This is really a surprise. I have no idea what Verizon is thinking. At least around here Verizon has, in my opinion, the worst service available (and, I'm qualified to make that assessment by the virtue of knowing them back when they called themselves Bell Atlantic/NYNEX mobile), and you'd expect them to oppose anything that would make it easier for their captive customers to flee to the dozens of available competitors.
First of all, they charge for their phones. AT&T, Sprint, and others give you a free phone with a service contract. Then, their phones are crap. Twice did my phone crap out after the warranty period expired. Each time they made me pay for a replacement phone, and locked me into another contract. On two other occasions the phone blew up while it was still under warranty. Each time, I had to wait two weeks to get the phone back, and neither time would they give me a loaner, so I was without service all that time.
Finally, last year I told them to screw off. Yes, I had to get a new number, oh well. My current contract expires in October, and I'm really looking forward to the Nov 24 date.
Just for laughs, last year I went into a local Verizon dealer. He tried to sell me a phone for sixty bucks, and a two-year contract. I told him the AT&T guy across the street is giving out free phones, with a one-year contract. The Verizon guy tried to tell me that you get what you're paying for. I just laughed, and went across the street.
I don't really know what Verizon is thinking. Maybe they think that their marketing can overcome their shitty service.
Certainly, I can. For the longest period of time, Groupwise has been one of the most obnoxious anonymous spam relays on the Internet. Anyone who was stupid enough to have an Internet-facing Groupwise was essentially running an anonymous spam relay.
I really can't bring myself up to trust anyone with anything concerning E-mail if they seem to be unable to grasp even the simple concept of a Received: header (not even mentioning such an advanced concept as a "closed mail relay").
The obvious question that I have, immediately after reading this story, is how exactly an average Joe-sixpack goes about obtaining a sufficient quantity of liquid nitrogen?
This whole thing sounds very interesting, but I don't think I can go into your average supermarket store and ask for some liquid nitrogen:
"Hello, I'd like a loaf of bread, Cheerios, and a gallon of your best liquid nitrogen. And, uh, a few grams of plutonium. I need it for my flux capacitor."
This is why last year I dumped Quickbooks (after using it for seven years) and switched to Peachtree.
Yes, Peachtree is far more convoluted and obfuscated that Quickbooks. Quickbooks (at least up until Quickbooks 99, the last version I used before dumping it) is definitely much easier to than Peachtree.
However, I'd rather stick to Peachtree, and my mind is at peace knowing that I'm not subject to privacy-invading spyware that phones home, and rest of Intuit's bullshit. Peachtree has a steep learning curve, but I'd rather put up with it than with Intuit.
I've been using TurboTax for eight years now. This "product activation" nonsense was a rude surprise for me this year. I certainly did my part in bitching, pissing, and moaning as loud as I could.
And, I might take this opportunity to mention that product activation wasn't the only thing that made doing last year's taxes with TurboTax a completely disgusting, and revolting experience. Almost every other screen was filled with Intuit's sales pitches for other unrelated garbage that I didn't need, or want. First, Turbotax haggled me to upgrade to a premium version of TurboTax. All they want is my credit card number to "unlock" the extra crap; there's nothing to download. Of course, after reviewing the list of additional "features" in the premium version it was pretty clear that no more than, perhaps, 1% of people could possibly use it.
Then, TurboTax haggled me to use Intuit's electronic filing service, against for a premium cost. Then, another sales pitch to upgrade to premium TurboTax features, Finally, TurboTax wanted me to pay for storing my tax return in an "electronic vault", for safekeeping (whatever the fuck it means).
This year, doing my taxes was a totally nauseating experience. Literally, my wallet had a bullseye painted right on it, in bright red colors, and Intuit tried everything they could to grab as much of it as they can. I JUST WANT TO DO MY TAXES AND LEAVE MY WALLET ALONE.
Intuit is hoping that this controversy is over. But I hope that it's not over. Even though Intuit is now furiously backpedaling and groveling that's not enough for me. I will follow through on my promise, and no matter how many times Intuit will now swear that their spyware/DRM is history, I will still use a competing product next year. And if I like it, I'll continue to use it. If not, I'll perhaps go back to Turbotax the following year.
I firmly believe that Intuit should not be allowed to get a get-out-of-jail-free card simply by issuing a bunch of warm-sounding press releases, full of vague and nebulous promises. They must still have to deal with the consequences of their decisions, and I'm hoping that others feel the same way too, and will still use some other competing tax preparation package next year.
This article does not really gives much of an overview on the history of spam wars. The article leaves out more stuff that it mentions. I couldn't find any references to:
* Evolutionary progress from your garden-variety, run-of-the mill carpetbombing from the sender's ISP to hijacking of external mail relays, leading to most mail relays now being closed; to repeated gang-banging of every mail relay on the Internet, in the late '90s, that was running the completely fucked up Sun sendmail 8.6, which fails to record the sender's identity, turning it into a somewhat efficient anonymous spam forwarding service; to direct-from-dialup spamware that doesn't need mail relays and delivers directly to the recipients' mail servers; to spamware that scans and hijacks open proxies, and spam-forwarding trojan zombies that take over and infest Windows-based clients.
* The rise, fall, and bankruptcy of Apex Global Information Systems, the first commercial attempt to make a business model out of providing dedicated spam connectivity; with Cyberpromo, Nancynet, Marynet, and Sallynet spam factories as their charter "customers".
* The rise and fall of MAPS. The article makes out MAPS as the leading champions, but those in the know sadly know that MAPS is now a shadow of its former self.
* The rise and fall of ORBS, and a gaggle of similar open relay blacklists that sprouted up to supplement and replace.
* The rise, and hopefully the fall, of the trend where large backbones quietly agree to accept premium connectivity and hosting fees, in exchange for ignoring complaints about their spamming parasites, all the while flouting their supposed "anti-spam" Acceptable Usage Policies/Terms Of Service (documentation and proof available per request).
* The rise of the trend where spam farms are set up in third world countries, whose hosts completely ignore spam complaints and are generally better resistent to spam blacklists, since they don't send much mail to the US.
* The rise of SPEWS, as a partial response for a need for a successor to MAPS, and a surprising accept of SPEWS, which has an aggressive blacklisting policies, which flew in the face of conventional thinking that network providers will tremble with fear, run to hide in the nearest closet, and become completely paralized at a mere prospect of rejecting a single non-junk message.
There's plenty more subject matter for anyone who really wants to provide an overview of spam wars. This article seems a bit skimpy on the facts...
This has already happened, for all practical matters. Linux vendors are maintaining their own kernel trees, essentially merging against the Linus tree on a regular basis, and carrying forward their own changes.
Red Hat, for example, is running off Alan Cox's tree. Nobody's going to admit that they've forked the kernel, but for all practical matters that's the story today.
And, for a good reason. The stock kernel is not usable for anything except basic, lightweight, hacking. As soon as you start putting it to regular use, all sorts of crap starts falling out.
I'd like to see anyone claim that they run off a stock Linus kernel, and have the box fully loaded with Gnome or KDE, and use it heavily for development tasks, or other intensive workloads. Or, god forbid, use it as a heavy-duty server for mail, web, or news.
If I were to guess, several months ago, what fundamental OSS project would fork next, I would've picked XFree86. The signs were all there. Slow pace of development. Closed inner development core. Bugs left unfixed.
I'm about to upgrade my machines. The new release comes with XFree86 4.3.0. I'm already aware of some stuff that works in 4.2 but is broken in 4.3. There was no response to a couple of bug reports that I sent in last year, so it's not a surprise to me.
I'm waiting the obvious forthcomming trolling, from the peanut gallery, about the fork, and how its going to be fodder for the OSS lobby. I do not find it a problem. I see it as a natural evolution of things. It's just like 4-5 years ago, when RMS was dragging his feet on gcc development, egcs got forked, and eventually became the new gcc. Right now, gcc 3.2 is a damn good compiler, and I doubt that we'd have it, without that fork.
This has to be a troll. It's one thing having dupes posted by different editors, it's quite something else when you have a dupe posted by the same editor.
The last dupe was also Taco's. Either this is a marvelous troll, or Rusty's right.
A) Ballmer should be booking a flight to MA right about now?
B) So I understand that the state estimates that they will have to pay $300 per new PC, with no cost for Linux? Who wants to be that Ballmer will now offer to sell the state XP licenses for fifty bucks a pop.
Now what's going to happen next is going to be intereting. Microsoft will argue that fifty bucks a pop would still be cheaper than the cost of retraining their orkers.
That's absolutely true. The only realistic way I see for Linux to be a viable option here would be either if:
A) The state intends to load Linux on their existing, aging PCs, thus eliminating the hardware costs alltogether, but were this true the story would've reflected that
B) The state was so scrapped for cash that even the fifty bucks per XP is too much, and they do not consider retraining as a budget line item
C) The state is smart enough to realize the monetary value of vendor lock-in. The greatest savnigs the state will realize with the Linux solution, of course, is the elimination of vendor lock-in. That's something that Microsoft will desperately try to avoid mentioning, but their popular trick is to first act as if they're going to give away copies of XP at rock-bottom price, only forgeting to emphasize that the "fire sale" is only for the first two or three years of the annual XP subscription license, and after the honeymoon is over, you bend over, grab your ankles, and start shitting out XP license fees...
Reread the original proposal. The original proposal states because the tickets are so insanely expensive to calculate, the sender keeps a constant pool of precomputed tickets, on standby.
That automatically precludes including any recipient-specific information, because it would involve expensive computation in order to send each message, which is precisely the intended means for blocking mass-mailings.
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
...However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day
... you'll just use a million copies of the same ticket.
While reading the story, and looking at the photo which shows a bunch of fifth graders sitting behinds KDE workstations, with a huge Tux poster in the background, I had another idea how our government can save money.
As we all know, nuclear tests have been banned for quite some time now. And government research labs all over the fruited plain spend enormous amounts of money on supercomputers that simulate nuclear explosions.
Well, it should be much cheaper just to set up a bunch of cheap earthquake monitors in the northwest US; have someone print that picture from the story; mail it to Steve Ballmer's house; and carefully watch the monitors for the next couple of days.
Seriously, if that article ever makes its way over to Redmond HQ, it's not going to get a warm reception. Given what I've observed about Microsoft's mentality, just the photo itself is good enough for a few ulcers. Seriously speaking, this is not a cheap yuck. That small picture clearly shows the biggest threat to the monopoly that Microsoft has spent the last decade building up. Stuff like this has to be a pepto-bismol moment for the MS bigwigs that read it.
Ads for the syndicated Futurama on TOON have been plastered on the side of NYC buses for a couple of weeks now. Complete with Bender's signature invitation.
Next time I see a new bus ad, I think I'll submit it as a story; and get a head start on all these fancy-shmancy web sites, who are REALLY behind the times...
The sob story in the linked article is about someone who's supposed to be a "product marketing director." That doesn't sound like a techie to me.
Certainly things are a bit tough out there, no doubt about that. Still, I think that if anyone's in a tight spot right now their time is better spent in hitting the classifieds and the help-wanted ads, instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves.
I've been doing contract programming for, oh, about ten years now. A little less than a year ago I went back "on the beach." Rather than wringing my hands out, and sharing my sad life's story to anyone who'd care to listen, I diligently looked for work, while at the same time I was studying up and brushing up my skills. I literally went to work each day: got up, went through all the job websites to see what came up overnight, then hitting the man pages, and studying until breaking for lunch. After lunch, another go at the job boards, to see what the pimps uploaded in the morning, then going back to the books until the significant-other finished work and came home.
Because of that, I picked up a number of good skills before I found a new gig, in early fall; and the stuff that I learned by then is precisely why my current contract just got renewed this week.
This may not be what people might want to hear, but if you have a good head on your shoulders, buck up, hang on, and don't settle for some cheap job that pays a half of what it should be paying. There's no doubt that companies these days are taking advantage of the soft economy, and using that to get geeks for pennies. I've witnessed this first hand, for almost a year now.
See here: folks need to understand that companies won't stop abusing geeks as long as the geeks permit themselves to be abused. Fsck them. There were plenty of low paying gigs that I could've taken earlier this summer. But I waited until I found a reasonable gig, at a reasonable pay. And if I didn't? If I took the low-paying jobs that all the headhunters/pimps were calling me about, then now, at the end of the year, I'd end up with the same pile of cash, but instead of picking up new skills over the summer, I would've wasted it in another windowlesss office, for toiling away for chump chnage.
Of course, a lot of advanced planning is required before you can afford to be on the beach for a prolonged period of time, without much of a lifestyle change. You have to be thinking ahead all the time; if when life was good you should still live a modest lifestyle, and hoard as much cash as you can, instead of blowing it away, living high on the hog. But that's another rant...
For more of the same, here's a great web site about abandoned stations in the New York City subway system, including a just gorgeous station directly underneath City Hall that sadly cannot be returned to service due to some minor technical issues (in addition to it being considered a security risk in this day and age).
You have got to be kidding me. "DAO and VBX"?? Is that what you consider to be the full spectrum of Windows-based development?
No, it was merely an advanced concept that's commonly called an "example". Name me any Windows API, library, or technology that was current five years ago, and is current today. The same thing can be said about _each and every_ Windows API.
Every Windows API/library that exists today, or ever existed in the past, comes complete with a ticking clock. When the alarm goes off, everything becomes obsolete, and all the time you've spent learning it is gone completely to waste.
First of all, cOM is on it's way out. It is being replaced by the new remoting and web services architecture.
I've yet to see anyone address this point, which must be made. I'm not sure what that "remoting and web service architecture" is. I don't know. But I damn know one thing: in three or four years Microsoft will obsolete that technology, and it will be replaced with something else.
Microsoft receives significant revenue from training armies of MCSE, using endless arrays of certifications and development programs. And, as such, they have a vested interest in keeping the revenue alive with what I call a "steady technology churn." They can't just pick an API, and go with it for the long term future. They need to force all the MCSEs back into the training camps, in order to make sure that their paper certifications do not expire.
I dabbled with some Windows programming, many years ago. You wanna know one thing? Nothing that I've learned back then is worth today any more than a hair on my ass. VBX controls, DAOs, all of that has long been made obsolete. I've done _nix programming for quite sometime before trying the Windows waters, but I quickly figured out what was going on: that the primary occupation of a Windows developer is to provide revenue to Microsoft, in terms of continuing MSDN subscriptions, fees for an endless stream of documentation for Application Interface Of The Year.
"Developers, developers, developers", indeed...
So I quickly ended that short term experiment, and went back to hacking _nix. The thing about _nix -- which is 180 degrees opposite of Windows programming -- is that the skills and the knowledge that you've learned ten or fifteen years ago is still used, and is as valid today as it was back then. If you go and learn today's crop of Windows APIs, in just a couple of years all the time you've spent today would be a complete and a total waste of time, because nothing that you've learned now is relevant any more, it's been obsoleted.
On the other hand, things like file descriptors, pipes, sockets, and other basic POSIX APIs will still be just as useful ten years from now as they are today, and as they were ten years ago. That is not to say that you won't learn anything new in the mean time. On the contrary, I have learned many great _nix technologies over the years, and I'm sure that I'll keep learning more exciting stuff in the years to come.
The key difference is that everything that I will learn will only complement, enrich, and add to my existing, growing base of knowledge. Unlike with Windows, where its only purpose would be to replace stuff that's been obsoleted by Microsoft. As a Windows programmer, I'm in for a lifetime's worth of a struggle to keep churning through one API after another, one Microsoft language, or library, or interface API after another, all while being milked by Microsoft for the training and development fees in the mean time. As a _nix programmer, I'm in for a lifetime of enrichment and expansion of my technical skills and knowledge.
Well, there's always Amaya, W3C's HTML editor/browser. I think they have a Win32 build.
Amaya's been around for a long time, but not many people know about it, which is a real shame. It's a nice HTML editor, and produces very clean, HTML 4.0 compliant code. It supports CSS, and many other related web technologies. Check it out.
Although this is certainly welcome news, it shouldn't be interpreted to mean that spam will dry up in the near future.
Read the story. It took four years to get this far. At four-five years a pop per spammer, how long would you care it'll take to go after all of 'em?
I still believe that the real solution is a combination of technical and social approaches, with litigation being used only for the worst offenders, like Heckel. It's been my experience that carefully-tuned mail filters are very succesful in blocking between 60-75% of the junk. If you don't mind an occasional false positive, you can get even better than that. Adding up what I find in/var/log/maillog, and my mailbox, my filters block about 95% of the crap that's flung my way.
What's left over can be kept in check by agressively going after the network providers who are providing Internet connectivity to these spamming parasites. That's the social approach. If you've been complaining to large networks you've probably figured out for yourself that many large networks consider spam complaints to be nothing other than requests to shut down a paying customer. A paying customer who often generated lucrative "bulk-friendly" hosting fees.
Agressive spam blacklists, like SPEWS have actually gotten some pretty good results in forcing these rogue networks to get their shit together, by massively blacklisting large portions of spam-hosting networks until such time that they decide to get rid of their spamming vermin. I think that the spam problem will finally get handled when more and more people will accept the notion that sometimes it is necessary to temporarily throw the baby out with the bathwater, and blackball an entire network until they no longer refuse to do anything about their spamming abusers.
Implementing guest accounts is real easy, but requires just a little bit of custom programming. The trick is to have a separate guest account for each terminal in the lab, and a custom login script that logs in to the guest account that's assigned to the login tty port.
After logging out, the script wipes out the account's home directory, and restores the default home directory contents from a skeleton model, somewhere. After logging in they can mess things up as much as they want. After logging out the account gets wiped out, and restored to a default state.
This was me about five months ago, when I wanted to learn Java myself. I went to the bookstore, and bought a fat java book; then I read it.
Later, I ended up browsing the Java API documentation on java.sun.com, then I found out that the entire documentation kit can be downloaded; which I did and I now have the entire Java API in/usr/share/doc.
I'm quite happy with the results. When I have some free time, I spend it playing with the java app that I wrote, which I use to keep track of my checkbook (no need for quicken); Swing, JDBC (Postgres), RMI, and the new SSL/TLS classes in Java 1.4. All of the documentation one can possibly need can be grabbed from java.sun.com.
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This is really a surprise. I have no idea what Verizon is thinking. At least around here Verizon has, in my opinion, the worst service available (and, I'm qualified to make that assessment by the virtue of knowing them back when they called themselves Bell Atlantic/NYNEX mobile), and you'd expect them to oppose anything that would make it easier for their captive customers to flee to the dozens of available competitors.
First of all, they charge for their phones. AT&T, Sprint, and others give you a free phone with a service contract. Then, their phones are crap. Twice did my phone crap out after the warranty period expired. Each time they made me pay for a replacement phone, and locked me into another contract. On two other occasions the phone blew up while it was still under warranty. Each time, I had to wait two weeks to get the phone back, and neither time would they give me a loaner, so I was without service all that time.
Finally, last year I told them to screw off. Yes, I had to get a new number, oh well. My current contract expires in October, and I'm really looking forward to the Nov 24 date.
Just for laughs, last year I went into a local Verizon dealer. He tried to sell me a phone for sixty bucks, and a two-year contract. I told him the AT&T guy across the street is giving out free phones, with a one-year contract. The Verizon guy tried to tell me that you get what you're paying for. I just laughed, and went across the street.
I don't really know what Verizon is thinking. Maybe they think that their marketing can overcome their shitty service.
Certainly, I can. For the longest period of time, Groupwise has been one of the most obnoxious anonymous spam relays on the Internet. Anyone who was stupid enough to have an Internet-facing Groupwise was essentially running an anonymous spam relay.
I really can't bring myself up to trust anyone with anything concerning E-mail if they seem to be unable to grasp even the simple concept of a Received: header (not even mentioning such an advanced concept as a "closed mail relay").
The obvious question that I have, immediately after reading this story, is how exactly an average Joe-sixpack goes about obtaining a sufficient quantity of liquid nitrogen?
This whole thing sounds very interesting, but I don't think I can go into your average supermarket store and ask for some liquid nitrogen:
"Hello, I'd like a loaf of bread, Cheerios, and a gallon of your best liquid nitrogen. And, uh, a few grams of plutonium. I need it for my flux capacitor."
Does the simulator keep track of how fast the virtual airline is burning up cash, and how long before they go bankrupt?
And, of course, no airplane cockpit is complete, these days, without a Breathalyzer.
This is why last year I dumped Quickbooks (after using it for seven years) and switched to Peachtree.
Yes, Peachtree is far more convoluted and obfuscated that Quickbooks. Quickbooks (at least up until Quickbooks 99, the last version I used before dumping it) is definitely much easier to than Peachtree.
However, I'd rather stick to Peachtree, and my mind is at peace knowing that I'm not subject to privacy-invading spyware that phones home, and rest of Intuit's bullshit. Peachtree has a steep learning curve, but I'd rather put up with it than with Intuit.
I've been using TurboTax for eight years now. This "product activation" nonsense was a rude surprise for me this year. I certainly did my part in bitching, pissing, and moaning as loud as I could.
And, I might take this opportunity to mention that product activation wasn't the only thing that made doing last year's taxes with TurboTax a completely disgusting, and revolting experience. Almost every other screen was filled with Intuit's sales pitches for other unrelated garbage that I didn't need, or want. First, Turbotax haggled me to upgrade to a premium version of TurboTax. All they want is my credit card number to "unlock" the extra crap; there's nothing to download. Of course, after reviewing the list of additional "features" in the premium version it was pretty clear that no more than, perhaps, 1% of people could possibly use it.
Then, TurboTax haggled me to use Intuit's electronic filing service, against for a premium cost. Then, another sales pitch to upgrade to premium TurboTax features, Finally, TurboTax wanted me to pay for storing my tax return in an "electronic vault", for safekeeping (whatever the fuck it means).
This year, doing my taxes was a totally nauseating experience. Literally, my wallet had a bullseye painted right on it, in bright red colors, and Intuit tried everything they could to grab as much of it as they can. I JUST WANT TO DO MY TAXES AND LEAVE MY WALLET ALONE.
Intuit is hoping that this controversy is over. But I hope that it's not over. Even though Intuit is now furiously backpedaling and groveling that's not enough for me. I will follow through on my promise, and no matter how many times Intuit will now swear that their spyware/DRM is history, I will still use a competing product next year. And if I like it, I'll continue to use it. If not, I'll perhaps go back to Turbotax the following year.
I firmly believe that Intuit should not be allowed to get a get-out-of-jail-free card simply by issuing a bunch of warm-sounding press releases, full of vague and nebulous promises. They must still have to deal with the consequences of their decisions, and I'm hoping that others feel the same way too, and will still use some other competing tax preparation package next year.
This article does not really gives much of an overview on the history of spam wars. The article leaves out more stuff that it mentions. I couldn't find any references to:
* Evolutionary progress from your garden-variety, run-of-the mill carpetbombing from the sender's ISP to hijacking of external mail relays, leading to most mail relays now being closed; to repeated gang-banging of every mail relay on the Internet, in the late '90s, that was running the completely fucked up Sun sendmail 8.6, which fails to record the sender's identity, turning it into a somewhat efficient anonymous spam forwarding service; to direct-from-dialup spamware that doesn't need mail relays and delivers directly to the recipients' mail servers; to spamware that scans and hijacks open proxies, and spam-forwarding trojan zombies that take over and infest Windows-based clients.
* The rise, fall, and bankruptcy of Apex Global Information Systems, the first commercial attempt to make a business model out of providing dedicated spam connectivity; with Cyberpromo, Nancynet, Marynet, and Sallynet spam factories as their charter "customers".
* The rise and fall of MAPS. The article makes out MAPS as the leading champions, but those in the know sadly know that MAPS is now a shadow of its former self.
* The rise and fall of ORBS, and a gaggle of similar open relay blacklists that sprouted up to supplement and replace.
* The rise, and hopefully the fall, of the trend where large backbones quietly agree to accept premium connectivity and hosting fees, in exchange for ignoring complaints about their spamming parasites, all the while flouting their supposed "anti-spam" Acceptable Usage Policies/Terms Of Service (documentation and proof available per request).
* The rise of the trend where spam farms are set up in third world countries, whose hosts completely ignore spam complaints and are generally better resistent to spam blacklists, since they don't send much mail to the US.
* The rise of SPEWS, as a partial response for a need for a successor to MAPS, and a surprising accept of SPEWS, which has an aggressive blacklisting policies, which flew in the face of conventional thinking that network providers will tremble with fear, run to hide in the nearest closet, and become completely paralized at a mere prospect of rejecting a single non-junk message.
There's plenty more subject matter for anyone who really wants to provide an overview of spam wars. This article seems a bit skimpy on the facts...
This has already happened, for all practical matters. Linux vendors are maintaining their own kernel trees, essentially merging against the Linus tree on a regular basis, and carrying forward their own changes.
Red Hat, for example, is running off Alan Cox's tree. Nobody's going to admit that they've forked the kernel, but for all practical matters that's the story today.
And, for a good reason. The stock kernel is not usable for anything except basic, lightweight, hacking. As soon as you start putting it to regular use, all sorts of crap starts falling out.
I'd like to see anyone claim that they run off a stock Linus kernel, and have the box fully loaded with Gnome or KDE, and use it heavily for development tasks, or other intensive workloads. Or, god forbid, use it as a heavy-duty server for mail, web, or news.
If I were to guess, several months ago, what fundamental OSS project would fork next, I would've picked XFree86. The signs were all there. Slow pace of development. Closed inner development core. Bugs left unfixed.
I'm about to upgrade my machines. The new release comes with XFree86 4.3.0. I'm already aware of some stuff that works in 4.2 but is broken in 4.3. There was no response to a couple of bug reports that I sent in last year, so it's not a surprise to me.
I'm waiting the obvious forthcomming trolling, from the peanut gallery, about the fork, and how its going to be fodder for the OSS lobby. I do not find it a problem. I see it as a natural evolution of things. It's just like 4-5 years ago, when RMS was dragging his feet on gcc development, egcs got forked, and eventually became the new gcc. Right now, gcc 3.2 is a damn good compiler, and I doubt that we'd have it, without that fork.
This has to be a troll. It's one thing having dupes posted by different editors, it's quite something else when you have a dupe posted by the same editor.
The last dupe was also Taco's. Either this is a marvelous troll, or Rusty's right.
A) Ballmer should be booking a flight to MA right about now?
B) So I understand that the state estimates that they will have to pay $300 per new PC, with no cost for Linux? Who wants to be that Ballmer will now offer to sell the state XP licenses for fifty bucks a pop.
Now what's going to happen next is going to be intereting. Microsoft will argue that fifty bucks a pop would still be cheaper than the cost of retraining their orkers.
That's absolutely true. The only realistic way I see for Linux to be a viable option here would be either if:
A) The state intends to load Linux on their existing, aging PCs, thus eliminating the hardware costs alltogether, but were this true the story would've reflected that
B) The state was so scrapped for cash that even the fifty bucks per XP is too much, and they do not consider retraining as a budget line item
C) The state is smart enough to realize the monetary value of vendor lock-in. The greatest savnigs the state will realize with the Linux solution, of course, is the elimination of vendor lock-in. That's something that Microsoft will desperately try to avoid mentioning, but their popular trick is to first act as if they're going to give away copies of XP at rock-bottom price, only forgeting to emphasize that the "fire sale" is only for the first two or three years of the annual XP subscription license, and after the honeymoon is over, you bend over, grab your ankles, and start shitting out XP license fees...
Reread the original proposal. The original proposal states because the tickets are so insanely expensive to calculate, the sender keeps a constant pool of precomputed tickets, on standby.
That automatically precludes including any recipient-specific information, because it would involve expensive computation in order to send each message, which is precisely the intended means for blocking mass-mailings.
Now, who's clueless?
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
...However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day
... you'll just use a million copies of the same ticket.
While reading the story, and looking at the photo which shows a bunch of fifth graders sitting behinds KDE workstations, with a huge Tux poster in the background, I had another idea how our government can save money.
As we all know, nuclear tests have been banned for quite some time now. And government research labs all over the fruited plain spend enormous amounts of money on supercomputers that simulate nuclear explosions.
Well, it should be much cheaper just to set up a bunch of cheap earthquake monitors in the northwest US; have someone print that picture from the story; mail it to Steve Ballmer's house; and carefully watch the monitors for the next couple of days.
Seriously, if that article ever makes its way over to Redmond HQ, it's not going to get a warm reception. Given what I've observed about Microsoft's mentality, just the photo itself is good enough for a few ulcers. Seriously speaking, this is not a cheap yuck. That small picture clearly shows the biggest threat to the monopoly that Microsoft has spent the last decade building up. Stuff like this has to be a pepto-bismol moment for the MS bigwigs that read it.
Ads for the syndicated Futurama on TOON have been plastered on the side of NYC buses for a couple of weeks now. Complete with Bender's signature invitation.
Next time I see a new bus ad, I think I'll submit it as a story; and get a head start on all these fancy-shmancy web sites, who are REALLY behind the times...
The sob story in the linked article is about someone who's supposed to be a "product marketing director." That doesn't sound like a techie to me.
Certainly things are a bit tough out there, no doubt about that. Still, I think that if anyone's in a tight spot right now their time is better spent in hitting the classifieds and the help-wanted ads, instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves.
I've been doing contract programming for, oh, about ten years now. A little less than a year ago I went back "on the beach." Rather than wringing my hands out, and sharing my sad life's story to anyone who'd care to listen, I diligently looked for work, while at the same time I was studying up and brushing up my skills. I literally went to work each day: got up, went through all the job websites to see what came up overnight, then hitting the man pages, and studying until breaking for lunch. After lunch, another go at the job boards, to see what the pimps uploaded in the morning, then going back to the books until the significant-other finished work and came home.
Because of that, I picked up a number of good skills before I found a new gig, in early fall; and the stuff that I learned by then is precisely why my current contract just got renewed this week.
This may not be what people might want to hear, but if you have a good head on your shoulders, buck up, hang on, and don't settle for some cheap job that pays a half of what it should be paying. There's no doubt that companies these days are taking advantage of the soft economy, and using that to get geeks for pennies. I've witnessed this first hand, for almost a year now.
See here: folks need to understand that companies won't stop abusing geeks as long as the geeks permit themselves to be abused. Fsck them. There were plenty of low paying gigs that I could've taken earlier this summer. But I waited until I found a reasonable gig, at a reasonable pay. And if I didn't? If I took the low-paying jobs that all the headhunters/pimps were calling me about, then now, at the end of the year, I'd end up with the same pile of cash, but instead of picking up new skills over the summer, I would've wasted it in another windowlesss office, for toiling away for chump chnage.
Of course, a lot of advanced planning is required before you can afford to be on the beach for a prolonged period of time, without much of a lifestyle change. You have to be thinking ahead all the time; if when life was good you should still live a modest lifestyle, and hoard as much cash as you can, instead of blowing it away, living high on the hog. But that's another rant...
For more of the same, here's a great web site about abandoned stations in the New York City subway system, including a just gorgeous station directly underneath City Hall that sadly cannot be returned to service due to some minor technical issues (in addition to it being considered a security risk in this day and age).
Please name *one* core Windows API that was in Windows 95 and is not supported in Windows XP. Please, just one.
Sure: VBX. Kindly help me figure out how to use the current version of Visual Studio to design VBX controls.
You have got to be kidding me. "DAO and VBX"?? Is that what you consider to be the full spectrum of Windows-based development?
No, it was merely an advanced concept that's commonly called an "example". Name me any Windows API, library, or technology that was current five years ago, and is current today. The same thing can be said about _each and every_ Windows API.
Every Windows API/library that exists today, or ever existed in the past, comes complete with a ticking clock. When the alarm goes off, everything becomes obsolete, and all the time you've spent learning it is gone completely to waste.
I've yet to see anyone address this point, which must be made. I'm not sure what that "remoting and web service architecture" is. I don't know. But I damn know one thing: in three or four years Microsoft will obsolete that technology, and it will be replaced with something else.
Microsoft receives significant revenue from training armies of MCSE, using endless arrays of certifications and development programs. And, as such, they have a vested interest in keeping the revenue alive with what I call a "steady technology churn." They can't just pick an API, and go with it for the long term future. They need to force all the MCSEs back into the training camps, in order to make sure that their paper certifications do not expire.
I dabbled with some Windows programming, many years ago. You wanna know one thing? Nothing that I've learned back then is worth today any more than a hair on my ass. VBX controls, DAOs, all of that has long been made obsolete. I've done _nix programming for quite sometime before trying the Windows waters, but I quickly figured out what was going on: that the primary occupation of a Windows developer is to provide revenue to Microsoft, in terms of continuing MSDN subscriptions, fees for an endless stream of documentation for Application Interface Of The Year.
"Developers, developers, developers", indeed...
So I quickly ended that short term experiment, and went back to hacking _nix. The thing about _nix -- which is 180 degrees opposite of Windows programming -- is that the skills and the knowledge that you've learned ten or fifteen years ago is still used, and is as valid today as it was back then. If you go and learn today's crop of Windows APIs, in just a couple of years all the time you've spent today would be a complete and a total waste of time, because nothing that you've learned now is relevant any more, it's been obsoleted.
On the other hand, things like file descriptors, pipes, sockets, and other basic POSIX APIs will still be just as useful ten years from now as they are today, and as they were ten years ago. That is not to say that you won't learn anything new in the mean time. On the contrary, I have learned many great _nix technologies over the years, and I'm sure that I'll keep learning more exciting stuff in the years to come.
The key difference is that everything that I will learn will only complement, enrich, and add to my existing, growing base of knowledge. Unlike with Windows, where its only purpose would be to replace stuff that's been obsoleted by Microsoft. As a Windows programmer, I'm in for a lifetime's worth of a struggle to keep churning through one API after another, one Microsoft language, or library, or interface API after another, all while being milked by Microsoft for the training and development fees in the mean time. As a _nix programmer, I'm in for a lifetime of enrichment and expansion of my technical skills and knowledge.
Well, there's always Amaya, W3C's HTML editor/browser. I think they have a Win32 build.
Amaya's been around for a long time, but not many people know about it, which is a real shame. It's a nice HTML editor, and produces very clean, HTML 4.0 compliant code. It supports CSS, and many other related web technologies. Check it out.
Although this is certainly welcome news, it shouldn't be interpreted to mean that spam will dry up in the near future.
/var/log/maillog, and my mailbox, my filters block about 95% of the crap that's flung my way.
Read the story. It took four years to get this far. At four-five years a pop per spammer, how long would you care it'll take to go after all of 'em?
I still believe that the real solution is a combination of technical and social approaches, with litigation being used only for the worst offenders, like Heckel. It's been my experience that carefully-tuned mail filters are very succesful in blocking between 60-75% of the junk. If you don't mind an occasional false positive, you can get even better than that. Adding up what I find in
What's left over can be kept in check by agressively going after the network providers who are providing Internet connectivity to these spamming parasites. That's the social approach. If you've been complaining to large networks you've probably figured out for yourself that many large networks consider spam complaints to be nothing other than requests to shut down a paying customer. A paying customer who often generated lucrative "bulk-friendly" hosting fees.
Agressive spam blacklists, like SPEWS have actually gotten some pretty good results in forcing these rogue networks to get their shit together, by massively blacklisting large portions of spam-hosting networks until such time that they decide to get rid of their spamming vermin. I think that the spam problem will finally get handled when more and more people will accept the notion that sometimes it is necessary to temporarily throw the baby out with the bathwater, and blackball an entire network until they no longer refuse to do anything about their spamming abusers.
Implementing guest accounts is real easy, but requires just a little bit of custom programming. The trick is to have a separate guest account for each terminal in the lab, and a custom login script that logs in to the guest account that's assigned to the login tty port.
After logging out, the script wipes out the account's home directory, and restores the default home directory contents from a skeleton model, somewhere. After logging in they can mess things up as much as they want. After logging out the account gets wiped out, and restored to a default state.
You could redo the old Star Trek series," mused Bonchune. "The original mission was only three years. You could do two more entirely in CG."
Uh, oh...
Star Trek, The X Generation
"Bones, this latte is too cold"
"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a Starbucks"
This was me about five months ago, when I wanted to learn Java myself. I went to the bookstore, and bought a fat java book; then I read it.
/usr/share/doc.
Later, I ended up browsing the Java API documentation on java.sun.com, then I found out that the entire documentation kit can be downloaded; which I did and I now have the entire Java API in
I'm quite happy with the results. When I have some free time, I spend it playing with the java app that I wrote, which I use to keep track of my checkbook (no need for quicken); Swing, JDBC (Postgres), RMI, and the new SSL/TLS classes in Java 1.4. All of the documentation one can possibly need can be grabbed from java.sun.com.