I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
The same technology that can monitor newbies in the fluffy-bunny level can monitor the Uber players in the jeweled-dragon level: a packet sniffer and protocol analyzer.
Dude, Solaris 9 is over three years old. Netscape 4.7x WAS the current version then!
You may as well gripe that Win2K comes bundled with old IE 5.0.
Compare it to RedHat 7.2 if you want to compare it to a distro that was contemporary with Solaris 9. Do you know what browser RH 7.2 came bundled with? Netscape 4.7!
We process 60 messages per second, on average, on normal weekday. Peaks go well above that value. Anything, even the lightest processing of a mail message, is felt on the servers load. I can certainly agree with the parent post.
Sounds like a fairly light load. What hardware do you use to host your mail server? My content-scanning systems (anti-spam and anti-virus) process about 10 times that many messages, about 750,000/day, of which 70% or more are rejected after analysis as spam or a virus. Yep, I take the whole message in and give them a "554" at the end of the DATA segment. The rest are tagged with a score and relayed on to the internal mail system. There are eight of them, 4 each in 2 separate data centers for redundancy. Each host is a dual P4-1.4Ghz system, with 1 Gb of RAM. They run 90% idle most of the time, but can reach 50% cpu usage when some spammer is hammering them.
Obviously, the internal mail system is quite a bit less "muscular" than the public-facing content scanners. After all, it only has to deal with 1/5 the volume, and no content scanning.
The users love not having to wade through piles of spam each morning (our previous RBL-only sendmail setup allowed a lot of spam through). The recapture of lost productivity was well worth the investment. We don't really care to change spammers behavior, although if we can we're happy to help do that. We just want to get our work done. Keeping the spam out of the users inbox is our metric for success.
The Unix factor: We spent more time tuning Unix, Sendmail and various Unix system utilities than we did tuning products from vendors that ran on Sendmail, including Roaring Penguin, Privacy Networks, Proofpoint and Cloudmark. In some cases, the differences were dramatic. A single-line change in Sendmail configuration, for example, tripled the throughput of Roaring Penguin's CanIt Software. This means companies that install their own software, rather than going with an appliance, need to be prepared for significant performance tuning.
Wow, a one-line change in sendmail.cf is "significant performance tuning". I guess I'm not overpaid after all.
A well-designed RBL blocks 95+% of spam and consumes less resources than all the other solutions.
I disagree, good software can do content analysis and also be frugal on resources. Besides, there are many badly designed and operated RBLs out there, maybe even more bad RBLs than bad content filters.
Plus it has the added benefit of stopping virus and worm propagation, phish e-mails and lots of other scenarios where unauthorized SMTP relays operate.
But it does nothing to stop those things when the immediate previous hop is a "legit" (as reported by the RBL) mail server. Content scanners stop viruses and phishing scams regardless of the IP address of the immediately previous hop (checking more than the socket connection endpoint involves content scanning the Received headers, of course, which is anathema to your way of thinking).
I see no reason to use client or server-side products that analyze the mail content, when this slows down mail service and reliability.
None of the modern content scanners slow down mail delivery, unless you try to run them on a underpowered hand-me-down PC.
RBLs, blocking mail based on the legitimacy of the source address...
"Legitimacy" in this case is in the eye of the administrators of the RBL, not in the eye of the administrator using the RBL on his mail server. I value the opinions of others, but I am not willing to trust their opinion as the last and final word. Content scanners like SpamAssassin give me the means to weigh the opinions of RBL maintainers, and formulate my own synthesis of all the opinions about the legitimacy of the current socket endpoint (or hop recorded in Received headers)....has proven to be the most effective method of curtailing spam,...
Really? Then how come there is even more of it around since RBLs started coming into use a few years back? Spam is on the increase, not the decline, and it is doing so in spite of RBLs, which have not affected the overall volume of spam at all....and unlike all the other solutions, this one aversely affects spammers by not allowing them to consume your resources.
Spammers do not care about using resources. They spam because there are some people who end up clicking on their ads. Any method that prevents an ad from getting clicked on hurts the spammers. That includes RBLs and content scanners.
A Union can negotiate with your boss. It cannot negotate with the guy who hires your bosses company to do something.
Nor can it negotiate with the electric company. So what? Nor can the electric company negotiate with the guy who hires your bosses company to do something. Again, so what? I don't see your point. If the boss has to abide by a contract with the union, then the union has indirectly influenced negotiations, just as the electric company has indirectly influenced negotiations by the brute fact that electricity usage costs money.
Now, if there were a way to keep the abusive publishers from handing out crappy deals that create the situations that require the death marches, then the problem would be largly solved, I think.
You think? Maybe the workers could band together and make employers sign contracts that force them to take workers into account when negotiating with publshers. Hmmm.....
There is something about Unions that are repulsive on some level to myself and the programmers I know. Mostly due to the negative connotations they have aquired.
But what about the negative connotations of workers competing against each other in a race to see who can work for the least amount of compensation? Bueller? Anyone?
Having a union for game programers at one developer studio means that a publisher will simply not give that studio any projects.
Until most programmers are unionized, of course. Then the publishers have little or no choice - kinda like how workers now have little or no choice, largely due to the collapse of unions.
I grant you that many unions have transformed from organizations originally chartered with the purpose of seeking to promote workers' interests, into organizations that collaborate with management to force concessions from workers.
But just as voters needs to make a clean break with the two-party duopoly in order to make political change possible, workers have to break with the two-party duopoly of management and union leadership.
Corrupt union leadership is no more an agument against unions in general than corrupt government officials are an argument against representative democracy in general.
It can't be the shadow of a contrail or anything like that. The Sun is located behind and to the right of the photgrapher. The shadow cast by a contrail should descend from the upper right to the lower left in this scene, not the opposite way as shown.
My Tivo Series 1 allows me to edit scheduled programs to start and end recording earlier/later, with a variety of options for how much earlier and later. I can program these settings into my Season Passes as well. I don't own a Series 2, but I have a hard time imagining this feature was taken out of the later models.
One product even installed 57 spyware files itself!
Obviously, the developers of that anti-spyware program had a different idea of what a "spyware file" was than the developers of the unnamed anti-spyware tool they used to detect that the first tool had installed 57 "spyware files."
So what is a "spyware file"? Is it any file flagged by whatever anti-spyware tool you happen to be running at the moment? That's a rather self-serving (for the anti-spyware vendor) definition, don't you think?
Re:Living with AIDS will cause it to spread?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
How is this different from the "white" in Star Trek that keeps the Jem'Hadar alive?
"White" and the Jem'Hadar are fictional. AIDS and people who have it are real.
Yeah, but will the modders own their work, or does Steam get to decide when and for how long you can enjoy the fruits of your own efforts modding the game?
Since our (United States) congress is so out of control in this realm, the only way to stop this nonsense is with a constitutional amendment declaring explicit copyright terms and terms for revocation.
Do you realize it is much harder to get a Constitutional amendment through Congress than an ordinary law? States can't just up and ratify an amendment on their own. Congress has to first accept it with a 2/3 majority, then 3/4 of the states must ratify it.
Before you go off half-cocked accusing other people of going off half-cocked, you might want to RTFA, including all you mods who upped this post to 5. The article is not about Windows or IE or what Microsoft shoulda or coulda or woulda done about any flaws.
The article is about the scumbags that exploit the flaws, and the lengths they'll go to to get their crap onto your PC. It's also about the money trail that can be followed to nail these suckers. The article was trying to demonstrate that there is a way to fight back against behind-your-back-ware, aside from securing the software and making sure your updates are current.
Just because the lock on the door to your house is an old design and can be easily jimmied doesn't mean someone can come in and take your Stuff and justify it by pointing out what a lamer you are for having such an old lock.
Well, thank you for not flaming me to death because I don't agree that level 60 characters are worth preserving at the expense of everything else in a damn game. There seem to be very few of us who feel that way anymore.
We play games for fun, numbnuts. Life already has enough risk, suffering, and loss.
Life has way more tedious grinds. And just like I said in another reply, here you are assigning some kind of "value" to an imaginary digital life, demanding that the game publishers protect your "investment." Oh, brother!
Kindbud the game you are looking for is called EVE.
Yep. Been there, done that, played it, liked it, got tired of it, played something else for a while. I may revisit it and play some more now that the new expansion is out.
I also still login to Meridian 59 hosted by NearDeathStudios.com every now and then, and build up a PK character just for fun. All the good players love chasing down a PK criminal. M59 doesn't have permadeath, but the PVP was great!
First of all, how many games can you think of that actually have permanent death? There aren't many...
Every MUD I've ever played had it. Only when people started paying for gameplay did they start to think that their digital character had some sort of "value" that had to be preserved by the game publisher, or else.
Bring back permanent character death, and I'm interested again. Permanent character death is the solution to everything that sucks about modern MMORPG. If a future game brings back permanent character death, that game will not need to have the level-grind. That game will not have so many campers for valuable item drops.
Hell, just bring back PvP with no safe zones outside towns and no level restrictions (save for the lowest of ultra-newbs who've just started), and that'll be a huge improvement.
I haven't seen anything in WoW that isn't there to appease the whiny brats who can't stand actually having anything in the game at-risk.
In order for this to be a consistent position, you'd have to only pay for software in source code form, since any binary you buy is going to be targeted to a specific (and "ephemeral") processor and operating system.
Not really. I still play Prince of Persia 2 in a virtual DOS machine. I still play Tribes 1 with a Voodoo driver emulator. This is under Windows 2000. I could also play these games under Linux using the same technology. I see no reason to believe that I won't be able to play them for as long as I am interested in doing so.
I think you've got the right idea, though. If a person doesn't like what they're getting for their money, they shouldn't buy the thing.
And I didn't. I want to play HL2, I liked the original and some of the spinoffs, and I'm sure I'd like this one too. But Valve are charging too much for what they are offering, so as much as I'd like it, I have to pass until the price comes down. Maybe in a year or so, when HL2 is ten bucks in the bargain bin....
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
The same technology that can monitor newbies in the fluffy-bunny level can monitor the Uber players in the jeweled-dragon level: a packet sniffer and protocol analyzer.
Despite what some believe, today's Linux is not "just a UNIX clone."
But Linux userland is, complete with all the gratuitous incompatibilities that make cross-platform Unix development a Hellhole of #ifdefs.
Dude, Solaris 9 is over three years old. Netscape 4.7x WAS the current version then!
You may as well gripe that Win2K comes bundled with old IE 5.0.
Compare it to RedHat 7.2 if you want to compare it to a distro that was contemporary with Solaris 9. Do you know what browser RH 7.2 came bundled with? Netscape 4.7!
We process 60 messages per second, on average, on normal weekday. Peaks go well above that value. Anything, even the lightest processing of a mail message, is felt on the servers load. I can certainly agree with the parent post.
Sounds like a fairly light load. What hardware do you use to host your mail server? My content-scanning systems (anti-spam and anti-virus) process about 10 times that many messages, about 750,000/day, of which 70% or more are rejected after analysis as spam or a virus. Yep, I take the whole message in and give them a "554" at the end of the DATA segment. The rest are tagged with a score and relayed on to the internal mail system. There are eight of them, 4 each in 2 separate data centers for redundancy. Each host is a dual P4-1.4Ghz system, with 1 Gb of RAM. They run 90% idle most of the time, but can reach 50% cpu usage when some spammer is hammering them.
Obviously, the internal mail system is quite a bit less "muscular" than the public-facing content scanners. After all, it only has to deal with 1/5 the volume, and no content scanning.
The users love not having to wade through piles of spam each morning (our previous RBL-only sendmail setup allowed a lot of spam through). The recapture of lost productivity was well worth the investment. We don't really care to change spammers behavior, although if we can we're happy to help do that. We just want to get our work done. Keeping the spam out of the users inbox is our metric for success.
The Unix factor: We spent more time tuning Unix, Sendmail and various Unix system utilities than we did tuning products from vendors that ran on Sendmail, including Roaring Penguin, Privacy Networks, Proofpoint and Cloudmark. In some cases, the differences were dramatic. A single-line change in Sendmail configuration, for example, tripled the throughput of Roaring Penguin's CanIt Software. This means companies that install their own software, rather than going with an appliance, need to be prepared for significant performance tuning.
Wow, a one-line change in sendmail.cf is "significant performance tuning". I guess I'm not overpaid after all.
A well-designed RBL blocks 95+% of spam and consumes less resources than all the other solutions.
...has proven to be the most effective method of curtailing spam, ...
...and unlike all the other solutions, this one aversely affects spammers by not allowing them to consume your resources.
I disagree, good software can do content analysis and also be frugal on resources. Besides, there are many badly designed and operated RBLs out there, maybe even more bad RBLs than bad content filters.
Plus it has the added benefit of stopping virus and worm propagation, phish e-mails and lots of other scenarios where unauthorized SMTP relays operate.
But it does nothing to stop those things when the immediate previous hop is a "legit" (as reported by the RBL) mail server. Content scanners stop viruses and phishing scams regardless of the IP address of the immediately previous hop (checking more than the socket connection endpoint involves content scanning the Received headers, of course, which is anathema to your way of thinking).
I see no reason to use client or server-side products that analyze the mail content, when this slows down mail service and reliability.
None of the modern content scanners slow down mail delivery, unless you try to run them on a underpowered hand-me-down PC.
RBLs, blocking mail based on the legitimacy of the source address...
"Legitimacy" in this case is in the eye of the administrators of the RBL, not in the eye of the administrator using the RBL on his mail server. I value the opinions of others, but I am not willing to trust their opinion as the last and final word. Content scanners like SpamAssassin give me the means to weigh the opinions of RBL maintainers, and formulate my own synthesis of all the opinions about the legitimacy of the current socket endpoint (or hop recorded in Received headers).
Really? Then how come there is even more of it around since RBLs started coming into use a few years back? Spam is on the increase, not the decline, and it is doing so in spite of RBLs, which have not affected the overall volume of spam at all.
Spammers do not care about using resources. They spam because there are some people who end up clicking on their ads. Any method that prevents an ad from getting clicked on hurts the spammers. That includes RBLs and content scanners.
On the other hand, I don't understand why ANYONE ships ANYTHING that talks on port 80 anymore.
There is nothing preventing running a SSL server on port 80. No port number has any magical properties of encryption that are exclusive to that port.
Employees already have to report profit from exercise of options as income.
A Union can negotiate with your boss. It cannot negotate with the guy who hires your bosses company to do something.
Nor can it negotiate with the electric company. So what? Nor can the electric company negotiate with the guy who hires your bosses company to do something. Again, so what? I don't see your point. If the boss has to abide by a contract with the union, then the union has indirectly influenced negotiations, just as the electric company has indirectly influenced negotiations by the brute fact that electricity usage costs money.
Now, if there were a way to keep the abusive publishers from handing out crappy deals that create the situations that require the death marches, then the problem would be largly solved, I think.
You think? Maybe the workers could band together and make employers sign contracts that force them to take workers into account when negotiating with publshers. Hmmm.....
There is something about Unions that are repulsive on some level to myself and the programmers I know. Mostly due to the negative connotations they have aquired.
But what about the negative connotations of workers competing against each other in a race to see who can work for the least amount of compensation? Bueller? Anyone?
Having a union for game programers at one developer studio means that a publisher will simply not give that studio any projects.
Until most programmers are unionized, of course. Then the publishers have little or no choice - kinda like how workers now have little or no choice, largely due to the collapse of unions.
I grant you that many unions have transformed from organizations originally chartered with the purpose of seeking to promote workers' interests, into organizations that collaborate with management to force concessions from workers.
But just as voters needs to make a clean break with the two-party duopoly in order to make political change possible, workers have to break with the two-party duopoly of management and union leadership.
Corrupt union leadership is no more an agument against unions in general than corrupt government officials are an argument against representative democracy in general.
It can't be the shadow of a contrail or anything like that. The Sun is located behind and to the right of the photgrapher. The shadow cast by a contrail should descend from the upper right to the lower left in this scene, not the opposite way as shown.
My Tivo Series 1 allows me to edit scheduled programs to start and end recording earlier/later, with a variety of options for how much earlier and later. I can program these settings into my Season Passes as well. I don't own a Series 2, but I have a hard time imagining this feature was taken out of the later models.
One product even installed 57 spyware files itself!
Obviously, the developers of that anti-spyware program had a different idea of what a "spyware file" was than the developers of the unnamed anti-spyware tool they used to detect that the first tool had installed 57 "spyware files."
So what is a "spyware file"? Is it any file flagged by whatever anti-spyware tool you happen to be running at the moment? That's a rather self-serving (for the anti-spyware vendor) definition, don't you think?
How is this different from the "white" in Star Trek that keeps the Jem'Hadar alive?
"White" and the Jem'Hadar are fictional. AIDS and people who have it are real.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
You think that's scandalous? I should show you my tax return if you want to see scandalous. :)
Yeah, but will the modders own their work, or does Steam get to decide when and for how long you can enjoy the fruits of your own efforts modding the game?
Since our (United States) congress is so out of control in this realm, the only way to stop this nonsense is with a constitutional amendment declaring explicit copyright terms and terms for revocation.
Do you realize it is much harder to get a Constitutional amendment through Congress than an ordinary law? States can't just up and ratify an amendment on their own. Congress has to first accept it with a 2/3 majority, then 3/4 of the states must ratify it.
Before you go off half-cocked accusing other people of going off half-cocked, you might want to RTFA, including all you mods who upped this post to 5. The article is not about Windows or IE or what Microsoft shoulda or coulda or woulda done about any flaws.
The article is about the scumbags that exploit the flaws, and the lengths they'll go to to get their crap onto your PC. It's also about the money trail that can be followed to nail these suckers. The article was trying to demonstrate that there is a way to fight back against behind-your-back-ware, aside from securing the software and making sure your updates are current.
Just because the lock on the door to your house is an old design and can be easily jimmied doesn't mean someone can come in and take your Stuff and justify it by pointing out what a lamer you are for having such an old lock.
Well, thank you for not flaming me to death because I don't agree that level 60 characters are worth preserving at the expense of everything else in a damn game. There seem to be very few of us who feel that way anymore.
We play games for fun, numbnuts. Life already has enough risk, suffering, and loss.
Life has way more tedious grinds. And just like I said in another reply, here you are assigning some kind of "value" to an imaginary digital life, demanding that the game publishers protect your "investment." Oh, brother!
Kindbud the game you are looking for is called EVE.
Yep. Been there, done that, played it, liked it, got tired of it, played something else for a while. I may revisit it and play some more now that the new expansion is out.
I also still login to Meridian 59 hosted by NearDeathStudios.com every now and then, and build up a PK character just for fun. All the good players love chasing down a PK criminal. M59 doesn't have permadeath, but the PVP was great!
First of all, how many games can you think of that actually have permanent death? There aren't many...
Every MUD I've ever played had it. Only when people started paying for gameplay did they start to think that their digital character had some sort of "value" that had to be preserved by the game publisher, or else.
You really need a girlfriend or boyfriend. Really. Or a outdoor hobby. Anything.
In other words you will whine till the cows come home because many of us refuse to allow you to impose upon us your lack of maturity.
Suck my cock.
Bring back permanent character death, and I'm interested again. Permanent character death is the solution to everything that sucks about modern MMORPG. If a future game brings back permanent character death, that game will not need to have the level-grind. That game will not have so many campers for valuable item drops.
Hell, just bring back PvP with no safe zones outside towns and no level restrictions (save for the lowest of ultra-newbs who've just started), and that'll be a huge improvement.
I haven't seen anything in WoW that isn't there to appease the whiny brats who can't stand actually having anything in the game at-risk.
In order for this to be a consistent position, you'd have to only pay for software in source code form, since any binary you buy is going to be targeted to a specific (and "ephemeral") processor and operating system.
Not really. I still play Prince of Persia 2 in a virtual DOS machine. I still play Tribes 1 with a Voodoo driver emulator. This is under Windows 2000. I could also play these games under Linux using the same technology. I see no reason to believe that I won't be able to play them for as long as I am interested in doing so.
I think you've got the right idea, though. If a person doesn't like what they're getting for their money, they shouldn't buy the thing.
And I didn't. I want to play HL2, I liked the original and some of the spinoffs, and I'm sure I'd like this one too. But Valve are charging too much for what they are offering, so as much as I'd like it, I have to pass until the price comes down. Maybe in a year or so, when HL2 is ten bucks in the bargain bin....