wouldn't it make sense to initially plan the mission for as long as the rovers remain operational, however long that may be?
No, because then the budget would have been too high and the project never would have been funded in the first place. The MER team needed to propose a budget to NASA that was reasonable, so they chose a mission length that was long enough to reach their science goals - 3 months - and then did their best to engineer rovers that could last 2-3 times as long if they're lucky.
None of those are fundamental problems with open-source software at all. My open-source software (Audacity) may not be perfect, but it doesn't suffer from most of those problems, and it's very popular (millions of downloads). Mozilla, especially FireFox, doesn't have those problems. There are hundreds of other smaller, special-purpose open-source programs that are easy to install, easy to use, and have great documentation.
So clearly it's quite possible to create open-source software with all of those qualities.
But anyone can make open-source software, and open-source software can survive and be moderately successful without any of these traits. This is a good thing. Unfortunately it means that for every stable, easy-to-use project on Sourceforge, there are a thousand unpolished or impossible to use programs, and that's not counting things that are just plain unfinished or in beta-testing. People need to realize that:
1. Open-source software can be just as good (and better), easy to install, easy to use, well-documented, stable, and supported as any commercial software. It requires a lot of commitment from many people to bring it to this level, but when there's enough demand, and a usually a few generous sponsors, it's quite possible.
2. Most open-source software is not at this level. That's okay, nobody is forcing you to use it. You can either contribute (either help improve it or document it yourself, or pay someone else to do it) or you can find another solution.
Numerical Python is great, but not necessarily suitable for this task. It's good when you're performing the same operation on the items of a vectors. When the vectors are long enough it indeed approaches the performance of C code. But in ray tracing every photon can take a different route depending on what it hits. I'm not so sure Numpy would perform nearly as well in this case.
You're totally right of course that it does require you vectorize your code. I'm not convinced that you couldn't vectorize raytracing, though. Start with a vector of a million photons. Do some vectorized calculations to determine which object all of them strike first. Suppose a hundred thousand strike the first object - then run the next calculation on that subset, and so on. Heck, I've found that rewriting C code to work this way is often faster because it's cache-efficient.
People are already cracking jokes about how the fact that it's in Java will mean that it will run a lot slower than it could. While I love to pick on Java as much as the next person, I am curious how much it actually makes a difference for raytracing - does anyone know? My experience with numerically-intensive algorithms is that Java is 2-4x slower than C. You can get it within 2x of the speed of C if you ignore object-oriented programming and you're really good at Java optimization, but that's it. And it will run much slower on some architecetures because Java guarantees certain floating-point operation semantics at the expense of speed.
If I were writing a new numerically-intensive program from scratch that I wanted to use for a cross-platform distributed computing project, I'd probably do it in Numerical Python (NumPy) - my experience has been that it can be within a factor of 2-3 of the speed of C, but it's much more concise, requiring half as many lines of code as Java or C to do the same thing. And these days Python is just as cross-platform as Java - it definitely runs great on Mac, Windows, and Unix.
I'm new to SuSE. I just purchased SuSE 9.0 Pro and I'm very happy with it. It looks like the upgrade to 9.1 costs $60 - is that right? I was happy to pay for 9.0 Pro, but I don't want to spend another $60 just a couple of months later. Will there be ISOs I can download? Or will there be an ftp mirror I can use for a net install?
However, I'm not sure how well Linux in general, and SuSE in particular works with Serial-ATA drives, especially when there's nothing but Serial-ATA available - ie. the installer would need to work with it, as well.
I just installed SuSE 9.0 on a PC with a serial ATA HD. At first I tried it with the BIOS set to legacy mode, but that didn't work. However, giving the "apic" option to the kernel in the installer did work.
Can anyone explain to me what the "apic" option is doing? Is my disk performance reduced in any way? I thought that the installer was really, really slow (it took 2+ hours, on a P4-2.8GHz), but now that the system is installed it seems pretty snappy.
In the case of the Riemann Zeta problem, no mathematician would say that we have PROOF that all solutions fall on the critical line, but what we have is an extraordinary amount of EVIDENCE that all solutions found so far do. This isn't the same as what the article was talking about, where a computer has produced a complete proof, but it's so long that nobody has verified it.
The classification problem for finite simple groups is more similar. In theory, a complete proof has been found - but it's too daunting for any one person to collect and verify the entire thing.
Frustrated with PowerPoint? Try Apple's Keynote. It's everything PowerPoint should have been years ago, and then some. Smooth drop-shadows and alpha-blending of everything. High-quality 2-D and 3-D transitions. Photo cutouts. Integrated chart support.
All that, and it even imports and exports PowerPoint documents, so you don't have to start from scratch.
Yes, it only runs on Macs. But if you give presentations a lot, it's nearly worth getting yourself a Powerbook just for Keynote!
Here's yet another data point. AudacityTeam.org gets 3,000 page views a day. Over 75% of Audacity downloads are for the Windows version. And yet, in terms of browser share:
MSIE 44% Mozilla 26% Netscape (compatible) 20% Opera 3% Other 7%
(Too bad my web hoster doesn't keep stats on KHTML/Safari in particular...)
Also check out the Google Zeitgeist - while they don't actually show any numbers for browser share, by carefully analyzing the image in a paint program, I would estimate that their numbers are:
Why is this modded a troll? I think the poll is quite relevant and it will be interesting to see how Slashdotters vote. I'm not sure it should be modded +5, but why mod it down?
Next time, don't forget to include Safari! (I voted for Konqueror instead, since they use the same HTML renderer, and I do like using Konqueror on Linux).
the ISPs need to have some server-side virus scan running. we do through our company's email server, and so far, it seems to work like a champ
This is so true...unlike spam, it's quite possible to detect 100% of known viruses with no false positives. That's because every virus must contain essentially the same payload. Viruses simply can't vary their content as much as spam can, because it has to result in executable code, plus some MIME trick or IE/Outlook exploit, either of which have no legitimate use and could be detected easily.
I started running ClamAV on my mail server a couple of weeks ago (after seeing a recommendation for it on Slashdot) and since then I have seen my viruses go down from 500 a day to 1 a week. I manually looked through thousands of the held messages and found no false positives, so now anything that ClamAV scans goes directly to/dev/null.
I have no idea why all ISPs don't use ClamAV! Obviously they don't need to throw messages away, just in case - advanced users might prefer that messages probably containing viruses just be quarantined instead - but that would eliminate the problem for most people.
SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional (five CDs, two double-sided DVDs, user guide and administration guide, 90 days of installation support) is $89.95. The update edition of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional is $59.95.
I just bought SUSE 9.0 Pro last week. Do I have to pay $59.95 for the update? Anyone know what options were available for people uprading from 8.0 to 8.1?
While the printed output is asthetically pleasing, it strikes me as an odd technology to persue, because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music. I'd wager the vast majority of rock musicians can't, and that roughly half of pop musicans can't. I can't, and I've written "plenty" of material and play several instruments.
Thanks to strong middle and high school music programs, more people can read music today than ever before.
Reading music is still simply the fastest way for an experienced musician to learn a new piece of music. Many jazz and classical musicians (including myself) can sightread (play it while reading it for the first time) quite complicated pieces of music, up to tempo, which is an extremely valuable skill.
Of course there are a small minority of successful recording artists who can't read music, but the vast majority of successful musicians do read music, and most of them read music well. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Admittedly, they don't have a link called Screenshots on their main page, but in two clicks you can get to this page, which leads you on a complete tour of the program, including a page of screenshots.
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians.
LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
The most popular music notation software is Finale. Finale is buggier than Windows ME and twice as bloated, but once you learn how to use it, it gets the job done. You can enter your notes relatively quickly, tweak them a little, print, and go. While it has some very non-intuitive options, it's straightforward enough that most amateur musicians are able to sit down and click around until they get it to do what they want.
How's the output? Pretty crappy if you don't spend any time playing with it. But if you spend a little bit of time fixing the glaring errors, the result is readable by most musicians.
LilyPond, on the other hand, reads a description of the music in a text-based format, and formats it automatically - using much nicer algorithms than Finale apparently uses. It might take quite a bit longer to get your music input, but the end result will look nice - and will not require nearly as much tweaking.
LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it. If somebody ever develops a front-end to LilyPond that's actually integrated (as opposed to something like Rosegarden that can just export to LilyPond's format), then it might be more accessible to the average musician.
Don't get me wrong - I think that LilyPond is great. I just think that a lot of the complaints I'm seeing in this forum are because people don't understand what problem LilyPond is trying to solve and who will benefit.
No, LilyPond is not ready to replace all of the other music notation software out there. But it's one of the best tools for professional music engraving already, and maybe someday it can also be an appropriate tool for the casual user, too.
Solves the wrong problem.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Charging for email doesn't discourage spam. It discourages mass email. But there are many legitimate uses of mass email, like discussion lists, automated order confirmation emails, etc. - and increasing the costs of sending this type of mail will hurt open-source developers and small businesses the most.
It's not surprising that Microsoft doesn't see the problem with this. They can afford to buy a few more mail servers to handle all of microsoft.com's outgoing mail, and they'd love it if people had to buy more servers (each running a copy of Windows, of course) just to handle all of the added computational costs of sending mail.
In the article, "Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks." But how do you know who's a nonprofit? Someone with a.org? Yeah, right!
I believe that SPF currently has the potential to put the biggest dent in spam, since it directly addresses forged email addresses without needing to replace SMTP. It's not a complete solution, but it's a lot more realistic than Microsoft's idea.
I use Clam-AV on my mail server to catch some few thousand viruses on a daily basis: it's open-source, has a distributed virus signature DB which is updated very frequently - and I don't need to manually patch it or anything - new sigs are picked by a cron job.
ClamAV is already catching the new breed of viruses with encoded zip archives, while most commercial products are not yet ready to deal with those.
Thanks! ClamAV seems pretty cool. Unfortunately it's missing a bunch of my SCO.A viruses - any idea why? It catches them if I extract the attachment and have it just scan the attachment, but it doesn't work on the email. Weird. Anyway, I sent a message to the mailing list asking for help with this. It seems solvable.
There are many legitimate reasons for someone to send me a zip file as an attachment.
Well a zip file is not executable, so I wouldn't necessarily block them. But if you did, just tell your buddy to rename them to.bin and send them through that way.
Of the 274 viruses that my filters caught since last night at midnight, 100 of them are zip files.
I absolutely insist on a solution that has no false positives and doesn't inconvenience legitimate people who want to send me normal email. There are commercial solutions out there that will look for known unique virus signatures. I'm looking for a recommendation for one of those or hopefully an open-source alternative.
Can anyone recommend a good server-side tool to block viruses and worms? I'm using procmail now with a bunch of handwritten rules, and they work well on a bunch of older viruses, but there are so many new variations now that I can't keep up! On the client side, Bayesian filters (in Mozilla Mail and Apple Mail.app, for example) work reasonably well with spam, but they have a harder time with viruses and worms. It's also more annoying because viruses and worms are so large (30k or 100k, typically) and my local mail client has to download the entire message before filtering it out.
Note that I don't want to just block all messages containing attachments with certain extensions. There are many legitimate reasons for someone to send me a zip file as an attachment.
I doubt SSE3 will make a difference for very many applications. A quick overview of x86 vector instructions:
MMX: primarily vector integer instructions on 64-bit registers; main flaw is that they use the floating-point registers, so you can't mix MMX and FP code. Biggest win for image processing, which is usually 8-bit data and perfect for MMX. 3Dnow: adds vector floating-point instructions on 64-bit registers (introduced by AMD). SSE: primarily vector floating-point instructions on 128-bit registers SSE2: vector double-precision floating-point instructions on 128-bit registers SSE3: only 13 new instructions (compared to dozens for each of the other extensions). no new vector types, just some complex arithmetic, horizontal arithmetic operations, and unaligned data loading.
Hi Dominic, not trolling, but impressed that you replied. My Mac came with this program, and it's very cool. I believe it's only free if bundled with the mac, it seems to be shareware, and I like it better than Audacity.
Well, I guess we've got a long way to go! If you think that Audacity has any hope, I'd encourage you to visit our feature request page and suggest the particular features you want.
By the way, my sister is in college and they're teaching audio recording 101 with....Audacity. Congratulations, I think that's very noteworthy. I didn't mean to put your efforts down in my post.
Very cool. No offense taken. There's no way that Audacity can be everything to everyone. But we're working very hard to make it as good as possible.
Nor is it as simple as that. Without COMMERCIAL software companies contributing to apps and kernels (while charging "too much" for some things), OSS would not be advancing as fast as it is.
There are a lot of PAID contributors who work on The GIMP, other Open Source apps (MySQL and PostreSQL spring to mind) and the Linux Kernel itself, for that matter.
That's true, but for every paid developer, there are often dozens of part-time volunteers who have made very significant contributions.
Audacity does not have any paid developers, though we have many volunteers who would love to get paid to work on Audacity if anyone wanted to sponsor us!
Audacity is a multitrack editor- something that most of the $50-$70 similar software titles cannot do!
But Pro Tools Free can do it... For free.
Which is great, unless you run Mac OS X or Linux. (Pro Tools Free is for Mac OS 9 and Windows only.) Or you want support for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Or you want something that's reasonably easy to use. Or you want an open-source solution to customize.
Slashdot Mirror
wouldn't it make sense to initially plan the mission for as long as the rovers remain operational, however long that may be?
No, because then the budget would have been too high and the project never would have been funded in the first place. The MER team needed to propose a budget to NASA that was reasonable, so they chose a mission length that was long enough to reach their science goals - 3 months - and then did their best to engineer rovers that could last 2-3 times as long if they're lucky.
None of those are fundamental problems with open-source software at all. My open-source software (Audacity) may not be perfect, but it doesn't suffer from most of those problems, and it's very popular (millions of downloads). Mozilla, especially FireFox, doesn't have those problems. There are hundreds of other smaller, special-purpose open-source programs that are easy to install, easy to use, and have great documentation.
So clearly it's quite possible to create open-source software with all of those qualities.
But anyone can make open-source software, and open-source software can survive and be moderately successful without any of these traits. This is a good thing. Unfortunately it means that for every stable, easy-to-use project on Sourceforge, there are a thousand unpolished or impossible to use programs, and that's not counting things that are just plain unfinished or in beta-testing. People need to realize that:
1. Open-source software can be just as good (and better), easy to install, easy to use, well-documented, stable, and supported as any commercial software. It requires a lot of commitment from many people to bring it to this level, but when there's enough demand, and a usually a few generous sponsors, it's quite possible.
2. Most open-source software is not at this level. That's okay, nobody is forcing you to use it. You can either contribute (either help improve it or document it yourself, or pay someone else to do it) or you can find another solution.
Numerical Python is great, but not necessarily suitable for this task. It's good when you're performing the same operation on the items of a vectors. When the vectors are long enough it indeed approaches the performance of C code. But in ray tracing every photon can take a different route depending on what it hits. I'm not so sure Numpy would perform nearly as well in this case.
You're totally right of course that it does require you vectorize your code. I'm not convinced that you couldn't vectorize raytracing, though. Start with a vector of a million photons. Do some vectorized calculations to determine which object all of them strike first. Suppose a hundred thousand strike the first object - then run the next calculation on that subset, and so on. Heck, I've found that rewriting C code to work this way is often faster because it's cache-efficient.
The link to the image should be http://www.cpjava.net/raytraces/DRUN.GIF (The www is necessary and was left out of the link in the article.)
People are already cracking jokes about how the fact that it's in Java will mean that it will run a lot slower than it could. While I love to pick on Java as much as the next person, I am curious how much it actually makes a difference for raytracing - does anyone know? My experience with numerically-intensive algorithms is that Java is 2-4x slower than C. You can get it within 2x of the speed of C if you ignore object-oriented programming and you're really good at Java optimization, but that's it. And it will run much slower on some architecetures because Java guarantees certain floating-point operation semantics at the expense of speed.
If I were writing a new numerically-intensive program from scratch that I wanted to use for a cross-platform distributed computing project, I'd probably do it in Numerical Python (NumPy) - my experience has been that it can be within a factor of 2-3 of the speed of C, but it's much more concise, requiring half as many lines of code as Java or C to do the same thing. And these days Python is just as cross-platform as Java - it definitely runs great on Mac, Windows, and Unix.
Thanks for the info. I'm getting 54 MB/sec buffered disk reads now, so I guess I'm in great shape.
I'm new to SuSE. I just purchased SuSE 9.0 Pro and I'm very happy with it. It looks like the upgrade to 9.1 costs $60 - is that right? I was happy to pay for 9.0 Pro, but I don't want to spend another $60 just a couple of months later. Will there be ISOs I can download? Or will there be an ftp mirror I can use for a net install?
However, I'm not sure how well Linux in general, and SuSE in particular works with Serial-ATA drives, especially when there's nothing but Serial-ATA available - ie. the installer would need to work with it, as well.
I just installed SuSE 9.0 on a PC with a serial ATA HD. At first I tried it with the BIOS set to legacy mode, but that didn't work. However, giving the "apic" option to the kernel in the installer did work.
Can anyone explain to me what the "apic" option is doing? Is my disk performance reduced in any way? I thought that the installer was really, really slow (it took 2+ hours, on a P4-2.8GHz), but now that the system is installed it seems pretty snappy.
In the case of the Riemann Zeta problem, no mathematician would say that we have PROOF that all solutions fall on the critical line, but what we have is an extraordinary amount of EVIDENCE that all solutions found so far do. This isn't the same as what the article was talking about, where a computer has produced a complete proof, but it's so long that nobody has verified it.
The classification problem for finite simple groups is more similar. In theory, a complete proof has been found - but it's too daunting for any one person to collect and verify the entire thing.
Frustrated with PowerPoint? Try Apple's Keynote. It's everything PowerPoint should have been years ago, and then some. Smooth drop-shadows and alpha-blending of everything. High-quality 2-D and 3-D transitions. Photo cutouts. Integrated chart support.
All that, and it even imports and exports PowerPoint documents, so you don't have to start from scratch.
Yes, it only runs on Macs. But if you give presentations a lot, it's nearly worth getting yourself a Powerbook just for Keynote!
Here's yet another data point. AudacityTeam.org gets 3,000 page views a day. Over 75% of Audacity downloads are for the Windows version. And yet, in terms of browser share:
MSIE 44%
Mozilla 26%
Netscape (compatible) 20%
Opera 3%
Other 7%
(Too bad my web hoster doesn't keep stats on KHTML/Safari in particular...)
Also check out the Google Zeitgeist - while they don't actually show any numbers for browser share, by carefully analyzing the image in a paint program, I would estimate that their numbers are:
MSIE 76% (6.0 - 49%, 5.5 - 10%, 5.0 - 13%, 4.0 - 5%)
Mozilla/Netscape 12% (Mozilla/NS6+ - 7%, Netscape 4.x - 5%)
Other 9%
The graph definitely shows Mozilla growing steadily, though not nearly as fast as IE6 is taking over previous versions of IE.
Why is this modded a troll? I think the poll is quite relevant and it will be interesting to see how Slashdotters vote. I'm not sure it should be modded +5, but why mod it down?
Next time, don't forget to include Safari! (I voted for Konqueror instead, since they use the same HTML renderer, and I do like using Konqueror on Linux).
the ISPs need to have some server-side virus scan running. we do through our company's email server, and so far, it seems to work like a champ
/dev/null.
This is so true...unlike spam, it's quite possible to detect 100% of known viruses with no false positives. That's because every virus must contain essentially the same payload. Viruses simply can't vary their content as much as spam can, because it has to result in executable code, plus some MIME trick or IE/Outlook exploit, either of which have no legitimate use and could be detected easily.
I started running ClamAV on my mail server a couple of weeks ago (after seeing a recommendation for it on Slashdot) and since then I have seen my viruses go down from 500 a day to 1 a week. I manually looked through thousands of the held messages and found no false positives, so now anything that ClamAV scans goes directly to
I have no idea why all ISPs don't use ClamAV! Obviously they don't need to throw messages away, just in case - advanced users might prefer that messages probably containing viruses just be quarantined instead - but that would eliminate the problem for most people.
SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional (five CDs, two double-sided DVDs, user guide and administration guide, 90 days of installation support) is $89.95. The update edition of SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional is $59.95.
I just bought SUSE 9.0 Pro last week. Do I have to pay $59.95 for the update? Anyone know what options were available for people uprading from 8.0 to 8.1?
While the printed output is asthetically pleasing, it strikes me as an odd technology to persue, because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music. I'd wager the vast majority of rock musicians can't, and that roughly half of pop musicans can't. I can't, and I've written "plenty" of material and play several instruments.
Thanks to strong middle and high school music programs, more people can read music today than ever before.
Reading music is still simply the fastest way for an experienced musician to learn a new piece of music. Many jazz and classical musicians (including myself) can sightread (play it while reading it for the first time) quite complicated pieces of music, up to tempo, which is an extremely valuable skill.
Of course there are a small minority of successful recording artists who can't read music, but the vast majority of successful musicians do read music, and most of them read music well. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Admittedly, they don't have a link called Screenshots on their main page, but in two clicks you can get to this page, which leads you on a complete tour of the program, including a page of screenshots.
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians.
LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
The most popular music notation software is Finale. Finale is buggier than Windows ME and twice as bloated, but once you learn how to use it, it gets the job done. You can enter your notes relatively quickly, tweak them a little, print, and go. While it has some very non-intuitive options, it's straightforward enough that most amateur musicians are able to sit down and click around until they get it to do what they want.
How's the output? Pretty crappy if you don't spend any time playing with it. But if you spend a little bit of time fixing the glaring errors, the result is readable by most musicians.
LilyPond, on the other hand, reads a description of the music in a text-based format, and formats it automatically - using much nicer algorithms than Finale apparently uses. It might take quite a bit longer to get your music input, but the end result will look nice - and will not require nearly as much tweaking.
LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it. If somebody ever develops a front-end to LilyPond that's actually integrated (as opposed to something like Rosegarden that can just export to LilyPond's format), then it might be more accessible to the average musician.
Don't get me wrong - I think that LilyPond is great. I just think that a lot of the complaints I'm seeing in this forum are because people don't understand what problem LilyPond is trying to solve and who will benefit.
No, LilyPond is not ready to replace all of the other music notation software out there. But it's one of the best tools for professional music engraving already, and maybe someday it can also be an appropriate tool for the casual user, too.
Charging for email doesn't discourage spam. It discourages mass email. But there are many legitimate uses of mass email, like discussion lists, automated order confirmation emails, etc. - and increasing the costs of sending this type of mail will hurt open-source developers and small businesses the most.
.org? Yeah, right!
It's not surprising that Microsoft doesn't see the problem with this. They can afford to buy a few more mail servers to handle all of microsoft.com's outgoing mail, and they'd love it if people had to buy more servers (each running a copy of Windows, of course) just to handle all of the added computational costs of sending mail.
In the article, "Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks." But how do you know who's a nonprofit? Someone with a
I believe that SPF currently has the potential to put the biggest dent in spam, since it directly addresses forged email addresses without needing to replace SMTP. It's not a complete solution, but it's a lot more realistic than Microsoft's idea.
I use Clam-AV on my mail server to catch some few thousand viruses on a daily basis: it's open-source, has a distributed virus signature DB which is updated very frequently - and I don't need to manually patch it or anything - new sigs are picked by a cron job.
ClamAV is already catching the new breed of viruses with encoded zip archives, while most commercial products are not yet ready to deal with those.
Thanks! ClamAV seems pretty cool. Unfortunately it's missing a bunch of my SCO.A viruses - any idea why? It catches them if I extract the attachment and have it just scan the attachment, but it doesn't work on the email. Weird. Anyway, I sent a message to the mailing list asking for help with this. It seems solvable.
There are many legitimate reasons for someone to send me a zip file as an attachment.
.bin and send them through that way.
Well a zip file is not executable, so I wouldn't necessarily block them. But if you did, just tell your buddy to rename them to
Of the 274 viruses that my filters caught since last night at midnight, 100 of them are zip files.
I absolutely insist on a solution that has no false positives and doesn't inconvenience legitimate people who want to send me normal email. There are commercial solutions out there that will look for known unique virus signatures. I'm looking for a recommendation for one of those or hopefully an open-source alternative.
Can anyone recommend a good server-side tool to block viruses and worms? I'm using procmail now with a bunch of handwritten rules, and they work well on a bunch of older viruses, but there are so many new variations now that I can't keep up! On the client side, Bayesian filters (in Mozilla Mail and Apple Mail.app, for example) work reasonably well with spam, but they have a harder time with viruses and worms. It's also more annoying because viruses and worms are so large (30k or 100k, typically) and my local mail client has to download the entire message before filtering it out.
Note that I don't want to just block all messages containing attachments with certain extensions. There are many legitimate reasons for someone to send me a zip file as an attachment.
Some info here. SSE3 is the big thing.
I doubt SSE3 will make a difference for very many applications. A quick overview of x86 vector instructions:
MMX: primarily vector integer instructions on 64-bit registers; main flaw is that they use the floating-point registers, so you can't mix MMX and FP code. Biggest win for image processing, which is usually 8-bit data and perfect for MMX.
3Dnow: adds vector floating-point instructions on 64-bit registers (introduced by AMD).
SSE: primarily vector floating-point instructions on 128-bit registers
SSE2: vector double-precision floating-point instructions on 128-bit registers
SSE3: only 13 new instructions (compared to dozens for each of the other extensions). no new vector types, just some complex arithmetic, horizontal arithmetic operations, and unaligned data loading.
Cool, thanks! I've seen Audacity in a couple magazines, but if you happen to remember which one, please let me know, thanks!
Hi Dominic, not trolling, but impressed that you replied. My Mac came with this program, and it's very cool. I believe it's only free if bundled with the mac, it seems to be shareware, and I like it better than Audacity.
Well, I guess we've got a long way to go! If you think that Audacity has any hope, I'd encourage you to visit our feature request page and suggest the particular features you want.
By the way, my sister is in college and they're teaching audio recording 101 with....Audacity. Congratulations, I think that's very noteworthy. I didn't mean to put your efforts down in my post.
Very cool. No offense taken. There's no way that Audacity can be everything to everyone. But we're working very hard to make it as good as possible.
Nor is it as simple as that. Without COMMERCIAL software companies contributing to apps and kernels (while charging "too much" for some things), OSS would not be advancing as fast as it is.
There are a lot of PAID contributors who work on The GIMP, other Open Source apps (MySQL and PostreSQL spring to mind) and the Linux Kernel itself, for that matter.
That's true, but for every paid developer, there are often dozens of part-time volunteers who have made very significant contributions.
Audacity does not have any paid developers, though we have many volunteers who would love to get paid to work on Audacity if anyone wanted to sponsor us!
Audacity is a multitrack editor- something that most of the $50-$70 similar software titles cannot do!
But Pro Tools Free can do it... For free.
Which is great, unless you run Mac OS X or Linux. (Pro Tools Free is for Mac OS 9 and Windows only.) Or you want support for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Or you want something that's reasonably easy to use. Or you want an open-source solution to customize.