Yup, math. Going with your simple numbers (which are likely wrong, but hey, that doesn't matter around here, and, even if it did, they're simple for doing off-the-cuff calculations with), say we have a vaccinated population of 1,000. So, 10 of them are still unknowingly at risk. As you said, small attack vector. Even if one got sick, the chances of interaction with one of the other 9 is low, and the epidemic becomes a single case, nothing to worry about.
Now, we get idiots listening to celebrities who don't know what they're talking about, and I'm not talking about the ones getting arrested on the White House sidewalk. So, let's say there's 100 kids who didn't get vaccinated. We went from 10 at risk to 190 at risk (1% of 900 plus 100). That's a jump from 1% to 19% because 10% of the population failed to get vaccinated. If someone gets sick, their chances of meeting up with one of the other 189 at-risk people is fairly significant, and we're likely to have a full-blow epidemic on our hands.
I work in a team that is spread out over timezones for: America/Edmonton, America/Toronto, America/Halifax, Europe/Dublin, Asia/Kolkata, and Asia/Shanghai. Unification of timezones would completely mess me up. Currently, by the timezone convention, I have a reasonable expectation that coworkers will be working at 10AM in their local time and not working at 10PM in their local time. (This isn't entirely true for Asia/Kolkata, but they're an exception I can keep in my head.) By converting the current time or the desired-meeting-time to each person's local time, I can get a pretty good indication of whether they'll even be awake or not, in the office or not. But, with unification, I'd have to then know what UTC time everyone's day starts and ends. And that's far more numbers to keep track of than the current system.
In a word, unification would suck. Worse than the current system. I can't understand the concept of global unification on timezones. The reality is that our days are zoned, and the current system, while deeply flawed, gives us at least a reasonable expectation of interaction. Heck, even when I do fly from one zone to another, the act of changing my watch tells me what time to expect to get up and go to bed based on the sun's position in the new zone. This is useful information that I can compartmentalise in a mechanical or digital object and not have to concern myself with again until I change zones again. I'm currently of the opinion that unification would be a step backwards, and have yet to see any evidence to even make me think to the contrary.
Who is making $25k a year in the teacher's union? Starting salaries here are higher than that, by a fair margin, and average salaries are over double that. Compound a PhD with leadership positions (principals), and you can be over 4 times your $25K (so, no, not generally worth it). I'm not saying teachers are overpaid. But they're not $25k, either.
First question: Dunno. Probably neither. Not hard to get, though. Second question: I switched to dreamhost.com because I can use rsync over ssh. Not posting any referral link to discourage thoughts about having a financial reason to say anything. Also: I don't work for them. I merely use them. I understand they have a less-than-stellar reputation, but for my purposes, it's been nearly nothing but positives.
What you're missing is that Firefox doesn't want to target the enterprise. What Mozilla is missing is that if they fail to target the enterprise, IE pretty much carries the day there.
That's only part of the story. What you say is true, but to add to it, as I recall from my EE books back in university, 1A is too much current to kill. It apparently has something to do with the fact that the electrons repel each other, and they will then travel across your skin instead of penetrating to your heart. Of course, that current will likely leave burns and hurt like hell, but this likely is related to why so many people survive lightning strikes.
Well, I agree with you. Except that transparency in my desktop helps me get my work done faster. First off, if it's opaque, it's got focus. And that is something I can say on many layers: the window with the WM's concept of "focus" (where keystrokes go) is displayed opaquely, but because it's opaque, it naturally gets my attention and focus. The time I spend guessing which window has focus is reduced. I know that, in the past, the window's title bar would show whether that window had focus or not, but with two monitors and eight apps, that takes more effort. Somehow, the opaque window just stands out - probably because the whole window shows whether it has focus or not instead of just a tiny bit near the top. Also, I've noticed that if I want to see something in one window while I'm doing something in another window, even if the one I'm looking at isn't at the top, I can often see it to gather its information (debugger, for example) for whatever I need it for. I spend less time shifting windows around, so, again, my work is getting done faster.
Just going off the KDE4 effects I currently have enabled: Blur - background stuff goes blurry, making it less likely to attract my focus, helping me focus on the task at hand; Dialog Parent - "Darkens the parent window of the currently active dialog" (making the dialog stand out in contrast, again, focus); Dim Inactive - "Darken inactive windows" (making the active window stand out in contrast); Slide Back - "Slide back windows losing focus" (simulates paper being moved out of the way - making your virtual desktop seem more like a real one, which ties it mentally with switching tasks - it works for me); various task switchers (currently "Cover Switch") - zoom out from the desktop while switching tasks with alt+tab, making it easier to find the one you want.
Yes, there's plenty of "candy" enabled, too. And plenty more that I don't have enabled. But, seriously, the same technology can be productive.
To the original topic, I don't care what is rendering the windows on my screen. What I do care about is being able to run remote applications on my screen without VNC or rdesktop or any of that other stuff. I do use VNC, but it's for particular problems when X over SSH is not sufficient. And when X over SSH is sufficient, VNC is unnecessary overhead. So long as Wayland still supports this even for Wayland clients, and not just for X-compatibility, I won't really care. Of course, if they're using new protocols and/or new ports, Wayland-over-SSH may need patches to SSH. Again, I won't really care, as long as it works.
Today, among other things, I run Lotus Notes over SSH - which allows Sametime IM's to pop up on whatever desktop I'm on, allowing co-workers to ping me, and also puts the Sametime icon in the system tray. If I were running this on VNC, the sametime icon and IM's would all be constrained to that VNC client, making it much less likely for me to see it. If Wayland doesn't allow this, it's dead to me.
I don't think you're far from the truth. The part you're missing is where to spend one's gaming dollar in lieu of the games with restrictive DRM. In simple terms, instead of spending time playing pirated games, gamers should be spending their time playing purchased DRM-free games. Carrot AND stick at the same time. The carrot that promises a market (read: cash) for games that meet demand, and the stick that punishes for not meeting that demand.
As long as companies think that the demand is merely for "good games" regardless of inconvenience, they will continue to market that way. It's only by putting your money toward companies that produce what matters to you (DRM-free) that you'll encourage proper behaviour.
Putting these companies on one's shitlist is a good start, but it's only half of the equation.
When you start worrying about registers, isn't that a compiler problem? Shouldn't the compiler already be doing that level of optimisation? Or is there a bunch of asm code in Firefox for some reason? Organising code such that it sits close to functions it calls regularly to avoid cache misses can be done by changing the linking order, and playing with the functions' layout and location in the source tree (oddly, sometimes creating an extra function can increase speed by being able to put the extra function near code it calls, and thus decrease cache misses - but this can all get blown out of the water by the user doing other things, having the entire app dropped from the cache in the middle of the tight loop, to go and run something else for a timeslice). So that's something FF devs can do - but I somehow doubt they do much for getting variables into registers. That's up to the compiler.
No, don't be silly. "4" will eventually mean "5". Here, let me show you. We all know that 2+2=4. But, with inflation, everything is going up over time, so if we merely assume large values of 2, we will get 2+2=5. QED.
Yes, because a normal crowd wouldn't notice the difference between google and a googol. Your IT friends, er, coworkers, should at least snicker at the faux pas.
Are you sure? I just bumped up to 50/3 about a month ago, for a price that seems a little high. Check it out. My bill says, "Personal TV + Broadband 50.... $84.90" (personal TV includes sufficient HD programming for our purposes). Add on two phone lines, and the children's tv stations, plus GST, and it's $128.85 per month. That's actually ~$60 less than before: by removing a bunch of TV stations that I didn't need and increasing my speed from 25 to 50Mbps.
I guess it depends on your definition of "expensive". I consider this "slightly uncomfortable" price for value, not "oh gawd, I'm being financially raped". As to speed, I'm not sure that 50Mbps counts as "slow". Sure, my network is a mix of 100Mbps switches and 1Gbps devices, much faster than this. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect sustained rates that high from across the world for $84.90/month.
Other providers might be expensive and slow. But that doesn't encompass every provider.
I have a huge ego. I freely admit it. I work from home because I can't fit my ego in the office doors.
On a serious note, I prefer code reviews. From the ego-centric side, it has two major benefits: it allows my ego to show off, second it helps the less-experienced/newer developers to learn new techniques, or just learn the code, often in areas they haven't spent a lot of time looking at. That means less time helping them later. It also happens to have the side benefit that their questions can make me think about the problem harder, and not-infrequently uncover typos, thinkos, under-developed (or over-developed) features, or plain bugs. Even for us egomaniacs.
Cancer is a fairly risky one - you should stick to safer ones to predict, like being eaten by a grue.
That said, I used to get very severe migraines. The neurologist I was seeing couldn't do a thing with them, short of prescribing addictive narcotics (and neither of us wanted to introduce a new dependency without having exhausted all other possibilities). I went to a naturopath under the theory that I don't care if it's a placebo, as long as it works (and the placebos the neurologist gave me weren't working). He did some weird voodoo that looked scientific, but I can't understand how it could possibly work. After fifteen or twenty minutes of pseudo-scientific mumbling to himself, he declared that I needed to take two things, and his secretary, who happened to also be his wife, promptly charged me $190, and gave me one of the two things (the homeopathic portion). The other one was black seed oil (BSO) capsules, which I continue to take, at about $32 per bottle of 120 capsules. I may get up to your $9999.99 price soon enough:-(
Here's the kicker. Prior to this, I was getting one to three migraines PER MONTH. These are the headaches that would render me unable to do anything for 4-8 hours. Since starting to take this placebo, I have not gotten a single migraine. I've had some bad headaches, ones that I knew would lead to a full migraine six months ago, but now can be more-or-less controlled with extra BSO combined with tylenol and/or advil. Most of the time, taking a few capsules of BSO suffices to keep the headaches entirely at bay.
Why? I don't have a clue. I know what the naturopath claims. Something about histamines in my head, and BSO is an anti-histamine. I don't entirely buy it. But I don't care. It works. It's measurable, it's falsifiable, and it does both in a short enough time span to be useful to me.
I've had three other people ask me about my miraculous migraine "cure". I always stress that this worked for me, it may not work for them.
There's much that science can't yet answer, whether it's predicting the weather, or understanding the human body. For every thing that science can't answer, there are at least a dozen snake-oil salesmen out there willing to defraud someone with that ailment. There is no scientific reason why a non-scientist could not have the answer, though there are plenty of rational reasons to be skeptical about any such claim, moreso when it's a non-scientist making the claim. Either way, I'm a firm believer in placebos, as long as they work for me. Regardless of the source: naturopath or licensed MD.
Maybe I'm too naive, but I suspect it's not even that malicious. I think it's merely that marketing folk got a hold of some numbers that the company wanted to put a positive spin on, and thought they (the marketing folk) were statisticians. About the only thing I learned from my Engineering Statistics course was that statistics looks obvious, but is far more complicated than it looks (at least, if you want to approach accuracy and such). I highly doubt that your average marketing drone has taken that much in post-secondary level statistics, and still think that a simple, but pretty, graph conveys the information they want it to.
I actually suspect that BP was about the same. A graph was made, the presenter had no fundamental understanding of it, and merely drew conclusions from the picture, the same as your average person might. And, since statistics is far harder than it appears (you know, actually paying attention to details), average people might accept the misconstruction as truth. I don't think it was deliberate on the part of the presenter, merely uneducated.
It'd be nice if presenters were actually knowledgeable in the subject they're presenting. However, for some reason, techies spurn the limelight more than average, while confidence men soak it up. I don't see a switch happening too often. (Gates, Jobs - these are exceptions, not the norm; most big-corp CEOs are former sales people, not former techies.)
The one I go with is that my ISP's SMTP servers are sufficient, so my postfix is configured to route all outbound mail to there. However, I've given some consideration to other options. My top one at the moment is to open up an ssh tunnel to a web host provider, and pump my email through their SMTP server. Why not directly? Because my ISP has outbound SMTP blocked, and I suspect that even if that weren't the case, the confusion with a spam zombie would still arise as your external IP address (which is known as a broadband IP address) would be attached as a "Received" header. However, with the ssh tunnel, the Received header would actually be the IP address you're ssh'd into instead of your real address, thus appearing as if it came from the web host instead of a broadband IP address.
Similar options exist if you can VPN to work (though then your employer's IT guys could intercept anything if they wanted to/were directed to), or VPN/SSH to a friend's broadband-connected system to use their ISP's SMTP server.
As for paying for one? Never looked into that. Since my ISP is blocking outbound (but not inbound) SMTP anyway, it's somewhat moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, math. Going with your simple numbers (which are likely wrong, but hey, that doesn't matter around here, and, even if it did, they're simple for doing off-the-cuff calculations with), say we have a vaccinated population of 1,000. So, 10 of them are still unknowingly at risk. As you said, small attack vector. Even if one got sick, the chances of interaction with one of the other 9 is low, and the epidemic becomes a single case, nothing to worry about.
Now, we get idiots listening to celebrities who don't know what they're talking about, and I'm not talking about the ones getting arrested on the White House sidewalk. So, let's say there's 100 kids who didn't get vaccinated. We went from 10 at risk to 190 at risk (1% of 900 plus 100). That's a jump from 1% to 19% because 10% of the population failed to get vaccinated. If someone gets sick, their chances of meeting up with one of the other 189 at-risk people is fairly significant, and we're likely to have a full-blow epidemic on our hands.
Simple math, people. Get yer vaccinations.
I work in a team that is spread out over timezones for: America/Edmonton, America/Toronto, America/Halifax, Europe/Dublin, Asia/Kolkata, and Asia/Shanghai. Unification of timezones would completely mess me up. Currently, by the timezone convention, I have a reasonable expectation that coworkers will be working at 10AM in their local time and not working at 10PM in their local time. (This isn't entirely true for Asia/Kolkata, but they're an exception I can keep in my head.) By converting the current time or the desired-meeting-time to each person's local time, I can get a pretty good indication of whether they'll even be awake or not, in the office or not. But, with unification, I'd have to then know what UTC time everyone's day starts and ends. And that's far more numbers to keep track of than the current system.
In a word, unification would suck. Worse than the current system. I can't understand the concept of global unification on timezones. The reality is that our days are zoned, and the current system, while deeply flawed, gives us at least a reasonable expectation of interaction. Heck, even when I do fly from one zone to another, the act of changing my watch tells me what time to expect to get up and go to bed based on the sun's position in the new zone. This is useful information that I can compartmentalise in a mechanical or digital object and not have to concern myself with again until I change zones again. I'm currently of the opinion that unification would be a step backwards, and have yet to see any evidence to even make me think to the contrary.
Who is making $25k a year in the teacher's union? Starting salaries here are higher than that, by a fair margin, and average salaries are over double that. Compound a PhD with leadership positions (principals), and you can be over 4 times your $25K (so, no, not generally worth it). I'm not saying teachers are overpaid. But they're not $25k, either.
It's her stage name.
First question: Dunno. Probably neither. Not hard to get, though. Second question: I switched to dreamhost.com because I can use rsync over ssh. Not posting any referral link to discourage thoughts about having a financial reason to say anything. Also: I don't work for them. I merely use them. I understand they have a less-than-stellar reputation, but for my purposes, it's been nearly nothing but positives.
If you have a 3D printer at your end with which to reconstruct it, perhaps... :-)
What you're missing is that Firefox doesn't want to target the enterprise. What Mozilla is missing is that if they fail to target the enterprise, IE pretty much carries the day there.
"Big order discount."
That's only part of the story. What you say is true, but to add to it, as I recall from my EE books back in university, 1A is too much current to kill. It apparently has something to do with the fact that the electrons repel each other, and they will then travel across your skin instead of penetrating to your heart. Of course, that current will likely leave burns and hurt like hell, but this likely is related to why so many people survive lightning strikes.
Well, I agree with you. Except that transparency in my desktop helps me get my work done faster. First off, if it's opaque, it's got focus. And that is something I can say on many layers: the window with the WM's concept of "focus" (where keystrokes go) is displayed opaquely, but because it's opaque, it naturally gets my attention and focus. The time I spend guessing which window has focus is reduced. I know that, in the past, the window's title bar would show whether that window had focus or not, but with two monitors and eight apps, that takes more effort. Somehow, the opaque window just stands out - probably because the whole window shows whether it has focus or not instead of just a tiny bit near the top. Also, I've noticed that if I want to see something in one window while I'm doing something in another window, even if the one I'm looking at isn't at the top, I can often see it to gather its information (debugger, for example) for whatever I need it for. I spend less time shifting windows around, so, again, my work is getting done faster.
Just going off the KDE4 effects I currently have enabled: Blur - background stuff goes blurry, making it less likely to attract my focus, helping me focus on the task at hand; Dialog Parent - "Darkens the parent window of the currently active dialog" (making the dialog stand out in contrast, again, focus); Dim Inactive - "Darken inactive windows" (making the active window stand out in contrast); Slide Back - "Slide back windows losing focus" (simulates paper being moved out of the way - making your virtual desktop seem more like a real one, which ties it mentally with switching tasks - it works for me); various task switchers (currently "Cover Switch") - zoom out from the desktop while switching tasks with alt+tab, making it easier to find the one you want.
Yes, there's plenty of "candy" enabled, too. And plenty more that I don't have enabled. But, seriously, the same technology can be productive.
To the original topic, I don't care what is rendering the windows on my screen. What I do care about is being able to run remote applications on my screen without VNC or rdesktop or any of that other stuff. I do use VNC, but it's for particular problems when X over SSH is not sufficient. And when X over SSH is sufficient, VNC is unnecessary overhead. So long as Wayland still supports this even for Wayland clients, and not just for X-compatibility, I won't really care. Of course, if they're using new protocols and/or new ports, Wayland-over-SSH may need patches to SSH. Again, I won't really care, as long as it works.
Today, among other things, I run Lotus Notes over SSH - which allows Sametime IM's to pop up on whatever desktop I'm on, allowing co-workers to ping me, and also puts the Sametime icon in the system tray. If I were running this on VNC, the sametime icon and IM's would all be constrained to that VNC client, making it much less likely for me to see it. If Wayland doesn't allow this, it's dead to me.
Not at all. Only 10% of scientists really actually believe this. The next 87% merely followed suit. It was inevitable.
I don't think you're far from the truth. The part you're missing is where to spend one's gaming dollar in lieu of the games with restrictive DRM. In simple terms, instead of spending time playing pirated games, gamers should be spending their time playing purchased DRM-free games. Carrot AND stick at the same time. The carrot that promises a market (read: cash) for games that meet demand, and the stick that punishes for not meeting that demand.
As long as companies think that the demand is merely for "good games" regardless of inconvenience, they will continue to market that way. It's only by putting your money toward companies that produce what matters to you (DRM-free) that you'll encourage proper behaviour.
Putting these companies on one's shitlist is a good start, but it's only half of the equation.
Based on TFA's claims on driver support and such, I'd say it's still underdeveloped.
When you start worrying about registers, isn't that a compiler problem? Shouldn't the compiler already be doing that level of optimisation? Or is there a bunch of asm code in Firefox for some reason? Organising code such that it sits close to functions it calls regularly to avoid cache misses can be done by changing the linking order, and playing with the functions' layout and location in the source tree (oddly, sometimes creating an extra function can increase speed by being able to put the extra function near code it calls, and thus decrease cache misses - but this can all get blown out of the water by the user doing other things, having the entire app dropped from the cache in the middle of the tight loop, to go and run something else for a timeslice). So that's something FF devs can do - but I somehow doubt they do much for getting variables into registers. That's up to the compiler.
No, don't be silly. "4" will eventually mean "5". Here, let me show you. We all know that 2+2=4. But, with inflation, everything is going up over time, so if we merely assume large values of 2, we will get 2+2=5. QED.
Yes, because a normal crowd wouldn't notice the difference between google and a googol . Your IT friends, er, coworkers, should at least snicker at the faux pas.
Um, what is that, a miniskirt, heels, and spare needles?
Internet in Canada is expensive and slow
Are you sure? I just bumped up to 50/3 about a month ago, for a price that seems a little high. Check it out. My bill says, "Personal TV + Broadband 50 .... $84.90" (personal TV includes sufficient HD programming for our purposes). Add on two phone lines, and the children's tv stations, plus GST, and it's $128.85 per month. That's actually ~$60 less than before: by removing a bunch of TV stations that I didn't need and increasing my speed from 25 to 50Mbps.
I guess it depends on your definition of "expensive". I consider this "slightly uncomfortable" price for value, not "oh gawd, I'm being financially raped". As to speed, I'm not sure that 50Mbps counts as "slow". Sure, my network is a mix of 100Mbps switches and 1Gbps devices, much faster than this. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect sustained rates that high from across the world for $84.90/month.
Other providers might be expensive and slow. But that doesn't encompass every provider.
I have a huge ego. I freely admit it. I work from home because I can't fit my ego in the office doors.
On a serious note, I prefer code reviews. From the ego-centric side, it has two major benefits: it allows my ego to show off, second it helps the less-experienced/newer developers to learn new techniques, or just learn the code, often in areas they haven't spent a lot of time looking at. That means less time helping them later. It also happens to have the side benefit that their questions can make me think about the problem harder, and not-infrequently uncover typos, thinkos, under-developed (or over-developed) features, or plain bugs. Even for us egomaniacs.
If you keep up with that "you're-when-you-mean-your" thing, you're bound to confuse Watson. It might even suggest you get Windows 7 preloaded.
Cancer is a fairly risky one - you should stick to safer ones to predict, like being eaten by a grue.
That said, I used to get very severe migraines. The neurologist I was seeing couldn't do a thing with them, short of prescribing addictive narcotics (and neither of us wanted to introduce a new dependency without having exhausted all other possibilities). I went to a naturopath under the theory that I don't care if it's a placebo, as long as it works (and the placebos the neurologist gave me weren't working). He did some weird voodoo that looked scientific, but I can't understand how it could possibly work. After fifteen or twenty minutes of pseudo-scientific mumbling to himself, he declared that I needed to take two things, and his secretary, who happened to also be his wife, promptly charged me $190, and gave me one of the two things (the homeopathic portion). The other one was black seed oil (BSO) capsules, which I continue to take, at about $32 per bottle of 120 capsules. I may get up to your $9999.99 price soon enough :-(
Here's the kicker. Prior to this, I was getting one to three migraines PER MONTH. These are the headaches that would render me unable to do anything for 4-8 hours. Since starting to take this placebo, I have not gotten a single migraine. I've had some bad headaches, ones that I knew would lead to a full migraine six months ago, but now can be more-or-less controlled with extra BSO combined with tylenol and/or advil. Most of the time, taking a few capsules of BSO suffices to keep the headaches entirely at bay.
Why? I don't have a clue. I know what the naturopath claims. Something about histamines in my head, and BSO is an anti-histamine. I don't entirely buy it. But I don't care. It works. It's measurable, it's falsifiable, and it does both in a short enough time span to be useful to me.
I've had three other people ask me about my miraculous migraine "cure". I always stress that this worked for me, it may not work for them.
There's much that science can't yet answer, whether it's predicting the weather, or understanding the human body. For every thing that science can't answer, there are at least a dozen snake-oil salesmen out there willing to defraud someone with that ailment. There is no scientific reason why a non-scientist could not have the answer, though there are plenty of rational reasons to be skeptical about any such claim, moreso when it's a non-scientist making the claim. Either way, I'm a firm believer in placebos, as long as they work for me. Regardless of the source: naturopath or licensed MD.
Don't forget to make the claim that it's not actual surgery, so no MD license is required. Nor really any training.
I stand corrected.
Maybe I'm too naive, but I suspect it's not even that malicious. I think it's merely that marketing folk got a hold of some numbers that the company wanted to put a positive spin on, and thought they (the marketing folk) were statisticians. About the only thing I learned from my Engineering Statistics course was that statistics looks obvious, but is far more complicated than it looks (at least, if you want to approach accuracy and such). I highly doubt that your average marketing drone has taken that much in post-secondary level statistics, and still think that a simple, but pretty, graph conveys the information they want it to.
I actually suspect that BP was about the same. A graph was made, the presenter had no fundamental understanding of it, and merely drew conclusions from the picture, the same as your average person might. And, since statistics is far harder than it appears (you know, actually paying attention to details), average people might accept the misconstruction as truth. I don't think it was deliberate on the part of the presenter, merely uneducated.
It'd be nice if presenters were actually knowledgeable in the subject they're presenting. However, for some reason, techies spurn the limelight more than average, while confidence men soak it up. I don't see a switch happening too often. (Gates, Jobs - these are exceptions, not the norm; most big-corp CEOs are former sales people, not former techies.)
Well, there are a few options.
The one I go with is that my ISP's SMTP servers are sufficient, so my postfix is configured to route all outbound mail to there. However, I've given some consideration to other options. My top one at the moment is to open up an ssh tunnel to a web host provider, and pump my email through their SMTP server. Why not directly? Because my ISP has outbound SMTP blocked, and I suspect that even if that weren't the case, the confusion with a spam zombie would still arise as your external IP address (which is known as a broadband IP address) would be attached as a "Received" header. However, with the ssh tunnel, the Received header would actually be the IP address you're ssh'd into instead of your real address, thus appearing as if it came from the web host instead of a broadband IP address.
Similar options exist if you can VPN to work (though then your employer's IT guys could intercept anything if they wanted to/were directed to), or VPN/SSH to a friend's broadband-connected system to use their ISP's SMTP server.
As for paying for one? Never looked into that. Since my ISP is blocking outbound (but not inbound) SMTP anyway, it's somewhat moot.