Well, I'm a pobox.com customer, and my own experience of their new antispam measures is absolutely nothing but fantastic. They recently overhauled their spam filters, and the result (again, this is just my experience) has been stunning.
Of course, this says little about SPF itself, but at the very least, for what it's worth, the company that invented it comes with my recommendation.
...until 100% compliance is reached, non-SPF mail will still have to be accepted.
Well, the way pobox.com has done it, you can choose to have your E-mail "flagged." SPF is one of those possible flags. If an E-mail gets X (a user-definable number) or more flags, it can be rejected as spam. This makes SPF useful even when there isn't 100% compliance.
How will I be able to send mail using my own business' domain, as I do today, when it is going out via an ISP server?
I would think that if your ISP is interested in doing honest business, they would make the effort to list their own mail server.
If you're running your own mail server, then, yes, this is a valid concern.
The only way to kill spam is to stop having all email be totally, absolutely, "free" of charge in any quantity.
I don't deny that that would be a very effective way, but I don't agree that it is the only way.
He is an advocate for Linux and wants people to adopt it but when the military adopts it he become outraged. Doesn't this seem like a contradiction????
Yes, but the more significant contradiction is why he should resign from a community group to protest the actions of the military.
As best as I can tell the examiners are limited to prior patent applications and official publications in searching for prior art. Little room seems to be reserved for common sense.
I dunno... "Official publications" could cover a heck of a lot of ground...
And besides, it's probably awfully hard to place a reliable date on unofficial publications... whatever that would mean. They have to guard against fraud.
I've noticed that Windows XP Home already has an idea of privileges. On my own machine, I've created a "root" account that has administrator access, and a user account that doesn't.
The problem is installing older win32 programs that assume you have write permission to all files on the filesystem. I stubbornly refused to give my user account administrator privileges, and the result was that I had to open a command prompt and use the "CACLS" command to give Users write permission to specific files and directories. Sometimes, this required a certain amount of trial and error to reverse-engineer how the program works.
Recently, I installed XP on my parents' computer, and I briefly thought of suggesting they make user accounts that have no administrator privileges, but I abandoned that idea right quick, when I recalled how much hacking I had to do, to get things to work.
However, when applications catch up with XP in terms of being aware of user privileges, hacking won't be required any more, and Microsoft will be in a position to start educating common users about the difference between an Administrator vs. User account.
I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that there are many things that I really like about XP and the direction it's taking.
What you're saying puzzles me. You're absolutely right that this article is not about testing as a whole. The title should have been "Unit Testing Frameworks in Python."
But your statement that "this is about hacking" and not professional software development puzzles me.
I believe unit tests are a very legitimate piece of testing - a kind of first-line defence. They're intended to test individual software modules for their low-level behaviour. Typically, a developer would be expected to run them before submitting any change or bugfix, as a kind of "smoke test" to make sure things are okay. Certainly, some organizations might make the mistake of thinking that this kind of testing is all that's required - which is dreadfully wrong - but I don't think there's anything hackish about it.
In a large organization, the testing team might not consider it testing because unit tests are necessarily maintained and performed by the developers only.
But I would argue the exact opposite with regards to underlining the difference between professional software development and hacking. If you don't have unit tests, I would say that what you're doing is closer to hacking.
Just a minute. Don't for an instant believe that user interface design is just about style - pretty colours and slick marketing - because it's not. It's just as much about function and utility as any other aspect of software design. It really does belong more in the engineering department than the art department or marketing.
I don't deny that the software foundations needed to be laid beforehand, but he's right on the money when he says that UI development is the hard part.
I'll admit my bias, because I am a professional user interface designer. But I tell you, I'm starting to long to get back to software development, where I have my roots. It's a purer and simpler world.
This is only somewhat related, but hey, this is Slashdot.
I was recently setting up a firewall/gateway machine for my parents and was annoyed to discover that the modem they were using had no free linux support. I had to buy a driver for it (for a reasonable price, mind you). I was then even more annoyed when it turned out that the driver installer needed gcc and kernel headers.
In retrospect, I guess it's understandable, and I'm not going to second-guess the people who decided they couldn't distribute a set of object files, but I still balked at having to install a compiler on a firewall.
My own gateway box, I'm glad to say, doesn't have gcc, binutils, and other such nonsense installed on it. It's as spare and as focused on its role as I can make it. Fewer packages, fewer security holes.
of the copious postings in which people are ranting, "this is not science!" "this is claptrap!" "obvious!" and by implication, "this is not worth discussing!"
I'd respond, but I don't want to make fools of the ranters.
The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." [snip] "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.
That sounds amazingly like my process as user interface designer and developer. Except that, in the first stage, I'm grumpy just because I have to mediate so many heated design meetings.
Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace
That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book, and at the time, anyone who knew anything about the internet laughed at the media people who bandied the word around as though Gibson's vision had anything in common with SMTP, NNTP, or HTTP.
Then we all watched, horrified, as the word set up shop, settled down, and refused to go away... Leading to all manner of cyber-this and cyber-that.
I'm replying to my own posting, and maybe that's a bit gauche, but, oh well...
Clearly, what they should have done is to follow Prince's lead and just choose a logo and say, "that's what it's called!" forcing everyone to refer to it as "the OS formerly known as Lindows."
I originally intended this as a joke, but the more I think of it, the more I think it could be a serious marketing plan. Erase any pronounceable name from the product line, and people are forced to use its former name to refer to it. None of that would be official, and Microsoft could do nothing about it.
Obviously, the company could not do anything that could be construed as influencing the public to use the word "Lindows," and that would be a gamble that they'd have to take, with this scheme. However, if they make a press release stating the name change (or name removal, rather), and laced it liberally with the phrase "OS formerly known as Lindows" then I suspect the informal moniker would stick.
They would probably need some kind of name that can be rendered in a western font, for invoices and the like, so maybe they could just choose some crazy set of letters, like "XZWUQMG," a name that nobody would really want to use.
Press releases would be kinda hard... So it's not a perfect plan, but it's far more reasonable than I thought originally!
Then again, I'm not sure how familiar the Dutch are with "the artist formerly known as Prince," and whether that name caught on there.
Clearly, what they should have done is to follow Prince's lead and just choose a logo and say, "that's what it's called!" forcing everyone to refer to it as "the OS formerly known as Lindows."
Oh.....and there are just as many different spellings of the word too.
Well, that's only true if you are spelling Japanese using the English alphabet. But then, you're imposing a completely foreign system of writing on the language, so what do you expect?
If you mean spelling using Japanese letters, then (as long as we exclude the whole kanji issue), Japanese spelling is absolutely dead simple. Of course, drop kanji into the mix, and you get possibly the most complex writing system in the world...
On the topic of spelling, English speakers have no right to feel superior. English spelling is possibly the craziest system that could be imposed on such a small set of letters (although - maybe it's because it's such a small set of letters). Take the sentence:
"Though the cough was rough, I shall plough through."
(And for Americans, "plough" = "plow".) Notice that all the words end with "ough" but none of the pronunciations are the same! That's just crazy.
(And if you try and argue that "plow" is more regular, I'd have to ask why it doesn't rhyme with "blow" or "flow"?)
The languages that are lost are the ones that do not contain the technical leanguage to survive contact with whatever absorbs them.
Are you kidding?? I'm not sure how literally and how completely you mean this, but I very much doubt that technology is such a prime factor as you imply.
I'm not a linguist, but I'd be pretty sure that the death of each and every language in history would make for its own PhD thesis. There would be too many factors and too many interactions to boil it down to such a simple formula. Besides technology, there's culture, economics, religion, and probably a slew of other factors that neither of us could imagine.
Perhaps the new knowledge would be a great benefit [...] But until that new knowlege arrives (through hard work or serendipity), it doesn't matter.
Well, if you define "matter" as "having an immediate benefit" then, yes, these things don't matter.
But I would be a bit more broad with my definition, and if something might be of benefit in the future, we should be motivated to work towards it today. Since it makes little sense to be motivated about something that doesn't matter, I would argue that these abstract ideas do matter.
Regardless, new ideas - great. Bust 'em out and put them through their paces. I could go for a better life.
I'd think that this means that it does matter to you in some way... If we honestly decide that pure science doesn't matter, then that implies that nobody should be motivated to "put them through their paces," as you say. Don't you think?
Are planes going to drop from the sky? Will we be thrown out of orbit?
It only matters if you are at all grateful for the technological society we live in, which was built on the shoulders of all those giants who devoted their lives doing the pure research to uncover the scientific explanations for phenomena in our universe, all of which "didn't matter" at the time.
Unless you're a luddite hermit, living off the land in some remote place, in which case, all I want to know is... How is it that your Slashdot ID is lower than mine?
I've always wondered how the scientific community would react if someone actually discovered a grand unified theory that works unbelievably well in every concievable respect, but is also unbelievably kludgey?
Basically: what if God had to debug and patch the universe over and over? What if it really, really is a big fat blob of kludgey spaghetti code?
How many scientists would accept that? Considering the value that scientists place on elegance, I don't think many would. In fact, I don't know if I would, myself!
The reason watches with moving hands are so successful is that [...] they are extremely fast and easy to read. [...] On a watch I can get an approximate time (it's almost 4:30pm) in a glance.
I think we agree, but I would put it this way: the act of reading an analog display degrades gracefully. If you want accuracy, you can take your time and examine the tick marks closely. If you glance at it, you get a general idea.
With a digital watch, if you glance at it and you only manage to catch the last two digits, you're not much the wiser.
Take a Page from Perl Philosophy
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's just like perl philosophy says: "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."
Trivial things like turning on your cell phone should be obvious - you shouldn't need a manual. This should not be compromised in the name of harder things like playing games or browsing the web. It's okay to make the user consult a manual for those.
And if you're supporting those harder things, you must have a comprehensive manual, because the people who want to do the harder things will, in the end, read it.
Slashdot Mirror
By coincidence, the UNIX clock will overflow on my birthday. In fact, it will almost overflow in my birth-hour. How cool is that?!
You're right, it's not cool, it's just geeky and lame. But I wrote about it on my website.
How lame is that?
Well, I'm a pobox.com customer, and my own experience of their new antispam measures is absolutely nothing but fantastic. They recently overhauled their spam filters, and the result (again, this is just my experience) has been stunning.
Of course, this says little about SPF itself, but at the very least, for what it's worth, the company that invented it comes with my recommendation.
Well, the way pobox.com has done it, you can choose to have your E-mail "flagged." SPF is one of those possible flags. If an E-mail gets X (a user-definable number) or more flags, it can be rejected as spam. This makes SPF useful even when there isn't 100% compliance.
How will I be able to send mail using my own business' domain, as I do today, when it is going out via an ISP server?
I would think that if your ISP is interested in doing honest business, they would make the effort to list their own mail server.
If you're running your own mail server, then, yes, this is a valid concern.
The only way to kill spam is to stop having all email be totally, absolutely, "free" of charge in any quantity.
I don't deny that that would be a very effective way, but I don't agree that it is the only way.
He is an advocate for Linux and wants people to adopt it but when the military adopts it he become outraged. Doesn't this seem like a contradiction????
Yes, but the more significant contradiction is why he should resign from a community group to protest the actions of the military.
I'm at a total loss to understand.
OSRM Declares Linux Free of Copyright Violations
Whoa, they can do that?? Well, hell...
I, DeadVulcan, declare that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction.
As best as I can tell the examiners are limited to prior patent applications and official publications in searching for prior art. Little room seems to be reserved for common sense.
I dunno... "Official publications" could cover a heck of a lot of ground...
And besides, it's probably awfully hard to place a reliable date on unofficial publications... whatever that would mean. They have to guard against fraud.
What do you mean by "common sense?"
I often have Akerue! moments.
Those are when you knew something, but suddenly, it's gone, and you can't for the life of you remember. I hate those.
I've noticed that Windows XP Home already has an idea of privileges. On my own machine, I've created a "root" account that has administrator access, and a user account that doesn't.
The problem is installing older win32 programs that assume you have write permission to all files on the filesystem. I stubbornly refused to give my user account administrator privileges, and the result was that I had to open a command prompt and use the "CACLS" command to give Users write permission to specific files and directories. Sometimes, this required a certain amount of trial and error to reverse-engineer how the program works.
Recently, I installed XP on my parents' computer, and I briefly thought of suggesting they make user accounts that have no administrator privileges, but I abandoned that idea right quick, when I recalled how much hacking I had to do, to get things to work.
However, when applications catch up with XP in terms of being aware of user privileges, hacking won't be required any more, and Microsoft will be in a position to start educating common users about the difference between an Administrator vs. User account.
I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that there are many things that I really like about XP and the direction it's taking.
What you're saying puzzles me. You're absolutely right that this article is not about testing as a whole. The title should have been "Unit Testing Frameworks in Python."
But your statement that "this is about hacking" and not professional software development puzzles me.
I believe unit tests are a very legitimate piece of testing - a kind of first-line defence. They're intended to test individual software modules for their low-level behaviour. Typically, a developer would be expected to run them before submitting any change or bugfix, as a kind of "smoke test" to make sure things are okay. Certainly, some organizations might make the mistake of thinking that this kind of testing is all that's required - which is dreadfully wrong - but I don't think there's anything hackish about it.
In a large organization, the testing team might not consider it testing because unit tests are necessarily maintained and performed by the developers only.
But I would argue the exact opposite with regards to underlining the difference between professional software development and hacking. If you don't have unit tests, I would say that what you're doing is closer to hacking.
And I was mildly surprised when it allowed me to continue without having checked something.
Then, later, I got
11. Do you have your own code library?
To which my answer was no. This was followed by
12. Did you write all the code in that library?
and
13. Would you take your code library with you, if switching from one employer to another?
To which I can't give meaningful answers. But now, it won't let me continue without giving responses!
So the only option left for me was
Exit this survey >>
What a crock.
Why would they name themselves Y (no pun intended)?
Why not?
That's why I think they should call it Y!11R6
Or maybe it should be Y!Y11R6... Y!X11R6? Or heck, just get to the point and call it !X11R6.
Function before style.
Just a minute. Don't for an instant believe that user interface design is just about style - pretty colours and slick marketing - because it's not. It's just as much about function and utility as any other aspect of software design. It really does belong more in the engineering department than the art department or marketing.
I don't deny that the software foundations needed to be laid beforehand, but he's right on the money when he says that UI development is the hard part.
I'll admit my bias, because I am a professional user interface designer. But I tell you, I'm starting to long to get back to software development, where I have my roots. It's a purer and simpler world.
This is only somewhat related, but hey, this is Slashdot.
I was recently setting up a firewall/gateway machine for my parents and was annoyed to discover that the modem they were using had no free linux support. I had to buy a driver for it (for a reasonable price, mind you). I was then even more annoyed when it turned out that the driver installer needed gcc and kernel headers.
In retrospect, I guess it's understandable, and I'm not going to second-guess the people who decided they couldn't distribute a set of object files, but I still balked at having to install a compiler on a firewall.
My own gateway box, I'm glad to say, doesn't have gcc, binutils, and other such nonsense installed on it. It's as spare and as focused on its role as I can make it. Fewer packages, fewer security holes.
of the copious postings in which people are ranting, "this is not science!" "this is claptrap!" "obvious!" and by implication, "this is not worth discussing!"
I'd respond, but I don't want to make fools of the ranters.
Heh. Take that stick of irony and smoke it!
The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." [snip] "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.
That sounds amazingly like my process as user interface designer and developer. Except that, in the first stage, I'm grumpy just because I have to mediate so many heated design meetings.
Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace
That's saying a bit too much... The term "cyberspace" was coined because of Gibson's popular book, and at the time, anyone who knew anything about the internet laughed at the media people who bandied the word around as though Gibson's vision had anything in common with SMTP, NNTP, or HTTP.
Then we all watched, horrified, as the word set up shop, settled down, and refused to go away... Leading to all manner of cyber-this and cyber-that.
Sigh.
I'm replying to my own posting, and maybe that's a bit gauche, but, oh well...
Clearly, what they should have done is to follow Prince's lead and just choose a logo and say, "that's what it's called!" forcing everyone to refer to it as "the OS formerly known as Lindows."
I originally intended this as a joke, but the more I think of it, the more I think it could be a serious marketing plan. Erase any pronounceable name from the product line, and people are forced to use its former name to refer to it. None of that would be official, and Microsoft could do nothing about it.
Obviously, the company could not do anything that could be construed as influencing the public to use the word "Lindows," and that would be a gamble that they'd have to take, with this scheme. However, if they make a press release stating the name change (or name removal, rather), and laced it liberally with the phrase "OS formerly known as Lindows" then I suspect the informal moniker would stick.
They would probably need some kind of name that can be rendered in a western font, for invoices and the like, so maybe they could just choose some crazy set of letters, like "XZWUQMG," a name that nobody would really want to use.
Press releases would be kinda hard... So it's not a perfect plan, but it's far more reasonable than I thought originally!
Then again, I'm not sure how familiar the Dutch are with "the artist formerly known as Prince," and whether that name caught on there.
Clearly, what they should have done is to follow Prince's lead and just choose a logo and say, "that's what it's called!" forcing everyone to refer to it as "the OS formerly known as Lindows."
Oh.....and there are just as many different spellings of the word too.
Well, that's only true if you are spelling Japanese using the English alphabet. But then, you're imposing a completely foreign system of writing on the language, so what do you expect?
If you mean spelling using Japanese letters, then (as long as we exclude the whole kanji issue), Japanese spelling is absolutely dead simple. Of course, drop kanji into the mix, and you get possibly the most complex writing system in the world...
On the topic of spelling, English speakers have no right to feel superior. English spelling is possibly the craziest system that could be imposed on such a small set of letters (although - maybe it's because it's such a small set of letters). Take the sentence:
"Though the cough was rough, I shall plough through."
(And for Americans, "plough" = "plow".) Notice that all the words end with "ough" but none of the pronunciations are the same! That's just crazy.
(And if you try and argue that "plow" is more regular, I'd have to ask why it doesn't rhyme with "blow" or "flow"?)
The languages that are lost are the ones that do not contain the technical leanguage to survive contact with whatever absorbs them.
Are you kidding?? I'm not sure how literally and how completely you mean this, but I very much doubt that technology is such a prime factor as you imply.
I'm not a linguist, but I'd be pretty sure that the death of each and every language in history would make for its own PhD thesis. There would be too many factors and too many interactions to boil it down to such a simple formula. Besides technology, there's culture, economics, religion, and probably a slew of other factors that neither of us could imagine.
I could be wrong, but I'd be amazed if so...
Perhaps the new knowledge would be a great benefit [...] But until that new knowlege arrives (through hard work or serendipity), it doesn't matter.
Well, if you define "matter" as "having an immediate benefit" then, yes, these things don't matter.
But I would be a bit more broad with my definition, and if something might be of benefit in the future, we should be motivated to work towards it today. Since it makes little sense to be motivated about something that doesn't matter, I would argue that these abstract ideas do matter.
Regardless, new ideas - great. Bust 'em out and put them through their paces. I could go for a better life.
I'd think that this means that it does matter to you in some way... If we honestly decide that pure science doesn't matter, then that implies that nobody should be motivated to "put them through their paces," as you say. Don't you think?
Are planes going to drop from the sky? Will we be thrown out of orbit?
It only matters if you are at all grateful for the technological society we live in, which was built on the shoulders of all those giants who devoted their lives doing the pure research to uncover the scientific explanations for phenomena in our universe, all of which "didn't matter" at the time.
Unless you're a luddite hermit, living off the land in some remote place, in which case, all I want to know is... How is it that your Slashdot ID is lower than mine?
I've always wondered how the scientific community would react if someone actually discovered a grand unified theory that works unbelievably well in every concievable respect, but is also unbelievably kludgey?
Basically: what if God had to debug and patch the universe over and over? What if it really, really is a big fat blob of kludgey spaghetti code?
How many scientists would accept that? Considering the value that scientists place on elegance, I don't think many would. In fact, I don't know if I would, myself!
The reason watches with moving hands are so successful is that [...] they are extremely fast and easy to read. [...] On a watch I can get an approximate time (it's almost 4:30pm) in a glance.
I think we agree, but I would put it this way: the act of reading an analog display degrades gracefully. If you want accuracy, you can take your time and examine the tick marks closely. If you glance at it, you get a general idea.
With a digital watch, if you glance at it and you only manage to catch the last two digits, you're not much the wiser.
It's just like perl philosophy says: "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."
Trivial things like turning on your cell phone should be obvious - you shouldn't need a manual. This should not be compromised in the name of harder things like playing games or browsing the web. It's okay to make the user consult a manual for those.
And if you're supporting those harder things, you must have a comprehensive manual, because the people who want to do the harder things will, in the end, read it.
All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?
Yes.
Next story?