Category: Tech

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I’ve noticed a new subset of blog spam over the past few months: Jokes. Instead of just filling the comment with links to the spamvertized site, it’ll either leave the the link in the author URL field, or toss a couple links in at the end, but the bulk of the comment will actually be a joke.

Generally they tend to be story-type jokes, the kind you’ll find on, say, Jumbo Joke. This is probably an effort to build up enough comedic content to overwhelm the presence of links to a porn or pillz site. A similar technique had a brief heyday maybe a year ago in email spam, though I haven’t seem many of them lately.

It’s still spam—there’s no way I’m letting those comments and links onto the site—and Spam Karma still catches them. Still, it at least makes the spamtraps a little more interesting than the endless morass of links and keywords.

On another note, I’ve been seeing a lot more email spam targeting the abuse contacts lately. I don’t know what they think they’re accomplishing, since the people reading abuse@wherever are most likely to report them and least likely to buy from them. I mean, “Greetings Abuse!!!” doesn’t seem an effective way to begin a sales pitch.

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A few months ago, I saw a 500-gigabyte hard drive at Fry’s. That’s when I realized that terabyte* drives were not far away.

Oh, sure, you’ve been able to put together multi-terabytes of storage using RAID arrays and clusters, but we’re talking something the average consumer will be able to walk into a store and buy. Something that the slightly-above-average consumer will be able to put in his computer with just a screwdriver and a cable.

It won’t be long. CNET reports that Hitachi anticipates a 1-TB drive by the end of the year.

Naturally, anyone who installs one of these will probably fill it up within a week.

(via Slashdot)

Edit: Something just occurred to me. In light of Mezzoblue’s recent article on naming drives, I’ve come up with the perfect name for my first terabyte drive: Ivan.

*Either 1,000 gigabytes or 1,024 gigabytes, depending on which definition you’re using. Is there a consensus yet?

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Today I noticed a spike in traffic coming from a post on Spread Firefox where I had made a comment. Not a ton of traffic, just ~15 hits from the same page on the same day, but that’s unusual for traffic from SFX posts—especially old ones. I checked to see if it had climbed into the site’s list of top posts (the usual explanation), but it wasn’t there. I just couldn’t figure out what was causing the traffic.

Then I realized the author of that post had another story show up on Slashdot today. I discovered this chain of links:

  1. Slashdot: Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?
  2. Idealog: Microsoft Drops The Ball on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Compliance [archive.org]
  3. SFX: Should NewsCloud.com Remain Firefox Only? [archive.org]
  4. The Alternative Browser Alliance (via signature in comment)

You can see how powerful the Slashdot effect is, if it can cause a noticeable (if minor) spike in traffic to a page 3 degrees away!

Of course, it pales next to being linked from the ISC Handler’s Diary, which seems to have pulled in 10 times as many visitors in 2 days. (Thanks!)

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This is a story on phone menus, though it applies to anything where the user interface can change. I phoned in a refill on a prescription this morning. The phone system lets you choose when you plan on picking it up, presumably so that the pharmacy can prioritize people who are coming in sooner. Generally, it asks you to enter the hour, then #, then 1 for AM or 2 for PM.

I wanted to swing by around noon, so I entered 12, then #, and then without listening for the option, I hit 2. I wanted to pick it up around 12:00 pm.

So I was surprised to hear, “We’re sorry, the pharmacy is not open at midnight.” I flashed back to elementary school, when I was out on the field trying to explain to my friends why noon was 12 PM and not 12 AM as they insisted. Had someone managed to get into a programming position, without clearing that up?

As I re-entered the time, I listened for the options. It turns out that they had anticipated just such confusion, as after I chose 12, the option was, “Please enter 1 for noon, or 2 for midnight.” That works great for people who are using the system for the first time, whether they know noon is PM or not. Unfortunately, for people who have been using it for years and (normally) don’t need to listen to the options, it switches the buttons around. It’s like those WinZip registration dialog boxes that would rearrange the buttons every time, so that you couldn’t just click through, you’d have to pay at least some attention to it.

Of course, then there’s the question of why it even gives you the option for midnight…

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Some funny spam subjects that have popped up in my inbox or in the server’s spam traps recently:

  • freewheeling slush — Because slush that’s hemmed in by tradition just isn’t worth reading.
  • Planning buying trickles — In times of drought, even the tiniest stream is a wise investment!
  • Google Animal Gestation — I see Google is diversifying their business again.
  • Wanna Burn Movies? — For some reason I’m picturing a can of film on a bonfire, not a DVD burner.
  • I found something Daphne — It looks like a monster mask! Jeepers, this haunting is a hoax!

Brought to you by the Department of Word Salad. (I really ought to draw up a guest strip for Spamusement with one of these.)

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Some interesting comments by Warren Ellis in today’s Bad Signal on film budgets, and Superman Returns in particular.

$250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie.

This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking more than the GNP of Luxembourg in a single weekend is not actually enough to put a movie in the black.

It’s the “spacelaunch” comment that I find most interesting, as I made the same comparison a few years ago, from the other side of the fence: Assuming that the Spirit and Opportunity missions to Mars are typical, price-wise, it doesn’t make sense to complain that we’re “wasting” money on space exploration when a mission costs as much as two summer blockbusters. Manned missions are, of course, more expensive, but robotic missions? If we, as a society, toss away $250 million several times a year on mindless action flicks, what’s so terrible about spending a similar amount to learn something about our universe?

Yes, I know the difference is public vs. private funding. Movies are financed by studios and private investors, and space exploration is usually financed by governments, and therefore by taxes. But comparing the dollar amounts puts things in a different perspective—whether you’re astonished by the literally astronomical movie budgets, or realizing that exploring outer space is more down to Earth than it seems at first glance.

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