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Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 08:27:08 +1100
When you want a system that just works, choose Windows. -- Old Jungle Saying |
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Brian (from Sydney) sent me the following bit of satire, which he got from a SLUG post. If I might quote from this link:
Many Microsoft Windows users who downloaded the recently released AntiSpyware program from Microsoft, or had it installed through an automatic Windows update, woke up to a surprise. Unintentionally, the heuristics of the software detected Internet Explorer as spyware, and removed the program from their systems.
Many a true word was spoken in jest ... All very amusing, I must say, (or should that be very droll?). Best bit of satire I have read for a while. The www.bbspot.com site runs Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) and PHP/4.3.9 (Well, I would have been more than a little surprised if it had been IIS!). The pages have a slick online news look, that renders well on w3m and lynx, the code is not W3C.
In fact, the page is so slick and newsy looking that many unwary readers might not realise it is satire. Actually, I had trouble myself, until I got to this paragraph:
Many computer users did not view this new "feature" positively. "I tried to check the weather this morning and all my little blue 'e' icons were missing. I couldn't get to the Internet at all. I guess I'll have to get a new computer," said Windows XP user Graham Newton.
Even then, I pondered ... that could also be true! But no, it is satire!
Brian also reports that spam is holding at a little below last month's record levels. Which concurs with my own observations. It seems that there is a Christmas rush for everything, including spamming. However in the case of spam this is taking place against the overall upward trend. The figures that I see from the PGTS mailhub are as follows:
yyyy-mm attempts ------- -------- 2004-07 323 2004-08 289 2004-09 271 2004-10 473 2004-11 679 2004-12 843 2005-01 573
According to this, the projected figure for January is 837. These are stats gathered from a database that runs for rejected spam coming to PGTS. Here is a rough sort of Mail Abuse Switchboard" which I will complete sometime. I intend to allow request for updating the exclusion list and to build my own private DNS-block list (another project on the back-burner).
Also, on an entirely different tack, I forgot to mention that there was an interesting phone call this morning from someone who asked me if I do computer training. I am not really in a position to do this, but I have had a few calls inquiring about it. I didn't get his name (very remiss of me -- but I simply cannot do sales and marketing).
He wanted to know if I could recommend a course on XML. I told him I couldn't. However I did warn him that most of the "courses on XML" would not teach much about XML. Instead they would teach users how to point and click with software that purported to be XML-compliant. I recommended Open Office as the best XML-compliant package available.
The best place to learn about XML is on the Internet.
Also found a very interesting article on Salon.com, How Microsoft Is Losing The War On Spam! For those of you who have not encountered it, Salon is a subscription based news service. Although if you want to, you can accept a cookie after viewing one of their commercials, and the advertiser picks up the tab for the subscription. Very slick operation. Well put together and makes good commercial sense. Unfortunately will not work with text only browsers like w3m. But hey! someone's got to pay the salary of all those people who design those slick ads! Salon.com looks like a smart online operator.