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Domain: rootsweb.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to rootsweb.com.

Comments · 56

  1. All Platforms Available! See pgpi.org by SomethingOrOther · · Score: 2 · on Zimmermann Suggests Freeing PGP Source

    You need one of the international versions of PGP available from www.pgpi.org you do

    Available on a shitload of platforms
    And pgpi is a very trusted site

    (I could also mention the Cyber Knights Templar builds. Also very trusted + open source)

  2. Re:Bah Humbug! by caca_phony · · Score: 2 · on Universities Creating Computer Discipline Offices
    Worst school masacre in US history:

    Bath, Michigan, 1927

    Man, that is a sad
    story

  3. His analogy would work if applied by Skapare · · Score: 2 · on Software Aesthetics

    There are 5 kinds of causes of bridge failures:

    • Bad specification
    • Bad design
    • Bad construction
    • Bad maintenance
    • Accident or sabotage
    As you point out, bridges do FALL DOWN. Here is a list of major bridge collapses, including this one which I actually witnessed fall. And the expense of one crash tracked to an error in design can be enormous. This is area where quality is design is important, and usually is done. And given that the cost of the design work is small compared to the cost of materials, construction, and loss in the event of a crash, there is relatively little pressure to reduce costs by cutting back on the design diligence. That doesn't rule out trying to design for lower costs elsewhere, but still, that is rare due to the extreme costs of crash.

    Software doesn't usually have the extreme costs of a crash. Some exceptions do exist, like airplane navigation and medical instruments (and cases of bad software there is a concern, too), but in general, the cost of a crash is low compared to the cost of design, which is often very high. That means that cost cutting measures tend to focus on the design because that's where the costs are high, even though it's only that way because the other costs are low. So pointy haired managers will do their thing and we get software that sucks to some degree.

    If software did have the same cost ratios of a bridge, you can be sure the design quality would not be skimped on, and better software would result. In the sense of "if the economic model could be applied" the analogy fits. But of course reality is that the economic model is not the same at all. So I see where he is coming from with his analogy, and it makes sense, but we can't use it to solve the problem of why software sucks so much.

  4. not a good argument by fizban · · Score: 3 · on Napster Judge Groks Filename Variation
    They obviously haven't heard of Soundex (note: there are more algorithms than just this one). It would allow them to handle a large portion of those spelling variations. Not to diss Napster, but they seem to be feigning ignorance. If they had any software developers of merit on their team, they'd be able to handle these problems easily.

    --

  5. Rootsweb by Glenn+R-P · · Score: 2 · on Free/Non-Profit Hosting Providers?

    Rootsweb provides free web hosting, subsidized by a banner that they insert at top and bottom of each page. It's for noncommercial/non"adult" use only. It started out being for genealogy but now allows material on most topics. See freepages.rootsweb.com

  6. sendmail is not that bad, qmail is not that great by Tim+Pierce · · Score: 4 · on Red Hat to fund Mozilla and Sendmail?

    Sendmail is really not a bad choice. If you can get over your fear of the sendmail.cf language, it's very servicable on a modern machine.

    Sendmail's "insecurity" is largely a myth at this point. I do not recall seeing a root exploit since Sendmail-8.8, which was about three years ago. While qmail and Postfix can legitimately brag about being designed for security from the ground up, the sendmail team has done a pretty good cleanup job.

    Doubting Thomases should consider that OpenBSD, the famously "ultra-secure" operating system, ships with sendmail, not qmail. How many people think that Theo de Raadt would put up with shipping software that has known exploits?

    We use sendmail to run one of the largest mailing list sites in the world. My experiments with qmail were pretty hideous; qmail has serious problems out of the box with high-volume delivery. The mail queue backed up by several thousand messages, and one big list actually caused the server to crash. (I am told that there are patches available to improve qmail's performance on very-high-volume sites. We have not had the opportunity to try them, but given my experience I am not sure that we want to.)

    I'm actually not a big fan of sendmail qua sendmail. But anti-sendmail sentiment is just pretty overblown these days, and the rebellion hype is not convincing. Sendmail is one of the classic open source success stories, it is a fine piece of software with a great future, and an excellent choice for a project to support.