There was a great article somewhere about a year ago with examples of cases where, in the process of translating wire stories, editors would do metric-to-imperial or imperial-to-metric conversions, but fail to round things off, resulting in phrases like "going the extra 1.6km" or "the whole 8.23 meters".
I can't find it with Google, but I did find a whole lot of other examples of that type of stupidity, including a travelogue about Grand Teton National Park directing tourists to "listen for the sound of the springs cascading from a cave 3,000 feet [914.4 meters] below the rim". If anyone's seen the actual article, though, I'd love to know...
Isn't that sort of the point of maglev? Isn't that like saying that we decided not to use word processors because they don't match the paper-on-pen technique we've traditionally used?
Surely it didn't take them nine years to realize that there were no wheels. I suspect this was imprecisely translated, and I'd love to know what they really said (or meant).
IANAL, but AOL does file (and win) lawsuits against their top spammers on a regular basis, and sends cease & desist letters to many, many more. Unfortunately, there are just too many of them out there, and it takes huge amounts of time and legwork to prove that a particular person sent (or caused to be sent) a particular spam run. Lawsuits help more from a deterrent standpoint than anything, and IMHO AOL still doesn't do enough to publicize their legal wins.
Maybe a good middle ground would be that at the end of the year (or maybe month), AOL were to send an email to their clients "Our filters blocked XXXX emails identified as spam from reaching your mailbox."
That'd be cool. Or, instead of just limiting the audience to current AOL members, they could issue a public press release every so often, detailing how much spam they'd blocked, so everyone would know!
So AOL should add the capacity to store 500 billion extra e-mails a day so that the less-than-1% of users who change ANY default preference EVER can turn off filtering if they don't want it?
AOL's got a whole team of people who work with the sending ISPs, and they do quite a bit of proactive contact, but you're right - with 500 billion blocked messages a day, they can't give everyone a courtesy phone call first. Sadly, the days when reporting spam to an ISP ensured that the spammer would "go down for it" ended about a decade ago.
There is a toll-free, 24x7 phone number for the postmaster desk at http://postmaster.info.aol.com. A sysadmin from your school should call them if you're still being blocked.
(A) The policy you describe is the way the Internet works. Being mail-bombed with bounces is no fun; it's what forced me to stop using jay@aol.com after ten years. But you're basically complaining that they follow the standard Internet practice of bouncing back undeliverable mail!
(B) Actually, AOL's system is more intricate than this. Bounces are shunted off to a separate queue, and large runs of bounces will be removed if they match the characteristics of spam bounces.
NB: AOL once got sued by a spammer for bouncing his undeliverable addresses back to him. He lost.
Actually, they only block dynamic IPs - which you really have to do these days if you want to stop mail from open proxies and distributed-spamming operations. If you prefer to run your own mail server, get a static IP. I have static-IP DSL from Speakeasy.net, and have never had any trouble getting mail to AOL.
Whoah, whoah, whoah! Where did we get from "no RF effects" to "no RF or other effects"? That's like saying nothing, anywhere, ever can affect the sound of audio.
The main difference between listening to a DVD player through RCA's and a CD player through TOSlink is the external converters, not the cables.
Now that we've established that using better quality electronics and cablesmakes a difference in video, why is it a stretch to assume the same thing is true for audio?
Because the bandwidth of video is significantly higher, and gets into all kinds of RF effects that I don't claim to understand.
Audio, which caps out around 22KHz, doesn't.
To translate into computer geek: "Now that we've established a distributed processing grid makes a difference in cryptography, why is it a stretch to assume the same thing is true for displaying the Times Sunday crossword page?"
- Incandescent bulbs are about 1% efficient (3% for halogen IIRC); the other 99% is heat. - LEDs are less than twice as efficient as incandescent (light output of a 60W LED = light output of a 100W incandescent). - But LEDs don't get very hot.
Where is the rest of the energy going, if not heat?
Have you followed development of the email client in Mozilla/Netscape? Feature-for-feature, it's always lagged behind OE -- but the current release has all the features you mention. And it's a lot easier to use than OE.
Yes, I have, and eagerly so - it is definitely catching up rapidly. Right now, the big things missing are IDLE (see below) and general performance; it takes significantly longer to sync up my mailbox or scroll through a large mailbox. Given that Firebird is only at 0.1, though, I am sure these will be corrected, and I expect that is where I'll end up.
[IDLE extension..] Well, that's a cool feature. But all it does is save on network bandwidth (which is hardly in short supply these days) and get you notified of email the very moment it arrives, instead of within 60 seconds.
It's not just a network bandwidth thing - it takes a lot of CPU to poll multiple 10,000-message folders for new mail every 60 seconds, and it makes the client sluggish, even on a fast P4. With IDLE, I can set my "scan" timeout ridiculously low - it's really just a catchup in case the impossible happens - and still get notified of new mail without heavy CPU utilization.
My problem with Mulberry is that it piles on the features (I think it must have more than any IMAP client) without trying to make them fit together, or make the whole reasonably usable. So you end up having to do a half-dozen clicks for even the simplest actions. Unless they're advertising that they've done some serious usability testing, I wouldn't bother downloading the latest release.
Yes, that was it, now I remember:) They are, in fact, advertising usability testing - "The best graphical user interface models and research were used in Mulberry's development, backed up by extensive direct user-testing with both "naive" and expert users" - but they're lying.
And not only doesn't it support IDLE, and not only is it single-threaded (!), but it erases the header cache every time you quit the app. Bad, bad Mulberry.
This whole Outlook/Exchange thing has been one long nightmare as a provider
You're an e-mail provider of some sort, and you don't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express?
They have absolutely nothing in common but the name and the fact that they both do e-mail. Outlook derives from Schedule Plus and the Exchange client, while Outlook Express is part of IE. They share little to no code.
Unfortunately, Eudora's database format can't handle my 9,000-message inbox; it expects your inbox to be small, and only your sub-folders to be large. And it hasn't been significantly updated in many years.
OE, for all its many flaws, is the least-worst IMAP client for Windows that supports HTML in e-mail. It handles large message stores flawlessly; it does disconnected mode; it lets me do a full-text search easily, it supports authenticated SMTP, STARTTLS, and IMAP over SSL; it cleanly supports multiple accounts, and it's certainly got the least clunky UI.
I also believe it is the *only* client (aside from Outlook itself) that supports the IDLE extension, which lets my Cyrus IMAP server push "new mail" notifications asynchronously, instead of requiring the client to poll every N minutes.
I have tried AOL Communicator, which I assume shares some code with Thunderbird. It's the next best to OE, no question, and it's very impressive for a 1.0 release, but it took *five times as long* to download my message store, and there were a few usability bugs I ran into.
I tried Mulberry a while ago, but I didn't like it; I forget why, exactly, but it looks like they've recently released a new client, so maybe I should check into that again.
When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.
That's an ancient Jewish joke...
On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish wrapped in paper. A man sitting across the aisle begins to taunt him. Finally, he asks: What makes you Jews so smart?" "All right," replies the Jew. "I guess I'll have to tell you. It's because we eat the heads of whitefish." "Well if that's the secret," the man says, then I can be as smart as you are." "That's right," says the Jew, "and in fact I have an extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks." The man pays for the fish head and begins to eat it.
An hour later, the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The man leaves the train and then comes back. "Listen, " he says, "you sold me that whitefish head for five kopecks but I just saw a wholewhitefish at the market for three kopecks." "See," replies the Jew, "you're getting smarter already."
Re:Scelson, as all spammers, is a liar
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
There is NO way he bought the AOL address information from AOL.
Actually, neither of the linked articles claims that he did. Only the article summary mistakenly says this.
The WaPo article says that he got his addresses through "legal means", but then goes on to say that he admits to harvesting from the AOL Member Directory (through bots, not inside sales), which is in fact against the Terms of Service.
The reason that Leonsis didn't deny that Scelson bought names from AOL is that nobody asked him. Leonsis also didn't deny that the earth is flat.
So it's entirely up to Microsoft whether or not to charge you for the fix to a problem they admit having!
In practice, though, this hasn't been a problem. I've written to PSS many times over the years to get hotfixes - or even just to report a bug and get confirmation that it's been logged - and never been charged for it. They've always acknowledged that my problem is due to their bug, and that means it's free.
I'm no fan of Microsoft's attitude and policies, but their support department is actually pretty decent as far as large-company consumer tech support goes, and when you run into someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it's easy to escalate your case. In fact, they even have a separate address you can write to to get your case escalated "outside of channels" if your tech support rep for some reason refuses.
Basically, he could not have thought of a worse example of where performance supposedly does not matter since modern email repositories resemble databases these days.
Amen! For example, AOL's new AOL Communicator, which I believe is based on the interesting but weighty Mozilla Mail component, downloads mail from an IMAP server *5 times* as slowly as Outlook Express, and has slower list boxes as well.
Re:What I really want(but am too lazy to look for)
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: 1
Why assume that it doesn't do that? Just because you don't know how?
No, because it never used to, and because the help text still doesn't mention that it can.
Here is the advanced help page [google.com] describing the search syntax you desire (plus others).
Gee, if only I had looked at the help text, I would have clearly seen that it supports parenthetical nesting of terms.
Oh. Wait. It doesn't say that it does. (And last time I tried anyway, it didn't. Granted, I should have tried again today before posting.)
What I really want
on
Google Hacks
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Is a way to do complex boolean queries on Google:
(baquaspa or "baqua spa" or "baquacil") and (plastics or warranty) and bromine
A better analogy than you may realize! Spam is like bacteria; it is self-reproducing (spam for spam software, spam for millions-of-addresses CDs). Using spam filters exerts a selection pressure on the spammers, and the stronger spammers adapt to the filters, become resistant, and multiply.
At AOL, as the single biggest target of spammers, we had to think very carefully about the effects of filters before we implemented them; turning on a weak filter would be just as bad as taking weak antibiotics for a day and stopping, and in some cases it could make the problem worse. For instance, we once decided to start treating any message with >N recipients as likely spam. All we did was force the spammers to start sending messages with one recipient each - which meant we now had to process N times as many messages as before!
(Incidentally, the antibiotic analogy led me to discover, and donate to, the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics, which fights overuse and improper use of antibiotics, helping to keep resistance down. Check them out and give them some money; you'll save on your own health care costs in the long run.)
Slashdot Mirror
For BYTE magazine, on his Winnebiko!
http://microship.com/bike/winnebiko/across.html
Ah.. so anything that doesn't give a "one-seat ride" wouldn't be worth it for them. Now that makes a little more sense. Thanks!
There was a great article somewhere about a year ago with examples of cases where, in the process of translating wire stories, editors would do metric-to-imperial or imperial-to-metric conversions, but fail to round things off, resulting in phrases like "going the extra 1.6km" or "the whole 8.23 meters".
I can't find it with Google, but I did find a whole lot of other examples of that type of stupidity, including a travelogue about Grand Teton National Park directing tourists to "listen for the sound of the springs cascading from a cave 3,000 feet [914.4 meters] below the rim". If anyone's seen the actual article, though, I'd love to know...
Isn't that sort of the point of maglev? Isn't that like saying that we decided not to use word processors because they don't match the paper-on-pen technique we've traditionally used?
Surely it didn't take them nine years to realize that there were no wheels. I suspect this was imprecisely translated, and I'd love to know what they really said (or meant).
IANAL, but AOL does file (and win) lawsuits against their top spammers on a regular basis, and sends cease & desist letters to many, many more. Unfortunately, there are just too many of them out there, and it takes huge amounts of time and legwork to prove that a particular person sent (or caused to be sent) a particular spam run. Lawsuits help more from a deterrent standpoint than anything, and IMHO AOL still doesn't do enough to publicize their legal wins.
Maybe a good middle ground would be that at the end of the year (or maybe month), AOL were to send an email to their clients "Our filters blocked XXXX emails identified as spam from reaching your mailbox."
That'd be cool. Or, instead of just limiting the audience to current AOL members, they could issue a public press release every so often, detailing how much spam they'd blocked, so everyone would know!
What? Oh.
So AOL should add the capacity to store 500 billion extra e-mails a day so that the less-than-1% of users who change ANY default preference EVER can turn off filtering if they don't want it?
AOL's got a whole team of people who work with the sending ISPs, and they do quite a bit of proactive contact, but you're right - with 500 billion blocked messages a day, they can't give everyone a courtesy phone call first. Sadly, the days when reporting spam to an ISP ensured that the spammer would "go down for it" ended about a decade ago.
There is a toll-free, 24x7 phone number for the postmaster desk at http://postmaster.info.aol.com. A sysadmin from your school should call them if you're still being blocked.
Jay, the ex-AOL mail guy
(A) The policy you describe is the way the Internet works. Being mail-bombed with bounces is no fun; it's what forced me to stop using jay@aol.com after ten years. But you're basically complaining that they follow the standard Internet practice of bouncing back undeliverable mail!
(B) Actually, AOL's system is more intricate than this. Bounces are shunted off to a separate queue, and large runs of bounces will be removed if they match the characteristics of spam bounces.
NB: AOL once got sued by a spammer for bouncing his undeliverable addresses back to him. He lost.
Jay, the ex-AOL mail guy
Actually, they only block dynamic IPs - which you really have to do these days if you want to stop mail from open proxies and distributed-spamming operations. If you prefer to run your own mail server, get a static IP. I have static-IP DSL from Speakeasy.net, and have never had any trouble getting mail to AOL.
Jay, the ex-AOL mail guy
Components? Of course. I was responding to the part about cables. I could have quoted that more clearly.
Whoah, whoah, whoah! Where did we get from "no RF effects" to "no RF or other effects"? That's like saying nothing, anywhere, ever can affect the sound of audio.
The main difference between listening to a DVD player through RCA's and a CD player through TOSlink is the external converters, not the cables.
Now that we've established that using better quality electronics and cablesmakes a difference in video, why is it a stretch to assume the same thing is true for audio?
Because the bandwidth of video is significantly higher, and gets into all kinds of RF effects that I don't claim to understand.
Audio, which caps out around 22KHz, doesn't.
To translate into computer geek: "Now that we've established a distributed processing grid makes a difference in cryptography, why is it a stretch to assume the same thing is true for displaying the Times Sunday crossword page?"
- Incandescent bulbs are about 1% efficient (3% for halogen IIRC); the other 99% is heat.
- LEDs are less than twice as efficient as incandescent (light output of a 60W LED = light output of a 100W incandescent).
- But LEDs don't get very hot.
Where is the rest of the energy going, if not heat?
Have you followed development of the email client in Mozilla/Netscape? Feature-for-feature, it's always lagged behind OE -- but the current release has all the features you mention. And it's a lot easier to use than OE.
:) They are, in fact, advertising usability testing - "The best graphical user interface models and research were used in Mulberry's development, backed up by extensive direct user-testing with both "naive" and expert users" - but they're lying.
Yes, I have, and eagerly so - it is definitely catching up rapidly. Right now, the big things missing are IDLE (see below) and general performance; it takes significantly longer to sync up my mailbox or scroll through a large mailbox. Given that Firebird is only at 0.1, though, I am sure these will be corrected, and I expect that is where I'll end up.
[IDLE extension..]
Well, that's a cool feature. But all it does is save on network bandwidth (which is hardly in short supply these days) and get you notified of email the very moment it arrives, instead of within 60 seconds.
It's not just a network bandwidth thing - it takes a lot of CPU to poll multiple 10,000-message folders for new mail every 60 seconds, and it makes the client sluggish, even on a fast P4. With IDLE, I can set my "scan" timeout ridiculously low - it's really just a catchup in case the impossible happens - and still get notified of new mail without heavy CPU utilization.
My problem with Mulberry is that it piles on the features (I think it must have more than any IMAP client) without trying to make them fit together, or make the whole reasonably usable. So you end up having to do a half-dozen clicks for even the simplest actions. Unless they're advertising that they've done some serious usability testing, I wouldn't bother downloading the latest release.
Yes, that was it, now I remember
And not only doesn't it support IDLE, and not only is it single-threaded (!), but it erases the header cache every time you quit the app. Bad, bad Mulberry.
This whole Outlook/Exchange thing has been one long nightmare as a provider
You're an e-mail provider of some sort, and you don't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express?
They have absolutely nothing in common but the name and the fact that they both do e-mail. Outlook derives from Schedule Plus and the Exchange client, while Outlook Express is part of IE. They share little to no code.
Unfortunately, Eudora's database format can't handle my 9,000-message inbox; it expects your inbox to be small, and only your sub-folders to be large. And it hasn't been significantly updated in many years.
OE, for all its many flaws, is the least-worst IMAP client for Windows that supports HTML in e-mail. It handles large message stores flawlessly; it does disconnected mode; it lets me do a full-text search easily, it supports authenticated SMTP, STARTTLS, and IMAP over SSL; it cleanly supports multiple accounts, and it's certainly got the least clunky UI.
I also believe it is the *only* client (aside from Outlook itself) that supports the IDLE extension, which lets my Cyrus IMAP server push "new mail" notifications asynchronously, instead of requiring the client to poll every N minutes.
I have tried AOL Communicator, which I assume shares some code with Thunderbird. It's the next best to OE, no question, and it's very impressive for a 1.0 release, but it took *five times as long* to download my message store, and there were a few usability bugs I ran into.
I tried Mulberry a while ago, but I didn't like it; I forget why, exactly, but it looks like they've recently released a new client, so maybe I should check into that again.
When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.
That's an ancient Jewish joke...
On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish wrapped in paper. A man sitting across the aisle begins to taunt him. Finally, he asks: What makes you Jews so smart?" "All right," replies the Jew. "I guess I'll have to tell you. It's because we eat the heads of whitefish." "Well if that's the secret," the man says, then I can be as smart as you are." "That's right," says the Jew, "and in fact I have an extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks." The man pays for the fish head and begins to eat it.
An hour later, the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The man leaves the train and then comes back. "Listen, " he says, "you sold me that whitefish head for five kopecks but I just saw a wholewhitefish at the market for three kopecks." "See," replies the Jew, "you're getting smarter already."
There is NO way he bought the AOL address information from AOL.
Actually, neither of the linked articles claims that he did. Only the article summary mistakenly says this.
The WaPo article says that he got his addresses through "legal means", but then goes on to say that he admits to harvesting from the AOL Member Directory (through bots, not inside sales), which is in fact against the Terms of Service.
The reason that Leonsis didn't deny that Scelson bought names from AOL is that nobody asked him. Leonsis also didn't deny that the earth is flat.
Jay the ex-AOL Mail Guy
So it's entirely up to Microsoft whether or not to charge you for the fix to a problem they admit having!
In practice, though, this hasn't been a problem. I've written to PSS many times over the years to get hotfixes - or even just to report a bug and get confirmation that it's been logged - and never been charged for it. They've always acknowledged that my problem is due to their bug, and that means it's free.
I'm no fan of Microsoft's attitude and policies, but their support department is actually pretty decent as far as large-company consumer tech support goes, and when you run into someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it's easy to escalate your case. In fact, they even have a separate address you can write to to get your case escalated "outside of channels" if your tech support rep for some reason refuses.
Basically, he could not have thought of a worse example of where performance supposedly does not matter since modern email repositories resemble databases these days.
Amen! For example, AOL's new AOL Communicator, which I believe is based on the interesting but weighty Mozilla Mail component, downloads mail from an IMAP server *5 times* as slowly as Outlook Express, and has slower list boxes as well.
Why assume that it doesn't do that? Just because you don't know how?
No, because it never used to, and because the help text still doesn't mention that it can.
Here is the advanced help page [google.com] describing the search syntax you desire (plus others).
Gee, if only I had looked at the help text, I would have clearly seen that it supports parenthetical nesting of terms.
Oh. Wait. It doesn't say that it does. (And last time I tried anyway, it didn't. Granted, I should have tried again today before posting.)
Is a way to do complex boolean queries on Google:
(baquaspa or "baqua spa" or "baquacil") and (plastics or warranty) and bromine
Stemming would also be nice.
No one company/institution on this planet could justify a dedicated oc12.
And you post this from hotmail? Are you just trying to supply a counterexample in the same breath?
When I worked at AOL, OC48 installations were a regular occurrence.
Think of spammers like an infection
A better analogy than you may realize! Spam is like bacteria; it is self-reproducing (spam for spam software, spam for millions-of-addresses CDs). Using spam filters exerts a selection pressure on the spammers, and the stronger spammers adapt to the filters, become resistant, and multiply.
At AOL, as the single biggest target of spammers, we had to think very carefully about the effects of filters before we implemented them; turning on a weak filter would be just as bad as taking weak antibiotics for a day and stopping, and in some cases it could make the problem worse. For instance, we once decided to start treating any message with >N recipients as likely spam. All we did was force the spammers to start sending messages with one recipient each - which meant we now had to process N times as many messages as before!
(Incidentally, the antibiotic analogy led me to discover, and donate to, the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics, which fights overuse and improper use of antibiotics, helping to keep resistance down. Check them out and give them some money; you'll save on your own health care costs in the long run.)
Jay the ex-AOL Mail Guy