To be strictly accurate, it is the SCI who has responded. Quite rightly as it was one of their staff who sent the offending e-mail. It's great fun to mouth off the "big guys", like Wiley (actually one of the last of the independent, family-owned publishers), but most people seem to be missing the point that Wiley themselves had nothing to do with this affair (other than the fact that they publish the Journal on behalf of the SCI). The original e-mail came from an assistant editor at the SCI and the affair has been quickly, and satisfactorily, settled by a more senior member of staff at the SCI.
Unfortunately that doesn't suit the loudmouths on Slashdot so poor old Wiley get all the flak for something they had little to do with. Now why doesn't that surprise me?
I can confirm the truth of this belief. I used to manage the mail servers for a sizable international company. When we started experimenting with a separate server to filter out Spam I set it up with an MX record with very low priority. This should only have received mail if our main mail server and it's backup were both unavailable. Within a matter of hours of the MX record being available mail started being received by this test server - all of it Spam.
Another, related, problem is when the secondary mail server belongs to your ISP. Spammers will target this, making the (almost certainly correct) assumptions that:
i. The ISP will have less rigorous Spam checking. ii. You won't block SMTP connections from your ISP's mail server.
In the end these factors actually lead to more certain ways of detecting, and thus blocking, certain Spam.
If you can manage a mail server that receives over 20,000 messages per day, pass through all items that satisfy the RFC requirements, and still achieve a Spam content of under 1% then I take my hat off to you.
I just can't do that with my mail servers. If I accepted all RFC-compliant mail then I'd be delivering over 10,000 items of Spam per day to my users. And that means that I'd be failing in my job. Just because mail is RFC-compliant doesn't mean it's not Spam!
I'm guessing that you don't administer a mail server! I do.
There's nothing "wrong with that" in the sense of RFCs, but there's everything "wrong with that" as far as a mail server is concerned. That "dsl" is enough to get most anti-Spam software rejecting the mail. There are no "rights" and "wrongs" when it comes to blocking Spam - it's just a matter of experience. And anyone with any degree of experience will know that a lot of Spam comes from "dsl" addresses; so they block them, or at least quarrantine the mail until it can be verified.
Yeah, I know all the arguments about how mail admins shouldn't do that sort of thing, but we've got to be pragmatic. The volume of Spam received by the average business nowadays is such that one has to resort to fairly Draconian measures. Blame those who abuse e-mail, not the poor admins.
Currently I multiboot Windows 2000, Windows XP 64 beta, Windows XP 64 trial edition, FreeBSD 64, Gentoo 32, and Gentoo 64 on my main computer. My second one only boots Solaris 10, BEOS, and Suse Linux (but I'm working on it!). Both use Grub as the boot loader and I have no, absolutely no problems with these setups.
Sure I may need to reinstall the MBR from time to time, but that's not a problem. Jeez, you guys just aren't trying!
As with so many simplistic solutions to Spam, this just doesn't work in the real world. Most companies need to recive mail from unknown senders to published addresses. (E.g. "Marketing", "Enquiries", "CustomerService", etc.) And these are, obviously, the accounts that suffer from the most Spam. But they are also the accounts that need to accept mail from strangers who may be using badly-configured SMTP servers. It's all very well to say they should do this or they should do that, but they are customers (or potential customers) which is what business is all about. The last thing that we want to do is to make it harder for them to contact us.
Work for a few months as administrator of a real-world mail system before coming up with simple solutions. Spam is not a simple problem and there are no simple solutions. I have no difficulty preventing Spam to my private e-mail address, but I have to work a lot harder to prevent it for my hundreds of mail users at work. (And we do pretty well, using a variety of techniques - but there's no single "magic bullet".)
If you'd read the Slashdot FAQ instead of being so anal you'd know the answer to that one. And you'd avoid the embarassment of making a stupid typo yourself.
Don't be so anally obsessive. It's not a big deal in the greater scheme of things and it's certainly not something that moderators will waste mod points on.
(Hope you note that I got all the apostrophes in the right places.)
a company is so large that they can afford to lose a company that has purchased millions of chips in the past
Well, yes, IBM are a company that large. Apple's business was drop in the ocean to the likes of IBM. A mere fleabite - and just about as irritating from what one reads. I'm sure that the general feeling at IBM is "good riddance" to Apple.
Might even turn out to be a financial gain in the long run. Having to service a fussy, idiosyncratic customer like Apple, who didn't actually buy a huge number of chips, must have caused quite a lot of noise in the system.
I get the flashing whenever I move the mouse pointer over the icons. And I get a box drawn around the selected item - real ugly. This looks like the triumph of style (bad!) over content to me.
Thought the use of the words "flashing" and "flashy" in the parent were very descriptive - this reminds me of all those Flash pages that I hate so much. (OK, I'm old; I just want the information not some kid's version of "cool".)
Apple's entire current user base would disagree with you.
That may well be true (although I seem to see a lot of Apple users who don't like the idea of a switch to Intel chips), but it's not the Apple user base that needs to be convinced if Apple is to increase it's market share.
PCs:cars::Apple:trains....
A very good analogy! But I think that most people would prefer the flexibility of a car (PC) rather than a train (Apple). Trains take you where they want you to go, cars take you where you want to go. And last time I checked a car was quite a lot cheaper than a train! I really can't see another Henry Ford mass producing trains.
It's just as well that you hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" label as in my country it would constitute libel to accuse people of a crime that a court of law has found them innocent of. Having said that, I have to agree that the US legal system is not the best in the world.
I'm not familiar with all of these cases, but is it true to contend that OJ Simpson was a "murderous, drug-pushing thug" and didn't he have to go through the due process of law (however poor we think that process was) rather than "walking the day after they are arrested"? I think that most people would contend that OJ Simpson proved that money can buy justice in the US rather than what the grandparent suggests.
Couldn't agree more. It's all too easy for those who don't have to administer a sizeable collection of servers to make glib remarks about the ease of patching them. Anyone who has to manage production systems knows that it's just not that easy. And a number of recent viruses have exploited vulnerabilities for which a patch isn't yet available.
a murderous, drug-pushing thug walks the day after he's arrested
Are you just being even more ridiculously hysterical than those calling for over-harsh punishments for hackers? Do you have any documented examples that you can quote to us of murderous, drug-pushing thugs walking the day after they are arrested. (I presume that by "murderous" you mean that they have committed murder rather than that they merely don't accord with your particular version of "normality".)
I think that you must have "forgotten" to factor in the cost of keyboard, mouse, and display when costing the mini-Mac. You can't buy a working system from Apple for $500.
I really don't think that's the right way to look at it. I think the question should be "is there any reason to get an Apple". I can't see anyone buying one so that they can run Windows on it (albeit dual booting with OS/X). The question, as a previous poster pointed out, is whether the premium that Apple charge (more like $500 than the $100-200 mentioned by that poster) is worth it to run OS/X. Simple answer as far as I'm concerned - no way!
Now if Apple were to make OS/X available for generic Intel (or AMD) computers then I'd be very interested. But I don't think that they are able to do that; they need to control the range of hardware that the OS runs on. This is one point where credit must be given to Microsoft; their OS does run (by no means perfectly) on just about any x86-based hardware (or x86-64). Again, this is one of the great strengths that Linux and the BSD variants have over OS/X.
If OS/X continues to be constrained by the range of hardware that it can run on it then it, and Apple computers, is (IMHO) ultimately doomed to fade away as yet another niche product. I'm sure that they'll continue as a media-player company, but not as far as personal computers are concerned.
* no, we don't have a Nazi government (I keep hearing that from Americans all the time)
Those damned Yankees keep getting things back to front.
Re:Finally catching up with Apple...
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
No, X86 is the common term for the 80368 to present day 80686 processors.
I certainly agree that x86 is a common term for these processors but not the only one. If you look at, for example the "arch" subdirectory of the Linux kernel source you have "i386" and "x86_64". Here is one example where "i386" is used generically to cover the whole range of processors.
The FreeBSD sources use a similar naming convention if I remeber correctly (which I rarely do nowadays).
Re:Finally catching up with Apple...
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
At the risk of seeming to be too dim to appreciate your hillarious remarks - i386 is commonly used as a generic term for all x86 processors from the 80386 onwards (excluding - of course - the wonderful Athlon 64s, generically known as x86-64). Hence all those Linux binary names that end in "i386".
...Apple's traditional ass ramming in regard to price, I don't think I'd take kindly to smart arse comments about Apple systems only working on Apple endorsed hardware either.
Can't help but agree with you about Apple prices. If I'd paid that sort of price for my hardware I'd be pretty pissed of when it didn't work properly. I guess that I don't need to point out the moral!
Slashdot Mirror
To be strictly accurate, it is the SCI who has responded. Quite rightly as it was one of their staff who sent the offending e-mail. It's great fun to mouth off the "big guys", like Wiley (actually one of the last of the independent, family-owned publishers), but most people seem to be missing the point that Wiley themselves had nothing to do with this affair (other than the fact that they publish the Journal on behalf of the SCI). The original e-mail came from an assistant editor at the SCI and the affair has been quickly, and satisfactorily, settled by a more senior member of staff at the SCI.
Unfortunately that doesn't suit the loudmouths on Slashdot so poor old Wiley get all the flak for something they had little to do with. Now why doesn't that surprise me?
I can confirm the truth of this belief. I used to manage the mail servers for a sizable international company. When we started experimenting with a separate server to filter out Spam I set it up with an MX record with very low priority. This should only have received mail if our main mail server and it's backup were both unavailable. Within a matter of hours of the MX record being available mail started being received by this test server - all of it Spam.
Another, related, problem is when the secondary mail server belongs to your ISP. Spammers will target this, making the (almost certainly correct) assumptions that:
i. The ISP will have less rigorous Spam checking.
ii. You won't block SMTP connections from your ISP's mail server.
In the end these factors actually lead to more certain ways of detecting, and thus blocking, certain Spam.
I stand corrected.
If you can manage a mail server that receives over 20,000 messages per day, pass through all items that satisfy the RFC requirements, and still achieve a Spam content of under 1% then I take my hat off to you.
I just can't do that with my mail servers. If I accepted all RFC-compliant mail then I'd be delivering over 10,000 items of Spam per day to my users. And that means that I'd be failing in my job. Just because mail is RFC-compliant doesn't mean it's not Spam!
there is nothing wrong with that
I'm guessing that you don't administer a mail server! I do.
There's nothing "wrong with that" in the sense of RFCs, but there's everything "wrong with that" as far as a mail server is concerned. That "dsl" is enough to get most anti-Spam software rejecting the mail. There are no "rights" and "wrongs" when it comes to blocking Spam - it's just a matter of experience. And anyone with any degree of experience will know that a lot of Spam comes from "dsl" addresses; so they block them, or at least quarrantine the mail until it can be verified.
Yeah, I know all the arguments about how mail admins shouldn't do that sort of thing, but we've got to be pragmatic. The volume of Spam received by the average business nowadays is such that one has to resort to fairly Draconian measures. Blame those who abuse e-mail, not the poor admins.
Are you guys competent to own a computer???
Currently I multiboot Windows 2000, Windows XP 64 beta, Windows XP 64 trial edition, FreeBSD 64, Gentoo 32, and Gentoo 64 on my main computer. My second one only boots Solaris 10, BEOS, and Suse Linux (but I'm working on it!). Both use Grub as the boot loader and I have no, absolutely no problems with these setups.
Sure I may need to reinstall the MBR from time to time, but that's not a problem. Jeez, you guys just aren't trying!
As with so many simplistic solutions to Spam, this just doesn't work in the real world. Most companies need to recive mail from unknown senders to published addresses. (E.g. "Marketing", "Enquiries", "CustomerService", etc.) And these are, obviously, the accounts that suffer from the most Spam. But they are also the accounts that need to accept mail from strangers who may be using badly-configured SMTP servers. It's all very well to say they should do this or they should do that, but they are customers (or potential customers) which is what business is all about. The last thing that we want to do is to make it harder for them to contact us.
Work for a few months as administrator of a real-world mail system before coming up with simple solutions. Spam is not a simple problem and there are no simple solutions. I have no difficulty preventing Spam to my private e-mail address, but I have to work a lot harder to prevent it for my hundreds of mail users at work. (And we do pretty well, using a variety of techniques - but there's no single "magic bullet".)
If you'd read the Slashdot FAQ instead of being so anal you'd know the answer to that one. And you'd avoid the embarassment of making a stupid typo yourself.
Get a life!
Don't be so anally obsessive. It's not a big deal in the greater scheme of things and it's certainly not something that moderators will waste mod points on.
(Hope you note that I got all the apostrophes in the right places.)
a company is so large that they can afford to lose a company that has purchased millions of chips in the past
Well, yes, IBM are a company that large. Apple's business was drop in the ocean to the likes of IBM. A mere fleabite - and just about as irritating from what one reads. I'm sure that the general feeling at IBM is "good riddance" to Apple.
Might even turn out to be a financial gain in the long run. Having to service a fussy, idiosyncratic customer like Apple, who didn't actually buy a huge number of chips, must have caused quite a lot of noise in the system.
I get the flashing whenever I move the mouse pointer over the icons. And I get a box drawn around the selected item - real ugly. This looks like the triumph of style (bad!) over content to me.
Thought the use of the words "flashing" and "flashy" in the parent were very descriptive - this reminds me of all those Flash pages that I hate so much. (OK, I'm old; I just want the information not some kid's version of "cool".)
Apple's entire current user base would disagree with you.
That may well be true (although I seem to see a lot of Apple users who don't like the idea of a switch to Intel chips), but it's not the Apple user base that needs to be convinced if Apple is to increase it's market share.
PCs:cars::Apple:trains....
A very good analogy! But I think that most people would prefer the flexibility of a car (PC) rather than a train (Apple). Trains take you where they want you to go, cars take you where you want to go. And last time I checked a car was quite a lot cheaper than a train! I really can't see another Henry Ford mass producing trains.
It's just as well that you hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" label as in my country it would constitute libel to accuse people of a crime that a court of law has found them innocent of. Having said that, I have to agree that the US legal system is not the best in the world.
I'm not familiar with all of these cases, but is it true to contend that OJ Simpson was a "murderous, drug-pushing thug" and didn't he have to go through the due process of law (however poor we think that process was) rather than "walking the day after they are arrested"? I think that most people would contend that OJ Simpson proved that money can buy justice in the US rather than what the grandparent suggests.
Couldn't agree more. It's all too easy for those who don't have to administer a sizeable collection of servers to make glib remarks about the ease of patching them. Anyone who has to manage production systems knows that it's just not that easy. And a number of recent viruses have exploited vulnerabilities for which a patch isn't yet available.
a murderous, drug-pushing thug walks the day after he's arrested
Are you just being even more ridiculously hysterical than those calling for over-harsh punishments for hackers? Do you have any documented examples that you can quote to us of murderous, drug-pushing thugs walking the day after they are arrested. (I presume that by "murderous" you mean that they have committed murder rather than that they merely don't accord with your particular version of "normality".)
All makes a standard PC running Linux (or FreeBSD) looks that much more attractive, doesn't it?
hardware/software integration is one of the only reasons that companies like Sun and Apple are around
Is this in the same sense that proprietary companies like SGI are still around?
I think that you must have "forgotten" to factor in the cost of keyboard, mouse, and display when costing the mini-Mac. You can't buy a working system from Apple for $500.
I can't see any reason to not get an Apple.
I really don't think that's the right way to look at it. I think the question should be "is there any reason to get an Apple". I can't see anyone buying one so that they can run Windows on it (albeit dual booting with OS/X). The question, as a previous poster pointed out, is whether the premium that Apple charge (more like $500 than the $100-200 mentioned by that poster) is worth it to run OS/X. Simple answer as far as I'm concerned - no way!
Now if Apple were to make OS/X available for generic Intel (or AMD) computers then I'd be very interested. But I don't think that they are able to do that; they need to control the range of hardware that the OS runs on. This is one point where credit must be given to Microsoft; their OS does run (by no means perfectly) on just about any x86-based hardware (or x86-64). Again, this is one of the great strengths that Linux and the BSD variants have over OS/X.
If OS/X continues to be constrained by the range of hardware that it can run on it then it, and Apple computers, is (IMHO) ultimately doomed to fade away as yet another niche product. I'm sure that they'll continue as a media-player company, but not as far as personal computers are concerned.
You get such a high class of debate on Slashdot!
* no, we don't have a Nazi government (I keep hearing that from Americans all the time)
Those damned Yankees keep getting things back to front.
No, X86 is the common term for the 80368 to present day 80686 processors.
I certainly agree that x86 is a common term for these processors but not the only one. If you look at, for example the "arch" subdirectory of the Linux kernel source you have "i386" and "x86_64". Here is one example where "i386" is used generically to cover the whole range of processors.
The FreeBSD sources use a similar naming convention if I remeber correctly (which I rarely do nowadays).
At the risk of seeming to be too dim to appreciate your hillarious remarks - i386 is commonly used as a generic term for all x86 processors from the 80386 onwards (excluding - of course - the wonderful Athlon 64s, generically known as x86-64). Hence all those Linux binary names that end in "i386".
He now works for a German security software company called Securepoint.
I sure as heck wouldn't let Securepoint anywhere near my systems if that's the quality of their employees.
...Apple's traditional ass ramming in regard to price, I don't think I'd take kindly to smart arse comments about Apple systems only working on Apple endorsed hardware either.
Can't help but agree with you about Apple prices. If I'd paid that sort of price for my hardware I'd be pretty pissed of when it didn't work properly. I guess that I don't need to point out the moral!