Whoever you are, I think you are seriously confused about the purpose of modding.
It's not to bump up stuff that you agree with and bump down stuff that you don't. It's to bump up *interesting and intelligent discussion*, and bump down *trolling/flaming/other useless shit*, regardless of whether or not you agree with what is being said.
The parent and grandparent are both interesting and intelligent commentaries. So both should be (and have been) modded up.
Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 have been sold in a dual-pack box for several years now. It's still readily available. I see it at Fry's all the time; they have a display of "old" games all for about $10, and the Fallout 1/2 combo is one of them.
I've often considered going back and buying all of the "games of the year" from about 1995 - 2000 and playing those, the graphics might not be equal to what's available today but I'm sure they'd be more fun that your average new $50 title.
I first saw this card when a friend bought one to play Tomb Raider. I was blown away; the game went from chunky, halting software-rendered 3d to beautiful, smooth, detailed hardware 3d. I immediately bought one of my own (from Canopus, the Canopus Pure 3D), which I proceeded to use for several years. I can remember the big pit in Tomb Raider where a couple of lions and gorillas were running around in the fringes of darkness. I thought it was so cool that you could see these animals from far away and rather than being blobs of smudgy pixels, they looked like real animals in miniature. It made the game feel so much more realistic.
The last games I played with my Canopus Pure 3D were the updated versions of Tie Fighter and X-Wing, which really ran well on an AMD K6-233 and Canopus Pure 3D. Those games had the advantage of not needing to render any backgrounds, it was all just black space, so they only had to render the actual ships flying around. I upgraded to a TNT2 card halfway through Tie Fighter but that game didn't get much faster or prettier, it was already well taken care of by the Voodoo-based Pure3D.
I bought another Pure3d for the system that I built for my sister in mid 1997 as a wedding present. A Cyrix 233 with 32 megs of memory and a Canopus Pure 3d, with monitor and printer, was over $2000 to hand-build at that time. You couldn't sell one of those systems for $50 these days...
My apologies again. My eyes glazed over a bit when I saw all of the links in the Slashdot article and I didn't follow them all. I read just enough to decide that this init replacement had some pretty serious dependencies on other software, and assumed it was mostly Gnome related. Mea Culpa.
But certainly SystemServices does have many more dependencies than init, even if none of them are Gnome specific. Python, D-Bus, all of the naming systems and nomenclatures inherent in his description of how services identify each other...
OK, I apologize if I don't know enough about Python and Gnome to be able to tell what parts of Gnome and what parts of Python this person intends to use. I am not an expert in either Python or Gnome. The author of the article writes:
Starting a service: ServiceManager, when you tell it "start org.designfu.SomeService" does a check on SomeService's dependencies, loads those first if necessary, and then activates org.designfu.SomeService using normal dbus activation. Ideally this would mean activating the daemon itself which would use DBus, but it could also mean activating a "python wrapper". ServiceManager sends out a signal over DBus announcing a new system service (and providing its name). At this point org.designfu.SomeService is responsible for keeping people notified as to its state.
I guess I assumed that dbus was some Gnome message passing system. Is it instead something in Python?
Reading this guy's thoughts on replacing init, makes it very clear that this is intended for very tight integration with the Gnome desktop system. It's not a general purpose mechanism built using the thinnest layer with the least dependencies possible (like init is). All you need to run init is a kernel, a filesystem, and for most init scripts, a shell program. This person's SystemServices concept is heavily tied into Gnome and would require a complete Gnome implementation to function properly. On the other hand, most init scripts do seem to be very specific in operation and make many assumptions about the tools available and the locations of files, making them tightly bound to the distribution they are running on as well. But at least init as a service starting program has minimal requirements, even if init script authors choose (typically because they have no other choice due to the lack of standardization of Linux systems) to make their scripts specific to the distribution.
This makes it unsuitable for the purpose of starting up system services on a Linux system which does not include Gnome. I think that init was designed with very limited requirements and thus runs on every Linux system no matter how it has been customized.
But that's typically the trade-off in software design: if your software can make more assumptions and be more specific in operation, then often it can be more powerful and integrate better with the specific system it is made to work on. Unfortunately, for something as general and low-level as the service running program, the SystemServices concept seems to specific to be useful for general use.
Which is not to say that it's a useless project, just don't expect to see it replacing init any time soon.
Good point, but irrelevent. Even if you declare a global variable, you still have to hardcode its value. The fact that the IP address only showed up 1 time in their string search of the binary would indicate that they did exactly what you said.
So you're not in left field, it's just that the developer who wrote the software apparently did exactly what you said, which was not relevent to the mistake at hand, which was more about the faulty implementation of the NTP service, and the fact that it was hardcoded to a single IP address.
I agree. Ico's ending was the best ending of any game, ever. Ico is in my list of top 5 video games of all time.
It's especially nice because there is an ending *after* the ending, after the final sequence and credits play and you control the boy running around on the beach.
FWIW, the staff at Fry's has gotten immeasurably better in recent years. Every time I go to enquire about motherboards, memory, processors, or hard drives there they seem to know a good bit about all of the products that they are selling. Other departments may be worse, and of course you have to cut them some slack because they sell *alot* of stuff and can't know everything about everything.
Years ago they were much, much worse. I really think that they are pretty good in this department now and several other friends of mine have made comments recently to the same effect, so it's not just me.
I actually like Fry's alot. If you read their weekly ads in the SJ Mercury news, which is a fun way to spend 5 or 10 minutes if you are a hardware geek like me, then you will find a handful of really amazing deals every week. Often there are free items, like the USB 2.0 card that I bought for my mom's computer last week. Or the Athlon motherboard/retail processor combo that I got this weekend. Didn't need the processor so I sold it on eBay and my net cost for the motherboard was only $20.
Anyway, about the door nazis at Fry's. They're so harmless it's ridiculous. I go in there all the time with a big, bulky backpack. Sometimes I buy stuff, sometimes I don't (I never steal), and I never stop for the door nazis on the way out. They don't even ask you to stop, you just ignore them and they ignore you. I have no idea why anyone bothers stopping for them. Actually I would enjoy it if they tried to stop me because I have several good comebacks just waiting for them, but have never had a chance to use them.
Now, the people at Best Buy in Manhattan (NYC) are a different story. They are super agressive. Unlike Fry's which hires the old and feeble to be their door nazis, Best Buy hires tough athletic teenagers. And they *will* try to stop you, with raised voices and quite agressively. The worst part is that it is embarrassing. I would not stop for them under any circumstances but I have been embarrassed on more than one occasion to think that the other customers around me are thinking that I am stealing just because I refuse to put up with being searched on the way out.
OK, and for another person's irrelevent preferences...
I hate microbrews. They suck. There is a *reason* that some brewers have been making beer for hundreds of years, and some only as long as fancy labels and funky names have been all the rage. I find that microbrewed beers have a very unfinished and unrefined taste. And I've tasted alot of them. They're typically sweeter and less complex in flavor. They almost all have that characteristic "we don't know what we are doing" over-sweet, over-ripe flavor. Crappy.
I get the feeling when I read about people's opinions of microbrews it's more about finding that "cool brew" that you don't think anyone else has probably heard of and thus makes you that much cooler to know about, than it is about actual *good beer*. It's kind of like people who say, "oh, you've never eaten pizza until you've eaten at [insert the name of some random pizza joint in some random city here]." And it's not really that the pizza is any better there, it's just that people love to think that they have the corner on some special knowledge about something. Microbrews are like that. So many people have told me, "you've gotta try Red Tree Frog Extra Special Blah Blah Blah Dark Ale. It's this little itty bitty microbrewery in the middle of nowhere and it's just the best!" And then I try it and it's the same old microbrewed drivel.
In my book, there is nothing that can beat a good, established British brew. Bass Ale is the closest to perfection that any beer will ever be.
Let me finish by saying that this was mostly just a rant, and I really don't have anything against microbrews per se, or the people that like them, I just get a little sick of hearing about them all of the time when I don't think they are anything special. Which I guess is kind of a rant in and of itself.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As one of the posters in this thread pointed out, it would go a long way towards helping establish accountability on the part of spammers. If you have to be accessible in order for "recipients" of your mail to be able to read the mail, then I suppose you'd have to be pretty easy to track down and also sue under the current anti-spam laws.
Anyway, it's just an idea. I think that the whole question of "should we come up with a new mail protocol" is kind of misguided because obviously the hard problems here are not technical, they're in dealing with the huge momentum built up around the current mail technologies. It seems to me that we already have all the technology that we need to solve this problem, it's more a matter of enforcement by ISPs. I was just posting the link because it was relevent.
If you're the same Mr. Sam that made Courier, then thanks... I've been using it on my server for years and really love it. I'd be particularly interested in hearing what your ideas are about the ways that we can solve the spam problem, given that you are the author of a complete modern mail system.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That is a very good point. Making spamming costly will not stop all spammers. Those with a legitimate business will still spam because there will still be enough legitimate customers out there who buy based on their spamming.
But making spam costly will indeed stop the majority of spam that is sent today, which is useless, annoying stuff that far less than 1/100 of 1 percent of people actually make a purchase based on.
That is the kind of spam that I really want to stop, and I think that making spamming cost money will have the desired effect.
In my mind I see a smooth graph of how much it costs to send junk email versus how many companies will send junk email. Right now we are at the end of the scale where the cost to send spam is almost nothing, and so the number of "companies" that will send out spam is HUGE, and not-concidentally the content of that spam is very poor.
We need to work our way to the end of the scale where spam costs real money to send, and only a moderate number of legitimate businesses then find sending spam worthwhile. And the kind of spam which is sent is then would be less annoying (to me anyway) as well. Spam would be more like advertising of actual products than make-money-rich schemes based on trying to sell snake oil.
D. J. Bernstein, the author of the supremely reliable and secure qmail mail server, wrote a proposal for a new Internet mail system a couple of years ago. It's called Internet Mail 2000. Check it out at:
"IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility."
It's an interesting concept and worth a read.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like it would do much to stop spamming, which is the major problem with the current internet mail infrastructure. For that, we need some way to make sending bulk email costly to spammers. Actually I'd say that this could be done already with current technologies, it's just that ISPs and large network providers are not being responsible in ensuring that the users of their networks pay the appropriate price for sending out SPAM.
Maybe ISP's should charge users for each outbound SMTP connection they make? I'd happily pay 10 cents per email I sent if it would reduce the amount of SPAM I received. It would only cost me a couple of bucks a month too at the rate that I send email...
The Europeans didn't contribute very much to China's infrastructure. Even today, many parts of China are not significantly different from the way they were hundreds of years ago. The imperialists did not change that at all.
They did, however, give China beer. Some Chinese beers aren't bad, even bordering on pretty good; I really enjoyed the 25 cent liter bottles of Yang Jing beer in Beijing.
Also, Tianjin (and probably many other Chinese cities that I wasn't fortunate enough to visit) has some neat European architecture that it wouldn't have had without the Europeans.
But aside from that, I don't think that the imperialists really helped mainland China much at all. Hong Kong is an entirely different story though.
To be clearer... what I'm trying to say is, if the European powers had not held China down for so long, at a time when the Chinese imperial system might naturally have crumbled on its own, but was instead propped up by the imperialists to their own ends, and at the expense of the Chinese people, then maybe China would be a democratic country now.
Unfortunately the Mao Dynasty, as you refer to it, was the only means by which the Chinese were able to finally get rid of the monkey on their back which had been holding them down for hundreds of years. That monkey was imperialism by European powers. It's really too bad that the only political party which was able to gather enough momentum to finally push the imperialists out was the communist party. It's also unfortunate that the imperialists had to be pushed out at all, otherwise China may very well have developed a democratic government on its own...
OK, well this discussion is way over and nobody will probably read this but...
You are right, although keep in mind that a good percentage of caucasians are lactose intolerant as well. I'm not, as the choice of desserts that I mentioned shows.
But they were just examples. Indeed there are several Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors in Beijing, and they are quite popular. My poing was just that fatty, sugary foods are eaten much less often there, whether they have milk in them or not. Thus just living the lifestyle which is natural in China (and quite enjoyable, really) is a good way to lose weight.
I spent a good deal of time in China a couple of years back. All I have to say is, the many people whom I met all over the country were honest and worked very hard, and I think that they deserve better living conditions than they currently have.
Their government is slowly but surely making progress towards a more reasonable form, and I hope that news technology developments like this are harbingers of improvement in their economy and the lives of the Chinese people in general.
I split lanes all the time on the way to work in CA. No problems whatsoever, some drivers are even nice enough to move over as much as they can when they see you coming. Nice to see that a) some people actually pay attention to what is going on around them, and b) they're nice enough to make the effort (although it's rarely needed as there's almost never a space that I can't fit through). But it's important to split sensibly, only 5 - 10 MPH faster than the cars, so as not to frighten anyone and also to reduce the risks involved.
I have also split lanes in NYC. On Manhattan streets anything goes so this is not a problem. I did it during a very long traffic jam on the west side highway and some people were clearly miffed. There was a cop-like vehicle about 15 car lengths back who I think got pissed off and tried to catch me but since he was in the traffic jam also he never really made any forward progress at all. At my conservative 15 - 20 MPH pace I left him way behind and never looked back.
I guess I'll never figure out why some people get so pissed at splitters. It's not my fault that car drivers choose to create traffic jams with their oversized vehicles. I split very carefully and reasonably. It's nice to live in CA where it seems people are just a bit more progressively minded about stuff like this.
Here's an alternate strategy for losing weight: move to China. If not permanently, at least for several months. I went there in 2001 and in 9 months I lost about 20 pounds without even trying. I didn't deprive myself in any way, I ate what I wanted and was very, very happy. But I did ride a bike more and fatty foods are just not readily available there. Ice cream before bed? Doesn't happen. Cheesecake for dessert? They don't have it. Buttered popcorn at the movie theatre? Doesn't exist.
I'm not trying to be flippant but really, it was the easiest 20 pounds I ever lost. Granted, it took 9 months, but I wasn't even trying, and I didn't go on any special diets or anything. Just the change of lifestyle did it for me. Oh, and I had a great time there.
Of course, I've been back in the USA for a year and a half and almost 10 pounds have come back. Time for another trip...
I guess I'm of a divided mind on this. On the one hand I believe in the freedom of people to use whatever programming tools they like best and feel most productive with. And of course if a person is going to go through the trouble of actually doing *work*, especially if it's software to be released for everyone's benefit under a free software license, then I would never be so arrogant as to suggest that they should observe anyone but their own (and especially not my) opinions about the tools that they should use.
But, I also feel that the effectiveness of a software package and its general value can be diminished if the "wrong" tools are used. I personally have had too many bad experiences trying to get Perl programs to run, and have formed a negative opinion of not only the syntax and structure of Perl programs, but on their fragility and usefuless at runtime.
So even though I don't want to discourage anyone from using Perl... I really want to discourage everyone in the strongest possible terms from using Perl:)
I'm curious about your statement about Perl allowing you to make maximum use of the hardware when other languages do not. Surely you can do everything in C that you can do in Perl? Also Java (if you allow calls out to C routines, which presumably you would have to allow in Perl as well to really have full access to the hardware)?
I would suggest that every programmer is limited in their ability to utilize the hardware, by their knowledge of the programming language in question. This doesn't seem to be an aspect of any particular programming language, but to all languages more or less equally. So I guess I don't understand how your statement differentiates Perl from C or any other language, except as they relate to your specific knowledge.
In which case I'd have to conclude that it really is just you:)
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever you are, I think you are seriously confused about the purpose of modding.
It's not to bump up stuff that you agree with and bump down stuff that you don't. It's to bump up *interesting and intelligent discussion*, and bump down *trolling/flaming/other useless shit*, regardless of whether or not you agree with what is being said.
The parent and grandparent are both interesting and intelligent commentaries. So both should be (and have been) modded up.
Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 have been sold in a dual-pack box for several years now. It's still readily available. I see it at Fry's all the time; they have a display of "old" games all for about $10, and the Fallout 1/2 combo is one of them.
I've often considered going back and buying all of the "games of the year" from about 1995 - 2000 and playing those, the graphics might not be equal to what's available today but I'm sure they'd be more fun that your average new $50 title.
I first saw this card when a friend bought one to play Tomb Raider. I was blown away; the game went from chunky, halting software-rendered 3d to beautiful, smooth, detailed hardware 3d. I immediately bought one of my own (from Canopus, the Canopus Pure 3D), which I proceeded to use for several years. I can remember the big pit in Tomb Raider where a couple of lions and gorillas were running around in the fringes of darkness. I thought it was so cool that you could see these animals from far away and rather than being blobs of smudgy pixels, they looked like real animals in miniature. It made the game feel so much more realistic.
...
...
The last games I played with my Canopus Pure 3D were the updated versions of Tie Fighter and X-Wing, which really ran well on an AMD K6-233 and Canopus Pure 3D. Those games had the advantage of not needing to render any backgrounds, it was all just black space, so they only had to render the actual ships flying around. I upgraded to a TNT2 card halfway through Tie Fighter but that game didn't get much faster or prettier, it was already well taken care of by the Voodoo-based Pure3D.
I bought another Pure3d for the system that I built for my sister in mid 1997 as a wedding present. A Cyrix 233 with 32 megs of memory and a Canopus Pure 3d, with monitor and printer, was over $2000 to hand-build at that time. You couldn't sell one of those systems for $50 these days
Ah the memories
This would all be very offensive if it wasn't true.
Just kidding (of course).
My apologies again. My eyes glazed over a bit when I saw all of the links in the Slashdot article and I didn't follow them all. I read just enough to decide that this init replacement had some pretty serious dependencies on other software, and assumed it was mostly Gnome related. Mea Culpa.
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But certainly SystemServices does have many more dependencies than init, even if none of them are Gnome specific. Python, D-Bus, all of the naming systems and nomenclatures inherent in his description of how services identify each other
OK, I apologize if I don't know enough about Python and Gnome to be able to tell what parts of Gnome and what parts of Python this person intends to use. I am not an expert in either Python or Gnome. The author of the article writes:
Starting a service: ServiceManager, when you tell it "start org.designfu.SomeService" does a check on SomeService's dependencies, loads those first if necessary, and then activates org.designfu.SomeService using normal dbus activation. Ideally this would mean activating the daemon itself which would use DBus, but it could also mean activating a "python wrapper". ServiceManager sends out a signal over DBus announcing a new system service (and providing its name). At this point org.designfu.SomeService is responsible for keeping people notified as to its state.
I guess I assumed that dbus was some Gnome message passing system. Is it instead something in Python?
Reading this guy's thoughts on replacing init, makes it very clear that this is intended for very tight integration with the Gnome desktop system. It's not a general purpose mechanism built using the thinnest layer with the least dependencies possible (like init is). All you need to run init is a kernel, a filesystem, and for most init scripts, a shell program. This person's SystemServices concept is heavily tied into Gnome and would require a complete Gnome implementation to function properly. On the other hand, most init scripts do seem to be very specific in operation and make many assumptions about the tools available and the locations of files, making them tightly bound to the distribution they are running on as well. But at least init as a service starting program has minimal requirements, even if init script authors choose (typically because they have no other choice due to the lack of standardization of Linux systems) to make their scripts specific to the distribution.
This makes it unsuitable for the purpose of starting up system services on a Linux system which does not include Gnome. I think that init was designed with very limited requirements and thus runs on every Linux system no matter how it has been customized.
But that's typically the trade-off in software design: if your software can make more assumptions and be more specific in operation, then often it can be more powerful and integrate better with the specific system it is made to work on. Unfortunately, for something as general and low-level as the service running program, the SystemServices concept seems to specific to be useful for general use.
Which is not to say that it's a useless project, just don't expect to see it replacing init any time soon.
Good point, but irrelevent. Even if you declare a global variable, you still have to hardcode its value. The fact that the IP address only showed up 1 time in their string search of the binary would indicate that they did exactly what you said.
So you're not in left field, it's just that the developer who wrote the software apparently did exactly what you said, which was not relevent to the mistake at hand, which was more about the faulty implementation of the NTP service, and the fact that it was hardcoded to a single IP address.
I agree. Ico's ending was the best ending of any game, ever. Ico is in my list of top 5 video games of all time.
It's especially nice because there is an ending *after* the ending, after the final sequence and credits play and you control the boy running around on the beach.
You did see it, right?
FWIW, the staff at Fry's has gotten immeasurably better in recent years. Every time I go to enquire about motherboards, memory, processors, or hard drives there they seem to know a good bit about all of the products that they are selling. Other departments may be worse, and of course you have to cut them some slack because they sell *alot* of stuff and can't know everything about everything.
Years ago they were much, much worse. I really think that they are pretty good in this department now and several other friends of mine have made comments recently to the same effect, so it's not just me.
I actually like Fry's alot. If you read their weekly ads in the SJ Mercury news, which is a fun way to spend 5 or 10 minutes if you are a hardware geek like me, then you will find a handful of really amazing deals every week. Often there are free items, like the USB 2.0 card that I bought for my mom's computer last week. Or the Athlon motherboard/retail processor combo that I got this weekend. Didn't need the processor so I sold it on eBay and my net cost for the motherboard was only $20.
Anyway, about the door nazis at Fry's. They're so harmless it's ridiculous. I go in there all the time with a big, bulky backpack. Sometimes I buy stuff, sometimes I don't (I never steal), and I never stop for the door nazis on the way out. They don't even ask you to stop, you just ignore them and they ignore you. I have no idea why anyone bothers stopping for them. Actually I would enjoy it if they tried to stop me because I have several good comebacks just waiting for them, but have never had a chance to use them.
Now, the people at Best Buy in Manhattan (NYC) are a different story. They are super agressive. Unlike Fry's which hires the old and feeble to be their door nazis, Best Buy hires tough athletic teenagers. And they *will* try to stop you, with raised voices and quite agressively. The worst part is that it is embarrassing. I would not stop for them under any circumstances but I have been embarrassed on more than one occasion to think that the other customers around me are thinking that I am stealing just because I refuse to put up with being searched on the way out.
OK, and for another person's irrelevent preferences ...
I hate microbrews. They suck. There is a *reason* that some brewers have been making beer for hundreds of years, and some only as long as fancy labels and funky names have been all the rage. I find that microbrewed beers have a very unfinished and unrefined taste. And I've tasted alot of them. They're typically sweeter and less complex in flavor. They almost all have that characteristic "we don't know what we are doing" over-sweet, over-ripe flavor. Crappy.
I get the feeling when I read about people's opinions of microbrews it's more about finding that "cool brew" that you don't think anyone else has probably heard of and thus makes you that much cooler to know about, than it is about actual *good beer*. It's kind of like people who say, "oh, you've never eaten pizza until you've eaten at [insert the name of some random pizza joint in some random city here]." And it's not really that the pizza is any better there, it's just that people love to think that they have the corner on some special knowledge about something. Microbrews are like that. So many people have told me, "you've gotta try Red Tree Frog Extra Special Blah Blah Blah Dark Ale. It's this little itty bitty microbrewery in the middle of nowhere and it's just the best!" And then I try it and it's the same old microbrewed drivel.
In my book, there is nothing that can beat a good, established British brew. Bass Ale is the closest to perfection that any beer will ever be.
Let me finish by saying that this was mostly just a rant, and I really don't have anything against microbrews per se, or the people that like them, I just get a little sick of hearing about them all of the time when I don't think they are anything special. Which I guess is kind of a rant in and of itself.
As one of the posters in this thread pointed out, it would go a long way towards helping establish accountability on the part of spammers. If you have to be accessible in order for "recipients" of your mail to be able to read the mail, then I suppose you'd have to be pretty easy to track down and also sue under the current anti-spam laws.
... I've been using it on my server for years and really love it. I'd be particularly interested in hearing what your ideas are about the ways that we can solve the spam problem, given that you are the author of a complete modern mail system.
Anyway, it's just an idea. I think that the whole question of "should we come up with a new mail protocol" is kind of misguided because obviously the hard problems here are not technical, they're in dealing with the huge momentum built up around the current mail technologies. It seems to me that we already have all the technology that we need to solve this problem, it's more a matter of enforcement by ISPs. I was just posting the link because it was relevent.
If you're the same Mr. Sam that made Courier, then thanks
That is a very good point. Making spamming costly will not stop all spammers. Those with a legitimate business will still spam because there will still be enough legitimate customers out there who buy based on their spamming.
But making spam costly will indeed stop the majority of spam that is sent today, which is useless, annoying stuff that far less than 1/100 of 1 percent of people actually make a purchase based on.
That is the kind of spam that I really want to stop, and I think that making spamming cost money will have the desired effect.
In my mind I see a smooth graph of how much it costs to send junk email versus how many companies will send junk email. Right now we are at the end of the scale where the cost to send spam is almost nothing, and so the number of "companies" that will send out spam is HUGE, and not-concidentally the content of that spam is very poor.
We need to work our way to the end of the scale where spam costs real money to send, and only a moderate number of legitimate businesses then find sending spam worthwhile. And the kind of spam which is sent is then would be less annoying (to me anyway) as well. Spam would be more like advertising of actual products than make-money-rich schemes based on trying to sell snake oil.
D. J. Bernstein, the author of the supremely reliable and secure qmail mail server, wrote a proposal for a new Internet mail system a couple of years ago. It's called Internet Mail 2000. Check it out at:
...
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
The basic premise is this:
"IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility."
It's an interesting concept and worth a read.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like it would do much to stop spamming, which is the major problem with the current internet mail infrastructure. For that, we need some way to make sending bulk email costly to spammers. Actually I'd say that this could be done already with current technologies, it's just that ISPs and large network providers are not being responsible in ensuring that the users of their networks pay the appropriate price for sending out SPAM.
Maybe ISP's should charge users for each outbound SMTP connection they make? I'd happily pay 10 cents per email I sent if it would reduce the amount of SPAM I received. It would only cost me a couple of bucks a month too at the rate that I send email
Very interesting comment.
.sig. It looks an awful lot like a coded message:
... CWHC?
Just curious about your
Rainy Cat's Computer can Work in Humid Conditions
RCCWHC? Does that mean something? Republic of China
The Europeans didn't contribute very much to China's infrastructure. Even today, many parts of China are not significantly different from the way they were hundreds of years ago. The imperialists did not change that at all.
They did, however, give China beer. Some Chinese beers aren't bad, even bordering on pretty good; I really enjoyed the 25 cent liter bottles of Yang Jing beer in Beijing.
Also, Tianjin (and probably many other Chinese cities that I wasn't fortunate enough to visit) has some neat European architecture that it wouldn't have had without the Europeans.
But aside from that, I don't think that the imperialists really helped mainland China much at all. Hong Kong is an entirely different story though.
Excellent post!
To be clearer ... what I'm trying to say is, if the European powers had not held China down for so long, at a time when the Chinese imperial system might naturally have crumbled on its own, but was instead propped up by the imperialists to their own ends, and at the expense of the Chinese people, then maybe China would be a democratic country now.
Unfortunately the Mao Dynasty, as you refer to it, was the only means by which the Chinese were able to finally get rid of the monkey on their back which had been holding them down for hundreds of years. That monkey was imperialism by European powers. It's really too bad that the only political party which was able to gather enough momentum to finally push the imperialists out was the communist party. It's also unfortunate that the imperialists had to be pushed out at all, otherwise China may very well have developed a democratic government on its own ...
OK, well this discussion is way over and nobody will probably read this but ...
You are right, although keep in mind that a good percentage of caucasians are lactose intolerant as well. I'm not, as the choice of desserts that I mentioned shows.
But they were just examples. Indeed there are several Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors in Beijing, and they are quite popular. My poing was just that fatty, sugary foods are eaten much less often there, whether they have milk in them or not. Thus just living the lifestyle which is natural in China (and quite enjoyable, really) is a good way to lose weight.
I spent a good deal of time in China a couple of years back. All I have to say is, the many people whom I met all over the country were honest and worked very hard, and I think that they deserve better living conditions than they currently have.
Their government is slowly but surely making progress towards a more reasonable form, and I hope that news technology developments like this are harbingers of improvement in their economy and the lives of the Chinese people in general.
I split lanes all the time on the way to work in CA. No problems whatsoever, some drivers are even nice enough to move over as much as they can when they see you coming. Nice to see that a) some people actually pay attention to what is going on around them, and b) they're nice enough to make the effort (although it's rarely needed as there's almost never a space that I can't fit through). But it's important to split sensibly, only 5 - 10 MPH faster than the cars, so as not to frighten anyone and also to reduce the risks involved.
I have also split lanes in NYC. On Manhattan streets anything goes so this is not a problem. I did it during a very long traffic jam on the west side highway and some people were clearly miffed. There was a cop-like vehicle about 15 car lengths back who I think got pissed off and tried to catch me but since he was in the traffic jam also he never really made any forward progress at all. At my conservative 15 - 20 MPH pace I left him way behind and never looked back.
I guess I'll never figure out why some people get so pissed at splitters. It's not my fault that car drivers choose to create traffic jams with their oversized vehicles. I split very carefully and reasonably. It's nice to live in CA where it seems people are just a bit more progressively minded about stuff like this.
Here's an alternate strategy for losing weight: move to China. If not permanently, at least for several months. I went there in 2001 and in 9 months I lost about 20 pounds without even trying. I didn't deprive myself in any way, I ate what I wanted and was very, very happy. But I did ride a bike more and fatty foods are just not readily available there. Ice cream before bed? Doesn't happen. Cheesecake for dessert? They don't have it. Buttered popcorn at the movie theatre? Doesn't exist.
...
I'm not trying to be flippant but really, it was the easiest 20 pounds I ever lost. Granted, it took 9 months, but I wasn't even trying, and I didn't go on any special diets or anything. Just the change of lifestyle did it for me. Oh, and I had a great time there.
Of course, I've been back in the USA for a year and a half and almost 10 pounds have come back. Time for another trip
I guess I'm of a divided mind on this. On the one hand I believe in the freedom of people to use whatever programming tools they like best and feel most productive with. And of course if a person is going to go through the trouble of actually doing *work*, especially if it's software to be released for everyone's benefit under a free software license, then I would never be so arrogant as to suggest that they should observe anyone but their own (and especially not my) opinions about the tools that they should use.
... I really want to discourage everyone in the strongest possible terms from using Perl :)
:)
But, I also feel that the effectiveness of a software package and its general value can be diminished if the "wrong" tools are used. I personally have had too many bad experiences trying to get Perl programs to run, and have formed a negative opinion of not only the syntax and structure of Perl programs, but on their fragility and usefuless at runtime.
So even though I don't want to discourage anyone from using Perl
I'm curious about your statement about Perl allowing you to make maximum use of the hardware when other languages do not. Surely you can do everything in C that you can do in Perl? Also Java (if you allow calls out to C routines, which presumably you would have to allow in Perl as well to really have full access to the hardware)?
I would suggest that every programmer is limited in their ability to utilize the hardware, by their knowledge of the programming language in question. This doesn't seem to be an aspect of any particular programming language, but to all languages more or less equally. So I guess I don't understand how your statement differentiates Perl from C or any other language, except as they relate to your specific knowledge.
In which case I'd have to conclude that it really is just you