I didn't complain that it wasn't "as good" as the book.
That comment was moreso aimed at the MSNBC article that you referenced, which was almost entirely dismissing the movie in relation to the book.
And I realize I have a bias since I had read the book before seeing the movie; however movies are never judged in isolation.
I don't think you're in the minority having read the book: I'd bet >80% of the population of Slashdot has read the book. I've read the series several times and I loved the movie, though I went in expecting the movie to be separate but inspired by the book and was actually very pleasantly surprized at how true to the books the movies actually were.
I guess the Godfather and Blade Runner are obvious examples. I liked the stories, and I liked the movies. The movies added good acting, impressive sets, interesting variations, etc.
Hehe, when you were reading the book were you thinking "Good, except for the bad acting...":-)
You have got to be kidding. Firstly, how many supposedly excellent "mob" movies have there been? COUNTLESS. How many TV series "mob" shows have been praised and given accolades because of their authentic portrayal of the mob? Dozens.
Script:
Vinny (talking as if he has some gauze in his mouth):
"We need to wipe dat rat bastard out!" (eating spaghetti)
Tony: "And piss of Scarpose? You nuts? Getouttahere..."
:-)
Any filmmaker need only watch a couple of existing movies and television shows and they've got the knowledge they need to make a mob movie.
After just about every movie that is an adaptation of a book, endless droids pipe on about how it "wasn't as good as the book": Is this not a given? Has there ever been a movie that's been "as good" as the book?
Firstly, books have more leeway timewise: They can go from 200 pages to 1000 pages and people don't bat an eye. Movies, on the other hand, are from 1 hour 30 minutes to 3 hours tops, with Lord of the Rings pushing the upper limits: It was absolutely impossible to fit in every nuance of the book without either making this into a 10 hour movie, or splitting the series out into about 8 movies (having said that I will say this: I think separating the movies at the same points as where the book separated was a mistake, and instead book 1 should have covered a movie and a half, with books 2 and 3 occupying less: There is just less interesting content with each passing book) : Neither of which is a reasonable option without the project having been canned a long time ago. Other complaints such as the missing poems and songs are questionable given that making this movie into a musical or poem reading movie would have commercially ruined it (in other words it would have never happened).
..but I was disappointed that it doesn't add anything to the book
I don't understand this complaint: How could the movie `add' something to the book without raising the ire of even more hardcore Tolkien fans? The small changes that were made for the movie were nuances and even still stories such as the MSNBC one are groaning about who was the one to dismiss the idea of going through the Mines, so imagine if they just created new storylines all together...
There will always be people who are displeased when one of their favourite books is made into a movie: There is no way that the filmmaker can encapsulate your visualizations, so when you see it if you're not willing to accept theirs as a credible version then you'll be disappointed. There's also always the `attempting to be academically elite' that will wave off this film with a dismissive brush to appear more critical, as if somehow that is a desired trait.
It is a fantastic movie, and apart from slightly too long fight scenes, an overuse of dramatic music, and a penchant for long fly by panning shots, there is very little to be criticized. Excellent execution that keeps you riveted to your seat for 3 hours straight. You have to respect LotR for making a superb movie given the challenges, versus saying putting a bunch of people in suits and getting them to talk with an Italian accent.
Really? Let me put it this way: When someone downloads from an FTP server inside my firewall, I can do an ipfstat -t and see exactly how many bytes have been sent and and have come in: Generally if I see that 100MB have been sent out, they'll have only gotten about 60MB of the file. There is CONSIDERABLE overhead with TCP/IP, and then whichever protocol you are using atop it to actually transfer the file.
Your argument is like saying, "Medicine has been around for 2000 years. All the advances that have been are just trendy and don't really benefit us."
I would say that a more apt analogy would be saying "For 2000 years doctors have checked your temperature and done an initial physical evaluation, but now we've renamed it `physioevaluation" and it's a whole new paradigm in health care.
On Rogers in London I got from 500Kbps (when the service was first introduced) up to 1.5Mbps (later on) capped on the modem, and the last I heard that remained the cap (and it's a very reasonable cap). On Cogeco in the GTA the cap was 2.0Mbps for a while, but then it dropped to 1.5Mbps. I've had some people report bogus numbers on the initial beginning of the downloads when most download managers are reporting completely bogus metrics, but from what I've heard the province wide Rogers cap was 1.5Mbps.
BTW: TCP/IP and then FTP|HTTP imposes so much throughput that you can't say "multiply the kB/s by 8 and you'll get the kb/s" : The standard multiplication is 10, although even it is understating it. i.e. If you get 1.5Mbps you could expect to maybe download at 150kB/s.
Refactoring is not re-writing. Refactoring is a methodical approach to moving, redesigning, and making the code cleaner. It's not throwing away and starting from scratch. The two words are wholly semantically different.
"Refactoring" is a trendy term (which alone makes it suspect) that came into mainstream acceptance very recently, but that most certainly doesn't mean that those in the software industry having been doing EXACTLY that for many years since? Why is it that once someone gives a name to something that people have done for years they think they've invented it?
I have never known a software project where the participants didn't actively look through, clean up, and where necessary rewrite old code, but now this is "refactoring" and it's a whole new paradigm in software engineering. Blah I say. I hereby name designing quality code and implementing it in a platform independent fashion "requantization", and my new paradigm is requantization development.
Just as a point of reference: I've noticed that the term "refactor" has gained popularity with the whole XP push. Of course "refactor" is just a cooler way of saying "rewrite". i.e. It's not "We should rewrite that module", but rather it's now cooler to say "We should refactor that module". Blah.
Not only that, but to say that this whole deal is rather shady and suspicious is an understatement. "A new operating system that'll revolutionize everything! Coming soon! Talk about us! Email it to your friends! We have nothing to show, but damnit D day is coming soon so we'll think up something!"
And really, the whole "running Windows in Linux" thing is a huge dead end of a commercial enterprise: We already have VMWare and it works absolutely beautifully.
he is proposing a fragmentation of the net, so advertizsers could bar ads (sites) from those who have not paid for them to be seen in that locality
Your preception of what I was saying is actually entirely wrong. While it's entirely possible that a site could "bar" users from different geographies or political zones from seeing a site, I doubt a single site on the planet would (especially because the user controls what the browser is sending, so if you're site only lets New Yorkers in then I'll just switch my reported location to New York and circumvent your limited border).
The benefits of geopolitical and location headers being sent with HTTP 1.1 requests are numerous, but here's a few:
-IBM sees that I'm from CA-ON and redirects me to the Canadian page, saving me from searching through yet ANOTHER multinational corporate site trying to figure out how to get to the Canadian section.
-The Weather Network immediately gives you your local weather when you visit. MapQuest can use your current location as a starting point. There are thousands of potential uses where the "starting point" matter: Nearest airport, police department, blah blah blah.
-Advertisers can pay for their ad to only be shown to users in a relevant marketplace. Joe's Sandwich Shoppe could pay for ads to only be shown to users within 10km of his location. There are millions of small businesses that would advertise on the internet if they had the ability to partition to a relevant group, and as it stands they don't.
Technically there is nothing whatsoever infeasible about what I'm proposing: It's a simple HTTP request header that's a function of HTTP 1.1, and there is no partitioning of the web apart from perhaps showing ads to only relevant parties.
Dang <. Anyways I mentioned that of course there are the micropercentage of people who constantly move around and don't want to change their geo-headers, in which case I'd say they should turn it off (it should be optional in all browsers that implement it). Of course if you have a GPS it should allow you to set the headers automatically (with a user configurable jitter or inaccuracy so that you can't be completely located). Be nice with your GPS enabled PDA to go to GoogleEvents.com and say "Search for local restaurants".
I completely and 100% agree that geolocating a user by IP is completely pointless: With the reasons you mentioned (NAT, mega-proxies like AOL, etc.). Indeed I am advocating that that solution has been a completely failure. In any case reverse-DNS geolocation takes too long and is too resource intensive for most websites to utilize them (not to mention often the ISPs have totally incorrect information).
Instead my suggestion is that browsers themselves, i.e. Mozilla, Opera, IE, allow the user to set their location and it passes it through as an HTTP request header (just like User-Agent or any of the other basic HTTP 1.1 headers), and this header carries through unmolested by any proxy servers en route. I tapped into wininet.dll and did this for all IE requests (or any other app that uses wininet) coming from my PC, in my case conforming to this draft so technically any site I visit knows where I am. I drafted my own proposal for a method for encapsulating user location.
Discrimination? Oh give me a break. Tell me a site that would discriminate based upon a users geography or geopolitical location, apart from fringe sites like the KKK.
In any case my advocacy is that the user has complete control over what information is sent, and whether it is sent at all. The truth is that both sets of information can be used to pump billions of dollars into the net to revive the state of content on the net: i.e. Imagine if the state of California could advertise advisories only to people with a geopolitical location of US-CA? Imagine if local restaurants and pool halls could launch an ad campaign with Google for users within 10KM of 43.32635/-79.79426? Such criteria doesn't currently exist and it has barred the Internet from any locality, despite the fact that 95% of our lives are still based upon locality. Local computer stores can easily compete with internet stores when you factor in shipping costs, but they are excluded from advertising on the net because of their local scope.
I seriously see the lack of localization of the net as being a major impediment to its growth.
It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.
Personally I recently switched to Opera (and I'm hardly anti-Microsoft and have been branded a Redmond operative on here countless times) as my primary browser, and I'm extremely pleased: It does what I want quickly and efficiently, and it has lots of little innovations and features (like mouse gestures) that really are brilliant.
I agree with the fundamentals of that for sure, but my contention is moreso that a sampling of 125,000 websites is a little more believable than a sampling of one website, and while you will never get a perfect cross-section of all desktop users, you will get closer to reality the larger the sampling (usually, though of course the hitbox people may only provide software to "Backyard Gardening" websites). I found lowendmac's contention that it was a "Mac site" with expected "even lower Linux users" ludicrous given that I've seen that site linked on here COUNTLESS times. Indeed, I know lowendmac purely through links to stories from Slashdot. Personally I'd have expected their Linux count to be significantly higher.
But I think that's really their point: If only small engineering circles use Linux, then it's a fundamental fact that the deployed base is small. The dream of Linux, and all other alternative OS', is that the oft stated scenario of "grandma using SuSe" will come true, and naturally grandma isn't going to start her browsing at Slashdot just because she installed Linux: She'll have the same general browsing as most other grandams.
In other words, if you're saying that websites always cater to a certain crowd then I 100% agree (though note that that stat came from information gathered from some 125,000 sites so it'd be less biased than, say, howtouseacomputer.com), however you're conceding defeat if you say that those who use Linux are of a different breed.
The stat that 0.24% of desktop users use Linux came from 125,000 disparate, largely general purpose websites (i.e. not "WindowsUserFanatics" or "BillGatesFanBoys": Indeed there are extremely few sites that are geared to specifically Windows users): Comparing these general stats against the stats against a technologically biased site is absolutely absurd. And if only fanatics and fanboys use Linux, well then they've proven their point about Linux' low acceptance right there...
Bullhockey. By your logic, beefing up airport security gives terrorists the victory
Well, firstly I was saying that tongue-in-cheek. But secondly I'd disagree with your analogy: Munging your email address is more like putting a big sign in front of the airport that says "Warehouse" and painting the jets to look like very large birds.
Re:How is SPAM distributed?
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
how is Spam distributed?
Of course there isn't one central "spammers registry" out there that all spammers draw from, but rather there are hundreds or thousands of disparate database compiled by culling newsgroups, scraping HTML, and of course by siphoning from other databases (forming an inheritance of email class instances): As such depending upon the spammers database source the likelihood of you getting fragged by them varies.
I've used my real, unadulterated (like terrorism: Put crap in your email address to lamely obfuscate it and you've let the spammers win) email address in newsgroup posts, and because of that I get about 40 spams a day to my hotmail account. Hotmail does a good job of filtering, but on top of that because I only use that account for online registrations to trivial sites, and fluff stuff I can scan through it with little concern that something important will be lost in the mass of spam.
Somewhat agreed, but modern slot machines are often networked together for monitoring and control, so you end up in a situation where your custom OS starts building in networking code, TCP/IP, etc. That's the reason many companies look to something like QNX where you can build a microsystem with only exactly what you need.
Is this a UK thing? Why would you not choose the most efficient way of doing something? Surely any extra learning is not a problem if the result is increased efficiency. And in the case of software, it's something else to add to your resume.
I love the control of a standard, but after driving on the QEW (or any other congested, often stopped highway) I'll take an automatic in a split second. As far as efficiency, the argument goes both ways: In many new cars the automatic (with uSec shifting times completely optimized to the torque curve of the engine) is more effective than a human could ever be, and efficiency `human wise' clearly favours the automatic transmission, as it requires no intervention whereas the standard requires constant intervention. Additionally advanced traction control/spin control products usually can only work with automatics allowing the computer sensors to totally control the systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't complain that it wasn't "as good" as the book.
That comment was moreso aimed at the MSNBC article that you referenced, which was almost entirely dismissing the movie in relation to the book.
And I realize I have a bias since I had read the book before seeing the movie; however movies are never judged in isolation.
I don't think you're in the minority having read the book: I'd bet >80% of the population of Slashdot has read the book. I've read the series several times and I loved the movie, though I went in expecting the movie to be separate but inspired by the book and was actually very pleasantly surprized at how true to the books the movies actually were.
I guess the Godfather and Blade Runner are obvious examples. I liked the stories, and I liked the movies. The movies added good acting, impressive sets, interesting variations, etc.
Hehe, when you were reading the book were you thinking "Good, except for the bad acting..."You have got to be kidding. Firstly, how many supposedly excellent "mob" movies have there been? COUNTLESS. How many TV series "mob" shows have been praised and given accolades because of their authentic portrayal of the mob? Dozens.
Script:
Vinny (talking as if he has some gauze in his mouth):
"We need to wipe dat rat bastard out!" (eating spaghetti)
Tony: "And piss of Scarpose? You nuts? Getouttahere..."
:-)
Any filmmaker need only watch a couple of existing movies and television shows and they've got the knowledge they need to make a mob movie.
After just about every movie that is an adaptation of a book, endless droids pipe on about how it "wasn't as good as the book": Is this not a given? Has there ever been a movie that's been "as good" as the book?
Firstly, books have more leeway timewise: They can go from 200 pages to 1000 pages and people don't bat an eye. Movies, on the other hand, are from 1 hour 30 minutes to 3 hours tops, with Lord of the Rings pushing the upper limits: It was absolutely impossible to fit in every nuance of the book without either making this into a 10 hour movie, or splitting the series out into about 8 movies (having said that I will say this: I think separating the movies at the same points as where the book separated was a mistake, and instead book 1 should have covered a movie and a half, with books 2 and 3 occupying less: There is just less interesting content with each passing book) : Neither of which is a reasonable option without the project having been canned a long time ago. Other complaints such as the missing poems and songs are questionable given that making this movie into a musical or poem reading movie would have commercially ruined it (in other words it would have never happened).
I don't understand this complaint: How could the movie `add' something to the book without raising the ire of even more hardcore Tolkien fans? The small changes that were made for the movie were nuances and even still stories such as the MSNBC one are groaning about who was the one to dismiss the idea of going through the Mines, so imagine if they just created new storylines all together...
There will always be people who are displeased when one of their favourite books is made into a movie: There is no way that the filmmaker can encapsulate your visualizations, so when you see it if you're not willing to accept theirs as a credible version then you'll be disappointed. There's also always the `attempting to be academically elite' that will wave off this film with a dismissive brush to appear more critical, as if somehow that is a desired trait.
It is a fantastic movie, and apart from slightly too long fight scenes, an overuse of dramatic music, and a penchant for long fly by panning shots, there is very little to be criticized. Excellent execution that keeps you riveted to your seat for 3 hours straight. You have to respect LotR for making a superb movie given the challenges, versus saying putting a bunch of people in suits and getting them to talk with an Italian accent.
Really? Let me put it this way: When someone downloads from an FTP server inside my firewall, I can do an ipfstat -t and see exactly how many bytes have been sent and and have come in: Generally if I see that 100MB have been sent out, they'll have only gotten about 60MB of the file. There is CONSIDERABLE overhead with TCP/IP, and then whichever protocol you are using atop it to actually transfer the file.
Your argument is like saying, "Medicine has been around for 2000 years. All the advances that have been are just trendy and don't really benefit us."
I would say that a more apt analogy would be saying "For 2000 years doctors have checked your temperature and done an initial physical evaluation, but now we've renamed it `physioevaluation" and it's a whole new paradigm in health care.
On Rogers in London I got from 500Kbps (when the service was first introduced) up to 1.5Mbps (later on) capped on the modem, and the last I heard that remained the cap (and it's a very reasonable cap). On Cogeco in the GTA the cap was 2.0Mbps for a while, but then it dropped to 1.5Mbps. I've had some people report bogus numbers on the initial beginning of the downloads when most download managers are reporting completely bogus metrics, but from what I've heard the province wide Rogers cap was 1.5Mbps.
BTW: TCP/IP and then FTP|HTTP imposes so much throughput that you can't say "multiply the kB/s by 8 and you'll get the kb/s" : The standard multiplication is 10, although even it is understating it. i.e. If you get 1.5Mbps you could expect to maybe download at 150kB/s.
Refactoring is not re-writing. Refactoring is a methodical approach to moving, redesigning, and making the code cleaner. It's not throwing away and starting from scratch. The two words are wholly semantically different.
"Refactoring" is a trendy term (which alone makes it suspect) that came into mainstream acceptance very recently, but that most certainly doesn't mean that those in the software industry having been doing EXACTLY that for many years since? Why is it that once someone gives a name to something that people have done for years they think they've invented it?
I have never known a software project where the participants didn't actively look through, clean up, and where necessary rewrite old code, but now this is "refactoring" and it's a whole new paradigm in software engineering. Blah I say. I hereby name designing quality code and implementing it in a platform independent fashion "requantization", and my new paradigm is requantization development.
Just as a point of reference: I've noticed that the term "refactor" has gained popularity with the whole XP push. Of course "refactor" is just a cooler way of saying "rewrite". i.e. It's not "We should rewrite that module", but rather it's now cooler to say "We should refactor that module". Blah.
Are mouse gestures in Opera "unistrokes"?
Not only that, but to say that this whole deal is rather shady and suspicious is an understatement. "A new operating system that'll revolutionize everything! Coming soon! Talk about us! Email it to your friends! We have nothing to show, but damnit D day is coming soon so we'll think up something!"
And really, the whole "running Windows in Linux" thing is a huge dead end of a commercial enterprise: We already have VMWare and it works absolutely beautifully.
he is proposing a fragmentation of the net, so advertizsers could bar ads (sites) from those who have not paid for them to be seen in that locality
Your preception of what I was saying is actually entirely wrong. While it's entirely possible that a site could "bar" users from different geographies or political zones from seeing a site, I doubt a single site on the planet would (especially because the user controls what the browser is sending, so if you're site only lets New Yorkers in then I'll just switch my reported location to New York and circumvent your limited border).
The benefits of geopolitical and location headers being sent with HTTP 1.1 requests are numerous, but here's a few:
-IBM sees that I'm from CA-ON and redirects me to the Canadian page, saving me from searching through yet ANOTHER multinational corporate site trying to figure out how to get to the Canadian section.
-The Weather Network immediately gives you your local weather when you visit. MapQuest can use your current location as a starting point. There are thousands of potential uses where the "starting point" matter: Nearest airport, police department, blah blah blah.
-Advertisers can pay for their ad to only be shown to users in a relevant marketplace. Joe's Sandwich Shoppe could pay for ads to only be shown to users within 10km of his location. There are millions of small businesses that would advertise on the internet if they had the ability to partition to a relevant group, and as it stands they don't.
Technically there is nothing whatsoever infeasible about what I'm proposing: It's a simple HTTP request header that's a function of HTTP 1.1, and there is no partitioning of the web apart from perhaps showing ads to only relevant parties.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default. asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-059.asp
Dang <. Anyways I mentioned that of course there are the micropercentage of people who constantly move around and don't want to change their geo-headers, in which case I'd say they should turn it off (it should be optional in all browsers that implement it). Of course if you have a GPS it should allow you to set the headers automatically (with a user configurable jitter or inaccuracy so that you can't be completely located). Be nice with your GPS enabled PDA to go to GoogleEvents.com and say "Search for local restaurants".
I completely and 100% agree that geolocating a user by IP is completely pointless: With the reasons you mentioned (NAT, mega-proxies like AOL, etc.). Indeed I am advocating that that solution has been a completely failure. In any case reverse-DNS geolocation takes too long and is too resource intensive for most websites to utilize them (not to mention often the ISPs have totally incorrect information).
Instead my suggestion is that browsers themselves, i.e. Mozilla, Opera, IE, allow the user to set their location and it passes it through as an HTTP request header (just like User-Agent or any of the other basic HTTP 1.1 headers), and this header carries through unmolested by any proxy servers en route. I tapped into wininet.dll and did this for all IE requests (or any other app that uses wininet) coming from my PC, in my case conforming to this draft so technically any site I visit knows where I am. I drafted my own proposal for a method for encapsulating user location.
Now of course there's the
Discrimination? Oh give me a break. Tell me a site that would discriminate based upon a users geography or geopolitical location, apart from fringe sites like the KKK.
In any case my advocacy is that the user has complete control over what information is sent, and whether it is sent at all. The truth is that both sets of information can be used to pump billions of dollars into the net to revive the state of content on the net: i.e. Imagine if the state of California could advertise advisories only to people with a geopolitical location of US-CA? Imagine if local restaurants and pool halls could launch an ad campaign with Google for users within 10KM of 43.32635/-79.79426? Such criteria doesn't currently exist and it has barred the Internet from any locality, despite the fact that 95% of our lives are still based upon locality. Local computer stores can easily compete with internet stores when you factor in shipping costs, but they are excluded from advertising on the net because of their local scope.
I seriously see the lack of localization of the net as being a major impediment to its growth.
It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.
Personally I recently switched to Opera (and I'm hardly anti-Microsoft and have been branded a Redmond operative on here countless times) as my primary browser, and I'm extremely pleased: It does what I want quickly and efficiently, and it has lots of little innovations and features (like mouse gestures) that really are brilliant.
I wonder what the reaction would have been on here if they said that Linux users comprised 50% of web users...
I agree with the fundamentals of that for sure, but my contention is moreso that a sampling of 125,000 websites is a little more believable than a sampling of one website, and while you will never get a perfect cross-section of all desktop users, you will get closer to reality the larger the sampling (usually, though of course the hitbox people may only provide software to "Backyard Gardening" websites). I found lowendmac's contention that it was a "Mac site" with expected "even lower Linux users" ludicrous given that I've seen that site linked on here COUNTLESS times. Indeed, I know lowendmac purely through links to stories from Slashdot. Personally I'd have expected their Linux count to be significantly higher.
But I think that's really their point: If only small engineering circles use Linux, then it's a fundamental fact that the deployed base is small. The dream of Linux, and all other alternative OS', is that the oft stated scenario of "grandma using SuSe" will come true, and naturally grandma isn't going to start her browsing at Slashdot just because she installed Linux: She'll have the same general browsing as most other grandams.
In other words, if you're saying that websites always cater to a certain crowd then I 100% agree (though note that that stat came from information gathered from some 125,000 sites so it'd be less biased than, say, howtouseacomputer.com), however you're conceding defeat if you say that those who use Linux are of a different breed.
The stat that 0.24% of desktop users use Linux came from 125,000 disparate, largely general purpose websites (i.e. not "WindowsUserFanatics" or "BillGatesFanBoys": Indeed there are extremely few sites that are geared to specifically Windows users): Comparing these general stats against the stats against a technologically biased site is absolutely absurd. And if only fanatics and fanboys use Linux, well then they've proven their point about Linux' low acceptance right there...
Bullhockey. By your logic, beefing up airport security gives terrorists the victory
Well, firstly I was saying that tongue-in-cheek. But secondly I'd disagree with your analogy: Munging your email address is more like putting a big sign in front of the airport that says "Warehouse" and painting the jets to look like very large birds.
how is Spam distributed?
Of course there isn't one central "spammers registry" out there that all spammers draw from, but rather there are hundreds or thousands of disparate database compiled by culling newsgroups, scraping HTML, and of course by siphoning from other databases (forming an inheritance of email class instances): As such depending upon the spammers database source the likelihood of you getting fragged by them varies.
I've used my real, unadulterated (like terrorism: Put crap in your email address to lamely obfuscate it and you've let the spammers win) email address in newsgroup posts, and because of that I get about 40 spams a day to my hotmail account. Hotmail does a good job of filtering, but on top of that because I only use that account for online registrations to trivial sites, and fluff stuff I can scan through it with little concern that something important will be lost in the mass of spam.
Somewhat agreed, but modern slot machines are often networked together for monitoring and control, so you end up in a situation where your custom OS starts building in networking code, TCP/IP, etc. That's the reason many companies look to something like QNX where you can build a microsystem with only exactly what you need.
Is this a UK thing? Why would you not choose the most efficient way of doing something? Surely any extra learning is not a problem if the result is increased efficiency. And in the case of software, it's something else to add to your resume.
I love the control of a standard, but after driving on the QEW (or any other congested, often stopped highway) I'll take an automatic in a split second. As far as efficiency, the argument goes both ways: In many new cars the automatic (with uSec shifting times completely optimized to the torque curve of the engine) is more effective than a human could ever be, and efficiency `human wise' clearly favours the automatic transmission, as it requires no intervention whereas the standard requires constant intervention. Additionally advanced traction control/spin control products usually can only work with automatics allowing the computer sensors to totally control the systems.