Oh c'mon. An 1G SD card is around $6. Heck, when I bought my nintendo DS recently, cough, I have seen 1G microSD cards on sale for $1(!) (when bought in quantities of 50+).
I don't know how many pictures (and what quality, RAW?) he expects to shoot per week but it doesn't sound so unreasonable to me to buy a few cards and send them instead of DVDs. They're smaller and more robust which may to translate to cheaper shipping and more chance to survive when sending from a "jungle post office".
No, it's not just you. I was in the same situation (investigated XMPP as a messaging protocol) and didn't find any useful documentation either. The little bits that I found were either sparse, incomplete, not authorative, outdated or wrong. Often it was *all* of that at the same time. Even most of the sample implementations and libraries were outright broken.
XMPP sounds like a great idea in theory and the existence of fairly mature implementations (in erlang FWIW) suggest that *someone* must know how to put things together. However, the total lack of documentation makes it near impossible for us uninitiated mortals to do anything useful with it...
While I agree with your general line of thinking I think you may be underestimating the amount of "concessions" that $600.000.000 can buy you.
This is not about getting a free ipod. It's more about building a nearby powerplant (dependable power), burying some fibre on tax-money (lots of fibre) or, uh, banning violent video games (stable social structure).
Yeah, right, let's cut off Russia. And when the bot operators move to china then let's cut off China. And when they move to the US, then let's cut off the US! Amazing idea, very well thought out.
Oh wait, I have a different idea. How about forcing Microsoft to finally secure their goddamn OS so that this worm-crap just can't spread like hellfire?
The best IT-managers I have worked with were of the "genius"-type. Genius as in: they are capable of taking over the job of every single team member at any time and do it better or at least as good as the guy who is doing it now. They are not only (chief-)architecting the system they're responsible for but literally laying out the class hierarchies, writing down the interfaces and database schemas for us fellow "code-monkeys" to fill in.
Given the amount of "sustained failure" that I have witnessed in companies where the manager-position was decoupled from the architect-position I'll give you a few simple questions to chew on:
- How do you earn any respect from your fellow programmers when most time is spent
with *them* explaining the problem to *you* instead of *you* explaining the
solution to *them*?
- How do you split up tasks at the appropiate joints and assign the subtasks
to the right team-members according to invidual skill level without
understanding each and every problem thoroughly?
- How do you know what things are "easy" or "hard" in programming without
having done them yourself?
- How do you give *any* kind of time estimates to your superiors when
you have, at best, a remote (second hand) idea of how long it *might* take?
No, really. If you're in the position to hire an IT-manager then better don't be cheap. Get the expirienced guy, the one who has actual completed projects to show, the one who asks for twice of what you're willing to pay and means it.
As a rule of thumb: Get the guy who asks the most questions before giving even the roughest estimate of how long it will take or how much it may cost. He's likely also the one with the longest answer to any questions about "and how exactly will feature X work technically, when finished?".
I had the same "whistle" on two TFT displays (BenQ FP931 fwiw). It was not there from the start but after a year of normal usage they grew the habit of emitting a constant, very high frequency whine, right after being turned off.
Took me a while to figure out the source of that annoying sound, guess it must be something with the PSU.
I replaced the screens asap because I didn't want to have to remember cutting the power off every night and was a bit worried that the constant tone would eventually hurt my nightsleep.
Curiously some of my friends couldn't even hear it at all. I guess I'm just generally sensitive to high pitch noise, I'm also one of these people who can tell whether a CRT is turned on in the room (with sound off) without looking.
I'm with you. Same here, I own a MacBook and initially intended to use it "for everything". But nowadays it's mostly just sitting there until I get around to use their fancy media-tools (iPhoto and such) once in a year.
I tried hard to use it in "mixed mode" (aqua + X11), with parallels and even with only linux but it annoyed me too much to become my everyday machine.
First off, I *hate* the apple window manager. The fat window borders take up way too much of my precious screen estate and the whole semantics (applications stay running even when closed, task switching distinguishes between "applications" and "app windows" etc.) just doesn't work for me.
I would love if I could run the MacBook in X11 and have all the nice apple apps open up in my favorite window manager. That would be ideal, the best of both worlds. But I'm not holding my breath for it to happen any time soon...
Dude, softraid is just traditional RAID in software rather than hardware, and suffers from similar issues.
Correct. So far...;-)
It's not easy for non-technical people to set up
"Non-technical" people buy stuff off the shelf and don't bother with any kind of RAID.
it's much slower in most cases than hardware RAID
Wrong. There is no performance difference. In fact only the highend RAID-cards have enough horsepower to drive a significant number of drives at full speed in an expensive RAID-level (5, 6). We are using (and have benchmarked) most of it in production, so you may take this as firsthand knowledge. FWIW I have dealt with (and am dealing with) 3ware, LSI, Adaptec (even their recent new-bios crap) cards, as well as linux mdraid, solaris zfs mirrors and, oh, our rack houses four storagetek 6140s, too. We didn't buy the storageteks because a linux box with two SCSI controllers couldn't run a RAID10 over 16 disks at equal speed. We bought them for the replication option, support contract (chain-of-blame) and, ofcourse, for FibreChannel.
it doesn't work well with non-identical drives
Wrong. No idea where you get that from, any softraid impl i've seen deals with arbitrary block-devices. There's nothing to stop you from creating a single raidset over a mix of HDDs, floppies, USB-sticks and maybe even a ram-disk for good measure - if you wanted to.
it only gives you striping, mirroring or stripe+mirror options, so you need either two or four drives to use it, and so on.
Wrong. What the heck are you talking about? The linux kernel has support for even RAID-6 for quite a while now.
If softraid were actually anywhere near as easy to set up and as reliable as ZFS will be, everyone and their grandmother would be using it already.
Guess what, "everybody" is using it already.
Most of the people (geeks) who bother with softraid only use it for striping two drives in an effort to get more performance out of their computer.
Maybe one day you'll get a job in IT and realize that some people actually use all this fancy "computer stuff" to get real work done, with real money involved... Thus I guess it's safe to assume that "most people who bother with softraid" do it not to get more performance "out of their computer" but rather to get more performance and reliability out of their servers.
True automatic redundancy and fault tolerance will be within financial reach for many individuals and small businesses for the first time ever.
Dude, yes, ZFS is nice but plain old softraid has been within financial reach for anyone for about a decade - and it does the job, too. I like ZFS as much as the next guy but I'd consider it natural evolution more than a "OMG!PONIES! revolution"...
At the moment actually. When I am at home I use remote X instead of local even on my laptop which has a faster CPU (Dual Core2) than my aging server. Remote X and a well set-up Xterm is considerably faster than running X locally. The reason why Firefox is slow in most lame remote X setups is fonts and flash. The first thing you need to do when dealing with Xterms is to set up a font server. The second is to set-up pulse and provide flash with working audio. If you do not, it will drag its feet horribly because it will keep trying to open the audio and fail at it.
Well, my expirience has been different but I admit that it might indeed work better under ideal conditions. Now try it over dialup, or try to use it for thinclients on a larger scale.
you really need to awake from hibernation mate and get a clue. For your information Vista has now turned most 2D accelerated ops and all 2D accelerated font rendering. As a result X11 setup on relatively recent hardware beats it flat at trivial things like moving a window, redrawing a window, drawing text in a window and so on. The margin is more than 50%. This is all over the computer press by the way so I suggest you actually read it, look at some real benchmarks and stop talking out of your arse
Well, I can't decipher your 2nd sentence, vista "turned" what? If this is all over the press and there are valid benchmarks then you sure won't mind pasting some URLs? Until then I'll stick to what my eyes and brain tell me. When switching from one fullscreen app to another there is a visible redraw in X11, on any hardware. It's barely visible (which doesn't mean much wrt user expirience) and there are worse issues with X11. But you can't talk it away, not even with childish insults.
Ok, maybe Ion can run on smaller hardware, but it isn't exactly a feature worth trumpeting that the fonts are going to look like crap.
Actually they look very nice. I would go on a limb and say they are *more* readable than the anti-aliased fuzz. There is a reason why you run your xterm with a bitmap font.
Xft/fontconfig was a brilliant piece of work that finally put to rest all of the moronic "X11 is obsolete and must be completely replaced" ranting.
Now that one gave me a good laugh! X11 is obsolete, should and will be replaced. The only reason we're still coping with it is because it is such a HUGE undertaking.
While the dorks were chanting for X11 to be replaced, the Xft/fontconfig people were fixing the exact problems that were supposedly insurmountable.
Insurmountable? You're kidding, right? Font rendering is not hard and the concepts involved haven't changed much for decades (remember postscript, NeXT?). It was considered "insurmountable" (or rather: a strong case for masochism) to tack sane font rendering on top of the broken X11 infrastructure. Well yes, they did it. But it's a hack and it shows. How often have *you* fought obscure font problems? How often have *you* wondered why fonts on windows and OSX still look better?
And they did so in a way that preserves X11's legendary network transparency.
You really need to pass on some of that crack you're smoking there... When was the last time that you tried to use, say, firefox, via X11 across even a fast LAN network? Legendary, my ass. Well, maybe legendary for being slow as molasses, locking up hard and just not working right. Don't even get me started on XDMCP...
From your post I can tell that you have never written a line of code against libX. If you had then you wouldn't be spurting nonsense like "legendary" or "brilliant".
Oh, and ever notice how an X11 UI (regardless of windowing toolkit) feels sluggish and less "solid" than the competition? Must be the stupid KDE and Gnome developers doing something wrong, right?
Yes, X11 has had it's time. But nobody in their right mind would claim it's a good platform by today's standards. It still exists because decades of graphical software is built on it so we can't just put it away.
I usually just say "Yes, and the phone system is down, too. We're working on it, can you get back to me later?". Usually they just say ok and hang up, without even noticing...
I have been in security for more than 20 years and am far more paranoid than almost anybody outside of certain 3 letter agencies.... I run Windows Server 2008...
I don't know where yours are, but mine is in grid.css or gridhack.css (Asuming that 'extends to the height of the page" mean that you always want the grid to have height atleast as high as the browser window. (There is a reason, they made the min-height tag)
Guess why it is called gridhack.css. And if you have ever looked at those grids you will admit what a crappy hack they are; fixed pixel sizes, custom css classes, tons of browser workarounds. If you start off with one of these then you'll be working against a proprietary ruleset (be it YUI or blueprint) and no, it will *not* be easy to convert the resulting html to something else when the fad ends.
But I think the real problem, is that we are still writing html/css by hand. Html is really the only document format written by hand anymore. I mean, you might hate html/css, but just try to write some postscript or pdf, and you will love going back to html.
Nobody forces you to write your html by hand. There's a whole market for dreamweaver's and whatever they're called these days. Oh, you say they don't work? Well, guess why!
What we really need is a GOOD html editor, so we can describe the page as : I want 2 colums this size, and the rest of the space given to the third column.
You're confusing content with presentation again. HTML is content, CSS is for presentation.
I don't see why you'd need an editor, though, the layout you mention should take no more than 4-5 lines of CSS3, and if it takes any more then CSS3 is broken.
Html was NEVER intended to be a format that was at large written in hand.
Please do your homework before making bold statements...
[...] or blur the page, so that you can't actually see anything at all... for a time.
Oh yea, that has been reported many times. But actually it's not IE blurring the screen, it's your own tears! Stop using windows and the problem will go away.
Don't get me wrong. I think that floats are great layout tools and CSS positioning isn't anything I want to give up. I do, however, think that it was completely wrongheaded to try and throw out tables as a layout tool. There's a lot you can do without them, but they lend themselves well to enough situations (and often end up being less fragile and/or easier to understand than their positioned div counterparts) that they or some mechanism like them should have been retained with approval.
Amen!
CSS3 will hopefully help a bit with the mess but I'm not positive that it will bring us back to the days of straightforward table-hacking. Yes, tables were ugly, non-semantic and introduced quite some maintenance nightmares. But they worked consistently across browsers and the pattern was so trivial (need a split? nest!) that even complicated layouts could be prototyped in no time.
Now fast forward to today. Hands up anyone who has gotten a CSS layout of moderate complexity to work without spending an ungodly amount of time on trial & error, css- and browser-hacks?
The separation of code and layout is indeed a holy grail worth aiming for. But the implementation we're looking at, namely CSS, is horrible.
So horrible that the people who really need to get anything done with it are nowadays resorting to CSS frameworks. Which, by pure coincidence, simply do away with all the semantics, em-sizes and quite a few other selling points of CSS. In favor of something that looks strikingly similar to what we have all been doing until a few years ago: A truckload of nested div's imitating the plain old table markup that CSS was supposed extinguish.
Welcome back to 720px fixed-width tables, only that nowadays it's called the 960px YUI grid and that nowadays you need to either use a code-generator or learn a proprietary meta-language (css classnames) to get started.
I dare to say that CSS, in it's current incarnation, is a failure. Sure, it works for really simple layouts, the "one floating menu bar and not much else" kind of layouts. But it falls hard on it's nose once you enter the world of multi-column layouts or anything involving forms.
It doesn't cease to amaze me how CSS and the box-model could go so wrong on a problem that has already been solved better by just about any windowing toolkit in existence.
It's really not hard to come up with a working concept and syntax of a grid (yes, a real grid, not the css hackery), full relative positioning (put this box *below* that box), inheritance (make this box as wide as *that* box) and all the other elements needed to describe any imaginable layout in a sane syntax.
It's not hard at all once you clear the failure that is CSS from your mind and start again.
"Not hard" as in a qualified design team could do it in under a year.
Guess what, spamming is still profitable without even caring about "batches". As a spammer, you basically have one huge list of e-mail adresses. Some may partition by country or other meta-data but most will likely not even bother and just load the shotgun with anything they have (the asian spam you get is a strong symptom of that).
There is just no need to check lists or clean them. A botnet of 100 windows-zombies (which is ridiculously tiny by todays standards) can spew 200-300 mails *per second* without breaking a sweat.
I recall reading an interview with a spammer a while back who claimed to be capable of making 10-15 million delivery attempts per hour.
Ofcourse the rate of people actually reading the crap is much lower due to spam filters and broken addresses. But the spammer doesn't need to care because his target audience (very old and/or very *stupid* people) don't use spam-filters.
Well, but back on topic, I personally have a little (very little) bit of hope that the improvements on mainstream spamfilters *may* help a bit. After all these old and/or stupid people are usually customers of one or another mainstream isp, thus anything that reduces the amount of spam they get a chance to respond to cuts into the spammers profit.
Unfortunately there is no real tipping point for spam to become "unprofitable" as it's pretty much a 99% profit business and the constant drop of bandwith-prices doesn't help either.
There is really only one instance that could seriously cut down on spam: Microsoft. The cost for spammers would raise significantly if it wasn't so trivial to turn any connected windows-machine into a zombie.
But I doubt they care at all unless someone is going to apply serious legal pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
in the german amazon shop but they got a little more expensive. they're now 2 EUR (about $2.99 USD)
they also have 1G SDCards for 0,39 EUR (about 0.50 USD).
Oh c'mon. An 1G SD card is around $6.
Heck, when I bought my nintendo DS recently, cough, I have seen 1G microSD cards on sale for $1(!) (when bought in quantities of 50+).
I don't know how many pictures (and what quality, RAW?) he expects to shoot per week
but it doesn't sound so unreasonable to me to buy a few cards and send them instead of
DVDs. They're smaller and more robust which may to translate to cheaper shipping and
more chance to survive when sending from a "jungle post office".
Yea those work great until the day when the *controller* dies.
No, it's not just you. I was in the same situation (investigated XMPP as a messaging protocol) and didn't find any useful documentation either.
The little bits that I found were either sparse, incomplete, not authorative, outdated or wrong. Often it was *all* of that at the same time.
Even most of the sample implementations and libraries were outright broken.
XMPP sounds like a great idea in theory and the existence of fairly mature implementations (in erlang FWIW) suggest that *someone* must know how to put things together.
However, the total lack of documentation makes it near impossible for us uninitiated mortals to do anything useful with it...
While I agree with your general line of thinking I think you may be underestimating the amount of "concessions"
that $600.000.000 can buy you.
This is not about getting a free ipod. It's more about building a nearby powerplant (dependable power),
burying some fibre on tax-money (lots of fibre) or, uh, banning violent video games (stable social structure).
Yeah, right, let's cut off Russia. And when the bot operators move to china then let's cut off China. And when they move to the US, then let's cut off the US!
Amazing idea, very well thought out.
Oh wait, I have a different idea.
How about forcing Microsoft to finally secure their goddamn OS so that this worm-crap just can't spread like hellfire?
Ouch, I call slippery slope on that!
The best IT-managers I have worked with were of the "genius"-type.
Genius as in: they are capable of taking over the job of every single team member at any time
and do it better or at least as good as the guy who is doing it now. They are not only (chief-)architecting
the system they're responsible for but literally laying out the class hierarchies, writing down the
interfaces and database schemas for us fellow "code-monkeys" to fill in.
Given the amount of "sustained failure" that I have witnessed in companies where
the manager-position was decoupled from the architect-position I'll give you a few
simple questions to chew on:
- How do you earn any respect from your fellow programmers when most time is spent
with *them* explaining the problem to *you* instead of *you* explaining the
solution to *them*?
- How do you split up tasks at the appropiate joints and assign the subtasks
to the right team-members according to invidual skill level without
understanding each and every problem thoroughly?
- How do you know what things are "easy" or "hard" in programming without
having done them yourself?
- How do you give *any* kind of time estimates to your superiors when
you have, at best, a remote (second hand) idea of how long it *might* take?
No, really. If you're in the position to hire an IT-manager then better don't be cheap.
Get the expirienced guy, the one who has actual completed projects to show, the one who
asks for twice of what you're willing to pay and means it.
As a rule of thumb: Get the guy who asks the most questions before giving
even the roughest estimate of how long it will take or how much it may cost.
He's likely also the one with the longest answer to any questions about
"and how exactly will feature X work technically, when finished?".
Huh?
And I thought the thinkpads were praised precisely because they do support these things (suspend-to-ram) under linux?
I had the same "whistle" on two TFT displays (BenQ FP931 fwiw).
It was not there from the start but after a year of normal usage
they grew the habit of emitting a constant, very high frequency whine,
right after being turned off.
Took me a while to figure out the source of that annoying sound,
guess it must be something with the PSU.
I replaced the screens asap because I didn't want to have to remember
cutting the power off every night and was a bit worried that the constant
tone would eventually hurt my nightsleep.
Curiously some of my friends couldn't even hear it at all.
I guess I'm just generally sensitive to high pitch noise, I'm also one
of these people who can tell whether a CRT is turned on in the room
(with sound off) without looking.
Read up on the MetaModes option in xorg.conf.
Mine looks like this:And I can play ET, AA, Tremulous, etc. just fine. The second screen simply goes off when a game requests fullscreen.
I'm with you. Same here, I own a MacBook and initially intended to use it "for everything".
But nowadays it's mostly just sitting there until I get around to use their fancy media-tools (iPhoto and such)
once in a year.
I tried hard to use it in "mixed mode" (aqua + X11), with parallels and even with only linux but
it annoyed me too much to become my everyday machine.
First off, I *hate* the apple window manager. The fat window borders take up way too much of
my precious screen estate and the whole semantics (applications stay running even
when closed, task switching distinguishes between "applications" and "app windows" etc.)
just doesn't work for me.
I would love if I could run the MacBook in X11 and have all the nice apple apps open up
in my favorite window manager. That would be ideal, the best of both worlds.
But I'm not holding my breath for it to happen any time soon...
Erm. You seem to have missed that mutt does support IMAP.
Searching, subscriptions, it's all there - and damn fast.
If this is all over the press and there are valid benchmarks then you sure won't mind pasting some URLs?
Until then I'll stick to what my eyes and brain tell me. When switching from one fullscreen app to another
there is a visible redraw in X11, on any hardware. It's barely visible (which doesn't mean much wrt user
expirience) and there are worse issues with X11. But you can't talk it away, not even with childish insults.
There is a reason why you run your xterm with a bitmap font.Now that one gave me a good laugh!
X11 is obsolete, should and will be replaced.
The only reason we're still coping with it is because it is
such a HUGE undertaking.Insurmountable? You're kidding, right?
Font rendering is not hard and the concepts involved haven't changed much for decades (remember postscript, NeXT?).
It was considered "insurmountable" (or rather: a strong case for masochism) to tack sane font rendering
on top of the broken X11 infrastructure. Well yes, they did it. But it's a hack and it shows.
How often have *you* fought obscure font problems? How often have *you* wondered why fonts on windows
and OSX still look better?You really need to pass on some of that crack you're smoking there...
When was the last time that you tried to use, say, firefox, via X11
across even a fast LAN network?
Legendary, my ass. Well, maybe legendary for being slow as molasses, locking
up hard and just not working right. Don't even get me started on XDMCP...
From your post I can tell that you have never written a line of code
against libX. If you had then you wouldn't be spurting nonsense like
"legendary" or "brilliant".
Oh, and ever notice how an X11 UI (regardless of windowing toolkit)
feels sluggish and less "solid" than the competition?
Must be the stupid KDE and Gnome developers doing something wrong, right?
Yes, X11 has had it's time. But nobody in their right mind would claim
it's a good platform by today's standards. It still exists because
decades of graphical software is built on it so we can't just put it away.
I usually just say "Yes, and the phone system is down, too. We're working on it, can you get back to me later?".
Usually they just say ok and hang up, without even noticing...
Good joke!
Guess why it is called gridhack.css. And if you have ever looked
at those grids you will admit what a crappy hack they are;
fixed pixel sizes, custom css classes, tons of browser workarounds.
If you start off with one of these then you'll be working against
a proprietary ruleset (be it YUI or blueprint) and no, it will
*not* be easy to convert the resulting html to something else
when the fad ends.
Nobody forces you to write your html by hand. There's a whole market for dreamweaver's and whatever they're called these days.
Oh, you say they don't work? Well, guess why!
You're confusing content with presentation again.
HTML is content, CSS is for presentation.
I don't see why you'd need an editor, though,
the layout you mention should take no more than 4-5 lines
of CSS3, and if it takes any more then CSS3 is broken.
Please do your homework before making bold statements...
You should go see a doctor soon. Maybe he can still get the
coolaid out of your system before it melts the rest of your
brain, too.
Oh yea, that has been reported many times. But actually it's not IE blurring the screen, it's your own tears!
Stop using windows and the problem will go away.
Amen!
CSS3 will hopefully help a bit with the mess but I'm not positive that it will bring us back
to the days of straightforward table-hacking. Yes, tables were ugly, non-semantic and introduced
quite some maintenance nightmares. But they worked consistently across browsers and the pattern
was so trivial (need a split? nest!) that even complicated layouts could be prototyped in no time.
Now fast forward to today. Hands up anyone who has gotten a CSS layout of moderate complexity
to work without spending an ungodly amount of time on trial & error, css- and browser-hacks?
The separation of code and layout is indeed a holy grail worth aiming for.
But the implementation we're looking at, namely CSS, is horrible.
So horrible that the people who really need to get anything done with it
are nowadays resorting to CSS frameworks. Which, by pure coincidence,
simply do away with all the semantics, em-sizes and quite a few
other selling points of CSS. In favor of something that looks
strikingly similar to what we have all been doing until a
few years ago: A truckload of nested div's imitating the
plain old table markup that CSS was supposed extinguish.
Welcome back to 720px fixed-width tables, only that nowadays
it's called the 960px YUI grid and that nowadays you need
to either use a code-generator or learn a proprietary
meta-language (css classnames) to get started.
I dare to say that CSS, in it's current incarnation,
is a failure. Sure, it works for really simple layouts,
the "one floating menu bar and not much else" kind
of layouts. But it falls hard on it's nose once you
enter the world of multi-column layouts or anything
involving forms.
It doesn't cease to amaze me how CSS and the box-model could
go so wrong on a problem that has already been solved better
by just about any windowing toolkit in existence.
It's really not hard to come up with a working concept and
syntax of a grid (yes, a real grid, not the css hackery),
full relative positioning (put this box *below* that box),
inheritance (make this box as wide as *that* box) and
all the other elements needed to describe any imaginable
layout in a sane syntax.
It's not hard at all once you clear the failure that is
CSS from your mind and start again.
"Not hard" as in a qualified design team could do
it in under a year.
Guess what, spamming is still profitable without even caring about "batches".
As a spammer, you basically have one huge list of e-mail adresses. Some may
partition by country or other meta-data but most will likely not even bother
and just load the shotgun with anything they have (the asian spam you get
is a strong symptom of that).
There is just no need to check lists or clean them.
A botnet of 100 windows-zombies (which is ridiculously tiny by
todays standards) can spew 200-300 mails *per second* without breaking
a sweat.
I recall reading an interview with a spammer a while back who
claimed to be capable of making 10-15 million delivery attempts per hour.
Ofcourse the rate of people actually reading the crap is much
lower due to spam filters and broken addresses. But the spammer
doesn't need to care because his target audience (very old and/or very
*stupid* people) don't use spam-filters.
Well, but back on topic, I personally have a little (very little) bit of
hope that the improvements on mainstream spamfilters *may* help a bit.
After all these old and/or stupid people are usually customers of one
or another mainstream isp, thus anything that reduces the amount of
spam they get a chance to respond to cuts into the spammers profit.
Unfortunately there is no real tipping point for spam to become
"unprofitable" as it's pretty much a 99% profit business and the
constant drop of bandwith-prices doesn't help either.
There is really only one instance that could seriously
cut down on spam: Microsoft. The cost for spammers would
raise significantly if it wasn't so trivial to turn any
connected windows-machine into a zombie.
But I doubt they care at all unless someone is going to
apply serious legal pressure.
Oh and the worst part is, once the parent (on mars) dies, the
child copy will turn into a zombie!
*cue shaun of the dead soundtrack*
Urban legend. All of the cheapo raid cards are *slower* than a softraid.
We're not talking high-end Vortex controllers here...
Read up on the CPUs that they put into those cheap cards and then
compare to your desktop CPU.