I work for a fairly large email service provider. Spam isn't dying by any means. We just doubled production hardware last week to have enough smtp listener processes to be able to accept email. Bayesian is nice for the single user. For an ISP, it isn't. ISPs are bearing the brunt of the expense right now. The day I fear is when ISPs start to go under, or start charging for spam filtering, or simply stop.
Those boxes are running at sustained loads of 40+ and are CPU bound. That's a bit rare in the email world, as you would know if you have ever run a non trivial system in production.
The spammers will send more spam is something that we have been observing in reality. I have seen AOLs numbers, and they are merely two orders of magnitude bigger than ours at the moment.
The response of spammers has been to use zombies, and send even more spam. Filters simply increase your costs, until it becomes unviable for ISPs to do content based filtering, as well as end users.
What would I use drag and drop for? I need an IRC client, an IM client, a browser, gvim, slrn, mutt, a music player. Oh, and a mail server and a real RDBMS and a webserver and SVN. That takes up four desktops (one for IRC, one for the browser, one for a full screen mutt in an xterm and one for the rest).
An office suite maybe, once a month or less. GIMP? Once in 6 months or less.
Drag and drop isn't relevant to my usage patterns (also, drag and drop isn't a windowmanager function, I can fire up Konqueror if needed and do any drag and drop stuff).
The biggest reasons I need X are because I don't have a good enough console based word processor, pdf viewer and Javascript capable browser.
AFAIK, Fedora is aimed more at the SOHO/home desktop user segment rather than a corporate environment (where support and long product lifetimes are important).
What, automatic, free, version controlled backup isn't a leap forward? Data loss is probably the next biggest thing a user can encounter outside of spyware and viruses, and so far the Mac has proven itself relatively immune
They borrowed some design ideas from Exposé, it looks like; you can view all four of your desktops at once; you can drag-and-drop windows from one to the other; and they all use the same Dock instead of using different Docks for each desktop, which is the one thing I always wanted.
Sounds like WindowMaker to me, except for the desktop viewing stuff (which I don't care about). I use one desktop per major application, and a few for the remote terminals.
And in all these cases, the end user is losing out on being able to use the hardware/software as (s)he pleases. This is precisely what the FSF is trying to prevent.
Google just setup a datacenter at Baltimore using grid power. A Google spokesperson said "This is perfectly in keeping with our motto of "Do no evil" and our plans to index all the world's information".
That's because most of your bus users are already in cars. Around here 50 to 95% of the population uses mass transit (depending on the city). The time cars stay off the road, traffic moves *fast*. The monment cars hit the road, traffic jams galore (a 45 minute ride turns into a 3 hour one). Buses typically carry 90 to 100 people, cars 1.
Mass transit is greener per person transported, on average.
Buses spew visible smoke, Cars spew CO (and SOx and NOx). Particulate carbon gets out of the air quite fast, the oxides don't. The oxides are also more damaging.
One bus carries ~ 50 people. A car carries 4, but more commonly 1. pollution caused by 1 bus vs pollution caused by 50 cars?
If you'd like a more topical example, consider "spam". People began altering their e-mail "From:" lines in order to make their addresses harder to guess or aggregate; people began doing pattern matching in order to catch known-bad messages and either sideline or reject them. Many defenders used many small tricks to protect their inboxes. The result has not been that less spam is sent or even that less spam is received, on an aggregate basis. Things are worse now than they've ever been. (I say this as co-founder of MAPS LLC, by which I hope to establish my credentials in the spam field for those of you who do not know me.) Today a small number of highly advanced defenders is spam-immune only because they are a small number and their techniques are not widely effective against the attackers; and a small number of highly advanced attackers can "spam at will" a far larger population than ever before. And the trend is that things are getting worse, and getting worse faster than ever before.
Sure Office is very bloated, but it is also the defacto standard and Openoffice has never been and probably never will be 100% compatible
Interesting. I tend to send out ODF documents, and I tend not to have issues. Of course, given that around here MS Office is ~ 3 months of salary for most people makes OpenOffice.org a huge moneysaver.
*Shrug*. My country has been targetted by Islamic terrorists for about two decades. They are backed by a Chinese/US/Saudi Arabia supported, armed and funded nuclear power. The Islamic terrorists already have nukes. Believe me, it really can't get worse from where I sit.
And you think I worry about teeny little things like giving nukes to Lebanon forcing Israel to openly declare its nuclear status? I suspect you need to learn a little bit more about the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Why watch when you can be?
R Daneel Oliwav
I work for a fairly large email service provider. Spam isn't dying by any means. We just doubled production hardware last week to have enough smtp listener processes to be able to accept email. Bayesian is nice for the single user. For an ISP, it isn't. ISPs are bearing the brunt of the expense right now. The day I fear is when ISPs start to go under, or start charging for spam filtering, or simply stop.
Those boxes are running at sustained loads of 40+ and are CPU bound. That's a bit rare in the email world, as you would know if you have ever run a non trivial system in production.
The spammers will send more spam is something that we have been observing in reality. I have seen AOLs numbers, and they are merely two orders of magnitude bigger than ours at the moment.
A driver level exploit gives you ring 0. Who cares abot shells when you 0wn the kernel itself?
The response of spammers has been to use zombies, and send even more spam. Filters simply increase your costs, until it becomes unviable for ISPs to do content based filtering, as well as end users.
It's also a lot more expensive to call a voice line than send an email. Slashdot is the here and now phenomenon, whereas email is more effort.
For exclusive advertising rights. If you want to advertise on MySpace, you have to go through Google.
What would I use drag and drop for? I need an IRC client, an IM client, a browser, gvim, slrn, mutt, a music player. Oh, and a mail server and a real RDBMS and a webserver and SVN. That takes up four desktops (one for IRC, one for the browser, one for a full screen mutt in an xterm and one for the rest).
An office suite maybe, once a month or less. GIMP? Once in 6 months or less.
Drag and drop isn't relevant to my usage patterns (also, drag and drop isn't a windowmanager function, I can fire up Konqueror if needed and do any drag and drop stuff).
The biggest reasons I need X are because I don't have a good enough console based word processor, pdf viewer and Javascript capable browser.
And that is the right thing to do :).
AFAIK, Fedora is aimed more at the SOHO/home desktop user segment rather than a corporate environment (where support and long product lifetimes are important).
What, automatic, free, version controlled backup isn't a leap forward? Data loss is probably the next biggest thing a user can encounter outside of spyware and viruses, and so far the Mac has proven itself relatively immune
c id=15860550
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193342&
Not a leap forward. Just continuing on bringing big iron technologies to the PC.
They borrowed some design ideas from Exposé, it looks like; you can view all four of your desktops at once; you can drag-and-drop windows from one to the other; and they all use the same Dock instead of using different Docks for each desktop, which is the one thing I always wanted.
Sounds like WindowMaker to me, except for the desktop viewing stuff (which I don't care about). I use one desktop per major application, and a few for the remote terminals.
Put it in ROM (or equivalent flashable hardware). Works fine.
There is a reason why open specifications work.
And in all these cases, the end user is losing out on being able to use the hardware/software as (s)he pleases. This is precisely what the FSF is trying to prevent.
Google just setup a datacenter at Baltimore using grid power. A Google spokesperson said "This is perfectly in keeping with our motto of "Do no evil" and our plans to index all the world's information".
If you are in India, you can preloaded Linux from Acer, Compaq/HP and a few other brands.
AOL has at least one person still on spam-l, and that happens to be the director of their postmaster group.
That's because most of your bus users are already in cars. Around here 50 to 95% of the population uses mass transit (depending on the city). The time cars stay off the road, traffic moves *fast*. The monment cars hit the road, traffic jams galore (a 45 minute ride turns into a 3 hour one). Buses typically carry 90 to 100 people, cars 1.
Mass transit is greener per person transported, on average.
Buses spew visible smoke, Cars spew CO (and SOx and NOx). Particulate carbon gets out of the air quite fast, the oxides don't. The oxides are also more damaging.
One bus carries ~ 50 people. A car carries 4, but more commonly 1. pollution caused by 1 bus vs pollution caused by 50 cars?
See here
The key paragraph:
If you'd like a more topical example, consider "spam". People began altering their e-mail "From:" lines in order to make their addresses harder to guess or aggregate; people began doing pattern matching in order to catch known-bad messages and either sideline or reject them. Many defenders used many small tricks to protect their inboxes. The result has not been that less spam is sent or even that less spam is received, on an aggregate basis. Things are worse now than they've ever been. (I say this as co-founder of MAPS LLC, by which I hope to establish my credentials in the spam field for those of you who do not know me.) Today a small number of highly advanced defenders is spam-immune only because they are a small number and their techniques are not widely effective against the attackers; and a small number of highly advanced attackers can "spam at will" a far larger population than ever before. And the trend is that things are getting worse, and getting worse faster than ever before.
Sure Office is very bloated, but it is also the defacto standard and Openoffice has never been and probably never will be 100% compatible
Interesting. I tend to send out ODF documents, and I tend not to have issues. Of course, given that around here MS Office is ~ 3 months of salary for most people makes OpenOffice.org a huge moneysaver.
As a Hindu in India, I can assure you we are just as organised as the Free Software and Open Source communities. Organised chaos.
I am sure they will listen to reason.
A coherent organized worldview that is dynamic, module-based and upgradable.
Welcome to Hinduism. Those pesky Indians already did this years ago.
*Shrug*. My country has been targetted by Islamic terrorists for about two decades. They are backed by a Chinese/US/Saudi Arabia supported, armed and funded nuclear power. The Islamic terrorists already have nukes. Believe me, it really can't get worse from where I sit.
2 -June/004544.htmle rrorismupdate.htmlr a_20020525.htmn es/volume16/Article1.htm. htmlm ain648733.shtml_ of_mass_destruction6 6r.htm
http://www.kashmir-information.com/Terrorism/
https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/pipermail/ornet/200
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Kashmir
http://www.kashmirherald.com/january2002/kashmirt
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10958641/
http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fellows/behe
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultli
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/12/terror/
http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/1577.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/000575.html
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040104-102921-91
And you think I worry about teeny little things like giving nukes to Lebanon forcing Israel to openly declare its nuclear status? I suspect you need to learn a little bit more about the rest of the world.
Or that will be the only company with users left, after the rest are compromised.
Running everything over http.... I would rather not be a sysadmin at a company which does that.