I've run both Spamassassin and Spambouncer. For the curious, I prefer Spamassassin, and here's why.
I was very impressed with Spambouncer. It was the first spam-heuristic system that I'd used (previously, I'd relied solely on MAPS, ORBS, ORDB, RBL, etc.), and I was very impressed. I found that it rejected a lot of legitimate mail until I grepped my "Sent Items" folder, extracted every "To" field and made that my white list. (The assumption being that if I've e-mailed somebody, I don't mind hearing from them.) That worked very well, and I was happy with Spamassassin. The odd piece of spam would get through, and I still had 1:100 legitimate messages get put in my spam folder. But it made my life much simpler.
Then I tried Spamassassin. The big reason was because I wanted to take part in Razor and know that I was a part of a collaborative process. Also, Spambouncer hadn't been updated in months, which struck me as odd. But I also just wanted to try something different. I found that Spamassassin was better. Not in a way that made Spambouncer look bad, it was just clear that Spamassassin was a superior product. For example, Spamassassin provides a complete scoring in the headers, so you know exactly what criteria caused the message to be block. And I never had to set up a whitelist -- it just works. I still get that tiny little bit of spam that gets through, no more or less than with Spambouncer, but that's really not a complaint. It's very, very rare that a legitimate piece of mail gets caught up in the system. Best of all, the nonexistent addresses on my system that spammers have somehow discovered (big@waldo.net, aldo@waldo.net) can be forwarded via my aliases table to Spamassassin's (Or is it Razor's? I forget.) server to be automatically added to their honeypot collection.
I'll stick with Spamassassin, I think. It appears to be the most mature, stable, simple, straightforward spam filtering product available today. For those looking to set up server-side spam filtering, I highly recommend it.
How many people will MEETUP? We guess that there will be 4-12 people at a MEETUP. We will try to let you know how many people to expect at your MEETUP.
What if there aren't enough people for a MEETUP? We cancel MEETUPs with less than 5 people signed-up.
Hmm...so what if one of them is an Anonymous Coward?
How one can feel companionship from complete strangers that you have never met, will most likely never meet; and will furthermore most likely never want to associate with in real life is beyond logical comprehension.
You must be new here. By "here," I mean "the Internet" and possibly "the world."
Have you never been a part of a physical gathering of members of an on-line community? I've been to a half dozen since 1994, and they've been uniformly fantastic. That's the most common reaction to such events. You should try attending one. They're really great.
"A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution."
Yay. Thank you very much, I appreciate that. Looks like Wired did our homework for us.:)
As long as I'm posting, I'd like to point out how funny it is that somebody moderated my originial post as "Flamebait." There needs to be some sort of an IQ test before people are allowed to moderate.: )
I'm sorry to be a party-pooper, but where's the evidence that they take money from Microsoft? The ZDNet article says nothing about that, and the talkback comments (at least the few dozen that I read) provide no evidence along those lines, either. The Register says that Richard Smith says that they take money from Microsoft, though they present no evidence along those lines. Smith's a cool guy and all, and he's got a good track record, but I'm going to need a little more than a second-hand non-credited reference to believe this.
I did a little poking around and a little Googling, but was unable to come up with any evidence on my own.
I don't travel much. I stay in a hotel perhaps as much as 4-6 nights a year. But every single time, I shop around to find a hotel that has broadband in the rooms. Sometimes I pay extra to get a room with broadband, sometimes they say that the whole place does. (I've been doing this since 1996, BTW.) And not once -- not a single time -- have I had Internet access from my room. Big hotel chains, local joints, cheap and expensive...they're all the same. They claim to have Internet access and either a) don't have it, b) it's broken or c) they don't know how it works. b) is the worst. I once had a hotel tell me that for help I had to call some toll-free support number that told me, friendly-like, that I should expect a wait of 180 minutes for support.
Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned, broadband in hotels is a myth. I'm ready to throw in the towel and get an Earthlink account and buy a modem.
As much as we English loving types had no use for real names, it was a viable way for Asian countries to use their own characters for DNS entries. It had a chance of being a standard.
You can also eat your own excrement - but you choose not to do so. What is your point, Einstein?
This is so obvious that I can't believe that I have to explain it. RMS has set up a false dilemma: that either Linus has to stop using Bitkeeper or else the FSF can't have anything to do with the kernel. In fact, there is a third option: they could use Bitkeeper. This is a fallacy of distraction intended to make it appear that the FSF's hands are tied, when in fact they're not.
Remember that this isn't a regular movie theater -- this is a fancy one, with tables and dinner being served and stuff. So there's got to be enough light to eat, people will be doing things like passing salt, getting up for fresh drinks, etc. A laptop isn't as grossly out of place as you might normally expect it to be.
Am I the only one that remembers the late-1998 ShuttleGNU / LinShuttle project/joke? I can find very few references to it anymore, and the original page is long gone, unfortunately. The basic premise was that a Russian shuttle was up for auction, and a project was being started to write all of the software necessary to control it -- it would be the first open-source space mission. At least, that was the story.:)
So, hey, who wants to start the GnuShuttle project on SourceForge?:)
I just tried it -- it's for shit. It made my Wall Street PB's screen all blinky and slow. I don't doubt it's good on some systems, but it's not so hot on mine.
What I would really like is a PC inside of a Power Mac case. Starting with the G3 Yosemites, Apple's cases got incredibly sexy. I'd been laboring under the impression that cases of the same quality as the Power Mac could be purchased, but after I dropped $100 on my first PC case a couple of months ago, I've learned that even some of the nicer ones are for shit compared to Apple's near-perfect Power Mac case.
Has anybody managed to convert a PowerMac case into a case accepting any standard-sized PC motherboard and related internal parts? This PC inside of an LC is kind of neat, but what we all really want is a Power Mac case.:)
In the first 100 words of this piece we have the phrase "And we were like: this just ain't right.".
You ain't from these parts, are you? Nat's a southern fella', from Virginia. I suggest you stay up north. You come down here talking like that and you won't get far. Sounds to me like you're all hat and no cattle.
Which netboot were you using? the potato one? download the woody netinst CD iso if you were - that should work fine.
Um...I don't know. I just followed the download link. Ah, here it is: Potato. Odd, the Debian site just gives two links, as if they were mirrors, so I just picked one at random. It looks like the first one is Woody.
It's too bad that the installer doesn't have the sort of information as you have so kindly provided me with. (ie: This installer is "Potato," which installs a version of Debian from [I'm making this up] July of 2000. If this is significantly after July of 2000, you would do well to go to http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and get the newest version.) And then the website could give some sort of useful information as to the difference between a root (or is it a tuber?) and the main character from Toy Story.
would you rather have a warning that suggests 18 things for you to do that *might* fix your problem? i'm sure the error exactly what was going wrong, and most importantly, nothing more and nothing less....
That would have been great, yes. The error told me, simply, that the hard drive was not recognized and that the NIC was not recognized. No suggestions for alternative approaches, where to get a driver to add to the CD, suggestions for different boot methods or LILO parameters to describe the drive geometry... Just a "sucks to be you" message.
The difference between the two is simple: Debian tells me what I've done that's wrong. Mandrake tells me what to do that will be right. And that's the difference between Debian and a user-friendly installer.
I built a new computer on Saturday, and I'd hoped to finally make the switch to Debian. Starting in 1994, I was a Slackware kind of guy. Somewhere in there I made the Red Hat transition. Starting about 8 months ago, I switched to Mandrake. Saturday, I was going to switch to Debian.
At least, that was the idea. The installer was less than descriptive. It failed to recognize my IBM Deskstar 40GB on a Promise RAID IDE controller -- both parts that are reportedly fine. At least, I think that it failed -- the error message was brief and undescriptive, without further recourse or details available. No problem, I thought, I'll do a net install. No such luck: it wouldn't recognize my 3Com Fast Etherlink. Not exactly a crazy off-brand of NIC. Not having any way to dump the terse error messages to a file, I did my best to memorize/scrawl the messages and Google for them, but that yielded no useful results.
With another installer (well, not Slack:), I would have tried a different class of installation, been given a more helpful error message...something. I can appreciate the concept of Debian being less-than-user-friendly. I can see how some people would like the inaccessibilty, to keep out the riff-raff. Maybe, on the basis of the fact that I couldn't properly work the installer, I am the riff-raff.
But, hey, Mandrake sure does work nice on this shiny new system.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, kiddies: .cc is wholly-owned by Clear Channel Entertainment. And we all know that they're evil now, don't we?
If not, get thee to ClearChannelSucks.org.
-Waldo Jaquith
What about for the apathetic?
For them, I prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
-Waldo Jaquith
I had exactly the same idea for how to do this (with distributed signature databases) in '93 when I started a well known ISP.
i z_pangrac.htm
http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/020318/020319_b
-Waldo Jaquith
I've run both Spamassassin and Spambouncer. For the curious, I prefer Spamassassin, and here's why.
I was very impressed with Spambouncer. It was the first spam-heuristic system that I'd used (previously, I'd relied solely on MAPS, ORBS, ORDB, RBL, etc.), and I was very impressed. I found that it rejected a lot of legitimate mail until I grepped my "Sent Items" folder, extracted every "To" field and made that my white list. (The assumption being that if I've e-mailed somebody, I don't mind hearing from them.) That worked very well, and I was happy with Spamassassin. The odd piece of spam would get through, and I still had 1:100 legitimate messages get put in my spam folder. But it made my life much simpler.
Then I tried Spamassassin. The big reason was because I wanted to take part in Razor and know that I was a part of a collaborative process. Also, Spambouncer hadn't been updated in months, which struck me as odd. But I also just wanted to try something different. I found that Spamassassin was better. Not in a way that made Spambouncer look bad, it was just clear that Spamassassin was a superior product. For example, Spamassassin provides a complete scoring in the headers, so you know exactly what criteria caused the message to be block. And I never had to set up a whitelist -- it just works. I still get that tiny little bit of spam that gets through, no more or less than with Spambouncer, but that's really not a complaint. It's very, very rare that a legitimate piece of mail gets caught up in the system. Best of all, the nonexistent addresses on my system that spammers have somehow discovered (big@waldo.net, aldo@waldo.net) can be forwarded via my aliases table to Spamassassin's (Or is it Razor's? I forget.) server to be automatically added to their honeypot collection.
I'll stick with Spamassassin, I think. It appears to be the most mature, stable, simple, straightforward spam filtering product available today. For those looking to set up server-side spam filtering, I highly recommend it.
-Waldo Jaquith
-Waldo Jaquith
How one can feel companionship from complete strangers that you have never met, will most likely never meet; and will furthermore most likely never want to associate with in real life is beyond logical comprehension.
You must be new here. By "here," I mean "the Internet" and possibly "the world."
Have you never been a part of a physical gathering of members of an on-line community? I've been to a half dozen since 1994, and they've been uniformly fantastic. That's the most common reaction to such events. You should try attending one. They're really great.
-Waldo Jaquith
"A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution."
:)
Yay. Thank you very much, I appreciate that. Looks like Wired did our homework for us.
As long as I'm posting, I'd like to point out how funny it is that somebody moderated my originial post as "Flamebait." There needs to be some sort of an IQ test before people are allowed to moderate.: )
-Waldo Jaquith
I'm sorry to be a party-pooper, but where's the evidence that they take money from Microsoft? The ZDNet article says nothing about that, and the talkback comments (at least the few dozen that I read) provide no evidence along those lines, either. The Register says that Richard Smith says that they take money from Microsoft, though they present no evidence along those lines. Smith's a cool guy and all, and he's got a good track record, but I'm going to need a little more than a second-hand non-credited reference to believe this.
I did a little poking around and a little Googling, but was unable to come up with any evidence on my own.
So, please, could somebody enlighten me?
-Waldo Jaquith
I don't travel much. I stay in a hotel perhaps as much as 4-6 nights a year. But every single time, I shop around to find a hotel that has broadband in the rooms. Sometimes I pay extra to get a room with broadband, sometimes they say that the whole place does. (I've been doing this since 1996, BTW.) And not once -- not a single time -- have I had Internet access from my room. Big hotel chains, local joints, cheap and expensive...they're all the same. They claim to have Internet access and either a) don't have it, b) it's broken or c) they don't know how it works. b) is the worst. I once had a hotel tell me that for help I had to call some toll-free support number that told me, friendly-like, that I should expect a wait of 180 minutes for support.
Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned, broadband in hotels is a myth. I'm ready to throw in the towel and get an Earthlink account and buy a modem.
-Waldo Jaquith
As much as we English loving types had no use for real names, it was a viable way for Asian countries to use their own characters for DNS entries. It had a chance of being a standard.
Speaking of standards...
The IETF Internationalized Domain Names Working Group
IBM On Unicode Domain Names
Slashdot: Why Unicode will Work on the Internet
Verisign's Internationalized Domain Name Testbed
-Waldo Jaquith
You can also eat your own excrement - but you choose not to do so. What is your point, Einstein?
This is so obvious that I can't believe that I have to explain it. RMS has set up a false dilemma: that either Linus has to stop using Bitkeeper or else the FSF can't have anything to do with the kernel. In fact, there is a third option: they could use Bitkeeper. This is a fallacy of distraction intended to make it appear that the FSF's hands are tied, when in fact they're not.
-Waldo Jaquith
RMS wrote:
The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines.
Yes they can. They just choose not to. What RMS meant to say was that the FSF is not willing to do this.
-Waldo Jaquith
Remember that this isn't a regular movie theater -- this is a fancy one, with tables and dinner being served and stuff. So there's got to be enough light to eat, people will be doing things like passing salt, getting up for fresh drinks, etc. A laptop isn't as grossly out of place as you might normally expect it to be.
-Waldo Jaquith
Exactly how is a cordless phone battery life of any importance? News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters?
Some fool posts this "how is this news for nerds?" reply to every story, and has done so for years. Do shut up and go away.
-Waldo Jaquith
Am I the only one that remembers the late-1998 ShuttleGNU / LinShuttle project/joke? I can find very few references to it anymore, and the original page is long gone, unfortunately. The basic premise was that a Russian shuttle was up for auction, and a project was being started to write all of the software necessary to control it -- it would be the first open-source space mission. At least, that was the story. :)
:)
So, hey, who wants to start the GnuShuttle project on SourceForge?
-Waldo Jaquith
I just tried it -- it's for shit. It made my Wall Street PB's screen all blinky and slow. I don't doubt it's good on some systems, but it's not so hot on mine.
-Waldo Jaquith
You might want to rethink that new Mac OS 9 category, then, huh?
:)
-Waldo Jaquith
Yeah, and after I got that coupon in the paper for a free Snickers bar, I started stealing candy bars from the grocery store.
-Waldo Jaquith
What I would really like is a PC inside of a Power Mac case. Starting with the G3 Yosemites, Apple's cases got incredibly sexy. I'd been laboring under the impression that cases of the same quality as the Power Mac could be purchased, but after I dropped $100 on my first PC case a couple of months ago, I've learned that even some of the nicer ones are for shit compared to Apple's near-perfect Power Mac case.
:)
Has anybody managed to convert a PowerMac case into a case accepting any standard-sized PC motherboard and related internal parts? This PC inside of an LC is kind of neat, but what we all really want is a Power Mac case.
-Waldo Jaquith
In the first 100 words of this piece we have the phrase "And we were like: this just ain't right.".
You ain't from these parts, are you? Nat's a southern fella', from Virginia. I suggest you stay up north. You come down here talking like that and you won't get far. Sounds to me like you're all hat and no cattle.
-Waldo Jaquith
I for one don't want to pay for a service that at is heart is free and should always be free.
Uh...OK. How about we host it on your server?
-Waldo Jaquith
KA-BOOM.
Take that, "Lost" Alamos!
-Waldo Jaquith
Which netboot were you using? the potato one? download the woody netinst CD iso if you were - that should work fine.
Um...I don't know. I just followed the download link. Ah, here it is: Potato. Odd, the Debian site just gives two links, as if they were mirrors, so I just picked one at random. It looks like the first one is Woody.
It's too bad that the installer doesn't have the sort of information as you have so kindly provided me with. (ie: This installer is "Potato," which installs a version of Debian from [I'm making this up] July of 2000. If this is significantly after July of 2000, you would do well to go to http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and get the newest version.) And then the website could give some sort of useful information as to the difference between a root (or is it a tuber?) and the main character from Toy Story.
-Waldo Jaquith
would you rather have a warning that suggests 18 things for you to do that *might* fix your problem? i'm sure the error exactly what was going wrong, and most importantly, nothing more and nothing less....
That would have been great, yes. The error told me, simply, that the hard drive was not recognized and that the NIC was not recognized. No suggestions for alternative approaches, where to get a driver to add to the CD, suggestions for different boot methods or LILO parameters to describe the drive geometry... Just a "sucks to be you" message.
The difference between the two is simple: Debian tells me what I've done that's wrong. Mandrake tells me what to do that will be right. And that's the difference between Debian and a user-friendly installer.
-Waldo Jaquith
Well, this is great to hear.
:), I would have tried a different class of installation, been given a more helpful error message...something. I can appreciate the concept of Debian being less-than-user-friendly. I can see how some people would like the inaccessibilty, to keep out the riff-raff. Maybe, on the basis of the fact that I couldn't properly work the installer, I am the riff-raff.
I built a new computer on Saturday, and I'd hoped to finally make the switch to Debian. Starting in 1994, I was a Slackware kind of guy. Somewhere in there I made the Red Hat transition. Starting about 8 months ago, I switched to Mandrake. Saturday, I was going to switch to Debian.
At least, that was the idea. The installer was less than descriptive. It failed to recognize my IBM Deskstar 40GB on a Promise RAID IDE controller -- both parts that are reportedly fine. At least, I think that it failed -- the error message was brief and undescriptive, without further recourse or details available. No problem, I thought, I'll do a net install. No such luck: it wouldn't recognize my 3Com Fast Etherlink. Not exactly a crazy off-brand of NIC. Not having any way to dump the terse error messages to a file, I did my best to memorize/scrawl the messages and Google for them, but that yielded no useful results.
With another installer (well, not Slack
But, hey, Mandrake sure does work nice on this shiny new system.
-Waldo Jaquith