I guess the fact that it is the most standards compliant browser ever made [...]
Prove it. I'll make a contrary assertion: Internet Explorer 6 is the most standards-compliant browser ever made. I'm not going to support it at all, but you didn't support your "fact" either.
I've heard this statement given as fact a lot, and I don't buy it. Last time I tried to make CSS pages on Mozilla, it seemed to have some important CSS-1 stuff broken. (And before a Bugzilla person jumps in: I don't really want to spend the time checking Mozilla's complete CSS compliance and creating bug reports. I just want people to stop spouting "facts".)
KDE is one of the few projects I've seen which actually seem to *welcome* new coders, and work to incorporate their code
Agreed. The one time I submitted a (small)patch to KDE, the response was very positive. My patch had a couple sections to it and one section was applied and one was not with an explanation (someone else was already planning on making more extensive changes to that segment of code, as I recall). They seemed pleased to get a bug report with a patch. And when I checked back in a version or so, the problem I had brought up was completely fixed.
I've never done anything more with the KDE code, but that's because of (A) my lack of time and (B) my overall satisfaction with KDE's current quality. The problems I've noticed were difficult for me to fix quickly and tended to go away in a release anyway.
I'm not a Hindu and some what HinduUnity.org preaches scares the heck out of me. But it shouldn't be forced off its ISP by crybabies
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - A.J. Liebling.
As I understand it, the supreme court has pretty much ruled consistently with this quote. If you own a press, you can say anything that isn't libelous or obscene. If you don't own a press, you are guaranteed nothing. No one is required to help you say what you want. [*]
So, yes, sites like HinduUnity.org should be forced off their ISPs. They have a constitutional right to say what they want, but no one is required to provide them a forum to spread their hatred.
[*] - I believe there is an exception for "common carriers" - basically if you are the only game in town. This would be a huge backbone provider, not a small ISP. It wouldn't apply here.
(Keep in mind, the legal details here are all from memory. If someone has an authoritative link, please post it.)
Think about the advantages an MP3 player can have over a CD player:
Higher capacity. Since MP3s are compressed, you can fit a lot more music on the same media. But these discs hold 185MB instead of 650MB, a lot of that advantage is gone. [Actually, their website says "Mb" as in Megabits. I assume that's a typo, since that would suck an awful lot.] With the memory card devices, you at least have Moore's Law telling you there will be higher-capacity cards eventually. That's not true here.
Longer battery life. Solid-state MP3 players last a lot longer because they don't have to spin a disc around. (Sorry, no numbers. Anyone?) Not true here; it still spins a disc.
Better LCD displays. MP3s can be encoded with the song title, artist, genre, etc. But it looks from their photos like this player doesn't actually show any more info on the LCD display than a standard CD player would.
Smaller. This thing is smaller than a CD player, but it's not the smallest MP3 player around.
Better skip protection. I've seen people try to jog while carrying CD players. It's really funny to watch; kind of a shuffle. Even with long anti-skip buffers, CD players will eventually run out of stuff to play if it's constantly moving. Solid-state MP3 players won't. But this thing isn't solid-state.
More convenient. With the flash memory devices, you can just connect them to your computer with a USB cable and drag stuff over. (Or put the card into your flash drive if you have one, etc.) With this, you have to find and buy an overpriced 3" CD-R and burn your music on it. That assumes you have a burner; a lot of people don't.
If you want to burn your music on to a CD, get something that takes a full-size CD. Standard CDs are higher-capacity, not much larger, cheaper, and more widely available. Plus, I believe that there are MP3 CD players that can handle standard audio CDs as well, so you have more flexibility.
If you want something small, get an MP3 player that takes a flash card. They much smaller than this thing, have more battery life, and don't skip.
I think that the "always" qualifier may have disappeared there...
I left that out deliberately, but maybe I should have explained it. Being a journalist in the sense we're talking about here is not something you do "sometimes". You don't "sometimes" report the facts in a non-biased manner. You always do, or you are not a journalist. Period.
Regardless, the original point still stands: claiming that posting a link to somebody else's work requires witholding one's opinion on the issue and that those who don't are violating the sacred "journalistic separation of news and editorial" is ludicrous.
I wouldn't say that Roblimo crossed any sacred line here either; the "I haven't run RedHat in two years" was pretty obviously (a) editorial and (b) dumb; no one's going to be tricked into sharing his opinion. But the comment wasn't terribly professional either, and I don't like the hypocrisy of claiming to be a journalist and not always acting professionally.
I'd like if Roblimo would make up his mind as to whether or not he is a journalist.
Copid: the people in charge of Slashdot don't always claim to be or have to be "journalists" in the strictest sense
They do claim to be journalists.
Roblimo:Plus there is a little matter of keeping ads apart from editorial material, which is one of those silly ethics things only journalists who care about their personal integrity may notice, but that upset us to the point of irrationality when we spot them. (it's here).
Yes they should know better [...] but nothing would have happened if nobody had written this worm.
I agree absolutely; the writers of these worms deliberately caused a lot of people a lot of stress. There's no excuse for that. They're bastards. But that doesn't change the fact that the people at this ISP would have had no problem if they were competent at their jobs. It's their job to know how to deal with computers; they apparently do not. It's hard for me to be sympathetic.
and yes, they probably didn't keep their servers entirely up to date with the latest security updates
I was talking about the SirCam worm in particular here the one that you need to actually run yourself to get infected with. Missing a security patch is more understandable to me, although ideally people would be vigilant as well as running software that doesn't need to be patched so often.
Next thing the police tells me I'm to blame for the latest break in in my house because my door wasn't patched against the latest models crowbar.
Not to blame, but it's much easier for me to have sympathy for someone who's stuff is stolen despite good common sense than for someone who doesn't even lock the door when (s)he goes on vacation.
They just suffered a lot of damage because some jerk somewhere lacks a decent moral and ethical education.
and because they weren't at all cautious. There are plenty of people who had absolutely no problem with SirCam because they were smart enough not to open and run double-named attachments sent to them by a near-illiterate masquerading as someone they may vaguely know (the email addresses it gives aren't necessarily at all close acquaintances). I just don't understand how people in the computer industry could fall victim to SirCam.
I know of at least one small ISP that had very serious problems this week. First one of the top dogs in the place sent sircam throughout the company
I have absolutely no sympathy for them. It's maybe understandable when someone from completely outside a computer-related field propogates a virus like that. But anyone at an ISP should know better. I don't care if they are in a non-technical position there; they still should have a basic understanding of what their company does. And the most basic understanding is all you need to not be infected.
Lycos result contains Javascript. Javascript redirects you to some server. That server runs some ActiveX code.
Stop there. ActiveX code doesn't run without a confirmation dialog saying something to the effect of "This is untrusted/unsigned code; are you sure you want to run it?" The security implications are made quite clear to the user. Now if a Javascript program could automatically click "OK" on that dialog, then I'd be worried. (Knowing Microsoft, I wouldn't be too surprised to hear about that sort of security vulnerability.)
Does anyone else think it's sad that people are worried about Lycos's vulnerability of allowing other people's Javascript to get on their pages? It's a problem if any HTML/Javascript/whatever someone sends at you creates a problem. You shouldn't have to stay on trusted websites to be safe. Lycos's problem is minor. The real problem to be addressed is that people don't consider Javascript safe, probably with good reason.
Windows Way: In explorer select view/as thumbnails. What's a filename again?
First, that's not the only reason you'd want to do this. I was thinking of making a webpage.
Second, this is just an example task. There are plenty of other tasks that I do naturally using a UNIX system that I just wouldn't be able to do without a CLI or a program specifically designed to solve that sort of task. Being able to go beyond what was planned is good. Generic tools are good.
Novice way I forgot about: Programs like FrontPage probably also have something to assist with this, but there are many reasons you may not want to use those programs: you don't like their HTML output, you want to produce dynamic pages (CGI, ASP, mod_perl/mod_php, servlets), you don't want to spend the money, etc. Plus, you might want to vary it slightly by using a certain colormap. In the advanced way, just add -map mycolors.cm to the command in the appropriate place. With FrontPage...well, you have to hope they designed that feature in to their batch command specifically. Once again, generic tools are good.
Wouldn't it be even better if Photoshop gave you a way to find out the command-line equivalent of its batch thumbnailify command, and your file manager gave you a way to find out the command-line way to rename a bunch of files? Then intermediate users would have no trouble doing what they need to do, and advanced users would be able to combine the two commands into a "give me thumbnails for the images in this directory" script without having to look anything up in a reference manual.
Interesting, but I don't think it'd work out. While Photoshop/GIMP and ImageMagick are related in functionality, they require very different skills to use. Photoshop/GIMP require the usual GUI navigation skills and the image editing ones. Using ImageMagick requires instead a good knowledge of how to use your shell/command interpreter and of how to read UNIX man pages (which I would argue is actually an acquired skill).
You could just print the exact command to use in the Photoshop manual, but then people would get confused when they want to vary it in any way. The great thing about the CLI interface is that it's very easy to do things that the designers didn't anticipate specifically. Giving people canned commands defeats the purpose of that. There is quite a bit of knowledge they have to have to make use of it, and I don't think there are any shortcuts.
Personally, I'd think that making the OS easier to use would be a good idea.
Making the OS easy to use is a noble goal, but remember: making it easy for the novice and easy for the advanced user are not the same!
Example task: Creating 96x96 JPEG thumbnails for each of a directory of larger JPEGs, such that x.jpg's thumbnail is x-th.jpg. Not an uncommon task, and one that will make my point quite clear.
Novice way: Open up Photoshop, GIMP, etc. For each image in the directory, open it, scale it down, and resave it with the new filename. Incredibly intuitive. A complete pain in the ass.
Intermediate way: Use Photoshop's Batch Action (or equivalent) on a bunch of files to resize them. Unfortunately, I believe this only outputs them all with the same filenames in a different directory. You'll still need to manually go through and rename the files. Not quite as intuitive. Still annoying.
Advanced way: Type this: for i in *.jpg; do mogrify -geometry '96x96!' < "$i" > "$(basename "$i").jpg"; done
Not at all intuitive. Incredibly quick and easy if you know how.
Remember, having a book available to learn about an OS doesn't necessarily mean that the novice way isn't there. It does mean that the advanced way is there. That's a good thing. I hope there are always books available about the software I use.
Notice the two greater-than signs in the first quote, and the one in the second. They weren't from the same post. The post I replied to stated that the first statement was false, which is wrong. The second statement was apparently his justification for saying that...but the two things aren't at all the same.
> > I suppose it is also true if there are 367 people in the room, there is a 100% chance two of them share the same birthday.
> no, there is always a finite chance that someone would have a unique birthday
No. There are only 366 possible birthdays (365 most years). If everyone in the room has a unique birthday, there can not be more than 366 people there.
My Postfix configuration was meant as an example of how it works. You can do SASL with Sendmail as well, though I don't know the specifics.
Once we get our new datacenter up (next month) we will have pop before smtp all setup so it becomes a non-issue
To me at least, the SASL seems to be a better solution. I've had bad experiences with one POP before SMTP setup, and I don't think they are limited to it. I just like the idea of doing the authentication as part of the SMTP procedure better than linking POP and SMTP together; seems kludgy and unreliable to me.
I was mainly trying to say that Verizon's solution was to host with them:)
Yeah, I agree that is a shitty way to do business. Qwest-like, even.
You're missing an option: SASL authentication. My Postfix mailserver is configured to use this and it works out fairly well. The major clients (Outlook, etc) seem to have support for it.
The client section allows my networks (you'd put in localhost and your dialup links) and SASL authenticated people, without checking DNS or the RBL (which is important if you are using the DUL; otherwise their machine may be listed and denied).
The recipient section allows SASL-authenticated people to send to addresses other than the auth_destination ones - in other words, to relay.
So, unless I'm missing something (like a big mail client that doesn't support SASL at all), there's a pretty good way for you and people like you to still provide supplementary addresses. And I think this move really will cut down on spam.
I think this may have been a flaw in the test. The users were simply plopped in front of terminals and told there was a new system on it. In the real world, there would be some exposure to advertising. There would be e-mails sent to employees. There would probably be a meeting about it or somethig. Usually people see the product logo before it ends up on their system.
You may be right. But ideally, it would be nice if they were plopped in front of the system and everything made sense to them. It's a goal to shoot for, even if it can't ever be reached. The foot may actually be a poor choice for a logo since it isn't immediately recognizable as one, but I don't think GNOME is likely to change it based on one usability survey. That'd be way too much work for too little benefit.
I would certainly say that the meaning of that one button is not as big a deal as many of the other things they revealed in the test, since once they know it is the logo it makes sense and they will remember. The settings under programs thing, on the other hand, I could easily see confusing them over and over again. The same with many of the other points raised.
Reading it, the comments seemed to be a lot of things like:
"This is ridiculous! The start button is a foot? What does a foot have to do with a start button?"
Read a little further. They gave the participants the very important hint that the foot is the GNOME logo and then:
"Where everything is; like a start menu like in Windows." (P5, P9)
"...to go to programs." (P3)
"...a 'Go' button." (P11)
"From my previous experience, I'd click there for a list of programs." (P2)
Their guesses were all dead on. If you didn't know that the footprint was the GNOME logo, you'd be confused, too. Think of all the associations you can make with a footprint. Traveling, history...exactly what they guessed.
"Whoa? How come the settings are under something called "Settings"?? Where is the control panel?"
Your paraphrase lost the meaning of the original. Try this instead:
"'Settings' should be in the control panel...'Settings' is not a program!" (P7)
"I wouldn't expect 'Settings' or 'System' to be under 'Program'." (P9)
They were not confused that the settings were in something called "Settings"; they were confused that the settings were in "Programs". Sounds like a pretty valid complaint to me.
Microsoft has succeeded in making their own screwed up naming conventions the "standard" of computers everywhere.
No. The users' expectations you've quoted were reasonable and not centric to a Microsoft desktop. You found what you expected to. You completely ignored all the information contrary to it.
Okay, let me rephrase that, then: a compressed version of a set of data can't beat the uncompressed version. Remember, the MP3 is almost without exception ripped from the CD. You can't possibly have better quality, though the original poster suggests you can have something that we perceive as better quality. The point of my post was that if there's some way of increasing the perceived quality, they could just do that to the original without compressing it and you'd still lose.
sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. [...] If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible.
Interesting idea, but I think that would be a seperate project from designing a compression scheme. If there were some set of translations you could run on the audio to make it sound more realistic, sooner or later the people who print the CDs would run it on them before they print. They'd be doing essentially the same thing but not compressing, and would sound better. Compressed formats just can't beat uncompressed formats. The only thing you can really hope for is to get the two close enough together that no one can tell the difference.
The suspicion could have to do with anything - he, Moe, and Curly were seen together regularly, and Moe was out of town on the day of the murder. This isn't evidence of murderous intent, it's just a connection that police might follow up.
And you think that connection makes him no more likely to have done this than the other hundred or so people around the city? Many of those would likely have never even seen Curly.
I'm not saying that your hypothetical situation is unbelievable, that they couldn't make a mistake like this. All I'm saying is that your 100:1 odds make no more sense than their 1:50,000.
That's why he said, "in the absense [sic] of all other evidence."
No, that wasn't what he said:
He said: No evidence exists except a suspicion on the part of the police and a hair on the knife used to kill Curly.
As I said, the match wasn't how they found Larry. Whether or not is was significant enough to stand up in court, they had some reason to check Larry's DNA. I believe in our justice system they must have some reason before they can do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the fact that it is the most standards compliant browser ever made [...]
Prove it. I'll make a contrary assertion: Internet Explorer 6 is the most standards-compliant browser ever made. I'm not going to support it at all, but you didn't support your "fact" either.
I've heard this statement given as fact a lot, and I don't buy it. Last time I tried to make CSS pages on Mozilla, it seemed to have some important CSS-1 stuff broken. (And before a Bugzilla person jumps in: I don't really want to spend the time checking Mozilla's complete CSS compliance and creating bug reports. I just want people to stop spouting "facts".)
KDE is one of the few projects I've seen which actually seem to *welcome* new coders, and work to incorporate their code
Agreed. The one time I submitted a (small)patch to KDE, the response was very positive. My patch had a couple sections to it and one section was applied and one was not with an explanation (someone else was already planning on making more extensive changes to that segment of code, as I recall). They seemed pleased to get a bug report with a patch. And when I checked back in a version or so, the problem I had brought up was completely fixed.
I've never done anything more with the KDE code, but that's because of (A) my lack of time and (B) my overall satisfaction with KDE's current quality. The problems I've noticed were difficult for me to fix quickly and tended to go away in a release anyway.
I'm not a Hindu and some what HinduUnity.org preaches scares the heck out of me. But it shouldn't be forced off its ISP by crybabies
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - A.J. Liebling.
As I understand it, the supreme court has pretty much ruled consistently with this quote. If you own a press, you can say anything that isn't libelous or obscene. If you don't own a press, you are guaranteed nothing. No one is required to help you say what you want. [*]
So, yes, sites like HinduUnity.org should be forced off their ISPs. They have a constitutional right to say what they want, but no one is required to provide them a forum to spread their hatred.
[*] - I believe there is an exception for "common carriers" - basically if you are the only game in town. This would be a huge backbone provider, not a small ISP. It wouldn't apply here.
(Keep in mind, the legal details here are all from memory. If someone has an authoritative link, please post it.)
I will be avoiding this one.
Think about the advantages an MP3 player can have over a CD player:
If you want to burn your music on to a CD, get something that takes a full-size CD. Standard CDs are higher-capacity, not much larger, cheaper, and more widely available. Plus, I believe that there are MP3 CD players that can handle standard audio CDs as well, so you have more flexibility.
If you want something small, get an MP3 player that takes a flash card. They much smaller than this thing, have more battery life, and don't skip.
Robin (Roblimo) Miller != Rob (CmdrTaco) Malda. CmdrTaco (Rob Malda) posted this story.
Wow. I could have sworn I saw that Roblimo posted this story, but you're right. Well, it's a good thing I'm not claiming to be a journalist. ;)
I think that the "always" qualifier may have disappeared there...
I left that out deliberately, but maybe I should have explained it. Being a journalist in the sense we're talking about here is not something you do "sometimes". You don't "sometimes" report the facts in a non-biased manner. You always do, or you are not a journalist. Period.
Regardless, the original point still stands: claiming that posting a link to somebody else's work requires witholding one's opinion on the issue and that those who don't are violating the sacred "journalistic separation of news and editorial" is ludicrous.
I wouldn't say that Roblimo crossed any sacred line here either; the "I haven't run RedHat in two years" was pretty obviously (a) editorial and (b) dumb; no one's going to be tricked into sharing his opinion. But the comment wasn't terribly professional either, and I don't like the hypocrisy of claiming to be a journalist and not always acting professionally.
I'd like if Roblimo would make up his mind as to whether or not he is a journalist.
Copid: the people in charge of Slashdot don't always claim to be or have to be "journalists" in the strictest sense
They do claim to be journalists.
Roblimo: Plus there is a little matter of keeping ads apart from editorial material, which is one of those silly ethics things only journalists who care about their personal integrity may notice, but that upset us to the point of irrationality when we spot them. (it's here).
Yes they should know better [...] but nothing would have happened if nobody had written this worm.
I agree absolutely; the writers of these worms deliberately caused a lot of people a lot of stress. There's no excuse for that. They're bastards. But that doesn't change the fact that the people at this ISP would have had no problem if they were competent at their jobs. It's their job to know how to deal with computers; they apparently do not. It's hard for me to be sympathetic.
and yes, they probably didn't keep their servers entirely up to date with the latest security updates
I was talking about the SirCam worm in particular here the one that you need to actually run yourself to get infected with. Missing a security patch is more understandable to me, although ideally people would be vigilant as well as running software that doesn't need to be patched so often.
Next thing the police tells me I'm to blame for the latest break in in my house because my door wasn't patched against the latest models crowbar.
Not to blame, but it's much easier for me to have sympathy for someone who's stuff is stolen despite good common sense than for someone who doesn't even lock the door when (s)he goes on vacation.
They just suffered a lot of damage because some jerk somewhere lacks a decent moral and ethical education.
and because they weren't at all cautious. There are plenty of people who had absolutely no problem with SirCam because they were smart enough not to open and run double-named attachments sent to them by a near-illiterate masquerading as someone they may vaguely know (the email addresses it gives aren't necessarily at all close acquaintances). I just don't understand how people in the computer industry could fall victim to SirCam.
I know of at least one small ISP that had very serious problems this week. First one of the top dogs in the place sent sircam throughout the company
I have absolutely no sympathy for them. It's maybe understandable when someone from completely outside a computer-related field propogates a virus like that. But anyone at an ISP should know better. I don't care if they are in a non-technical position there; they still should have a basic understanding of what their company does. And the most basic understanding is all you need to not be infected.
Lycos result contains Javascript. Javascript redirects you to some server. That server runs some ActiveX code.
Stop there. ActiveX code doesn't run without a confirmation dialog saying something to the effect of "This is untrusted/unsigned code; are you sure you want to run it?" The security implications are made quite clear to the user. Now if a Javascript program could automatically click "OK" on that dialog, then I'd be worried. (Knowing Microsoft, I wouldn't be too surprised to hear about that sort of security vulnerability.)
Does anyone else think it's sad that people are worried about Lycos's vulnerability of allowing other people's Javascript to get on their pages? It's a problem if any HTML/Javascript/whatever someone sends at you creates a problem. You shouldn't have to stay on trusted websites to be safe. Lycos's problem is minor. The real problem to be addressed is that people don't consider Javascript safe, probably with good reason.
Windows Way: In explorer select view/as thumbnails. What's a filename again?
First, that's not the only reason you'd want to do this. I was thinking of making a webpage.
Second, this is just an example task. There are plenty of other tasks that I do naturally using a UNIX system that I just wouldn't be able to do without a CLI or a program specifically designed to solve that sort of task. Being able to go beyond what was planned is good. Generic tools are good.
Novice way I forgot about: Programs like FrontPage probably also have something to assist with this, but there are many reasons you may not want to use those programs: you don't like their HTML output, you want to produce dynamic pages (CGI, ASP, mod_perl/mod_php, servlets), you don't want to spend the money, etc. Plus, you might want to vary it slightly by using a certain colormap. In the advanced way, just add -map mycolors.cm to the command in the appropriate place. With FrontPage...well, you have to hope they designed that feature in to their batch command specifically. Once again, generic tools are good.
Enlightenment: the realization that your 100-line shell script can be reimplemented as a 5-line Perl script.
Wouldn't it be even better if Photoshop gave you a way to find out the command-line equivalent of its batch thumbnailify command, and your file manager gave you a way to find out the command-line way to rename a bunch of files? Then intermediate users would have no trouble doing what they need to do, and advanced users would be able to combine the two commands into a "give me thumbnails for the images in this directory" script without having to look anything up in a reference manual.
Interesting, but I don't think it'd work out. While Photoshop/GIMP and ImageMagick are related in functionality, they require very different skills to use. Photoshop/GIMP require the usual GUI navigation skills and the image editing ones. Using ImageMagick requires instead a good knowledge of how to use your shell/command interpreter and of how to read UNIX man pages (which I would argue is actually an acquired skill).
You could just print the exact command to use in the Photoshop manual, but then people would get confused when they want to vary it in any way. The great thing about the CLI interface is that it's very easy to do things that the designers didn't anticipate specifically. Giving people canned commands defeats the purpose of that. There is quite a bit of knowledge they have to have to make use of it, and I don't think there are any shortcuts.
Personally, I'd think that making the OS easier to use would be a good idea.
Making the OS easy to use is a noble goal, but remember: making it easy for the novice and easy for the advanced user are not the same!
Example task: Creating 96x96 JPEG thumbnails for each of a directory of larger JPEGs, such that x.jpg's thumbnail is x-th.jpg. Not an uncommon task, and one that will make my point quite clear.
Novice way: Open up Photoshop, GIMP, etc. For each image in the directory, open it, scale it down, and resave it with the new filename. Incredibly intuitive. A complete pain in the ass.
Intermediate way: Use Photoshop's Batch Action (or equivalent) on a bunch of files to resize them. Unfortunately, I believe this only outputs them all with the same filenames in a different directory. You'll still need to manually go through and rename the files. Not quite as intuitive. Still annoying.
Advanced way: Type this:
for i in *.jpg; do mogrify -geometry '96x96!' < "$i" > "$(basename "$i").jpg"; done
Not at all intuitive. Incredibly quick and easy if you know how.
Remember, having a book available to learn about an OS doesn't necessarily mean that the novice way isn't there. It does mean that the advanced way is there. That's a good thing. I hope there are always books available about the software I use.
I hope some native speaker of American English will correct the inevitable typos and grammatical errors
That should be "advise", not "advice". The former is a verb; the latter a noun.
IIRC, a comma is only used in an "and" clause if the subject is restated. So no comma is necessary here.
As someone else said, that should be "repeal".
That's all I see. Better than most native speakers, as someone else pointed out.
Notice the two greater-than signs in the first quote, and the one in the second. They weren't from the same post. The post I replied to stated that the first statement was false, which is wrong. The second statement was apparently his justification for saying that...but the two things aren't at all the same.
> > I suppose it is also true if there are 367 people in the room, there is a 100% chance two of them share the same birthday.
> no, there is always a finite chance that someone would have a unique birthday
No. There are only 366 possible birthdays (365 most years). If everyone in the room has a unique birthday, there can not be more than 366 people there.
This is a pretty simple idea, but it actually has a name - The Pigeonhole Principle.
We don't use postfix
My Postfix configuration was meant as an example of how it works. You can do SASL with Sendmail as well, though I don't know the specifics.
Once we get our new datacenter up (next month) we will have pop before smtp all setup so it becomes a non-issue
To me at least, the SASL seems to be a better solution. I've had bad experiences with one POP before SMTP setup, and I don't think they are limited to it. I just like the idea of doing the authentication as part of the SMTP procedure better than linking POP and SMTP together; seems kludgy and unreliable to me.
I was mainly trying to say that Verizon's solution was to host with them :)
Yeah, I agree that is a shitty way to do business. Qwest-like, even.
You're missing an option: SASL authentication. My Postfix mailserver is configured to use this and it works out fairly well. The major clients (Outlook, etc) seem to have support for it.
It's configured like this:
The client section allows my networks (you'd put in localhost and your dialup links) and SASL authenticated people, without checking DNS or the RBL (which is important if you are using the DUL; otherwise their machine may be listed and denied).
The recipient section allows SASL-authenticated people to send to addresses other than the auth_destination ones - in other words, to relay.
So, unless I'm missing something (like a big mail client that doesn't support SASL at all), there's a pretty good way for you and people like you to still provide supplementary addresses. And I think this move really will cut down on spam.
I think this may have been a flaw in the test. The users were simply plopped in front of terminals and told there was a new system on it. In the real world, there would be some exposure to advertising. There would be e-mails sent to employees. There would probably be a meeting about it or somethig. Usually people see the product logo before it ends up on their system.
You may be right. But ideally, it would be nice if they were plopped in front of the system and everything made sense to them. It's a goal to shoot for, even if it can't ever be reached. The foot may actually be a poor choice for a logo since it isn't immediately recognizable as one, but I don't think GNOME is likely to change it based on one usability survey. That'd be way too much work for too little benefit.
I would certainly say that the meaning of that one button is not as big a deal as many of the other things they revealed in the test, since once they know it is the logo it makes sense and they will remember. The settings under programs thing, on the other hand, I could easily see confusing them over and over again. The same with many of the other points raised.
Reading it, the comments seemed to be a lot of things like:
"This is ridiculous! The start button is a foot? What does a foot have to do with a start button?"
Read a little further. They gave the participants the very important hint that the foot is the GNOME logo and then:
Their guesses were all dead on. If you didn't know that the footprint was the GNOME logo, you'd be confused, too. Think of all the associations you can make with a footprint. Traveling, history...exactly what they guessed.
"Whoa? How come the settings are under something called "Settings"?? Where is the control panel?"
Your paraphrase lost the meaning of the original. Try this instead:
They were not confused that the settings were in something called "Settings"; they were confused that the settings were in "Programs". Sounds like a pretty valid complaint to me.
Microsoft has succeeded in making their own screwed up naming conventions the "standard" of computers everywhere.
No. The users' expectations you've quoted were reasonable and not centric to a Microsoft desktop. You found what you expected to. You completely ignored all the information contrary to it.
Okay, let me rephrase that, then: a compressed version of a set of data can't beat the uncompressed version. Remember, the MP3 is almost without exception ripped from the CD. You can't possibly have better quality, though the original poster suggests you can have something that we perceive as better quality. The point of my post was that if there's some way of increasing the perceived quality, they could just do that to the original without compressing it and you'd still lose.
sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. [...] If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible.
Interesting idea, but I think that would be a seperate project from designing a compression scheme. If there were some set of translations you could run on the audio to make it sound more realistic, sooner or later the people who print the CDs would run it on them before they print. They'd be doing essentially the same thing but not compressing, and would sound better. Compressed formats just can't beat uncompressed formats. The only thing you can really hope for is to get the two close enough together that no one can tell the difference.
The suspicion could have to do with anything - he, Moe, and Curly were seen together regularly, and Moe was out of town on the day of the murder. This isn't evidence of murderous intent, it's just a connection that police might follow up.
And you think that connection makes him no more likely to have done this than the other hundred or so people around the city? Many of those would likely have never even seen Curly.
I'm not saying that your hypothetical situation is unbelievable, that they couldn't make a mistake like this. All I'm saying is that your 100:1 odds make no more sense than their 1:50,000.
That's why he said, "in the absense [sic] of all other evidence."
No, that wasn't what he said:
He said: No evidence exists except a suspicion on the part of the police and a hair on the knife used to kill Curly.
As I said, the match wasn't how they found Larry. Whether or not is was significant enough to stand up in court, they had some reason to check Larry's DNA. I believe in our justice system they must have some reason before they can do that.