You're exactly right. I've been running Spam Vampire 24/7 for quite some time now (1-2 years). Works great. Quit bitching and do something about it!
Re:Ending Spam?
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, I think that most rational people would understand the title to mean "Ending spam as it pertains to ME". In which case, as far as most people are concerned, if they don't see spam, then the spam problem is solved. I really don't think that that is an inordinate amount of literacy license.
And yes, if you don't see it, then unless you're a system administrator (can't be more than 0.001% of the population), the problem IS solved. The problem isn't spam per se, but that spam clogs up MY inbox.
It's just like anything else. Nobody is going to end spam altogether... that's just naive. But if you don't see it any more, then the problem (again, spam filling up MY inbox), then it's fixed. I don't give two shits as to what some upstream sysadmin has to do to stop it. I have my own problems, and that's part fo his job. Just stop spam from getting to ME, and I'm all good.
Are there any plans in the pipe to make the game playable for "normal" people (ie: people older than 15 who do not have 10 hours day to play/cheat, etc.)? I'd love to be able to play online, but the experience quite frankly, sucks.
Has academic research in computing really sunk to this level?
Considering that most people call a "fact" something that they found on Wikipedia or via Google, I'd have to say that the answer to your questions is "yes". The Net is a vast source of incorrect, incomplete, and otherwise bad data. There may be a lot of information out there, but the vast majority is wrong. This "cheapening" of information has and probably will lead to more of this crap "research".
The things that "transhumanists" describe simply will not be possible? It has nothing to do with technology: it's resources. We're seeing oil prices soar right now. With oil and other basic resources that we need for a modern society quickly dwindling: breathable air, drinkable water, etc. society as we know it will collapse long before most of these pie-in-the-sky ideals are reached.
You get protection in the off chance that something unfortunate happens , and they get to rake in billions upon billions . They would not be offering this insurance if they thought that they would have to pay out on a lot of claims.
No, they would not be offering insurance if the total amount they expect to pay in claims is moer than they'd take in in premiums. I haven't seen a single number concerning cost. Who says that Lloyd's isn't charging $1,000,000/year/seat for Linux use? Lloyds is known for insuring very expensive, high risk items. I should know. One of my special, very expensive business vehicles is insured through Lloyd's. They simply mitigate their risk through very high premiums. So, your assumption isn't quite correct.
Free system that allows you to be productive while others are busy updating their virus definitions and removing spyware is uneconomical!
Free system that has many, many unknown authors and copyright holders that takes the US Supreme Court to determine copyright validity is uneconomical. Although my sentence, like yours, still isn't correct English, is more realistic than yours.
Oh, and I interviewed at SAS Institute. I ended up calling them after my second interview to tell them I wasn't interested after talking to several people who worked there that mentioned that managers would watch the fucking parking lot to see who wasn't staying late. Their raises are based 50% on how much overtime you work (and that was straight from the mouth of their recruiter).
You should probably check your facts before trying to troll. SAS has a strict policy (and always has for as long as I've known) that people are NOT allowed to work past, I believe it's 6:00PM. At SAS, I worked pretty much 8:30-5:00 every day, wore jeans and t-shirts, no shoes around the office, had access to unlimited snacks (as does every employee), and ate at the best corporate cafeteria I've ever seen, subsidized by SAS. IBM, on the other hand, just has those two overpriced grease pits that they call cafeterias.
As far as IBM, it's a big company. You may have worked in good parts. But I gave all of the info you need to check up on it. Ask anybody who worked in Aptiva support if you want. I'll stand behind what I said.
2. A web interface makes it very tough to integrate with hardware.
3. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel (something open source people have a hard time understanding). My business isn't software. It's pet supplies. Unless I can get a *huge* competitive advantage, that would be a tremendous waste of time and money.
I seriously would, but I've looked into open source for our store pretty extensively, and I haven't seen anything that would come close to filling our needs. Plus, we're a real, live small business where every sale counts towards getting everybody paid, so there's very little room for mistakes. I can't imagine a transition like this going smoothly, quite honestly: we have existing (generic) hardware that it all would have to interface with. We have credit card processing integrated in with the pos system (ie: not one of those CC terminals that you see everywhere). We have our point of sale system talking to both our back end accounting package, and the web site. It would be a *huge* job, which is why I thought it was so ridiculous when that guy suggested that *somebody* should do it for free. Nobody's gonna do this amount of work for free unless they were a bit "off" in the head. Keep in mind that we're pretty much a tiny business. This police dept. installation would probably make ours look rpetty trivial by comparison.
Reading the article it would appear that the Scottish Police Force admins are too incompetent to set up the systems properly. Perhaps they would rather use Microsoft's brain dead 3 clicks and you're configured interface, but they sacrifice security in doing so.
As a businessman, every time I read something like this from one of you zealots, I'm even further away from considering using OSS in my business.
Maybe if the entire Linux community (not just the software developers) offered their products and services for free Linux would be cheaper than MS.
Cool! I'm glad you think so! If you would, please show up at our store (you can find the address on the website), and install Linux on all of our PC's along with an open source point of sale system, and an open source accounting package. It should be a seamless transition. Sunday mornings are the best time for us. Looking forward to seeing you then!
I'm very serious. I was a phone jockey at the main IBM office in RDU, NC. I was answering calls for the "Craptiva" line as it was called. We literally had to ask to go to the bathroom. If it was busy, they often said no. They were painting the walls of the cube farm one week, and people were literally not allowed to go home, even if the paint fumes were making them sick. I also wasn't allowed *unpaid* time off to get married. Keep in mind that I was one of several hundred people with identical jobs. And, morale was so low when I left, that people were walking out of the buildig with all kinds of equipment. By the time I left, they were literally chaining PC's and monitors to desks so that people wouldn't walk off with them.
Now, IBM is a *huge* company, so what I'm describing isn't necessarily indiciative of the entire company, I'm sure. I just wanted to point out that it's not as simple as "IBM=Good because they sell Linux products".
Best company I ever worked for: SAS Institute in Cary, NC.
I can honestly tell you that if you spend a lot of time in places with decent wi-fi, then you are definitely in the minority. The vast majority of the US has zero wi-fi, but cell phone service is pretty damned widespread. I don't live in a major city, but I can't remember the last time I found a cell phone dead zone. In contrast, I quite literally know of 1/4 of one city block where there's wi-fi (I don't use wi-fi at home because it's just too damn slow and unreliable compared to good ol' ethernet). This to me sounds like a version of "going around your asshole to get to your elbow". But hey, whatever floats your boat. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me.
Wow! How revolutionary! A phone that doesn't need wires, that you can use almost anywhere, that doesn't have long distance charges! Honestly, who cares if it's VOIP? People still complain about quality of regular cell service. I can't imagine VOIP over 802.11x. It brings new meaning to, "Can you hear me now?"
That's kinda' like geeks who buy a powerful PC with a video card so that they can watch TV on their PC's.
Oh, and there are many many college students that have no interest whatsoever in working at Microsoft (because they have a conscience).
You forgot to mention the fact that they're also naive as hell, too. There are few grown-ups in this day & age that would turn down a Microsoft job. Times are tough, and only the wealthy (in both time and money) can afford to have a conscience.
And if you think that IBM is a shiny, happy company, then I've got a story to tell you about when I worked there about 10 years ago and had to ask to go to the bathroom.
Proposal for new Slashdot topic/section:
on
Spring Into PHP 5
·
· Score: 1
PHP book reviews! Considering that there seems to be about 1-2 week, it would be a pretty good size topic.
You can buy a Mac Mini for $499. So... what high cost of entry?
Actually, I just got a nice thrift shop machine for $50 that has specs almost identical than the Mac Mini, and I don't have to run out to buy a fancy USB keyboard, USB mouse, an expensive monitor with that newer plug, and all new software. Oh yeah, and Windows 2000 still outperforms OSX by a mile on similar hardware. The basic Mac Mini would have to cost $200 for me to be willing to try it.
They're saying, write something we don't like, and we'll stop talking to you.
You mean like the US presidential administration not only refusing to talk to intelligent news sources and not allowing dissenting citizens from getting anywhere near the president? If the US gov't can do it and get away with it with no repurcussions, I see nothing wrong with Google doing the same. In this case, ZDNet did act with little to more journalistic integrity, and they continue their ridiculously childish behavior with this press release.
The parent poster didn't mention whether or not they've been around for a while. He said that they won't make money. Last I checked, Debian and FreeBSD don't make money. Hell, does either group actually employ a single person?
I did something similar for a warehouse system using one of those hand held scanner thingies. The ones they were using were ancient, and had no documentation. I had to reverse-engineer. I can tell you that as far as point-of-scale barcode scanners go, the vast majority simply go through the PS2 keyboard port, and send the equivalent of the numbers typed out, with a carriage return at the end. But credit card swipes are different, as are receipt printers, and pole displays, and like you mentioned, scales, etc.
Staples and CompUSA are major, multi-billion dollar international corporations. Right tool for the right job, buddy. It doesn't exactly make sense to spend more on an accounting package than the total value of the business.
May I hazard a guess that you mostly worked with large corporations with significant IT investment in a given database platform (or the availability of any major DB platform)?
You got it... Big projects... I converted the USPS' main inventory management system from greenscreen to RDBMS. Same thing with NC's medicare billing system, etc. Even on smaller projects I worked on, there was already a committment to a major database (usually Oracle, sometimes MS-SQL). But in all cases, there was such a vast amount of data (usually in terrabytes), or such a massive amount of stored procs that switching databases would be a *major* deal. Never created a app on my own (sounds like a PITA), but yeah, that seems like one place where portability would be helpful, too.
Still, why would a company say "We're using MS-SQL now, we'll move to something else later"? Were they not using a licensed copy (financial investment)? Were they just really new, and using a trial copy (no real code written against it)? Or maybe they were smaller/low activity databases that really could be switched out without much of a concern for performance? Hell, even in that last case, you've still got the installation, the configuration, the maintenance procedures, etc. that would have to be changed. I dunno. Sounds strange to me. Sounds to me like somebody trying to build a car around a 4 cylinder engine, with the possiblity of dropping a 8 cylinder into it later. I've always been taught (and seen in practice) that the FIRST thing that any company does with any kind of technological assets does is to choose a database, and build their business around it. Hell, I'd imagine that even changing server OS's would be less of a disruption than ripping out one database in favor of another.
Slashdot Mirror
You're exactly right. I've been running Spam Vampire 24/7 for quite some time now (1-2 years). Works great. Quit bitching and do something about it!
Well, I think that most rational people would understand the title to mean "Ending spam as it pertains to ME". In which case, as far as most people are concerned, if they don't see spam, then the spam problem is solved. I really don't think that that is an inordinate amount of literacy license.
And yes, if you don't see it, then unless you're a system administrator (can't be more than 0.001% of the population), the problem IS solved. The problem isn't spam per se, but that spam clogs up MY inbox.
It's just like anything else. Nobody is going to end spam altogether... that's just naive. But if you don't see it any more, then the problem (again, spam filling up MY inbox), then it's fixed. I don't give two shits as to what some upstream sysadmin has to do to stop it. I have my own problems, and that's part fo his job. Just stop spam from getting to ME, and I'm all good.
Are there any plans in the pipe to make the game playable for "normal" people (ie: people older than 15 who do not have 10 hours day to play/cheat, etc.)? I'd love to be able to play online, but the experience quite frankly, sucks.
Has academic research in computing really sunk to this level?
Considering that most people call a "fact" something that they found on Wikipedia or via Google, I'd have to say that the answer to your questions is "yes". The Net is a vast source of incorrect, incomplete, and otherwise bad data. There may be a lot of information out there, but the vast majority is wrong. This "cheapening" of information has and probably will lead to more of this crap "research".
The things that "transhumanists" describe simply will not be possible? It has nothing to do with technology: it's resources. We're seeing oil prices soar right now. With oil and other basic resources that we need for a modern society quickly dwindling: breathable air, drinkable water, etc. society as we know it will collapse long before most of these pie-in-the-sky ideals are reached.
You get protection in the off chance that something unfortunate happens , and they get to rake in billions upon billions . They would not be offering this insurance if they thought that they would have to pay out on a lot of claims .
No, they would not be offering insurance if the total amount they expect to pay in claims is moer than they'd take in in premiums. I haven't seen a single number concerning cost. Who says that Lloyd's isn't charging $1,000,000/year/seat for Linux use? Lloyds is known for insuring very expensive, high risk items. I should know. One of my special, very expensive business vehicles is insured through Lloyd's. They simply mitigate their risk through very high premiums. So, your assumption isn't quite correct.
Free system that allows you to be productive while others are busy updating their virus definitions and removing spyware is uneconomical!
Free system that has many, many unknown authors and copyright holders that takes the US Supreme Court to determine copyright validity is uneconomical. Although my sentence, like yours, still isn't correct English, is more realistic than yours.
I was also surprised to see your post, considering that I pay them quarterly for insurance for one of my special vehicles.
Oh, and I interviewed at SAS Institute. I ended up calling them after my second interview to tell them I wasn't interested after talking to several people who worked there that mentioned that managers would watch the fucking parking lot to see who wasn't staying late. Their raises are based 50% on how much overtime you work (and that was straight from the mouth of their recruiter).
You should probably check your facts before trying to troll. SAS has a strict policy (and always has for as long as I've known) that people are NOT allowed to work past, I believe it's 6:00PM. At SAS, I worked pretty much 8:30-5:00 every day, wore jeans and t-shirts, no shoes around the office, had access to unlimited snacks (as does every employee), and ate at the best corporate cafeteria I've ever seen, subsidized by SAS. IBM, on the other hand, just has those two overpriced grease pits that they call cafeterias.
As far as IBM, it's a big company. You may have worked in good parts. But I gave all of the info you need to check up on it. Ask anybody who worked in Aptiva support if you want. I'll stand behind what I said.
1. A web interface is too slow.
2. A web interface makes it very tough to integrate with hardware.
3. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel (something open source people have a hard time understanding). My business isn't software. It's pet supplies. Unless I can get a *huge* competitive advantage, that would be a tremendous waste of time and money.
I seriously would, but I've looked into open source for our store pretty extensively, and I haven't seen anything that would come close to filling our needs. Plus, we're a real, live small business where every sale counts towards getting everybody paid, so there's very little room for mistakes. I can't imagine a transition like this going smoothly, quite honestly: we have existing (generic) hardware that it all would have to interface with. We have credit card processing integrated in with the pos system (ie: not one of those CC terminals that you see everywhere). We have our point of sale system talking to both our back end accounting package, and the web site. It would be a *huge* job, which is why I thought it was so ridiculous when that guy suggested that *somebody* should do it for free. Nobody's gonna do this amount of work for free unless they were a bit "off" in the head. Keep in mind that we're pretty much a tiny business. This police dept. installation would probably make ours look rpetty trivial by comparison.
Reading the article it would appear that the Scottish Police Force admins are too incompetent to set up the systems properly. Perhaps they would rather use Microsoft's brain dead 3 clicks and you're configured interface, but they sacrifice security in doing so.
As a businessman, every time I read something like this from one of you zealots, I'm even further away from considering using OSS in my business.
Maybe if the entire Linux community (not just the software developers) offered their products and services for free Linux would be cheaper than MS.
Cool! I'm glad you think so! If you would, please show up at our store (you can find the address on the website), and install Linux on all of our PC's along with an open source point of sale system, and an open source accounting package. It should be a seamless transition. Sunday mornings are the best time for us. Looking forward to seeing you then!
I'm very serious. I was a phone jockey at the main IBM office in RDU, NC. I was answering calls for the "Craptiva" line as it was called. We literally had to ask to go to the bathroom. If it was busy, they often said no. They were painting the walls of the cube farm one week, and people were literally not allowed to go home, even if the paint fumes were making them sick. I also wasn't allowed *unpaid* time off to get married. Keep in mind that I was one of several hundred people with identical jobs. And, morale was so low when I left, that people were walking out of the buildig with all kinds of equipment. By the time I left, they were literally chaining PC's and monitors to desks so that people wouldn't walk off with them.
Now, IBM is a *huge* company, so what I'm describing isn't necessarily indiciative of the entire company, I'm sure. I just wanted to point out that it's not as simple as "IBM=Good because they sell Linux products".
Best company I ever worked for: SAS Institute in Cary, NC.
I can honestly tell you that if you spend a lot of time in places with decent wi-fi, then you are definitely in the minority. The vast majority of the US has zero wi-fi, but cell phone service is pretty damned widespread. I don't live in a major city, but I can't remember the last time I found a cell phone dead zone. In contrast, I quite literally know of 1/4 of one city block where there's wi-fi (I don't use wi-fi at home because it's just too damn slow and unreliable compared to good ol' ethernet). This to me sounds like a version of "going around your asshole to get to your elbow". But hey, whatever floats your boat. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me.
Wow! How revolutionary! A phone that doesn't need wires, that you can use almost anywhere, that doesn't have long distance charges! Honestly, who cares if it's VOIP? People still complain about quality of regular cell service. I can't imagine VOIP over 802.11x. It brings new meaning to, "Can you hear me now?"
That's kinda' like geeks who buy a powerful PC with a video card so that they can watch TV on their PC's.
Oh, and there are many many college students that have no interest whatsoever in working at Microsoft (because they have a conscience).
You forgot to mention the fact that they're also naive as hell, too. There are few grown-ups in this day & age that would turn down a Microsoft job. Times are tough, and only the wealthy (in both time and money) can afford to have a conscience.
And if you think that IBM is a shiny, happy company, then I've got a story to tell you about when I worked there about 10 years ago and had to ask to go to the bathroom.
PHP book reviews! Considering that there seems to be about 1-2 week, it would be a pretty good size topic.
You can buy a Mac Mini for $499. So... what high cost of entry?
Actually, I just got a nice thrift shop machine for $50 that has specs almost identical than the Mac Mini, and I don't have to run out to buy a fancy USB keyboard, USB mouse, an expensive monitor with that newer plug, and all new software. Oh yeah, and Windows 2000 still outperforms OSX by a mile on similar hardware. The basic Mac Mini would have to cost $200 for me to be willing to try it.
They're saying, write something we don't like, and we'll stop talking to you.
You mean like the US presidential administration not only refusing to talk to intelligent news sources and not allowing dissenting citizens from getting anywhere near the president? If the US gov't can do it and get away with it with no repurcussions, I see nothing wrong with Google doing the same. In this case, ZDNet did act with little to more journalistic integrity, and they continue their ridiculously childish behavior with this press release.
When you have billions you can be really generous with millions.
And what percentage of your income, pray tell, do you give to charity? C'mon, big spender. We want to know.
The parent poster didn't mention whether or not they've been around for a while. He said that they won't make money. Last I checked, Debian and FreeBSD don't make money. Hell, does either group actually employ a single person?
I did something similar for a warehouse system using one of those hand held scanner thingies. The ones they were using were ancient, and had no documentation. I had to reverse-engineer. I can tell you that as far as point-of-scale barcode scanners go, the vast majority simply go through the PS2 keyboard port, and send the equivalent of the numbers typed out, with a carriage return at the end. But credit card swipes are different, as are receipt printers, and pole displays, and like you mentioned, scales, etc.
Staples and CompUSA are major, multi-billion dollar international corporations. Right tool for the right job, buddy. It doesn't exactly make sense to spend more on an accounting package than the total value of the business.
May I hazard a guess that you mostly worked with large corporations with significant IT investment in a given database platform (or the availability of any major DB platform)?
You got it... Big projects... I converted the USPS' main inventory management system from greenscreen to RDBMS. Same thing with NC's medicare billing system, etc. Even on smaller projects I worked on, there was already a committment to a major database (usually Oracle, sometimes MS-SQL). But in all cases, there was such a vast amount of data (usually in terrabytes), or such a massive amount of stored procs that switching databases would be a *major* deal. Never created a app on my own (sounds like a PITA), but yeah, that seems like one place where portability would be helpful, too.
Still, why would a company say "We're using MS-SQL now, we'll move to something else later"? Were they not using a licensed copy (financial investment)? Were they just really new, and using a trial copy (no real code written against it)? Or maybe they were smaller/low activity databases that really could be switched out without much of a concern for performance? Hell, even in that last case, you've still got the installation, the configuration, the maintenance procedures, etc. that would have to be changed. I dunno. Sounds strange to me. Sounds to me like somebody trying to build a car around a 4 cylinder engine, with the possiblity of dropping a 8 cylinder into it later. I've always been taught (and seen in practice) that the FIRST thing that any company does with any kind of technological assets does is to choose a database, and build their business around it. Hell, I'd imagine that even changing server OS's would be less of a disruption than ripping out one database in favor of another.