I had thought of something similar for fighting spam. Here's how I'd handle each email:
If the email is from someone in my whitelist, allow the mail to go through and feed it as 'ham' to the Bayesian filter.
If the email is not in my whitelist, run it through spam filtering software (Spamassassin works well) to determine if it is likely to be spam.
If it seems like spam, then use a challenge-response system (like TMDA) to find out if a human sent the email.
If the mail doesn't seem like spam, just deliver it. If I get 3 non-spammy messages from the same person (separated by a day or more) then add them to my whitelist automatically.
If someone responds to the TMDA challenge, put them in the whitelist and deliver the original email.
If no one responds to the TMDA challenge after a week, feed the mail as 'spam' the the Bayesian filter.
In addition, I'd use a system like Sneakemail to generate random email addresses to give out to businesses I want to do business with and use to sign up to mailing lists. These email addresses would be added to my whitelist so they could send me mail without going through the challenge-response system. If they start spamming me, I put the random email I gave them on my blacklist.
This system has the following benefits:
Business mail I want (like receipts and newsletters from companies I do business with) get through always since the Sneakemail-type address is whitelisted. This solves the problem of businesses not responding to TMDA challenges.
My real email address is protected from businesses who are likely to sell it and from people farming addresses from mailing lists.
Personal email that the spam filter sees as non-spam gets delivered without bothering the sender with a challenge-response system.
Personal email that does seem spammy by the filter still has a second chance to make it through the system with the challenge-response system. This should reduce false-positives to include only spammy emails from people who don't respond the the challenge.
The Bayesian filter is automatically trained based on mails from people in my whitelist and mails from people who never respond to the challenge-response.
You would still get spam with this system (personal email that your filter thinks is non-spam), but hopefully your false-positive rate would be zero. Also, you don't annoy other people much by only sending challenge-response messages to spam-like emails. Finally, this would be easy for end users to use. They don't have to train the spam filter, since it should train itself. The only complicated part would be generating and using the random emails that you give to businesses and mailing lists.
> Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS.
Is that even possible? Do you have any idea what I would go through to obtain such a disk?
There is a section at bootdisk.com for network enabled bootdisks. I haven't tried any of them, but Bart's Network Boot Disk claims to have this feature along with SSH and SCP which would be very useful as well.
This is probably more junk than you want to haul around, so pick and choose what will be most useful to you.
Try to keep a known-good video card handy. Then if the computer is really messed up you can pull everything but that video card and one stick of memory to see if you can boot.
It's also a good idea to keep a known-good network card handy along with driver disks.
Get a good DOS bootdisk. Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS.
I seem to recall utils to let you read NTFS from DOS too, so try to get that on a disk or CD.
Copies of Norton Ghost and Parition Magic can come in handy sometimes.
Is there a way to write to CD-R from DOS? Or maybe Knoppix will work for that. Might be useful for backing up stuff before major surgery.
Heck, CD-R drives are pretty cheap now ($50-60, I think), so bring one along if you want a very complete kit. Or maybe just pack a cheap 30GB hard drive (I recommend you keep it at 30GB or less so it will work with older BIOSes).
Knoppix and Memtest86 (as others have mentioned) are very good. Tomsrtbt is also good.
Pack some zip-ties for making wires and cables neat. And bring something to cut out old ties.
Bring a paper clip for ejecting stuck CDs.
Super glue. Duct tape. Thermal compound.
An "L" shaped phillips screw driver for when a longer one won't fit.
Bring a hex-head screw driver for removing case screws that have been stripped.
Something long with a magnet on one end for fishing lost case screws.
A pair of long, thin "pliers" that lock tight when you close them for gripping things. I forget the name, but they almost look like a medical instrument for clamping veins and such.
IDE cable, floppy cable, phone cable, ethernet cable. Extra screws of the normal type for computer cases. Extra jumpers.
A kit to mount a 3.5-inch drive in a 5.25-inch bay.
I think you can fit the install files for win95/98/Me all on one CD, so burn one and keep it handy for when windows demands the install CD for drivers.
It might also be a good idea to burn all the service packs and bug fixes you can find for old versions of windows. Include the latest version of IE and DirectX.
A pair of cheap headphones for testing sound cards.
A can of compressed air and maybe some of those moistened towels in packets for cleaning stuff. Get some Goo-Gone if you want to be extra prepared.
I believe the reason is that sets in Python are implemented in the Python language itself. Since Python already has hash tables implemented in C, it was easy to write a good set class by using a hashtable. To get the same level of performance with another data structure would mean writing and maintaining a bunch of C code.
The Python developers could always rewrite the set class in C using Fibonacci heaps at some later time. By writing it in Python, they get a reasonably good implementation now where people can use and experiment with it and suggest improvements to them before commiting to a harder to maintain C version.
I work for a company that puts in fire protection systems, so maybe I can provide some insight here.
First of all, Halon is not installed anymore. It isn't poisonous or toxic as some here have claimed. Halon is very damaging to the ozone layer, so it is being phased out. A popular alternative for protecting computer equipment is FM-200. I have very little experience with Halon / FM-200 as my company mostly does water-based systems. I think that anything other than a water-based system in a home would not be practical, but I may be wrong or biased.
Most of our work is in commercial buildings, but we do occasionally install sprinklers in houses. Usually this is because the owner requests it, or because the house is large enough to require it under local fire codes. Sometimes houses are built too close together and the fire code requires the houses to be protected. I have sprinklers in my home, but mainly because I work for a fire protection company.
If you are building a new house, adding sprinklers is fairly cheap. I'd say roughly $1-2 per square foot. You may get a discount on your home owner's insurance (in our state, it is a 10% discount I believe). Retrofitting a house to have sprinklers is possible but difficult (and expensive).
Sprinkler contractors are, at least in Texas, licensed by the state. Most areas require you to file detailed plans with the fire marshal's office and have the system inspected once or twice during construction. It would be possible to install fire sprinklers yourself if you could work within your local laws. This would be about the same difficulty as running your own electrical or plumbing, so it's not for the faint of heart.
A common myth, especially in movies, is that sprinklers are centrally controlled (by computer?!) and that if one sprinkler goes off in an area, all of them do. This is not true. Sprinklers are heat activated, and only those close enough to a strong heat source will go off. Some sprinklers have a piece of metal that melts or dislodges to allow water to flow. Others have a glass tube filled with a liquid and a small bubble. When it gets hot, the bubble expands and bursts the glass tube. Once activated, they can only be stopped by turning off the water supply to them.
If a sprinkler goes off in your home, you can expect severe water damage in that area. Your computers might survive, but I wouldn't count on it. Would your computer survive if you turned it on and threw it in the shower for 20 minutes? Make backups, and have offsite copies if possible.
I'm amazed at all the anti-spam postings on Slashdot recently. This is really a hot topic now for some reason.
Here's an anti-spam service I'd pay for.
Have a system like Sneakemail that gives me a random email address to use for signing up for stuff on the web.
Use Spamassassin (or a similar tool) to filter mail.
Include all of the Sneakemail addresses in the whitelist automatically so they get through. If they start getting spam, there should be a way to set them to bounce. This makes sure that receipts and newsletters get through 100% of the time since they are often incorrectly tagged as spam.
Anything that scores under 5 or so from Spamassassin gets delivered automatically.
Anything else has to go through a TMDA like system to authenticate.
A second (and third?) email address that always goes through TMDA. This would be used for mailing lists and Usenet.
A web interface, IMAP, and POP3 for downloading mail. Allow people to forward their filtered mail to another email address also.
I think this system would have the best balance of a spam-free inbox and low risk of losing important mail. How much would I pay? I think I'd pay $5 a month if it was set up well. $10 a month is too much for sure though, unless you offer some other features. There is already a cool webmail service called MailSnare that uses TMDA for only $19.95 per year, so you'd have competition:-)
Many people in other countries are trying to learn English. Maybe they don't need your tech skills, but your native English speaking skills are needed.
I suggest you try China. We desperately need better relations with China. You could show them that we aren't monsters who intentionally bomb embassies and crash our spy planes into military jets:) If you have a university degree, you can probably get a year-long job at a university in China as an English teacher. Also, learning Chinese might help your career when you get back.
Do a web search on "teach english in china". Good luck at finding a way to make a difference in the world.
Try ABClassroom. The child can click letters on the screen or hit them on the keyboard, and the computer will say the letter. It also teaches shapes and colors, and has a "chalkboard."
The program is for Windows and costs nothing. It also makes it difficult for a child to exit the program, even disabling CTRL-ALT-DEL.
This might be too advanced for a 19-month-old. But it should be fine for a 24- to 30-month-old. If the child can click-and-drag, they will like the "chalkboard".
You might also try Crash, Bang, Wallop. I found the program to be a little annoying (too noisy!), but it is simple and very young kids will like it. It is also a free windows program.
A program that generates such sounds is Brain Wave Generator. It is Windows shareware, but the FAQ on the website says it runs on Wine.
On another note, has anyone tried SuperMemo? This is a software flashcard program. I like the concept behind it, and even bought the software. But the user interface is so horrible that I can't stand to use it. Are there any better alternatives?
I have used J2 for more than two years now, and their service has been very good. I would recommend them without hesitation.
The price (from free to $12.50 per month) will be cheaper than a second phone line, and the service will probably be more reliable than your own fax machine. You don't have to worry about running out of paper or people getting busy signals while others are faxing you.
J2 has fax numbers available in many countries. If you have international friends, family, or customers, you can get one of these numbers and they can fax you or send voice mail without long distance toll charges.
The faxes come in your email as compressed.tif files of between 15-30k per page. With the right software, you can view, edit, and resend the faxes on your computer without printing. You can store thousands of old faxes on CD-R, which has saved me many times.
Slashdot Mirror
but the contries in Europe are far from being a single contry.
Perhaps the term anarcho-syndicalist commune would be more accurate?
- If the email is from someone in my whitelist, allow the mail to go through and feed it as 'ham' to the Bayesian filter.
- If the email is not in my whitelist, run it through spam filtering software (Spamassassin works well) to determine if it is likely to be spam.
- If it seems like spam, then use a challenge-response system (like TMDA) to find out if a human sent the email.
- If the mail doesn't seem like spam, just deliver it. If I get 3 non-spammy messages from the same person (separated by a day or more) then add them to my whitelist automatically.
- If someone responds to the TMDA challenge, put them in the whitelist and deliver the original email.
- If no one responds to the TMDA challenge after a week, feed the mail as 'spam' the the Bayesian filter.
In addition, I'd use a system like Sneakemail to generate random email addresses to give out to businesses I want to do business with and use to sign up to mailing lists. These email addresses would be added to my whitelist so they could send me mail without going through the challenge-response system. If they start spamming me, I put the random email I gave them on my blacklist.This system has the following benefits:
- Business mail I want (like receipts and newsletters from companies I do business with) get through always since the Sneakemail-type address is whitelisted. This solves the problem of businesses not responding to TMDA challenges.
- My real email address is protected from businesses who are likely to sell it and from people farming addresses from mailing lists.
- Personal email that the spam filter sees as non-spam gets delivered without bothering the sender with a challenge-response system.
- Personal email that does seem spammy by the filter still has a second chance to make it through the system with the challenge-response system. This should reduce false-positives to include only spammy emails from people who don't respond the the challenge.
- The Bayesian filter is automatically trained based on mails from people in my whitelist and mails from people who never respond to the challenge-response.
You would still get spam with this system (personal email that your filter thinks is non-spam), but hopefully your false-positive rate would be zero. Also, you don't annoy other people much by only sending challenge-response messages to spam-like emails. Finally, this would be easy for end users to use. They don't have to train the spam filter, since it should train itself. The only complicated part would be generating and using the random emails that you give to businesses and mailing lists.> Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS.
Is that even possible? Do you have any idea what I would go through to obtain such a disk?
There is a section at bootdisk.com for network enabled bootdisks. I haven't tried any of them, but Bart's Network Boot Disk claims to have this feature along with SSH and SCP which would be very useful as well.
I believe the reason is that sets in Python are implemented in the Python language itself. Since Python already has hash tables implemented in C, it was easy to write a good set class by using a hashtable. To get the same level of performance with another data structure would mean writing and maintaining a bunch of C code.
The Python developers could always rewrite the set class in C using Fibonacci heaps at some later time. By writing it in Python, they get a reasonably good implementation now where people can use and experiment with it and suggest improvements to them before commiting to a harder to maintain C version.
I work for a company that puts in fire protection systems, so maybe I can provide some insight here.
First of all, Halon is not installed anymore. It isn't poisonous or toxic as some here have claimed. Halon is very damaging to the ozone layer, so it is being phased out. A popular alternative for protecting computer equipment is FM-200. I have very little experience with Halon / FM-200 as my company mostly does water-based systems. I think that anything other than a water-based system in a home would not be practical, but I may be wrong or biased.
Most of our work is in commercial buildings, but we do occasionally install sprinklers in houses. Usually this is because the owner requests it, or because the house is large enough to require it under local fire codes. Sometimes houses are built too close together and the fire code requires the houses to be protected. I have sprinklers in my home, but mainly because I work for a fire protection company.
If you are building a new house, adding sprinklers is fairly cheap. I'd say roughly $1-2 per square foot. You may get a discount on your home owner's insurance (in our state, it is a 10% discount I believe). Retrofitting a house to have sprinklers is possible but difficult (and expensive).
Sprinkler contractors are, at least in Texas, licensed by the state. Most areas require you to file detailed plans with the fire marshal's office and have the system inspected once or twice during construction. It would be possible to install fire sprinklers yourself if you could work within your local laws. This would be about the same difficulty as running your own electrical or plumbing, so it's not for the faint of heart.
A common myth, especially in movies, is that sprinklers are centrally controlled (by computer?!) and that if one sprinkler goes off in an area, all of them do. This is not true. Sprinklers are heat activated, and only those close enough to a strong heat source will go off. Some sprinklers have a piece of metal that melts or dislodges to allow water to flow. Others have a glass tube filled with a liquid and a small bubble. When it gets hot, the bubble expands and bursts the glass tube. Once activated, they can only be stopped by turning off the water supply to them.
If a sprinkler goes off in your home, you can expect severe water damage in that area. Your computers might survive, but I wouldn't count on it. Would your computer survive if you turned it on and threw it in the shower for 20 minutes? Make backups, and have offsite copies if possible.
Here's an anti-spam service I'd pay for.
I think this system would have the best balance of a spam-free inbox and low risk of losing important mail. How much would I pay? I think I'd pay $5 a month if it was set up well. $10 a month is too much for sure though, unless you offer some other features. There is already a cool webmail service called MailSnare that uses TMDA for only $19.95 per year, so you'd have competition :-)
Many people in other countries are trying to learn English. Maybe they don't need your tech skills, but your native English speaking skills are needed.
:) If you have a university degree, you can probably get a year-long job at a university in China as an English teacher. Also, learning Chinese might help your career when you get back.
I suggest you try China. We desperately need better relations with China. You could show them that we aren't monsters who intentionally bomb embassies and crash our spy planes into military jets
Do a web search on "teach english in china". Good luck at finding a way to make a difference in the world.
Try ABClassroom. The child can click letters on the screen or hit them on the keyboard, and the computer will say the letter. It also teaches shapes and colors, and has a "chalkboard."
The program is for Windows and costs nothing. It also makes it difficult for a child to exit the program, even disabling CTRL-ALT-DEL.
This might be too advanced for a 19-month-old. But it should be fine for a 24- to 30-month-old. If the child can click-and-drag, they will like the "chalkboard".
You might also try Crash, Bang, Wallop. I found the program to be a little annoying (too noisy!), but it is simple and very young kids will like it. It is also a free windows program.
A program that generates such sounds is Brain Wave Generator. It is Windows shareware, but the FAQ on the website says it runs on Wine.
On another note, has anyone tried SuperMemo? This is a software flashcard program. I like the concept behind it, and even bought the software. But the user interface is so horrible that I can't stand to use it. Are there any better alternatives?
How about in Python:
def foo(n):
return lambda m, N=n: m+N
bar = foo(1)
baz = foo(2)
print bar(5)
print baz(5)
You might also look at an article on developerWorks about functional programming in Python.
The price (from free to $12.50 per month) will be cheaper than a second phone line, and the service will probably be more reliable than your own fax machine. You don't have to worry about running out of paper or people getting busy signals while others are faxing you.
J2 has fax numbers available in many countries. If you have international friends, family, or customers, you can get one of these numbers and they can fax you or send voice mail without long distance toll charges.
The faxes come in your email as compressed .tif files of between 15-30k per page. With the right software, you can view, edit, and resend the faxes on your computer without printing. You can store thousands of old faxes on CD-R, which has saved me many times.
Ports are available for Win3.1/9x/NT and GTK/Motif/Lesstif. A Mac port is underway and ports to Qt, BeOS, OS/2 and more are "under consideration."
Liscensed under LGPL.