Ever wonder what mail servers people run? I found myself wondering what the top universities used, so I wrote a lame little script to go and query the top 50 schools from this list, find out their mail servers, and then netcat to them to see what they respond with.

The results were interesting. I was specifically wondering how the war between Sendmail and Postfix was going. As expected, Sendmail is still winning, but Postfix seems to be holding its own.

So out of 36 responses I got 7 with Postfix in the banner. If we take that highly unscientific sample and call it legit, we’re looking at roughly 20% of top-50 universities using Postfix. Not bad.

Aside from the MTA war, though, it was just interesting to see what these guys were putting in their banners. Check out the Princeton one, for example — they have some sort of secret message encoded with MD5 in theirs. And MIT points out that they don’t want any collect or third party calls. Nice.

Anyway, here are the results and the tool I used. Be sure to check out the raw output as well; there are quite a few interesting tidbits in there.:

Files

[ The Results ]
[ The Raw Results ]
[ The Script I Used ]
[ The List of Universities I Used ]

A recent article discusses a study that found how simply believing you could become smarter actually makes you smarter. I’m sure about 5,000 experts have already disputed this, but let me (a wannabe expert) clear things up for you.

This study didn’t improve “intelligence”; it improved results. Let us pretend that the outcome of academics is 80% behavior and 20% intelligence (the ratio doesn’t matter that much here, so relax). These high-risk children that were tested were sub-par students, so in the 80% portion of their score they were probably using like 1/4 to 1/3 of their potential.

Intelligence, on the other hand is constantly being tapped at nearly full-bore. So if they were using 1/4 their “effort” and scoring a 20, and getting a 15 in intelligence, then they were ending up with a final tally of 35. Well, all this study did was remove their negative feelings about themselves and make them actually 1) care, and 2) try.

So that took their effort to like 75%, let’s say. So that’s a 60, combined with their 15 = 75. 35 before, 75 after — hence:

The majority of academic/general success is the result of effort, not aptitude. Aptitude only kicks in at the highest levels of difficulty.