If you have to manually vet the contents of your SPAM filters, something is wrong.
Buy a filter that allows end users to scan filtered mail and manage their own queues. Barracuda Networks is one we have used for SMB's and it does quite a good job. I think Symantec's tool can work in a similar fashion.
I am 30+ years out of college, HOWEVER, my oldest daughter is finishing an engineering degree at Georgia Tech. Here are my observations.
At an engineering focused school, you are surrounded with like-minded students. This is good and bad. Good because you get 1MM different opinions, bad because they are all like-minded students.
If you decide to change majors, you're not starting over. If you are considering computer science or engineering, an engineering school will have a broader range of classes in your major. Within a Comp Sci program, you will have a broader array of related studies (embedded software, etc).
I was very impressed that Georgia Tech offers a vast web of support for new students. Several similar schools offer a "Freshman Experience" program where you have tutors for all the core classes in your dorm, via cable TV (not kidding, you can sit in your underwear and call in problems they will review on TV), and within your school). They focus on offering admission to students interested in engineering (and having grades, etc), then they make sure they have everything they need to be successful. Attrition rates are under 10% versus 30-40% 30 years ago.
As a parent and hiring manager, I am not that keen on an engineer from a liberal arts program. Why bother? The few candidates I have interviewed have sucked compared to their engineering school counterparts and if they were *really* interested in computer science, why wouldn't they get a BS in CompSci or related programs? To me a BA means they studied theory, didn't do lab work, and they aren't as immersed in technology like the students I see at Georgia Tech and other programs.
I would consider a co-op program as well. It gives you real-world experience and lets you focus on what you really want to do in the working world. RPI, Drexel, Georgia Tech, and lots of other schools have these programs and they have been placing students for decades (like 50-75 years).
I have had discussions about being well rounded. I think you can do that yourself, after you leave school. College is a 4-5 year period of 'immersion'. If you want to read Yeats, that's what libraries are for. If you want to write poetry, there are groups in every city and everyone is a publisher on the Internet.
I have a degree in Chemical Engineering. The difference between a BS and MS (or PhD for that matter) was 2-3 thousand per year in the late 70's and early 80's. I don't believe anything has changed.
At that time, many of the foreign nationals were 'sponsored' by their respective countries. They have the foresight to determine how many engineers they need and sponsor them accordingly.
The US, particularly the current administration, are retarded. They don't have a Plan (i.e. Clue). Energy, infrastructure, you name it, they don't have it.
Why do I get the feeling George W. Bush was one of the guys making fun of the nerds/geeks and that nothing has changed since his undergrad years.
Just FYI, I'm particularly bitter because my oldest daughter is in Chemical Engineering (Go, Yellow Jackets!) and will graduate with more debt than is reasonable. I don't need to get into a discussion about why we need more Chemical Engineers (energy, plastics, food, clothing, just about everything you use on a daily basis)...
Hi, its Paul. You don't remember me because you weren't associated with SCO at the time, but I was an SCO developer and beta tester 'back in the day'. I ran a public access SCO UNIX system in Philadelphia. I (helped) run the UNIX SIG on CompuServe and converted a bunch of applications so they ran on SCO platforms. On the commercial side, SCO UNIX ran construction management and engineering procurement software for a $500MM project (it no longer runs on SCO).
Not any more, Darl. That ship has sailed. I'm a 50 year old, bald, bearded engineer and I'm mad as hell at you Darl. I will do anything in my power to make sure you fail. I grep'ed through old source code just to find prior art (and I still have source from 1984).
I'm not alone Darl. We are the decision makers now. Money and cars don't cut it. Your goin' down, Darl, and the harder the better.
I'm a 'boomer' with three daughters. They suffer from having an engineer for a father, but there *are* benefits to having a geek for a father. We will buy just about any cool toy in a heartbeat. Well, at least something *we* consider cool or remember playing with as a child.
Lincoln Logs - wood is good
Tinker Toys - more wood
Erector Set - metal is good
Checkers, chess, dominos - wood boards and pieces, even little kids can learn to play.
chinese checkers - my girls use a cool >50 year old metal set that rotates to cover storage bins for the marbles.
Duncan tops - wood with replacable plastic tips. I was playing around with one in the mall and we had a group of 10-15 kids gathered around who had never seen a top 'in real life'.
Duncan yo-yo's - available online as a 'classic set' including the butterfly and double diamond
kites - the simple, easy to fly ones, not the fancy stunt kites
boomerang - more wood, if you get a good one, they really return. Either the banana or 'X' type are easy to find and even the kids can get them to return with a little practice.
microscope - go for good optics, not maximum magnification, then look at stuff like newspaper print, pond water and maybe some old food in the fridge.
telescope - look for good optics, not maximum magnification and a good tripod, then take it out into the country at night and find as many planets as you can.
rockets - in order of price - baking soda and vinegar, water and air pressure, Estes. They are all really cool. We used to shoot baking soda rockets the height of the house (and onto the roof). The water pump rockets could clear the roof and the Estes rockets can get you arrested.
chemistry set - they still don't include saltpeter, but you can some kits pretty cheap that include experiments that will hold the interest of grammar/middle school kids.
frenel lens - I got mine at Edmund Scientific before they closed. Its a large, flat plastic lens consisting of concentric circles to focus sunlight into a small diameter 'furnace'. We used to melt lead weights used to balance automobile wheels, and used Air Force issue goggles used to track objects across the face of the sun to protect our eyes. God knows if the lead fumes will shorten my life...
slide rule - just checking to see if you read this far, but I'm also serious that everyone should know how to perform multiplication and division on a slide rule. Just because.
Ken is doing a good job. He has techniques like answering with the fewest details and always phrases his answers as a question.
However, the only reason he has won 25 days in a row is because they changed the rules of the game.
I forget his last name, but supercontestant Chuck from the 80's would clean KenJen's clock. Chuck gave very complete answers, including one reference in Hebrew that the judges missed the first time and gave him points after researching the answer.
Anyone remember Chuck's last name? He didn't win the overall on one of the Champion match-ups, but he was a very impressive contestant.
The 17 year old is not an issue anymore - as noted above, you gotta trust them at some point. She has earned my trust and this is no longer an issue. She (and her friends) know I'm quite capable of finding out anything and everything if I want to anyway.
My 12 year old is dyslexic. Letter transposition is part of her issue, so we have dubbed her 'porn queen' because, as most of us know, most of the typo sites are porn or at least re-direction sites to places 12 year olds should not travel. I'm using We-Blocker (Web Blocker). Its free (donations accepted) and it works, but it really seems to consume CPU cycles on her workstation.
I'm looking for something I can setup on a proxy server - Windows or FreeBSD if possible. Any suggestions from the masses.
I realize I'm the odd man out on/. - bald 40-something with kids, but if you live long enough, you will be looking for similar answers;).
I have an original MS Mouse. Green buttons, dedicated card (9 pins) and metal ball. It just keep running and the metal ball doesn't seem to pickup desk crud the way the rubber ones do.
I just threw out my Integrand case and power supply because the power supply was bad (must weigh 25 lbs). I would need to convert the case to support ATX motherboards and the 100 CFM fan made it sound like a VAX when you turned it on.
I replaced over 100 batteries used in our household (three daughters, geek father) with NiMH. No problems at all. I get the next to highest mAh rated batteries from Thomas Distributing (just a happy customer) and I use an Altek 5798 charger. The tri-state LED's give a good status on when its done charging.
I had a few go bad over the past few years, but I know several sets have had hundreds of charges.
The last AA set I got were 2000 mAh and they are great in my Fuji digicam.
www.thomasdistributing.com - don't let the 'web designer on acid' interface bother you, they have always had the best price and reasonable delivery. I even like the 'free gifts' (synth chamois car cloth, plastic battery holders).
I run a relatively small mail server for friends, family and a few small businesses.
I'm blocking 211, 212, 218/8 and lots of smaller subnets. I whitelisted all the mailing lists I use and it doesn't appear I'm blocking any legit mail (unless jhnpq4os6@yahoo.com is someone my kids know, and I don't think so).
So if China has run out of IP addresses, my job is almost done. Where is Russia on the list??
Fuck 'em until they get a clue that hosting P0rn, gambling and sex sites isn't really the basis for a 'new economy' in the East.
Its interesting that so many people are talking about MSoft OS boxes getting obsoleted quickly.
I just finished hacking around with my brother's PowerMac 6116CD. Its running Mac OS 7.5.1, it can only support 72 Meg of RAM and MacOS 9.1. This product line was out of production in 1996.
Most of the PC's in my house are from 1996 and have been upgraded with (at least) large, fast hard drives and RAM (256 to 512 Meg). They 350 - 450 MHz Pentium and Celeron boxes running Windows 2000 and Office XP. They are reasonably fast and useful for my daughters to run Office, browse the web, listen to music, etc. The Mac on the otherhand takes longer to boot than my server and its basically a doorstop. It can't be upgraded to the latest OS rev and RAM/disk upgrades are pretty limited.
This ties into the theory that lots of people only want wordprocessing, e-mail and web browsing. You can do this on a 5-6 year old machine.
Depending on your environment and the functionality you desire there are several solutions.
If you want to synch UNIX (NDIS) and Windows 2000 account information and passwords, one way to do this is to use Windows Services for UNIX (SFU).
The down side with this is Windows must be the NIS master, but it offers some nice features for Windows/UNIX environments. The price is reasonable (~US$150).
Some of the UNIX guys get indigestion over Windows as a NIS master, but it works out of the box where there are fewer UNIX hosts and clients than Windows boxes.
He is not a freaking Software developer, he is just another loser looking for another fifteen minutes of fame.
I like to wear my "Spamming the Globe" t-shirt once a season just to make sure it doesn't get moldy in my drawer.
When I read about the Knoller and Noel whose dog murdered the woman in California I thought of Canter and Siegel. I think it should be against the law for two lawyers to marry. Its sort of like cousins getting married without the genetics. Just living together and having sex must lobotomize your moral compass. Anyone have conclusive proof of my theory?
As someone who has done more than my share of e-mail server disaster recovery work, I actually *admire* anyone who can extract specific messages from random backup tapes.
Most of the calls I got involved blood on the floor, unmarked backup tapes (in several different formats) and hours (and hours and hours) of inventory, catalog, restore to get a server back in production.
Also, very few companies are keeping more than two weeks of e-mail backups. Have you done the math recently? My old dot-bomb employer (may the accountant have nettles in his testicles), had 100 Gig of messages for 800-900 staff on 5-6 servers scattered around the US.
Our original legal guy wanted us to keep mail for six years. After I did the math, the cost ($$ and manpower) was prohibitive (plus we started imploding at that point - anyone interested in a seven year lease of prime Boston real estate?).
Another issue is how do you prove a message is real or forged? Digital sigs? Hard copy? It would require 'expert witness' testimony to verify the authenticity and lineage (source, route, etc) of the message.
When our segment was switched from @Home to comcast.net, I found my LinkSys could not obtain a DHCP lease.
I tested with one of my laptops and it worked fine, but not the LinkSys. I banged a valid Intel MAC address into the LinkSys (MAC alias setting) and it got a lease.
A call to tech support (well, several) confirmed that they are blocking some MAC addresses.
My complaint is if they won't let us run some sort of hardware firewall (like) device, are they going to nuke/filter/pursue all the script kiddies and infected IIS servers that are scanning my LinkSys 10, 15, 20+ times a night??
I have a Pickett TS-5 purchased at the Georgia Tech bookstore fire sale in 9/74. This is a log-log/deci-log slide rule that I still use to show my daughters (and dot-com youths) how to use.
My first calculator was an HP-35, but I think I thew it out around 1984 when the batteries died and I could not get any replacement from HP. I owned it for 10 years, washed it twice (don't ask, but it was almost waterproof) and it was dropped from second and third story windows onto grass and hard dirt. Duct tape held the battery in after the little wings broke during one of the falls.
RPN rules. TI still sucks and I still struggle with the '=' key on non-HP calculators.
I would not feel insulted in the least if the book was recorded by the author. Particularly Tolkien. Just to hear his pronounciation of the various Hobbit or Lord of the Rings character names and story settings would be a treat.
I am a consultant and engineer by degree. My primary consulting focus is e-mail systems and Internet connections for large corporations. I was a node on the Internet in 1986 and have worked primarily for engineering and manufacturing companies.
No client has ever directed me to start a witch hunt. Never. I have worked with HR and MIS groups to develop and publish a clear, written policy for e-mail and Internet use.
If you have had to manage the volume of e-mail and HTTP traffic at some large corporations you would appreciate the problem. 1000+ users can generate something like 40K-50K of messages per day. Combined with HTTP traffic you can have gigabytes of data passing through your firewall and e-mail server(s).
Unless you limit the size of incoming and outgoing messages, they often exceed 5-6 Meg. My clients spend big bucks on storage and network hardware and software (and consulting) to keep these systems running 7x24. Putting e-mail and HTTP policies in place is self-defence more than anything else (legal and technical).
As an e-mail Postmaster, I treat e-mail the same way one would treat First Class US Mail. However, when e-mail bounces, I read enough to determine where it should go and attempt to forward (or automate the process). I have encountered 5+ Meg porn video files on more than one occasion. How do you handle this? I don't 'rat out' users, but press the company to establish a policy if none exists, or re-state the policy for users so its very clear what the consequences are.
This month a Major Financial Institution (bank) on the east coast fired staff for forwarding pictures and 'dirty jokes'. They had a written policy, they informed the staff (repeatedly), yet through sheer volume of mail and network traffic it became a problem then needed to address. Several people were fired. One of the people fired admitted he screwed up, acknowledged that they were aware of the policy, chose to ignore it and recognized the consequences.
Does it take firing people for a company to establish that they are serious about a published (and promoted) e-mail and HTTP policy?
I really don't know, but when training and consulting try to balance personal rights with technical responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have to manually vet the contents of your SPAM filters, something is wrong.
Buy a filter that allows end users to scan filtered mail and manage their own queues. Barracuda Networks is one we have used for SMB's and it does quite a good job. I think Symantec's tool can work in a similar fashion.
-Paul
I am 30+ years out of college, HOWEVER, my oldest daughter is finishing an engineering degree at Georgia Tech. Here are my observations.
At an engineering focused school, you are surrounded with like-minded students. This is good and bad. Good because you get 1MM different opinions, bad because they are all like-minded students.
If you decide to change majors, you're not starting over. If you are considering computer science or engineering, an engineering school will have a broader range of classes in your major. Within a Comp Sci program, you will have a broader array of related studies (embedded software, etc).
I was very impressed that Georgia Tech offers a vast web of support for new students. Several similar schools offer a "Freshman Experience" program where you have tutors for all the core classes in your dorm, via cable TV (not kidding, you can sit in your underwear and call in problems they will review on TV), and within your school). They focus on offering admission to students interested in engineering (and having grades, etc), then they make sure they have everything they need to be successful. Attrition rates are under 10% versus 30-40% 30 years ago.
As a parent and hiring manager, I am not that keen on an engineer from a liberal arts program. Why bother? The few candidates I have interviewed have sucked compared to their engineering school counterparts and if they were *really* interested in computer science, why wouldn't they get a BS in CompSci or related programs? To me a BA means they studied theory, didn't do lab work, and they aren't as immersed in technology like the students I see at Georgia Tech and other programs.
I would consider a co-op program as well. It gives you real-world experience and lets you focus on what you really want to do in the working world. RPI, Drexel, Georgia Tech, and lots of other schools have these programs and they have been placing students for decades (like 50-75 years).
I have had discussions about being well rounded. I think you can do that yourself, after you leave school. College is a 4-5 year period of 'immersion'. If you want to read Yeats, that's what libraries are for. If you want to write poetry, there are groups in every city and everyone is a publisher on the Internet.
Hope this helps.
-Paul
I have a degree in Chemical Engineering. The difference between a BS and MS (or PhD for that matter) was 2-3 thousand per year in the late 70's and early 80's. I don't believe anything has changed.
At that time, many of the foreign nationals were 'sponsored' by their respective countries. They have the foresight to determine how many engineers they need and sponsor them accordingly.
The US, particularly the current administration, are retarded. They don't have a Plan (i.e. Clue). Energy, infrastructure, you name it, they don't have it.
Why do I get the feeling George W. Bush was one of the guys making fun of the nerds/geeks and that nothing has changed since his undergrad years.
Just FYI, I'm particularly bitter because my oldest daughter is in Chemical Engineering (Go, Yellow Jackets!) and will graduate with more debt than is reasonable. I don't need to get into a discussion about why we need more Chemical Engineers (energy, plastics, food, clothing, just about everything you use on a daily basis)...
-Paul
Darl -
Hi, its Paul. You don't remember me because you weren't associated with SCO at the time, but I was an SCO developer and beta tester 'back in the day'. I ran a public access SCO UNIX system in Philadelphia. I (helped) run the UNIX SIG on CompuServe and converted a bunch of applications so they ran on SCO platforms. On the commercial side, SCO UNIX ran construction management and engineering procurement software for a $500MM project (it no longer runs on SCO).
Not any more, Darl. That ship has sailed. I'm a 50 year old, bald, bearded engineer and I'm mad as hell at you Darl. I will do anything in my power to make sure you fail. I grep'ed through old source code just to find prior art (and I still have source from 1984).
I'm not alone Darl. We are the decision makers now. Money and cars don't cut it. Your goin' down, Darl, and the harder the better.
Your pal,
Paul
I'm a 'boomer' with three daughters. They suffer from having an engineer for a father, but there *are* benefits to having a geek for a father. We will buy just about any cool toy in a heartbeat. Well, at least something *we* consider cool or remember playing with as a child.
Lincoln Logs - wood is good
Tinker Toys - more wood
Erector Set - metal is good
Checkers, chess, dominos - wood boards and pieces, even little kids can learn to play.
chinese checkers - my girls use a cool >50 year old metal set that rotates to cover storage bins for the marbles.
Duncan tops - wood with replacable plastic tips. I was playing around with one in the mall and we had a group of 10-15 kids gathered around who had never seen a top 'in real life'.
Duncan yo-yo's - available online as a 'classic set' including the butterfly and double diamond
kites - the simple, easy to fly ones, not the fancy stunt kites
boomerang - more wood, if you get a good one, they really return. Either the banana or 'X' type are easy to find and even the kids can get them to return with a little practice.
microscope - go for good optics, not maximum magnification, then look at stuff like newspaper print, pond water and maybe some old food in the fridge.
telescope - look for good optics, not maximum magnification and a good tripod, then take it out into the country at night and find as many planets as you can.
rockets - in order of price - baking soda and vinegar, water and air pressure, Estes. They are all really cool. We used to shoot baking soda rockets the height of the house (and onto the roof). The water pump rockets could clear the roof and the Estes rockets can get you arrested.
chemistry set - they still don't include saltpeter, but you can some kits pretty cheap that include experiments that will hold the interest of grammar/middle school kids.
frenel lens - I got mine at Edmund Scientific before they closed. Its a large, flat plastic lens consisting of concentric circles to focus sunlight into a small diameter 'furnace'. We used to melt lead weights used to balance automobile wheels, and used Air Force issue goggles used to track objects across the face of the sun to protect our eyes. God knows if the lead fumes will shorten my life...
slide rule - just checking to see if you read this far, but I'm also serious that everyone should know how to perform multiplication and division on a slide rule. Just because.
Ken is doing a good job. He has techniques like answering with the fewest details and always phrases his answers as a question.
However, the only reason he has won 25 days in a row is because they changed the rules of the game.
I forget his last name, but supercontestant Chuck from the 80's would clean KenJen's clock. Chuck gave very complete answers, including one reference in Hebrew that the judges missed the first time and gave him points after researching the answer.
Anyone remember Chuck's last name? He didn't win the overall on one of the Champion match-ups, but he was a very impressive contestant.
My daughters, wife and I use StarTac's. We share the data synch, car adapters, hands free and batteries.
I might have to stock up on a few US$8.00 aftermarket batteries while I can still get them.
Screw color and polyphonic ring tones that make me want to drive a pencil through the forehead of the dickhead in line behind me at Starbucks.
The only thing I would like is more than 99 Phone book entries.
I have three daughters - 17, 12, 9.
/. - bald 40-something with kids, but if you live long enough, you will be looking for similar answers ;).
The 17 year old is not an issue anymore - as noted above, you gotta trust them at some point. She has earned my trust and this is no longer an issue. She (and her friends) know I'm quite capable of finding out anything and everything if I want to anyway.
My 12 year old is dyslexic. Letter transposition is part of her issue, so we have dubbed her 'porn queen' because, as most of us know, most of the typo sites are porn or at least re-direction sites to places 12 year olds should not travel. I'm using We-Blocker (Web Blocker). Its free (donations accepted) and it works, but it really seems to consume CPU cycles on her workstation.
I'm looking for something I can setup on a proxy server - Windows or FreeBSD if possible. Any suggestions from the masses.
I realize I'm the odd man out on
-peb
I vow to post Gator is spyware anywhere I can, although I don't see this is much of an issue because googling 'gator spyware' has >22,000 hits.
Another way to handle this is to use a local DNS server and 'blackhole' gator, ad sites and anything else that annoys me.
I have an original MS Mouse. Green buttons, dedicated card (9 pins) and metal ball. It just keep running and the metal ball doesn't seem to pickup desk crud the way the rubber ones do.
I just threw out my Integrand case and power supply because the power supply was bad (must weigh 25 lbs). I would need to convert the case to support ATX motherboards and the 100 CFM fan made it sound like a VAX when you turned it on.
I replaced over 100 batteries used in our household (three daughters, geek father) with NiMH. No problems at all. I get the next to highest mAh rated batteries from Thomas Distributing (just a happy customer) and I use an Altek 5798 charger. The tri-state LED's give a good status on when its done charging.
I had a few go bad over the past few years, but I know several sets have had hundreds of charges.
The last AA set I got were 2000 mAh and they are great in my Fuji digicam.
www.thomasdistributing.com - don't let the 'web designer on acid' interface bother you, they have always had the best price and reasonable delivery. I even like the 'free gifts' (synth chamois car cloth, plastic battery holders).
Hope this helps!
I run a relatively small mail server for friends, family and a few small businesses.
I'm blocking 211, 212, 218/8 and lots of smaller subnets. I whitelisted all the mailing lists I use and it doesn't appear I'm blocking any legit mail (unless jhnpq4os6@yahoo.com is someone my kids know, and I don't think so).
So if China has run out of IP addresses, my job is almost done. Where is Russia on the list??
Fuck 'em until they get a clue that hosting P0rn, gambling and sex sites isn't really the basis for a 'new economy' in the East.
Its interesting that so many people are talking about MSoft OS boxes getting obsoleted quickly.
I just finished hacking around with my brother's PowerMac 6116CD. Its running Mac OS 7.5.1, it can only support 72 Meg of RAM and MacOS 9.1. This product line was out of production in 1996.
Most of the PC's in my house are from 1996 and have been upgraded with (at least) large, fast hard drives and RAM (256 to 512 Meg). They 350 - 450 MHz Pentium and Celeron boxes running Windows 2000 and Office XP. They are reasonably fast and useful for my daughters to run Office, browse the web, listen to music, etc. The Mac on the otherhand takes longer to boot than my server and its basically a doorstop. It can't be upgraded to the latest OS rev and RAM/disk upgrades are pretty limited.
This ties into the theory that lots of people only want wordprocessing, e-mail and web browsing. You can do this on a 5-6 year old machine.
Depending on your environment and the functionality you desire there are several solutions.
If you want to synch UNIX (NDIS) and Windows 2000 account information and passwords, one way to do this is to use Windows Services for UNIX (SFU).
The down side with this is Windows must be the NIS master, but it offers some nice features for Windows/UNIX environments. The price is reasonable (~US$150).
Some of the UNIX guys get indigestion over Windows as a NIS master, but it works out of the box where there are fewer UNIX hosts and clients than Windows boxes.
He is not a freaking Software developer, he is just another loser looking for another fifteen minutes of fame.
I like to wear my "Spamming the Globe" t-shirt once a season just to make sure it doesn't get moldy in my drawer.
When I read about the Knoller and Noel whose dog murdered the woman in California I thought of Canter and Siegel. I think it should be against the law for two lawyers to marry. Its sort of like cousins getting married without the genetics. Just living together and having sex must lobotomize your moral compass. Anyone have conclusive proof of my theory?
As someone who has done more than my share of e-mail server disaster recovery work, I actually *admire* anyone who can extract specific messages from random backup tapes.
Most of the calls I got involved blood on the floor, unmarked backup tapes (in several different formats) and hours (and hours and hours) of inventory, catalog, restore to get a server back in production.
Also, very few companies are keeping more than two weeks of e-mail backups. Have you done the math recently? My old dot-bomb employer (may the accountant have nettles in his testicles), had 100 Gig of messages for 800-900 staff on 5-6 servers scattered around the US. Our original legal guy wanted us to keep mail for six years. After I did the math, the cost ($$ and manpower) was prohibitive (plus we started imploding at that point - anyone interested in a seven year lease of prime Boston real estate?).
Another issue is how do you prove a message is real or forged? Digital sigs? Hard copy? It would require 'expert witness' testimony to verify the authenticity and lineage (source, route, etc) of the message.
When our segment was switched from @Home to comcast.net, I found my LinkSys could not obtain a DHCP lease.
I tested with one of my laptops and it worked fine, but not the LinkSys. I banged a valid Intel MAC address into the LinkSys (MAC alias setting) and it got a lease.
A call to tech support (well, several) confirmed that they are blocking some MAC addresses.
My complaint is if they won't let us run some sort of hardware firewall (like) device, are they going to nuke/filter/pursue all the script kiddies and infected IIS servers that are scanning my LinkSys 10, 15, 20+ times a night??
If you only have a few domains, or you need additional services (DNS, mail, basic web page), Register.Com has worked out well for me.
I moved from Network Solutions and have not looked back.
I have a Pickett TS-5 purchased at the Georgia Tech bookstore fire sale in 9/74. This is a log-log/deci-log slide rule that I still use to show my daughters (and dot-com youths) how to use.
My first calculator was an HP-35, but I think I thew it out around 1984 when the batteries died and I could not get any replacement from HP. I owned it for 10 years, washed it twice (don't ask, but it was almost waterproof) and it was dropped from second and third story windows onto grass and hard dirt. Duct tape held the battery in after the little wings broke during one of the falls.
RPN rules. TI still sucks and I still struggle with the '=' key on non-HP calculators.
I would not feel insulted in the least if the book was recorded by the author. Particularly Tolkien. Just to hear his pronounciation of the various Hobbit or Lord of the Rings character names and story settings would be a treat.
I am a consultant and engineer by degree. My primary consulting focus is e-mail systems and Internet connections for large corporations. I was a node on the Internet in 1986 and have worked primarily for engineering and manufacturing companies.
No client has ever directed me to start a witch hunt. Never. I have worked with HR and MIS groups to develop and publish a clear, written policy for e-mail and Internet use.
If you have had to manage the volume of e-mail and HTTP traffic at some large corporations you would appreciate the problem. 1000+ users can generate something like 40K-50K of messages per day. Combined with HTTP traffic you can have gigabytes of data passing through your firewall and e-mail server(s).
Unless you limit the size of incoming and outgoing messages, they often exceed 5-6 Meg. My clients spend big bucks on storage and network hardware and software (and consulting) to keep these systems running 7x24. Putting e-mail and HTTP policies in place is self-defence more than anything else (legal and technical).
As an e-mail Postmaster, I treat e-mail the same way one would treat First Class US Mail. However, when e-mail bounces, I read enough to determine where it should go and attempt to forward (or automate the process). I have encountered 5+ Meg porn video files on more than one occasion. How do you handle this? I don't 'rat out' users, but press the company to establish a policy if none exists, or re-state the policy for users so its very clear what the consequences are.
This month a Major Financial Institution (bank) on the east coast fired staff for forwarding pictures and 'dirty jokes'. They had a written policy, they informed the staff (repeatedly), yet through sheer volume of mail and network traffic it became a problem then needed to address. Several people were fired. One of the people fired admitted he screwed up, acknowledged that they were aware of the policy, chose to ignore it and recognized the consequences.
Does it take firing people for a company to establish that they are serious about a published (and promoted) e-mail and HTTP policy?
I really don't know, but when training and consulting try to balance personal rights with technical responsibility.