I never heard the terms "swamp cooler" or "refrigerated air conditioning" when I was growing up - in Delaware and New Jersey, you're basically living in a swamp, so evaporative cooling systems just push the humidity from 90% to 95% without actually making you cooler, and *all* air conditioning is refrigerated air conditioning. My uncle in Texas lives somewhere dry enough and hot enough for swamp coolers to be the normal A/C system (obviously nowhere near Houston...).
Here in San Francisco Bay Area, most of the warm half of the year you can get by with opening the windows at night and closing them during the day, with a few weeks when it's actually worth going to the office instead of telecommuting.
As I said, I hadn't installed a BSD system since 4.2, and the support mechanisms have changed a bit since then. NetBSD installed painlessly, but as far as I could tell it didn't have a web browser on it, and I was behind a firewall which was going to increase the annoyance of doing ftp by hand to download Mozilla, and there was a Knoppix CD just sitting there. I could spend an hour or two doing RTFM, or just install Knoppix and have my browser work.
Either way I was going to have to deal with my corporate IT department to get hooked up to the printers, and I figured they'd know even less about BSD than about Linux, though it turned out they didn't know that either. I'll try some BSD flavor in my lab when I get the chance, and it may be that it really is simpler than typing apt-get whatever, or hassling with RedHat RPM repositories.
I liked Linus's comment on the single-mindedness of some BSD derivatives - he hit on OpenBSD's security focus without going into Theo's personality (:-), and the NetBSD folks want to port their system to anything bigger than a digital watch.
Obviously with only three main BSDs out there, or four if you count Dragonfly, there's a lot less variability in the installation and porting systems, which seem to take up a lot of the learning-curve time. Many of the Linuxes are focusing on either friendliness or newbie support, and I'm occasionally nervous about whether I can install something without it wiping out my existing systems. NetBSD was really easy to install, in spite of the BSDish disk partitioning issues, but it was sufficiently minimalist that when I was done I realized that I was going to need to learn Yet Another Ports System to get any work done, so I gave up and put Knoppix on that machine because it had the tools I needed for that project. OpenBSD's installation focus seems to be "Buy a CD from Theo or Do Everything From Scratch", and I haven't installed BSD from scratch since 4.2BSD on a Vax, so I haven't tried that yet, but I assume that if I had a project-related need or a bunch of extra spare time, it wouldn't be that hard (or I'd go buy the CD.)
Some of us have hair that's too thin to grow that long, and haven't been thirty in a long time. Keep the hair....
Actually, if you were female, it would be given a second thought, depending on your age and part of the country. Some places long hair isn't the style, some places it is, some places it's only the style for younger women.
I've had a couple of major banks as customers, and their IT and telecomm departments all went business casual a decade ago. (This is San Francisco Bay Area - your mileage may vary.) I'd still wear a jacket and tie for a first visit to anybody management level, but for a non-Asian bank out here I wouldn't expect to leave the jacket on. For an Asian bank I'd guess on dressing more formally for the first visit.
There are styles of business clothing that really made sense in non-centrally-heated European buildings a century and a half ago. Some of them still look good today, if you've got the weather for it. But in many businesses, the gray wool suit has been replaced with cotton pants (thanks to Levis for their heavy-duty Dockers advertising and encouragement of "business casual"), and in much of the computer business, the standard conformist business dress is bluejeans, or black jeans if you want to be more formal, or khakis if you're a salesman. That doesn't mean T-shirts (depends on the environment), but golf shirts seem to be fairly common sales rep dress - the real issue is whether the shirt is for your own company, or one of your customers/suppliers, as opposed to some random designer.
Earrings for guys, or moderate numbers of them for women, are old territory in most of the country; maybe the Southeast hasn't caught up.
Hiking boots were pretty standard engineer footgear when I was younger. Some of the change is probably fashion, some was probably just that I lived in the Northeast after college, and it was what most of us had worn in school, when we were walking 20 miles through the snow uphill both ways to get to the keypunches and punchcard readers, and here in California lots of people haven't dealt with snow.
Back when I was young, we could still annoy our straight-laced parents by growing long hair. But by the 80s, that just didn't work any more, though kids who got their hair cut into short military-crew-cut styles during the Reagan Years could be disturbing to those of us from a kinder gentler generation. Once it became possible to tell the guys with shaved heads from the hostile skinheads, it was amusing to watch some of the retro styles like the shaved-head-and-goatee Lenin or Victorian looks. Brightly colored hair may have been a punkish statement during the 1980s, but since then it's mostly calmed down to a fashion preference.
Rings in the eyebrows are still useful for squicking your mom, I suppose, but it's Been Done, and while some people feel the need to go get mass quantities of metal in their face to maintain their radicalness, most people get over that because it takes a lot of effort.
The mid-80s boys' style that I was susprised didn't stick around was the heavy hair on top in a big ponytail with very short hair on the sides, which says "Hey, dad, I've got lots of hair on top and you're going bald and can't do this nyahh nyahh", but it disappeared also.
I'm sorry, but the earrings-on-guys-means-you're-gay thing is twenty years out of date, at least in the blue states (on both coasts...). Leave aside the question of whether that has anything to do with anything, at least catch up with the current millenium to pick things to be prudish about. In the late 80s it was still the case that wearing an earring might not mean that you were gay, but it meant you had to put up with some people still thinking that you were, but even most grandmothers and rednecks have pretty much gotten over that. On the other hand, that also meant that you were self-confident about your sexual identity, and liked doing decorative things, and chicks generally dug that.
A decade ago, about when I hit 40, I was wondering about getting an earring. My wife's comment was "Wouldn't work - you'd look like [friend of ours of similar age]." "Oh. You're probably right. Guess not then:-)".
If she Floats, she must be a Witch...
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
Sigh. There's too much witch-hunting going on in the US government today. At least this one's Canadian, and the US government probably isn't willing to endanger its Precious Bodily Fluids, er, umm, National Information Infrastructure by letting Foreigners contribute to the Echelon Filtering Standards.
San Francisco's actually a sensible place to wear a suit - it gets cold and wet here in the winter. I tend to do the tweed jacket thing instead, but being older and heavier that works better on me. The last time I wore a tie to a non-Japanese non-upper-management customer in the Bay Area was probably a decade ago - the customer's comment was "extra points because it's a Jerry Garcia tie, but you don't need to wear them when you visit us." But I'm the technical specialist that the sales people bring with them to talk technical, so they're expected to wear the "I'm the sales person" target drag, and I'm expected to have the "beard and sandals" look, which is in fact what I prefer.
Hey, call me old-fashioned, but I liked the purple best:-) Purples and blues seem to be especially popular for older women who are getting gray and don't want to do the pretend-you're-not-old conformist dying it aolid blond bit, but I've also had younger friends who looked really good in blue.
Maybe Starbucks has some ill-defined policies against facial piercings, but at least in San Francisco they didn't seem to apply, and at most of the other coffee shops, heavily metallized faces were pretty prevalent for most of the IT boom and the few years after (except for the place nearest my office, which is run by an older Polish couple who listen to jazz instead of post-alternative.)
It wasn't just that people sometimes had trouble remembering URLs - it was only usable if you were reading the magazine next to your computer. So the only time you could use it was when you could just as well type in the URL yourself. Also, this was back when most computers were desktops, and laptops didn't have wireless on them, so you'd have to be reading your magazine at your desk, not on your couch or the train or wherever.
The grandparent article contends that copyrights that extend beyond the author's death don't make sense, and that long copyright times don't make sense. Anon.Coward does a good job with the long-period and the retroactive-increase issues. But the beyond-death issue is also important.
If copyright expires at death, it makes it really hard for old artists to sell their work to publishers. (Ok, it also makes it hard for live-fast-die-young rockers to sell their work too:-) Somebody who's 80 years old has an expected remaining lifetime of 5-10 years if they're in average health, and a non-trivial chance of dying in the next year before the book's even gotten out to the stores, is a bad financial bet compared to somebody who's 20 and has an expected 60-80 years left even if they might not have anything interesting to say. Old people do occasionally write first novels that become best-sellers, and they often write memoirs, and if they've been interesting people their work might be a really good investment for a publisher, but if the copyright vanishes when they die, they're not going to be able to get as much money for them.
Old musicians are in a similar situation - some genres, like jazz and blues and classical, are just fine for old guys with decades of experience, even though they may not still be in shape for the vocals or dancing around the stage. Is there some reason that they should only be able to make money by doing live concerts and not also by selling records, just because they're in worse shape than Keith Richards so copyright-ending-at-death would mean that greedy record companies wouldn't pay them as much?
And what if only the drummer explodes, but the other three band members are fine?
I've used dodgeit.com for a while, and it's a very nice service. Thanks! I occasionally won't see mail from places I expect (I mainly use it for online newspapers like the nytimes.com), but mostly it's disposable mail. Do you also use greylisting?
I don't see why anyone would use a "real" email address for whois, as opposed to a role address like dnsadmin@mydomain or dnsadmin-mydomain@example-isp.com. You can set it up to forward to your real email address, and you might put your real name and maybe even real phone number in the record, but if you want to change admins, or arrange for vacation coverage, you can forward it to whoever has the job in the future. The number of spammers targeting domain owners seems to have increased, which is another reason to use a role address instead of any address you care about.
Assuming that by "my ISP" you really mean "my email service provider", whether you want the spam filtering to be run by them or be run by you where you've got more control over it is a matter of personal taste - do you risk having false positives there, and how much?
However, greylisting needs to be done by the system that first receives the SMTP from the sender, which is typically your email ISP. The big advantage of greylisting that Poskanzer points out is that you don't get false positives - mail from unknown sources just gets delayed rather than rejected, and that manages to kill off an amazing fraction of spam.
Similarly, the greeting-wait feature has to be done by the initial SMTP receiver, and even that kills more than you'd expect, without bothering legitimate email senders.
Yes, you'd have to work hard to get that much spam, but if you're the author of a number of popular software packages like thttpd and some of the PBM stuff, and you've been using the same address for over a decade and participating in lots of Usenet and other Internet discussions, that'll get your name out there for the harvesters to find. As TFA and another poster point out, being named "acme.com" doesn't help either.
I started using an email address at pobox.com almost a decade ago, which forwards to whatever ISP I actually use to receive mail. For a while that was Netcom (which became Mindspring and then Earthlink), now it's a small ISP run by a friend who provides really good service. Pobox.com was started by a couple of college students in a dorm room, and grew to become a long-running commercial business. One of its proprietors, Meng Weng Wong, is also one of the main authors of SPF. And yes, that means that my address is splattered all over the web in various mailing list archives, so spammers' harvester systems do find it.
That doesn't mean that I use my main address for everybody - I do use free web-based email systems for interacting with some companies, and dodgeit.com disposable email addresses for signing up for random internet services like online newspapers (bugmenot.com is a similar service.) For the mailing lists that I run, I generally use an address on the list machine for administrative mail, and my regular address if I actually send mail to the list.
If you RTFA, Poskanzer points out one of the critical features, which is that unlike RBLs, Greylisting is safe because it doesn't do false-positive rejections of email from legitimate senders - it just delays them. That's not 100% accurate - somebody running SMTP on a dialup could get repeated rejections until their mailer gives up, but that's pretty rare and they'd at least get a rejection message as opposed to a silent discard.
Without downloading and unzipping your code, I can't tell how your blacklisting features work, but an obvious extension to a greylisting system is to give RBLed sites a much longer greylist time than mail from unknown sites (e.g. 4-hour retries vs. 5-minute.) It's particularly useful because you can even use some of the more aggressive lists in spite of their enjoyment of collateral damage, and you can use whole-country blocklists for places you don't expect to get mail from, such as Korea and China, without actually rejecting much mail from real people.
I find that it's fairly rare that I'm having highly interactive email sessions with people that I don't know well enough to whitelist, except for followups to initial messages which greylist systems usually autowhitelist. That's partly because I work for a big company, so most of my real email at work is from my company or my regular customers, who are the people that are most likely to send me things in response to a phone conversation; if you're at a small company or individual business your mileage may vary. At home, most of my email is from mailing list servers, which I'd also whitelist, though I do occasionally have off-list conversations with people who are on the lists.
What would help is for outgoing mail to automatically whitelist the recipients - I'm not sure how many greylist systems do that.
Greylisting workarounds are easier than you'd think - check the return codes, and any time you get a temporary reject, mark the item for delivery later. Most greylisting timers are set to less than an hour, so if you're still spamming an hour later, run the deferred-sites list again. (This does of course lead to an arms race with greylist times being increased, and if you want to get fancy, you *could* try parsing the response to find the actual retry time, but the crude version is a good start.) It helps to sort targets by domain name, though that may have other issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in San Francisco Bay Area, most of the warm half of the year you can get by with opening the windows at night and closing them during the day, with a few weeks when it's actually worth going to the office instead of telecommuting.
Either way I was going to have to deal with my corporate IT department to get hooked up to the printers, and I figured they'd know even less about BSD than about Linux, though it turned out they didn't know that either. I'll try some BSD flavor in my lab when I get the chance, and it may be that it really is simpler than typing apt-get whatever, or hassling with RedHat RPM repositories.
Obviously with only three main BSDs out there, or four if you count Dragonfly, there's a lot less variability in the installation and porting systems, which seem to take up a lot of the learning-curve time. Many of the Linuxes are focusing on either friendliness or newbie support, and I'm occasionally nervous about whether I can install something without it wiping out my existing systems. NetBSD was really easy to install, in spite of the BSDish disk partitioning issues, but it was sufficiently minimalist that when I was done I realized that I was going to need to learn Yet Another Ports System to get any work done, so I gave up and put Knoppix on that machine because it had the tools I needed for that project. OpenBSD's installation focus seems to be "Buy a CD from Theo or Do Everything From Scratch", and I haven't installed BSD from scratch since 4.2BSD on a Vax, so I haven't tried that yet, but I assume that if I had a project-related need or a bunch of extra spare time, it wouldn't be that hard (or I'd go buy the CD.)
Oh, come on now, somebody had to do it.
Actually, if you were female, it would be given a second thought, depending on your age and part of the country. Some places long hair isn't the style, some places it is, some places it's only the style for younger women.
I've had a couple of major banks as customers, and their IT and telecomm departments all went business casual a decade ago. (This is San Francisco Bay Area - your mileage may vary.) I'd still wear a jacket and tie for a first visit to anybody management level, but for a non-Asian bank out here I wouldn't expect to leave the jacket on. For an Asian bank I'd guess on dressing more formally for the first visit.
Earrings for guys, or moderate numbers of them for women, are old territory in most of the country; maybe the Southeast hasn't caught up.
Hiking boots were pretty standard engineer footgear when I was younger. Some of the change is probably fashion, some was probably just that I lived in the Northeast after college, and it was what most of us had worn in school, when we were walking 20 miles through the snow uphill both ways to get to the keypunches and punchcard readers, and here in California lots of people haven't dealt with snow.
Rings in the eyebrows are still useful for squicking your mom, I suppose, but it's Been Done, and while some people feel the need to go get mass quantities of metal in their face to maintain their radicalness, most people get over that because it takes a lot of effort.
The mid-80s boys' style that I was susprised didn't stick around was the heavy hair on top in a big ponytail with very short hair on the sides, which says "Hey, dad, I've got lots of hair on top and you're going bald and can't do this nyahh nyahh", but it disappeared also.
A decade ago, about when I hit 40, I was wondering about getting an earring. My wife's comment was "Wouldn't work - you'd look like [friend of ours of similar age]." "Oh. You're probably right. Guess not then :-)".
Sigh. There's too much witch-hunting going on in the US government today. At least this one's Canadian, and the US government probably isn't willing to endanger its Precious Bodily Fluids, er, umm, National Information Infrastructure by letting Foreigners contribute to the Echelon Filtering Standards.
OK, my office is about 6-8 blocks from that part of Folsom, but around Halloween it's still fun to watch the pedestrians...
San Francisco's actually a sensible place to wear a suit - it gets cold and wet here in the winter. I tend to do the tweed jacket thing instead, but being older and heavier that works better on me. The last time I wore a tie to a non-Japanese non-upper-management customer in the Bay Area was probably a decade ago - the customer's comment was "extra points because it's a Jerry Garcia tie, but you don't need to wear them when you visit us." But I'm the technical specialist that the sales people bring with them to talk technical, so they're expected to wear the "I'm the sales person" target drag, and I'm expected to have the "beard and sandals" look, which is in fact what I prefer.
Hey, call me old-fashioned, but I liked the purple best :-) Purples and blues seem to be especially popular for older women who are getting gray and don't want to do the pretend-you're-not-old conformist dying it aolid blond bit, but I've also had younger friends who looked really good in blue.
Maybe Starbucks has some ill-defined policies against facial piercings, but at least in San Francisco they didn't seem to apply, and at most of the other coffee shops, heavily metallized faces were pretty prevalent for most of the IT boom and the few years after (except for the place nearest my office, which is run by an older Polish couple who listen to jazz instead of post-alternative.)
It wasn't just that people sometimes had trouble remembering URLs - it was only usable if you were reading the magazine next to your computer. So the only time you could use it was when you could just as well type in the URL yourself. Also, this was back when most computers were desktops, and laptops didn't have wireless on them, so you'd have to be reading your magazine at your desk, not on your couch or the train or wherever.
Or Ginger Beer. Or non-alcoholic beers if you drink those.
If copyright expires at death, it makes it really hard for old artists to sell their work to publishers. (Ok, it also makes it hard for live-fast-die-young rockers to sell their work too :-) Somebody who's 80 years old has an expected remaining lifetime of 5-10 years if they're in average health, and a non-trivial chance of dying in the next year before the book's even gotten out to the stores, is a bad financial bet compared to somebody who's 20 and has an expected 60-80 years left even if they might not have anything interesting to say. Old people do occasionally write first novels that become best-sellers, and they often write memoirs, and if they've been interesting people their work might be a really good investment for a publisher, but if the copyright vanishes when they die, they're not going to be able to get as much money for them.
Old musicians are in a similar situation - some genres, like jazz and blues and classical, are just fine for old guys with decades of experience, even though they may not still be in shape for the vocals or dancing around the stage. Is there some reason that they should only be able to make money by doing live concerts and not also by selling records, just because they're in worse shape than Keith Richards so copyright-ending-at-death would mean that greedy record companies wouldn't pay them as much?
And what if only the drummer explodes, but the other three band members are fine?
I've used dodgeit.com for a while, and it's a very nice service. Thanks! I occasionally won't see mail from places I expect (I mainly use it for online newspapers like the nytimes.com), but mostly it's disposable mail. Do you also use greylisting?
I don't see why anyone would use a "real" email address for whois, as opposed to a role address like dnsadmin@mydomain or dnsadmin-mydomain@example-isp.com. You can set it up to forward to your real email address, and you might put your real name and maybe even real phone number in the record, but if you want to change admins, or arrange for vacation coverage, you can forward it to whoever has the job in the future. The number of spammers targeting domain owners seems to have increased, which is another reason to use a role address instead of any address you care about.
However, greylisting needs to be done by the system that first receives the SMTP from the sender, which is typically your email ISP. The big advantage of greylisting that Poskanzer points out is that you don't get false positives - mail from unknown sources just gets delayed rather than rejected, and that manages to kill off an amazing fraction of spam.
Similarly, the greeting-wait feature has to be done by the initial SMTP receiver, and even that kills more than you'd expect, without bothering legitimate email senders.
Yes, you'd have to work hard to get that much spam, but if you're the author of a number of popular software packages like thttpd and some of the PBM stuff, and you've been using the same address for over a decade and participating in lots of Usenet and other Internet discussions, that'll get your name out there for the harvesters to find. As TFA and another poster point out, being named "acme.com" doesn't help either.
That doesn't mean that I use my main address for everybody - I do use free web-based email systems for interacting with some companies, and dodgeit.com disposable email addresses for signing up for random internet services like online newspapers (bugmenot.com is a similar service.) For the mailing lists that I run, I generally use an address on the list machine for administrative mail, and my regular address if I actually send mail to the list.
Without downloading and unzipping your code, I can't tell how your blacklisting features work, but an obvious extension to a greylisting system is to give RBLed sites a much longer greylist time than mail from unknown sites (e.g. 4-hour retries vs. 5-minute.) It's particularly useful because you can even use some of the more aggressive lists in spite of their enjoyment of collateral damage, and you can use whole-country blocklists for places you don't expect to get mail from, such as Korea and China, without actually rejecting much mail from real people.
What would help is for outgoing mail to automatically whitelist the recipients - I'm not sure how many greylist systems do that.
Greylisting workarounds are easier than you'd think - check the return codes, and any time you get a temporary reject, mark the item for delivery later. Most greylisting timers are set to less than an hour, so if you're still spamming an hour later, run the deferred-sites list again. (This does of course lead to an arms race with greylist times being increased, and if you want to get fancy, you *could* try parsing the response to find the actual retry time, but the crude version is a good start.) It helps to sort targets by domain name, though that may have other issues.