I've heard what you mention here... but I think a more current definition of "taint" is pussy. At least that's what I've been hearing them young whipper snappers around here use lately.
with Suzzanna Decantworthy additional research: Sean McCleanaugh
Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza. Please note that this will not work with cordless phones. To do this you will need two mobile phones -they do not have to be on the same network but you will need to know the number of one of them. The only other items you will need are:
An egg cup, (make sure that the egg cup is made of an insulating material such as China, wood or glass - plastic will do. DO NOT use stainless steel or other metal). A radio, AM or FM - you can also use your hifi.
A table or other flat surface on which to place the phones and egg cup. You can place the radio anywhere in the room but you might as well put it on the table.
How To Do It:
Take an egg from the fridge and place it in the egg cup in the centre of the table. Switch on the radio or hifi and turn it up to a comfortable volume. Switch on phone A and place it on the table such that the antenna (the pokey thing at the top) is about half an inch from the egg (you may need to experiment to get the relative heights correct - paperbacks are good if you have any - if not you may be able to get some wood off cuts from your local hardware shop). Switch on phone B and ring phone A then place phone B on the table in a similar but complementary position to Phone A. Answer phone A - you should be able to do this without removing it from the table. If not, don't panic, just return the phone to where you originally placed on the table. Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A. Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone. Cut out these instructions for future reference. Note: We cooked our egg during the evening using free local calls, if you were to cook an egg for lunch it would cost £3.00 - not cheap but you do have the convenience.
I feel foolish for asking but... What's the radio for??
To generate traffic. On modern digital cell phones, if the line is silent, they don't transmit or recieve, or at least not enough to speak of. Saves on power.
The radio will generate traffic and cause the power output of the phone to max out.
The MPAA, in response to questions regarding the rating, defended the rating, saying "The rating was appropriately assigned and is just, as it clearly exposes some of the biggest dicks in the industry."
If there ever was a time I needed mod points... it was for that.
You've already said it's semantics, anything that "denies" me access to my "services" is:. a Denial of Service. Thankfully I've got the IE7 Beta, and I don't think too many MSDN subscribers are rushing out to exploit it.
No, probably not... just everyone else in the known world. But by god, you are safe from those nefarious MSDN subscribers!
Okay, you've never had a console, but admit to playing Dance, Dance Revolution? I suspect your either a girl or gay. And I don't say that demeaningly. Its just I can't imagine a red-blooded male American (including Canadians) who would play it, except maybe in secret, and definitely true geeks don't have the coordination for it. Geezus what is Slashdot coming to?!?!
What world have you been living in? DDR is actually quite fun... I'm a 30 something male and straight. So that shoots your theory to shit.
DDR is decent exercise, and it's a fairly hard game. I've never played it in the arcade because I don't want to look like an idiot in front of people, so I opted for the home version both on the Xbox and the PC (Stepmania) and ended up buying some Red Octane Afterburner pads (wish I had went with Cobalt Flux in retrospect).
If you fancy yourself good at video games, I suggest you give DDR a try and see how much you truely suck at coordination. I can whip your ass up one side and down the other at any fighter you care to mention, but a 12 year old girl can kick my ass at DDR playing backwards and blindfolded. I will admit, though, that DDR is a lot about patterns and memorization... kinda like Mortal Combat.
However, instead of UPS, which charges and arm and a leg to ship, try using DHL (Formerly known as Airborne Express) - they are usually at least a day or two faster than UPS and 1/3 to 1/2 the cost.
Plus they are a cool yellow and red, not poop brown.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
Are you like... new to the internet?
It existed just fine prior to the advertising, and everything was free. Is the content more rich and expansive? Yes... but that is because of a number of factors. Google AdWords seem to do just fine with advertising.
It's not the advertising that's the problem, it's the intrusive advertising that causes so much problems. Doubleclick is the king of intrusive advertising, so they need to be shut down by the market forces.
Advertising is going to have to evolve to not annoy the target audience, otherwise, the target audience is going to block the advertising. AdBlocking software isn't going to be the end of free content, it will be the end of annoying advertising and the salvation of quality companies like Google that know how to advertise.
SpamBag is run by Sam Varshavchik, the author of Courier. A singularly most unpleasant and moronic individual.
I had the misfortune to cross his path a number of years ago about an issue with Courier I believe or something else, I can't quite recall, and I will never forget it. He is one of the most vitrolic, annoying, moronic individuals I have ever come across. I'm amazed he was able to produce something as nice as the Courier MTA package, but I guess idiot savants like him can do good things. It's just unfortunate he has the social skills of a diseased whore.
Anyone that uses SpamBag as their RBL is a dumbass in the extreem. Then again, anyone that uses ANY RBL as the final arbitrator of email delivery should be beaten to begin with.
Why are so many articles lately apparently written by people who can't figure out subject/verb agreement?
"HAS" and "IS" is for singular subjects, such as "Apple IS going to announce..." or "Apple HAS been promising..."
Apple is a single company. They are not multiple entities, and therefor call for a singular agreement. Do people actually talk like that? Do they really say "Apple have been promising..." when talking? Do they not realize they sound like uneducated trailer park people? Judging from the fact that the submitter used "rumour" as opposed to "rumor," I suspect they are from the UK or there abouts. As such, what's the equivilent of a trailer park in the UK?
Remember, folks, HAS and IS are for singular subjects. HAVE and ARE are for plural subjects.
Why do we even have/. editors if they don't fix mistakes like this?
There are just so many things wrong with this article.
First off, you can build (or even buy with rebates) a perfectly good gaming rig that will run all the current games, and a lot of games into the forseeable future - and you can buy it for the same price as the next gen consoles (around $400).
But that aside, the fact is, it doesn't matter how fast or powerful your next gen console is, the graphics still suck. Can they do good graphics? Yeah, I'm sure they can... but they are still displaying it ON A TV. Got a HD TV? Ok, so you're in the minority, and guess what? The HD resolution STILL sucks compared to a $50 monitor from the local computer store.
Sure, the picture is bigger, but even at 1080i, the picture doesn't look that great. Yes, I have two HD TV's in my house, one a 65" Toshiba rear projection, and a high end front projection system in my home theater room. So yes, I know what I'm talking about.
If I want good graphics, I go to my PC, I don't go to my XBox. The next gen consoles are never going to be able to match what PC monitor can do, unless perhaps they are hooked up to the self same monitor.
Now, I'll grant that a lot of people just don't care and are happy with crappy resolutions. Next you have the problem of online play... want to play online? WHooopie, I can play with a whopping 16 other people... or if I'm lucky and the title supports it, I can play up to 64 other people. That's about the same as a lot of games on the PC, but gee, I'm locked into one service for the most part, unless I install a mod chip that lets me use other online serves. And I have to pay for this service. Now, to add insult to that injury, the fact that the console is so "cheap" (supposedly), means that every anonymous obnoxious kiddie out there is going to have the same setup and will be online causing grief. Yay, just what I want. Again, if I want online play, I head back to my PC, where I can pick what network(s) I connect to to play my games.
Is all that *possible* on the next gen consoles? Yeah, I'm sure it's *possible*, but not unless you do some hardware hacking. The next gen consoles are going to be locked down tighter than a drum so they can generate perpetual revenue. Why would they let people play on open/free/alternate networks? They won't.
Consoles are great, they have their place... but to say they are going to replace PC gaming is ludicrous. They are two entirely different spheres of gaming, and while one may have some effect on the other, the fact is, each type of system caters to a particular type of game and person... one isn't going to kill off the other, at least not with this upcoming generation of consoles.
Yes, but the Pocket PC video chipsets are pure arse compared. I have a HP3950 iPaq ( 400 mhz arm 64 ram ), and it cant run MAME or any other emulators worth a damn
I don't know what other emulators you are referring to, but in the case of MAME, it's not because of the video chipset in your iPaq, it's because MAME emulates the video hardware, or at the best of times, does not take advantage of the abilities of any video chipset in a given machine. That's why you need such a beefy processor to run simple stuff that would be trivial if programmed in today's methods. All the video processing is done on the CPU, not the GPU.
If MAME were to be rewritten for the PPC and specifically targeted at that video chipset, it would fly... but it's meant to be portable (MAME) and to be compiled on many different systems, as well as providing absolute true emulation of old hardware, and thus *EVERYTHING* is handled by the CPU since it's basically creating a virtual machine. That's why MAME runs so crappy on a PPC, not because the GPU sucks.
Card's idea of good SciFi is "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind" (!?).
I always knew Card was a little screwy in the head, but I do love his Ender series... but man, if this guy thinks those two movies are the finest example of Scifi for the screen, my opinion of his opinion just took the biggest crap in the largest toilet in the world.
Malkovich was ok, and while I could see how it might be classified as SF, I'd move it closer to fantasy. And Eternal Sunshine was one of the crappiest movies I've seen. It wasn't nearly as bad as AI, which stands alone at the pinnacle of how bad a SciFi movie can ever be, but I did want my two hours of life back after watching Eternal Sunshine.
Neither of these movies are even close to what good SciFi is about; Neither were executed well, neither were written all that well. Malkovich was entertaining, at least... but come on, to hold them up as an example of good SF? That's just a travesty of justice and an insult to SF. It's no wonder Card writes mostly fantasy, and only occasionally dips into the SF arena. He's not exactly clear on the concept of what good SF truely is.
Gamers don't want photorealism. I'm not sure why people seem to think that we are working towards photorealism as the end goal of graphic gaming; we're not. We could have been there long ago taking a different path to that outcome, but it's been shown many times before that a game that looks real does not have the same appeal as a game that is slightly less real looking.
We want to escape into a fantasy world, not into a photorealistic world that is undistinguisable from our own. I realize that in a photorealistic gaming world, we could still have non-real things, but the fact is that many studies have shown that the typical gamer prefers the slightly stylized images of a non-photorealistic world to that of a photorealistic one.
Game developers have known this for years, and while we've been working towards better and better graphics, photorealism is not the direction we've been headed.
Not that the CentOS distro is bad, but it's really more for a server, not a user box. Since this is going in the computing labs, and presumably the students will be logging into the box(es), it would seem to me that using another distro more geared towards users would be appropriate, since the CentOS 3.3 is geared towards enterprise servers.
I'm sure it can be tweaked to be just fine, but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab.
Because we all know that black hole services work!
Oh wait... no they don't.
Anyone who uses a blackhole service as the final decision maker on whether or not to reject mail is a worthless system administrator that is negligent in his or her job. They should not be allowed to administrate systems if that is the case.
The bottom line is, Black hole systems like MAPS/ORBS/etc... don't work as intended, period. Anyone who says differently lives with blinders on, and is totally incapable of accepting reality. Yes, I feel quite comfortable making this blanket statement.
I, thankfully, have never been on the receiving end of this vigalante, worthless system, and my mail servers rarely get rejected for main being misidentified as spam. However, I sympathize greatly with the people that do. Since I am a competent administrator, I am capable of seeing exactly why RBL's don't work; why they have never worked, and why they will never work. Anyone with any competence whatsoever in managing a real, live mail system on the real, live internet (running a mail server from your DSL line does not count) knows exactly why RBLs are useless as final arbitrators.
They can be used just fine in a weighted system, and that's exactly how they should be used... but any system that uses it for final arbitration should be wiped off the face of the internet until such time as the system administrators can get their heads out of thier collective asses and learn how to actually do their job, instead of shucking off their responsibility to these RBL administrators that have a God complex and should be shot on site. They are little better than the spammers they are trying to stop in their zealotry (is that a word?).
I still am failing to see what this has to do with my assertation that GPG signatures are not the solution. It's 2005, and SSL / signed certs have been available on the web for years. People STILL don't pay attention to the warnings, even with rampant malware/spyware/etc... on the web.
Yet, somehow, magically, you think people are going to pay attention to them in email. An environment that is even more esoteric than web pages to the average user.
Yeah, I can see it now... Grandma Jones champing at the bit to generate her 4096bit private key, and then uploading that to a central server. Oh, but which central key authority should she use? Her ISPs, yeah! Ahh, but little grandson Timmy, who's 7 years old doesn't know how to change his key authority to accept Grandma's ISP, so the mail can't be authenticated, and it gets filtered out. Or he just clicks OK, give it to me anyway.
Since he's so use to clicking that anyway, he just does that for every email.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that GPG is a valid solution, it's just not viable. The solution needs to be implemented at the server level, and it needs to be implemented with ZERO end user interaction, or it will NOT HAPPEN. EVER. PERIOD. You obviously don't deal with a lot of end users, even the tech savvy ones are not going to go through the hassle of GPG signatures. Only a very small portion of the net will bother with active spam prevention methods like GPG. Any viable method to all this needs to be handled by the people who get paid to handle this... namely the system administrators, and therefore, any solution to this MUST be server side and MUST be handled by the professionals, not Grandma Jones.
Now, you can argue that we're still a long way from getting people from using methods to ensure email sources are valid, but techincally we can do it today with existing infastructure.
I never said the technology wasn't there. I said: "we are still a long way from providing an environment where the From header can not be (easily) spoofed."
The net is built on the foundation of open SMTP. Switching that entire foundation over to something else is a long, LONG way off. GPG signatures are probably the last thing on the list of viable alternatives. It may be the best, but it's still the last thing. It has to be implemented at the server level with exactly ZERO user intervention, otherwise it won't get done. GPG signatures are great for the geek, but they are totally useless to the population at large.
They won't implement them, and even if they do, they will click "Ok" on insecure documents anyway.
With your example, it would be very, very easy to send mail as you. So the signature check fails, so what? It just takes a 5 second look at a website where the HTTPS certificate fails and people click "So what, give me the content anyway." If you believe that won't happen with email, you are terribly mistaken.
So no, GPG signatures are not even remotely a possible solution to the problem.
So the whole premise here is that mass mail viruses are peaked because they are slowly being devoured by the phishes... err phishers.
While I suppose that's true to an extent, we are still a long way from providing an environment where the From header can not be (easily) spoofed. The article makes it sound like we are going to throw a switch any day now and all will be right in the world of SMTP.
In short, I wouldn't say we've reached a peak necessarily, but perhaps more of a plateau. But even then, I think that might be wishful thinking.
If I were Bill Gates, I'd be suing France for defamatory remarks against me. Who wants to be linked to France in the manner of "So many views in common."
On the other hand, if were Bill, I'd probably just declare war on France instead.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot about the forced upgrades that you pay for, feature creep, and bloat.
The bloat... god the bloat.
No, I didn't hear wrong. I assure you.
Learn to read.
Honestly, haven't you people heard of "reading comprehsion?"
If I had potentially "heard wrong," I would have said, "I thought I heard..." not, "I heard."
I'm not like you, I don't make statements that are ambiguous, I say what I mean.
I've heard what you mention here ... but I think a more current definition of "taint" is pussy. At least that's what I've been hearing them young whipper snappers around here use lately.
You kids get off my lawn!
23 : Wymsey Weekend
Weekend Eating:
Mobile Cooking
with Suzzanna Decantworthy
additional research: Sean McCleanaugh
Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza. Please note that this will not work with cordless phones.
To do this you will need two mobile phones -they do not have to be on the same network but you will need to know the number of one of them. The only other items you will need are:
An egg cup, (make sure that the egg cup is made of an insulating material such as China, wood or glass - plastic will do. DO NOT use stainless steel or other metal).
A radio, AM or FM - you can also use your hifi.
A table or other flat surface on which to place the phones and egg cup. You can place the radio anywhere in the room but you might as well put it on the table.
How To Do It:
Take an egg from the fridge and place it in the egg cup in the centre of the table.
Switch on the radio or hifi and turn it up to a comfortable volume.
Switch on phone A and place it on the table such that the antenna (the pokey thing at the top) is about half an inch from the egg (you may need to experiment to get the relative heights correct - paperbacks are good if you have any - if not you may be able to get some wood off cuts from your local hardware shop).
Switch on phone B and ring phone A then place phone B on the table in a similar but complementary position to Phone A.
Answer phone A - you should be able to do this without removing it from the table. If not, don't panic, just return the phone to where you originally placed on the table.
Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.
Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.
Cut out these instructions for future reference.
Note: We cooked our egg during the evening using free local calls, if you were to cook an egg for lunch it would cost £3.00 - not cheap but you do have the convenience.
Phone A > > > > > > Egg Phone B
I feel foolish for asking but...
What's the radio for??
To generate traffic. On modern digital cell phones, if the line is silent, they don't transmit or recieve, or at least not enough to speak of. Saves on power.
The radio will generate traffic and cause the power output of the phone to max out.
The MPAA, in response to questions regarding the rating, defended the rating, saying "The rating was appropriately assigned and is just, as it clearly exposes some of the biggest dicks in the industry."
If there ever was a time I needed mod points... it was for that.
You could have bought 1 share for $.83, not 610,000 shares for $.0083.
.83 of 1 cent. This would be $5063.00 dollars for 610,000 shares.
.83 of 1 cent, not $0.83. It's $0.0083.
610,000 shares would have cost $506,300 (plus commissions).
Your could have bought 1 share for $.0083, or
1 yen is
You've already said it's semantics, anything that "denies" me access to my "services" is :. a Denial of Service. Thankfully I've got the IE7 Beta, and I don't think too many MSDN subscribers are rushing out to exploit it.
No, probably not... just everyone else in the known world. But by god, you are safe from those nefarious MSDN subscribers!
Okay, you've never had a console, but admit to playing Dance, Dance Revolution? I suspect your either a girl or gay. And I don't say that demeaningly. Its just I can't imagine a red-blooded male American (including Canadians) who would play it, except maybe in secret, and definitely true geeks don't have the coordination for it. Geezus what is Slashdot coming to?!?!
What world have you been living in? DDR is actually quite fun... I'm a 30 something male and straight. So that shoots your theory to shit.
DDR is decent exercise, and it's a fairly hard game. I've never played it in the arcade because I don't want to look like an idiot in front of people, so I opted for the home version both on the Xbox and the PC (Stepmania) and ended up buying some Red Octane Afterburner pads (wish I had went with Cobalt Flux in retrospect).
If you fancy yourself good at video games, I suggest you give DDR a try and see how much you truely suck at coordination. I can whip your ass up one side and down the other at any fighter you care to mention, but a 12 year old girl can kick my ass at DDR playing backwards and blindfolded. I will admit, though, that DDR is a lot about patterns and memorization... kinda like Mortal Combat.
No... then he was like OMG!!!1!11!! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeEEEEEEEEEEEeEEEE!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, I'll stop using FedEx as well...
However, instead of UPS, which charges and arm and a leg to ship, try using DHL (Formerly known as Airborne Express) - they are usually at least a day or two faster than UPS and 1/3 to 1/2 the cost.
Plus they are a cool yellow and red, not poop brown.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
Are you like... new to the internet?
It existed just fine prior to the advertising, and everything was free. Is the content more rich and expansive? Yes... but that is because of a number of factors. Google AdWords seem to do just fine with advertising.
It's not the advertising that's the problem, it's the intrusive advertising that causes so much problems. Doubleclick is the king of intrusive advertising, so they need to be shut down by the market forces.
Advertising is going to have to evolve to not annoy the target audience, otherwise, the target audience is going to block the advertising. AdBlocking software isn't going to be the end of free content, it will be the end of annoying advertising and the salvation of quality companies like Google that know how to advertise.
SpamBag is run by Sam Varshavchik, the author of Courier. A singularly most unpleasant and moronic individual.
I had the misfortune to cross his path a number of years ago about an issue with Courier I believe or something else, I can't quite recall, and I will never forget it. He is one of the most vitrolic, annoying, moronic individuals I have ever come across. I'm amazed he was able to produce something as nice as the Courier MTA package, but I guess idiot savants like him can do good things. It's just unfortunate he has the social skills of a diseased whore.
Anyone that uses SpamBag as their RBL is a dumbass in the extreem. Then again, anyone that uses ANY RBL as the final arbitrator of email delivery should be beaten to begin with.
Why are so many articles lately apparently written by people who can't figure out subject/verb agreement?
/. editors if they don't fix mistakes like this?
"HAS" and "IS" is for singular subjects, such as "Apple IS going to announce..." or "Apple HAS been promising..."
Apple is a single company. They are not multiple entities, and therefor call for a singular agreement. Do people actually talk like that? Do they really say "Apple have been promising..." when talking? Do they not realize they sound like uneducated trailer park people? Judging from the fact that the submitter used "rumour" as opposed to "rumor," I suspect they are from the UK or there abouts. As such, what's the equivilent of a trailer park in the UK?
Remember, folks, HAS and IS are for singular subjects. HAVE and ARE are for plural subjects.
Why do we even have
There are just so many things wrong with this article.
First off, you can build (or even buy with rebates) a perfectly good gaming rig that will run all the current games, and a lot of games into the forseeable future - and you can buy it for the same price as the next gen consoles (around $400).
But that aside, the fact is, it doesn't matter how fast or powerful your next gen console is, the graphics still suck. Can they do good graphics? Yeah, I'm sure they can... but they are still displaying it ON A TV. Got a HD TV? Ok, so you're in the minority, and guess what? The HD resolution STILL sucks compared to a $50 monitor from the local computer store.
Sure, the picture is bigger, but even at 1080i, the picture doesn't look that great. Yes, I have two HD TV's in my house, one a 65" Toshiba rear projection, and a high end front projection system in my home theater room. So yes, I know what I'm talking about.
If I want good graphics, I go to my PC, I don't go to my XBox. The next gen consoles are never going to be able to match what PC monitor can do, unless perhaps they are hooked up to the self same monitor.
Now, I'll grant that a lot of people just don't care and are happy with crappy resolutions. Next you have the problem of online play... want to play online? WHooopie, I can play with a whopping 16 other people... or if I'm lucky and the title supports it, I can play up to 64 other people. That's about the same as a lot of games on the PC, but gee, I'm locked into one service for the most part, unless I install a mod chip that lets me use other online serves. And I have to pay for this service. Now, to add insult to that injury, the fact that the console is so "cheap" (supposedly), means that every anonymous obnoxious kiddie out there is going to have the same setup and will be online causing grief. Yay, just what I want. Again, if I want online play, I head back to my PC, where I can pick what network(s) I connect to to play my games.
Is all that *possible* on the next gen consoles? Yeah, I'm sure it's *possible*, but not unless you do some hardware hacking. The next gen consoles are going to be locked down tighter than a drum so they can generate perpetual revenue. Why would they let people play on open/free/alternate networks? They won't.
Consoles are great, they have their place... but to say they are going to replace PC gaming is ludicrous. They are two entirely different spheres of gaming, and while one may have some effect on the other, the fact is, each type of system caters to a particular type of game and person... one isn't going to kill off the other, at least not with this upcoming generation of consoles.
Yes, but the Pocket PC video chipsets are pure arse compared. I have a HP3950 iPaq ( 400 mhz arm 64 ram ), and it cant run MAME or any other emulators worth a damn
I don't know what other emulators you are referring to, but in the case of MAME, it's not because of the video chipset in your iPaq, it's because MAME emulates the video hardware, or at the best of times, does not take advantage of the abilities of any video chipset in a given machine. That's why you need such a beefy processor to run simple stuff that would be trivial if programmed in today's methods. All the video processing is done on the CPU, not the GPU.
If MAME were to be rewritten for the PPC and specifically targeted at that video chipset, it would fly... but it's meant to be portable (MAME) and to be compiled on many different systems, as well as providing absolute true emulation of old hardware, and thus *EVERYTHING* is handled by the CPU since it's basically creating a virtual machine. That's why MAME runs so crappy on a PPC, not because the GPU sucks.
Holy hell on a hiking trip...
Card's idea of good SciFi is "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind" (!?).
I always knew Card was a little screwy in the head, but I do love his Ender series... but man, if this guy thinks those two movies are the finest example of Scifi for the screen, my opinion of his opinion just took the biggest crap in the largest toilet in the world.
Malkovich was ok, and while I could see how it might be classified as SF, I'd move it closer to fantasy. And Eternal Sunshine was one of the crappiest movies I've seen. It wasn't nearly as bad as AI, which stands alone at the pinnacle of how bad a SciFi movie can ever be, but I did want my two hours of life back after watching Eternal Sunshine.
Neither of these movies are even close to what good SciFi is about; Neither were executed well, neither were written all that well. Malkovich was entertaining, at least... but come on, to hold them up as an example of good SF? That's just a travesty of justice and an insult to SF. It's no wonder Card writes mostly fantasy, and only occasionally dips into the SF arena. He's not exactly clear on the concept of what good SF truely is.
Gamers don't want photorealism. I'm not sure why people seem to think that we are working towards photorealism as the end goal of graphic gaming; we're not. We could have been there long ago taking a different path to that outcome, but it's been shown many times before that a game that looks real does not have the same appeal as a game that is slightly less real looking.
We want to escape into a fantasy world, not into a photorealistic world that is undistinguisable from our own. I realize that in a photorealistic gaming world, we could still have non-real things, but the fact is that many studies have shown that the typical gamer prefers the slightly stylized images of a non-photorealistic world to that of a photorealistic one.
Game developers have known this for years, and while we've been working towards better and better graphics, photorealism is not the direction we've been headed.
Not that the CentOS distro is bad, but it's really more for a server, not a user box. Since this is going in the computing labs, and presumably the students will be logging into the box(es), it would seem to me that using another distro more geared towards users would be appropriate, since the CentOS 3.3 is geared towards enterprise servers.
I'm sure it can be tweaked to be just fine, but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab.
Because we all know that black hole services work!
Oh wait... no they don't.
Anyone who uses a blackhole service as the final decision maker on whether or not to reject mail is a worthless system administrator that is negligent in his or her job. They should not be allowed to administrate systems if that is the case.
The bottom line is, Black hole systems like MAPS/ORBS/etc... don't work as intended, period. Anyone who says differently lives with blinders on, and is totally incapable of accepting reality. Yes, I feel quite comfortable making this blanket statement.
I, thankfully, have never been on the receiving end of this vigalante, worthless system, and my mail servers rarely get rejected for main being misidentified as spam. However, I sympathize greatly with the people that do. Since I am a competent administrator, I am capable of seeing exactly why RBL's don't work; why they have never worked, and why they will never work. Anyone with any competence whatsoever in managing a real, live mail system on the real, live internet (running a mail server from your DSL line does not count) knows exactly why RBLs are useless as final arbitrators.
They can be used just fine in a weighted system, and that's exactly how they should be used... but any system that uses it for final arbitration should be wiped off the face of the internet until such time as the system administrators can get their heads out of thier collective asses and learn how to actually do their job, instead of shucking off their responsibility to these RBL administrators that have a God complex and should be shot on site. They are little better than the spammers they are trying to stop in their zealotry (is that a word?).
Thanks so much for pointing out how obviously obvious it was. If not for you, I would have missed it, Captain Obvious.
I still am failing to see what this has to do with my assertation that GPG signatures are not the solution. It's 2005, and SSL / signed certs have been available on the web for years. People STILL don't pay attention to the warnings, even with rampant malware/spyware/etc... on the web.
Yet, somehow, magically, you think people are going to pay attention to them in email. An environment that is even more esoteric than web pages to the average user.
Yeah, I can see it now... Grandma Jones champing at the bit to generate her 4096bit private key, and then uploading that to a central server. Oh, but which central key authority should she use? Her ISPs, yeah! Ahh, but little grandson Timmy, who's 7 years old doesn't know how to change his key authority to accept Grandma's ISP, so the mail can't be authenticated, and it gets filtered out. Or he just clicks OK, give it to me anyway.
Since he's so use to clicking that anyway, he just does that for every email.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that GPG is a valid solution, it's just not viable. The solution needs to be implemented at the server level, and it needs to be implemented with ZERO end user interaction, or it will NOT HAPPEN. EVER. PERIOD. You obviously don't deal with a lot of end users, even the tech savvy ones are not going to go through the hassle of GPG signatures. Only a very small portion of the net will bother with active spam prevention methods like GPG. Any viable method to all this needs to be handled by the people who get paid to handle this... namely the system administrators, and therefore, any solution to this MUST be server side and MUST be handled by the professionals, not Grandma Jones.
Now, you can argue that we're still a long way from getting people from using methods to ensure email sources are valid, but techincally we can do it today with existing infastructure.
I never said the technology wasn't there. I said: "we are still a long way from providing an environment where the From header can not be (easily) spoofed."
The net is built on the foundation of open SMTP. Switching that entire foundation over to something else is a long, LONG way off. GPG signatures are probably the last thing on the list of viable alternatives. It may be the best, but it's still the last thing. It has to be implemented at the server level with exactly ZERO user intervention, otherwise it won't get done. GPG signatures are great for the geek, but they are totally useless to the population at large.
They won't implement them, and even if they do, they will click "Ok" on insecure documents anyway.
With your example, it would be very, very easy to send mail as you. So the signature check fails, so what? It just takes a 5 second look at a website where the HTTPS certificate fails and people click "So what, give me the content anyway." If you believe that won't happen with email, you are terribly mistaken.
So no, GPG signatures are not even remotely a possible solution to the problem.
So the whole premise here is that mass mail viruses are peaked because they are slowly being devoured by the phishes... err phishers.
While I suppose that's true to an extent, we are still a long way from providing an environment where the From header can not be (easily) spoofed. The article makes it sound like we are going to throw a switch any day now and all will be right in the world of SMTP.
In short, I wouldn't say we've reached a peak necessarily, but perhaps more of a plateau. But even then, I think that might be wishful thinking.
If I were Bill Gates, I'd be suing France for defamatory remarks against me. Who wants to be linked to France in the manner of "So many views in common."
On the other hand, if were Bill, I'd probably just declare war on France instead.