any reason, that would be ideal. I wouldn't particularly mind if someone nabbed one of my 14.4k modems, as long as I was free to nab one of their Soundblaster AWE-64 cards in exchange.
We may need to get a bunch of big boxes and label them "modems", "LAN cards", "memory chips", "sound cards", "power cords" and so on, but that's the limit of the management that would be required.
So you're the guy that's got all my power cords! I was wondering how it is that, whenever I look for one, I've always mysteriously run out....And I was putting it down to the odd sock fairy
In your case, am I right in guessing that the default "location" field would be "I'm about to throw this damn thing out if you don't move it right now"...?
it's gonna have to emulate: - the "clunk" of a controller that's been bashed slightly beyond its designated left/right/up/down extremes by a million users overdosed on Jolt and Mountain Dew - the strange sticky feel that comes from having Coke dribbled into the controller drop by drop over several years - the strange smell that comes from the carpets and walls of old video arcades. Male sweat + flatulence + cigarettes + dope +... - the smeared screen that's been touched by 1000 "helpers" trying to tell the game player what to do next
It seems that they've decided to provision potentially 50x their existing disc space for email (as 98% of the email is currently spam, which is presumably filtered out at the moment), instead of deploying additional resources for filtering before it gets to the users.
Good luck with that approach! If their primary constraint is budgetary, as it would seem, it would make more sense to invest *more* in filtering so that the crap didn't get to users' mailboxes where it will doubtless stay indefinitely in some cases.
Note: I'm assuming that, because they have some apparent requirement that all mail gets delivered, that they cannot effectively enforce email quotas that would result in non-delivery of email.
Using this logic, if we were just stepping onto Mars today, our astronauts would be sporting the finest Hypercolour shirts and acid wash denim spacesuits money could have bought 20 years ago. Not to mention their helmets would be an unusual shape to cope with the mullet haircuts.
You miss my point - they can't use Windows of any nature because the licences aren't transferrable. A charity is not gonna leave Windows on recycled PCs because there's a history of MS cracking down on recycled licences. To recycle these PCs and give them to anybody, people have to install a free OS of some type - it could be Linux, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, whatever. I think Linux is the obvious choice here, but it is one of several candidates.
Whichever one it is, the people receiving these PCs will need training of some sort or the PC will become a bookend. The cost of that training - be it Linux, FreeBSD,... - has to be borne by *someone*, and I don't think it's likely that underprivileged people are gonna pony up for it. Maybe they'd would prefer it if someone bought a copy of Windows and trained them on it instead - their skills might be more marketable - but it ain't gonna happen.
I can't believe all these people dissing BS - sorry, WS. For anyone who watched the original Star Trek as a kid, I ask you: - who didn't want to be Kirk, tooling around the galaxy getting it on with alien chicks in nearly every episode? - who didn't want to kiss Nichelle Nicholls? - who didn't want to fight aliens on a regular basis, always win, get the girl and only token injuries, then do it all again next week? - who didn't want to be boss of the Enterprise? Not some toy Apollo mission, this is the Enterprise!!!! - who didn't want to have Spock as a buddy? Spock, the guy who knows everything, is super strong and would *never* horn in on your action
And, somehow, he did all this despite an almost total lack of acting ability. Even as a kid, I knew all those dialog... pauses... weren't the way a normal person spoke, and all that high-drama music during the fight scenes was really there to cover up the lack of credible violence. If Shatner could do all this with an obvious speech impediment, then I, a mere kid, had the universe literally at my fingertips!
Bring him back, bring him back now. Cram the TV schedule with Shatner, and bring hope to a new generation of kiddies!
Have you contacted Dell and HP directly and offered to take the PCs off their hands for nothing?
If not, or you don't know who to contact, respond and I'll see if I can put you in touch with someone at HP Melbourne. It's many years since I worked there, but I can probably still track down someone for you to talk to. If it comes off, I think it's probably likely they'll give you some exposure too; they'll be keen to announce that they're partnering with you to help the community.
> the recycling programs of Dell and HP are nothing > more than a means of getting older systems out of > use, to be replaced by newer systems
Exactly what did he expect these recycling programs are for? Of course they're primarily a means to sell new systems!
If a company has a bunch of HP/Dell PCs that are about to reach their end-of-life, they can either arrange the disposal themselves or give them back to the vendor to dispose of. Many companies will offer the PCs to their employees for a very low cost, and some of these employees will take them, put Linux on them and give them to charity. Maybe the company has someone on staff that acts as a focal point for charitable distribution of these PCs (as well as new stuff); if so, that person may take on the role of coordinating that sort of work.
***If this is "all too hard" for the company, and they just want to get rid of the old PCs without being accused of screwing up the environment by dumping them somewhere***, they're free to give them back to Dell/HP who'll dispose of them. Some companies see this as a useful thing; they've got a problem (disposal of a bunch of PCs without screwing the environment) and Dell/PC will take care of the problem for them. That's called a "competitive advantage".
Here's news: there's no fleet of people at Dell/HP who call up every charity in the world trying to dispose of old PCs 24x7! There may be a few people who take the role on themselves, but there's no way a few people can dispose of thousands of old PCs on an ongoing basis in their spare time.
It's *not* trivial to donate these PCs; among other things, either they have to arrange for MS to transfer the OS licence to some unknown recipient (unlikely), or they have to arrange a workforce to format discs, install e.g. Linux on them and then train whoever it is these PCs are going to be given to. Strangely, neither Dell or HP feel it is their role to act as unpaid Linux trainers for the world's underprivileged! Finally, if a charity receives a free PC from Dell/HP, there's at least an implied support arrangement there - when that old clunker of a PC breaks down, who's gonna get called?
If Slashdot or any other organization wants to form a group of people who will take these PCs, reformat them, install Linux, donate them to the world's charities and provide support afterwards, I'm sure Dell and HP would be very happy to hear about it. After all, that group would then be solving a problem Dell and HP have - how to dispose of the PCs. Do that; the world will benefit from it and probably vendors other than Dell and HP will want to jump on board too. If not, then find something real to complain about.
> Consider this - if a spammer purchases a CD with > 1,000,000 email addresses (they're out there, > probably more like 10,000,000 emails though), he > would have to pay $10,000 or $1,000 to send those.
Wouldn't the spammer then just claim that $10k back as a business expense?
> That's very nice, but the fact remains that 90% of > all spam originates from countries that are out of > the FBI's jurisdiction. What are they going to do > about it?
How about: - define spammers as terrorists - propose a free trade agreement with countries housing spammers - make adoption of US terrorist laws a condition of accepting the free trade agreement...the rest is left to the reader's imagination
From the article: > In the last 12 months, about 35 percent of the > base has moved to Windows 2000. It's accelerating. > We will see in this calendar year another third of > the base move. It's a pretty small percentage of > customers on NT 4.0 -- less than 20 percent. Japan > is higher than that. The United States is lower. > But the vast majority of customers will move by > the end of this year
Based on my own experience, I'd dispute these figures. Over the last 12-24 months, I've worked at several banks, General Motors, General Electric, and large government bodies. Every one of them has loads of NT 4 servers in production, and no plans to migrate a lot of these systems because they just work.
Many of them still use NT 4 on the desktop too. I've got no idea how the licencing for this works, but many many people who work for these companies are logging into NT 4 each day.
If this guy is talking about migrating their customer-facing systems to Win 2000 or 2003, then I'd believe that - these companies roll out new customer-facing systems very quickly and not many *customer-facing* systems more than a few years old are still out there. However, it isn't stated in this interview that he's excluding back-office and end-user systems in these migration figures. You'd be right if you guessed that customer-facing systems make up a tiny percentage of overall system numbers at these sites.
There must be a lot of Slashdotters working at similar large sites - what have you encountered in terms of migration rates, and the number of NT 4 systems still in operation?
Here's some news: spam != mass murder, regardless of whatever spin you want to apply
I'd be really interested in watching this debate, as I'm genuinely curious how it is that OIRB see themselves as being hard done by in this instance. Regardless of the name, SpamCop isn't acting as any sort of global email traffic cop - if SpamCop "blocks spam", it's because ISPs are taking SpamCop's recommendations and acting upon them.
It's absolutely no different to the Alexis de Tocqueville institute publishing its information; I may disagree with the content, but I've got no power to prevent others reading it and acting on it *and nor should I have that power*. I can, however, feel free to pick their information to pieces and post responses. OptInRealBig is free to respond to SpamCop's published information in exactly the same way; the fact OIRB have to deal with is that more ISPs seem to trust and agree with SpamCop than not.
I think you raise a really good point - hope you don't get modded down and people miss it...
I think a sizeable number of people read through source code as a way of educating themselves. OSS code is (as you point out, rightly or wrongly) seen as a source of very well-written code, and if I was going to teach myself something from someone else's source code, I'd be inclined to use OSS code as a starting point.
As these people educating themselves start to learn about what e.g. a buffer overflow is, what it looks like and how to avoid it, they'll think back to the OSS code they've read through and either mentally congratulate the author or possibly notify him/her to say their code has a security hole in it. I'm not sure: OSS code may even be used as a teaching tool in universities, in which case there will be lots of reviewers.
This reviewing-as-you're-learning approach would probably only apply to big OSS projects such as Apache or the Linux kernel I can't imagine a lot of people are suddenly going to start teaching themselves about buffer overflows using e.g. the Ethereal source. However, it's projects such as Apache and Linux that would be most at risk from buffer overflows; a buffer overflow in Ethereal, while it may be important, isn't likely to lead to lots of exploits in the real world.
Good point though - I'll be interested in what other replies you get
What I'd like to see is something along the following lines: - I get email in my email client - I mark the email as spam (or my spam filter does), and any URLs in the spam message are logged
Some time later, I decide to go to a site that has been referenced in spam sent to me. My Web browser gives me a popup window warning me "You're about to hit a site that's previously spammed you. Do you want to continue?". I think "Hmm, maybe I don't want to buy my new car/toy/whatever from these guys after all; I'll go somewhere else instead"...
In other words, the spam *I* get is used to create filtering rules about the sites *I* visit.
I'm sure the spammers would get smart about avoiding this if it ever caught on, and maybe the logging would have to be made progressively smarter over time. However, I'd *really* like the capability of being notified when I visit the site of a vendor who's previously spammed me.
Bottom line: if vendors realise that they'll be missing out on sales from a *real* potential customer as a direct consequence of their spamming, maybe they'll stop paying the spammers to do their advertising.
The former Iraqi Information Minister has been spotted in New Hampshire, where he is believed to be working for a large corporate enterprise.
According to our translator, he said "I believe Alexis de Tocqueville to have been one of the greatest Iraqis in history, and it is an honour to be serving his esteemed foundation. I believe this role to be the pinnacle of my professional career to date, even exceeding my colonisation of Mars in 1994"
It'd be interesting to simplify that for everybody: put a "Report Spam" button on Mozilla Mail, KMail, Evolution etc. that sends that detail to abuse@sourcedomain, postmaster@sourcedomain, root@sourcedomain,... where sourcedomain is the name of the domain from which the email originated.
You might find that suddenly the owner of sourcedomain gets inundated with email from people pushing the button on their mail clients, and maybe they'll then decide to do something about it. If 50000 people around the world report a single spam email message back to the source ISP, maybe the swamping of their email server by nastygrams will get them to sit up and take notice.
Of course, I'm assuming that these ISPs actually don't want spammers as customers. I'm not thinking it'll fix the problem, but it may get some of the worst offending ISPs to be a bit more proactive.
Slashdot Mirror
MS seems to fairly regularly confuse say "this is good/bad for consumers" when it really means "this is good/bad for Microsoft". Do they knowingly take MS-internal-only presentations and show them to the public as normal business?
A statement such as "With open source, there is no way to make more software" may make sense to a bunch of coders inside of Microsoft, but it's so obviously stupid outside of that context that it doesn't even survive cursory analysis.
Could they actually define at what point this "no way to make more software" statement has/will kick in? Was it after Linux was released in 1991? After Apache was released a year or so later? Maybe OOo was the last piece of software that could be produced? Is it happening right now, and the code that's being developed at the moment can't be finished? Maybe it's in the future sometime; I'd really like to know the date that it's gonna occur so I can get into another industry beforehand.
Idiots
10. Tell all my mates. Note the names of the one or two who don't laugh at me, and remember to send them, and only them, Xmas cards this year
9. Get a really really fast sniffer, so I can make sure there's no porn traffic going through my router
8. Write out 92Tb as a decimal number, just because I know it'll look really impressive
7. Use it to pick up chicks. Revert to old story about being in astronaut training program, as it would be just as successful and slightly less geeky
6. It's optical, right? See what happens when I cross the beams...
5. Sleep with it under my bed. Less painful than a vasectomy, and probably just as effective
4. Paint go-fast stripes on it, put a "Turbo" sticker on it, then track down and razz anyone who spent $450k on the "old, non-turbo version" by mistake
3. Use it to beat the living daylights out of everyone associated with "Big Brother". I really really hate that show
2. Advertise it on eBay with a photo, no reserve, and a description of "some sort of computer network thingy"
1. Buy 2 and see if they'll reproduce in captivity
Most supercomputer users aren't going to want to plonk down literally millions of dollars in software licences to Microsoft - they'd rather be spending this money on either plugging in more hardware or on building and refining their analysis engine.
What could MS conceivably offer that would counter this?
Yep, that's a good approach, provided you're prepared to write a good deal of code in your abstraction layer to support MySQL's "differences" compared to other database products.
On the other hand, if MySQL is going to be 50%+ of your user base, then it might not be the worth the effort.
If you're prepared to accept dBase II as a relational database, then I'd submit that IBM's ISAM/VSAM files have been around a good deal longer than that and they're fairly similar in terms of capability. No transaction level support, no ACID compliance, etc.
In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066.
Without wanting to be nasty, I'd say from a FOSS perspective you'd probably focus on: ...and that's about it.
- MySQL (because it's so ubiquitous, fast and solid, although missing some features that would make it a better fit for some uses)
- Postgres (because it's mature, reasonably fast, solid, been available for a while and broadly comparable with Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 in terms of capability)
- Oracle/DB2/SQL Server (subject to whether you wanted to deal with commercial databases or not)
Other, totally viable, databases options exist, but unless you're particularly enamoured with e.g. SAP DB, I'd say you'd probably be better off leaving support of such products to the one or two users who really want to use them. I'm assuming GPL here - supposedly development is shared between "owners" and users, with users kicking their enhancements back to the base product for inclusion.
I'm sure IT managers in India must chuckle to themselves when they see discussion of the dreaded "Slashdot effect".
A one-off hit of 100,000 SMS hits per hour on a site would be newsworthy and probably site-melting just about anywhere else, but in India it's just another day at the office.
If it isn't already, Indian IT infrastructure should be THE reference testing ground for application scalability and load testing. Doesn't matter if it's systems for voting in elections, distributing exam results, traffic information, drought/flood information - if your system works in India, it's pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere else in the world from a load/stress perspective.
the mate with a really big, empty garage.
If a bunch of us could cart all our crap over to this hypothetical garage, and we had a gentlemen's agreement between all of us that we were all free to dip in to the big pile at any time for any reason, that would be ideal. I wouldn't particularly mind if someone nabbed one of my 14.4k modems, as long as I was free to nab one of their Soundblaster AWE-64 cards in exchange.
We may need to get a bunch of big boxes and label them "modems", "LAN cards", "memory chips", "sound cards", "power cords" and so on, but that's the limit of the management that would be required.
So you're the guy that's got all my power cords! I was wondering how it is that, whenever I look for one, I've always mysteriously run out. ...And I was putting it down to the odd sock fairy
> my wife.
In your case, am I right in guessing that the default "location" field would be "I'm about to throw this damn thing out if you don't move it right now"...?
it's gonna have to emulate: ...
- the "clunk" of a controller that's been bashed slightly beyond its designated left/right/up/down extremes by a million users overdosed on Jolt and Mountain Dew
- the strange sticky feel that comes from having Coke dribbled into the controller drop by drop over several years
- the strange smell that comes from the carpets and walls of old video arcades. Male sweat + flatulence + cigarettes + dope +
- the smeared screen that's been touched by 1000 "helpers" trying to tell the game player what to do next
When it does all this, count me in!
It seems that they've decided to provision potentially 50x their existing disc space for email (as 98% of the email is currently spam, which is presumably filtered out at the moment), instead of deploying additional resources for filtering before it gets to the users.
Good luck with that approach! If their primary constraint is budgetary, as it would seem, it would make more sense to invest *more* in filtering so that the crap didn't get to users' mailboxes where it will doubtless stay indefinitely in some cases.
Note: I'm assuming that, because they have some apparent requirement that all mail gets delivered, that they cannot effectively enforce email quotas that would result in non-delivery of email.
Exactly.
Using this logic, if we were just stepping onto Mars today, our astronauts would be sporting the finest Hypercolour shirts and acid wash denim spacesuits money could have bought 20 years ago. Not to mention their helmets would be an unusual shape to cope with the mullet haircuts.
You miss my point - they can't use Windows of any nature because the licences aren't transferrable. A charity is not gonna leave Windows on recycled PCs because there's a history of MS cracking down on recycled licences. To recycle these PCs and give them to anybody, people have to install a free OS of some type - it could be Linux, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, whatever. I think Linux is the obvious choice here, but it is one of several candidates.
... - has to be borne by *someone*, and I don't think it's likely that underprivileged people are gonna pony up for it. Maybe they'd would prefer it if someone bought a copy of Windows and trained them on it instead - their skills might be more marketable - but it ain't gonna happen.
Whichever one it is, the people receiving these PCs will need training of some sort or the PC will become a bookend. The cost of that training - be it Linux, FreeBSD,
I can't believe all these people dissing BS - sorry, WS. For anyone who watched the original Star Trek as a kid, I ask you:
... pauses ... weren't the way a normal person spoke, and all that high-drama music during the fight scenes was really there to cover up the lack of credible violence. If Shatner could do all this with an obvious speech impediment, then I, a mere kid, had the universe literally at my fingertips!
- who didn't want to be Kirk, tooling around the galaxy getting it on with alien chicks in nearly every episode?
- who didn't want to kiss Nichelle Nicholls?
- who didn't want to fight aliens on a regular basis, always win, get the girl and only token injuries, then do it all again next week?
- who didn't want to be boss of the Enterprise? Not some toy Apollo mission, this is the Enterprise!!!!
- who didn't want to have Spock as a buddy? Spock, the guy who knows everything, is super strong and would *never* horn in on your action
And, somehow, he did all this despite an almost total lack of acting ability. Even as a kid, I knew all those dialog
Bring him back, bring him back now. Cram the TV schedule with Shatner, and bring hope to a new generation of kiddies!
Have you contacted Dell and HP directly and offered to take the PCs off their hands for nothing?
If not, or you don't know who to contact, respond and I'll see if I can put you in touch with someone at HP Melbourne. It's many years since I worked there, but I can probably still track down someone for you to talk to. If it comes off, I think it's probably likely they'll give you some exposure too; they'll be keen to announce that they're partnering with you to help the community.
> the recycling programs of Dell and HP are nothing
> more than a means of getting older systems out of
> use, to be replaced by newer systems
Exactly what did he expect these recycling programs are for? Of course they're primarily a means to sell new systems!
If a company has a bunch of HP/Dell PCs that are about to reach their end-of-life, they can either arrange the disposal themselves or give them back to the vendor to dispose of. Many companies will offer the PCs to their employees for a very low cost, and some of these employees will take them, put Linux on them and give them to charity. Maybe the company has someone on staff that acts as a focal point for charitable distribution of these PCs (as well as new stuff); if so, that person may take on the role of coordinating that sort of work.
***If this is "all too hard" for the company, and they just want to get rid of the old PCs without being accused of screwing up the environment by dumping them somewhere***, they're free to give them back to Dell/HP who'll dispose of them. Some companies see this as a useful thing; they've got a problem (disposal of a bunch of PCs without screwing the environment) and Dell/PC will take care of the problem for them. That's called a "competitive advantage".
Here's news: there's no fleet of people at Dell/HP who call up every charity in the world trying to dispose of old PCs 24x7! There may be a few people who take the role on themselves, but there's no way a few people can dispose of thousands of old PCs on an ongoing basis in their spare time.
It's *not* trivial to donate these PCs; among other things, either they have to arrange for MS to transfer the OS licence to some unknown recipient (unlikely), or they have to arrange a workforce to format discs, install e.g. Linux on them and then train whoever it is these PCs are going to be given to. Strangely, neither Dell or HP feel it is their role to act as unpaid Linux trainers for the world's underprivileged! Finally, if a charity receives a free PC from Dell/HP, there's at least an implied support arrangement there - when that old clunker of a PC breaks down, who's gonna get called?
If Slashdot or any other organization wants to form a group of people who will take these PCs, reformat them, install Linux, donate them to the world's charities and provide support afterwards, I'm sure Dell and HP would be very happy to hear about it. After all, that group would then be solving a problem Dell and HP have - how to dispose of the PCs. Do that; the world will benefit from it and probably vendors other than Dell and HP will want to jump on board too. If not, then find something real to complain about.
> Consider this - if a spammer purchases a CD with
> 1,000,000 email addresses (they're out there,
> probably more like 10,000,000 emails though), he
> would have to pay $10,000 or $1,000 to send those.
Wouldn't the spammer then just claim that $10k back as a business expense?
> That's very nice, but the fact remains that 90% of
...the rest is left to the reader's imagination
> all spam originates from countries that are out of
> the FBI's jurisdiction. What are they going to do
> about it?
How about:
- define spammers as terrorists
- propose a free trade agreement with countries housing spammers
- make adoption of US terrorist laws a condition of accepting the free trade agreement
From the article:
> In the last 12 months, about 35 percent of the
> base has moved to Windows 2000. It's accelerating.
> We will see in this calendar year another third of
> the base move. It's a pretty small percentage of
> customers on NT 4.0 -- less than 20 percent. Japan
> is higher than that. The United States is lower.
> But the vast majority of customers will move by
> the end of this year
Based on my own experience, I'd dispute these figures. Over the last 12-24 months, I've worked at several banks, General Motors, General Electric, and large government bodies. Every one of them has loads of NT 4 servers in production, and no plans to migrate a lot of these systems because they just work.
Many of them still use NT 4 on the desktop too. I've got no idea how the licencing for this works, but many many people who work for these companies are logging into NT 4 each day.
If this guy is talking about migrating their customer-facing systems to Win 2000 or 2003, then I'd believe that - these companies roll out new customer-facing systems very quickly and not many *customer-facing* systems more than a few years old are still out there. However, it isn't stated in this interview that he's excluding back-office and end-user systems in these migration figures. You'd be right if you guessed that customer-facing systems make up a tiny percentage of overall system numbers at these sites.
There must be a lot of Slashdotters working at similar large sites - what have you encountered in terms of migration rates, and the number of NT 4 systems still in operation?
Funny, maybe, but +5 Insightful???
Here's some news: spam != mass murder, regardless of whatever spin you want to apply
I'd be really interested in watching this debate, as I'm genuinely curious how it is that OIRB see themselves as being hard done by in this instance. Regardless of the name, SpamCop isn't acting as any sort of global email traffic cop - if SpamCop "blocks spam", it's because ISPs are taking SpamCop's recommendations and acting upon them.
It's absolutely no different to the Alexis de Tocqueville institute publishing its information; I may disagree with the content, but I've got no power to prevent others reading it and acting on it *and nor should I have that power*. I can, however, feel free to pick their information to pieces and post responses. OptInRealBig is free to respond to SpamCop's published information in exactly the same way; the fact OIRB have to deal with is that more ISPs seem to trust and agree with SpamCop than not.
I think you raise a really good point - hope you don't get modded down and people miss it...
I think a sizeable number of people read through source code as a way of educating themselves. OSS code is (as you point out, rightly or wrongly) seen as a source of very well-written code, and if I was going to teach myself something from someone else's source code, I'd be inclined to use OSS code as a starting point.
As these people educating themselves start to learn about what e.g. a buffer overflow is, what it looks like and how to avoid it, they'll think back to the OSS code they've read through and either mentally congratulate the author or possibly notify him/her to say their code has a security hole in it. I'm not sure: OSS code may even be used as a teaching tool in universities, in which case there will be lots of reviewers.
This reviewing-as-you're-learning approach would probably only apply to big OSS projects such as Apache or the Linux kernel I can't imagine a lot of people are suddenly going to start teaching themselves about buffer overflows using e.g. the Ethereal source. However, it's projects such as Apache and Linux that would be most at risk from buffer overflows; a buffer overflow in Ethereal, while it may be important, isn't likely to lead to lots of exploits in the real world.
Good point though - I'll be interested in what other replies you get
What I'd like to see is something along the following lines:
- I get email in my email client
- I mark the email as spam (or my spam filter does), and any URLs in the spam message are logged
Some time later, I decide to go to a site that has been referenced in spam sent to me. My Web browser gives me a popup window warning me "You're about to hit a site that's previously spammed you. Do you want to continue?". I think "Hmm, maybe I don't want to buy my new car/toy/whatever from these guys after all; I'll go somewhere else instead"...
In other words, the spam *I* get is used to create filtering rules about the sites *I* visit.
I'm sure the spammers would get smart about avoiding this if it ever caught on, and maybe the logging would have to be made progressively smarter over time. However, I'd *really* like the capability of being notified when I visit the site of a vendor who's previously spammed me.
Bottom line: if vendors realise that they'll be missing out on sales from a *real* potential customer as a direct consequence of their spamming, maybe they'll stop paying the spammers to do their advertising.
The former Iraqi Information Minister has been spotted in New Hampshire, where he is believed to be working for a large corporate enterprise.
According to our translator, he said "I believe Alexis de Tocqueville to have been one of the greatest Iraqis in history, and it is an honour to be serving his esteemed foundation. I believe this role to be the pinnacle of my professional career to date, even exceeding my colonisation of Mars in 1994"
It'd be interesting to simplify that for everybody: put a "Report Spam" button on Mozilla Mail, KMail, Evolution etc. that sends that detail to abuse@sourcedomain, postmaster@sourcedomain, root@sourcedomain, ... where sourcedomain is the name of the domain from which the email originated.
You might find that suddenly the owner of sourcedomain gets inundated with email from people pushing the button on their mail clients, and maybe they'll then decide to do something about it. If 50000 people around the world report a single spam email message back to the source ISP, maybe the swamping of their email server by nastygrams will get them to sit up and take notice.
Of course, I'm assuming that these ISPs actually don't want spammers as customers. I'm not thinking it'll fix the problem, but it may get some of the worst offending ISPs to be a bit more proactive.