But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Even if they had, they're in a typical dilemma:
Let's assume that response rates would go up. Let's even say it's a simple linear factor of 2, i.e. halving spam would quadruple the response rate, and vice versa.
Let's say spam today is at what we define 1.
You are spammer A. You currently churn out 1 mio. spam a day and have a response rate of 1 ppm, i.e. 1 per day. You know that if spam globally would drop to 0.5, response rates would rise to 4 ppm, so you would get your 1 response with only 0.25 mio. However, with 1 mio. you'd get 4 replies! And with 2 mio, you'd get 8! Your (local) choice would be clear: More spam.
Let's assume everyone does that. Spam rises to 2 and response rates drop to 0.25 ppm. So for your 2 mio spams you only get a response every other day. If you lower your spam level, you'll get even less. But by doubling again, you will get back to your initial level of 1 response per day. Again, your choice is obvious.
This, btw., is a very well-known problem of cooperation. Unless everyone in the system works together, you cannot realize the profits of reduced activity. On the contrary, doing what's good for you individually/locally drags the whole system down a slippery slope, but you can't do the "right thing", because it is a stupid local choice.
There are a few simple games made by the UN to teach this to the world leaders and their UN representatives. I'm not kidding you, they're (sometimes) playing games at the UN, because many people don't "get" this and similiar problems without experiencing them. I've played a few of these games, it is revealing to realize mid-game that the only way for you to win is to cooperate with your "enemy", so that both of you win.
Patching is dead. In a world where worms can spread faster than patches, patching is by definition a failed paradigm.
Of course, too much so-called security business depends on the model of adding layer after layer after layer (each layer another product that can be sold) to achieve "security". Whereas security (without quotation marks) is often reached by reducing rather than increasing complexity.
My bet is 18 months or less before a worm uses some exploit in an anti-virus or anti-worm software to propagate.
Had to write this, because it hurts to see so many people get a small, but important difference wrong:
M$ is not losing money on every xbox sold. They lost the money when it was produced. They really have maximum incentive to sell whatever they already made, in order to make at least some of the money back. Millions of the things are still sitting in stores and warehouses, and it's not exactly a PS2-on-launch situation where they are pretty much guaranteed sales. As a matter of fact, many of them will be returned, costing M$ even more $$$.
Pushing xbox2 out before most of the xboxes are sold will only make it worse.
Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
Yes, yes and yes. For both systems, if it supports your hardware out-of-the box, it's pretty much painless nowadays. If your hardware is not supported, you're out of luck in both cases. In Linux you hunt down the drivers, compile, recompile, load modules, etc. in windos you hunt down the drivers, find they don't work, hunt down another version, find out they suck, load down a third, find them acceptable but unstable, etc.
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks?
It really is more secure. Sorry, professional bias (I'm employed as a security dude.)
Nevertheless, to paraphrase Scott Culp (an M$ dude, ironically), stupid admins trump secure systems.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
Perhaps if they did, they might just realise how much their productivity increases. Being able to use tab completion, seeing all members of a class/struct as you type, little wavy lines under invalid variables (with addins), being able to just place a breakpoint anywhere in their code as they are typing etc etc etc
That's unbelievable! What an invention! Quick, let's find a cool name for it... how about "Integrated Development Environment", sounds really great, doesn't it? Oh, wait, IDE is already taken for some hardware thingy. Damn...
and youve got yourself an environment that is very highly unlikely to be replicated under a free OS simply due to the time and effort and research and money required to build such a thing.
You mean eclipse doesn't really exist outside my imagination?
(Yes, I know it doesn't do some of the things you mention. It does, however, do about a hundred other things that VS can't and never will, like properly interfacing with other non-proprietary tools so you're not locked into one tool for life.)
He's right, though. My own transition to Linux was complete on the day I wiped my windos partition many years ago. It was only afterwards that I really noticed some things, and started to wonder why I had put up with the shit for so long.
a) Habit. After 5 years of exclusive Linux useage, I'm just so used to it that I have trouble using a windos system when I have to (at work, friends, etc.) - I'm always looking for my shortcuts, the windowmaker dock and I try to middle-mouse-button-paste all the time.
b) (closely related) Tools On Linux, I have all the tools I need to work efficiently. I have found the text editor, window manager and mail program of my choice and customized them to my needs. None of them exist on windos.
c) Ethics Supporting Microsoft in any way is supporting a convicted criminal. Since it also is a crime that I care about, I just don't think it's the right thing to do.
d) Security Doh. I'm a security dude (both at work and privately), so that one is obvious. Yes, windos systems can be locked down pretty good. However, almost no windos admin has the required skills or experience. For all I know, it also is so badly designed that the lack of security is a fundamental problem, not one of implementation details and bugs.
e) Privacy Thank you, Mr. Gates, but I do believe that what is on my computer is actually mine, and that I am the one in charge of my private and personal data, and unless I want it given away, no software has any business doing so.
f) Better Living through Linux It really makes my life easier and less stressful. I've never lost a major document because Word fucked it up, and I've never had a total system crash. I never had to clean up a virus-infected system and I don't have to worry every time I go online whether or not my virus scanner has the patterns for the latest worm already. Also, I don't have to play cheap tech support for all my friends all the time. For those who want a serious hint, I tell them to use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. So far, most of them were glad they switched.
Actually, the look of things is about the only thing that even total idiots do change about their computers.
Many, many thousands of machines out there run without having ever been update since install, with every service under the sun enabled, and probably with the default passwords still in place. However, these same machines have custom backgrounds, colour cursors, sound effects and a dozen screensavers.
Skins are big with people who don't know how to change the Start menu and believe Linux must be a windos program, because how can something run on a computer if it isn't a windos program?
Are you people seriously telling me, that a suitable punishment for spamming is being fucked up the arse?
No, it's not suitable, but all the suitable punishments involve technology of pain induction that hasn't yet been developed, so for the moment it'll do.
Entire companies whose anti-spam products are sold at substantial profit to businesses would go out of business forcing them to lay off their employees.
True, but their profits don't come out of thin air. Other companies could pay for more employees if their costs for anti-spam, anti-virus, etc. software weren't as high as they are. Add the costs for bandwidth (almost never free for companies), wasted time, annoyance (which results in lower productivity) etc. - then do the math.
I'm sure your result will show that without spam, the economy as a whole is better off than with.
Truly random shuffle sucks, especially if you have a large mp3/ogg library that does contain music you don't really like (e.g. it's a library shared with roommate/wife/etc) or you only like for some occasions, or has a great variety of moods. Nothing fries your brain as much as speed metal following a slow, sensual classical song.
There are a lot of tools now that improve on random shuffling. One I can recommend is imms, an add-on to xmms. It improves random shuffling by adding a "preference memory". Songs you manually select from the playlist get scored higher, songs you skip get scored lower, etc. - at first it's random. After a while, the stuff you like comes up more often, but there's always a chance for some of the "class B" stuff also getting played.
Unless that company is a very, very odd company, the job of the sysadmin is roughly:
1. keep the system up and running 2. make backups and stuff 3. keep the system up and running 4. make sure the performance is ok 5. keep the system up and running 6. do any other odd stuff you feel is necessary, like, uh, security or whatever it's called
I've been sysadmin for years, for 3 different companies. Nobody outside the tech circles every seriously cared about security. Unless there was a recent break-in, then every manager was a total security fan (and oddly always had been and he had told you a hundred times...) for about the next 3 days or so, depending on the severity of the compromise.
Trust me: Nobody reads 99% of the logfiles. The other 1% are either exceptional companies or bored sysadmins.
If votes are counted manually, you need human volunteers to do it. Both the number of voters and the number of potential volunteers are in direct relation to the number of people interested in the election. Thus, they scale up very nicely and it doesn't matter the least whether you vote in your 150 people backwater village or your 20 mio. metropolis.
The point is, if you only have to count one vote per ballot it's easy to do by hand, if you have to count 10 or 20 votes per ballot, things get more complicated.
Humans are much more adaptable than you give them credit for.
I just helped counting in an election with 11 votes per ballot last week. I dare to say that the error margin was smaller (in the 1% area) than any of the "e-voting" (e for electronic or for error?) machines discussed so far, and the counting was done entirely by untrained volunteers with little or no prior experience.
I think that it's a terribly damning sign that Slashdot generally condemns e-voting.
When the people who know a technology best scream that it should not be used for a specific purpose - don't you think they should be listened to?
I use computers for lots of purposes that other people use pen and paper or other "mundane" means for. I also refuse to use computers for certain purposes, because I know (maybe better than my neighbour) that in this are, a pen and a piece of paper will be better.
Like all things, there's a place and a time. Voting is not something I would want to be done by computer technology before it matures significantly, say 100 years in the future.
I have (16k hits/min during the business day). Something like 750 hits per day is well below the line noise threshold for any large site. Unless you look for patterns like that intentionally, you'll never notice.
In your SCO-is-Vader cosmology, who's Jar Jar Binks?/. - always rambling on and on and largely ignored by everyone who counts, except for the few random insights that statistically a large enough amount of rambling is guaranteed to produce.
In reaction, the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has called for a boycott: German Page
This banner with the motto "Industry kills Music" is especially nice. The german text at the bottom translates to "And you are surprised that things are going badly?" and was part of a recent speech at a german music price ceremony where except for one indie band only badly casted, out-of-TV and largely joke-"stars" were on stage. Oh, and the big bosses of the german music industry were present. According to news articles, they didn't exactly like being told the truth so bluntly and on live television...
Slashdot Mirror
But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Even if they had, they're in a typical dilemma:
Let's assume that response rates would go up. Let's even say it's a simple linear factor of 2, i.e. halving spam would quadruple the response rate, and vice versa.
Let's say spam today is at what we define 1.
You are spammer A. You currently churn out 1 mio. spam a day and have a response rate of 1 ppm, i.e. 1 per day.
You know that if spam globally would drop to 0.5, response rates would rise to 4 ppm, so you would get your 1 response with only 0.25 mio. However, with 1 mio. you'd get 4 replies! And with 2 mio, you'd get 8!
Your (local) choice would be clear: More spam.
Let's assume everyone does that. Spam rises to 2 and response rates drop to 0.25 ppm. So for your 2 mio spams you only get a response every other day. If you lower your spam level, you'll get even less. But by doubling again, you will get back to your initial level of 1 response per day. Again, your choice is obvious.
This, btw., is a very well-known problem of cooperation. Unless everyone in the system works together, you cannot realize the profits of reduced activity. On the contrary, doing what's good for you individually/locally drags the whole system down a slippery slope, but you can't do the "right thing", because it is a stupid local choice.
There are a few simple games made by the UN to teach this to the world leaders and their UN representatives. I'm not kidding you, they're (sometimes) playing games at the UN, because many people don't "get" this and similiar problems without experiencing them. I've played a few of these games, it is revealing to realize mid-game that the only way for you to win is to cooperate with your "enemy", so that both of you win.
9.5 for style, 0 for content.
Patching is dead. In a world where worms can spread faster than patches, patching is by definition a failed paradigm.
Of course, too much so-called security business depends on the model of adding layer after layer after layer (each layer another product that can be sold) to achieve "security". Whereas security (without quotation marks) is often reached by reducing rather than increasing complexity.
My bet is 18 months or less before a worm uses some exploit in an anti-virus or anti-worm software to propagate.
In what court were you personally sued?
SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
COUNTY OF SANTA CLARA
CV - 786804
On Wednesday, December 29, 1999
You can find my name in the court papers, if you care.
Had to write this, because it hurts to see so many people get a small, but important difference wrong:
M$ is not losing money on every xbox sold. They lost the money when it was produced. They really have maximum incentive to sell whatever they already made, in order to make at least some of the money back. Millions of the things are still sitting in stores and warehouses, and it's not exactly a PS2-on-launch situation where they are pretty much guaranteed sales. As a matter of fact, many of them will be returned, costing M$ even more $$$.
Pushing xbox2 out before most of the xboxes are sold will only make it worse.
One word to all you holier-than-thou USians: DeCSS.
I live in Germany.
I was sued over DeCSS in the USofA.
I was never sued, nor even questioned over DeCSS in Germany.
For me, the question on which country has more free speech has been answered.
Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
Yes, yes and yes.
For both systems, if it supports your hardware out-of-the box, it's pretty much painless nowadays. If your hardware is not supported, you're out of luck in both cases. In Linux you hunt down the drivers, compile, recompile, load modules, etc. in windos you hunt down the drivers, find they don't work, hunt down another version, find out they suck, load down a third, find them acceptable but unstable, etc.
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks?
It really is more secure. Sorry, professional bias (I'm employed as a security dude.)
Nevertheless, to paraphrase Scott Culp (an M$ dude, ironically), stupid admins trump secure systems.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
I don't do business with convicted criminals.
Perhaps if they did, they might just realise how much their productivity increases. Being able to use tab completion, seeing all members of a class/struct as you type, little wavy lines under invalid variables (with addins), being able to just place a breakpoint anywhere in their code as they are typing etc etc etc
That's unbelievable! What an invention! Quick, let's find a cool name for it... how about "Integrated Development Environment", sounds really great, doesn't it? Oh, wait, IDE is already taken for some hardware thingy. Damn...
and youve got yourself an environment that is very highly unlikely to be replicated under a free OS simply due to the time and effort and research and money required to build such a thing.
You mean eclipse doesn't really exist outside my imagination?
(Yes, I know it doesn't do some of the things you mention. It does, however, do about a hundred other things that VS can't and never will, like properly interfacing with other non-proprietary tools so you're not locked into one tool for life.)
He's right, though. My own transition to Linux was complete on the day I wiped my windos partition many years ago. It was only afterwards that I really noticed some things, and started to wonder why I had put up with the shit for so long.
Rule #1: Spammers lie
You believe a single word he says, I have an almost unused bridge for sale.
So how much is the fee for doing "grep TODO *.php"?
a) Habit.
After 5 years of exclusive Linux useage, I'm just so used to it that I have trouble using a windos system when I have to (at work, friends, etc.) - I'm always looking for my shortcuts, the windowmaker dock and I try to middle-mouse-button-paste all the time.
b) (closely related) Tools
On Linux, I have all the tools I need to work efficiently. I have found the text editor, window manager and mail program of my choice and customized them to my needs. None of them exist on windos.
c) Ethics
Supporting Microsoft in any way is supporting a convicted criminal. Since it also is a crime that I care about, I just don't think it's the right thing to do.
d) Security
Doh. I'm a security dude (both at work and privately), so that one is obvious. Yes, windos systems can be locked down pretty good. However, almost no windos admin has the required skills or experience. For all I know, it also is so badly designed that the lack of security is a fundamental problem, not one of implementation details and bugs.
e) Privacy
Thank you, Mr. Gates, but I do believe that what is on my computer is actually mine, and that I am the one in charge of my private and personal data, and unless I want it given away, no software has any business doing so.
f) Better Living through Linux
It really makes my life easier and less stressful. I've never lost a major document because Word fucked it up, and I've never had a total system crash. I never had to clean up a virus-infected system and I don't have to worry every time I go online whether or not my virus scanner has the patterns for the latest worm already.
Also, I don't have to play cheap tech support for all my friends all the time. For those who want a serious hint, I tell them to use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. So far, most of them were glad they switched.
which I thought was physically impossible.
It's called "software". You can't see it, but it runs on the big heater-thing you have in the corner, the one hooked up to that weird TV on the desk.
I know I could link up palm pilot to my cellular via infrared and send SMS directly from the PDA. That was 8 years ago.
Actually, the look of things is about the only thing that even total idiots do change about their computers.
Many, many thousands of machines out there run without having ever been update since install, with every service under the sun enabled, and probably with the default passwords still in place. However, these same machines have custom backgrounds, colour cursors, sound effects and a dozen screensavers.
Skins are big with people who don't know how to change the Start menu and believe Linux must be a windos program, because how can something run on a computer if it isn't a windos program?
Are you people seriously telling me, that a suitable punishment for spamming is being fucked up the arse?
No, it's not suitable, but all the suitable punishments involve technology of pain induction that hasn't yet been developed, so for the moment it'll do.
Entire companies whose anti-spam products are sold at substantial profit to businesses would go out of business forcing them to lay off their employees.
True, but their profits don't come out of thin air. Other companies could pay for more employees if their costs for anti-spam, anti-virus, etc. software weren't as high as they are. Add the costs for bandwidth (almost never free for companies), wasted time, annoyance (which results in lower productivity) etc. - then do the math.
I'm sure your result will show that without spam, the economy as a whole is better off than with.
If SCO goes bankrupt, this (I assume) goes in a legal round file somewhere.
Yes, but it also is a major opportunity for us go generate some FUD. Something like:
Mess with Linux, go bancrupt.
Would certainly make the next taker think twice.
Any more recent examples, please?
Alice Cooper "The Last Temptation" (1994)
David Bowie "1.Outside" (1995)
There's a couple more recent ones outside the mainstream as well, but these are the most recent "popular music" ones I know.
Truly random shuffle sucks, especially if you have a large mp3/ogg library that does contain music you don't really like (e.g. it's a library shared with roommate/wife/etc) or you only like for some occasions, or has a great variety of moods. Nothing fries your brain as much as speed metal following a slow, sensual classical song.
There are a lot of tools now that improve on random shuffling. One I can recommend is imms, an add-on to xmms.
It improves random shuffling by adding a "preference memory". Songs you manually select from the playlist get scored higher, songs you skip get scored lower, etc. - at first it's random. After a while, the stuff you like comes up more often, but there's always a chance for some of the "class B" stuff also getting played.
Very cool
What, exactly, is your job again, sir?
Unless that company is a very, very odd company, the job of the sysadmin is roughly:
1. keep the system up and running
2. make backups and stuff
3. keep the system up and running
4. make sure the performance is ok
5. keep the system up and running
6. do any other odd stuff you feel is necessary, like, uh, security or whatever it's called
I've been sysadmin for years, for 3 different companies. Nobody outside the tech circles every seriously cared about security. Unless there was a recent break-in, then every manager was a total security fan (and oddly always had been and he had told you a hundred times...) for about the next 3 days or so, depending on the severity of the compromise.
Trust me: Nobody reads 99% of the logfiles. The other 1% are either exceptional companies or bored sysadmins.
You are proving what exactly?
If votes are counted manually, you need human volunteers to do it.
Both the number of voters and the number of potential volunteers are in direct relation to the number of people interested in the election. Thus, they scale up very nicely and it doesn't matter the least whether you vote in your 150 people backwater village or your 20 mio. metropolis.
Your point was?
The point is, if you only have to count one vote per ballot it's easy to do by hand, if you have to count 10 or 20 votes per ballot, things get more complicated.
Humans are much more adaptable than you give them credit for.
I just helped counting in an election with 11 votes per ballot last week. I dare to say that the error margin was smaller (in the 1% area) than any of the "e-voting" (e for electronic or for error?) machines discussed so far, and the counting was done entirely by untrained volunteers with little or no prior experience.
I think that it's a terribly damning sign that Slashdot generally condemns e-voting.
When the people who know a technology best scream that it should not be used for a specific purpose - don't you think they should be listened to?
I use computers for lots of purposes that other people use pen and paper or other "mundane" means for.
I also refuse to use computers for certain purposes, because I know (maybe better than my neighbour) that in this are, a pen and a piece of paper will be better.
Like all things, there's a place and a time. Voting is not something I would want to be done by computer technology before it matures significantly, say 100 years in the future.
You've never admin'ed a major site, have you?
I have (16k hits/min during the business day). Something like 750 hits per day is well below the line noise threshold for any large site. Unless you look for patterns like that intentionally, you'll never notice.
In your SCO-is-Vader cosmology, who's Jar Jar Binks? /. - always rambling on and on and largely ignored by everyone who counts, except for the few random insights that statistically a large enough amount of rambling is guaranteed to produce.
In reaction, the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has called for a boycott: German Page
This banner with the motto "Industry kills Music" is especially nice. The german text at the bottom translates to "And you are surprised that things are going badly?" and was part of a recent speech at a german music price ceremony where except for one indie band only badly casted, out-of-TV and largely joke-"stars" were on stage.
Oh, and the big bosses of the german music industry were present. According to news articles, they didn't exactly like being told the truth so bluntly and on live television...