I usually reckon it takes 24 hours for the majority of ISPs to pick up the changes in a DNS record (using a standard 8 hour TTL). 36 before you can start telling people to bitch to their ISPs to fix their DNS.
That's why you'd listen on both the old address and the new for
several days after making the DNS change. After, say, one week,
you'd stop listening on the old address. One week should be
enough to account for cached DNS entries to expire. (That is,
provided there is not a situation where your secondary DNS server
can't do zone transfers and is still authoritatively serving
old data. That data could be weeks old. But, you can check
for that.) Perhaps at the time you drop the old address,
you'd start listening on another new address, so that you
are always listening on two addresses, and one is always in
the (week-long) process of being phased out.
Yes, this means you are still accepting connections on the
old address for a week, but the observed behavior of spammers
is that they continue sending to no-longer-listed addresses
for months.
You know, there are millions of undernourished people in the U.S. too. It would have been nice if our government fed it's citizens before acting on all of it's "world-stage aspirations."
Well, it already provided everyone a free, compulsory education, and you didn't bother to learn the difference between "it's" and "its". There is only so much the government can do,
and beyond that, people have to help themselves.
In the United
States, it's really damn hard to literally go hungry.
I know this because I've known people who couldn't afford to
feed themselves without government assistance, and I've seen
what the government provides. Heck, I even been to the grocery
store several times with one guy I knew who paid for essentially
100% of his food with the public money available to him as a
single guy. It wasn't super, super generous, but he was able
to get enough to eat despite his penchant for buying
$15.00/lb salmon
and the most expensive organic free-range chicken you can buy
and despite his tendency to shop at the high-end grocery
stores in town, all of which is, incidentally, perfectly legal
when buying food on government assistance.
Oh, and speaking of legalities, this same guy would also sometimes
have some credit left over at the end of the month and be in a
"use it or lose it" situation, so he'd try to get people he knew
to go to the grocery store with him, buy their groceries with his
remaining credit, and get them to give him cash. (The astute
reader will have noticed that I described him as a "guy I knew"
rather than a "guy I still know".)
And this all happened in Texas, which is not exactly on the
"hey, let's tax people to institute more government programs"
center of the universe. So tell me again: why is it that you
think there is a hunger problem in the US?
Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?
No, because the Iraq War was started on March 30, 2003, whereas
Hurricane Katrina didn't
make landfall until August 29, 2005. Despite all the money that the US "squanders"
on high-tech stuff, the US still hasn't managed to invent a
time machine.
I removed all MX records for the domain, and the hostnames have nothing to do with the domain (so A record lookups won't help), but 30 days later I still was receiving over 2 million spams a day. After about 6 months the number really started falling off.
It's not hard to think that spammers are probably keeping
lists of IP addresses rather than DNS names. They don't care
about correctness, so there is no need for them to try the correct
SMTP server. Therefore, why bother with the overhead of DNS?
Or at least, why do the lookup more than once every month or so,
especially when IP addresses of mail servers tend to be pretty
stable. (You might even call them "static".)
Because spammers may be directly targeting an IP address,
one other possible way to fight spam is to change the IP address
of your SMTP server regularly. If you change the MX
records (well, really the A records they point to),
legitimate traffic will pick up the changes. To be safe, you
can continue to listen on the old IP address for a
week or so while you make the transition to the new IP address.
That ought to give stale DNS entries plenty of time to expire.
And, of course, you keep rotating, so that out of, say, 254
possible addresses, you're only using each one for maybe 1%
of the time. The other addresses are, of
course, not responding to any TCP packets received on port 25.
All this will achieve in the long term is force spammers
to use DNS and/or carefully prune their list of IP addresses
they try to send spam directly to. Well, that and any
message sent to an IP address that hasn't been current
for, say, 1 month is a message that is a very strong
candidate for being sent to an RBL.
It's not a huge win, and the spammers will adapt, but until
someone figure out some idea which is a huge win, there is
some value in continuously forcing spammers to adapt. It
makes spamming less easy.
A lot of venues (atleast smaller ones like bars) pay what is basically "music insurance". They pay a blanket fee to cover all the royalties that would be owed by any band they have in.
Here's the really ironic thing. So do churches!
It's called the CCLI,
and I'll bet you noticed that the domain there ends in.com
rather than.org. It gives new, or at least additional,
meaning to the concept of fleecing the flock. Not so much the
CCLI itself, necessarily, but just the huge amount of non-free
worship music. As the CCLI's web site says, they are
"serving the church by providing legal, affordable solutions
to the copyright issues surrounding congregational worship
services".
I guess my main question here is, if you are someone who
writes worship songs, don't you want people to worship God
more? Wouldn't it even be fair to say that you want people
to worship God as much as possible? If so, then why would
you require them to pay money to use your song to
worship God?
Once again, I think the answer lies with the record labels.
The church has bought into the idea of for-profit Christian
music so thoroughly and pervasively these days that basically
all, or at least a lot of the music they choose comes from for-profit
organizations, and that makes it a significant administrative
burden to pay off all the copyright holders (like Word Records -- oh look, another.com domain) every week,
hence the popularity of things like CCLI.
If you want to use songs that the congregation recognizes,
you are almost forced into using copyrighted songs.
The bottom line (pun intended) is that churches don't pay
tax to the government, but they do pay a "tax" to the
record labels.
Of course, with churches, it's sold differently. It's sold
as music that is "safe for the whole family". Notice that
it's not "music that brings you closer to God" or anything
like that. We're not talking about music that challenges
you to grow spiritually here; we're talking about music
that is safe, like a Volvo.
Also, notice that as dumb as
it sounds, I'm not making up that "safe for the whole family"
thing. I actually left out the "®". It should be
written as "Safe for the Whole Family®", and it's the
slogan of KLTY, also known
as the "#1 Christian Radio Station in America". Because
nothing brings glory to God like having higher revenues
than everyone else, right? (No, I don't actually know that
the #1 claim is based on revenues, but I do know that
Salem Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: SALM) owns both
that radio station, and also
this marketing division.
So that's at least part of the goal.)
Not a bit like drug dealers...exactly like drug dealers...The RIAA is trying to be the middle man in an agreement that's just between a grassroots 'pirate'(distributor) and an artist.
This is the music-industry equivalent of the mafia harassing someone because they are importing drugs straight from Colombia and selling them on their territories, bypassing the mafia's trade route and therefore removing them from the deal.
I don't think this is a good analogy, because the artists have
willingly signed a contract with a record label and assigned
some of their rights to the record label. Therefore, this
matter is no longer between just an artist and a DJ. The
record label (and anyone they choose to represent them),
who the artist has chosen to bring into the picture, has a
say in the matter.
A better analogy would be one of venture capitalists. If you
have a good idea for some new software or something, you can
either finance development and everything else on your own,
and make your own connections, and try to do your own sales,
and so on, or you can make a deal with venture capitalists,
who will use their connections in the industry, their money,
their experience at managing a company, and so on to help
your new company succeed. And to help themselves succeed.
But, when you make a make a deal with venture capitalists,
you give up a certain amount of control. The contract you
sign usually gives them the ability to do things like
replace management personnel if they think the company is
going in
the wrong direction. It probably also gives them a seat
on the board of directors. You are no longer the boss, or at
least you are no longer completely the boss.
And so it is with artists who make a deal with a record
label. Just like lots of software people don't have a
knack for business, many artists don't either and would
prefer to have someone more experienced in that area
handling that side of things. Or maybe they just suckered
in by a "we think you're really, really talented, and we
can make you famous" line. Even if it's the latter, the
artist has willingly signed, so it's kind of a case of
caveat emptor.
Now, it may be the case that record labels are becoming
unnecessary. I personally doubt it, since as
Frank Zappa once said, "most people wouldn't know good
music if it came up and bit them in the ass," and no matter how
crappy the music they put out, they have enough marketing
behind it that they can create a market for it. That may
be a workable business model, even if it is stupid and all about
making money. But personally, I don't care. The record labels
can keep, for all I care, the rights signed over to
them by all the artists who have no talent and never wanted
anything other riches and fame and a rock star lifestyle.
To me, it's more important to develop a viable way for
good artists to make what they deserve off their music
(and performances), so if that can happen, I guess I
personally don't really care that much about the RIAA.
Although it is, of course, annoying when they act smug
and moralistic when what they are really trying to promote
is their own self-interest, and only that.
SCO has an agreement with the attorneys that they not be paid by the hour. They will get a majority of the settlement against IBM instead.
So far they have gotten nothing for years of work. They are probably fairly desperate, and willing to do anything.
Surely even the lawyers representing SCO, despite their
apparently exiguous technical knowledge, are at least
smart enough to be familiar with
the concept of a sunk cost.
I suppose you can argue that caring whether it's a sunk
cost requires rationality, and representing SCO calls into
question whether they are acting rationally. Regardless,
I think that would easily be outweighed by lawyers' usual
tendency to be very rational when it comes to looking out
for their own self-interest.
In a related story,
when polled, several industry experts suggested that this new
myspace software was not expected to be an invasion of privacy
at all. Asked how software that was specifically intended to
track the actions of another individual could be anything other
than invasive, the experts responded, "Oh, yes that's a good point.
It's pretty simple really: we are basing our analysis on software
that myspace has produced in the past, like the web site, and based
on this analysis, we've concluded that the software is unlikely
to, y'know, work. As in... function. As in... not
do something other than just produce a bunch of
'an unexpected error has occurred' messages. So really, there's
nothing to worry about at all, and everyone should be able to
just produce as they always have. It should have no impact."
having time to relax and be yourself in the evenings might just be the drug some people seek.
Indeed, it was for me, and that's why I was very pleased with the
change when I switched from a 100% telecommuting job to a regular
office job with no telecommuting.
When I was working at home, I'd take my time and often take an
hour or two break to go shopping or do laundry or something
during the day, meaning I was often working until 9:00pm.
As a result, there was not a very good dividing line between
work time and personal time, and I virtually never enjoyed
my evenings. Now, with the regular office job, I sit in a
cube and close to 100% of the stuff I'm doing while I'm there
is work. Then I drive home, and while I'm at home, I
don't have to think about work at all. It's much easier to
relax in the evenings now because of that.
...You keep using that license. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah, that's it. Sun doesn't know much about the BSD license.
That's real easy to believe considering that Sun was founded
by a small group of people including Bill Joy, who happens
happens to have been one of the major authors of BSD in the
first place, having written (at least) the TCP/IP stack, the
vi editor, and the C shell.
Oh, and versions 1.x through 4.x of SunOS were based on
BSD. SunOS 5.x is based on SVR4, but it also has both
source and binary compatibility with the SunOS 4.x, so
it certainly has some BSD code in it as well.
So, I think Sun is in a position to grok the BSD license.
And even if they didn't, they could still put this stuff
in commercial products, since they own the copyright and
don't need a license to do whatever they want with it.
All they do release under an OSS license is an *interpreter* of the language. This is completely worthless for high-end number crunching. Wake me up when they open source a good optimising *compiler*.
Read the summary. It's an alpha version of the language.
Beta software means the design is finished and the feature
set will not change, but the implementation is not finished.
Alpha software means the design is still changing.
Why
would any sane person or organization produce an optimising
compiler for a language whose definition is still changing?
That makes about as much sense as sending prototypes of some
new car you're designing off to the government agencies to
have them crash tested. You're going to have to redo the
process again later when the design is finalized, so there
is really no point in doing it now.
I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
OK, here's my 44-line version written in C. The only library calls I use are printf(),
putchar(), and atoi(). I even inserted several
blank lines and separated out the banner printing into a separate
function to make it easier to read. I didn't group groups of 3
months together horizontally like/usr/bin/cal does, but
I don't think that would take more than an extra 13 lines; I'm just
too lazy to do it right now. (And yes, it really works. I used a
shell script to test the math against the output of/usr/bin/cal, and it at least gets the day of the week of
the first day of the year right from 1753 up through 2499.)
However, hearing that Sony itself has been pressuring the porn industry away from the Blu-Ray format, it seems they've shot themselves in the foot and mooted their brand from competition.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to me. For some inexplicable
reason, Sony has an insatiable desire to push and try to
control its own formats
at any cost, no matter how irrational or self-defeating it
might be. For instance,
MiniDisc. Nobody really ever believed it would take over from
the Compact Disc (hey, it's the same thing, only smaller, with
lossy compression, and incompatible with the thing everyone
already standardized on 10 years ago!), but did that stop
them from trying to push it? Oh wait -- why am I talking about
MiniDisc in the past tense when Sony
is still trying to sell them?
Anyway, MiniDisc was nuts, and it had ATRAC, which they
insisted on to the exclusion of MP3, and for no reason. But
that isn't all. Think about Memory Sticks. The digital
camera market is pretty big. Sony is a major player. Do
you think they offer any cameras that use something more
standard like, say, SDCard? Why, no they don't. Other
manufacturers are flexible about things like that because
it might, you know, be what the customer wants. But Sony?
No friggin' way they'd ever use a non-Sony format when a
Sony format exists, even if it's virtually a fringe format.
Oh, let's see. Can I go on? Oh yeah, how about PSP movie
format? That was a big success, wasn't it? Well, maybe
not. What about Sony PlayStation (the original) game
discs?
Were they regular DVDs? Nope, special PlayStation-only
discs (although the PlayStation could play regular DVDs
as well).
Basically, somebody at Sony has a thing (I would say
fetish, but that's too easy) for proprietary media,
and no matter how many times they fail at it, they
don't get the message, and they keep trying again and
again. They want to control the media, the physical
media. They are like Microsoft, except that they only
try for the vendor lock-in and fail at it
every time; in that sense,
they are like Microsoft's idiot brother.
Cingular and T-Mobile do share the same network technology (GSM/GPRS), which might be what you're thinking of.
I'm fairly sure, from talking to the T-Mobile rep at my
local store about this, that T-Mobile has roaming agreements
with Cingular. This means
that in certain areas of the country where T-Mobile doesn't
have (enough) towers but Cingular does, T-Mobile pays
Cingular to handle calls for its customers as if it were
T-Mobile's own network, so that T-Mobile
can boast a larger coverage area. I believe this is quite
common, actually, and many carriers have agreements with
other carriers to fill gaps in their coverage. It benefits
everyone, because spending lots of money to cover some remote
area of an Interstate highway is not effort that is economical
to duplicate across multiple carriers.
This is fairly out of date, but here
is an old article talking about reciprocal agreement between T-Mobile and the old AT&T Wireless (whose network Cingular absorbed). I wouldn't
be surprised if some of this still applies today.
Eats battery like nothing else, this might be good for the odd fix now and again when you boot up, but running continously would probably put a bit of a crimp on your battery.
Luckily Apple laptops already have acceleration sensors. So, all
you need to do is fire up the GPS when you detect any kind of
significant motion (something more than just vibration).
The give the user a preferences option to have the GPS always
off, always on, or on only when motion is detected, and you're
doing pretty well, I would think.
Well, actually the labels are there for the manufacturers. They don't give a crap what you do with their product, if there's a warning label then your chances of successfully suing them are minimal.
Yes, I think that much is clear. The point that the contest is
trying to make is that your chances of successfully suing them
should already be minimal without the labels.
They are trying to remind people of that by showing the
existence of some really stupid warning labels, thus showing
the absurdity and brokenness of a justice system that makes the
labels necessary.
On a side note, I happen to partially disagree with them that
the existence of these warning labels proves our justice system
is broken (at least in this particular way).
It's all about the level of
risk vs. the cost of eliminating the risk.
If I owned a home in an area that was well above the nearest
body of water (or creek, river, etc.) and thus had very
low chances of flooding, and if a reputable insurance
company offered me a legit flood insurance policy good for 50 years
for a one-time premium of $1, I would probably
buy that insurance. Any kind of flood damage is pretty
unlikely, but I won't miss the $1, and if something did
happen, I'd be covered.
In the same way, if you're a lawyer for a manufacturer and
there is any kind of warning label you could put on the
product that describes a real event that could
happen, even if it requires the user of the product to be
dumb as dirt for it to happen, and even if it requires the
judge and
jury to act in a ridiculous manner for the lawsuit to succeed,
the fact is, you don't know that those two things
won't coincide and bite you in the butt. They probably
won't, but given that it costs you very little to prevent it,
and given that you could lose millions of dollars if it
does happen
(say, in a wrongful death lawsuit), why not do it?
So, the fact is that warning labels are cheap insurance.
It's almost always a good idea to opt for cheap insurance,
where that means insurnce that actually costs significantly
less than it "should" if the cost were based on
doing the math. But cheap insurance can be made cheaper
in two ways: either hold the cost as a constant and
increase the risk being insured against, or hold the risk
constant and reduce the cost.
So how do we know that these stupid
warning labels really indicate anything about the justice
system and its tolerance of frivolous
lawsuits? Isn't it also possible that all they indicate
is that with modern manufacturing techniques, it's
really, really cheap to put warning labels on things?
BOSTON... Winters may be frigid, but at least there are lots of single nerds to hibernate with.
It was in the low 60s today here in Boston. Great timing, Wired.
Actually, low 60's is fairly cold, at least compared to here in
Austin, TX (another city on the list), where the KATT weather station
measured 80.1F as the high today.
Also, aren't you guys up in the Northeast having one of the mildest
winters on record in something like 100 years?
Even though it's already 10,000 employees strong Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president for people operations, sees no reason the company won't reach 20,000 by the end of the year. This will mean hiring something like 200 people a week, every week, all year.
Something like 200? How about 191.7808 people a week, people?
How hard is it to compute that? (And if I can figure that out
and Google can't, do you think they'll hire me?!)
This to me is a clear indication that something seriously messed up inside Google HR right now.
I have a 3.65 GPA and couldn't get an interview at Google New York. And they are hiring sub 3.0s now ? LOL
The fact that they hire people with below a 3.0 GPA doesn't
mean their HR department is screwed up. It simply means they
aren't being dogmatic.
For what it's worth, my GPA was below 3.0 when I graduated
with my BSCS in 2001. Know why?
Even though I typically got about a 3.75 every semester
my last 4 semesters when I was finishing up school,
in my pre-dropout days back in 1990-1992, I got a few semesters
of things like 1.5 and 0.5 and 0.0,
because I was too stupid to drop classes I'd stopped going to.
For what it's worth, I'm 35 years old now.
So my low grades are from 15 years ago. Should Google not hire
me because of that?
Oh yeah, and this certainly seems appropriate for this Slashdot topic!
Go ask - women do not like the light they throw off.
AFAIK, the two main quality issues with fluorescent lights are:
Ballast frequency, which is a very similar issue to refresh rate.
Color temperature, which is essentially whether the light is
yellowish or neutral or blue/greenish.
With CFLs, the ballast frequency issue was solved a long time ago.
Basically, the voltage needs to be stepped up way higher than
line voltage (120V in the US, 220V many other places). The low-tech
way to do this is with a transformer. This means you get 60 Hz
(or 50 Hz, whatever) current at that high frequency. That means
flickering. Flickering doesn't happen with incandescent bulbs
because it is heat of the filament that is causing the light
to be emitted. The electrical current going through the bulb goes to zero
120 times a second (with 60 Hz power), but the filament's thermal
mass is high enough that the bulb "coasts" through the zero voltage
(and zero current)
crossing and continues to emit light. You can even turn off an
incandescent and watch it continue to glow for a fraction of a
second after power is removed, because it takes time for the
filament to cool. But this continuous lighting thing is not the
case with a fluorescent,
as I understand it. The gas in the tube only produces light
when there's a voltage, and it stops pretty much instantaneously
when it's not being electrically excited.
Thus, with a fluorescent and a low-tech ballast,
you get an effect similar to what it
looks like when your monitor is set at a painfully low refresh rate,
only not quite as bad, but still annoying.
But, as I said, compact fluorescents don't suffer from this issue.
The reason is they have electronic ballasts. Instead of simple,
dumb circuit with a transformer in it, they have a circuit that
steps up the voltage, but it converts it to a much higher-frequency
A/C voltage before it gets into the tube. I'm not sure of the
frequency, but googling indicates it is in the tens of thousands
of Hz. So, it's
fast enough your eye really can't perceive it.
The other issue, color temperature is a little different
story. As this
explanation says, "Warm light is preferred for living spaces because it is more flattering to skin tones and clothing." I think this is the
key reason for aesthetic objections to CFLs. Incandescents produce
warm light at a color temperature of about 2700K, because that's what
happens when you heat up a filament. With compact fluorescents,
different options are available. If you want something
similar to what you're used to with an incandescent, you should
choose a 2700K CFL! It's not at all uncommon for CFLs to come in
color temperatures in the range of 4000K or 5000K. That will
appear considerably bluer or even weird and greenish compared
to an incandescent. Nobody wants their skin tone to appear
overly greenish, so 2700K it is, for aesthetic purposes, in
most cases.
On a side note, things are different if you want to, say, take
pictures of things. In that case, you might want to go with
a higher color temperature, because 2700K is considerably
warmer (yellower) than what you see outside on a nice sunny
day.
One thing that has also never made sense to me is why so many houses in the Western US don't have basements. Its hotter in the SouthWest than anywhere else in the Nation.
I live in Texas, which is sorta the Southwest, and in the part of
Texas where I live at least, the (limestone) bedrock can be as little
as 1 ft from the surface. To build a basement, you'd have to cut
through it somehow. That seems expensive. I'm not a geologist
nor am I structural engineer, but
maybe other parts of the country are different, and building the
basement is simply a convenient way of getting the foundation
down to the rock below, whereas in other areas, the rock is so
near the surface, that you just pour a slab on top of it, and
you're done?
Oh, you mean like this one that draws 105W and is rated at 6900 lumens and is equivalent
to about a 400W incandescent bulb?
like 150W equivalent, which would use about 30W.
Ah, I see, you're only looking for about 2600 lumens then. So, depending on
color temperature, you probably want something like
this
2700K one or this 4100K one or this 5100K one.
Unfortunately things seem to be going the other way, as at my local store I can now only buy 18W CFLs
There is that. I have been able to buy 27W CFLs at a local store,
and I believe I have even seen something around 30W, but they are
hard to find.
For this to work would require everyone's cooperation.
For it to work perfectly would require everyone's
cooperation. For it to work well enough to have
some positive benefit would only require the cooperation
of a lot of people.
Of course, it won't make it impossible for people to
look at NSFW items while at work. But for those
people who want to avoid looking at NSFW stuff
because they have a sense of professionalism, it will
help them do that.
Basically, this could work reasonably well for the case
where a user wants to control what they themselves see.
In that respect, it works a lot like Google's
SafeSearch does, allowing the user to make their
own decisions about what they choose to look at.
It does nothing useful for the case where someone wants
to control what someone else sees, but as far as I
can tell, it's not intended to.
Also, for what it's worth, if I ran a porn site, I would
definitely want to put a nsfw flag on anything and
everything. It would provide information that search engines
could use to identify nsfw content, which is exactly the
kind of content potential visitors to my site would be
looking for, right?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you'd listen on both the old address and the new for several days after making the DNS change. After, say, one week, you'd stop listening on the old address. One week should be enough to account for cached DNS entries to expire. (That is, provided there is not a situation where your secondary DNS server can't do zone transfers and is still authoritatively serving old data. That data could be weeks old. But, you can check for that.) Perhaps at the time you drop the old address, you'd start listening on another new address, so that you are always listening on two addresses, and one is always in the (week-long) process of being phased out.
Yes, this means you are still accepting connections on the old address for a week, but the observed behavior of spammers is that they continue sending to no-longer-listed addresses for months.
Well, it already provided everyone a free, compulsory education, and you didn't bother to learn the difference between "it's" and "its". There is only so much the government can do, and beyond that, people have to help themselves.
In the United States, it's really damn hard to literally go hungry. I know this because I've known people who couldn't afford to feed themselves without government assistance, and I've seen what the government provides. Heck, I even been to the grocery store several times with one guy I knew who paid for essentially 100% of his food with the public money available to him as a single guy. It wasn't super, super generous, but he was able to get enough to eat despite his penchant for buying $15.00/lb salmon and the most expensive organic free-range chicken you can buy and despite his tendency to shop at the high-end grocery stores in town, all of which is, incidentally, perfectly legal when buying food on government assistance.
Oh, and speaking of legalities, this same guy would also sometimes have some credit left over at the end of the month and be in a "use it or lose it" situation, so he'd try to get people he knew to go to the grocery store with him, buy their groceries with his remaining credit, and get them to give him cash. (The astute reader will have noticed that I described him as a "guy I knew" rather than a "guy I still know".)
And this all happened in Texas, which is not exactly on the "hey, let's tax people to institute more government programs" center of the universe. So tell me again: why is it that you think there is a hunger problem in the US?
No, because the Iraq War was started on March 30, 2003, whereas Hurricane Katrina didn't make landfall until August 29, 2005. Despite all the money that the US "squanders" on high-tech stuff, the US still hasn't managed to invent a time machine.
It's not hard to think that spammers are probably keeping lists of IP addresses rather than DNS names. They don't care about correctness, so there is no need for them to try the correct SMTP server. Therefore, why bother with the overhead of DNS? Or at least, why do the lookup more than once every month or so, especially when IP addresses of mail servers tend to be pretty stable. (You might even call them "static".)
Because spammers may be directly targeting an IP address, one other possible way to fight spam is to change the IP address of your SMTP server regularly. If you change the MX records (well, really the A records they point to), legitimate traffic will pick up the changes. To be safe, you can continue to listen on the old IP address for a week or so while you make the transition to the new IP address. That ought to give stale DNS entries plenty of time to expire.
And, of course, you keep rotating, so that out of, say, 254 possible addresses, you're only using each one for maybe 1% of the time. The other addresses are, of course, not responding to any TCP packets received on port 25.
All this will achieve in the long term is force spammers to use DNS and/or carefully prune their list of IP addresses they try to send spam directly to. Well, that and any message sent to an IP address that hasn't been current for, say, 1 month is a message that is a very strong candidate for being sent to an RBL.
It's not a huge win, and the spammers will adapt, but until someone figure out some idea which is a huge win, there is some value in continuously forcing spammers to adapt. It makes spamming less easy.
Here's the really ironic thing. So do churches!
It's called the CCLI, and I'll bet you noticed that the domain there ends in .com
rather than .org. It gives new, or at least additional,
meaning to the concept of fleecing the flock. Not so much the
CCLI itself, necessarily, but just the huge amount of non-free
worship music. As the CCLI's web site says, they are
"serving the church by providing legal, affordable solutions
to the copyright issues surrounding congregational worship
services".
I guess my main question here is, if you are someone who writes worship songs, don't you want people to worship God more? Wouldn't it even be fair to say that you want people to worship God as much as possible? If so, then why would you require them to pay money to use your song to worship God?
Once again, I think the answer lies with the record labels. The church has bought into the idea of for-profit Christian music so thoroughly and pervasively these days that basically all, or at least a lot of the music they choose comes from for-profit organizations, and that makes it a significant administrative burden to pay off all the copyright holders (like Word Records -- oh look, another .com domain) every week,
hence the popularity of things like CCLI.
If you want to use songs that the congregation recognizes,
you are almost forced into using copyrighted songs.
The bottom line (pun intended) is that churches don't pay
tax to the government, but they do pay a "tax" to the
record labels.
Of course, with churches, it's sold differently. It's sold as music that is "safe for the whole family". Notice that it's not "music that brings you closer to God" or anything like that. We're not talking about music that challenges you to grow spiritually here; we're talking about music that is safe, like a Volvo.
Also, notice that as dumb as it sounds, I'm not making up that "safe for the whole family" thing. I actually left out the "®". It should be written as "Safe for the Whole Family®", and it's the slogan of KLTY, also known as the "#1 Christian Radio Station in America". Because nothing brings glory to God like having higher revenues than everyone else, right? (No, I don't actually know that the #1 claim is based on revenues, but I do know that Salem Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: SALM) owns both that radio station, and also this marketing division. So that's at least part of the goal.)
I don't think this is a good analogy, because the artists have willingly signed a contract with a record label and assigned some of their rights to the record label. Therefore, this matter is no longer between just an artist and a DJ. The record label (and anyone they choose to represent them), who the artist has chosen to bring into the picture, has a say in the matter.
A better analogy would be one of venture capitalists. If you have a good idea for some new software or something, you can either finance development and everything else on your own, and make your own connections, and try to do your own sales, and so on, or you can make a deal with venture capitalists, who will use their connections in the industry, their money, their experience at managing a company, and so on to help your new company succeed. And to help themselves succeed.
But, when you make a make a deal with venture capitalists, you give up a certain amount of control. The contract you sign usually gives them the ability to do things like replace management personnel if they think the company is going in the wrong direction. It probably also gives them a seat on the board of directors. You are no longer the boss, or at least you are no longer completely the boss.
And so it is with artists who make a deal with a record label. Just like lots of software people don't have a knack for business, many artists don't either and would prefer to have someone more experienced in that area handling that side of things. Or maybe they just suckered in by a "we think you're really, really talented, and we can make you famous" line. Even if it's the latter, the artist has willingly signed, so it's kind of a case of caveat emptor.
Now, it may be the case that record labels are becoming unnecessary. I personally doubt it, since as Frank Zappa once said, "most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them in the ass," and no matter how crappy the music they put out, they have enough marketing behind it that they can create a market for it. That may be a workable business model, even if it is stupid and all about making money. But personally, I don't care. The record labels can keep, for all I care, the rights signed over to them by all the artists who have no talent and never wanted anything other riches and fame and a rock star lifestyle. To me, it's more important to develop a viable way for good artists to make what they deserve off their music (and performances), so if that can happen, I guess I personally don't really care that much about the RIAA. Although it is, of course, annoying when they act smug and moralistic when what they are really trying to promote is their own self-interest, and only that.
Surely even the lawyers representing SCO, despite their apparently exiguous technical knowledge, are at least smart enough to be familiar with the concept of a sunk cost.
I suppose you can argue that caring whether it's a sunk cost requires rationality, and representing SCO calls into question whether they are acting rationally. Regardless, I think that would easily be outweighed by lawyers' usual tendency to be very rational when it comes to looking out for their own self-interest.
In a related story, when polled, several industry experts suggested that this new myspace software was not expected to be an invasion of privacy at all. Asked how software that was specifically intended to track the actions of another individual could be anything other than invasive, the experts responded, "Oh, yes that's a good point. It's pretty simple really: we are basing our analysis on software that myspace has produced in the past, like the web site, and based on this analysis, we've concluded that the software is unlikely to, y'know, work. As in... function. As in... not do something other than just produce a bunch of 'an unexpected error has occurred' messages. So really, there's nothing to worry about at all, and everyone should be able to just produce as they always have. It should have no impact."
Indeed, it was for me, and that's why I was very pleased with the change when I switched from a 100% telecommuting job to a regular office job with no telecommuting.
When I was working at home, I'd take my time and often take an hour or two break to go shopping or do laundry or something during the day, meaning I was often working until 9:00pm. As a result, there was not a very good dividing line between work time and personal time, and I virtually never enjoyed my evenings. Now, with the regular office job, I sit in a cube and close to 100% of the stuff I'm doing while I'm there is work. Then I drive home, and while I'm at home, I don't have to think about work at all. It's much easier to relax in the evenings now because of that.
I must be hungry, because when I saw that this story was tagged with "mooreslaw", I thought, "Mmm, that sounds good. Is that anything like coleslaw?".
I don't understand string theory either. I just want to say that it's strange just how often xkcd is appropriate when it comes to Slashdot stories...
Yeah, that's it. Sun doesn't know much about the BSD license. That's real easy to believe considering that Sun was founded by a small group of people including Bill Joy, who happens happens to have been one of the major authors of BSD in the first place, having written (at least) the TCP/IP stack, the vi editor, and the C shell.
Oh, and versions 1.x through 4.x of SunOS were based on BSD. SunOS 5.x is based on SVR4, but it also has both source and binary compatibility with the SunOS 4.x, so it certainly has some BSD code in it as well.
So, I think Sun is in a position to grok the BSD license. And even if they didn't, they could still put this stuff in commercial products, since they own the copyright and don't need a license to do whatever they want with it.
Read the summary. It's an alpha version of the language. Beta software means the design is finished and the feature set will not change, but the implementation is not finished. Alpha software means the design is still changing.
Why would any sane person or organization produce an optimising compiler for a language whose definition is still changing? That makes about as much sense as sending prototypes of some new car you're designing off to the government agencies to have them crash tested. You're going to have to redo the process again later when the design is finalized, so there is really no point in doing it now.
OK, here's my 44-line version written in C. The only library calls I use are printf(), putchar(), and atoi(). I even inserted several blank lines and separated out the banner printing into a separate function to make it easier to read. I didn't group groups of 3 months together horizontally like /usr/bin/cal does, but
I don't think that would take more than an extra 13 lines; I'm just
too lazy to do it right now. (And yes, it really works. I used a
shell script to test the math against the output of /usr/bin/cal, and it at least gets the day of the week of
the first day of the year right from 1753 up through 2499.)
This comes as absolutely no surprise to me. For some inexplicable reason, Sony has an insatiable desire to push and try to control its own formats at any cost, no matter how irrational or self-defeating it might be. For instance, MiniDisc. Nobody really ever believed it would take over from the Compact Disc (hey, it's the same thing, only smaller, with lossy compression, and incompatible with the thing everyone already standardized on 10 years ago!), but did that stop them from trying to push it? Oh wait -- why am I talking about MiniDisc in the past tense when Sony is still trying to sell them?
Anyway, MiniDisc was nuts, and it had ATRAC, which they insisted on to the exclusion of MP3, and for no reason. But that isn't all. Think about Memory Sticks. The digital camera market is pretty big. Sony is a major player. Do you think they offer any cameras that use something more standard like, say, SDCard? Why, no they don't. Other manufacturers are flexible about things like that because it might, you know, be what the customer wants. But Sony? No friggin' way they'd ever use a non-Sony format when a Sony format exists, even if it's virtually a fringe format.
Oh, let's see. Can I go on? Oh yeah, how about PSP movie format? That was a big success, wasn't it? Well, maybe not. What about Sony PlayStation (the original) game discs? Were they regular DVDs? Nope, special PlayStation-only discs (although the PlayStation could play regular DVDs as well).
Basically, somebody at Sony has a thing (I would say fetish, but that's too easy) for proprietary media, and no matter how many times they fail at it, they don't get the message, and they keep trying again and again. They want to control the media, the physical media. They are like Microsoft, except that they only try for the vendor lock-in and fail at it every time; in that sense, they are like Microsoft's idiot brother.
I'm fairly sure, from talking to the T-Mobile rep at my local store about this, that T-Mobile has roaming agreements with Cingular. This means that in certain areas of the country where T-Mobile doesn't have (enough) towers but Cingular does, T-Mobile pays Cingular to handle calls for its customers as if it were T-Mobile's own network, so that T-Mobile can boast a larger coverage area. I believe this is quite common, actually, and many carriers have agreements with other carriers to fill gaps in their coverage. It benefits everyone, because spending lots of money to cover some remote area of an Interstate highway is not effort that is economical to duplicate across multiple carriers.
This is fairly out of date, but here is an old article talking about reciprocal agreement between T-Mobile and the old AT&T Wireless (whose network Cingular absorbed). I wouldn't be surprised if some of this still applies today.
Luckily Apple laptops already have acceleration sensors. So, all you need to do is fire up the GPS when you detect any kind of significant motion (something more than just vibration). The give the user a preferences option to have the GPS always off, always on, or on only when motion is detected, and you're doing pretty well, I would think.
Yes, I think that much is clear. The point that the contest is trying to make is that your chances of successfully suing them should already be minimal without the labels. They are trying to remind people of that by showing the existence of some really stupid warning labels, thus showing the absurdity and brokenness of a justice system that makes the labels necessary.
On a side note, I happen to partially disagree with them that the existence of these warning labels proves our justice system is broken (at least in this particular way). It's all about the level of risk vs. the cost of eliminating the risk. If I owned a home in an area that was well above the nearest body of water (or creek, river, etc.) and thus had very low chances of flooding, and if a reputable insurance company offered me a legit flood insurance policy good for 50 years for a one-time premium of $1, I would probably buy that insurance. Any kind of flood damage is pretty unlikely, but I won't miss the $1, and if something did happen, I'd be covered.
In the same way, if you're a lawyer for a manufacturer and there is any kind of warning label you could put on the product that describes a real event that could happen, even if it requires the user of the product to be dumb as dirt for it to happen, and even if it requires the judge and jury to act in a ridiculous manner for the lawsuit to succeed, the fact is, you don't know that those two things won't coincide and bite you in the butt. They probably won't, but given that it costs you very little to prevent it, and given that you could lose millions of dollars if it does happen (say, in a wrongful death lawsuit), why not do it?
So, the fact is that warning labels are cheap insurance. It's almost always a good idea to opt for cheap insurance, where that means insurnce that actually costs significantly less than it "should" if the cost were based on doing the math. But cheap insurance can be made cheaper in two ways: either hold the cost as a constant and increase the risk being insured against, or hold the risk constant and reduce the cost. So how do we know that these stupid warning labels really indicate anything about the justice system and its tolerance of frivolous lawsuits? Isn't it also possible that all they indicate is that with modern manufacturing techniques, it's really, really cheap to put warning labels on things?
Actually, low 60's is fairly cold, at least compared to here in Austin, TX (another city on the list), where the KATT weather station measured 80.1F as the high today.
Also, aren't you guys up in the Northeast having one of the mildest winters on record in something like 100 years?
Something like 200? How about 191.7808 people a week, people? How hard is it to compute that? (And if I can figure that out and Google can't, do you think they'll hire me?!)
The fact that they hire people with below a 3.0 GPA doesn't mean their HR department is screwed up. It simply means they aren't being dogmatic.
For what it's worth, my GPA was below 3.0 when I graduated with my BSCS in 2001. Know why? Even though I typically got about a 3.75 every semester my last 4 semesters when I was finishing up school, in my pre-dropout days back in 1990-1992, I got a few semesters of things like 1.5 and 0.5 and 0.0, because I was too stupid to drop classes I'd stopped going to. For what it's worth, I'm 35 years old now. So my low grades are from 15 years ago. Should Google not hire me because of that?
Oh yeah, and this certainly seems appropriate for this Slashdot topic!
AFAIK, the two main quality issues with fluorescent lights are:
With CFLs, the ballast frequency issue was solved a long time ago. Basically, the voltage needs to be stepped up way higher than line voltage (120V in the US, 220V many other places). The low-tech way to do this is with a transformer. This means you get 60 Hz (or 50 Hz, whatever) current at that high frequency. That means flickering. Flickering doesn't happen with incandescent bulbs because it is heat of the filament that is causing the light to be emitted. The electrical current going through the bulb goes to zero 120 times a second (with 60 Hz power), but the filament's thermal mass is high enough that the bulb "coasts" through the zero voltage (and zero current) crossing and continues to emit light. You can even turn off an incandescent and watch it continue to glow for a fraction of a second after power is removed, because it takes time for the filament to cool. But this continuous lighting thing is not the case with a fluorescent, as I understand it. The gas in the tube only produces light when there's a voltage, and it stops pretty much instantaneously when it's not being electrically excited. Thus, with a fluorescent and a low-tech ballast, you get an effect similar to what it looks like when your monitor is set at a painfully low refresh rate, only not quite as bad, but still annoying.
But, as I said, compact fluorescents don't suffer from this issue. The reason is they have electronic ballasts. Instead of simple, dumb circuit with a transformer in it, they have a circuit that steps up the voltage, but it converts it to a much higher-frequency A/C voltage before it gets into the tube. I'm not sure of the frequency, but googling indicates it is in the tens of thousands of Hz. So, it's fast enough your eye really can't perceive it.
The other issue, color temperature is a little different story. As this explanation says, "Warm light is preferred for living spaces because it is more flattering to skin tones and clothing." I think this is the key reason for aesthetic objections to CFLs. Incandescents produce warm light at a color temperature of about 2700K, because that's what happens when you heat up a filament. With compact fluorescents, different options are available. If you want something similar to what you're used to with an incandescent, you should choose a 2700K CFL! It's not at all uncommon for CFLs to come in color temperatures in the range of 4000K or 5000K. That will appear considerably bluer or even weird and greenish compared to an incandescent. Nobody wants their skin tone to appear overly greenish, so 2700K it is, for aesthetic purposes, in most cases.
On a side note, things are different if you want to, say, take pictures of things. In that case, you might want to go with a higher color temperature, because 2700K is considerably warmer (yellower) than what you see outside on a nice sunny day.
I live in Texas, which is sorta the Southwest, and in the part of Texas where I live at least, the (limestone) bedrock can be as little as 1 ft from the surface. To build a basement, you'd have to cut through it somehow. That seems expensive. I'm not a geologist nor am I structural engineer, but maybe other parts of the country are different, and building the basement is simply a convenient way of getting the foundation down to the rock below, whereas in other areas, the rock is so near the surface, that you just pour a slab on top of it, and you're done?
Oh, you mean like this one that draws 105W and is rated at 6900 lumens and is equivalent to about a 400W incandescent bulb?
Ah, I see, you're only looking for about 2600 lumens then. So, depending on color temperature, you probably want something like this 2700K one or this 4100K one or this 5100K one.
There is that. I have been able to buy 27W CFLs at a local store, and I believe I have even seen something around 30W, but they are hard to find.
For it to work perfectly would require everyone's cooperation. For it to work well enough to have some positive benefit would only require the cooperation of a lot of people.
Of course, it won't make it impossible for people to look at NSFW items while at work. But for those people who want to avoid looking at NSFW stuff because they have a sense of professionalism, it will help them do that.
Basically, this could work reasonably well for the case where a user wants to control what they themselves see. In that respect, it works a lot like Google's SafeSearch does, allowing the user to make their own decisions about what they choose to look at. It does nothing useful for the case where someone wants to control what someone else sees, but as far as I can tell, it's not intended to.
Also, for what it's worth, if I ran a porn site, I would definitely want to put a nsfw flag on anything and everything. It would provide information that search engines could use to identify nsfw content, which is exactly the kind of content potential visitors to my site would be looking for, right?