I run several small community mail servers, and I firewalled off China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan about a year ago. It was the best thing that I ever did for those servers. Spam dropped down drastically, and I'm yet to get a single complaint about somebody not getting mail. Sucks to be in China, I guess, but this is a solution that, for me, has proved to be perfect.
I've hiked the Appalachian Trail carrying a computer with me. Well, actually it was a rotating cast of computers. This was in 1996, so I'm sure that there are better options right now, but the basic structural integrity of laptops doesn't appeal to have changed a great deal since then, at least in my experience. A quick run-down:
Thinkpad: Lasted just over a month. I took it out of my pack in North Carolina and found that it had shattered into thousands of pieces. The screen was responsible for most of the shrapnel, but the butterfly keyboard had pretty much exploded. I have no idea what caused it.
Compaq Aero: IIRC, it snapped in half.
Toshiba Satellite: So damned heavy I nearly threw it off a cliff, but that doesn't count. The case collapsed after some bumps.
Some Army Notebook: Some army contractor had me test out this ruggedized computer. It was an early pen-based laptop, with crude handwriting recognition. It was supposed to be indestructable. By this time I was in northern Maine, in October, and the thing stopped working below about 40 degrees. Needless to say, I didn't get much use out of it. IIRC, the stupid faux-leather-and-plastic case peeled off and the battery door ceased to close.
Apple Newton: The perfect ruggedized computer. I had a keyboard for it. It worked under all conditions, had a battery life of the gods. I kept it in an outside pocket of my pack (for easy accessibility), where it got all kinds of scrapes and bruises. But it was never harmed structurally or in any way had any problems. In fact, I was so convinced of its merits that I bought my very first Apple (horrors!) when I got back from the trail in the fall: a Duo 280c laptop. I've been a Mac user ever since.:)
-Waldo Jaquith
I Changed Steve Oedekerk Show's Name
on
Review: Kung Pow
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sometime back in '96 (if memory serves), Steve Odekerk had a one-shot show on NBC, some kind of cyber-stand-up kind of a thing. (I'm a little sketchy on the details.) The name of the show was "steveodekerk.com." Being a mischevious young 2600-writing dork, I looked it up, and found that the domain wasn't registered. Naturally, I registered it. (This was in the heady days of no-cash-down-required domain name registrations.)
A week passed. Nothing happened. Then something minor, but interesting, happened: they changed the name of the show. Now it was "steve.odekerk.com." They'd registered odekerk.com, lacking their own domain name.
That was one of the greatest achievements of my 18-year-old life: getting NBC to change the name of a show. I'm not saying that was a worthwhile endeavor, nor that it was a good or useful thing to do in retrospect, but it sure thrilled me at the time.:)
Thanks, folks. The answers that seem to be the most correctish are the ones that read "what are you, stupid?" The point being that this is a topic of such piddling interest and without bearing on the Real World(tm) that it has nothing to do with a city councilor, least of all with a campaign. It's the IT guy's job, end of story, for the most part. I had suspected this to be the case, but figured that it was something worth asking/. about.
FYI, this is the real Waldo Jaquith's account. Somebody made an account named Waldo Jaquith and is posting some rather amusing flamebait. You know it's me because my UID rocks and his is astronomical.:)
Anyhow, I'd appreciate if moderators could moderate appropriately. Thanks, folks! Of to class...
I don't think the original poster was confused about the technologies themselves.
Actually, I really was confused. I mean, I agree with you that it's ridiculous that their statement was so buzzword-laden, but I really and truly didn't understand what they were talking about. My thanks for the translation.:)
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
Oh, no, very little.
And you'll get absolutely none if you act now and buy my new SlashdotSpamBeGone, for just $9.95.
The work we are doing involves Mesa? and XFree86, including both 2D and 3D multi-screen technology, and we are working very closely with the OpenGL? ARB to maintain the integrity of the OpenGL API. We believe that OpenGL 2.0 needs more industry support, so we are working to help generate that support. DRI? technology is still in its infancy, and TG plans to help bring it to full fruition. Our first step in that goal is to significantly improve the existing open source DRI driver for the Radeon chipset. That driver is tentatively scheduled for release in late spring or early summer of 2002.
I'm no moron. I own a handful of computers, Mac and Linux, I've built a few dozen machines in my time, and I managed to configure X on them when necessary. That said, what the hell does this mean?
(I'm not trying to troll, but - this person is asking for it! They're not bothering to investigate the issue and complaining about it. Laziness is one thing, but to complain about being lazy is disgusting.)
Where the fuck do you get off making such assumptions? I'm not "asking for it," and you have no idea how much time that I've spent on this. I've spent something like ten hours of my life learning how 802.11b works, planning my home network, my office network, and a downtown freenet.
Further, I don't know what makes you think that a good response to somebody having trouble with consumer networking is to tell them to go back to college and take a signals course. What the hell is that? Are we all forced to become experts in every technology that we want to make use of? I suppose that you took some biology classes before you got that goldfish, perhaps took some plumbing classes in your local community college when your sink stopped up? I imagine you're one of those jerks that "helps" Linux newbies by telling them to read the kernel code.
Why wouldn't they be able to use wireless? 802.11b equipment generally gets along OK with 2.4 Gb cordless phones, as long as both devices are well-made and play nicely (letting you select between channels, etc).
I'm glad that you've had good luck thus far, but I've heard far too many cautionary tales about coexisting GHz phones and 802.11b networks to warrant spending $500 on equipment only to find that the stories are right.
This would be ideal for my girlfriend's family's house. They have GHz cordless phones in their home, so they can't use wireless. They have a huge, huge house (it's been expanded from the original, smaller house), so ethernet just isn't a viable option for them. Consequently, I've got 5 of their computers networked and sharing a 56k, but the other 3 still have to dial out. (Thus using up the line and preventing any of the other 7 computers from being connected.) This PowerLine Router will be ideal for their setup, and I'm quite pleased to see it becoming available.
Armor Systems' Advantage and Premiere, both fine accounting packages (I gather -- I don't use them) both run on Unix. I don't know anything about their feature set, or even the difference between the two, but my girlfriend's mother (an accountant) runs them on her network, though on DOS, and she likes 'em fine. I've had to paw through the manual on a number of occasions when figuring out the whole multi-user setup, and there are constant references to making it run properly under Windows/DOS, Novell and Unix. Presumably it would be possible to get it to run under Linux.
I just installed Spambouncer, a procmail-based set of filters, on all of my servers over the past few days. I love it. It takes a little tweaking, but that's easy enough. It was not a problem to set up, and I've gone from a dozen or so UCEs per day to one or two. After a few more days of tweaking, I should be down to zero.
ObCompliment: Go Bennett, it's your birthday, go Bennett, it's your birthday! [1]
StarOffice has a much more impressive feature list: multiplatform support, much better support for WordXP/2K import/export, java, international spellchecker etc.
StarOffice is laughably bloated, and is worthless for mere mortals to make use of. I've tried and tried, and gave up a few months ago.
KOffice can't work with any document format except for HTML and their own KOffice format. A nice word processor, but worthless without at least RTF.
Abiword, OTOH, is a simple word processor that does everything well. It's not at the point where it's my daily word processor, but I've watched it come along over the months, and I definitely feel like it's getting there.
Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?
Guys, this sucks, but we've got to pay our hosting bills. And that's all there is to it. One of my sites (we won our second annual VH1 Music Award for "Coolest Fan Website" just last weekend) is tremendously popular. Bajillions of hits each month, and traffic increases by about 15% each month, every month. In the past 16 months, we went from getting $4 CPM to $0.22 CPM on our ads, and that number is rapidly dropping. With a monthly hosting and bandwidth bill of $450, that's just not cutting it. Now only about 10% of our ads shown are network ads; the rest are for t-shirts and stickers that we sell. So now we have to put a lot of work into printing and shipping shirts, which sucks; we just want to be running a website.
Y'all can't free-ride forever -- these hosting and bandwidth fees have to be paid somehow. Yes, the ads suck, yes, they're poorly-placed, yes, they don't pertain to you, yes, they're intrusive. But that's not our fault. Most of us are just trying to break even so that we can pursue our hobby sites. So suck it up and deal with terrible ads.
One question: How does Katz fit into the whole OSDN/Sourceforge idea? Keep in mind that Kuro5hin wasn't a part of the OSDN/Sourceforge idea...
Katz doesn't fit in, in that he's too small of a piece in the puzzle. This would be like asking "How does John Smith, who works in the marketing department at HP, fit into the HP/Compaq merger?" It's just not a valid question.
Slashdot Mirror
I run several small community mail servers, and I firewalled off China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan about a year ago. It was the best thing that I ever did for those servers. Spam dropped down drastically, and I'm yet to get a single complaint about somebody not getting mail. Sucks to be in China, I guess, but this is a solution that, for me, has proved to be perfect.
-Waldo Jaquith
An automated Googlewhacking system.
Ingenius!
-Waldo Jaquith
I've hiked the Appalachian Trail carrying a computer with me. Well, actually it was a rotating cast of computers. This was in 1996, so I'm sure that there are better options right now, but the basic structural integrity of laptops doesn't appeal to have changed a great deal since then, at least in my experience. A quick run-down:
:)
Thinkpad: Lasted just over a month. I took it out of my pack in North Carolina and found that it had shattered into thousands of pieces. The screen was responsible for most of the shrapnel, but the butterfly keyboard had pretty much exploded. I have no idea what caused it.
Compaq Aero: IIRC, it snapped in half.
Toshiba Satellite: So damned heavy I nearly threw it off a cliff, but that doesn't count. The case collapsed after some bumps.
Some Army Notebook: Some army contractor had me test out this ruggedized computer. It was an early pen-based laptop, with crude handwriting recognition. It was supposed to be indestructable. By this time I was in northern Maine, in October, and the thing stopped working below about 40 degrees. Needless to say, I didn't get much use out of it. IIRC, the stupid faux-leather-and-plastic case peeled off and the battery door ceased to close.
Apple Newton: The perfect ruggedized computer. I had a keyboard for it. It worked under all conditions, had a battery life of the gods. I kept it in an outside pocket of my pack (for easy accessibility), where it got all kinds of scrapes and bruises. But it was never harmed structurally or in any way had any problems. In fact, I was so convinced of its merits that I bought my very first Apple (horrors!) when I got back from the trail in the fall: a Duo 280c laptop. I've been a Mac user ever since.
-Waldo Jaquith
Sometime back in '96 (if memory serves), Steve Odekerk had a one-shot show on NBC, some kind of cyber-stand-up kind of a thing. (I'm a little sketchy on the details.) The name of the show was "steveodekerk.com." Being a mischevious young 2600-writing dork, I looked it up, and found that the domain wasn't registered. Naturally, I registered it. (This was in the heady days of no-cash-down-required domain name registrations.)
:)
A week passed. Nothing happened. Then something minor, but interesting, happened: they changed the name of the show. Now it was "steve.odekerk.com." They'd registered odekerk.com, lacking their own domain name.
That was one of the greatest achievements of my 18-year-old life: getting NBC to change the name of a show. I'm not saying that was a worthwhile endeavor, nor that it was a good or useful thing to do in retrospect, but it sure thrilled me at the time.
-Waldo Jaquith
Thanks, folks. The answers that seem to be the most correctish are the ones that read "what are you, stupid?" The point being that this is a topic of such piddling interest and without bearing on the Real World(tm) that it has nothing to do with a city councilor, least of all with a campaign. It's the IT guy's job, end of story, for the most part. I had suspected this to be the case, but figured that it was something worth asking /. about.
:) Thanks, all.
Now I know.
-Waldo Jaquith
Oh, for chrissake -- it's a troll. A rather amusing one, at that.
-Waldo Jaquith
FYI, this is the real Waldo Jaquith's account. Somebody made an account named Waldo Jaquith and is posting some rather amusing flamebait. You know it's me because my UID rocks and his is astronomical. :)
Anyhow, I'd appreciate if moderators could moderate appropriately. Thanks, folks! Of to class...
-Waldo Jaquith
Affinity is a better term for this than trust. Just because I enjoy reading someone's posts doesn't mean I necessarily "trust" them.
Good point!
-Waldo Jaquith
If only I had moderator points...
...(Score: -1, troll)...by CmdrTaco...
I can see why you don't have moderator points!
-Waldo Jaquith
If this feature takes off, I'd like to see a "distributed affinity" system implemented, similar to Google's PageRank system [google.com]. If I call a particular poster a friend, then anyone whom they call a friend gets an X% boost in my ranking, anyone they call a friend gets an X©/100 boost, and so on.
What you're saying is that you'd ilke to use Advogato. The term that you're looking for is a "distributed trust metric."
-Waldo Jaquith
Thus, no one can sell obvious things like "business.com" for $400,000,000,000,000 or whatever.
business.com sold for -- I kid you not -- $7.5M US in November of 1999. What were they thinking?
-Waldo Jaquith
...aaaaa-steroids.
I don't think the original poster was confused about the technologies themselves.
:)
Actually, I really was confused. I mean, I agree with you that it's ridiculous that their statement was so buzzword-laden, but I really and truly didn't understand what they were talking about. My thanks for the translation.
-Waldo Jaquith
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
Oh, no, very little.
And you'll get absolutely none if you act now and buy my new SlashdotSpamBeGone, for just $9.95.
-Waldo Jaquith
The work we are doing involves Mesa? and XFree86, including both 2D and 3D multi-screen technology, and we are working very closely with the OpenGL? ARB to maintain the integrity of the OpenGL API. We believe that OpenGL 2.0 needs more industry support, so we are working to help generate that support. DRI? technology is still in its infancy, and TG plans to help bring it to full fruition. Our first step in that goal is to significantly improve the existing open source DRI driver for the Radeon chipset. That driver is tentatively scheduled for release in late spring or early summer of 2002.
I'm no moron. I own a handful of computers, Mac and Linux, I've built a few dozen machines in my time, and I managed to configure X on them when necessary. That said, what the hell does this mean?
Really. I'm asking.
-Waldo Jaquith
(I'm not trying to troll, but - this person is asking for it! They're not bothering to investigate the issue and complaining about it. Laziness is one thing, but to complain about being lazy is disgusting.)
Where the fuck do you get off making such assumptions? I'm not "asking for it," and you have no idea how much time that I've spent on this. I've spent something like ten hours of my life learning how 802.11b works, planning my home network, my office network, and a downtown freenet.
Further, I don't know what makes you think that a good response to somebody having trouble with consumer networking is to tell them to go back to college and take a signals course. What the hell is that? Are we all forced to become experts in every technology that we want to make use of? I suppose that you took some biology classes before you got that goldfish, perhaps took some plumbing classes in your local community college when your sink stopped up? I imagine you're one of those jerks that "helps" Linux newbies by telling them to read the kernel code.
Don't be such a dick.
-Waldo Jaquith
Why wouldn't they be able to use wireless? 802.11b equipment generally gets along OK with 2.4 Gb cordless phones, as long as both devices are well-made and play nicely (letting you select between channels, etc).
I'm glad that you've had good luck thus far, but I've heard far too many cautionary tales about coexisting GHz phones and 802.11b networks to warrant spending $500 on equipment only to find that the stories are right.
-Waldo Jaquith
This would be ideal for my girlfriend's family's house. They have GHz cordless phones in their home, so they can't use wireless. They have a huge, huge house (it's been expanded from the original, smaller house), so ethernet just isn't a viable option for them. Consequently, I've got 5 of their computers networked and sharing a 56k, but the other 3 still have to dial out. (Thus using up the line and preventing any of the other 7 computers from being connected.) This PowerLine Router will be ideal for their setup, and I'm quite pleased to see it becoming available.
-Waldo Jaquith
As I wrote on k5 in October:
Armor Systems' Advantage and Premiere, both fine accounting packages (I gather -- I don't use them) both run on Unix. I don't know anything about their feature set, or even the difference between the two, but my girlfriend's mother (an accountant) runs them on her network, though on DOS, and she likes 'em fine. I've had to paw through the manual on a number of occasions when figuring out the whole multi-user setup, and there are constant references to making it run properly under Windows/DOS, Novell and Unix. Presumably it would be possible to get it to run under Linux.
-Waldo Jaquith
[waldo@tux]$ whois freesklyarov.org
AgentZero Technologies
955 Massachusetts Ave #130
Cambridge, MA 02139
US
Domain Name: FREESKLYAROV.ORG
Record last updated on 13-Dec-2001.
Record expires on 18-Jul-2002.
[waldo@tux]$ whois freedsklyarov.org
No match for domain "FREEDSKLYAROV.ORG".
Hmm...
-Waldo Jaquith
I just installed Spambouncer, a procmail-based set of filters, on all of my servers over the past few days. I love it. It takes a little tweaking, but that's easy enough. It was not a problem to set up, and I've gone from a dozen or so UCEs per day to one or two. After a few more days of tweaking, I should be down to zero.
ObCompliment: Go Bennett, it's your birthday, go Bennett, it's your birthday! [1]
-Waldo Jaquith
[1] I am so white.
StarOffice has a much more impressive feature list: multiplatform support, much better support for WordXP/2K import/export, java, international spellchecker etc.
StarOffice is laughably bloated, and is worthless for mere mortals to make use of. I've tried and tried, and gave up a few months ago.
KOffice can't work with any document format except for HTML and their own KOffice format. A nice word processor, but worthless without at least RTF.
Abiword, OTOH, is a simple word processor that does everything well. It's not at the point where it's my daily word processor, but I've watched it come along over the months, and I definitely feel like it's getting there.
-Waldo Jaquith
Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?
It does.
http://www.nancies.org/
It's a simple fact: each pageview costs more to serve up than the advertising revenue that it brings in. Even when every page on your site is 30k.
-Waldo Jaquith
Guys, this sucks, but we've got to pay our hosting bills. And that's all there is to it. One of my sites (we won our second annual VH1 Music Award for "Coolest Fan Website" just last weekend) is tremendously popular. Bajillions of hits each month, and traffic increases by about 15% each month, every month. In the past 16 months, we went from getting $4 CPM to $0.22 CPM on our ads, and that number is rapidly dropping. With a monthly hosting and bandwidth bill of $450, that's just not cutting it. Now only about 10% of our ads shown are network ads; the rest are for t-shirts and stickers that we sell. So now we have to put a lot of work into printing and shipping shirts, which sucks; we just want to be running a website.
Y'all can't free-ride forever -- these hosting and bandwidth fees have to be paid somehow. Yes, the ads suck, yes, they're poorly-placed, yes, they don't pertain to you, yes, they're intrusive. But that's not our fault. Most of us are just trying to break even so that we can pursue our hobby sites. So suck it up and deal with terrible ads.
-Waldo Jaquith
One question: How does Katz fit into the whole OSDN/Sourceforge idea? Keep in mind that Kuro5hin wasn't a part of the OSDN/Sourceforge idea...
Katz doesn't fit in, in that he's too small of a piece in the puzzle. This would be like asking "How does John Smith, who works in the marketing department at HP, fit into the HP/Compaq merger?" It's just not a valid question.
-Waldo Jaquith