As much as I dislike MicroSoft, I have to agree with you, which is why I can't figure out why companies still write software for Windows. If you do, and your product is reasonably successful, there are only two options for your future: 1) you'll get bought out by Microsoft, or 2) Microsoft will come out with a competing product and put you out of business. This has been obvious since Microsoft came out with Windows 95 and all but killed Novell. Personally, I think they were just about ready to do the same thing to Intuit (with MS Money), but Linux got in their way.
Well, I've heard of SPF. I guess the actual mechanics didn't register, consciously.:-)
In fact, in many surveys the spammers are registering domains and using SPF *more* than legitimate users are.
Sure, but you'd think they wouldn't be able to keep that up, forever. It's trivial to reject all mail from a specific domain in most email software and, every time a spammer needs to register a new domain, it'll cost him money.
I haven't been keeping up on my anti-spam measures, lately, so I'm not sure if this has been considered, yet. Wouldn't it be possible to simply add a DNS record that allows a mail server to verify that the machine trying to send it mail is authorized to do so, for that domain?
A machine that supports it could ask the sending domain "Is this machine allowed to send email on your behalf?" The sending domain could simply answer "yes" or "no". That would immediately eliminate all the zombies, for those people who wanted to upgrade their DNS and mail software. It would also be backward compatible for people who couldn't. The best part is that could be controlled by the domain administrators, rather than some government agency or black hole list.
I personally don't know any IP addresses by heart aside from my local 192.168.*.* ones at home
Exactly. What do you think the chances are that you'd even be able to remember a 128-bit address. There are any number of network issues where you might need to use it.
Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive, the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Not that it matters, but I'll have to disagree with you on the 8086. 64k? Sorry, that was small, even then.
as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a/64
That's even sillier than I thought. Why would I, as home user, or a business, or even a large ISP, need 2^64 addresses?
Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile
Oops. You're partially correct. I did a NASA: I forgot to convert from English to Metric.:-)
The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000/64's for each square meter of earth's surface
That's still a lot of addresses. Honestly, why do we need so many?
Honestly, why do we need 128 bits? 64 bits is enough address space for every square meter of the surface of the Earth (including the oceans) to have almost 92,000 IPs. I understand we don't want to run out, but now, we're seriously hindering the convenience of IP. It's hard enough to remember and type in a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address. How big a hassle is it going to be, when we need to type xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx?
I am sure that they will do a half-hearted job of supporting ODF, and people will grow frustrated with how "limited" it is compared to the native XML file type.
I hope that's not true. It'll really suck, in twenty years, when the government tries to print out your birth certificate and they can't, because it's in Word 97 format and MicroSoft discontinued support for that format 10 years earlier.
Incidently, as much as I'd like to see MicroSoft be required to compete on a level playing field, that's only a small part of why we want ODF. The real reason we want ODF is so that we can read our government documents in the future.
Actually, at my former employer, we just pulled numbers out of our asses - seriously. Sometimes the estimate would get a serious adjustment, usually downward, if the customer thought it was too much. I don't think we ever exceeded our estimates by less than 50%. Usually, we exceeded them by 3 or even 4 times.
At one point, I got tired of hearing customers complain, and made a serious effort to make good estimates. Our CEO would come down and complain they were too high and force me to lower them, even though he didn't really have a clue what he was talking about. That's one of the reasons they're my former employer.
I've been telling my co-workers for a long time - while hackers who break into companies' networks should be punished, the companies, themselves should be punished more. The very first paragraph of this essay (the one comparing the European banks to the American banks) would seem to agree with me.
Let's face it: if your corporate network can't stand up to some high-school kid in his basement, it certainly isn't going to stand up to a well-funded foriegn power trying to attack us.
I can remember when processors had that many transistors!
You know, I reall like that metric, especially when you consider each of those processors probably has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million transistors.
Don't feel old, though. I cut my programming teeth on a processor with only 3500 transistors (6502). The transistors were probably so large, you didn't even need a clean room to manufacture it.:-)
How long would it take to write one of those images to a SSD card??
Forget that. I'd be more concerned about the transfer rate.
If you assume 24 bpp, or 3 bytes per pixel, that'll be 333Mb per raw image. With a 333MBps transfer rate, it will take a full second to retrieve an image from the device. That's way too long. If you consider minimal photography requirements - say, 1/30th of a second - you'll need a transfer rate of 9990MBps. That's pretty high, even for current electronics.
Remember when everyone at work was running NT4 and we went to Windows 2000? Or when home PC's went from Win95/98/ME to XP?
Actually, what I remember most was when Win95 came out. It was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of computer operating systems. The 640k memory barrier was going away, software would use the full 32-bit capability of the machine, etc. Most of the promises weren't delivered, and the ones that were delivered were so half-assed, the system was practically identical to Win3.11 (except in user interface, of course). On top of that, it was at least 8 years late. Still, MicroSoft insisted it was the best thing ever and everyone believed them. People even bought new computers, if necessary, even though they were much more expensive, then.
I seriously doubt they'll have a problem selling Vista.
I don't get why you'd want multiple T1s from the same provider, if you're looking for redundancy. In my experience, it's much more likely your upstream provider will go down, than the T1, itself.
Have to disagree with you (and apparently many other slashdotters), there. Zip was yet another product that proved my signature. In reality, the cost-per-megabyte on Fujitsu's 640Mb MO drives (and disks) was at least twice as good as Zip and the disks were much more durable, too. Unfortunately, Fujitsu sucks at marketing to Americans.
To me it was clear, from the beginning, that Zip was just a stopgap technology. Recordable CDs were coming down in price and USB keys were on the horizon. Never bought a drive, for that reason.
I'll agree with that, but I think you need to explicity mention surfing. Knowing how to use a search engine is one of the most powerful Internet skills you can have. I know I would have a much more difficult time doing my job without it.
I'm not sure I agree that "computer literate" is that vague, but I do understand what you're saying about it meaning different things to different people.
I've been doing computers for more than 25 years, now. I can write software in a bunch of different languages and I can build computers and networks from scratch. After all that time, I'm only average with a word processor and I've never used a spreadsheet or a presentation tool - not even once. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
I'd like to get around to that stuff at some point, but I can't, right now: my company needs me to build a pair of 16-port fax servers with failover capability.:-)
Original copyright law released all monopoly control of those recordings.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of patents.
Copyrights are completely different. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was just a few years ago that Disney got legislators to extend copyrights to "the lifetime of the creator + 70 years". Pretty much anything produced since the early 20th century stil has a valid copyright.
Are there any similar services out there open to the public?
Sorry, it took me so long to get back to you. I thought this discussion was over.:-) I only noticed you replied because I was managing my Slashdot account.
As I mentioned, WebSecret is okay, but it's expensive and it's only good for online purchases. You don't actually get a card, just a number. They're at www.websecretcard.com. I have one of those cards, right now.
Just recently I saw a grocery (Safeway) store selling Visa and American Express gift cards. As far as I can tell, you can use those just like a regular credit card. They're less expensive, but they only go up to $100. WebSecret goes up to $500.
Since most of the zombies belong to people who don't know any better and are too lazy to do anything about it, we should be able to use hackers' own techniques against them. When a remote "mail server" connects to your mail server, probe the machine for all the known remote exploits. If one is successful, install a virus on it that replaces the boot sector with a program that says something like:
Your machine has been determined to be a spam zombie. None of your files have been deleted, but you will need professional help to get them back. After your computer is restored, INSTALL PROPER SECURITY SOFTWARE and/or GET A PROPER FIREWALL to prevent this from happening again.
Of course, all they'll really need to do is go to Best Buy or Comp USA or wherever and have them run "FDISK/MBR" and scan for malware, but it's enough of a pain so that they'll put some effort into making sure it doesn't happen again. I guarantee, it would only be a matter of weeks before all the zombies were gone.
First of all, as I'm sure many people will point out, Linux doesn't have all the multimedia support we'd like it to have, because of all the legal issues involved. If the laws were changed, I guarantee it would be a matter of weeks before Linux could do all of what you're asking. It would be a big enough deal that Red Hat and Novell would probably drop whatever they were doing and make it work.
Second, it's not like Windows is without multimedia issues. Just yesterday, I was trying to make a video on my Windows machine with Movie Maker (complete piece of shit that it is). When I wanted to save the completed video, I was offered the choice of about 15 different formats. Which one was missing? The universal standard, of course: mpeg. Yet, I can take the same video and do the conversion, with no trouble, on Linux.
Personally, I think that, alone, should be enough to get Microsoft back in court. Linux's issues are caused by outside forces; Microsoft's issues are deliberate attempts to make it more difficult for users to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I dislike MicroSoft, I have to agree with you, which is why I can't figure out why companies still write software for Windows. If you do, and your product is reasonably successful, there are only two options for your future: 1) you'll get bought out by Microsoft, or 2) Microsoft will come out with a competing product and put you out of business. This has been obvious since Microsoft came out with Windows 95 and all but killed Novell. Personally, I think they were just about ready to do the same thing to Intuit (with MS Money), but Linux got in their way.
Attack of the Show, Sometimes good, sometimes painful.
I used to think that. Then I tuned in one time, maybe a month or two ago, and saw one of the guys shaving his junk.
Never again.
It already exists, its called an SPF record.
:-)
Well, I've heard of SPF. I guess the actual mechanics didn't register, consciously.
In fact, in many surveys the spammers are registering domains and using SPF *more* than legitimate users are.
Sure, but you'd think they wouldn't be able to keep that up, forever. It's trivial to reject all mail from a specific domain in most email software and, every time a spammer needs to register a new domain, it'll cost him money.
I haven't been keeping up on my anti-spam measures, lately, so I'm not sure if this has been considered, yet. Wouldn't it be possible to simply add a DNS record that allows a mail server to verify that the machine trying to send it mail is authorized to do so, for that domain?
A machine that supports it could ask the sending domain "Is this machine allowed to send email on your behalf?" The sending domain could simply answer "yes" or "no". That would immediately eliminate all the zombies, for those people who wanted to upgrade their DNS and mail software. It would also be backward compatible for people who couldn't. The best part is that could be controlled by the domain administrators, rather than some government agency or black hole list.
I personally don't know any IP addresses by heart aside from my local 192.168.*.* ones at home
Exactly. What do you think the chances are that you'd even be able to remember a 128-bit address. There are any number of network issues where you might need to use it.
Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive,
/64
:-)
/64's for each square meter of earth's surface
the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Not that it matters, but I'll have to disagree with you on the 8086. 64k? Sorry, that was small, even then.
as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a
That's even sillier than I thought. Why would I, as home user, or a business, or even a large ISP, need 2^64 addresses?
Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile
Oops. You're partially correct. I did a NASA: I forgot to convert from English to Metric.
The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000
That's still a lot of addresses. Honestly, why do we need so many?
Honestly, why do we need 128 bits? 64 bits is enough address space for every square meter of the surface of the Earth (including the oceans) to have almost 92,000 IPs. I understand we don't want to run out, but now, we're seriously hindering the convenience of IP. It's hard enough to remember and type in a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address. How big a hassle is it going to be, when we need to type xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx?
I am sure that they will do a half-hearted job of supporting ODF, and people will grow frustrated with how "limited" it is compared to the native XML file type.
I hope that's not true. It'll really suck, in twenty years, when the government tries to print out your birth certificate and they can't, because it's in Word 97 format and MicroSoft discontinued support for that format 10 years earlier.
Incidently, as much as I'd like to see MicroSoft be required to compete on a level playing field, that's only a small part of why we want ODF. The real reason we want ODF is so that we can read our government documents in the future.
"Laser" is an acronym. Changing it to "lazer" would be like changing "SCSI" to "SCSY".
Actually, at my former employer, we just pulled numbers out of our asses - seriously. Sometimes the estimate would get a serious adjustment, usually downward, if the customer thought it was too much. I don't think we ever exceeded our estimates by less than 50%. Usually, we exceeded them by 3 or even 4 times.
At one point, I got tired of hearing customers complain, and made a serious effort to make good estimates. Our CEO would come down and complain they were too high and force me to lower them, even though he didn't really have a clue what he was talking about. That's one of the reasons they're my former employer.
I've been telling my co-workers for a long time - while hackers who break into companies' networks should be punished, the companies, themselves should be punished more. The very first paragraph of this essay (the one comparing the European banks to the American banks) would seem to agree with me.
Let's face it: if your corporate network can't stand up to some high-school kid in his basement, it certainly isn't going to stand up to a well-funded foriegn power trying to attack us.
I can remember when processors had that many transistors!
:-)
You know, I reall like that metric, especially when you consider each of those processors probably has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million transistors.
Don't feel old, though. I cut my programming teeth on a processor with only 3500 transistors (6502). The transistors were probably so large, you didn't even need a clean room to manufacture it.
How long would it take to write one of those images to a SSD card??
Forget that. I'd be more concerned about the transfer rate.
If you assume 24 bpp, or 3 bytes per pixel, that'll be 333Mb per raw image. With a 333MBps transfer rate, it will take a full second to retrieve an image from the device. That's way too long. If you consider minimal photography requirements - say, 1/30th of a second - you'll need a transfer rate of 9990MBps. That's pretty high, even for current electronics.
Remember when everyone at work was running NT4 and we went to Windows 2000? Or when home PC's went from Win95/98/ME to XP?
Actually, what I remember most was when Win95 came out. It was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of computer operating systems. The 640k memory barrier was going away, software would use the full 32-bit capability of the machine, etc. Most of the promises weren't delivered, and the ones that were delivered were so half-assed, the system was practically identical to Win3.11 (except in user interface, of course). On top of that, it was at least 8 years late. Still, MicroSoft insisted it was the best thing ever and everyone believed them. People even bought new computers, if necessary, even though they were much more expensive, then.
I seriously doubt they'll have a problem selling Vista.
We do (sort of) have a say. In November, you can vote out the incumbents. That's what I'll be doing.
I don't get why you'd want multiple T1s from the same provider, if you're looking for redundancy. In my experience, it's much more likely your upstream provider will go down, than the T1, itself.
I repeat: I totally agree.
Far superior to anything else at the time.
Have to disagree with you (and apparently many other slashdotters), there. Zip was yet another product that proved my signature. In reality, the cost-per-megabyte on Fujitsu's 640Mb MO drives (and disks) was at least twice as good as Zip and the disks were much more durable, too. Unfortunately, Fujitsu sucks at marketing to Americans.
To me it was clear, from the beginning, that Zip was just a stopgap technology. Recordable CDs were coming down in price and USB keys were on the horizon. Never bought a drive, for that reason.
Surfing and email
I'll agree with that, but I think you need to explicity mention surfing. Knowing how to use a search engine is one of the most powerful Internet skills you can have. I know I would have a much more difficult time doing my job without it.
I'm not sure I agree that "computer literate" is that vague, but I do understand what you're saying about it meaning different things to different people.
:-)
I've been doing computers for more than 25 years, now. I can write software in a bunch of different languages and I can build computers and networks from scratch. After all that time, I'm only average with a word processor and I've never used a spreadsheet or a presentation tool - not even once. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
I'd like to get around to that stuff at some point, but I can't, right now: my company needs me to build a pair of 16-port fax servers with failover capability.
Original copyright law released all monopoly control of those recordings.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of patents.
Copyrights are completely different. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was just a few years ago that Disney got legislators to extend copyrights to "the lifetime of the creator + 70 years". Pretty much anything produced since the early 20th century stil has a valid copyright.
Are there any similar services out there open to the public?
:-) I only noticed you replied because I was managing my Slashdot account.
Sorry, it took me so long to get back to you. I thought this discussion was over.
As I mentioned, WebSecret is okay, but it's expensive and it's only good for online purchases. You don't actually get a card, just a number. They're at www.websecretcard.com. I have one of those cards, right now.
Just recently I saw a grocery (Safeway) store selling Visa and American Express gift cards. As far as I can tell, you can use those just like a regular credit card. They're less expensive, but they only go up to $100. WebSecret goes up to $500.
Actually, now that we have WebSecret and Visa and American Express gift cards, it's easy to shop anonymously.
First of all, as I'm sure many people will point out, Linux doesn't have all the multimedia support we'd like it to have, because of all the legal issues involved. If the laws were changed, I guarantee it would be a matter of weeks before Linux could do all of what you're asking. It would be a big enough deal that Red Hat and Novell would probably drop whatever they were doing and make it work.
Second, it's not like Windows is without multimedia issues. Just yesterday, I was trying to make a video on my Windows machine with Movie Maker (complete piece of shit that it is). When I wanted to save the completed video, I was offered the choice of about 15 different formats. Which one was missing? The universal standard, of course: mpeg. Yet, I can take the same video and do the conversion, with no trouble, on Linux.
Personally, I think that, alone, should be enough to get Microsoft back in court. Linux's issues are caused by outside forces; Microsoft's issues are deliberate attempts to make it more difficult for users to switch.