Monday, September 29, 2003

Second-hand Spam?

Everyone seems to have finally acknowledged that SPAM is a serious problem. Especially because so many viruses have been spread in a similar manner. However, there is a lesser-known scourge that I am starting to get annoyed with - something that I like to call second-hand SPAM.

Don't know what I am talking about? In my opinion, second-hand spam are unwanted e-mails sent to you indirectly - i.e. via a mailing list that you are on. This would include both e-mails inappropriate for the list as well as people who put the list's e-mail on a different list.

Many lists enforce posts only from subscribers, but if a rouge mailer joins as a subscriber, he or she could then easily stick the list's address on a distrib list on their own - this is annoying, especially if the idiot doing this assumes that all other people on this specific list care about the same issues as he or she does.

But what I really hate are list moderators who use a double-standard when deciding if a post gets through or not. For example, I know of a community-oriented list where the moderator shoots down classifieds - i.e. someone selling furniture or organizing a trip outside the context of the community, but would like to include community members - but will put through posts about how nice his/her recent vacation was.

Even if we find ways to effictively eradicate first-hand SPAM, there is no way to eradicate the causes of Second-Hand SPAM - Poor Judgement!

Thursday, September 11, 2003

iPaq 4100

I know that this has been around for a while, but I finally stumbled across information about the ipaq 4100 series PocketPC. It seems like a very cool concept. It looks like a version of a miniaturized Tablet PC. The unit folds completely closed, but can be opened up in two stages. The first lets you flip the PDA style screen to the front, and used with the stylus, it works just like a traditional 'vertical' pda, not at all unlike the current 3xxx, 5xxx and 19xx series ipaqs. The second stage however, let's you flip out the back panel into a full-sized keyboard. This also requires you to flip the screen so that it is in landscape mode. This looks more like a traditional mini-laptop or similar to HP's old Handheld PCs (a la the Jornada 700 series). I know this may be hard to visualize, but I found this 'supposedly' legit HP flash presentation on an Italian WebSite - http://www.pocketpcitalia.com/top_secret.zip.

Hmm.. my 30th birthday is coming up next year, and I think that is when the Warranty on my current iPaq runs out.