You protect your photos the same way that you protect the rest of your data: you back it up. Backup strategy is determined by the state of cheap storage hardware.
There is no cheap hardware that will reliably archive your data, unattended, for 20 years. So avoid any strategy that involves the concept of "archive." Instead, leverage this useful property of disk drives: if you can successfully write some data to the drive, then you will likely be able to read data from any location on the same disk drive. If you do so on the same day, at least. With this principle in mind, you will need to place a copy of ALL of your data onto a disk drive that you use at least occasionally. As you use the drive, you are passively testing it.
First, upgrade your main computer disk drive. It must be big enough to hold ALL of the data that you wish to keep forever. Don't cheat yourself: if you want to keep certain photos, movies, music, etc. forever, it must all fit on the disk drive that you use every day.
Your main disk drive may fail, or you may alter its contents accidentally. Therefore, you need backup. This would be an external disk drive, your choice of USB, firewire, or eSATA.
Your external disk drive may fail, or the cheap backup software that you use might do something stupid to that disk. Therefore, you need two external disk drives, not one. You swap them each time you back up. Your goal is to have two external disk drives, both of which contain copies of all of your data. Your house might burn down, so you need to cache a third external disk drive away from your house. Your job site might be the best location for this.
You can't depend on any of your disk drives if you don't test them. So, you need to periodically rotate your three external disk drives. Me, I take an external disk drive to work one morning a month. In the evening, I return with a different disk drive and start using it for backup.
Since you are taking disk drives out of the (relative) safety of your house, you should think about encrypting your external disks.
If you use this strategy, then you are protected as follows:
- If your main, internal disk drive craps out, you have backups to recover from.
- If one of your two in-use backup drives craps out, you will find out within a few days, when you try to back up to it.
- If your house burns down, you have a copy of your data off-site.
- If your offsite disk drive craps out, you will find out eventually, when you rotate it back to your house to use as a backup disk.
Conclusion: this is the minimum bill of materials for securing your data against single faults:
- A big disk drive that you use for all of your day-to-day activities.
- three external disk drives.
- backup software, preferably with reasonable encryption.
- a willingness to promptly replace any of the above items that fails.
It would be cool if my MacPro and my laptop used WiFi to sync up documents, preferences, media files and such. This problem is especially acute in iTunes where I have hundreds of GB of media on my main machine, but have to manually manage those things on my laptop. I wish Apple recognized this problem and solved it elegantly.
I am an older software engineer, here are my observations.
Your point is that the simple software tasks can be performed cheaply in developing countries. The more difficult tasks cannot.
This is true now, for some reasonable value of "true." However, my young colleagues in Bangalore and Beijing are not standing still in this race. They are working hard, picking up skills as fast as they can. Exactly as I did, when I was their age.
In a few years, these Asian new college grads will no longer be entry level engineers. They will be the senior developers of their time. And where will the American senior developers be? Retired, that's where. If we lose a generation of American entry level engineers, where will the next generation of senior developers come from?
I have so far failed in attempts to integrate my computer with my TV. The AppleTV appliance looks interesting, but it tops out at 720P. My TV uses 1920x1080 pixels, and I want to drive them all.
Give Apple credit for doing a fine job on the feature set that they chose to deliver. The famous Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) found it to be stable, elegant, and pleasant to use.
Here are some other possible solutions:
1. Dedicated media extenders
This class of products includes appliances like the Netgear EVA700 and the DLink DSM-520. I have an EVA700 and I have read reviews of all the other gadgets in this class. They suck. Here is a case where the professional reviews on sites such as CNet and Toms Hardware paint a pretty picture, but the reality is that the machines are horribly unstable. This is bad enough in a personal computer. In a living room appliance, it is fatal. Read the user reviews at Amazon.com for details.
2. Microsoft's XBox 360
I have heard good reports of this machine. Although it is a gaming console, Microsoft built in a respectable media extender capability, apparently. I have not tested it personally. I am waiting for a '360 that has digital output (DVI or HDMI), but this might not be interesting to other users.
3. Apple Mac Mini
This is a general purpose computer that is quiet enough for living room use. It also ships with a handheld remote control. It seems promising. The fact that it is a general purpose computer is both a blessing and a curse...... A blessing, because it gives the user control. For example, if you are having trouble streaming a particular video format (DivX?) to your living room, you can hope that a software upgrade, or a new piece of software can solve the problem.... A curse, because it makes the box more difficult to integrate than dedicated-to-purpose machines like AppleTV. You can't just plug it in and start streaming audio/video/photos. It also makes for a much more expensive solution. More than twice as expensive!
I am also concerned that the current Mac Mini might not have quite enough CPU power to decode high quality 1080I bitstreams. I would love to be able to stream 1080P too.
Nevertheless, this is my favorite alternative at the moment. I plan to obtain one of these soon.
I have read similar articles on the web. In most articles, the author does not disclose what kind of success he had with his methods. So I have a problem with this Slashdot post. How many times did the author sue a caller? How much money did the court award? How much of that amount did he recover? Did he suffer any negative consequences, such as a counter suit? Without this information, it is not possible to assign a value to the methods that this article recommends.
There is another attack just started against Blue Security, I think. Someone has been sending out e-mails that appear to be sent by me. These e-mails urge the reader to join the Blue Security effort. In other words, these e-mails look like spam that "sells" Blue Security, and they look like they came from me.
I know this because I have received three "delivery failure" messages from mailer daemons.
In other news, the number of spams that I get per day has almost doubled recently.
Amazon.com has a search engine named a9.com. It has a "yellow pages" feature. The businesses listed in these "yellow pages" have had "Click to call" for several monthes now.
But now that Google offers it, it is big news. Right?
The original post mentioned the misspelling "definately." This is an example of a spelling error that spread through usenet news and other online (web) forums. I have seen several cases of this over the years.
I suspect that many people are influenced by what they read online. If they see a common word misspelled in a particular way, they assume that the spelling is correct, and use it themselves.
I try to use perfect spelling in whatever I post, because I do not wish to start (or enforce) a "spelling virus."
I wish that Slashdot had a spellchecker button. It would be rather embarrassing if I misspelled a word in this post!
About a year ago, I upgraded my ancient Startac to the latest model offered by Verizon. I quickly discovered two locations in my town where the new phone failed to place a call, yet the Startac manages to do so. I visit these two places often, so I returned the new phone. I am using the Startac again.
I asked several Verizon reps which of their phones offers the best RF performance. Each rep stated that all of the new phones are the same.
I cannot accept that a shitty camera and an irritating ringtone are more important features than a good radio.
The linked-to article has a further link to a web page describing a new PDA: the Apple iNote.
The iHome (as described) is *almost* realistic. The disk drive and DRAM are a bit too big. Otherwise, the imaginary iHome would be a good product, and welcomed by many.
On the other hand, the iNote (as described) is pure comedy.
In my opinion, here is the proper way to deal with this and any similar scourge:
1. Install Privoxy. It writes every bit of HTTP activity to its log file.
2. Wait for a pop-up ad to appear.
3. Immediately consult the Privoxy log file. Determine what URL the pop-up came from.
4. Block out the entire domain from which the pop-up came from. Use whatever IP blocker you like best: Your DNS relay, your firewall, your hosts file, or Privoxy.
The last time I checked, the U.S.A. owned almost all of the world's sources of helium. In fact, since WWII, the U.S. government has controled the sale of it. This will be yet another reason for China to maintain friendly relations with the U.S.A.
Quote: The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. That includes long term deaths attributed to radiation poisoning and increased cancer rates. Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone.
If you are going to consider the mortality caused by mining the coal, then you should also consider the mortality caused by mining uranium. That stuff doesn't grow on trees, you know. More nuclear power will mean more mining accidents. Different mines, though.
I would like to know how people use these gadgets. If you ride a train every day, you could certainly occupy yourself with such a gadget. Otherwise, when would you use it? If you are sitting in an airplane, wouldn't you prefer to use a notebook computer? It would have a bigger screen.
I suspect that these gadgets will sell in a few places such as Tokyo, but not elsewhere. What am I missing?
I've developed products that use Microsoft Windows as an embedded operating system. If reliability is an issue, there is only one way to deploy Windows: treat the computing device as a specialized instrument, not as a general purpose computer. ANY changes to hardware and software cannot be tolerated!
The existence of malicious software (such as viruses, worms, and so forth) complicates this idea, but not by much. What it means is that if the computing device is connected to a network, then this network must be a closed, tightly controlled circuit. For idiots: it is because the malicious software may modify the "instrument."
The network could be a small handful of medical devices, each of which is treated as an instrument, not as a general purpose computer. Installing e-mail clients, web browsers, or Powerpoint is not allowed!
Attaching an office PC to the network is definitely not allowed!
If this simple rule is followed, then Microsoft's patches will not be an urgent matter. If this rule is NOT followed, then no amount of patching will make the instrument reliable. Hilarity will NOT ensue.
If GE Medical does not understand this, if the hospital does not understand this, then NEITHER entity should be in the health care business.
> I've had the following in my HOSTS file for a while now > > 0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.com > 0.0.0.0 ads.doubleclick.net >...
Some alternatives that are fun:
1. Install privoxy from sourceforge.net. This is a local http proxy that allows you to filter out web content using regular expressions. So you can easily blank out any URL that contains the string "doubleclick." This is easier and more complete than trying to enumerate all the hostnames that Doubleclick Inc. uses. Privoxy is multi-platform; you can use it under Linux, Windows, etc.
2. Install posadis from sourceforge.net. This is a caching DNS server that you can install on your computer. It allows you to control how domain names (like *.doubleclick.net) get resolved by ALL the programs on your computer. I use it to essentially blackhole domains that I don't like. Once again, this is a multi-platform project. In particular, under Windoze, it runs as a service. It has an irritating bug: under Windoze, it will occasionally start using 100% CPU. When this happens, you have to restart the posadis service. A hassle, verily. But I enjoy having the control that derives from running my own DNS server.
3. Use a firewall (hardware or software) to block out numeric IP addresses. For example, 216.73.92.112 is www.doubleclick.net, so it should be blocked. I used to use this approach. I liked the idea of absolutely blocking any packets going to or from the bad guys, regardless of the DNS name used. The problem with this approach is that outfits like doubleclick.net will use a ton of different numeric IP addresses, and it's difficult to keep up with them.
This Slashdot post is misleading. According to the Navy League article, warships with electric propulsion systems will be deployed in 2011. But the advanced weapons (rail guns, lasers, etc.) will not. The advanced weapons will be made *possible* because of the electricity available from the new propulsion systems. But the article does NOT say that the weapons will be ready by 2011.
Quote: Although the quote is probably out of context, telling people they should expect to be fired at any time is probably a motivational technique learned in today's MBA environment. Force and fear doesn't even work well with prisoners. So why do MBAs and other assorted managerial parasites think they work for tech?
I don't think that this kind of arrogance is being taught at MBA schools, if that's what you mean. It's simply management trying to take advantage of the weak job market. Have you noticed what has happened to salary levels recently?
Gateway is trying to diversify into consumer electronics: Televisions, MP3 players, and so forth. This seems like a good idea to me, since competing with Dell on PCs is difficult.
After the Gateway stores close down, how will they peddle their consumer electronics? Unlike PCs, customers want to see and hear these products perform.
bogofilter doesn't seem to be fooled by the random word spams either. Bayesian filtering rules!
The real stealth inflation comes from the Fed
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I saw the headline of this posting, I was hoping that the article would be about the Federal Reserve Bank. What a disappointment.
The Fed has been printing money like mad, for several years now. This is inflation, big time. The published rate of inflation is below 2% per annum, but this is deceiving. Consider an example: an electric table saw.
Perhaps its price has barely changed in the last two years. Is this an example of low inflation? No. The price changed only a little, but the table saw changed a lot. Two years ago, most of the manufacturing that went into the table saw was performed in the U.S. or Japan, or possibly Taiwan. Today, most of the manufacturing took place in China. The cost of this production decreased dramatically. The price did not. Where did the difference go? Was it turned into profit? Doubtful. Except for markets where a monopoly exists, profits are constrained by competition.
A similar story has developed for services. Consider an insurance policy, a home equity loan, or the interpretation of your last mammogram. Over the past several years, all three of these services became much cheaper to provide, due to offshoring. The labor used to provide these services gradually moved to India. The phone support, the analysis of creditworthiness, the medical transcription, the inspection of X-ray images, all of this (and much more) is steadily moving overseas.
The price, in dollars, of these goods and services has not changed much. The nature of these goods and services has changed tremendously. How is this possible? It's because the government has been printing money like crazy. It's not easy to figure out how much new money is being created. For some reason, newspapers love to report changes in the interest rates controlled by the Fed. They even report rumors of future changes in this rate. The byproduct of these rate manipulations is usually an increase in the money supply, and this information is rarely reported. If mentioned at all, it is in the form of an aside to a more "important" development. I've seen figures ranging from 6% per annum to 12% per annum. I don't know what the true figure is. But I do know that prices on goods and services should be in free fall right now. This, because every month, more of these goods and services are being produced by dirt cheap overseas labor.
We're enduring lower pay and more frequent spells of unemployment, due to offshoring. We're being denied the benefits of cheaper foreign-made goods and services, due to the Fed.
The practice of burdening spammers with insincere replies is likely to reduce spammage. The beauty of this approach is that the ultimate client of the spam is the one who will bear the cost. The mortgage lender or pornographer whose wares are advertised is, ultimately, the entity who will take the time to respond to the (false) sales lead. If this entity gets enough false sales leads, he will take a keen interest in avoiding them.
But this is a labor intensive solution. People who wish to fight spam in this way will have to engage in an exchange of e-mails with the spammer (or his ultimate client). If/when this spam-fighting technique gains traction, spammers will find alternatives to e-mail for replies. The spams will request a visit to a web page, rather than an e-mail reply. As other/. posters have noted, this method is already very popular with spammers.
In my experience, Bayesian filtering on incoming e-mails works astonishingly well. I use a package called bogofilter, and it has a marvelous property. After a training period, it NEVER classifies "good" e-mail as spam. Thus, I can discard spam e-mails without reading them. For me, this is the holy grail of spam-fighting. I don't even look at the subject line of spam e-mails. My mail client doesn't even notify me when a spam e-mail arrives. The spams just silently disappear, without using any of my time at all. Sure, a few spams per day evade my filter, but the volume of these "clever" spams is not high enough to trouble me.
As far as I'm concerned, the war against spam has already been won. There are other Bayesian filters at sourceforge, including POPFile, spambayes, and crm114. Take your pick.
The disappearance of IT jobs is only part of a very frightening development. The big picture is that living standards are going to become more equitable, world wide.
This development is driven by two historic changes. In the first place, the American capitalist model of economics has been embraced by much of the world's population. The big breakthroughs occurred in China and India.
The second change is that modern electronic communication systems has made information portable, and cheaply so.
As a result, almost any job whose output is information is subject to price competition from overseas.
I think that it's important to understand that this trend doesn't only apply to IT workers. It applies to careers as diverse as interpretation of mammograms to analysis of mortgage applications.
If you get squeezed out of your IT job, where will you go next? There's no place to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
You protect your photos the same way that you protect the rest of your data: you back it up. Backup strategy is determined by the state of cheap storage hardware.
There is no cheap hardware that will reliably archive your data, unattended, for 20 years. So avoid any strategy that involves the concept of "archive." Instead, leverage this useful property of disk drives: if you can successfully write some data to the drive, then you will likely be able to read data from any location on the same disk drive. If you do so on the same day, at least. With this principle in mind, you will need to place a copy of ALL of your data onto a disk drive that you use at least occasionally. As you use the drive, you are passively testing it.
First, upgrade your main computer disk drive. It must be big enough to hold ALL of the data that you wish to keep forever. Don't cheat yourself: if you want to keep certain photos, movies, music, etc. forever, it must all fit on the disk drive that you use every day.
Your main disk drive may fail, or you may alter its contents accidentally. Therefore, you need backup. This would be an external disk drive, your choice of USB, firewire, or eSATA.
Your external disk drive may fail, or the cheap backup software that you use might do something stupid to that disk. Therefore, you need two external disk drives, not one. You swap them each time you back up. Your goal is to have two external disk drives, both of which contain copies of all of your data.
Your house might burn down, so you need to cache a third external disk drive away from your house. Your job site might be the best location for this.
You can't depend on any of your disk drives if you don't test them. So, you need to periodically rotate your three external disk drives. Me, I take an external disk drive to work one morning a month. In the evening, I return with a different disk drive and start using it for backup.
Since you are taking disk drives out of the (relative) safety of your house, you should think about encrypting your external disks.
If you use this strategy, then you are protected as follows:
- If your main, internal disk drive craps out, you have backups to recover from.
- If one of your two in-use backup drives craps out, you will find out within a few days, when you try to back up to it.
- If your house burns down, you have a copy of your data off-site.
- If your offsite disk drive craps out, you will find out eventually, when you rotate it back to your house to use as a backup disk.
Conclusion: this is the minimum bill of materials for securing your data against single faults:
- A big disk drive that you use for all of your day-to-day activities.
- three external disk drives.
- backup software, preferably with reasonable encryption.
- a willingness to promptly replace any of the above items that fails.
rsync?
I am an older software engineer, here are my observations.
Your point is that the simple software tasks can be performed cheaply in developing countries. The more difficult tasks cannot.
This is true now, for some reasonable value of "true." However, my young colleagues in Bangalore and Beijing are not standing still in this race. They are working hard, picking up skills as fast as they can. Exactly as I did, when I was their age.
In a few years, these Asian new college grads will no longer be entry level engineers. They will be the senior developers of their time. And where will the American senior developers be? Retired, that's where. If we lose a generation of American entry level engineers, where will the next generation of senior developers come from?
I have so far failed in attempts to integrate my computer with my TV. The AppleTV appliance looks interesting, but it tops out at 720P. My TV uses 1920x1080 pixels, and I want to drive them all.
... A blessing, because it gives the user control. For example, if you are having trouble streaming a particular video format (DivX?) to your living room, you can hope that a software upgrade, or a new piece of software can solve the problem. ... A curse, because it makes the box more difficult to integrate than dedicated-to-purpose machines like AppleTV. You can't just plug it in and start streaming audio/video/photos. It also makes for a much more expensive solution. More than twice as expensive!
Give Apple credit for doing a fine job on the feature set that they chose to deliver. The famous Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) found it to be stable, elegant, and pleasant to use.
Here are some other possible solutions:
1. Dedicated media extenders
This class of products includes appliances like the Netgear EVA700 and the DLink DSM-520. I have an EVA700 and I have read reviews of all the other gadgets in this class. They suck. Here is a case where the professional reviews on sites such as CNet and Toms Hardware paint a pretty picture, but the reality is that the machines are horribly unstable. This is bad enough in a personal computer. In a living room appliance, it is fatal. Read the user reviews at Amazon.com for details.
2. Microsoft's XBox 360
I have heard good reports of this machine. Although it is a gaming console, Microsoft built in a respectable media extender capability, apparently. I have not tested it personally. I am waiting for a '360 that has digital output (DVI or HDMI), but this might not be interesting to other users.
3. Apple Mac Mini
This is a general purpose computer that is quiet enough for living room use. It also ships with a handheld remote control. It seems promising. The fact that it is a general purpose computer is both a blessing and a curse...
I am also concerned that the current Mac Mini might not have quite enough CPU power to decode high quality 1080I bitstreams. I would love to be able to stream 1080P too.
Nevertheless, this is my favorite alternative at the moment. I plan to obtain one of these soon.
I have read similar articles on the web. In most articles, the author does not disclose what kind of success he had with his methods. So I have a problem with this Slashdot post. How many times did the author sue a caller? How much money did the court award? How much of that amount did he recover? Did he suffer any negative consequences, such as a counter suit? Without this information, it is not possible to assign a value to the methods that this article recommends.
There is another attack just started against Blue Security, I think. Someone has been sending out e-mails that appear to be sent by me. These e-mails urge the reader to join the Blue Security effort. In other words, these e-mails look like spam that "sells" Blue Security, and they look like they came from me.
I know this because I have received three "delivery failure" messages from mailer daemons.
In other news, the number of spams that I get per day has almost doubled recently.
Amazon.com has a search engine named a9.com. It has a "yellow pages" feature. The businesses listed in these "yellow pages" have had "Click to call" for several monthes now.
But now that Google offers it, it is big news. Right?
The original post mentioned the misspelling "definately." This is an example of a spelling error that spread through usenet news and other online (web) forums. I have seen several cases of this over the years.
I suspect that many people are influenced by what they read online. If they see a common word misspelled in a particular way, they assume that the spelling is correct, and use it themselves.
I try to use perfect spelling in whatever I post, because I do not wish to start (or enforce) a "spelling virus."
I wish that Slashdot had a spellchecker button. It would be rather embarrassing if I misspelled a word in this post!
"... What else can you add to a cell phone?"
How about the ability to complete a phone call?
About a year ago, I upgraded my ancient Startac to the latest model offered by Verizon. I quickly discovered two locations in my town where the new phone failed to place a call, yet the Startac manages to do so. I visit these two places often, so I returned the new phone. I am using the Startac again.
I asked several Verizon reps which of their phones offers the best RF performance. Each rep stated that all of the new phones are the same.
I cannot accept that a shitty camera and an irritating ringtone are more important features than a good radio.
The linked-to article has a further link to a web page describing a new PDA: the Apple iNote.
The iHome (as described) is *almost* realistic. The disk drive and DRAM are a bit too big. Otherwise, the imaginary iHome would be a good product, and welcomed by many.
On the other hand, the iNote (as described) is pure comedy.
In my opinion, here is the proper way to deal with this and any similar scourge:
1. Install Privoxy. It writes every bit of HTTP activity to its log file.
2. Wait for a pop-up ad to appear.
3. Immediately consult the Privoxy log file. Determine what URL the pop-up came from.
4. Block out the entire domain from which the pop-up came from. Use whatever IP blocker you like best: Your DNS relay, your firewall, your hosts file, or Privoxy.
5. Repeat as needed.
I could not find a BitTorrent link for Mozilla on the mozilla.org web pile. So here I am downloading via ftp. Expected duration: 3.1 hours.
The last time I checked, the U.S.A. owned almost all of the world's sources of helium. In fact, since WWII, the U.S. government has controled the sale of it. This will be yet another reason for China to maintain friendly relations with the U.S.A.
Quote:
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. That includes long term deaths attributed to radiation poisoning and increased cancer rates. Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone.
If you are going to consider the mortality caused by mining the coal, then you should also consider the mortality caused by mining uranium. That stuff doesn't grow on trees, you know. More nuclear power will mean more mining accidents. Different mines, though.
I would like to know how people use these gadgets. If you ride a train every day, you could certainly occupy yourself with such a gadget. Otherwise, when would you use it? If you are sitting in an airplane, wouldn't you prefer to use a notebook computer? It would have a bigger screen.
I suspect that these gadgets will sell in a few places such as Tokyo, but not elsewhere. What am I missing?
I've developed products that use Microsoft Windows as an embedded operating system. If reliability is an issue, there is only one way to deploy Windows: treat the computing device as a specialized instrument, not as a general purpose computer. ANY changes to hardware and software cannot be tolerated!
The existence of malicious software (such as viruses, worms, and so forth) complicates this idea, but not by much. What it means is that if the computing device is connected to a network, then this network must be a closed, tightly controlled circuit. For idiots: it is because the malicious software may modify the "instrument."
The network could be a small handful of medical devices, each of which is treated as an instrument, not as a general purpose computer. Installing e-mail clients, web browsers, or Powerpoint is not allowed!
Attaching an office PC to the network is definitely not allowed!
If this simple rule is followed, then Microsoft's patches will not be an urgent matter. If this rule is NOT followed, then no amount of patching will make the instrument reliable. Hilarity will NOT ensue.
If GE Medical does not understand this, if the hospital does not understand this, then NEITHER entity should be in the health care business.
> I've had the following in my HOSTS file for a while now ...
>
> 0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.com
> 0.0.0.0 ads.doubleclick.net
>
Some alternatives that are fun:
1. Install privoxy from sourceforge.net. This is a local http proxy that allows you to filter out web content using regular expressions. So you can easily blank out any URL that contains the string "doubleclick." This is easier and more complete than trying to enumerate all the hostnames that Doubleclick Inc. uses. Privoxy is multi-platform; you can use it under Linux, Windows, etc.
2. Install posadis from sourceforge.net. This is a caching DNS server that you can install on your computer. It allows you to control how domain names (like *.doubleclick.net) get resolved by ALL the programs on your computer. I use it to essentially blackhole domains that I don't like. Once again, this is a multi-platform project. In particular, under Windoze, it runs as a service. It has an irritating bug: under Windoze, it will occasionally start using 100% CPU. When this happens, you have to restart the posadis service. A hassle, verily. But I enjoy having the control that derives from running my own DNS server.
3. Use a firewall (hardware or software) to block out numeric IP addresses. For example, 216.73.92.112 is www.doubleclick.net, so it should be blocked. I used to use this approach. I liked the idea of absolutely blocking any packets going to or from the bad guys, regardless of the DNS name used. The problem with this approach is that outfits like doubleclick.net will use a ton of different numeric IP addresses, and it's difficult to keep up with them.
This Slashdot post is misleading. According to the Navy League article, warships with electric propulsion systems will be deployed in 2011. But the advanced weapons (rail guns, lasers, etc.) will not. The advanced weapons will be made *possible* because of the electricity available from the new propulsion systems. But the article does NOT say that the weapons will be ready by 2011.
Quote:
Although the quote is probably out of context, telling people they should expect to be fired at any time is probably a motivational technique learned in today's MBA environment. Force and fear doesn't even work well with prisoners. So why do MBAs and other assorted managerial parasites think they work for tech?
I don't think that this kind of arrogance is being taught at MBA schools, if that's what you mean. It's simply management trying to take advantage of the weak job market. Have you noticed what has happened to salary levels recently?
Gateway is trying to diversify into consumer electronics: Televisions, MP3 players, and so forth. This seems like a good idea to me, since competing with Dell on PCs is difficult.
After the Gateway stores close down, how will they peddle their consumer electronics? Unlike PCs, customers want to see and hear these products perform.
bogofilter doesn't seem to be fooled by the random word spams either. Bayesian filtering rules!
When I saw the headline of this posting, I was hoping that the article would be about the Federal Reserve Bank. What a disappointment.
The Fed has been printing money like mad, for several years now. This is inflation, big time. The published rate of inflation is below 2% per annum, but this is deceiving. Consider an example: an electric table saw.
Perhaps its price has barely changed in the last two years. Is this an example of low inflation? No. The price changed only a little, but the table saw changed a lot. Two years ago, most of the manufacturing that went into the table saw was performed in the U.S. or Japan, or possibly Taiwan. Today, most of the manufacturing took place in China. The cost of this production decreased dramatically. The price did not. Where did the difference go? Was it turned into profit? Doubtful. Except for markets where a monopoly exists, profits are constrained by competition.
A similar story has developed for services. Consider an insurance policy, a home equity loan, or the interpretation of your last mammogram. Over the past several years, all three of these services became much cheaper to provide, due to offshoring. The labor used to provide these services gradually moved to India. The phone support, the analysis of creditworthiness, the medical transcription, the inspection of X-ray images, all of this (and much more) is steadily moving overseas.
The price, in dollars, of these goods and services has not changed much. The nature of these goods and services has changed tremendously. How is this possible? It's because the government has been printing money like crazy. It's not easy to figure out how much new money is being created. For some reason, newspapers love to report changes in the interest rates controlled by the Fed. They even report rumors of future changes in this rate. The byproduct of these rate manipulations is usually an increase in the money supply, and this information is rarely reported. If mentioned at all, it is in the form of an aside to a more "important" development. I've seen figures ranging from 6% per annum to 12% per annum. I don't know what the true figure is. But I do know that prices on goods and services should be in free fall right now. This, because every month, more of these goods and services are being produced by dirt cheap overseas labor.
We're enduring lower pay and more frequent spells of unemployment, due to offshoring. We're being denied the benefits of cheaper foreign-made goods and services, due to the Fed.
The practice of burdening spammers with insincere replies is likely to reduce spammage. The beauty of this approach is that the ultimate client of the spam is the one who will bear the cost. The mortgage lender or pornographer whose wares are advertised is, ultimately, the entity who will take the time to respond to the (false) sales lead. If this entity gets enough false sales leads, he will take a keen interest in avoiding them.
/. posters have noted, this method is already very popular with spammers.
But this is a labor intensive solution. People who wish to fight spam in this way will have to engage in an exchange of e-mails with the spammer (or his ultimate client). If/when this spam-fighting technique gains traction, spammers will find alternatives to e-mail for replies. The spams will request a visit to a web page, rather than an e-mail reply. As other
In my experience, Bayesian filtering on incoming e-mails works astonishingly well. I use a package called bogofilter, and it has a marvelous property. After a training period, it NEVER classifies "good" e-mail as spam. Thus, I can discard spam e-mails without reading them. For me, this is the holy grail of spam-fighting. I don't even look at the subject line of spam e-mails. My mail client doesn't even notify me when a spam e-mail arrives. The spams just silently disappear, without using any of my time at all. Sure, a few spams per day evade my filter, but the volume of these "clever" spams is not high enough to trouble me.
As far as I'm concerned, the war against spam has already been won. There are other Bayesian filters at sourceforge, including POPFile, spambayes, and crm114. Take your pick.
> Its some of the scummiest software I have ever
> seen, and unfortuantly there is no other player
> which plays their media.
JetAudio plays Real Media. I like it, and I don't think that it is spyware. Would someone please post if I am wrong!
The disappearance of IT jobs is only part of a very frightening development. The big picture is that living standards are going to become more equitable, world wide.
This development is driven by two historic changes. In the first place, the American capitalist model of economics has been embraced by much of the world's population. The big breakthroughs occurred in China and India.
The second change is that modern electronic communication systems has made information portable, and cheaply so.
As a result, almost any job whose output is information is subject to price competition from overseas.
I think that it's important to understand that this trend doesn't only apply to IT workers. It applies to careers as diverse as interpretation of mammograms to analysis of mortgage applications.
If you get squeezed out of your IT job, where will you go next? There's no place to hide.