I actually run a service which sends out opted-in newsletters for a number of clients. The average newsletter contains text, links, and some graphics, and is about 50K bytes. I regularly do runs of more than 1,000,000 emails. Based on what I know of it, 1,000,000 50K average messages can be sent in under 5 days by one server.
That server BTW is a P4 2.4GHz running LAMP with a dedicated 1.5Mbps pipe.
Automating that is actually very easy. Go through your inbox with IMAP and capture the hyperlinks in the email source, grab the website (using a proxy) at the link and see if there's a form there. If there's a form, fill it in using honeypot credit cards and emails. Send any cookie and session information it gives you to a central location which does capture and enforcement. Submit the form with your own headers substituted, so when it sends back a page, that page goes to the central location you just reported to which takes over the session. They take it from there.
So let's see... 280,000,000 spam messages equals what, about 9 years?
Really, I'd like to see SOME jail time on these if in fact a criminal law is broken, but isn't 9 years a little much? How about a token 90 days with 3-5 years for reoffending? That seems more in line. Just one catch though: he has to spend 16 hours a day of those 90 days clicking a "Delete" button.
Well, I know slashdotting can really tax a server, but still. Would you want the name of your hosting service to appear on a server overload error page? Us/. types understand what's going on, but John Q. Public doesn't.
How interesting. Much of the experience other/. posters have had with Google's HR are very similar to what I was put through when I interviewed with IBM in the mid '80s. And the opening (I hesitate to use the term "opportunity") at IBM wasn't even permanent: it was a 6 month contract.
First, it took 3 attempts to connect for a phone interview, and there was a significant degree of consternation at IBM that I would not permit such a call during the day (while I was working at a client's office). Then followed in person interviews at their Canadian head office, during which it became obvious in a hurry that they had not read my resume or confused it with another (my degree is NOT in Engineering from U of T, and I have NEVER worked as a mainframe systems programmer). Five different people, 4 hours. The only part that was really interesting was the lunch in the IBM cafeteria, where I quickly grew to understand where the "Big" in "Big Blue" came from.
Another phone interview followed, and then, despite two follow up letters from me, I heard nothing, so I just assumed that they were not interested and did not have the courtesy to contact me to tell me so. Fine. I took another contract I was interviewing for, and forgot about them.
Four months later, I got a phone call from IBM asking me when I can start. Huh? You think I'm going to wait around for 4 months while you decide? What planet did you say you were from?
What I took away from that experience was this: when HR and the company hiring process gets seriously confused and out of control, the company suffers big time. IBM had to take a major kick in the pants before they smartened up. Until they did, they were heading for irrelevance very quickly. I'm guessing that Google might have to go through the same thing. Not for a while, because they have a strong core and strong growth. But sooner or later it will happen. Every week that passes by, they take one more step away from upstart towards mature. And in IT, mature = complacent = stagnant = doomed.
Yes, solving the TSP could save millions over time. But how much would it cost to undo the damage caused by cracking RSA, another non-polynomial problem?
Back when I was 14 years old, I was a video game fanatic. Now admittedly, that was quite a long time ago. I was addicted to "Asteroids" and "Defender" and "Robotron". But while I played them, I also got quite a good idea of the underlying programming and how the game itself worked.
Two years later, I was writing games. It was the days before IDEs and sophisticated graphics engines, so everything had to be done from the metal up. It was hard work. But some of my software was picked up by a software company affiliated with a major computer magazine (Instant Software, Kilobaud Magazine) and royalty cheques started to come in. Big time.
Ultimately my business interests in writing games and having others distribute them lasted only 3 years, but it was the springboard for me to grow into other areas of computing. To this day I still own a computer related business. Video games were my start.
One could argue that today, with 7 figure budgets for game production and armies of programmers, there is no way for a young single guy or 2-3 friends to write successful game software. I would say, though, that this is incorrect: look around the Internet and you will find many many examples of shareware game authors earning quite a good living. In some cases very good. The Internet is an unparalleled software distribution resource, and if you can get 2% of 500,000 people who downloaded your software to pay you $5 for it, that's $50,000 for your efforts. You don't need many of those in a year.
Hopefully this young man can milk this game playing contract for all it's worth, then use his earnings as seed capital for the next stage in his career. It's what I did, and I've never looked back.
So, the USA thinks the following information will help them determine if I am a terrorist or not:
Whether or not I order a vegetarian or Kosher meal
My email address
The fact that I occupy a window or an aisle seat
The fact that I might want to go on a museum tour
That I missed a connecting flight in 2002
Funny, but I don't see terrorists these days showing up to the airport to buy a one way ticket in cash, ordering a Halal meal, and pre booking a tour of The White House and The Capitol.
IMHO they are demanding this data because they need to be seen to be doing something, and because the current US government has had a good deal of success with bullying tactics. So tell me: if I paid for my ticket with a credit card issued to an online gambling company, will I be arrested? Will I come under suspicion if one of the other members of the group I am travelling with is on the infamous "No Fly" list? Will the fact that I have dual citizenship and two passports, and that I use either passport depending on destination, raise flags? Let's say my visa was issued on one passport, but somehow the record shows the other one?
This is just an excuse for a massive fishing expedition, and I fully expect the information they get to be misused. The current US government has demonstrated repeatedly that it cannot be trusted, and will do whatever it wants to regardless of international agreements, common sense, or fair play.
It is too bad that the EU knuckled under on this. America can apply American law all it wants in America, but it has to get over this thinking that its laws supercede those of other sovereign nations.
I have found email very useful for years, but for the last couple it's usefulness has been declining. There is now so much filtering of spam happening, and at all levels, that I no longer consider email a form of communication to rely on: anything important goes by fax or snail. It seems that these days everybody and his uncle wants to spam filter for you. Sometimes I have found hosting companies simply apply spam filtering to my clients' domains assuming that it is a wanted feature. One client lost 80% of his online orders for a week to a spam filter.
It's a damn shame really - email has such potential. Sure spam is a problem, but often the solution is worse than the problem.
The web? Now, the web I wouldn't want to give up. Can't I give up another Internet protocol instead? Like Telnet maybe?
Not sure why the fuss over 16GB USB Flash...
on
16GB Flash USB Dongle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When Kanguru has introduced a 64GB flash drive (measures 1.5 x 2.5 x 9.2 cm). Link to it here.
For me at least, the huge $2,799 USD price tag will keep it out of my pocket for at least a little while. But one thing's for sure: prices always come down. Wonder what this will go for this time next year.
I mean really. My voice changes all the time, sometimes quite often. I smoke and in the morning, my voice is quite deep. If I get a sinus cold or the flu, my enunciation is different. If I am under a lot of stress, it changes again - a fact some commercial lie detectors claim to be able to detect. So I'm not sure voice recognition would fly.
Iris patterns? You've heard of the infamous double swipe, sometimes accomplished by a card scanner device placed over the top of the legitimate one. How long before criminals are collecting your iris patterns using a fake eyepiece over the top of the real one? Fingerprints? Did you know that, either through accident or genetics, about 2% of people leave no usuable fingerprints? Life can get very difficult already for these people, without the added problem of "access denied".
For biometrics to truly work, it will need to be a combination of things, as previously suggested, plus a PIN or password. Which combination it will turn out to be, who can say?
I've got problems with recruiters on jobsites also, but I'm an employer. My requirements are quite specialized - 60% of what we do involves abstration layers, so potential recruits need to know them very well above all other requirements.
When I've posted on Workopolis or Monster in the past, along with the applications, I've received large numbers of pitches from recruiters. Now, if a recruiter can't be trusted to differentiate between PHP4 and PHP5, how do you guess they are on abstraction layers?
I've given up on Workopolis and Monster. Dice is better, but poor in Canada. Want to know where I've had more luck? Believe it or not, Craigslist. A better quality of responses and in my city it's free.
My first actual computer (not counting programmable calculators) was a MOS KIM-1, a 6502 based single board with 1K of RAM, a 6 digit LED display, and an on board hex keypad. It was programmed in 6502 machine code (I still remember that opcode x2 where x=anything other than A crashed the processor). Bought it in 1976. Within 2 years, I upgraded to a PET 2001 with 8K of RAM, and that's where I first began to make money programming (I was 14 at the time). The PET came with Microsoft BASIC built in, so I can actually say I've got 28 years of experience with Microsoft products (and look what it did to me;)
Oh, terrific. I can see it now - police demanding access to your computer to make sure you're running a firewall. And of course, the police will be trained to identify any one of the hundreds of firewalls now available, won't they? Just which firewalls will fall within their legal definition of "firewall". I'd like to know. And I'm sure their definition of "firewall" will be well though out --- NOT!
If you ask me, this is just to provide the police with an excuse to upgrade their usual hangout from donut shops to Starbucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually run a service which sends out opted-in newsletters for a number of clients. The average newsletter contains text, links, and some graphics, and is about 50K bytes. I regularly do runs of more than 1,000,000 emails. Based on what I know of it, 1,000,000 50K average messages can be sent in under 5 days by one server.
That server BTW is a P4 2.4GHz running LAMP with a dedicated 1.5Mbps pipe.
Automating that is actually very easy. Go through your inbox with IMAP and capture the hyperlinks in the email source, grab the website (using a proxy) at the link and see if there's a form there. If there's a form, fill it in using honeypot credit cards and emails. Send any cookie and session information it gives you to a central location which does capture and enforcement. Submit the form with your own headers substituted, so when it sends back a page, that page goes to the central location you just reported to which takes over the session. They take it from there.
Simple. A couple of days of coding.
So let's see... 280,000,000 spam messages equals what, about 9 years?
Really, I'd like to see SOME jail time on these if in fact a criminal law is broken, but isn't 9 years a little much? How about a token 90 days with 3-5 years for reoffending? That seems more in line. Just one catch though: he has to spend 16 hours a day of those 90 days clicking a "Delete" button.
"SiteGround - Hosting Suitable For You!"
/. types understand what's going on, but John Q. Public doesn't.
Well, I know slashdotting can really tax a server, but still. Would you want the name of your hosting service to appear on a server overload error page? Us
Presumably means the RIAA will eventually drop the 300 lawsuits it just filed against North Koreans?
How interesting. Much of the experience other /. posters have had with Google's HR are very similar to what I was put through when I interviewed with IBM in the mid '80s. And the opening (I hesitate to use the term "opportunity") at IBM wasn't even permanent: it was a 6 month contract.
First, it took 3 attempts to connect for a phone interview, and there was a significant degree of consternation at IBM that I would not permit such a call during the day (while I was working at a client's office). Then followed in person interviews at their Canadian head office, during which it became obvious in a hurry that they had not read my resume or confused it with another (my degree is NOT in Engineering from U of T, and I have NEVER worked as a mainframe systems programmer). Five different people, 4 hours. The only part that was really interesting was the lunch in the IBM cafeteria, where I quickly grew to understand where the "Big" in "Big Blue" came from.
Another phone interview followed, and then, despite two follow up letters from me, I heard nothing, so I just assumed that they were not interested and did not have the courtesy to contact me to tell me so. Fine. I took another contract I was interviewing for, and forgot about them.
Four months later, I got a phone call from IBM asking me when I can start. Huh? You think I'm going to wait around for 4 months while you decide? What planet did you say you were from?
What I took away from that experience was this: when HR and the company hiring process gets seriously confused and out of control, the company suffers big time. IBM had to take a major kick in the pants before they smartened up. Until they did, they were heading for irrelevance very quickly. I'm guessing that Google might have to go through the same thing. Not for a while, because they have a strong core and strong growth. But sooner or later it will happen. Every week that passes by, they take one more step away from upstart towards mature. And in IT, mature = complacent = stagnant = doomed.
Yes, solving the TSP could save millions over time. But how much would it cost to undo the damage caused by cracking RSA, another non-polynomial problem?
The real pornography here lies in how the *AA is screwing the artists and the consumers at the same time.
Think Microsoft has patched them yet?
Back when I was 14 years old, I was a video game fanatic. Now admittedly, that was quite a long time ago. I was addicted to "Asteroids" and "Defender" and "Robotron". But while I played them, I also got quite a good idea of the underlying programming and how the game itself worked.
Two years later, I was writing games. It was the days before IDEs and sophisticated graphics engines, so everything had to be done from the metal up. It was hard work. But some of my software was picked up by a software company affiliated with a major computer magazine (Instant Software, Kilobaud Magazine) and royalty cheques started to come in. Big time.
Ultimately my business interests in writing games and having others distribute them lasted only 3 years, but it was the springboard for me to grow into other areas of computing. To this day I still own a computer related business. Video games were my start.
One could argue that today, with 7 figure budgets for game production and armies of programmers, there is no way for a young single guy or 2-3 friends to write successful game software. I would say, though, that this is incorrect: look around the Internet and you will find many many examples of shareware game authors earning quite a good living. In some cases very good. The Internet is an unparalleled software distribution resource, and if you can get 2% of 500,000 people who downloaded your software to pay you $5 for it, that's $50,000 for your efforts. You don't need many of those in a year.
Hopefully this young man can milk this game playing contract for all it's worth, then use his earnings as seed capital for the next stage in his career. It's what I did, and I've never looked back.
Funny, but I don't see terrorists these days showing up to the airport to buy a one way ticket in cash, ordering a Halal meal, and pre booking a tour of The White House and The Capitol.
IMHO they are demanding this data because they need to be seen to be doing something, and because the current US government has had a good deal of success with bullying tactics. So tell me: if I paid for my ticket with a credit card issued to an online gambling company, will I be arrested? Will I come under suspicion if one of the other members of the group I am travelling with is on the infamous "No Fly" list? Will the fact that I have dual citizenship and two passports, and that I use either passport depending on destination, raise flags? Let's say my visa was issued on one passport, but somehow the record shows the other one?
This is just an excuse for a massive fishing expedition, and I fully expect the information they get to be misused. The current US government has demonstrated repeatedly that it cannot be trusted, and will do whatever it wants to regardless of international agreements, common sense, or fair play.
It is too bad that the EU knuckled under on this. America can apply American law all it wants in America, but it has to get over this thinking that its laws supercede those of other sovereign nations.
Conversation during an interview for a contract IT position a few years ago:
Them: What is your experience with SDLC?
Me: Well, I can't say I've used it in a long time. You didn't mention that this project involved mainframe networking.
Them: Mainframe networking? It doesn't. SDLC is "Software Development Life Cycle".
Me: Oh, sorry. To me it means "Synchronous Data Link Control". It's an IBM acronym that's been around forever.
Where an acronym itself becomes a single letter in another acronym.
The worst offender that comes to mind right now? M$ "NetBEUI", with the B for BIOS crammed in there.
I have found email very useful for years, but for the last couple it's usefulness has been declining. There is now so much filtering of spam happening, and at all levels, that I no longer consider email a form of communication to rely on: anything important goes by fax or snail. It seems that these days everybody and his uncle wants to spam filter for you. Sometimes I have found hosting companies simply apply spam filtering to my clients' domains assuming that it is a wanted feature. One client lost 80% of his online orders for a week to a spam filter.
It's a damn shame really - email has such potential. Sure spam is a problem, but often the solution is worse than the problem.
The web? Now, the web I wouldn't want to give up. Can't I give up another Internet protocol instead? Like Telnet maybe?
Shouldn't the RIAA be suing over this?
When Kanguru has introduced a 64GB flash drive (measures 1.5 x 2.5 x 9.2 cm). Link to it here.
For me at least, the huge $2,799 USD price tag will keep it out of my pocket for at least a little while. But one thing's for sure: prices always come down. Wonder what this will go for this time next year.
I mean really. My voice changes all the time, sometimes quite often. I smoke and in the morning, my voice is quite deep. If I get a sinus cold or the flu, my enunciation is different. If I am under a lot of stress, it changes again - a fact some commercial lie detectors claim to be able to detect. So I'm not sure voice recognition would fly.
Iris patterns? You've heard of the infamous double swipe, sometimes accomplished by a card scanner device placed over the top of the legitimate one. How long before criminals are collecting your iris patterns using a fake eyepiece over the top of the real one? Fingerprints? Did you know that, either through accident or genetics, about 2% of people leave no usuable fingerprints? Life can get very difficult already for these people, without the added problem of "access denied".
For biometrics to truly work, it will need to be a combination of things, as previously suggested, plus a PIN or password. Which combination it will turn out to be, who can say?
I've got problems with recruiters on jobsites also, but I'm an employer. My requirements are quite specialized - 60% of what we do involves abstration layers, so potential recruits need to know them very well above all other requirements. When I've posted on Workopolis or Monster in the past, along with the applications, I've received large numbers of pitches from recruiters. Now, if a recruiter can't be trusted to differentiate between PHP4 and PHP5, how do you guess they are on abstraction layers? I've given up on Workopolis and Monster. Dice is better, but poor in Canada. Want to know where I've had more luck? Believe it or not, Craigslist. A better quality of responses and in my city it's free.
My first actual computer (not counting programmable calculators) was a MOS KIM-1, a 6502 based single board with 1K of RAM, a 6 digit LED display, and an on board hex keypad. It was programmed in 6502 machine code (I still remember that opcode x2 where x=anything other than A crashed the processor). Bought it in 1976. Within 2 years, I upgraded to a PET 2001 with 8K of RAM, and that's where I first began to make money programming (I was 14 at the time). The PET came with Microsoft BASIC built in, so I can actually say I've got 28 years of experience with Microsoft products (and look what it did to me ;)
"I did not have asexual relations with that woman."
Oh, terrific. I can see it now - police demanding access to your computer to make sure you're running a firewall. And of course, the police will be trained to identify any one of the hundreds of firewalls now available, won't they? Just which firewalls will fall within their legal definition of "firewall". I'd like to know. And I'm sure their definition of "firewall" will be well though out --- NOT!
If you ask me, this is just to provide the police with an excuse to upgrade their usual hangout from donut shops to Starbucks.