"Yeah, but let's not forget that the US Military is a tremendous career opportunity for many people, as an alternative to trade school, minimum wage jobs, unemployment, etc. They take great care of you, the pay is good, and the benefits are extraordinary and last long after you leave the service."
Or be dead a week after you hit the ground in active duty in Iraq.
About 15 years ago after high-school, I took my ASVABS and scored ridiculously high. I took the physical, was all set to join... and was trying to pick a position that suited me. There was nothing open for at least 3 years in my field of skill based on my scores.
But they had INFANTRY! (so they said)
"You don't have anything that actually requires using my brain?"
"Sure we do. INFANTRY!"
"Did you even read the score on my ASVABS?"
"Yes, you qualify for everything, including INFANTRY!"
They even had me brought into the office of some high-ranking person with lots of silverware on his chest. He tried to convince me that not serving was making me a "mockery of the system" and all kinds of reverse-psychology. So I asked him:
"Have you seen my scores? Do you have a job I'll actually LIKE, besides 'band' and 'infantry'? If not, we're done here. I'm done here."
For the next 3 MONTHS, I had recruiters at my door at my home (3 hours away from the testing centers) asking me all kinds of questions and trying to push me to join. At that time, we had a 600 yard range on our property, and I could have easily out-shot almost any of them in a firing range test.
I never did, and now I'm glad I didn't. What a mess of deceit and lies, just to convince people to join. Anyone weaker than me (mentally and psychologically), would have probably accepted infantry.
From TFA "In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
I'm sorry, content providers pay for the content, advertisers do not.
Advertisers can offset that cost, but it shouldn't be the primary funding resource for the content. If it is, your business model is broken, not the client's browser.
Besides, how do you expect blind users and people using WAP, clipping, cell, PDA, and text-mode browsers to read your content if you don't support them.
We'll go elsewhere in either case. If you litter your pages with advertisements, or make it impossible to read it with a standard browser (which includes text-mode browsers), your "audience" will just find somewhere else to read it.
Fix your business model and stop pointing fingers at your target audience and passing the buck on to them. If you can't afford to present the content on your own, then don't.
Well that cinches it... now I can block Hotmail permanently, since they are refusing to deliver mail from my legitimate MX.
There are lots of alternatives to using Hotmail... Gmail, Yahoo mail, and others. Use them instead.
99% of the mail coming from Hotmail is spam anyway, so this gives me more reason to stop the spam coming from Hotmail to my users. I'm protecting my users by blocking Hotmail.
I for one am tired of Microsoft claiming to embrace standards by strangling off the air from the lungs of the real standards bodies. When Sender-ID is a widespread industry standard (i.e. in every MTA without patching), THEN I'll begin working with Microsoft to stop spam.
I will not be strong-armed by Microsoft, ever, especially where it affects MY server and MY users and MY mail. Period.
Until their OS stops being a malware replication engine, their services stop harboring spammers by the millions, and their patches actually FIX problems instead of CAUSING them, they can go pound sand.
"This crack will become obsolete again too... it's a cat and mouse game, and frankly the hackers crack the encryption for the challenge of doing it, because frankly not everyone should have to pay the highway robbery price of windows..."
Its not quite Cat and Mouse. See, the companies that get broken into or "schooled" by felons who break into their systems or breach their security, teach them how to secure things tighter. The kiddies that work around their "security patches" or other controls help these companies to tighten their access control and eventually they get better at security.
Except the ones doing it get jailed, even when they're ASKED to break into the systems. So Microsoft gets a free community security audit, and in some cases code that helps prove the flaw (i.e. an exploit in the wild). They fix the hole, arrest the offenders, and move on to the next hole.
See, its Cat and Cat really. Microsoft (and other companies) tighten their security, close holes, and arrest the perpetrators that taught them how to use security properly.
In the end, either all the holes are closed, or all the people willing to find them are in jail. Problem solved.
"From now on, we'll have to beg for everything from Hollywood."
Or we can just stop spending our money on their trash.
Let them institute the broadcast flag. I'm not spending $7k on a flatpanel HDTV just so I can watch CSI and Law & Order a few times a week. Once my analog TV goes out of vogue and I can no longer watch TV, is when I cancel my cable TV subscription, save the $50/month and spend it on my bike or house renovations or whatever else comes to mind.
I definitely will NOT be renting DVDs any more (so I'll cancel NetFlix, saving another $20/month) and I won't be going to the movies (with Daughter v1.0, we don't go out to the movies anyway). So I'm saving close to $100/month in cable television costs, gas, and DVD rental charges. Sweet!
"Even the stuff we take for granted today."
Like going outside for a walk?
How about getting an ice cream with the family?
What about spending a weekend at the beach, instead of staring at a dancing piece of colored glass (with high-definition, lacklustre programming).
No, I definitely see forcing everyone to upgrade to HDTV and implementing the broadcast flag as a good thing. Not only will it increase piracy of the existing material tenfold (and someone WILL bypass it), but it will cause people to get outside, cancel their cable subscriptions, and learn to do other things than sit inside and vegetate on the couch, getting obese...
"I know it's a bit too late to dash of a handwritten letter to your rep in this occasion. But a phone call may be appropriate."
And at 200 calls per-hour, they'll just stop answering the phones. Seriously, do you think they're going to listen?
Going down there in person is a hit-or-miss chance of actually speaking to someone with the power to change anything... or you'll end up in jail for "stalking" your senator.
The reason they probably slid this through on a rider so fast, was likely so people could NOT write to their senators in time.
I love my government more and more every day, don't you?
Ok, so here we have the FCC mandating that we have to all convert our "old analog" television sets to digital television sets by 2007 or something...
Then we have the "Broadcast Flag" being driven through on a rider, shh... nobody will notice.
And now they can basically control what you can record via your "Dish DVR" or "TiVo" or TV tuner card or whatever other device you want to use, because of Hollywood pressure.
We already see DVDs where you can't bypass the intro commercials to get to the navigational menus, even for DVDs which we bought, which should have paid for the removal of those commercials.
Next, we'll see television sets being sent a signal that ignores the remote control's "channel" buttons during commercials. You just won't be able to switch away during commercials... you'll be forced to watch them (or power off your TV).
How far are we from a Telescreen here, really? I mean... all they need is a way to peer back in, and a way to stop you from turning off the TV or the volume...
pilot-link is probably the most-current out there so far... works on OSX, Linux, BSD natively, and soon... Windows as well. There are other projects (ColdSync, jSyncManager) but they don't support current handhelds and they work questionably on the platforms we support in our base tree.
pilot-link has languages bindings for Perl, Python, Java, and TCL. We've got support for the latest Palm handhelds, including the Tungsten T5, LifeDrive and Tungsten E2.
pilot-link supports writing to external storage (SD cards, CompactFlash, MemoryStick), and we support libusb as well for a nice 600% speedup over the standard usb->serial layers present in Linux. Darwinusb uses native usb by default (no serial layers involved).
I don't run Windows, but if I did, of course I'd make sure my mail client wasn't permitting malicious e-mails to run ActiveX. And apparently you don't either, or you'd know that Exchange is an MTA, not an MUA (or if it is, nobody uses it as an MUA).
You must be confused, because at no point did I say that Exchange was an MUA. Perhaps you're misunderstanding my statement about Exchange "rendering" email via the MSIE ActiveX control into a user's mailbox.
Yes, the MTA called Exchange does/used to do this, and its exactly how people's mailboxes were infected with the latest HTML trojan du jour without ever even opening your email to read it. I'm pretty sure Exchange closed off that hole by now, but it did/does exist, because that's how Exchange deals/dealt with incoming HTML email.
It was a nasty one, especially for corporations with lots of Exchange servers and thousands of users.
"Ok, you're just wrong. Right clicking in Safari gives an application-specific contextual menu, just like almost every other program in OS X."
Safari seems to be the only one, mostly because it deals with MDI differently than most applications.
Nothing else that I've tried (in the core OSX install) has this. Launch iTunes, right-click anywhere, and try to configure the preferences of iTunes, or the Help or anything else.
"What you don't get is the full menu structure in a contextual menu, which is what you want."
What I'd like, is to be able to configure and interact with the application itself through the application's window, without having to interact with the desktop.
I don't want to have to go aaaaaaaaaaaall the way up to the top of my 30" LCD to access the File menu, for an application sitting aaaaaaaaaaall the way down on the lower-right of the screen. Its wasteful and annoying, and that menubar at the top needs to go away... (for me, others may prefer it, I don't use menus, icons, titlebars, frames, docks, or wharfs).
But I see your point, its a desktop for "Home" users and those who wish to tinker with media (movies, video, music). Its most-definitely not for power users, workstations, or real development tasks.
Maybe the Intel processors will change the speed and usability, but it certainly won't be changing the price of the hardware as sold by Apple, so it'll still be out of my range. Besides, I can do anything OSX can do on my Linux machine anyway, at exponentially greater speeds, so why would I want an OSX machine for daily use?
"I feel ya there. I too have tens of thousands of images and it's a pain in the ass to navigate any folder with more than just a few hundred images."
Firstly:
This isn't a Linux problem.
This isn't a GNOME problem.
This isn't a filesystem problem.
Now, what are you left with? Applications and hardware. What application are you using to "navigate any folder with more than just a few hundred images"? qiv? gthumb? f-spot?
iPhoto doesn't scale nearly as well as f-spot on Linux. f-spot imports 50,000 photos in about 60 seconds here, and displays them all in a matter of seconds. There have been numerous writeups about iPhoto crashing dozens of times while trying to import dozens of thousands of photos.
If you're using a slow or poorly-coded application to manage your photos, you might want to consider upgrading to something released this century.
"If any of those directions result in inconsistent user interfaces, it's not good for usability."
Inconsistent with what? Itself? Or other environments?
What you might be calling inconsistent, I call choice. I like being able to decide which UI fits my working style the best. I don't like being strongarmed into a tiny little box, or forcing me to re-engineer my entire workflow just because the OS itself lacks the flexibility (i.e. OSX) to allow me to work how I want to work.
But I agree, when two applications, built with the same toolkit are using menus in a completely different way, that's bad.
But to expect that a gtk+ application and Qt application behave the same way, with the same menu structure and behavior, is just silly. The day that happens, is the day I find another toolkit to embrace.
That's like saying a Porsche should have the same dashboard and driving controls as a 4x4 pickup truck, because both can drive on the same roads and both have 4 wheels.
And what is wrong with sending formatted text as email? Maybe all the HTML email you get is spam, but people actually use HTML email for real work (messages including tables, images, etc.). HTML email sure beats Microsoft Word attachments, which is what people would be using otherwise.
I don't get HTML email, actually, because its automatically stripped at the MTA, same for all of my users, and I've never heard a single complaint yet.
I was being simplistic when I suggested using HTML::Strip. The full milter uses a lot of other modules, including::Strip, HTML::TableExtractor, and others... to make sure that the actual content of the email isn't lost, even if fonts and colors and images are.
But like I said... webpages go on port 80, email on port 25. Period.
Actually, I should reconfigure all outgoing HTML email to be sent as DocBook XML instead. What? You can't render DocBook XML? Oh, you should upgrade your mail client then. Maybe I'll use PostScript for HTML-based email instead, and blame those Outlook users who can't read standards-compliant attachment types.
See the problem here? I don't like email senders dictating what tools I use on my end to read their email. I shouldn't have to turn my mail client into a browser to read email, just like they shouldn't have to load OpenJade/DSSL or Ghostview to read my emails.
"Except that everything is not nice and systematic. First, all programs get dumped together under/usr, making it nearly impossible to cleanly uninstall if it was compiled from source or the package manager database got corrupted ("--force", anyone?)."
Most (if not all) source tarballs have a 'make uninstall' target, provided by autoconf. Some packages that don't use autoconf may not have it, but I've only run into less than a handful that do not. If they don't, just make a package out of it (dpkg-build, if Debian), or use InstallWatch and uninstall the trace it builds.
As for using --force, if you have to use --force, something else is wrong on your system. Fix that problem first, and you won't have to use --force. I haven't had to "force" any packages on my system in over 5 years now, and before that for 5+ years prior, I was using all source anyway.
"True, but under/etc they are placed almost randomly. If you don't know the exact name of the configuration file you need (which may or may not be under a subdirectory...), you're out of luck."
There are rules there also. If the application needs more than one configuration file (such as sendmail), you'll have a directory/etc/mail, or/etc/dovecot or whatever, per-app. If the application only uses one config file, you'll find it "bare" in/etc (like rsyncd.conf for rsync or ppc.conf for PearPC). Simple and clean, the way it should be.
Mind explaining how an application checks its changes into a Windows directory structure, including all of the relevant keys in the registry hive? What about OSX putting things everywhere in/Applications,/Library, and the user's own home directory in scattered little directories and random.plist files and hidden files which Finder can't even see?
Trust me, Linux has the most-open, cleanest layout out there... but it could stand to have some improvement, but most of that is due to the flexibility of using whatever toolkit the application author decides to use, and where he wants to put his resources.
"Slapping something onto their desktop and telling them to live with it will not cut it. Anyone who believes otherwise needs to slide out from behind their keyboard to take a break from writing and spend some time with the people who actually sit behind a keyboard all day and make use of the applications from the time they enter work until they leave (aside from lunch)."
To paraphrase your own statement... these applications weren't written for you. You don't count.
The people using these applications are the developers themselves. If they find use in them, great. If they have horrible or ugly UIs in your opinion, so what? You don't count. The developer makes the choice of what works for them.
Don't be misled that we're writing software "for you", because we're not. We're writing it for us, to push technology or to get more use out of our hardware or simply because we wanted to see if we could connect two disparate systems together with some code glue.
If some random subset of "users" finds the applications useful but clunky or ugly, guess what? They have absolutely no say in the matter. They don't count.
When you begin to pay for our time, you can begin to dictate the rules. Until then, get back in line..
We do this in our spare time. Many/most of us have day jobs, families, hobbies. When someone tries to tell us what WE should be doing in OUR spare time, we just go and do something else. When you take the fun out of what we choose to do in our spare time by applying "rules" to our hobbies, it no longer becomes fun, and we go elsewhere.
Keep that in mind the next time you rant about how the software you got for free doesn't suit YOUR needs.
There are some very simple ways to solve this, en-masse...
Set up a milter that calls HTML::Strip to strip out all HTML from email. I don't want my webpages on port 25, just like I don't want my email on port 80. Users don't know or care anyway, set it up at the MTA side and they'll get clean emails.
Use a real MUA, like pine, mutt or other that allows you to see the actual content of the message, not its abstracted "rendered" equivalent. I simply hit 'h' in pine, and can see the resulting link that the phisher is trying to send me to... if it doesn't match the anchor tag, it gets deleted (and forwarded to spam-$USER, see dspam below).
Don't run Windows. Nothing need more be said here. When the same ActiveX control is used by Exchange to "render" email into your mailbox as MSIE to "render" maliscious HTML to your browser, you should be concerned.
Install and configure dspam. Problem solved after only a few phish emails come through. Simply send them back to your internal spam-$USER address and you'll never see them again, including future ones that are similar. If you want to see them again, go into the web interface and send them to your mail, which will automagically re-score them lower so they get through. My users and I haven't seen a single spam get through to any of our mailboxes in MONTHS, not a single one. Beats the pants off of anything else out there that I've used.
Education. Teach your users that they should never respond or click URLs in email, ever, period. Show them that PayPal and eBay and other companies never ask you to log back in to verify any personal information. Show them how these systems work, and reinforce it all the time by asking them questions about it. Drill it into them.
DShield is apparently used to throwing hundreds of false-postives, making the tool useless for actual production work.
I just checked my IP, and it says my IP appears 413 times in the db as an "attacker", which is utter garbage, since I run a very tightly locked-down Linux/FreeBSD farm behind that IP, and no "attacker" put any trojans on the boxes. Every single installed package matches the checksum that came with it.
Our FSF attorney and the United States Copyright Agreement that we all had to fill out in order to litigate our claim in court ($25.00 + first and last 10 pages of source code sent in to the US Copyright Office, etc.)
"One should inform the companies that there are other more free licenses, like the BSD license, and they may freely use such licensed software."
(emphasis mine)
You didn't define "free" there, but it certainly isn't free as in freedom, even if it was obtained at no cost to the company.
Free Software (ala the GPL) is about making sure the code remains available, so others can take advantage of it, improve upon it, and share those improvements with others.
The BSD license, in almost every single commercial case, is used in exactly the opposite way of this mantra. Companies (like Microsoft, SCO, Sun and others) regularly take BSD code, improve upon it, and keep those improvements proprietary, closed, known only unto themselves. Nobody outside the nexus of the company can take advantage of those improvements.
They take the oxygen out of the community that gave them the code in the first place. Its selfish, rude, and a slap in the face of the developers and the community that helped them by writing code they found useful enough to use in their commercial products.
We provide legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software.
Free and Open Source Software ("FOSS") is maturing at a rapid pace. The FOSS production ecosystem, once dominated by a few small not-for-profit entities and individual contributors, now includes a global array of individuals, not-for-profit entities, and commercial developers and redistributors. In this mixed-model organizational environment, all FOSS developers must have an environment where liability and other legal issues do not impede their important public service work. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) provides legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance FOSS
Slashdot Mirror
What's a popup? I haven't seen a single browser popup in at least 3 years now with any of my browsers.
Q: How many voters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None, voters can't change anything.
Or be dead a week after you hit the ground in active duty in Iraq.
About 15 years ago after high-school, I took my ASVABS and scored ridiculously high. I took the physical, was all set to join... and was trying to pick a position that suited me. There was nothing open for at least 3 years in my field of skill based on my scores.
They even had me brought into the office of some high-ranking person with lots of silverware on his chest. He tried to convince me that not serving was making me a "mockery of the system" and all kinds of reverse-psychology. So I asked him:
For the next 3 MONTHS, I had recruiters at my door at my home (3 hours away from the testing centers) asking me all kinds of questions and trying to push me to join. At that time, we had a 600 yard range on our property, and I could have easily out-shot almost any of them in a firing range test.
I never did, and now I'm glad I didn't. What a mess of deceit and lies, just to convince people to join. Anyone weaker than me (mentally and psychologically), would have probably accepted infantry.
I'm sorry, content providers pay for the content, advertisers do not.
Advertisers can offset that cost, but it shouldn't be the primary funding resource for the content. If it is, your business model is broken, not the client's browser.
Besides, how do you expect blind users and people using WAP, clipping, cell, PDA, and text-mode browsers to read your content if you don't support them.
We'll go elsewhere in either case. If you litter your pages with advertisements, or make it impossible to read it with a standard browser (which includes text-mode browsers), your "audience" will just find somewhere else to read it.
Fix your business model and stop pointing fingers at your target audience and passing the buck on to them. If you can't afford to present the content on your own, then don't.
Well that cinches it... now I can block Hotmail permanently, since they are refusing to deliver mail from my legitimate MX.
There are lots of alternatives to using Hotmail... Gmail, Yahoo mail, and others. Use them instead.
99% of the mail coming from Hotmail is spam anyway, so this gives me more reason to stop the spam coming from Hotmail to my users. I'm protecting my users by blocking Hotmail.
I for one am tired of Microsoft claiming to embrace standards by strangling off the air from the lungs of the real standards bodies. When Sender-ID is a widespread industry standard (i.e. in every MTA without patching), THEN I'll begin working with Microsoft to stop spam.
I will not be strong-armed by Microsoft, ever, especially where it affects MY server and MY users and MY mail. Period.
Until their OS stops being a malware replication engine, their services stop harboring spammers by the millions, and their patches actually FIX problems instead of CAUSING them, they can go pound sand.
Why punish the whitehats that are helping security?
Its not quite Cat and Mouse. See, the companies that get broken into or "schooled" by felons who break into their systems or breach their security, teach them how to secure things tighter. The kiddies that work around their "security patches" or other controls help these companies to tighten their access control and eventually they get better at security.
Except the ones doing it get jailed, even when they're ASKED to break into the systems. So Microsoft gets a free community security audit, and in some cases code that helps prove the flaw (i.e. an exploit in the wild). They fix the hole, arrest the offenders, and move on to the next hole.
See, its Cat and Cat really. Microsoft (and other companies) tighten their security, close holes, and arrest the perpetrators that taught them how to use security properly.
In the end, either all the holes are closed, or all the people willing to find them are in jail. Problem solved.
Or we can just stop spending our money on their trash.
Let them institute the broadcast flag. I'm not spending $7k on a flatpanel HDTV just so I can watch CSI and Law & Order a few times a week. Once my analog TV goes out of vogue and I can no longer watch TV, is when I cancel my cable TV subscription, save the $50/month and spend it on my bike or house renovations or whatever else comes to mind.
I definitely will NOT be renting DVDs any more (so I'll cancel NetFlix, saving another $20/month) and I won't be going to the movies (with Daughter v1.0, we don't go out to the movies anyway). So I'm saving close to $100/month in cable television costs, gas, and DVD rental charges. Sweet!
Like going outside for a walk?
How about getting an ice cream with the family?
What about spending a weekend at the beach, instead of staring at a dancing piece of colored glass (with high-definition, lacklustre programming).
No, I definitely see forcing everyone to upgrade to HDTV and implementing the broadcast flag as a good thing. Not only will it increase piracy of the existing material tenfold (and someone WILL bypass it), but it will cause people to get outside, cancel their cable subscriptions, and learn to do other things than sit inside and vegetate on the couch, getting obese...
Its all good.
They don't? You might want to check to make sure. ;)
And at 200 calls per-hour, they'll just stop answering the phones. Seriously, do you think they're going to listen?
Going down there in person is a hit-or-miss chance of actually speaking to someone with the power to change anything... or you'll end up in jail for "stalking" your senator.
The reason they probably slid this through on a rider so fast, was likely so people could NOT write to their senators in time.
I love my government more and more every day, don't you?
Ok, so here we have the FCC mandating that we have to all convert our "old analog" television sets to digital television sets by 2007 or something...
Then we have the "Broadcast Flag" being driven through on a rider, shh... nobody will notice.
And now they can basically control what you can record via your "Dish DVR" or "TiVo" or TV tuner card or whatever other device you want to use, because of Hollywood pressure.
We already see DVDs where you can't bypass the intro commercials to get to the navigational menus, even for DVDs which we bought, which should have paid for the removal of those commercials.
Next, we'll see television sets being sent a signal that ignores the remote control's "channel" buttons during commercials. You just won't be able to switch away during commercials... you'll be forced to watch them (or power off your TV).
How far are we from a Telescreen here, really? I mean... all they need is a way to peer back in, and a way to stop you from turning off the TV or the volume...
Orwell would be proud.
pilot-link has languages bindings for Perl, Python, Java, and TCL. We've got support for the latest Palm handhelds, including the Tungsten T5, LifeDrive and Tungsten E2.
pilot-link supports writing to external storage (SD cards, CompactFlash, MemoryStick), and we support libusb as well for a nice 600% speedup over the standard usb->serial layers present in Linux. Darwinusb uses native usb by default (no serial layers involved).
If you're interested in seeing the code, we've got a public CVS, Doxygenized code output, CVS statistics, and many other things.
Don't forget our mailing lists as well, if you're interested in following the discussions. I've written some detailed HOWTO documents as well to help users with their Palm devices.
I just released 0.12.0-pre4 a few days ago. Try it out... we need feedback and testers. (Bugs go here).
If you want to talk to us real-time, we're out on irc.pilot-link.org in #pilot-link. We'd love to hear from you...
You must be confused, because at no point did I say that Exchange was an MUA. Perhaps you're misunderstanding my statement about Exchange "rendering" email via the MSIE ActiveX control into a user's mailbox.
Yes, the MTA called Exchange does/used to do this, and its exactly how people's mailboxes were infected with the latest HTML trojan du jour without ever even opening your email to read it. I'm pretty sure Exchange closed off that hole by now, but it did/does exist, because that's how Exchange deals/dealt with incoming HTML email. It was a nasty one, especially for corporations with lots of Exchange servers and thousands of users.
Safari seems to be the only one, mostly because it deals with MDI differently than most applications.
Nothing else that I've tried (in the core OSX install) has this. Launch iTunes, right-click anywhere, and try to configure the preferences of iTunes, or the Help or anything else.
What I'd like, is to be able to configure and interact with the application itself through the application's window, without having to interact with the desktop.
I don't want to have to go aaaaaaaaaaaall the way up to the top of my 30" LCD to access the File menu, for an application sitting aaaaaaaaaaall the way down on the lower-right of the screen. Its wasteful and annoying, and that menubar at the top needs to go away... (for me, others may prefer it, I don't use menus, icons, titlebars, frames, docks, or wharfs).
But I see your point, its a desktop for "Home" users and those who wish to tinker with media (movies, video, music). Its most-definitely not for power users, workstations, or real development tasks.
Maybe the Intel processors will change the speed and usability, but it certainly won't be changing the price of the hardware as sold by Apple, so it'll still be out of my range. Besides, I can do anything OSX can do on my Linux machine anyway, at exponentially greater speeds, so why would I want an OSX machine for daily use?
"Real people" don't send webpages over port 25.
Firstly:
Now, what are you left with? Applications and hardware. What application are you using to "navigate any folder with more than just a few hundred images"? qiv? gthumb? f-spot?
iPhoto doesn't scale nearly as well as f-spot on Linux. f-spot imports 50,000 photos in about 60 seconds here, and displays them all in a matter of seconds. There have been numerous writeups about iPhoto crashing dozens of times while trying to import dozens of thousands of photos.
If you're using a slow or poorly-coded application to manage your photos, you might want to consider upgrading to something released this century.
Inconsistent with what? Itself? Or other environments?
What you might be calling inconsistent, I call choice. I like being able to decide which UI fits my working style the best. I don't like being strongarmed into a tiny little box, or forcing me to re-engineer my entire workflow just because the OS itself lacks the flexibility (i.e. OSX) to allow me to work how I want to work.
But I agree, when two applications, built with the same toolkit are using menus in a completely different way, that's bad.
But to expect that a gtk+ application and Qt application behave the same way, with the same menu structure and behavior, is just silly. The day that happens, is the day I find another toolkit to embrace.
That's like saying a Porsche should have the same dashboard and driving controls as a 4x4 pickup truck, because both can drive on the same roads and both have 4 wheels.
I don't get HTML email, actually, because its automatically stripped at the MTA, same for all of my users, and I've never heard a single complaint yet.
I was being simplistic when I suggested using HTML::Strip. The full milter uses a lot of other modules, including ::Strip, HTML::TableExtractor, and others... to make sure that the actual content of the email isn't lost, even if fonts and colors and images are.
But like I said... webpages go on port 80, email on port 25. Period.
Actually, I should reconfigure all outgoing HTML email to be sent as DocBook XML instead. What? You can't render DocBook XML? Oh, you should upgrade your mail client then. Maybe I'll use PostScript for HTML-based email instead, and blame those Outlook users who can't read standards-compliant attachment types.
See the problem here? I don't like email senders dictating what tools I use on my end to read their email. I shouldn't have to turn my mail client into a browser to read email, just like they shouldn't have to load OpenJade/DSSL or Ghostview to read my emails.
Most (if not all) source tarballs have a 'make uninstall' target, provided by autoconf. Some packages that don't use autoconf may not have it, but I've only run into less than a handful that do not. If they don't, just make a package out of it (dpkg-build, if Debian), or use InstallWatch and uninstall the trace it builds.
As for using --force, if you have to use --force, something else is wrong on your system. Fix that problem first, and you won't have to use --force. I haven't had to "force" any packages on my system in over 5 years now, and before that for 5+ years prior, I was using all source anyway.
There are rules there also. If the application needs more than one configuration file (such as sendmail), you'll have a directory /etc/mail, or /etc/dovecot or whatever, per-app. If the application only uses one config file, you'll find it "bare" in /etc (like rsyncd.conf for rsync or ppc.conf for PearPC). Simple and clean, the way it should be.
Mind explaining how an application checks its changes into a Windows directory structure, including all of the relevant keys in the registry hive? What about OSX putting things everywhere in /Applications, /Library, and the user's own home directory in scattered little directories and random .plist files and hidden files which Finder can't even see?
Trust me, Linux has the most-open, cleanest layout out there... but it could stand to have some improvement, but most of that is due to the flexibility of using whatever toolkit the application author decides to use, and where he wants to put his resources.
To paraphrase your own statement... these applications weren't written for you. You don't count.
The people using these applications are the developers themselves. If they find use in them, great. If they have horrible or ugly UIs in your opinion, so what? You don't count. The developer makes the choice of what works for them.
Don't be misled that we're writing software "for you", because we're not. We're writing it for us, to push technology or to get more use out of our hardware or simply because we wanted to see if we could connect two disparate systems together with some code glue.
If some random subset of "users" finds the applications useful but clunky or ugly, guess what? They have absolutely no say in the matter. They don't count.
When you begin to pay for our time, you can begin to dictate the rules. Until then, get back in line..
We do this in our spare time. Many/most of us have day jobs, families, hobbies. When someone tries to tell us what WE should be doing in OUR spare time, we just go and do something else. When you take the fun out of what we choose to do in our spare time by applying "rules" to our hobbies, it no longer becomes fun, and we go elsewhere.
Keep that in mind the next time you rant about how the software you got for free doesn't suit YOUR needs.
There are some very simple ways to solve this, en-masse...
Set up a milter that calls HTML::Strip to strip out all HTML from email. I don't want my webpages on port 25, just like I don't want my email on port 80. Users don't know or care anyway, set it up at the MTA side and they'll get clean emails.
Use a real MUA, like pine, mutt or other that allows you to see the actual content of the message, not its abstracted "rendered" equivalent. I simply hit 'h' in pine, and can see the resulting link that the phisher is trying to send me to... if it doesn't match the anchor tag, it gets deleted (and forwarded to spam-$USER, see dspam below).
Don't run Windows. Nothing need more be said here. When the same ActiveX control is used by Exchange to "render" email into your mailbox as MSIE to "render" maliscious HTML to your browser, you should be concerned.
Install and configure dspam. Problem solved after only a few phish emails come through. Simply send them back to your internal spam-$USER address and you'll never see them again, including future ones that are similar. If you want to see them again, go into the web interface and send them to your mail, which will automagically re-score them lower so they get through. My users and I haven't seen a single spam get through to any of our mailboxes in MONTHS, not a single one. Beats the pants off of anything else out there that I've used.
Education. Teach your users that they should never respond or click URLs in email, ever, period. Show them that PayPal and eBay and other companies never ask you to log back in to verify any personal information. Show them how these systems work, and reinforce it all the time by asking them questions about it. Drill it into them.
DShield is apparently used to throwing hundreds of false-postives, making the tool useless for actual production work.
I just checked my IP, and it says my IP appears 413 times in the db as an "attacker", which is utter garbage, since I run a very tightly locked-down Linux/FreeBSD farm behind that IP, and no "attacker" put any trojans on the boxes. Every single installed package matches the checksum that came with it.
Looks like they need to fix their tool a bit.
Our FSF attorney and the United States Copyright Agreement that we all had to fill out in order to litigate our claim in court ($25.00 + first and last 10 pages of source code sent in to the US Copyright Office, etc.)
(emphasis mine)
You didn't define "free" there, but it certainly isn't free as in freedom, even if it was obtained at no cost to the company.
Free Software (ala the GPL) is about making sure the code remains available, so others can take advantage of it, improve upon it, and share those improvements with others.
The BSD license, in almost every single commercial case, is used in exactly the opposite way of this mantra. Companies (like Microsoft, SCO, Sun and others) regularly take BSD code, improve upon it, and keep those improvements proprietary, closed, known only unto themselves. Nobody outside the nexus of the company can take advantage of those improvements.
They take the oxygen out of the community that gave them the code in the first place. Its selfish, rude, and a slap in the face of the developers and the community that helped them by writing code they found useful enough to use in their commercial products.
In other words... NOT free.
The Software Freedom Law Center does exactly that, and is headed up by Eben Moglen himself...
From their page: