The "average" Jane and John Doe is not a great metric; many ISP's do a reasonable job of spam filtering. Try an unfiltered box and look at traffic patters for a year for an accurate measurement. Users perceptions are not a reliable indication.
I'm in Canada and my filters are pretty simple. Spam was down a bit after xmas, but in the last two weeks it's about doubled. Again.
I get more than I did a year ago.
So, no, I would not by any stretch say spam is down. But I am getting much more efficient at deleteing it. Practice makes perfect and all that.
Some of my email addresses are 20 years old now. I probably get more than my share.
"April 1 is a Friday. Apple almost always announces products on Tuesday.:)"
That's the most insightful thing said on this whole page. The only press releases that get issued on a friday are the ones poeple want buried; by monday nobody cares. ICANN is famous for doing this. That's really is what they do.
" I was around when only trolls might have defended the notion of a large company using trade secret law to trump the free speech rights of independent journalists"
Perhaps people have grown up and deciced respecting the law is a good thing?
"MS isn't going to create a new Windows release for April 1-14, but they could schedule their own press event for that period extolling the feature set of the Longhorn beta"
MS vapourware vs. a new rev of a gui consumer BSD?
"If you're rebooting a Windows machine more than an OS X machine, then it is broken."
Sure, Windows is stable as hell. Until you load drivers for the peripherals you need. Then it becomes ustable. Maybe it's possible to make windows stable. But OSX is ungodly stable out of the box, as in weeks if not months if not years of uptime compared to hours and days for windows. I've never seen an OSX machine crash and I've only seen one hang in a program once, ironically IE.
And there really is someting to be said for having and icon you can click on to get a real unix prompt not some POS with a bizarre version of CP/M with incorrectly facing slashes. To say noting of windows bizarre notion of requiring the GUI to work to configure the GUI. Broken. Put windows in televsion more (320x240) then tell me how long it takes you to unfuck that.
I've railed against macs for two decades, and I still think OS9 machines are unusable but when forced to use one with OSX to do real work for two weeks that all changed within an hour. They work, they don't crash, it's a turnkey BSD system than you can seamlessly plug your camera or whatever into. It's what Windows might be in 10 years, although that might be overoptimistic.
I'll concede Windows has more game titles. I think that's appropriate. I write unix code and don't play games and don't care which game console you pick. Wintel might be an excellent platform for that. Big woop.
"Bollocks. NT4 was quite snappy on average hardware of the time (Pentium 100ish). OS X needs at least a G5 to be even *close* to that level of responsiveness."
Depends on what you're doing. Pentia do better at random memory accesses so someting like Mathematica is faster on a Penita. Power PC chips excel at linear accesses to they will outperform a Pentia at the same clock rate for something like Photoshop.
To say you need a G5 to make OSX outperform NT on a Penita 100 is a fantasy and proof you've never tried it.
Don't make shit up if you expect to be taken seriously.
"WinNT 3.1 was the OS X 10.0 of the 90s, lots of potential but painfully slow. NT 3.5 was faster, and NT 4.0 was even faster still. Contrary to the convential wisdom here, Win XP is slightly faster than all"
If you had actually tried this you'd know it's not true. 3.1 is faster than 95 which is faster than 98 which is faster then XP on the same system. Try it for yourself and see. In fact, 98 a 1700 mhz machine is faster then XP on a 3000 mhz machine. I reverted to 98 on one machine I need Windoze on jsut for this reason so say nothing of the fact there are minor things like parellal port scanners than can not work on that POS XP (no driver). Bah.
Even old MS-DOS versions are faster then new ones on the same hardware.
Amiga floppies. All my email from 1986 to 1990 fit on 3 Amiga floppies downloaded from a Xenix system. They are of course unreadable... although, it jsut occured to me I have a 10 meg Amiga scsi A1000 drive in the barn that has it all. Hmmm...
As long as we're talking about dubious American corporate practices... I lived in Los Angeles once and was paid to port an accounting package from unix to pc. It was a litttle unusual as you could go in after the fact and juggle all sorts of stuff in rather odd ways.
I was told it was for the movie industry and it was explained to me they would take out 10K in the morning in cash, buy tons of drugs then needed to put it on the books as various production expenses while putting whatever cash was left over, back.
The same company I was a consultant for doing this wanted to bid on a project for the city but it required a $15,000.00 cashiers check. They either didn't want to or couldn't afford it so they got a casheirs check for that amount, photocopied it, deposited the check back into their own account and sent the photocopy of the check with the proposal to the city. When they called weeks later the city was somewhat embarrassed as they could only find a photocopy of the check, not the original. They didn't get the contract and retured the 15K. The vice president had a graduate degree in Hungarian fairy tales (I am not making this up) so it was, to say the least, an entertaining place to work, but, uh...
I quit. I made sure I left lots of rotting fruit hidden in various places. Took them two years to get rid of the flies I heard.
Do I believe Microsoft deleted those mails as uninteresting? Uh, no.
"Now, again, I think it's odd that they can recover email from before and after, but not during... but there are legitimate reasons why mail would be missing"
Not all of it.
Every email concerning Burst for 35 weeks? I don't buy it.
Like I had a choice. "Here's three computers, make them work". Great.
I had no idea you could even buy a new contemporary working computer for $300 CAD. Gosh they're light. They don't even make good doorstops or boat anchors any more.
No more PC's for me, I'm sick of cheap crap and a well spec'd PC cost more to make and more hasle to build than a decent used mac, so I'm going Mac from hereon out anway.
I just wish they hadn't deviated from the one true (SCSI) path. IME over a two decades of futzing with drives SCSI is more reliable if not generally faster.
Ok, if you have one COB (Chip On Board) CPU and it fries, say, oh, because the fan fails and lets the smoke out of the cpu then you have a second chance by plugging in another CPU. Witthout this ability you can do nothing else than throw away an otherwise good motherboard. And it's good to have options as to what CPU you can plug in.
As somebody who had this happen on a 3 month old mobo last week for this exact reason, I'd buy one.
(and yes I vacuumed the dust out tiwce since I got and and checked the fan, it seemed fine during regular PM)
This may not be the intended use but that's how I view this.
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm not sure how much of your rights you can sign away. Not all I know that much. I suspect but certainly do not know, that they can get away with this though.
I have an easy out though. I steadfastly refuse to use an IM service. If they can't figure out talk, tough. "Can I we talk in IM". "No, we can exchange email. It's the same thing but 2 seconds slower".
I also plead ignorance if somebody sends me a doc or xls file: "Huh? What's this? Really? Sorry, I don't have any MS software". Fortunatly poeple dumb enough to send me this crap have never heard of Open-whatever.
You have to nip this evil crap in the bud. I once made the mistake of admitting I might be able to figure out COBOL. Those were the worst two years of my life. This woorks as well for hardware too. Although I've written BIOS chips and worked for seevral (pre-pc) computer companies if anybody in (the small) town here asks me if I know anything about computers I say "no" or "well I was thinking of getting a Mac, why?".
Slashdot Mirror
The "average" Jane and John Doe is not a great metric; many ISP's do a reasonable job of spam filtering. Try an unfiltered box and look at traffic patters for a year for an accurate measurement. Users perceptions are not a reliable indication.
I'm in Canada and my filters are pretty simple. Spam was down a bit after xmas, but in the last two weeks it's about doubled. Again.
I get more than I did a year ago.
So, no, I would not by any stretch say spam is down. But I am getting much more efficient at deleteing it. Practice makes perfect and all that.
Some of my email addresses are 20 years old now. I probably get more than my share.
"In all seriousness though, this looks like a perfect time to test the GPL in cou rt (if they make it that far.)"
Um, what would the actual damages be? (in the legal sense of the words "actual damages")
".. rotten fish would have been far more effective"
Nah, you can find fish by the smell. A fifty pound bag of oranges only cost four dollars back then and there. And only the flies could find them.
Limburger in light fixtures works well too but who can stand the smell of putting it there?
"April 1 is a Friday. Apple almost always announces products on Tuesday. :)"
That's the most insightful thing said on this whole page. The only press releases that get issued on a friday are the ones poeple want buried; by monday nobody cares. ICANN is famous for doing this. That's really is what they do.
" Maybe you should get a girlfriend instead. Wouldn't that be something !
When's the release date?"
With or without time off for good behaviour?
"Slashdot can be a fascinating site, but it has never been a beacon of elevated journalistic rigor."
No, it's more like a cross between alt.flame and talk.bizarre.
I keep waiting for the Brahms Gang to show up. Dominus is already isolized.
" I was around when only trolls might have defended the notion of a large company using trade secret law to trump the free speech rights of independent journalists"
Perhaps people have grown up and deciced respecting the law is a good thing?
"MS isn't going to create a new Windows release for April 1-14, but they could schedule their own press event for that period extolling the feature set of the Longhorn beta"
MS vapourware vs. a new rev of a gui consumer BSD?
I'm still thinking about this? Oh please...
"If you're rebooting a Windows machine more than an OS X machine, then it is broken."
Sure, Windows is stable as hell. Until you load drivers for the peripherals you need. Then it becomes ustable. Maybe it's possible to make windows stable. But OSX is ungodly stable out of the box, as in weeks if not months if not years of uptime compared to hours and days for windows. I've never seen an OSX machine crash and I've only seen one hang in a program once, ironically IE.
And there really is someting to be said for having and icon you can click on to get a real unix prompt not some POS with a bizarre version of CP/M with incorrectly facing slashes. To say noting of windows bizarre notion of requiring the GUI to work to configure the GUI. Broken. Put windows in televsion more (320x240) then tell me how long it takes you to unfuck that.
I've railed against macs for two decades, and I still think OS9 machines are unusable but when forced to use one with OSX to do real work for two weeks that all changed within an hour. They work, they don't crash, it's a turnkey BSD system than you can seamlessly plug your camera or whatever into. It's what Windows might be in 10 years, although that might be overoptimistic.
I'll concede Windows has more game titles. I think that's appropriate. I write unix code and don't play games and don't care which game console you pick. Wintel might be an excellent platform for that. Big woop.
"Bollocks. NT4 was quite snappy on average hardware of the time (Pentium 100ish). OS X needs at least a G5 to be even *close* to that level of responsiveness."
Depends on what you're doing. Pentia do better at random memory accesses so someting like Mathematica is faster on a Penita. Power PC chips excel at linear accesses to they will outperform a Pentia at the same clock rate for something like Photoshop.
To say you need a G5 to make OSX outperform NT on a Penita 100 is a fantasy and proof you've never tried it.
Don't make shit up if you expect to be taken seriously.
"WinNT 3.1 was the OS X 10.0 of the 90s, lots of potential but painfully slow. NT 3.5 was faster, and NT 4.0 was even faster still. Contrary to the convential wisdom here, Win XP is slightly faster than all"
If you had actually tried this you'd know it's not true. 3.1 is faster than 95 which is faster than 98 which is faster then XP on the same system. Try it for yourself and see. In fact, 98 a 1700 mhz machine is faster then XP on a 3000 mhz machine. I reverted to 98 on one machine I need Windoze on jsut for this reason so say nothing of the fact there are minor things like parellal port scanners than can not work on that POS XP (no driver). Bah.
Even old MS-DOS versions are faster then new ones on the same hardware.
[you may | if you ask your]
"requires knowledge of UNIX commands."
el-ess, see-dee...
Ref: Unix commands for fucking morons by Dan Gookin, P35.
"Windows SP upgrades, which are free"
Yes, but OSX actually works.
Would a BSOD emulator for BSD make you happy?
[do not bother to]
"...cannot use SETI@Home or Folding@Home for drug research, can they?"
You're telling me when I go to somebodys place and their screensaver on their PC is looking for aliens that isn't drug research?
Welcome, you must be new to earth.
"Regardless, I was actually curious to see what kind of burning solution they bring to Linux./i"
Burning solution? Dude, it's saturday. Take the necktie off.
And you won't even have to reboot it to change DNS settings.
Forget that, you wouldn't believe what some asshole with the same name as me posted to alt.drugs 20 years ago. Thanks deja/google.
Amiga floppies. All my email from 1986 to 1990 fit on 3 Amiga floppies downloaded from a Xenix system. They are of course unreadable... although, it jsut occured to me I have a 10 meg Amiga scsi A1000 drive in the barn that has it all. Hmmm...
As long as we're talking about dubious American corporate practices... I lived in Los Angeles once and was paid to port an accounting package from unix to pc. It was a litttle unusual as you could go in after the fact and juggle all sorts of stuff in rather odd ways.
I was told it was for the movie industry and it was explained to me they would take out 10K in the morning in cash, buy tons of drugs then needed to put it on the books as various production expenses while putting whatever cash was left over, back.
The same company I was a consultant for doing this wanted to bid on a project for the city but it required a $15,000.00 cashiers check. They either didn't want to or couldn't afford it so they got a casheirs check for that amount, photocopied it, deposited the check back into their own account and sent the photocopy of the check with the proposal to the city. When they called weeks later the city was somewhat embarrassed as they could only find a photocopy of the check, not the original. They didn't get the contract and retured the 15K. The vice president had a graduate degree in Hungarian fairy tales (I am not making this up) so it was, to say the least, an entertaining place to work, but, uh...
I quit. I made sure I left lots of rotting fruit hidden in various places. Took them two years to get rid of the flies I heard.
Do I believe Microsoft deleted those mails as uninteresting? Uh, no.
"Now, again, I think it's odd that they can recover email from before and after, but not during... but there are legitimate reasons why mail would be missing"
Not all of it.
Every email concerning Burst for 35 weeks? I don't buy it.
"Why not buy a socketed motherboard instead? "
Like I had a choice. "Here's three computers, make them work". Great.
I had no idea you could even buy a new contemporary working computer for $300 CAD. Gosh they're light. They don't even make good doorstops or boat anchors any more.
No more PC's for me, I'm sick of cheap crap and a well spec'd PC cost more to make and more hasle to build than a decent used mac, so I'm going Mac from hereon out anway.
I just wish they hadn't deviated from the one true (SCSI) path. IME over a two decades of futzing with drives SCSI is more reliable if not generally faster.
For further enlightnment the library of congress recommends the movie _Don's Party_.
"I have no idea about his actual citizenship"
With a name like "Hew Griffiths" I have a guess...
"Somebody please explain me...."
Ok, if you have one COB (Chip On Board) CPU and it fries, say, oh, because the fan fails and lets the smoke out of the cpu then you have a second chance by plugging in another CPU. Witthout this ability you can do nothing else than throw away an otherwise good motherboard. And it's good to have options as to what CPU you can plug in.
As somebody who had this happen on a 3 month old mobo last week for this exact reason, I'd buy one.
(and yes I vacuumed the dust out tiwce since I got and and checked the fan, it seemed fine during regular PM)
This may not be the intended use but that's how I view this.
>I wonder whether this would even be legal.
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm not sure how much of your rights you can sign away. Not all I know that much. I suspect but certainly do not know, that they can get away with this though.
I have an easy out though. I steadfastly refuse to use an IM service. If they can't figure out talk, tough. "Can I we talk in IM". "No, we can exchange email. It's the same thing but 2 seconds slower".
I also plead ignorance if somebody sends me a doc or xls file: "Huh? What's this? Really? Sorry, I don't have any MS software". Fortunatly poeple dumb enough to send me this crap have never heard of Open-whatever.
You have to nip this evil crap in the bud. I once made the mistake of admitting I might be able to figure out COBOL. Those were the worst two years of my life. This woorks as well for hardware too. Although I've written BIOS chips and worked for seevral (pre-pc) computer companies if anybody in (the small) town here asks me if I know anything about computers I say "no" or "well I was thinking of getting a Mac, why?".
I'm not making that heinous mistake twice.
>emt 377
sob r3,1$