INQUIRER has skilled editor shocka

I can't believe you actually take the time to go through all these mails you must be getting. And there are mails that are responses to mails you published, etc, etc..

Why not intoduce a "feedback" feature below every article ?

All I can say is "Please don't." I /like/ the fact that the Inquirer's letters pages have been pre-vetted by a skilled editor. That's what makes the difference between a Letters page and random mound of cruft. If I want to read inane, offtopic, uninformed "opinions", there's always Slashdot comments.

Thanks,
Charles

Re to Bob's letter on Inq staff going through all mails

Poor Bob. He doesn't understand product differentiation. Adding a feedback feature to every article and not reading every email personally would make the Inquirer only a Slashdot clone. While the Slashdot posting methodology is good, it has its limitations and disadvantages.

1)You have to be brilliant for a long time before moderators start modding your brilliant comments up where people can see them. But on the Inquirer, brilliance, and keen discernment are posted immediately for all to profit from, controversies are enjoyed for the intelligent discussion that is provoked, and off-the-wall letters full of buffoonery are posted for everyone's amusement. What could be better?
2)Slashdot posts are displayed according to importance or relevance, whereas at the Inquirer all posted letters are equal in format.
3)Slashdot doesn't display reader letters in as nice and readable a font as Inq
4)Slashdot doesn't email you the moderator's feedback on your letters.

Michaela Stephens

"Spam net threat is yet another myth" is yet another very bad article

Rarely have so many non sequiteurs been deployed to so little effect as in the "Spam net threat is yet another myth" article. In order to somehow assure us that the threat of spam isn't as bad as some people say, Doug Mohney offers us:

1. The idea that the war on spam has become a terribly dirty business, as if that is relevant to anything. Spam continues to outnumber legitimate e-mails in my mail-box 5 to 1, whether or not some hothead is calling in death threats to people involved in the spamming business. The fact that there are a few nutcases on the anti-Spam side of the dispute doesn't mean anything.

2. The strangely contradictory idea that the spammers can take legal action against anti-spam activists. I'm not sure why this is presented as a point in the middle of a screed about how supposedly the spammers aren't that much of a threat. Surely the fact that spammers are able to dissuade anti-spam activists by threats of legal action makes them more of a menace, not less.

3. The suggestion that spamming can be easily controlled by spam-company ISPs cutting them off. Many spammers don't buy ISP service and then send thousands of e-mail messages over their nice new legitimate SMTP server - they simply buy net access long enough to forge mail on open SMTP servers, or use scripts to abuse free email hosting services. It's possible for ISPs to detect this, but not trivial.

4. The increasingly tiresome idea that because the Internet is global, all attempts to regulate anything on it are Doomed To Failure. Yes, banning spam in the US will not fix things overnight. First, the US is not the only country considering such a law. Second, these sort of laws can eventually become enforced globally to some extent - one can ask the Nigerians, very nicely, to pass a similar law or watch all of their incoming packets get dropped on the floor. Finally - even excluding the idea that other countries will follow suit - if it becomes illegal to send bulk unsolicited commercial email without observing certain niceties (perhaps including a header indicating that it is, in fact, unsolicited commercial email) then most companies based in the US will become very reluctant to hire a spammer to do their dirty work, regardless of whether the spammer is in New York or Nigeria. It would strain credence that some Nigerian spammer has just decided to start doing free promotions for "Bob's Penis Enlargement and Credit Repair Incorporated, Pittsburgh, PA" for free. Investigations will get started, and some of them will put people like Bob out of business. Of course, if Bob has incorporated his business in Nigeria also then we're out of luck. But I'd settle for a partial victory.

5. Some asinine attempts to blow libertarian smoke up our asses…. Speaking of the "cop-out of last resort", quoting someone from Texas saying "I fear from the republic" is a pretty piss-poor substitute for political argument. "And how many elected politicians would you trust with correctly understanding and implementing a half-decent solution, hmm?" Oh, gee, Doug, you got me. That buffoonish public sector couldn't possibly manage something as fearsomely complex as drafting a reasonable law requiring that spammers include a header that identifies their unsolicited commercial e-mail as such. Yeah, that's a phenomenally complicated task compared to things like building federal highway systems, handing out NSF funding to research labs, running the FAA, allowing the bulk of seniors to avoid abject poverty, etc. Yes, government screws a lot of complicated tasks up to some extent. But please spare us the sophomoric drivel about how elected officials can't get anything done and that every last good thing in the entire Western world is due to the amazing powers of free enterprise. If you have a coherent argument about why this is one of those things that government will get wrong, let's hear it.

6. Suggestions that it's all about suing someone. I'm all for AOL suing someone. However, the bulk of us don't have the time or the resources, and as long as the spammers take care not to annoy organizations big enough to make this sort of action worthwhile, we're out of luck.

Doug fails to address the core issue - that is, why people think spam can deeply harm the Internet. Simply put, e-mail is considered one of the most worthwhile services available on the Internet. Spam makes e-mail far less useful, particularly to users who are either technically less able or to users who are deemed sensitive to particular kinds of material (no-one wants their 10-year-old getting porn spam). It's always possible to use people (volunteer or paid) to filter this stuff - or put layers of software in that try to reduce the problem, but ultimately, this passes the cost on to the user. This will reduce the number of people who use e-mail and very possibly, other internet services besides. If great-grandma can't get pictures of her new descendent without receiving daily "How to enlarge your penis" spam, she's not exactly going to spend $20 a month to explore all of the Good Things the internet has to offer.

Yours Sincerely,
Geoff Langdale.

Regarding your article on TSMC and 90nm, I thought you'd be interested in this article. Both IBM and UMC are delivering working 90nm silicon to Xilinx for their Spartan3 FPGA line. 300mm wafers. Kudos to IBM and UMC.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030414S0037

Also Xilinx's biggest competition in FPGA arena is Altera. Altera uses TSMC as their foundry. A couple of months ago Altera announced a new product line (Cyclone) at TSMC's 0.13u. They don't appear to be ready for a 90nm product launch until the end of 2003 per

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030119S0006

Regards,
Kevin Hubbard

Subject: Microsoft smooth talking AMD processor performance

check out matrox's requirements for their new video editing board

Matrox's new board is very processor intensive using the system processors to do the lion's share of rendering video effects. I especially liked the Pentium 3 reference ((P3 1ghz AMD 1500+ (1.33GHz) or P$ 1.8 ghz)) guess megahertz is taking a side seat now eh?

WildBill

Subject: Man hits back at AOL spamming suit

AOL is similar the pot colouring the kettle black in my book. Should we sue AOL for sending us all of the junk mail coasters? Yes AOL pays shipping fees, but spammers pay ISP fees. Personally, I get more junkmail from AOL, Citibank Visa, and Discover Card at home than spam....

'I had all I can stands, and I can't stands no more' - Popeye

Patrick

Shared source is not open source!

Isn't this MS shared source, like all the rest, purely a non-commercial license? I fail to see how saying 'hey universities, can you please do our research for us, but if there's any profit to be made, only we can make it' is open source.

One of the key criteria of open source is that their should be no restrictions on the use of the source code.

The OSI created the term open source, please stick to their definition of it. MS is deliberately muddying the waters with 'shared source', and you seem to have fallen for it.

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

See #6, no discrimination against field of endeavour. MS shared source discriminates against anyone wanting to use the code commercially.

Will Smith

Just wanted to point out that I think Doug Mohoney misses the point of the relentless persuit of Moores Law. He tries to equate more transistors to more cylinders in a car engine, while forgetting that there is a cost reduction in the process of getting more transistors. His last sentence is this:

"You don't need a 12 cylinder engine just to pick up the groceries."

But I say, if a company could make a 12 cylinder engine that cost the same as a 4-banger, wouldn't everyone want to buy the 12? It doesn't really matter if you "need" the power or not, consumers are tuned in to "more for less". This is especially true when it comes to computers, because the average consumer doesn't really have a feel for what constitutes "too much power". The tech companies that sit back complacently and say, "our hardware is faster than any app can take advantage of, so we may as well relax and wait for software to catch up", are the tech companies that will go out of business.

John in Dallas

Re: "Tyan late to game with Opteron mobos"

AMD's problem is not the Number of Motherboard suppliers.

Their problem is having more Motherboard Suppliers than there are Motherboard Customers.

Thus, AMD has asked Tyan and Solectron to "absent themselves" from April 22's Hyper-Hoopla.

Paul R. Engel

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