It is more like, "Hey, that's a nice computer you have there. I would hate to see it get infected by a virus because we got lazy about maintaining security on older versions of Windows. Here, buy Vista."
And yes, my opinion is anecdotal. I don't claim otherwise. But that doesn't change the fact that at the last five companies I've worked for/with over the last decade (three of them national publishers where I worked in trade nonfiction), I have spent almost my entire time working in MS Word and collaborating with other people in MS Word.
You are/were a writer. Of course all your time was spent in Word and not, say, a desktop publish app. The fact remains that people concerned with design and layout of published material rarely rely on Word. And if they do, they don't know what they are doing. Maybe you know about writing, but you clearly don't know about publishing. Especially if you think that publishing consists of "some lonely guy at the end of the hall."
Your apparent hatred of the application is clouding your abilities to read and communicate civilly.
What are you talking about? I don't hate Word. I'm just saying it isn't an appropriate tool for publishing. You can't rely on it for formatting and layout. And you certainly can't send it to a Printer.
A properly setup SMTP MTA will reject with a 55x (permanent failure) error, and the sending MTA generates the bounce message, sending it to the account generating the email, not looking at the From: address at all.
Some admins prefer to use blacklists for scoring rather than automatic rejection. It cuts down greatly on the false positives.
Perhaps I phrased it badly -- I need 100% Word compatible formatting. In other words, when I send a client a document it needs to show up in the exact same format in which I put it, so that -- if they choose - they can simply print it off without making any changes whatsoever.
Do not assume that your Word document will display the same way on your client's computer as it did on yours. Word is notorious for messing up formatting and fonts on different computers... even with the exact same version of Office. I believe just having a different printer installed will change things. If you are serious about preserving formatting, you wouldn't use Word. I'm not saying OpenOffice is any better, I'm just saying there are more appropriate applications for getting accurate layout and formatting. You may want to do some research.
You got caught making shit by TWO people and now you are trying to change the subject away from publishing. Everybody knows that Word is the defacto standard for internal documents. But we were talking about publishing here. Something you obviously know nothing about.
Go to any Windows publishing house (and this includes most of the major ones, a bunch of whom I've worked in or with). How do you make a PDF? Well, you start with a Word file and you run it through Acrobat. So making a PDF for such people involves... Word.
The point is that you don't publish with Word. You do the publishing in PDF (in this particular case). You use Word for what it is intended for... processing words. You use other applications/formats to produce formatted, publishable output.
And yes, the book goes into Quark before going to press, but do the authors or editors work in Quark?
Of course not. They are processing words. So they use a word processor.
Do the page designers even work in Quark? No, they all work in Word.
I'm not sure what you consider a "designer," but as far as I know, they do not work in Word. No designer who knows what he or she is doing, anyway.
It's the lonely guy at the end of the hall doing final layout that dumps everything into the formatter/publisher application just before it goes to press for a full run.
If by "it" you mean some advertising flyer and by "press" you mean some HP LaserJet in the corner, sure. But people who actually do publishing have departments whose job it is to do layout and prepare jobs for printers. While they may get the content in Word format, all the layout is done in other applications.
Before that I was working at eBay's customer service office. Most internal documents were circulated in (you guessed it) Word. And before that I was working as a technical writer on user manuals for a now-defunct Linux startup in the late '90s. Imagine my shock when I got hired there originally only to find that everyone outside of software development itself was using Windows boxen and... Word. Myself included, and the manuals (about Linux products) got produced just fine.
Wait, first you're talking about publishing and now you are talking about eBay customer service and some Linux startup? Note that neither one of those instances has anything to do with publishing. Of course internal documents at most companies are distributed in Word format. Nobody is disputing that. Question is, what do people who publish use? Fact is that anyone even halfway serious about publishing or accuracy of layout is using a layout application such as Quark or InDesign or similar. If they are not, they don't know what they are doing. Nobody in their right mind depends on accurate and consistent document layout in Word. (yes, I realize that there are people not in their right mind)
How many people need technical support for an office suite? I mean, beyond just figuring out how to do things (use the Help menu). Servers and mission critical database/network applications I can understand wanting support, but for an office suite? Come on.
Indeed. People should not be using a word processor as if it were a desktop publishing or layout application. That is what Quark/InDesign/PageMaker/etc are for. Word processors are for.. processing words. But people shouldn't use email to share large files or use spreadsheets as databases, but they do anyway. Unfortunately, Microsoft crams so many features into Word that using it for desktop publishing is just too tempting for some people. I've even seen people use Word to produce web pages! Ack!
I could be wrong, but from my understanding Second Life was a game that was largely based around user generated content; the game gets better as you attract more people to develop interesting content within your game. If you actively discourage people from playing a game like this you will probably scare away a lot of people who could bring a lot of value to it; consider that a lot of "artistic" people have a great deal of difficulty just "getting" a user interface that makes sense to technical people.
I haven't played SL much. Just a few days as a n00b. But from what I gather, building objects (the confusing part) is a technical AND artistic. Designing objects is one thing, but then you have to script them to make them do interesting things. Scripting is technical. There is really no way to get around that. One might liken it to designing a website with Javascript and server side scripting. Doing it well is not easy. And it isn't for everyone.
Problem with sending bouncebacks is that you can end up causing just as much of a problem as you are solving. If you bounceback messages to forged senders, you are effectively spamming people. One has to be careful about which messages are just dropped and which are bounced back. If you reject blacklisted IPs at the SMTP level, you should always get a bounceback. But if messages are "scored" based on blacklists, you may not get a bounceback if it scores to high...
Don't get me wrong, I am all for exploration and research in space. I think there is a lot to learn. It is just that there is a difference between exploration and colonization. We're a long way from actually colonizing anything outside of Earth. It doesn't make much sense to start thinking of locations in terms of colonization unless there is some real practical drive for it. When really, there isn't.
If she'd complained to me about her bill she figured it out.;-)
So, let me ask you this: Is there any inherant benefit in allowing companies to link unrelated services together and force both on you if you want one? And if not, is there any detriment to not allowing companies to ONLY offer a service if it's bundled with another unrelated one?
You keep using that word "force." I don't think it means what you think it means.
Of course companies should be able to offer whatever bundles they want, but personally I think it would be very beneficial to all to not allow companies to only offer services bundled with other unrelated services.
In the case of a true monopoly I think it is reasonable to regulate in that way, but it is really hard to justify when there are alternatives and the services in question are non-essential.
Whenever someone brings up colonizing another planet, I can't help but wonder "why?" Yes, there is the novelty factor of being able to do it. But how practical is it? What is the objective? Would we do it to preserve the species? From what? An asteriod hitting Earth and turning it into a wasteland? Could Earth possibly be any worse than Titan... or even Mars... in that case?
Think about it. What is the best Earth alternative we could realistically hope to find?
Want to colonize "Earth in Deep Freeze?" Antarctica isn't too far away. If nothing else, it has plenty of water and even oil. And if Global Warming gets as bad as some fear it might, Antarctica might not end up being such a bad place! Or what about colonizing the bottom on the ocean? Certainly that would be easier than traveling half way across the solar system... or farther.
Seems to me that Earth would have to be all but vaporized for it to be much worse than any place you could find in outer space.
Um, being forced to pay for phone service you don't want to get internet service...but that's somehow not forcing...hmmm, I'm having trouble following that logic.
First of all, I was responding to being "forced" to pay for TV with internet, not phone with internet. But either way, it isn't force if you have the option to not pay for either service. The most you could say is that the cable company is offering a shitty package. Well, don't buy it! Nobody is forcing you to do anything.
Particularly if you live somewhere where it's a one corp show.
I don't know any place that doesn't have a regular telco. If the cable company offers a shitty package, try the telco. No DSL? Dialup is still an option. Maybe it isn't as good as cable broadband, but it is still an option. Where's the force?
Forcing a minimum TV subscription to get TV service, not the same thing at all.
It is when the "minimum" is unreasonably inclusive.
Are you actually suggesting you see no problem with this? No wonder they do it, because there are enough suckers out there to buy into it with no questions asked.
But you're the sucker buying into it! As I noted in my pervious post, I don't pay the cable company one red cent! I'm no sucker. They offer a shitty package that makes me pay for way more than I want, so I don't subscribe. Heck, I don't even pay the phone company. All my internet/phone comes through a DSL provider that is independent of the telco*. And I just download whatever TV shows I want to watch.
-matthew
* Yes, I realize that the DSL provider uses the telco lines, but the point is that I don't pay th telco and am not force to accept their package.
Is it not illegal to force an unrelated service on someone?
Why would it be illegal? You're not being forced. You don't have to buy their package. It isn't like TV is an essential service. And if you don't want their internet, go DSL or dialup.
It would be GREAT if cable companies would offer much more granular service, but the reality is that they don't. If I want cable, I have to pay for 100+ channels even though I'd only watch like 4 of them. I don't have cable (or any other TV service) for that very reason, actually.
Difference is that open source is SUPPOSED to be that way. Cathedral vs. Bazaar and all that...
-matthew
Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 3, Informative
If your building a small project, the model-view-controller thing can get really annoying, with the needing of 3 files for a single web page thing.
Single web page? That isn't a small project... that is a TINY project.
Because it's not compiled, it seems like it's not a good idea for really large projects either.
So you don't see any applications somewhere between a tiny project and a large enterprise application? Seems to me that most applications fit in this area. Blogs, forums, CMS, all kinds of things. An intranet is a great place for rails apps.
I really couldn't find any reason why I'd want to use it above PHP,
For one thing, PHP is an ugly language with a hacked together object system and terrible function naming. Ruby blows PHP away as far as scripting languages go. And then add Rail on top of it which totally takes advantage of Ruby's features.
I did PHP for a while, but after writing an app in Rails for first time, I didn't want ot touch another line of PHP again. If I need to throw some simple dynamic content on a website, I'll resort to PHP because it is so readily available, but beyond that, forget it. I won't waste my time.
and it doesn't really have the qualities needed to take on something like Java or.Net.
You fail to see the huge space between PHP and Java.
What would ruin the system for me is not having coworkers available when you need them. Say what you want about the 9-5 grind, but at least you know your coworker will be there when you need them. (unless they are sick or on vacation, of course). With flex time, especially "extreme" flex time, work is often delayed because so and so doesn't come in until noon or they can't finish a project with you because they leave at 2pm.
That said, it sure would be nice if more companies adopted this so that traffic wouldn't be so concentrated at certain times of the day.
I think you may be underestimating just how much spam this guy is talking about. He said he was getting over 1,000,000 spams per day. That comes out to 12 spams per second. Now I'll admit that I haven't done any tuning to spamassassin, but it takes my commodity PC about 10 wallclock seconds per email to process in spamassassin. Of course, greylist processing takes only a few milliseconds, so that helps take off a lot of the load.
It doesn't just help, it nearly eliminates the load. Here's a graph for one small mail gateway that I maintain: http://mailgw.pnca.edu/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi Look at the monthly graph. Right around week 45 I implmented greylisting. Notice how the "recieved" and "sent" graphs nearly go 1 to 1. The difference between those two graphs represents the amount of SPAM that SA has to filter.
A lot of spam can also be blocked before hitting SA by maintaining a valid recipients table on the gateway(s) so that invalid recipients can be rejected. This can be automated by scripts that download the LDAP directory periodically.
Now maybe you have experience setting up antispam solutions that can handle 1,000,000 spams per day, and your setup really can scan email at the rate of 12 spams per second. From reading your post, I get the feeling that you have not ever set up such a system and that you are underestimating the volume.
It would most likely require multiple servers, I admit. But when you weight that against $14k/year to have someone else filter your mail...
Though I'd also suggest (and did) that technological solutions to this problem are basically self-defeating in the long run. It just makes it an arms race between server admins and spammers (build a better mousetrap and....) and the losers are the end users.
But the problem stems from the fact that SMTP was so open in the first place. So closing it down and making it a little more difficult for home users to run their own mail server seems reasonable to me.
I am an admin who implements SPAM filtering and it doesn't feel like an arms race. Sure, there are some new spamming techniques that will cause a few extra unwanted messages to get through the filter here and there, but for the most part I'm on top of the game. It isn't like a constant battle that I'm spending a lot of time fighting. And in some ways I actually enjoy it. It gives me a sense of accomplishment to block 80% of all email as spam.:-P
I suppose the users are the losers in the end. But it is better than not having email at all...
Slashdot Mirror
It is more like, "Hey, that's a nice computer you have there. I would hate to see it get infected by a virus because we got lazy about maintaining security on older versions of Windows. Here, buy Vista."
-matthew
You are/were a writer. Of course all your time was spent in Word and not, say, a desktop publish app. The fact remains that people concerned with design and layout of published material rarely rely on Word. And if they do, they don't know what they are doing. Maybe you know about writing, but you clearly don't know about publishing. Especially if you think that publishing consists of "some lonely guy at the end of the hall."
What are you talking about? I don't hate Word. I'm just saying it isn't an appropriate tool for publishing. You can't rely on it for formatting and layout. And you certainly can't send it to a Printer.
-matthew
Some admins prefer to use blacklists for scoring rather than automatic rejection. It cuts down greatly on the false positives.
-matthew
Do not assume that your Word document will display the same way on your client's computer as it did on yours. Word is notorious for messing up formatting and fonts on different computers... even with the exact same version of Office. I believe just having a different printer installed will change things. If you are serious about preserving formatting, you wouldn't use Word. I'm not saying OpenOffice is any better, I'm just saying there are more appropriate applications for getting accurate layout and formatting. You may want to do some research.
-matthew
You got caught making shit by TWO people and now you are trying to change the subject away from publishing. Everybody knows that Word is the defacto standard for internal documents. But we were talking about publishing here. Something you obviously know nothing about.
-matthew
The point is that you don't publish with Word. You do the publishing in PDF (in this particular case). You use Word for what it is intended for... processing words. You use other applications/formats to produce formatted, publishable output.
Of course not. They are processing words. So they use a word processor.
I'm not sure what you consider a "designer," but as far as I know, they do not work in Word. No designer who knows what he or she is doing, anyway.
If by "it" you mean some advertising flyer and by "press" you mean some HP LaserJet in the corner, sure. But people who actually do publishing have departments whose job it is to do layout and prepare jobs for printers. While they may get the content in Word format, all the layout is done in other applications.
-matthew
Wait, first you're talking about publishing and now you are talking about eBay customer service and some Linux startup?
Note that neither one of those instances has anything to do with publishing. Of course internal documents at most companies are distributed in Word format. Nobody is disputing that. Question is, what do people who publish use? Fact is that anyone even halfway serious about publishing or accuracy of layout is using a layout application such as Quark or InDesign or similar. If they are not, they don't know what they are doing. Nobody in their right mind depends on accurate and consistent document layout in Word. (yes, I realize that there are people not in their right mind)
-matthew
People mention Google docs/spreadsheets if there haven't been minimal (and often free) spreadsheet/word processing apps out for years.
-matthew
How many people need technical support for an office suite? I mean, beyond just figuring out how to do things (use the Help menu). Servers and mission critical database/network applications I can understand wanting support, but for an office suite? Come on.
-matthew
Indeed. People should not be using a word processor as if it were a desktop publishing or layout application. That is what Quark/InDesign/PageMaker/etc are for. Word processors are for.. processing words. But people shouldn't use email to share large files or use spreadsheets as databases, but they do anyway. Unfortunately, Microsoft crams so many features into Word that using it for desktop publishing is just too tempting for some people. I've even seen people use Word to produce web pages! Ack!
-matthew
I haven't played SL much. Just a few days as a n00b. But from what I gather, building objects (the confusing part) is a technical AND artistic. Designing objects is one thing, but then you have to script them to make them do interesting things. Scripting is technical. There is really no way to get around that. One might liken it to designing a website with Javascript and server side scripting. Doing it well is not easy. And it isn't for everyone.
-matthew
Problem with sending bouncebacks is that you can end up causing just as much of a problem as you are solving. If you bounceback messages to forged senders, you are effectively spamming people. One has to be careful about which messages are just dropped and which are bounced back. If you reject blacklisted IPs at the SMTP level, you should always get a bounceback. But if messages are "scored" based on blacklists, you may not get a bounceback if it scores to high...
-matthew
Don't get me wrong, I am all for exploration and research in space. I think there is a lot to learn. It is just that there is a difference between exploration and colonization. We're a long way from actually colonizing anything outside of Earth. It doesn't make much sense to start thinking of locations in terms of colonization unless there is some real practical drive for it. When really, there isn't.
-matthew
If she'd complained to me about her bill she figured it out.
You keep using that word "force." I don't think it means what you think it means.
In the case of a true monopoly I think it is reasonable to regulate in that way, but it is really hard to justify when there are alternatives and the services in question are non-essential.
-matthew
Whenever someone brings up colonizing another planet, I can't help but wonder "why?" Yes, there is the novelty factor of being able to do it. But how practical is it? What is the objective? Would we do it to preserve the species? From what? An asteriod hitting Earth and turning it into a wasteland? Could Earth possibly be any worse than Titan... or even Mars... in that case?
Think about it. What is the best Earth alternative we could realistically hope to find?
Want to colonize "Earth in Deep Freeze?" Antarctica isn't too far away. If nothing else, it has plenty of water and even oil. And if Global Warming gets as bad as some fear it might, Antarctica might not end up being such a bad place! Or what about colonizing the bottom on the ocean? Certainly that would be easier than traveling half way across the solar system... or farther.
Seems to me that Earth would have to be all but vaporized for it to be much worse than any place you could find in outer space.
-matthew
First of all, I was responding to being "forced" to pay for TV with internet, not phone with internet. But either way, it isn't force if you have the option to not pay for either service. The most you could say is that the cable company is offering a shitty package. Well, don't buy it! Nobody is forcing you to do anything.
I don't know any place that doesn't have a regular telco. If the cable company offers a shitty package, try the telco. No DSL? Dialup is still an option. Maybe it isn't as good as cable broadband, but it is still an option. Where's the force?
It is when the "minimum" is unreasonably inclusive.
But you're the sucker buying into it! As I noted in my pervious post, I don't pay the cable company one red cent! I'm no sucker. They offer a shitty package that makes me pay for way more than I want, so I don't subscribe. Heck, I don't even pay the phone company. All my internet/phone comes through a DSL provider that is independent of the telco*. And I just download whatever TV shows I want to watch.
-matthew
* Yes, I realize that the DSL provider uses the telco lines, but the point is that I don't pay th telco and am not force to accept their package.
Why would it be illegal? You're not being forced. You don't have to buy their package. It isn't like TV is an essential service. And if you don't want their internet, go DSL or dialup.
It would be GREAT if cable companies would offer much more granular service, but the reality is that they don't. If I want cable, I have to pay for 100+ channels even though I'd only watch like 4 of them. I don't have cable (or any other TV service) for that very reason, actually.
-matthew
Difference is that open source is SUPPOSED to be that way. Cathedral vs. Bazaar and all that...
-matthew
Single web page? That isn't a small project... that is a TINY project.
So you don't see any applications somewhere between a tiny project and a large enterprise application? Seems to me that most applications fit in this area. Blogs, forums, CMS, all kinds of things. An intranet is a great place for rails apps.
For one thing, PHP is an ugly language with a hacked together object system and terrible function naming. Ruby blows PHP away as far as scripting languages go. And then add Rail on top of it which totally takes advantage of Ruby's features.
I did PHP for a while, but after writing an app in Rails for first time, I didn't want ot touch another line of PHP again. If I need to throw some simple dynamic content on a website, I'll resort to PHP because it is so readily available, but beyond that, forget it. I won't waste my time.
You fail to see the huge space between PHP and Java.
-matthew
You're free.... to think what we let you. Let's here it for freedom. Can I get an "amen?"
What would ruin the system for me is not having coworkers available when you need them. Say what you want about the 9-5 grind, but at least you know your coworker will be there when you need them. (unless they are sick or on vacation, of course). With flex time, especially "extreme" flex time, work is often delayed because so and so doesn't come in until noon or they can't finish a project with you because they leave at 2pm.
That said, it sure would be nice if more companies adopted this so that traffic wouldn't be so concentrated at certain times of the day.
-matthew
Doesn't take a criminal to be nosy.
-matthew
It doesn't just help, it nearly eliminates the load. Here's a graph for one small mail gateway that I maintain: http://mailgw.pnca.edu/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi Look at the monthly graph. Right around week 45 I implmented greylisting. Notice how the "recieved" and "sent" graphs nearly go 1 to 1. The difference between those two graphs represents the amount of SPAM that SA has to filter.
A lot of spam can also be blocked before hitting SA by maintaining a valid recipients table on the gateway(s) so that invalid recipients can be rejected. This can be automated by scripts that download the LDAP directory periodically.
It would most likely require multiple servers, I admit. But when you weight that against $14k/year to have someone else filter your mail...
-matthew
Oh, a wife is easy. It would be more accurate to say that no slashdotter has a hot mistress on the side. We're only as faithful as our options.... ;-)
-matthew
But the problem stems from the fact that SMTP was so open in the first place. So closing it down and making it a little more difficult for home users to run their own mail server seems reasonable to me.
I am an admin who implements SPAM filtering and it doesn't feel like an arms race. Sure, there are some new spamming techniques that will cause a few extra unwanted messages to get through the filter here and there, but for the most part I'm on top of the game. It isn't like a constant battle that I'm spending a lot of time fighting. And in some ways I actually enjoy it. It gives me a sense of accomplishment to block 80% of all email as spam.
I suppose the users are the losers in the end. But it is better than not having email at all...
-matthew