Seriously, I think the best option would be to set up one of those soft fences akin to the ones you see on the ski slopes. The material looks pretty cheap and it will save your ass if you get too out of control to stop (which you will if you do it right.)
This wasn't a hardware modification or anything. According to the article they installed "additional software" to speed up their connections.
What strikes me as odd is that George Runner, the lawyer that got busted, had needed to resign from his job as assistant prosecutor after being caught on video stealing coffee and creamer. He didn't get charged but it cost him his job. Then the police chief is forced to resign because he set up the video surveillence without authorization. This really comes across as being the result of some kind of vendetta. Then six other guys get dragged into it, including a 15 and a 16 year old kid, possibly so it doesn't look like they are just targeting the lawyer.
Who knows what's really going on, but it really smells fishy to me.
Re:Only if it's the same size disk
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.
Speaking from experience, this never caused us a problem. Granted, all the machines we cloned used FAT partitions (they were all NT and OS/2 machines--we're talking about 4 years back.) No, we didn't use NTFS or HPFS on workstations because we needed to be able to access the files from DOS in the event that the OS got fubared. I can't say for certain how drive geometry would affect other types of OS's/filesystems.
Re:Only if it's the same size disk
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.
This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK. I've never used the Unix version, but the DOS version would restore to a larger target with no problem, except that the extra sectors on the target would remain unused. In other words, it's not necessary to have identical drives in both systems. Just make sure that your source image is < or = to the target drive.
The "stickers" at the static type, not the sticky type so it sounds a lot more like littering than vandalism to me. BTW, the vandalism fine is only $50. Littering fines are usually more expensive.
My first thought was "OK, this is actually worth rebooting into Windows." [from the website: "Note: Allow One minute to download. Requires IE5."]
Back on topic:
One of my friends in elementary school (I'm 31 now) told me there was an easter egg where you could see the credits for the designers of the game.
If i remember correctly there was this room where you started, and on the east side of the room there was some way to get through the wall. Anyone know anything about that?
I'm remembering this from like 20 years ago, so i could have some of it wrong. At any rate, this is some of the coolest news I've read on slashdot in a long time.:)
But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness.
I'm sure that there are some gentoo users as you describe, but I'd like to state for the record that all the members of the Gentoo community that I've dealt with have been both helpful and pleasant in their responses to questions. Don't let a couple kiddies give you a bad impression of the average gentoo user.
Gentoo certainly isn't the easiest distro to set up, but if you know what you're doing the benefits are worth the time/work getting it started. If you compile everything from stage 1 you're looking at at least a day of compile time--but the actual time you need to spend in front of the computer is most likely going to be less than an hour. The amount of compile time really depends on what packages you install. You can use precompiled packages for a lot of stuff, but the point of compiling it from stage 1 is that you have a system that is fully optimized for your specific processor. This made a huge difference on my Athlon--I can actually watch DVD's smoothly now--something that Windows and Mandrake couldn't do for me.
What worked best for me as far as installation was to create a partition in Mandrake, chroot into that, and do the installation in there. Basically you can do pretty much the entire installation in a shell window without having to stop whatever else you're doing. I'm not sure this is well documented though. If you know your stuff linux-wise you can figure it out. It's not for the linux newbie though.
I agree with both points but at the same time it sucks when there's a part that you like a lot that is left out. I liked the meeting with Aragorn better in the book (and the original LOTR animated movie) much better than in the new version.
There was a long silence. At last Frodo spoke with hesitation. 'I thought that you were a friend before the letter came,' he said, 'or at least I wished to. You have frightened me several times tonight, but never the way that servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would -- well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.'
'I see,' laughed Strider. 'I look foul and feel fair. Is that it? All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.'
That part really stuck with me for some reason and I was disappointed that it was changed in the movie.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2
I agree totally. Back when I was a kid we didn't have smileys. We had letters and numbers and various math related characters on our keyboards.
Kids today have it too easy and it's making them lazy. <g>
This interesting article contains a link to some demo code that allows malicious code to be uploaded, extracted, and executed from from IE by clicking a link.
"Their patching tiny pinprick holes and not the overall problems, their mitigating factors, their ignoring small demonstrated flaws, all add up into a monster problem, which basically stinks," said Http-equiv in an e-mail interview Tuesday.
Thus the name "Stench" given to the vulnerability. And very telling about just how bad the security issues with Windows are when you add them together. Three "insignificant flaws" deemed to be "minor annoyances" are put together form a serious trojan that requires no user input other than clicking on a link in IE.
It just goes to show that security can't just be an afterthough to be patched with little band-aids. You really have to stay on top of it, otherwise someone figures out how to create a huge vulnerability out of your "minor" low severity flaws. (They note 18 known existing flaws in IE in the two day old article I linked.)
On the other hand as customers we shouldn't have to repeatedly ask them to fix inaccuracies and be ignored until we threaten to switch all our domains to another registrar. I ditched VS over a year ago due to some sleezy crap they pulled with a couple of my personal domains when I tried to transfer. Unfortunately I still have to deal with them for customers that didn't know better when they registered either.
Well of all drinks I've tried, Vanilla Coke is the only regular one that gives me problems. That I find strange.
Same here. I only tried it once and regretted the whole "rewarding my curiosity" thing. Felt more like Vito kicked me in the gut. For a similar effect dump shots of Das Komet in your regular coke. At least you can catch a buzz that way.
The first time I ever saw a mouse that was the first thought that crossed my mind. I was somewhat computer literate for the time--I knew Applesoft BASIC and 6502 assembly. I picked it up to look at it and the first thing I thought was "Oh, it must be like Missle Command or Centipede." (We're talking early-mid 80's here.)
There are times when calling tech support is handy if you know the right questions, but I'm not experienced with MS tech support since I haven't wasted time calling them in over five years now. Knowing how to read the manual and search the net for what you need to know is a much more useful skill if you don't know the answer already.
Having one of the certs usually means that you were able to stick it out through a couple classes over a couple months.
Having a degree means you were able to stick it out over a couple years and take many classes.
Having experience and good references mean you've actually been in the field and done well at it.
Whichever way I look at it though, experience and references outweigh a degree and a degree outweighs a certification. When I was doing consulting gigs they kept telling me I should get an MCSE or an MCD (or whatever they call developers) if I wanted to make more money. This really pissed me off because I was already training MCSE's making the same money as me to do stuff that's common in just about every corporate environment.
I've met plenty of MCSE's that already knew their stuff, or at least were quick to learn so I'm not trashing the people that took time to get an MCSE...in fact I have to recommend it since it makes it that much easier to get your foot in the door. However, I still think experience and references should be the first thing that employers look at. If your company sets specific ranges of salaries based on whether or not someone has a certification regardless of experience then you're not doing the best you can to get the best employees.
Admittedly it's more stable than the 9x series, but it still crashes every couple days. The big difference is that it just automatically reboots instead of displaying a blue screen. Initially I was running it on a K6-400 with 128mb of ram and the rebooting was so bad I couldn't get anything done -- it was literally rebooting itself every 5-10 minutes.
Then I got myself a Athlon 1700+, motherboard, and 256mb for xmas and upgraded the machine. It runs better now. It's only rebooted itself 3 times in the last week.
By the way, Mandrake 8.1 ran great with the K6 and still is running great the Athlon on the same machine.
I know one other person using it and he's very impressed with the stability. He said he usually gets a week of uptime and he's very impressed. Of course, he's a been a big Windows fan as long as I've known him and getting several days of uptime is a big deal to him.
A question: I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is an option in XP to have it randomly blue-screen like previous versions instead of the default random reboot behaviour. I'm serious. Is it true? If so someone please tell me how to get my old familiar bluescreens back. TIA.
I'm with you on that 100%. What amazes me is that the people who take time to bitch about new kernel announcements actually expect to be taken seriously...after they spend the time to write a comment about what a waste of time it is to read a simple headline announcing a new kernel.
Yeah whatever. Maybe Slashdot should just start a fund to send all the crybabies some tissue paper to blow their nose when they're done bawling about all the extra bandwidth a kernel summary takes up.:)
I think perl as a language sucks like a vacuum cleaner.
Why? Because I've tried and tried in the past to write some small programs in perl. Each time it was a hassle to get aquinted with the stupid syntaxis.
Let me preface my response with this: Since I started programming I've learned/used Applesoft BASIC, 6502 Assembly, Pascal, QuickBASIC, x86 assembly, C++, Java, and Perl. Never once was a language intuitively easy enough for me to jump write in a code without learning the language first. However, out of all of them Perl was the easiest to learn and put into real use.
Really, your post and most similar posts seem to read like "I don't know how to use it so it sucks."
That's kind of ridiculous. Not long after I learned Perl I got interested in learning Python. I guess in a way I expected that I'd pick it up quickly and it would be banging out code in a day or two. This wasn't the case. I gave up on it (at least for the time being) because I didn't want to spend the time to learn it. However, I at least learned enough about it to be impressed with it and put it on my list of languages that I'd like to learn at some point.
I find Perl much easier to use than C++, but just because you know C++ doesn't mean you'll automatically be able to program in Perl without learning it.
As far as posts about the ugliness of _some_ people's Perl code, I think there is a reasonable explanation for this. Perl is easy enough to use that people are able to write code in the language before they've really come to understand the pitfalls involved with writing unclear code.
Also, addressing comments about being able to accomplish different things in more than one way: Yes, it's true that this can lead to harder to read code. This also makes it easier to write _clearer_ code if used properly.
Well-written Perl code is extremely easy to read. There may be a lot of ugly Perl code out there, but it doesn't mean that clear, well-written Perl scripts are impossible.
Re:Which releases are production stable?
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 2
This is not the way it's "supposed" to be. It might be true, but don't present it that way. Even versioned kernels are SUPPOSED to be stable. All of them. Patchlevel kernel revisions on the even number trees are not supposed to be anything but bugfixes.
I think people need to realize that brand new kernels are like software 'release candidates'. In the case of Linux kernels they are made available to everyone for testing therefore they get somewhat widely tested. When [Debian|RedHat|SuSE] determine that a kernel is ready for prime-time they incorporate the kernel into their distribution and/or release it as an upgrade. These kernels should be though of as 'final realeases.'
As always, even with final releases of ANY software, there is no guarantee of 'buglessness.' <g> You really never know how software is going to react in your own environment until you actually test it.
It's really unreasonable for people to expect any kind of guarantee of stability from software that was realeased in the last 24 hours and hasn't been widely tested.
Not to ruin the fun, but the poster goes by the name 'spacefem' which would lead me to believe the EE student is female as well. Still, you deserve the +2 funny anyway...
Good luck. Have fun. Have you considered the following? It's really kind of late to stop the spam when it's already on your mail server. Better solutions would involve your mail administrator and IP-level blocks against spam sites (RBL et al.) as well as probably additional server-level filtering.
I agree with the last sentence that I quoted. But as of now, there is no way for the end user to filter it at that level. I think this is the key to stopping spam. I think it's as ridiculous to expect legislation to stop spam as it is to expect legislation to stop people from walking into my house if I don't lock the doors. The fact is that we need the tools to block spam from our e-mail boxes ourselves. Do we really want our goverments to pass a bunch of ineffective laws instead?
Back my original point, they say that it's too late to block spam when it's already on our mail server. But right now we can't as end users block it until we've already downloaded it to our own machines, so blocking between the server and our PC would be a vast improvement at this point.
Ultimately I'd like sendmail to be able to block based on a black/gray/white-list file/database on the server. Blacklist=never accept, whitelist=always accept, and greylist is an autoresponder that gives human-readable instructions requesting that the sender enter an arbitrary keyword to get on the whitelist.
You currently don't have access to this mailbox. This mailbox does not allow unsolicted commercial e-mail. If you agree to these terms please type 'accept' now to send your e-mail.
That's really just a rough outline. But the thing that would make it all possible would be for sendmail to allow the owner of the mailbox to be able to have their black/grey/whitelist's and a list of keywords that would determine which list to put undetermined senders on.
I posted this idea on Usenet six or seven years ago and got flamed for it, but I really believe that giving the mailservers the ability to filter based on address lists and keyword lists would empower e-mail client developers and users to truly combat spam.
When they arrived, all I got was the books that have the authenticity cert on them. Each one had the "For distribution with a new PC only. NOT FOR RESALE" stickers partially remmoved. There went 260 down the drain.
When I was working at Merrill Lynch they had a big cardboard box full of exactly the licenses/books that you are talking about. Each new computer came with one of them and we would just throw them in a box. Eventually we just threw them out because there were hundreds of them and they were just taking up space.
I'm sure many companies have huge boxes of these licenses that they have no use for. At $25 a pop I could've made a killing if I threw that box in the back of my car instead of having them taken to the dumpster.
If you want to get back at the people who ripped you off I'd suggest reporting them to M$. If someone is selling the licenses in the manner you're talking about, they might be interested enough to do something about it.
Anytime changes are made to a kernel (or any other code for that matter) there is always the potential for new errors to be introduced. If you want a truly stable kernel then you need to wait until it's been around long enough to be proven to be stable.
The same goes for service packs for Windows. None of the Windows shops that I used to work for would ever install service packs until they had been available long enough to know the new errors they would introduce. In fact many of those companies had policies that declared you would be fired for installing any new service packs until IT had determined that they wouldn't break usability.
If you install software on a production system that was just released yesterday, you're just asking for trouble. This applies to ALL software, not just kernels.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I think the best option would be to set up one of those soft fences akin to the ones you see on the ski slopes. The material looks pretty cheap and it will save your ass if you get too out of control to stop (which you will if you do it right.)
This wasn't a hardware modification or anything. According to the article they installed "additional software" to speed up their connections.
What strikes me as odd is that George Runner, the lawyer that got busted, had needed to resign from his job as assistant prosecutor after being caught on video stealing coffee and creamer. He didn't get charged but it cost him his job. Then the police chief is forced to resign because he set up the video surveillence without authorization. This really comes across as being the result of some kind of vendetta. Then six other guys get dragged into it, including a 15 and a 16 year old kid, possibly so it doesn't look like they are just targeting the lawyer.
Who knows what's really going on, but it really smells fishy to me.
Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.
Speaking from experience, this never caused us a problem. Granted, all the machines we cloned used FAT partitions (they were all NT and OS/2 machines--we're talking about 4 years back.) No, we didn't use NTFS or HPFS on workstations because we needed to be able to access the files from DOS in the event that the OS got fubared. I can't say for certain how drive geometry would affect other types of OS's/filesystems.
If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.
This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK. I've never used the Unix version, but the DOS version would restore to a larger target with no problem, except that the extra sectors on the target would remain unused. In other words, it's not necessary to have identical drives in both systems. Just make sure that your source image is < or = to the target drive.
The "stickers" at the static type, not the sticky type so it sounds a lot more like littering than vandalism to me. BTW, the vandalism fine is only $50. Littering fines are usually more expensive.
Seems to work fine on Mozilla 1.0.1 on RH8.
Yep. I tried it out in Linux after posting. Works just great in gentoo with the latest mozilla & flash ebuilds.
(hint: click on the 'reset' switch to get it started.)
someone's found something useful to with Flash!
:)
My first thought was "OK, this is actually worth rebooting into Windows." [from the website: "Note: Allow One minute to download. Requires IE5."]
Back on topic:
One of my friends in elementary school (I'm 31 now) told me there was an easter egg where you could see the credits for the designers of the game.
If i remember correctly there was this room where you started, and on the east side of the room there was some way to get through the wall. Anyone know anything about that?
I'm remembering this from like 20 years ago, so i could have some of it wrong. At any rate, this is some of the coolest news I've read on slashdot in a long time.
But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness.
I'm sure that there are some gentoo users as you describe, but I'd like to state for the record that all the members of the Gentoo community that I've dealt with have been both helpful and pleasant in their responses to questions. Don't let a couple kiddies give you a bad impression of the average gentoo user.
Gentoo certainly isn't the easiest distro to set up, but if you know what you're doing the benefits are worth the time/work getting it started. If you compile everything from stage 1 you're looking at at least a day of compile time--but the actual time you need to spend in front of the computer is most likely going to be less than an hour. The amount of compile time really depends on what packages you install. You can use precompiled packages for a lot of stuff, but the point of compiling it from stage 1 is that you have a system that is fully optimized for your specific processor. This made a huge difference on my Athlon--I can actually watch DVD's smoothly now--something that Windows and Mandrake couldn't do for me.
What worked best for me as far as installation was to create a partition in Mandrake, chroot into that, and do the installation in there. Basically you can do pretty much the entire installation in a shell window without having to stop whatever else you're doing. I'm not sure this is well documented though. If you know your stuff linux-wise you can figure it out. It's not for the linux newbie though.
That part really stuck with me for some reason and I was disappointed that it was changed in the movie.
I agree totally. Back when I was a kid we didn't have smileys. We had letters and numbers and various math related characters on our keyboards.
Kids today have it too easy and it's making them lazy. <g>
http://online.securityfocus.com/news/606
Thus the name "Stench" given to the vulnerability. And very telling about just how bad the security issues with Windows are when you add them together. Three "insignificant flaws" deemed to be "minor annoyances" are put together form a serious trojan that requires no user input other than clicking on a link in IE.
It just goes to show that security can't just be an afterthough to be patched with little band-aids. You really have to stay on top of it, otherwise someone figures out how to create a huge vulnerability out of your "minor" low severity flaws. (They note 18 known existing flaws in IE in the two day old article I linked.)
On the other hand as customers we shouldn't have to repeatedly ask them to fix inaccuracies and be ignored until we threaten to switch all our domains to another registrar. I ditched VS over a year ago due to some sleezy crap they pulled with a couple of my personal domains when I tried to transfer. Unfortunately I still have to deal with them for customers that didn't know better when they registered either.
Yeah and don't forget Slashdot covered it too over two years ago (June 8, 2000)
Well of all drinks I've tried, Vanilla Coke is the only regular one that gives me problems. That I find strange.
Same here. I only tried it once and regretted the whole "rewarding my curiosity" thing. Felt more like Vito kicked me in the gut. For a similar effect dump shots of Das Komet in your regular coke. At least you can catch a buzz that way.
For all its faults, Microsoft is not known for kicking its customers in the teeth.
It's just that they're better known for working over their customers on the other end.
Dude, it's called a trackball.
The first time I ever saw a mouse that was the first thought that crossed my mind. I was somewhat computer literate for the time--I knew Applesoft BASIC and 6502 assembly. I picked it up to look at it and the first thing I thought was "Oh, it must be like Missle Command or Centipede." (We're talking early-mid 80's here.)
There are times when calling tech support is handy if you know the right questions, but I'm not experienced with MS tech support since I haven't wasted time calling them in over five years now. Knowing how to read the manual and search the net for what you need to know is a much more useful skill if you don't know the answer already.
Having one of the certs usually means that you were able to stick it out through a couple classes over a couple months.
Having a degree means you were able to stick it out over a couple years and take many classes.
Having experience and good references mean you've actually been in the field and done well at it.
Whichever way I look at it though, experience and references outweigh a degree and a degree outweighs a certification. When I was doing consulting gigs they kept telling me I should get an MCSE or an MCD (or whatever they call developers) if I wanted to make more money. This really pissed me off because I was already training MCSE's making the same money as me to do stuff that's common in just about every corporate environment.
I've met plenty of MCSE's that already knew their stuff, or at least were quick to learn so I'm not trashing the people that took time to get an MCSE...in fact I have to recommend it since it makes it that much easier to get your foot in the door. However, I still think experience and references should be the first thing that employers look at. If your company sets specific ranges of salaries based on whether or not someone has a certification regardless of experience then you're not doing the best you can to get the best employees.
Admittedly it's more stable than the 9x series, but it still crashes every couple days. The big difference is that it just automatically reboots instead of displaying a blue screen. Initially I was running it on a K6-400 with 128mb of ram and the rebooting was so bad I couldn't get anything done -- it was literally rebooting itself every 5-10 minutes.
Then I got myself a Athlon 1700+, motherboard, and 256mb for xmas and upgraded the machine. It runs better now. It's only rebooted itself 3 times in the last week.
By the way, Mandrake 8.1 ran great with the K6 and still is running great the Athlon on the same machine.
I know one other person using it and he's very impressed with the stability. He said he usually gets a week of uptime and he's very impressed. Of course, he's a been a big Windows fan as long as I've known him and getting several days of uptime is a big deal to him.
A question: I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is an option in XP to have it randomly blue-screen like previous versions instead of the default random reboot behaviour. I'm serious. Is it true? If so someone please tell me how to get my old familiar bluescreens back. TIA.
numb
I'm with you on that 100%. What amazes me is that the people who take time to bitch about new kernel announcements actually expect to be taken seriously...after they spend the time to write a comment about what a waste of time it is to read a simple headline announcing a new kernel.
:)
Yeah whatever. Maybe Slashdot should just start a fund to send all the crybabies some tissue paper to blow their nose when they're done bawling about all the extra bandwidth a kernel summary takes up.
I think perl as a language sucks like a vacuum cleaner.
Why? Because I've tried and tried in the past to write some small programs in perl. Each time it was a hassle to get aquinted with the stupid syntaxis.
Let me preface my response with this: Since I started programming I've learned/used Applesoft BASIC, 6502 Assembly, Pascal, QuickBASIC, x86 assembly, C++, Java, and Perl. Never once was a language intuitively easy enough for me to jump write in a code without learning the language first. However, out of all of them Perl was the easiest to learn and put into real use.
Really, your post and most similar posts seem to read like "I don't know how to use it so it sucks."
That's kind of ridiculous. Not long after I learned Perl I got interested in learning Python. I guess in a way I expected that I'd pick it up quickly and it would be banging out code in a day or two. This wasn't the case. I gave up on it (at least for the time being) because I didn't want to spend the time to learn it. However, I at least learned enough about it to be impressed with it and put it on my list of languages that I'd like to learn at some point.
I find Perl much easier to use than C++, but just because you know C++ doesn't mean you'll automatically be able to program in Perl without learning it.
As far as posts about the ugliness of _some_ people's Perl code, I think there is a reasonable explanation for this. Perl is easy enough to use that people are able to write code in the language before they've really come to understand the pitfalls involved with writing unclear code.
Also, addressing comments about being able to accomplish different things in more than one way: Yes, it's true that this can lead to harder to read code. This also makes it easier to write _clearer_ code if used properly.
Well-written Perl code is extremely easy to read. There may be a lot of ugly Perl code out there, but it doesn't mean that clear, well-written Perl scripts are impossible.
This is not the way it's "supposed" to be. It might be true, but don't present it that way. Even versioned kernels are SUPPOSED to be stable. All of them. Patchlevel kernel revisions on the even number trees are not supposed to be anything but bugfixes.
I think people need to realize that brand new kernels are like software 'release candidates'. In the case of Linux kernels they are made available to everyone for testing therefore they get somewhat widely tested. When [Debian|RedHat|SuSE] determine that a kernel is ready for prime-time they incorporate the kernel into their distribution and/or release it as an upgrade. These kernels should be though of as 'final realeases.'
As always, even with final releases of ANY software, there is no guarantee of 'buglessness.' <g> You really never know how software is going to react in your own environment until you actually test it.
It's really unreasonable for people to expect any kind of guarantee of stability from software that was realeased in the last 24 hours and hasn't been widely tested.
Not to ruin the fun, but the poster goes by the name 'spacefem' which would lead me to believe the EE student is female as well. Still, you deserve the +2 funny anyway...
I agree with the last sentence that I quoted. But as of now, there is no way for the end user to filter it at that level. I think this is the key to stopping spam. I think it's as ridiculous to expect legislation to stop spam as it is to expect legislation to stop people from walking into my house if I don't lock the doors. The fact is that we need the tools to block spam from our e-mail boxes ourselves. Do we really want our goverments to pass a bunch of ineffective laws instead?
Back my original point, they say that it's too late to block spam when it's already on our mail server. But right now we can't as end users block it until we've already downloaded it to our own machines, so blocking between the server and our PC would be a vast improvement at this point.
Ultimately I'd like sendmail to be able to block based on a black/gray/white-list file/database on the server. Blacklist=never accept, whitelist=always accept, and greylist is an autoresponder that gives human-readable instructions requesting that the sender enter an arbitrary keyword to get on the whitelist.
That's really just a rough outline. But the thing that would make it all possible would be for sendmail to allow the owner of the mailbox to be able to have their black/grey/whitelist's and a list of keywords that would determine which list to put undetermined senders on.
I posted this idea on Usenet six or seven years ago and got flamed for it, but I really believe that giving the mailservers the ability to filter based on address lists and keyword lists would empower e-mail client developers and users to truly combat spam.
When they arrived, all I got was the books that have the authenticity cert on them. Each one had the "For distribution with a new PC only. NOT FOR RESALE" stickers partially remmoved. There went 260 down the drain.
When I was working at Merrill Lynch they had a big cardboard box full of exactly the licenses/books that you are talking about. Each new computer came with one of them and we would just throw them in a box. Eventually we just threw them out because there were hundreds of them and they were just taking up space.
I'm sure many companies have huge boxes of these licenses that they have no use for. At $25 a pop I could've made a killing if I threw that box in the back of my car instead of having them taken to the dumpster.
If you want to get back at the people who ripped you off I'd suggest reporting them to M$. If someone is selling the licenses in the manner you're talking about, they might be interested enough to do something about it.
Anytime changes are made to a kernel (or any other code for that matter) there is always the potential for new errors to be introduced. If you want a truly stable kernel then you need to wait until it's been around long enough to be proven to be stable.
The same goes for service packs for Windows. None of the Windows shops that I used to work for would ever install service packs until they had been available long enough to know the new errors they would introduce. In fact many of those companies had policies that declared you would be fired for installing any new service packs until IT had determined that they wouldn't break usability.
If you install software on a production system that was just released yesterday, you're just asking for trouble. This applies to ALL software, not just kernels.