That said, have you read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel?
If you compare book #3 and book #4 to the first two books... then yes, yes I have read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel. (The first two were rather simplistic plots, a bit formulaic, and too many instances of hero learns new skill by accident in chapter 7 only to use it to save the world in chapter 8.
Fortunately, her skills at crafting a tale have gotten better in each book, so I feel comfortable believing that the next book will be a good read. (I have not read book #5 yet... waiting for the paperback edition.)
I'm not a FPS guy...never was very good at them, mainly due to the time involved in learning the controls. I read that line and thought - hey, maybe this ones for me!
The trick is to find one that scratches your personal itch and pulls you in. For me, it was the WWII FPS games that have come out over the past few years (MoHAA and Call of Duty). With Call of Duty, I've even gone as far as logging into the public multi-player servers and trying my hand against other players.
I haven't decided if I'll pickup DOOM3 yet... Duke Nukem 3D was a lot of fun back when I played it, but it had a good dose of comedy rather then being straight horror.
inimum size of 7x4 inches (paperback size), 2nd model 8.5x11
Unfortunately, ebook readers live in a world where tablet PCs are quickly becoming useful and practical.
Any size larger then a paperback book that cannot be held in one hand easily is going to get trounced by the more general-purpose tablet PCs.
Wireless access with web browser ability is probably also going to be required. Unless they go the route of the iPod and you download content ahead of time.
There are dectectors that do detect something which is generally accepted as being neutrinos.
The interact very weakly, has an energy less than 29 eV and travel close to the speed of light.
Since they interact so weakly they can be used to detect supernovas before the supernova is visible on the sky.
Okay, run that one by me again? You're saying that a particle that travels less than the speed of light will show up before the visible light (which travels at light speed)? And what does "weakly interacting" have to do with being able to detect supernovas?
I suspect what you were trying to say is that those particles are precursors to the supernova explosion (or at least emitted at the start of the supernova process before any visible change in the star takes place).
2) More importantly, they don't let you check where the links are going to. If I rollover "www.paypal.com" and in the little bar in my browser it says "www.paypal.com," I know it's alright. But if it says "ccnums.steal-this-suckers-identity.com"...
(has the little lightbulb go off)
Maybe Thunderbird / Mozilla Mail should add a feature where a tool tip shows up over the URL as you hover the mouse over it? That would be much more noticable then what shows up down in the status bar. Allow the web designer to use the ALT attribute (or TITLE?) to add additional information, but the first line of the pop-up should always be the uncamouflaged URL. Any URLs that use odd things like user@domain could have those parts put in bold-face type.
netscape is bloated and useless now that mozilla is out. firefox is picking up a huge amount of support and it's the best browser on the net.
I've used both Firefox and Mozilla. As to which is better depends on your usage patterns. (I do wish Mozilla would take after Firefox more... there are some differences between the two that there shouldn't be.)
I used to use Firefox+Thunderbird. But since I always have both of those applications open, when the latest version of Mozilla came out I switched back to using Mozilla's suite.
I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.
IBM and Quantum are the same way (although back then, I think I had to call a phone number for the RMA). When you buy the higher line drives with the 3 year warranties, it's extremely rare that you get *any* flak about getting it RMA'd. Never needed anything other then the serial number off of the failed drive.
It's been a while since I RMA'd an older drive, but I remember also getting back something that was larger capacity then what I sent in.
The price premium for small form-factor really isn't too bad. Unless you go for really small. The price of the case is a wash, where you usually have to pay a premium is the motherboard and possibly "thin" components (like a slimline DVD drive instead of a standard 5.25" drive). The other place you might pay more is if the unit only is able to hold a 2.5" laptop hard drive.
I have a fanless VIA EPIA in a Morex Venus 668 case (logicsupply.com carries them). The case probably barely qualifies as SFF, but it has (2) regular sized 5.25" bays, a regular 3.5" internal hard drive bay, and a 3.5" floppy drive bay. The case also supports a single PCI expansion card. Since it takes standard devices, it wasn't that much more expensive to build then a full sized PC.
Right now I have (2) 300GB 5400rpm drives, a DVD-ROM, and the floppy-disk installed, all running on top of Gentoo. Nice, quiet, and barely uses any power. (It's my test-box for checking out Gentoo and various linux server apps such as PostgreSQL, etc..)
Okay, I don't know how to do it, but wouldn't it be great if we could have some open-network DISTCC farms to use in completing Gentoo builds?
Oooh... what fun!
How to root thousands of gentoo boxes in mere days!
Seriously, would you really want to trust DISTCC results from a system not directly under your control that you have confidence that hasn't been tampered with?
(Sorry, but that's the first thing that comes to mind...)
someone REALLY using an IPAQ or any similar device for anything else than a desktop ornament when they are done playing with it.
It really depends on your job and what tools you normally carry around.
Back when I worked software development with a 45 minute commute, I used my Palm IIID extensively to keep track of everything. (Replaced my Franklin-Covey planner.) The work machine was a desktop so I didn't have a laptop that I could always keep with me when travelling. The Palm let me stay organized, get to all of my meetings, download reading material for review in a spare moment while waiting on an appointment, etc.. As a bonus, I was able to keep my home and work calendar and contact book up to date by using the Palm as a bridge device.
Later, I switched jobs to full-time telecommuting for a firm in another state. Switched to a phone with PalmOS so I only had to carry 1 device instead of two. Also started using a laptop full-time. However, the only time the PDA functionality really got used was on the trains when I didn't want to pull out the laptop. So the PDA functionality of the phone has been worth a lot less (depending on how often I travel).
As laptop prices continue to slowly fall, they encroach more and more on what PDAs are useful for. However, there are still numerous social situations (sales) where it may be impolite to pull out a laptop to jot down a simple note. I can put a PDA in a coat pocket and take it anywhere... can't quite do that with a laptop yet.
You really could apply your statement to people who buy planner systems like Day-Timer or Franklin-Covey, get all psyched up about organizing everything, and then let the planner gather dust in the corner. I was lucky to work for a company where we were all put through a training session and then *required* to use the planners. The majority of folks who did this are now dedicated planner users and have stuck with it for years.
Is it me, or do new PDAs come out every 3 frickin' months!??! Even with common sw platforms like Windows CE and PalmOS it sounds like a major hassle trying to make software that gets the most out of it.
/shrug
I'm still using my Kyocera QCP6035 PalmOS phone (mmm, a bit over 3-years old now). Have zero plans for replacing it before 2006. It does everything I need, I can customize it with additional PalmOS applications, and I'm generally happy with everything about it.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers want everyone to upgrade every year.
I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
"Labels" are a cute idea, but they're not a substitute for folders. And labels are useless for mailing list subscriptions.
1) You can't search for the List-ID: header, instead you have to depend on a string in the subject line or that all e-mail comes from a specific address (some e-mail lists set the reply-to as the original author).
2) If you subscribe to both "[Theora-Codec]" and "[Theora]", there's no way to distinguish the two in the search interface. Putting in a search string of "[Theora]" will silently drop the brackets and match both "[Theora]" and "[Theora-Codec]" tagged mail.
3) It makes the *bad* assumption that all e-mail is of the same urgency. For a lot of mailing lists, this is false because while you'll want to respond to joe@bob.net ASAP, you'll probably only read the mailing list e-mails once a day (or even just once a week).
GMail's implementation only works for people who never organize their mail by topic.
I've been running 2000 Pro since it was available, and I've put off installing XP even though I have a boxed copy of it simply because I don't see any possible benefit of switching from what's a fantastic stable yet flexible desktop OS.
If Win2000 works for you, stick with it.
I switched the gaming box over to WinXP because it simply made my life easier (more games work then under Win2000).
For a laptop, however, WinXP is nicer then Win2000. WinXP handles WiFi in a much better manner then Win2000 ever did.
XP really isn't all that different under the covers then Win2000. It does seem to do multimedia better then Win2000. We were leery of it at first on the company network, but once we learned the (slight) differences all of the new machines have been XP.
The typical solution I've heard to this dilemma is that your FROM address must be the one given to you by your ISP. It is the Reply-To should be your destination address. I think this is the 'proper' way to do things and will probably add some accountability to email, but I agree that it's going to be like pulling teeth to get people to actually do this. Sucks sucks sucks. But for the greater good, I think.
Here's a hint for your employer.
Distinguish yourself by offering authorized and encrypted outbound SMTP for your hosting customers and help them publish SPF TXT records. Don't forget that by offering encrypted POP3/SMTP, you protect your users against having their passwords sniffed off the wire/wifi.
You might get away with not offering that service for another year or two... but not for much longer. If you don't step up to the plate, your competitors will (and a few of them already do offer that service).
I think what we're going to see is being able to use your domain name on the From: line as another differentiator between webhost pricing tiers. You want to receive mail @domain? That's $X/month? YOu want to also send mail from @domain? That's $X+2/month.
There's enough competition in the hosting market that $X+2/month won't fly (at least not for long). Outbound authenticated SMTP is simply going to become a required part of standard hosting service (if you provide inbound POP3 you need to also provide outbound SMTP for your customers).
A lot of the better hosting companies already support outbound encrypted/authenticated SMTP.
Yeah, I was wondering about this too--- particularly how this is going to work with things like universities. Where I just graduated from, you're only allowed to use their SMTP server if you are either on campus, use the VPN, or are using authentication over SSL from wherever. For everyone off campus, you are expected to use your ISP's SMTP server.... and often, you'd have to anyway, with ISP's blocking outgoing port 25 these days. So how then would a university, for example, implement SPF with people using whatever.edu 'From' addresses, but going through thousands of different ISP-owned SMTP servers?
First off, unless your desktop machine is running a full SMTP daemon (e.g. sendmail / postfix / exchange / etc.) you're not supposed to be talking to other SMTP servers on port 25. The fact that you've been allowed to do so is laziness on pretty much everyone's part. Client machines should be talking to their SMTP server in an authenticated manner using one of the ports like tcp/465 and the like. Which is not a port that ISPs are blocking.
Secondly, if you want to send e-mail from a particular domain, that domain is perfectly within it's legal rights to say "you must use our authorized outbound mail servers". Which is what happens when they publish SPF-type information. Right now, using the MX records, a domain can specify what machines are authorized to accept incoming mail for that domain. (You wouldn't route mail for domainA.com to domainB.com's mail server and expect it to be delivered, right? Unless domainA's MX record specifically says that domainB.com's mail servers will handle that e-mail.) SPF information is simply the mirror image of the MX record (more or less).
Third, if we allow you to forge our domain on your e-mail and send it willy-nilly from any hotspot or mail server on the planet... well, that means that any spammer or worm can also forge our domain onto their mailings. This is extremely frustrating to a mail admin who has to deal with hundreds and thousands of mis-directed bounces from forged e-mail. The only solution is to stop domain forging from being allowed on the network. At least with SPF-type solutions, it's up to the owner of the domain to choose to publish SPF-type information and how strict they want it to be.
In short, if you want to send e-mail from domainX who publishes SPF information, you will need to abide by the rules that domainX has chosen to publish. Most likely this will require you to either VPN into their network or use an authenticated SMTP session to route mail through their mail server.
If you don't agree with domainX's rules, you are perfectly free to setup your own domain and publish your own SPF records (or not publish any).
Heck, AOL already does SPF on an ad-hoc basis, where you have to register for a whitelist if your domain sends more then a handful of e-mails to their users per some time period. At least with SPF, I can publish a single record for my domains rather then having to register with every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane ISP on the planet.
If the head of one of the biggest media conglomerates says they need to be broken up, it may just show how bad things have gotten. There are a few filthy rich who think they are filthy rich enough, and can now put principles ahead of purse. On the other hand, it may be that he's not nutty, but rather Daffy:
More likely, he's either attempting to:
Kill off any upcoming competitors now that he thinks his company is "big enough".
Or he's playing an angle where he'll profit from the restrictions.
Guaranteed he didn't get that rich from being a goody two-shoes. I want to know what the real story behind the story is.
Pay-at-the-pump stations are so convenient I will not use a traditional pay-inside gas pump unless absolutely necessary, even if it means going a bit out of my way.
I've been known to cross the street to use the pay-at-the-pump station instead of one where I have go to in and deal with a minimum-wage employee. (Or wait in a long line while some out-of-state yokel tries to pay with a combination of food stamps, out-of-state check, and pennies scrounged from underneath the car seat.)
What is surprising is that I know (well, pretty sure) that stores don't make more then a few pennies per gallon profit from their gasoline sales. Instead, they make it up on huge mark-ups on the stuff they sell inside (in their mini-mart). People who pay at the pump are much less likely to impulse purchase something.
So they might sell more gasoline per hour then a store with a 2-3 minute wait at the cashier, but I wonder if it's killing them in other areas.
Sometimes it seems to me that Windows tends to use more memory if you give it more memory (e.g. it tends to be looser about allocating memory). Dunno if that applies to the various apps that I use or not.
Eh, I'm upgrading my memory this week anyway (maxing out the laptop). Having a dozen apps open at once gets rather addicting. At least, as long as you can keep up with all of the windows.
I have a GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB card, so I'm in roughly the same boat. I use FutureMark's 3DMark03 test results to get a rough idea of how well various cards stack up (yes, I realize that there have been problems in the past... no, I really don't care). If I ignore the over-clocked cards, I get the following typical scores:
GeForce4 MX440 64MB: ~400
GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB: ~2000
GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB: ~2050
highest score in the database: ~17000
more realistic high score: ~14000-15000
ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB: ~14500-15500
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: ~13500-14000
ATI RADEON X800 PRO 256MB: ~13000-14000
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 XT 256MB: ~1600
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB: ~1250
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 256MB: ~2700
ATI RADEON 9600 Series 128MB?: ~4800-5200
ATI RADEON 9200 256MB: ~1200
And yeah, the scores probably mean nothing in reality other then the vague generality that if card X gets a higher score then card Y that it will generally be faster.
The ATI RADEON 9600 and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 cards looked like a decent price/performance, but I haven't gone and done any digging to find out. Prices for those cards are at least under $200.
The calculators with big buttons are easier to use, full stop. This isn't an issue if you only use it a couple of times a week, but if you were using it for extended periods, messing around with dinky little calculator keys would soon start to grate.
Yep, but little kids always think that their usage pattern is the only usage pattern. And anyone who doesn't conform to their usage pattern is a loser that they can make fun of.
(One of my first jobs, I had to add up the daily report by hand at the district office, prior to it being faxed up to region and to each division manager. If you had a good calculator, say one with 1/2" buttons, you had to guard it like a prize rooster or someone would walk off with it.)
If you're not swapping (heavily) with WinXP Pro on 256MB, then you must be running some miracle machine (or it was freshly built).
Mozilla 1.7 alone is eating 193MB of memory at the moment (7 browser windows w/ 20-30 total tabs, plus the mail app). MSOutlook eats up another 60MB. Big fat AOL Instant Messenger chewing up 27MB. Two explorer.exe processes each using 28MB. MSExcel with 20MB, PGPTray with 10MB, and another dozen processes each eaing up a few MB each. Screen resolution *might* play into this a bit as I'm running dual screens (1400x1050+1024x768), plus the Anti-Virus software, WinZip, WinRAR, and a few other things integrated into the Windows Shell.
Looking at Windows Task Manager, the Commit Charge (K) section of the Performance tab:
Total: 557692
Limit: 2316176
Peak: 642660
The machine's been up for around 4 days and has 768MB installed. Since I have enough physical memory to cover my typical peak memory requirements, swapping is minimal. And on a laptop with a 4800rpm harddrive, swapping is extremely painful.
I stand by my 512MB recommendation for WinXP. And it's better to double the memory (256MB to 512MB or 512MB to 1GB) on a WinXP machine then to spend that cash on the fastest CPU offered.
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That said, have you read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel?
If you compare book #3 and book #4 to the first two books... then yes, yes I have read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel. (The first two were rather simplistic plots, a bit formulaic, and too many instances of hero learns new skill by accident in chapter 7 only to use it to save the world in chapter 8.
Fortunately, her skills at crafting a tale have gotten better in each book, so I feel comfortable believing that the next book will be a good read. (I have not read book #5 yet... waiting for the paperback edition.)
I'm not a FPS guy...never was very good at them, mainly due to the time involved in learning the controls. I read that line and thought - hey, maybe this ones for me!
The trick is to find one that scratches your personal itch and pulls you in. For me, it was the WWII FPS games that have come out over the past few years (MoHAA and Call of Duty). With Call of Duty, I've even gone as far as logging into the public multi-player servers and trying my hand against other players.
I haven't decided if I'll pickup DOOM3 yet... Duke Nukem 3D was a lot of fun back when I played it, but it had a good dose of comedy rather then being straight horror.
inimum size of 7x4 inches (paperback size), 2nd model 8.5x11
Unfortunately, ebook readers live in a world where tablet PCs are quickly becoming useful and practical.
Any size larger then a paperback book that cannot be held in one hand easily is going to get trounced by the more general-purpose tablet PCs.
Wireless access with web browser ability is probably also going to be required. Unless they go the route of the iPod and you download content ahead of time.
There are dectectors that do detect something which is generally accepted as being neutrinos. The interact very weakly, has an energy less than 29 eV and travel close to the speed of light.
Since they interact so weakly they can be used to detect supernovas before the supernova is visible on the sky.
Okay, run that one by me again? You're saying that a particle that travels less than the speed of light will show up before the visible light (which travels at light speed)? And what does "weakly interacting" have to do with being able to detect supernovas?
I suspect what you were trying to say is that those particles are precursors to the supernova explosion (or at least emitted at the start of the supernova process before any visible change in the star takes place).
2) More importantly, they don't let you check where the links are going to. If I rollover "www.paypal.com" and in the little bar in my browser it says "www.paypal.com," I know it's alright. But if it says "ccnums.steal-this-suckers-identity.com"...
(has the little lightbulb go off)
Maybe Thunderbird / Mozilla Mail should add a feature where a tool tip shows up over the URL as you hover the mouse over it? That would be much more noticable then what shows up down in the status bar. Allow the web designer to use the ALT attribute (or TITLE?) to add additional information, but the first line of the pop-up should always be the uncamouflaged URL. Any URLs that use odd things like user@domain could have those parts put in bold-face type.
Anyone got a link to such a request in bugzilla?
netscape is bloated and useless now that mozilla is out. firefox is picking up a huge amount of support and it's the best browser on the net.
I've used both Firefox and Mozilla. As to which is better depends on your usage patterns. (I do wish Mozilla would take after Firefox more... there are some differences between the two that there shouldn't be.)
I used to use Firefox+Thunderbird. But since I always have both of those applications open, when the latest version of Mozilla came out I switched back to using Mozilla's suite.
I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.
IBM and Quantum are the same way (although back then, I think I had to call a phone number for the RMA). When you buy the higher line drives with the 3 year warranties, it's extremely rare that you get *any* flak about getting it RMA'd. Never needed anything other then the serial number off of the failed drive.
It's been a while since I RMA'd an older drive, but I remember also getting back something that was larger capacity then what I sent in.
The price premium for small form-factor really isn't too bad. Unless you go for really small. The price of the case is a wash, where you usually have to pay a premium is the motherboard and possibly "thin" components (like a slimline DVD drive instead of a standard 5.25" drive). The other place you might pay more is if the unit only is able to hold a 2.5" laptop hard drive.
I have a fanless VIA EPIA in a Morex Venus 668 case (logicsupply.com carries them). The case probably barely qualifies as SFF, but it has (2) regular sized 5.25" bays, a regular 3.5" internal hard drive bay, and a 3.5" floppy drive bay. The case also supports a single PCI expansion card. Since it takes standard devices, it wasn't that much more expensive to build then a full sized PC.
Right now I have (2) 300GB 5400rpm drives, a DVD-ROM, and the floppy-disk installed, all running on top of Gentoo. Nice, quiet, and barely uses any power. (It's my test-box for checking out Gentoo and various linux server apps such as PostgreSQL, etc..)
Thanks... I did used to know what that was, it's just been too many years since I've heard it used.
I pray that Darl doesn't wind up on Springer wearing a wife-beater.
Er, since I don't watch Springer... what is a wife-beater and why would you be wearing one?
Okay, I don't know how to do it, but wouldn't it be great if we could have some open-network DISTCC farms to use in completing Gentoo builds?
Oooh... what fun!
How to root thousands of gentoo boxes in mere days!
Seriously, would you really want to trust DISTCC results from a system not directly under your control that you have confidence that hasn't been tampered with?
(Sorry, but that's the first thing that comes to mind...)
someone REALLY using an IPAQ or any similar device for anything else than a desktop ornament when they are done playing with it.
It really depends on your job and what tools you normally carry around.
Back when I worked software development with a 45 minute commute, I used my Palm IIID extensively to keep track of everything. (Replaced my Franklin-Covey planner.) The work machine was a desktop so I didn't have a laptop that I could always keep with me when travelling. The Palm let me stay organized, get to all of my meetings, download reading material for review in a spare moment while waiting on an appointment, etc.. As a bonus, I was able to keep my home and work calendar and contact book up to date by using the Palm as a bridge device.
Later, I switched jobs to full-time telecommuting for a firm in another state. Switched to a phone with PalmOS so I only had to carry 1 device instead of two. Also started using a laptop full-time. However, the only time the PDA functionality really got used was on the trains when I didn't want to pull out the laptop. So the PDA functionality of the phone has been worth a lot less (depending on how often I travel).
As laptop prices continue to slowly fall, they encroach more and more on what PDAs are useful for. However, there are still numerous social situations (sales) where it may be impolite to pull out a laptop to jot down a simple note. I can put a PDA in a coat pocket and take it anywhere... can't quite do that with a laptop yet.
You really could apply your statement to people who buy planner systems like Day-Timer or Franklin-Covey, get all psyched up about organizing everything, and then let the planner gather dust in the corner. I was lucky to work for a company where we were all put through a training session and then *required* to use the planners. The majority of folks who did this are now dedicated planner users and have stuck with it for years.
Is it me, or do new PDAs come out every 3 frickin' months!??! Even with common sw platforms like Windows CE and PalmOS it sounds like a major hassle trying to make software that gets the most out of it.
/shrug
I'm still using my Kyocera QCP6035 PalmOS phone (mmm, a bit over 3-years old now). Have zero plans for replacing it before 2006. It does everything I need, I can customize it with additional PalmOS applications, and I'm generally happy with everything about it.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers want everyone to upgrade every year.
I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first. It's great being able more then one label to a message.
"Labels" are a cute idea, but they're not a substitute for folders. And labels are useless for mailing list subscriptions.
1) You can't search for the List-ID: header, instead you have to depend on a string in the subject line or that all e-mail comes from a specific address (some e-mail lists set the reply-to as the original author).
2) If you subscribe to both "[Theora-Codec]" and "[Theora]", there's no way to distinguish the two in the search interface. Putting in a search string of "[Theora]" will silently drop the brackets and match both "[Theora]" and "[Theora-Codec]" tagged mail.
3) It makes the *bad* assumption that all e-mail is of the same urgency. For a lot of mailing lists, this is false because while you'll want to respond to joe@bob.net ASAP, you'll probably only read the mailing list e-mails once a day (or even just once a week).
GMail's implementation only works for people who never organize their mail by topic.
I've been running 2000 Pro since it was available, and I've put off installing XP even though I have a boxed copy of it simply because I don't see any possible benefit of switching from what's a fantastic stable yet flexible desktop OS.
If Win2000 works for you, stick with it.
I switched the gaming box over to WinXP because it simply made my life easier (more games work then under Win2000).
For a laptop, however, WinXP is nicer then Win2000. WinXP handles WiFi in a much better manner then Win2000 ever did.
XP really isn't all that different under the covers then Win2000. It does seem to do multimedia better then Win2000. We were leery of it at first on the company network, but once we learned the (slight) differences all of the new machines have been XP.
For the record, nslookup is deprecated and you should use dig.
Unfortunately, dig isn't available on a stock Windows box (Microsoft hasn't seen fit to provide us with that useful tool).
I usually use demon.net's net tools page... or NSLOOKUP.
The typical solution I've heard to this dilemma is that your FROM address must be the one given to you by your ISP. It is the Reply-To should be your destination address. I think this is the 'proper' way to do things and will probably add some accountability to email, but I agree that it's going to be like pulling teeth to get people to actually do this. Sucks sucks sucks. But for the greater good, I think.
Here's a hint for your employer.
Distinguish yourself by offering authorized and encrypted outbound SMTP for your hosting customers and help them publish SPF TXT records. Don't forget that by offering encrypted POP3/SMTP, you protect your users against having their passwords sniffed off the wire/wifi.
You might get away with not offering that service for another year or two... but not for much longer. If you don't step up to the plate, your competitors will (and a few of them already do offer that service).
I think what we're going to see is being able to use your domain name on the From: line as another differentiator between webhost pricing tiers. You want to receive mail @domain? That's $X/month? YOu want to also send mail from @domain? That's $X+2/month.
There's enough competition in the hosting market that $X+2/month won't fly (at least not for long). Outbound authenticated SMTP is simply going to become a required part of standard hosting service (if you provide inbound POP3 you need to also provide outbound SMTP for your customers).
A lot of the better hosting companies already support outbound encrypted/authenticated SMTP.
Yeah, I was wondering about this too--- particularly how this is going to work with things like universities. Where I just graduated from, you're only allowed to use their SMTP server if you are either on campus, use the VPN, or are using authentication over SSL from wherever. For everyone off campus, you are expected to use your ISP's SMTP server.... and often, you'd have to anyway, with ISP's blocking outgoing port 25 these days. So how then would a university, for example, implement SPF with people using whatever.edu 'From' addresses, but going through thousands of different ISP-owned SMTP servers?
First off, unless your desktop machine is running a full SMTP daemon (e.g. sendmail / postfix / exchange / etc.) you're not supposed to be talking to other SMTP servers on port 25. The fact that you've been allowed to do so is laziness on pretty much everyone's part. Client machines should be talking to their SMTP server in an authenticated manner using one of the ports like tcp/465 and the like. Which is not a port that ISPs are blocking.
Secondly, if you want to send e-mail from a particular domain, that domain is perfectly within it's legal rights to say "you must use our authorized outbound mail servers". Which is what happens when they publish SPF-type information. Right now, using the MX records, a domain can specify what machines are authorized to accept incoming mail for that domain. (You wouldn't route mail for domainA.com to domainB.com's mail server and expect it to be delivered, right? Unless domainA's MX record specifically says that domainB.com's mail servers will handle that e-mail.) SPF information is simply the mirror image of the MX record (more or less).
Third, if we allow you to forge our domain on your e-mail and send it willy-nilly from any hotspot or mail server on the planet... well, that means that any spammer or worm can also forge our domain onto their mailings. This is extremely frustrating to a mail admin who has to deal with hundreds and thousands of mis-directed bounces from forged e-mail. The only solution is to stop domain forging from being allowed on the network. At least with SPF-type solutions, it's up to the owner of the domain to choose to publish SPF-type information and how strict they want it to be.
In short, if you want to send e-mail from domainX who publishes SPF information, you will need to abide by the rules that domainX has chosen to publish. Most likely this will require you to either VPN into their network or use an authenticated SMTP session to route mail through their mail server.
If you don't agree with domainX's rules, you are perfectly free to setup your own domain and publish your own SPF records (or not publish any).
Heck, AOL already does SPF on an ad-hoc basis, where you have to register for a whitelist if your domain sends more then a handful of e-mails to their users per some time period. At least with SPF, I can publish a single record for my domains rather then having to register with every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane ISP on the planet.
If the head of one of the biggest media conglomerates says they need to be broken up, it may just show how bad things have gotten. There are a few filthy rich who think they are filthy rich enough, and can now put principles ahead of purse. On the other hand, it may be that he's not nutty, but rather Daffy:
More likely, he's either attempting to:
Kill off any upcoming competitors now that he thinks his company is "big enough".
Or he's playing an angle where he'll profit from the restrictions.
Guaranteed he didn't get that rich from being a goody two-shoes. I want to know what the real story behind the story is.
Pay-at-the-pump stations are so convenient I will not use a traditional pay-inside gas pump unless absolutely necessary, even if it means going a bit out of my way.
I've been known to cross the street to use the pay-at-the-pump station instead of one where I have go to in and deal with a minimum-wage employee. (Or wait in a long line while some out-of-state yokel tries to pay with a combination of food stamps, out-of-state check, and pennies scrounged from underneath the car seat.)
What is surprising is that I know (well, pretty sure) that stores don't make more then a few pennies per gallon profit from their gasoline sales. Instead, they make it up on huge mark-ups on the stuff they sell inside (in their mini-mart). People who pay at the pump are much less likely to impulse purchase something.
So they might sell more gasoline per hour then a store with a 2-3 minute wait at the cashier, but I wonder if it's killing them in other areas.
Oops, I misunderstood you then.
Sometimes it seems to me that Windows tends to use more memory if you give it more memory (e.g. it tends to be looser about allocating memory). Dunno if that applies to the various apps that I use or not.
Eh, I'm upgrading my memory this week anyway (maxing out the laptop). Having a dozen apps open at once gets rather addicting. At least, as long as you can keep up with all of the windows.
I have a GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB card, so I'm in roughly the same boat. I use FutureMark's 3DMark03 test results to get a rough idea of how well various cards stack up (yes, I realize that there have been problems in the past... no, I really don't care). If I ignore the over-clocked cards, I get the following typical scores:
GeForce4 MX440 64MB: ~400
GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB: ~2000
GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB: ~2050
highest score in the database: ~17000
more realistic high score: ~14000-15000
ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB: ~14500-15500
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: ~13500-14000
ATI RADEON X800 PRO 256MB: ~13000-14000
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 XT 256MB: ~1600
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB: ~1250
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 256MB: ~2700
ATI RADEON 9600 Series 128MB?: ~4800-5200
ATI RADEON 9200 256MB: ~1200
And yeah, the scores probably mean nothing in reality other then the vague generality that if card X gets a higher score then card Y that it will generally be faster.
The ATI RADEON 9600 and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 cards looked like a decent price/performance, but I haven't gone and done any digging to find out. Prices for those cards are at least under $200.
The calculators with big buttons are easier to use, full stop. This isn't an issue if you only use it a couple of times a week, but if you were using it for extended periods, messing around with dinky little calculator keys would soon start to grate.
Yep, but little kids always think that their usage pattern is the only usage pattern. And anyone who doesn't conform to their usage pattern is a loser that they can make fun of.
(One of my first jobs, I had to add up the daily report by hand at the district office, prior to it being faxed up to region and to each division manager. If you had a good calculator, say one with 1/2" buttons, you had to guard it like a prize rooster or someone would walk off with it.)
If you're not swapping (heavily) with WinXP Pro on 256MB, then you must be running some miracle machine (or it was freshly built).
Mozilla 1.7 alone is eating 193MB of memory at the moment (7 browser windows w/ 20-30 total tabs, plus the mail app). MSOutlook eats up another 60MB. Big fat AOL Instant Messenger chewing up 27MB. Two explorer.exe processes each using 28MB. MSExcel with 20MB, PGPTray with 10MB, and another dozen processes each eaing up a few MB each. Screen resolution *might* play into this a bit as I'm running dual screens (1400x1050+1024x768), plus the Anti-Virus software, WinZip, WinRAR, and a few other things integrated into the Windows Shell.
Looking at Windows Task Manager, the Commit Charge (K) section of the Performance tab:
Total: 557692
Limit: 2316176
Peak: 642660
The machine's been up for around 4 days and has 768MB installed. Since I have enough physical memory to cover my typical peak memory requirements, swapping is minimal. And on a laptop with a 4800rpm harddrive, swapping is extremely painful.
I stand by my 512MB recommendation for WinXP. And it's better to double the memory (256MB to 512MB or 512MB to 1GB) on a WinXP machine then to spend that cash on the fastest CPU offered.