The tighter the NDA, the more you should suspect that the underlying tech is not rocket science.
So to speak.
In this case, graphics is not that hard. Fast graphics, even, is not all that hard.
The cruft is the thing that is hard. Mechanisms to manage (emulate) the cruft are about the only thing non-obvious enough to get a good patent on, and much of that, if shown to the light of day, will be seen to be covered by prior art.
A big part of the reason INTEL got so excited about ray-tracing was that they were/are hoping there will be something in there that will be hard enough and innovative enough to get some solid IP protection on.
False hopes. (... besides IP being an oxymoron...)
What I want to know is why we put up with proprietary in the CPU itself.
I mean, if we really want free and open, why aren't we pushing for a truly free and open (and maybe even elegant) CPU, instead of being satisfied with the pseudo-open x86 junk?
Sub addresses give you a little more control over how your whitelists work. That's the whole point, I think.
In the case of your mom, you give her something like stonewallred+mom7734@yourisp.example. Then you filter that To: address with your mom's sender address for your "mom" folder. And, if you care to talk with your mom's friends sometimes, dump the senders that don't match in a "friendsofmom" folder instead of the black hole.
A little more flexibility.
Your own personal domain, of course, is even more flexible.
It's not just google's idea, it's a full-fledged RFC since a year and several months back.
Until ISPs at least start giving their users domains at a reasonable cost, it's a very useful tool. So any ISP stripping the sub-address is just being a pig and contributing to the mess.
Until we can get the ISPs to give each user a domain name for something reasonable (like, free, within the ISP's domain(s), per places like dyndns.com), this helps.
Besides, the horse is already out of the barn. This gives you a little more fine-grained control in your white-list filters.
Of course spammers will just drop the sub address.
That's why you filtering all mail without a sub-address to a folder labeled "probable_spam", or "people_I_havenot_met_and_probably_donot_want_to", or "stinky".
If you didn't start that way, after the filters that already catch all the people who should be sending to that address and sort them out to other folders, filter everything else to the stinky folder. (Ergo, use a white list before the black list.)
But another part of me tells me making opt-in the defualt by laws with teeth in them is not going to be a good thing.
Think about your sidewalk. It's there for a purpose.
Block off your sidewalk with a 3 meter wall and a moat full of crocodiles and you get no solicitors. But the firemen and the EMTs also have a problem getting in when you're home alone, passed out, with the house burning down around you.
The problem is that no-call lists are not No-solicitors signs. They're more like attractive nuisances. Train wrecks in progress.
No-solicitors signs can't be enforced on people who are not from your country until the Internet starts having laws, and we don't want the Internet to have laws.
Which means the ultimate solution is a stratified (balkanized) Internet, and we don't want that, either.
At least, we don't want stratification until the ISPs get their hands out of the cookie jar so that every home, family, and/or user gets a full domain name and the ISPs either provide mail service to that domain or provide the hooks for the domain owner (not renter) to run his or her own server.
And before that, we need better standard OSses. (That means we have to get Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle out of the way. IBM, too, since getting the others out of the way would leave them with no real competitors. Sun being bought by Oracle worries me.)
And we need better standards for e-mail, file sharing, web-site publishing, etc., standards that transparently support simple forms of encryption. Not perfect encryption, but good enough to eliminate casual eavesdropping just by putting an pwn3d bot's interface in promiscuous mode.
That's a lot of work, and we're hiding from it.
Until then, RFC 5233 addresses can help a lot, if used wisely.
How to use the RFC 5233 addresses wisely?
First, assume that your base address will soon be harvested. Thus, your base address of user@isp.example is essentially an alias for user+spam@isp.example . Pre-filter it that way.
Second, set up a suffix for bulk purposes, such as user+bulk_nnnnn@isp.example . "bulk" is okay, but you might prefer something a little more original to yourself, like "klub", or "hanbai". The serial number could also come before or in the middle, like bunnnnnlk, and you might want to use pseudo-random serial numbers instead of just cycling through from bu00000lk to bu99999lk.
Hmm. bu23645lk would be harder to filter than bulk23645 with the simple non-RE filters that are most common.
Third, set up suffixes for mail lists. user+list_nnnnn@isp.example or user+listname@isp@example .
By setting up suffixes, I mean that you outline a system of filter rules.
Fourth through n-1-th, plan out the patterns you'll use for friends, family, church, school, club (hmm. klub. woops.), etc.
All these can be white-list controlled, because you have an idea who and where mail addressed that way should be coming from. Two or three sets of filters for each system, one that white-lists known senders, one that diverts unknown senders to a "probably-junk" folder, and maybe one that (temporarily or permanently) black-holes known offender senders who have latched onto that group of suffixes.
Finally, you have a set of doorbell or knock addresses that you give out at business meetings and other parties: ackr_nnnnn@isp.example . (At this point, I assume that the use of the knock address is obvious?)
Now, I'm going to polish that up a bit and publish it on my blog.
Of course, with a little time, you can actually set up a domain of your own for cheap with a little help from a place like google.com and a place like dyndns.org. (Google will run your mail server for you if you have a web server and a domain name pointed to it. Of course, there's that thing about letting Google spool your mail, but it is possible.)
It really should be the way the internet works, but too many people during the boom days thought that setting up your own server was too hard. And too many ISPs were willing to make money catering to that attitude.
The ISPs don't want to help people get their own domains now because they think they'll lose a revenue stream.
That's the reason RFC 5233 addressing can be useful, if you do it right.
But running your own domain does work best, and would work even better if everyone did.
If you quit thinking it hurts, you will quit feeling pain.
Yes, they are stealing our bandwidth, including our attention bandwidth. That you have acquired a taste for punishment in no way remedies the clogging of my mailbox, nor the amount of time it takes me to confirm that my heuristics haven't taken any false positives.
That we can't stamp out spam, and that we should change our reading behavior are separate questions. But the technology isn't there yet.
The sub-address alternative helps, but we really need every user to have his or her own domain name to really make it feasible to filter/flag by variation from expected sender. Dynamic filtering isn't quite up to snuff yet, either.
I'm from Texas. That's a state in the United States of America, you know, that big country North of Mexico.
I've lived in Japan for 15 years, for what it's worth.
I'm also Mormon, if that helps you pin any labels on me.
Yeah, when I was in college some twenty or thirty years ago, most of the business sophomores were running around misquoting their teachers to the effect that the primary purpose of being in business was to make a profit.
Unfortunately, a lot of those sophomores graduated still sophomores.
The part of the lecture they conveniently forgot involved the methods of making a profit --
You profit society by providing a service, by adding to the value of society. Society returns the favor partly in monetary-type profits, to encourage you to continue providing your service, or to provide related services or variations on your service.
That sounds like the ceramic paved sidewalk out front of this apartment building.
Except for the slope part.
Cannot walk on that when it's wet, in any sort of shoes I can buy in Japan, without slipping. It's a lot like trying to walk on slippery ice.
Ice is one thing I don't care to walk barefoot on. A bed of nails is another.
To tell the truth, my knees and back would probably be in better shape if I hadn't gotten used to the partial buffering sneakers give. I've developed a really bad gait. I've tried to unlearn it, but I can't seem to find any sneakers with a good heal these days, and it's considered uncivilized to run around outside without shoes in Japan.
Oh. Tapeworms is another thing I don't want to walk on without shoes, although it's not as big a problem here in Japan as it was when they used to use unpasteurized fertilizer.
If you can walk and run comfortably in your shoes, and if your knees and back don't start to feel funny, the shoes are probably pretty good for your feet and style of walking and running.
You may want different shoes (or even slippers or thongs) for when you're sitting at your desk.
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The tighter the NDA, the more you should suspect that the underlying tech is not rocket science.
So to speak.
In this case, graphics is not that hard. Fast graphics, even, is not all that hard.
The cruft is the thing that is hard. Mechanisms to manage (emulate) the cruft are about the only thing non-obvious enough to get a good patent on, and much of that, if shown to the light of day, will be seen to be covered by prior art.
A big part of the reason INTEL got so excited about ray-tracing was that they were/are hoping there will be something in there that will be hard enough and innovative enough to get some solid IP protection on.
False hopes. (... besides IP being an oxymoron ...)
What I want to know is why we put up with proprietary in the CPU itself.
I mean, if we really want free and open, why aren't we pushing for a truly free and open (and maybe even elegant) CPU, instead of being satisfied with the pseudo-open x86 junk?
Well, ubuntu as a word does have a separate existence from the OS.
(It's mentioned on the ubuntu (OS) web site, and you'll go somewhere other than Canonical's web site if you try to go to http://www.ubuntu.org.
Yeah, I didn't want to get distracted from RFC5233 addresses, so I just kind of waved my hands at that part, but that's the way it ends up.
We don't want Verizon and their kind to balkanize the infrastructure for us, so we must balkanize our own.
Sub addresses give you a little more control over how your whitelists work. That's the whole point, I think.
In the case of your mom, you give her something like stonewallred+mom7734@yourisp.example. Then you filter that To: address with your mom's sender address for your "mom" folder. And, if you care to talk with your mom's friends sometimes, dump the senders that don't match in a "friendsofmom" folder instead of the black hole.
A little more flexibility.
Your own personal domain, of course, is even more flexible.
It's not just google's idea, it's a full-fledged RFC since a year and several months back.
Until ISPs at least start giving their users domains at a reasonable cost, it's a very useful tool. So any ISP stripping the sub-address is just being a pig and contributing to the mess.
Until we can get the ISPs to give each user a domain name for something reasonable (like, free, within the ISP's domain(s), per places like dyndns.com), this helps.
Besides, the horse is already out of the barn. This gives you a little more fine-grained control in your white-list filters.
You assume the spammers know the trick.
And arrange your filters on your address appropriately.
Tags that are part of the address they're sending to you at are one more tool in your toolbox of filters.
Of course spammers will just drop the sub address.
That's why you filtering all mail without a sub-address to a folder labeled "probable_spam", or "people_I_havenot_met_and_probably_donot_want_to", or "stinky".
If you didn't start that way, after the filters that already catch all the people who should be sending to that address and sort them out to other folders, filter everything else to the stinky folder. (Ergo, use a white list before the black list.)
Part of me wants to agree with you.
But another part of me tells me making opt-in the defualt by laws with teeth in them is not going to be a good thing.
Think about your sidewalk. It's there for a purpose.
Block off your sidewalk with a 3 meter wall and a moat full of crocodiles and you get no solicitors. But the firemen and the EMTs also have a problem getting in when you're home alone, passed out, with the house burning down around you.
The problem is that no-call lists are not No-solicitors signs. They're more like attractive nuisances. Train wrecks in progress.
No-solicitors signs can't be enforced on people who are not from your country until the Internet starts having laws, and we don't want the Internet to have laws.
Which means the ultimate solution is a stratified (balkanized) Internet, and we don't want that, either.
At least, we don't want stratification until the ISPs get their hands out of the cookie jar so that every home, family, and/or user gets a full domain name and the ISPs either provide mail service to that domain or provide the hooks for the domain owner (not renter) to run his or her own server.
And before that, we need better standard OSses. (That means we have to get Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle out of the way. IBM, too, since getting the others out of the way would leave them with no real competitors. Sun being bought by Oracle worries me.)
And we need better standards for e-mail, file sharing, web-site publishing, etc., standards that transparently support simple forms of encryption. Not perfect encryption, but good enough to eliminate casual eavesdropping just by putting an pwn3d bot's interface in promiscuous mode.
That's a lot of work, and we're hiding from it.
Until then, RFC 5233 addresses can help a lot, if used wisely.
How to use the RFC 5233 addresses wisely?
First, assume that your base address will soon be harvested. Thus, your base address of user@isp.example is essentially an alias for user+spam@isp.example . Pre-filter it that way.
Second, set up a suffix for bulk purposes, such as user+bulk_nnnnn@isp.example . "bulk" is okay, but you might prefer something a little more original to yourself, like "klub", or "hanbai". The serial number could also come before or in the middle, like bunnnnnlk, and you might want to use pseudo-random serial numbers instead of just cycling through from bu00000lk to bu99999lk.
Hmm. bu23645lk would be harder to filter than bulk23645 with the simple non-RE filters that are most common.
Third, set up suffixes for mail lists. user+list_nnnnn@isp.example or user+listname@isp@example .
By setting up suffixes, I mean that you outline a system of filter rules.
Fourth through n-1-th, plan out the patterns you'll use for friends, family, church, school, club (hmm. klub. woops.), etc.
All these can be white-list controlled, because you have an idea who and where mail addressed that way should be coming from. Two or three sets of filters for each system, one that white-lists known senders, one that diverts unknown senders to a "probably-junk" folder, and maybe one that (temporarily or permanently) black-holes known offender senders who have latched onto that group of suffixes.
Finally, you have a set of doorbell or knock addresses that you give out at business meetings and other parties: ackr_nnnnn@isp.example . (At this point, I assume that the use of the knock address is obvious?)
Now, I'm going to polish that up a bit and publish it on my blog.
Of course, with a little time, you can actually set up a domain of your own for cheap with a little help from a place like google.com and a place like dyndns.org. (Google will run your mail server for you if you have a web server and a domain name pointed to it. Of course, there's that thing about letting Google spool your mail, but it is possible.)
It really should be the way the internet works, but too many people during the boom days thought that setting up your own server was too hard. And too many ISPs were willing to make money catering to that attitude.
The ISPs don't want to help people get their own domains now because they think they'll lose a revenue stream.
That's the reason RFC 5233 addressing can be useful, if you do it right.
But running your own domain does work best, and would work even better if everyone did.
... which seems to me to be a good reason to buy AMD processors even if the shilly sills are right about "only $200 more to get [ponies]" bit.
You appear to be full of yourself. Is that how you wish others to think of you?
But, seriously, what do you understand of value?
As opposed to perceived value, for example.
that it hurts when I hit you.
If you quit thinking it hurts, you will quit feeling pain.
Yes, they are stealing our bandwidth, including our attention bandwidth. That you have acquired a taste for punishment in no way remedies the clogging of my mailbox, nor the amount of time it takes me to confirm that my heuristics haven't taken any false positives.
That we can't stamp out spam, and that we should change our reading behavior are separate questions. But the technology isn't there yet.
The sub-address alternative helps, but we really need every user to have his or her own domain name to really make it feasible to filter/flag by variation from expected sender. Dynamic filtering isn't quite up to snuff yet, either.
Nicely said.
Country?
I'm from Texas. That's a state in the United States of America, you know, that big country North of Mexico.
I've lived in Japan for 15 years, for what it's worth.
I'm also Mormon, if that helps you pin any labels on me.
Yeah, when I was in college some twenty or thirty years ago, most of the business sophomores were running around misquoting their teachers to the effect that the primary purpose of being in business was to make a profit.
Unfortunately, a lot of those sophomores graduated still sophomores.
The part of the lecture they conveniently forgot involved the methods of making a profit --
You profit society by providing a service, by adding to the value of society. Society returns the favor partly in monetary-type profits, to encourage you to continue providing your service, or to provide related services or variations on your service.
I suppose you think money is value, too?
I expect we only saw the tip of the iceberg yesterday.
Look for holes the size of VW bugs in i7.
Money doesn't buy you a pass to break mathematical laws.
stockholders are the reason any company exists?
And you sell for AIG and Madoff, I suppose?
AMD going belly up for so long now?
Companies have bad times. That is nowhere near the same as going belly up.
So, for all that you say you like AMD and maybe want to buy their stock, you come across as a shill.
True, but it doesn't mean that we prove anything by roasting the argument.
heh.
But, yeah, we would actually want to assume that God's perfection would appear sloppy to us.
To every thing, there is a season.
A time to be neat, a time to be sloppy.
(I'm sure that verse is in there somewhere.)
That sounds like the ceramic paved sidewalk out front of this apartment building.
Except for the slope part.
Cannot walk on that when it's wet, in any sort of shoes I can buy in Japan, without slipping. It's a lot like trying to walk on slippery ice.
Ice is one thing I don't care to walk barefoot on. A bed of nails is another.
To tell the truth, my knees and back would probably be in better shape if I hadn't gotten used to the partial buffering sneakers give. I've developed a really bad gait. I've tried to unlearn it, but I can't seem to find any sneakers with a good heal these days, and it's considered uncivilized to run around outside without shoes in Japan.
Oh. Tapeworms is another thing I don't want to walk on without shoes, although it's not as big a problem here in Japan as it was when they used to use unpasteurized fertilizer.
If you can walk and run comfortably in your shoes, and if your knees and back don't start to feel funny, the shoes are probably pretty good for your feet and style of walking and running.
You may want different shoes (or even slippers or thongs) for when you're sitting at your desk.
even on concrete, if you haven't been spoiled by shoes.
(I say, but I tend to wear shoes these days.)