Last week I was getting bombarded by over 100 bounced spam messages an hour thanks to a spammer using my email address as a reply-to address in the forged header of his v1agra sales pitches.
I was getting these because I have a domain where I have set up mail forwarding for about a dozen email addresses, and anythingElse&myDomain.org goes to my own email account. So the spammer was bombarding the world with messages, each one with a different reply-to address (generated at random) but they all had my domain. All the undelivered messages were getting bounced to my email account. I fixed the problem by forwarding everythingElse@myDomain.org to a non-existant domain.
Now, what happens if the failed delivery notifications themselves get bounced and the email server at the intended victim's ISP gets swamped? Am I in trouble or is it the spammer that's responsible? I can't think of any other way I could have protected myself.
Some of the guys who work at our place are excellent programmers and are extremely knowledgable about the underlying technology that they're using. When it comes to interfacing their software with the user though, they start to get some funny ideas about what the user needs.
"Yes but that's how I would think it works" they'll say. Says I, "Yes but you're a certain type of guy who knows what's going on underneath it all, from the user's point of view he's looking for something completely different."
That's why our company has people like me, renaissance people if you will, who can think with both sides of the brain and provide a bridge between the technical people and the creative people who design the user interface.
It's a good learning process, all this interaction means that they get to learn a bit more about the needs of the user and I get to learn about the underlying technology. Books like this would probably help us all.
Another book that's doing the rounds at our place is The design of Everyday Things. It covers much more than just computing and gives a good insight into the psychology of the user. Some of the psychoanalysis stuff is a bit deep for my liking, although overall it's quite informative.
Oh, I didn't know that. I actually enjoy a good football game, especially when the local teams are on, but I have to be doing something else at the same time to keep me occupied during the commercials.
Moderator, I think you were a bit harsh on me there, it was an honest mistake.
I suppose it depends on the market. Americans have become accustomed to sports that stop every few seconds, Europeans are used to more continuously flowing sports. On-screen advertising during soccer, rugby, ozzie-rules, gaelic football or hurling is, IMHO, a good way to bring revenue in whilst not interfering too much with the game.
If I didn't know better I'd think that the rules of American football evolved with TV advertising and product placement in mind. If that were true, it would be a good example of commercial advertising interests having a detrimental effect on content.
Ever since I heard of SVG I've heard that it's "catching up" with Flash. When it supports streaming video and gui components to embed in your movie, I'll start to believe it. In the meantime, I'm sticking with Flash.
Any Harrier Jump Jet pilot in the Royal Navy will tell you that a heavier load can be lifted with the same amount of fuel if you take off horizintally and with a bit f help from the 'ski-jump' that was added to British Invincible-class aircraft carriers many years ago. A design for a horizontally launching/landing unmanned launcher called HOTOL was proposed to ESA by British Aerospace in the '80s but didn't get off the drawing board. There's another article here that describes the air-breathing ascent and the take-off trolley that would support it on the runway. Sounds a bit like Fireball XL5!
Nah, no the Doc's style. Remember when Jimmy Bond married some chick and cried buckets over her at the end of the film when she got plugged? What a load of garbage that was! What did it add to the story apart from makin Sean Connery play a completely different character for a few seconds? It was the same in that movie where the Doctor snogged that woman near the end. It just didn't look right. I mean, how the hell is he supposed to know how to kiss anyway?
I disagree. Good CGI effects and good, intellectual, long-term story-telling can co-exist. Just look at Babylon 5. And they had a pretty tight budget too. The use of CGI and innovative use of movable sets helped them to keep the costs down. Model shots can cost more than CGI and aren't necessarily as good.
"Did they compare temperature changes in the cities to temperature changes in areas of low population?"
"I love how you ask the question..........."
If the guy had read the Scientific American article, he would have seen the contrast between coastal and inland temperature behaviour. In coastal cities it gets warmer at the weekends, inland it gets warmer during the week.
From the article:
"The direction of the effect was not always the same, however. Some cities (particularly those on the coast) exhibited higher DTRs [Diurnal Temperature Ranges] on the weekends than during the weeks, whereas many in the midwest showed smaller DTRs on the weekends."
.... where's the table football, inflatable furniture and all the other dot-com era regalia?
I have my doubts about the private office == higher productivity stuff. Everyone at my company has a private office and the temptation to skive is phenomenal. Although fear of our CEO is a good counterbalance to that..........
How about using something similar to state/national lottery machines? You have a card, you mark it, feed it into the machine, and it reads it using OMR. Instead of spitting out the ticket like in the lottery, it could swallow it and retains all paper tickets in case there's a recount, in which case a paper trail exists that you can audit by hand.
It was decided by the powers that be that Florida's electoral votes would go to Bush
And who were the "powers that be?" W's brother and his campaign manager. Read The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast for an insight into the right-wing coup that was the 2000 Florida election.
Now if only a similar scare could make it into the headlines saying "Using a cellphone when driving can give you SARS." Or better still, "Using a cellphone when driving and simultaniously talking at the top of your voice so that everyone else stopped at the lights can hear you as you wave your arms around emphatically can seriously increase risk of developing a serious illness." Maybe then I could get to work without having at least one near-death experience every morning.
"Complete lack of alternatives?" In most British cities there's a profusion of alternatives. If you're going to odd places with no direct rail link then yeah, it's gonna take longer than by car, but in the UK there are a great many places where you can live easily without a car. London is one example cited my many people I know, I used to live in Manchester and got by without a car no problem. There were plenty of buses, trains and trams, I commuted by bike most days. I took my fortnightly shopping home in a taxi and used cabs for any other unusual destinations and on the odd occasion when I was in a rush and there was no alternative.
I ride a bicycle, and in this traffic it's not much slower. There's nothing like approaching a bit of roadworks and sailing past the people I saw a few minutes before and yelling So long suckers!
I believe that 75% of the cost of petrol in the UK goes to the taxman. Given that Britain is such a crowded island (especially in the Southeast of England) and the _total_ cost of motoring (road construction etc) this is perfectly sensible.
SUVs are so popular in the US because of a loophole in the law that exempts them and light trucks from the same emission and fuel-consumption regulations as regular cars. That and the phallic substitution/I'm-a-gas-guzzling-American-and-proud -of-it mentality. Closing that loophole is the first step towards allowing _real_ market forces take effect and get these monstrosities off the road.
This is what I thought. The iTunes store is not a competing service for any record label. It's competing wth HMV, the Virgin Megastore, Our Price and Sam Goody etc. They're not competing with CBS, Island or Apple/EMI. This would be like "Walkers' Crisps" sueing a shop called "Walkers'" that sell's crisps.
Incorrect. Congestion is a bad thing. It is bad for the environment and bad for industry. It must be managed sensibly and it can be controlled, as the success of the London congestion charging scheme has proven. As I've said above, rationing by queue as opposed to rationing by price is something that should have disappeared with the Soviet era.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week I was getting bombarded by over 100 bounced spam messages an hour thanks to a spammer using my email address as a reply-to address in the forged header of his v1agra sales pitches.
I was getting these because I have a domain where I have set up mail forwarding for about a dozen email addresses, and anythingElse&myDomain.org goes to my own email account. So the spammer was bombarding the world with messages, each one with a different reply-to address (generated at random) but they all had my domain. All the undelivered messages were getting bounced to my email account. I fixed the problem by forwarding everythingElse@myDomain.org to a non-existant domain.
Now, what happens if the failed delivery notifications themselves get bounced and the email server at the intended victim's ISP gets swamped? Am I in trouble or is it the spammer that's responsible? I can't think of any other way I could have protected myself.
"Could care less" is the American equivalent of the British "Couldn't care less." I thought it was a typo the first time I saw it too.
"Yes but that's how I would think it works" they'll say. Says I, "Yes but you're a certain type of guy who knows what's going on underneath it all, from the user's point of view he's looking for something completely different."
That's why our company has people like me, renaissance people if you will, who can think with both sides of the brain and provide a bridge between the technical people and the creative people who design the user interface.
It's a good learning process, all this interaction means that they get to learn a bit more about the needs of the user and I get to learn about the underlying technology. Books like this would probably help us all.
Another book that's doing the rounds at our place is The design of Everyday Things. It covers much more than just computing and gives a good insight into the psychology of the user. Some of the psychoanalysis stuff is a bit deep for my liking, although overall it's quite informative.
... He knows how to live despite having been laid off!
Oh, I didn't know that. I actually enjoy a good football game, especially when the local teams are on, but I have to be doing something else at the same time to keep me occupied during the commercials.
Moderator, I think you were a bit harsh on me there, it was an honest mistake.
I suppose it depends on the market. Americans have become accustomed to sports that stop every few seconds, Europeans are used to more continuously flowing sports. On-screen advertising during soccer, rugby, ozzie-rules, gaelic football or hurling is, IMHO, a good way to bring revenue in whilst not interfering too much with the game.
If I didn't know better I'd think that the rules of American football evolved with TV advertising and product placement in mind. If that were true, it would be a good example of commercial advertising interests having a detrimental effect on content.
I think there's got to be a happy medium here.
Ever since I heard of SVG I've heard that it's "catching up" with Flash. When it supports streaming video and gui components to embed in your movie, I'll start to believe it. In the meantime, I'm sticking with Flash.
[Ducks]
Why the need for a vertical take-off?
Any Harrier Jump Jet pilot in the Royal Navy will tell you that a heavier load can be lifted with the same amount of fuel if you take off horizintally and with a bit f help from the 'ski-jump' that was added to British Invincible-class aircraft carriers many years ago. A design for a horizontally launching/landing unmanned launcher called HOTOL was proposed to ESA by British Aerospace in the '80s but didn't get off the drawing board. There's another article here that describes the air-breathing ascent and the take-off trolley that would support it on the runway. Sounds a bit like Fireball XL5!
Nah, no the Doc's style. Remember when Jimmy Bond married some chick and cried buckets over her at the end of the film when she got plugged? What a load of garbage that was! What did it add to the story apart from makin Sean Connery play a completely different character for a few seconds? It was the same in that movie where the Doctor snogged that woman near the end. It just didn't look right. I mean, how the hell is he supposed to know how to kiss anyway?
.... where's the table football, inflatable furniture and all the other dot-com era regalia?
I have my doubts about the private office == higher productivity stuff. Everyone at my company has a private office and the temptation to skive is phenomenal. Although fear of our CEO is a good counterbalance to that..........
I think I've got just the location for you.
How about using something similar to state/national lottery machines? You have a card, you mark it, feed it into the machine, and it reads it using OMR. Instead of spitting out the ticket like in the lottery, it could swallow it and retains all paper tickets in case there's a recount, in which case a paper trail exists that you can audit by hand.
Now if only a similar scare could make it into the headlines saying "Using a cellphone when driving can give you SARS." Or better still, "Using a cellphone when driving and simultaniously talking at the top of your voice so that everyone else stopped at the lights can hear you as you wave your arms around emphatically can seriously increase risk of developing a serious illness." Maybe then I could get to work without having at least one near-death experience every morning.
Will you please stop modding all my posts as "funny?" It was a serious question god dammit!
Anyone know where to get a listing of the _full_ leaderboard?
Plus ten times the pose value!
"Complete lack of alternatives?" In most British cities there's a profusion of alternatives. If you're going to odd places with no direct rail link then yeah, it's gonna take longer than by car, but in the UK there are a great many places where you can live easily without a car. London is one example cited my many people I know, I used to live in Manchester and got by without a car no problem. There were plenty of buses, trains and trams, I commuted by bike most days. I took my fortnightly shopping home in a taxi and used cabs for any other unusual destinations and on the odd occasion when I was in a rush and there was no alternative.
SUVs are so popular in the US because of a loophole in the law that exempts them and light trucks from the same emission and fuel-consumption regulations as regular cars. That and the phallic substitution/I'm-a-gas-guzzling-American-and-proud -of-it mentality. Closing that loophole is the first step towards allowing _real_ market forces take effect and get these monstrosities off the road.
This is what I thought. The iTunes store is not a competing service for any record label. It's competing wth HMV, the Virgin Megastore, Our Price and Sam Goody etc. They're not competing with CBS, Island or Apple/EMI. This would be like "Walkers' Crisps" sueing a shop called "Walkers'" that sell's crisps.
Er, I don't know why this was modded "funny," it was an honest question. A co-worker told me this and I was wondering if it were true.
Incorrect. Congestion is a bad thing. It is bad for the environment and bad for industry. It must be managed sensibly and it can be controlled, as the success of the London congestion charging scheme has proven. As I've said above, rationing by queue as opposed to rationing by price is something that should have disappeared with the Soviet era.