Now try and tell me it doesn't make sense to switch.
As long as it is economically viable, yes, it makes sense to switch. The problem with alternative energy isn't that we intentionally avoid it, it's that it's either 1) Too expensive. 2) Inefficient, i.e. your car does 0 to 60 in 3 minutes or so.
As soon as the cost and efficiency is solved, absolutely, your plan sounds great! Just don't try to legislate it into place before the technology is ready. That's when you'll find people opposing your plan.
Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost certain.
Face it, that has yet to be proven. Even if the screen shots provided are correct, it has yet to be determined who put those comments in each code and when. SCO could have just as easily inserted them in their code at the time because it was easier than developing it themselves. Or perhaps they inserted the code intentionally so that later they could say "See? It's the same." Or maybe SCO contributed the code to their Linux distribution? Or, yes, perhaps someone took it from SCO inappropriately and inserted it in Linux--in which case THAT PERSON (or company) should be SCO's target, not Linux and Linux users worldwide.
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
And I'm sure that as soon as SCO acts reasonably and friggin' tells the world what sections of code they have a beef with, that's exactly what will happen regardless of whether SCO's claims are valid or not.
Much of the information on countries provided by the CIA is a compilation of available information--"available", in this case, means published by the Russian government. You don't actually think the CIA went through Russia and interviewed 10,000 people at random and found that only 30 couldn't read, did you?
Yeah, and in Mexico the official unemployment rate is 3%--and they're *complaining* about that. Of course, 3% is B.S. It's much much higher but they say 3% because it plays better than the truth. Likewise, I don't doubt 99.6% is optimistic.
RMS is just ridiculously over-the-top, and should wake up and smell th coffee.
So it would seem. Anyone that suggests that "non-free" software is "predatory social system that keeps people in a state of domination and division" needs a clue. It's not the cost of the software that keeps people in a state of domination or division. It's the companies or organizations that are responsible for the software, regardless of whether or not they charge.
For example, Linux is free but there is more division in the Linux community than there is with Windows. The freedom and free cost of Linux leads to division in the form of different distributions and different GUIs.
Windows costs money and there is much less division since what Microsoft says is law. But, obviously, they dominate the market.
These people that believe that ALL commercial software should disappear and everything should be free need a clue. Open source and free is great for many projects and not applicable to others. Linux zealots (and I am a very happy Linux user myself) need to realize that commercial software is a part of reality and will continue to be a part of reality. It's great that a lot of software is free and open source--especially the operating system itself--but as long as Linux zealots bash commercial software you'll find very little commercial software for Linux... and those that need that commercial software will have to choice but to stick with Windows.
We must welcome both commercial and free software, both closed-source and open-source for Linux.
Sounds a lot like you were considering creating a closed source program that you only distribute as binaries. Good, we don't need those, stay away.
That's a good way to keep Linux at its current (low) marketshare.
I think open source is great. I don't deny that I use many open source apps, primarily those that come with my Linux distribution. But I also paid $89 for Win4Lin so I can still use my Windows legacy apps under Linux. It's a good app that blows away Wine and is well worth the $89. VMWare is another option if you need compatability that the open-source community hasn't been able to provide--but that costs several hundred dollars. Both are closed-source.
The fact is, open source is great but it isn't for every company and product. You're not going to see Oracle go open source. I doubt you'll see VMWare or Win4Lin go open source. All those cool Windows games (which I don't play but apparently many others do) are never going to be open-source yet seem to be one of the main reasons people give for Linux being slow to be adopted at home. There are plenty of good applications we need on Linux--but if you're going to encourage closed-source to stay away then you'll never see these apps on Linux and Linux we will continue to live in a Microsoft-dominated world where nothing commercial, be it games or end user apps, is available for Linux.
This problem isn't really a problem if you go with open source approach. If it's open source and the program has enough users, it'll not only fix this problem, but also improve the overall quality of the program. If the source is out there, someone will provide binaries for whatever platforms there are.
99.5% of the users in the world aren't going to know how to make a given source compile under their particular Linux version. And probably 99% don't even want to compile it, they want to run an install program and it's done. And probably 90% will be tired of looking for an app and finding it available for every Linux distribution and version EXCEPT, apparently,the one they have. I'm a software developer and that's what *I* want.
Installing Win4Lin was a dream because I just ran a setup program and it ran. I don't have to go out and find a ton of dependencies and install and/or compile them.
My target market is microcontroller compilers. This is a niche market and those that are interested in the product are few and far between, and also probably not Linux hackers. To expect that the app would flourish under open-source is wrong. Rather, my target customers will just get a Windows app that they can install and get to their real work.
I understand the interest of open source and I can't argue with its success in many apps. But you are wrong if you think that Linux doesn't need closed-source apps. The lack of commercial, closed-source apps is what's keeping people on Windows. If the Win4Lin closed-source app wasn't available I wouldn't have been able to make the decision to upgrade to Linux. So you can thank that closed-source, binary-only application for winning one more user from Windows to Linux.
When you compile a distro say... Debian, with gcc 2.x, when they upgrade to 3.x in 5 years or so, all the packages will be broken at that point...
Which is, of course, a *big* problem that Linux still has. I've migrated completely to Linux and, even as a software developer, my concern is that I really have no clue if/when a binary will break in terms of going to a new version of Linux.
I once wrote a CD Player application for Windows 95 back when the Windows 95's CD player sucked. I stuck it online and sold it as shareware for $15 a pop. I stopped caring about the program sometime around Windows 98 but there are apparently sites out there that still have it available for downloading. And if you install it on Windows XP, guess what? It still works. It's been 8 years since I compiled that binary and it still works on the latest version of Windows even though Microsoft compilers have gone through, what, 4 or 5 major versions sicne then?
I personally am tired of both Microsoft and Windows. That, and a lot of other standard reasons, is why I upgraded to Linux. But the whole situation where a binary program stops working at some point is bad news. There are some apps I'd like to develop for Linux but, quite frankly, I'm not inclined to do so at this point because it's a huge effort to test the applications on so many different versions of so many different distributions. And when some new version comes along it's entirely probable that the binary will stop working. It's just not worth it.
This is the same reason that no software house will ever produce bug free products. If you make a perfect application that does the job then there's no incentive to upgrade.
That's nonsense. I worked briefly as a network administrator/PC support for a 100-seat company in the early 90's--but I'm really a software developer and that's what I've done my entire professional career except for my 1.5-year stint as the network admin.
As a software developer I can assure you that I *always* try to make my code bug-free with as many features as possible. Like everyone, I never achieve that goal 100%. It's not because I want to milk the customers--it's because sooner or later you have to get the product out the door. Forgot sales-related deadlines and think practically: If you're developing a product you can just keep adding all the cool stuff you know you want, but you'll never sell a single copy until you get version 1.0 out there. Then you can have some income to add the rest of the stuff. A company that waits until it's product is "done" is a company that will go out of business because it will never have a single sale since it's product will be in development perpetually. Whether you should charge your customers an upgrade fee to move from 1.x to 2.0 is questionable, though.
I can also tell you, when I was in charge of that company's network and hardware I would definitely pick the most reliable hardware I could. I'm not thinking "Oh, my job is at risk if I make things so reliable they don't need me." You do the best job you can with the money available. Unfortunately, I didn't have an infinite budget so I bought the best computers I could with the budget available.
The whole idea that software developers intentionally make their own lives harder by "installing" bugs and/or that IT departments would increase their daily support burden on purpose is both cynical and silly. I've been in both positions and have never seen anything of the sort.
Actually, the drones were sent all over the *galaxy*. In the movie we are only shown that a single drone hits Hoth. Which, of course, always seemed pretty silly to me since what's the probability of the drone hitting anywhere near where the rebel base happens to be? That lends credibility to the thought that many were sent to each planet--but we certainly weren't shown that in the movie.
Sorry, I don't usually bicker about movie details in Slashdot posts--but this has always been something that bothered me since I was a kid. What were the odds of a single drone happpening upon the rebel base on an entire planet?
This has nothing to do with deregulation. There have been huge blackouts decades before there was deregulation. Heck, this same grid was the same one that caused the big blackout in about the same area in the late 60's, IIRC.
There is no inherent reason why deregulation will cause problems. In fact, the opposite is true. But electric deregulation combined with new environmental regulation is definitely a bad thing. You have the electric sector needing to do one thing and an environmental sector impeding that. Which is more important is open to debate, but you can't ignore the fact that environmental regulations limit what often needs to be done to keep the electrical sector functioning.
I think the best way to generate random numbers is to somehow "digitize" SCO's daily claims. They seem about as random and non-predictable as any random number generator I've seen.:)
We love DUBYA!!! WOOHOOO!!!!... How about those 500,000 dead Iraqi children from sanctions?
Oh, the ones perpetuated by Clinton instead of reaching a solution to the problem during his nearly decade in office?
Had to go and invade the place and bomb them back into the dark ages to add insult to injury?
At least in 10 years Iraq will probably be in pretty good shape. Had decisive action been taken any time during Clinton's time in office Iraq would either be well on the way to recovery or pretty much totally recovered by now.
David Boies' law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, represents SCO. Boies represented former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election recount and tried the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft.
Wow... Sounds like just the winning lawyer I'd want on my side in a battle against a multi-billion dollar company.:)
To address the change in risk attitudes if your life expectancy is longer - yes, if you are rational, you should be more risk averse since you have more to loose. But who says that people are rational?
Perhaps. But I don't think that such decisions come down to "how many years of life am I risking" as much as "I am risking not being alive tomorrow." When you make a decision regarding a dangerous activity I don't think "Well, I wouldn't have done this 30 years ago, but now that I only have probably 20 years left to gamble, what the heck."
In fact, people generally do more life-threatening, foolish things when they are younger. That's partly due to the immortality one feels being young and also due to a lack of judgement--but everything I've seen in life suggests that people become more risk-averse as they grow older and have less time left rather than the opposite being true.
Nah, many small businesses have to deal with multiple currencies. That used to be for the international "big boys" such as IBM, but that's no longer the case.
That's half a billion dollars. I think Microsoft has, what, 40 billion? You can argue they still have 39.5, but losing about 1.3% of their reserves on a podunk little company with a silly 'ol lawsuit is still an important message.
Like someone else said, that's more than the Justice Department was able to do in 5 years.
Well, it's happening. I know a major university in Mexico has gotten hit. My sister-in-law was noting major instability in her system until she disconnected it from the network (in a moment of brillance, considering she's not a computer wizard) and rebooted. She reported it worked fine without the network connected, but with the network connected all kinds of instability.
A friend of mine in San Antonio--also not a computer wizard--who works from home over a cable modem also was hit early in the day. Her computer was rebooting every 5 minutes or so. She couldn't even stay online long enough to get an IM conversation--she eventually called me on the phone and asked what I thought. I hadn't heard about the virus yet so I told her that her Windows had either gone unstable and she'd probably have to reinstall Windows, or she had been hit by a virus and also might have to reinstall Windows.
Then I read about this. So I don't know exactly who is or isn't affected, nor if there's some other way the worm can get loosed in a local network (I assume the university in Mexico has a firewall!), but it's definitely causing problems for many mortals.:)
I am happily running Linux behind a wirewall, though, so I just get to watch and grin at the hidden message left by the virus writer. "Billy gates why do you let this happen? Stop making money and fix your software.":)
Can businesses afford to deploy Linux with the SCO "threat"? My question is: Cant they afford NOT to?:)
Other applications (QuickBooks) suck. QuickBooks either sucks so bad it doesn't do a lot of the accounting stuff I "learned" in the university or they had a bunch of accountants write the software that know nothing about usability. This means that the software is about as easy to use and understand as the archaeic accounting programs that were developed in mainframe text environments or under DOS. Regardless, the end result is that I have not been able to make QuickBooks do everything I wanted it to and, quite frankly, constantly get the feeling that the program is either extremely limited or just so stupidly designed so as to make things too difficult to accomplish.
In the past QuickBooks has pretty much been it for small businesses, and is one of the reasons I bought Win4Lin when I migrated to Linux--so I could still run QuickBooks. But I hate it with a passion.
I've been wanting to investigate GnuCash for sometime. When I was on RedHat 7.3 I couldn't even get the damn thing to compile and I couldn't resolve all the dependency issues, so I eventually gave up. Now that I've upgraded to RedHat 9.0 GnuCash was one of the installable packages--and I installed it.
It is my intention to play around with it and see if I can migrate my small business finances to it and abandon QuickBooks altogether. Even if GnuCash were to suck as bad as QuickBooks I'd like to ditch QuickBooks just on principle. QuickBooks doesn't even support multiple currencies, which is just silly.
"They" is "me." Or rather "us." But I was one of the primary developers.
Better would be if the software would be running at your ISP instead of some other company that will fetch all your mail and filter it. I'm sure more people would be comfortable with an extra-charge spamfilter from their ISP than with some external party filtering all their mail.
A valid point, and we do plan on making it available to ISPs. One step at a time, though.:)
My ISP offers spam filtering but it is based on DNS blacklists that filter on sending or relaying SMTP server address. That sucks.
True, that's always been a rather ineffective way at blocking spam--at least when you consider the potential false positives. We are thinking, though, of making DNS-based blacklists available--i.e., that whether or not a given IP is currently in a DNS blacklist can be used as part of the decision-making process in rating a message as spam or not. A DNS blacklist can be useful at helping making a decision regarding whether a specific message is spam, but I wouldn't certainly make it the ONLY factor in the decision.
You have pretty much described PrismEmail. It, among other things, does Bayesian filtering. It's server-based so you don't have to download the spam. It's user-specific so you have your own Bayesian corpus that applies only to you, not server-wide. You can inspect blocked email on the server at any time or wait for a single spam report each night to see a list of all email blocked--a quick click will then release any message that was misclassified. And you can just click on a link in the headers of a message if it was spam and it got through.
Really, all the people that think that server-side Bayesian filtering is impossible are confused. No, you can't have a single corpus that applies to everyone on the server--that defeats the purpose of Bayesian. But you definitely can do the user-specific filtering on the server. Let the server do the work, you only download the good stuff, and there's nothing to install locally.
Bayesian filter should be implemented in the client, which, thankfully, is becoming more and more common.
Nah, all spam filters (including Bayesian) should be implemented at the *server* before the user has to download spam... but even though the filters are on the server they should be configurable and applicable to each individual user. Then you get the benefit of user-specific spam filtering but it happens at the server where it belongs.
Oh yeah, I assume they either want you to visit federalfundingprogram.com out of curiosity to see WTF is going on, or have you send an email to info@federalfundingprogram.com which will surely come back with some kind of additional spam and confirm your address is working. Either that or they want you to google for the stuff they mention--presumably the stuff the sell is near the top of the Google list and it's a way to get you to see it even though you think you're doing a service for someone else.
Anyway, been there, seen that, been filtered by my Bayesian.:)
I'm amazed it's taken this long for someone to talk about it. I had a multi-player online game back when I ran a BBS in 1985--multi-player in that each player made one move per day since they weren't all online at the same time. I wanted to charge $5 a piece and then whoever won the game would win the money everyone had put in. I decided against it because I figured it could be construed as gambling and I could get in trouble.
Little did I know at the time that even in 2003 law enforcement scarcely cares about outright fraud conducted online--in retrospect I'm sure I could've gotten away with it in 1985 and we all would have had some fun with some money in play. Oh well.
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As long as it is economically viable, yes, it makes sense to switch. The problem with alternative energy isn't that we intentionally avoid it, it's that it's either 1) Too expensive. 2) Inefficient, i.e. your car does 0 to 60 in 3 minutes or so.
As soon as the cost and efficiency is solved, absolutely, your plan sounds great! Just don't try to legislate it into place before the technology is ready. That's when you'll find people opposing your plan.
Face it, that has yet to be proven. Even if the screen shots provided are correct, it has yet to be determined who put those comments in each code and when. SCO could have just as easily inserted them in their code at the time because it was easier than developing it themselves. Or perhaps they inserted the code intentionally so that later they could say "See? It's the same." Or maybe SCO contributed the code to their Linux distribution? Or, yes, perhaps someone took it from SCO inappropriately and inserted it in Linux--in which case THAT PERSON (or company) should be SCO's target, not Linux and Linux users worldwide.
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
And I'm sure that as soon as SCO acts reasonably and friggin' tells the world what sections of code they have a beef with, that's exactly what will happen regardless of whether SCO's claims are valid or not.
So it would seem. Anyone that suggests that "non-free" software is "predatory social system that keeps people in a state of domination and division" needs a clue. It's not the cost of the software that keeps people in a state of domination or division. It's the companies or organizations that are responsible for the software, regardless of whether or not they charge.
For example, Linux is free but there is more division in the Linux community than there is with Windows. The freedom and free cost of Linux leads to division in the form of different distributions and different GUIs.
Windows costs money and there is much less division since what Microsoft says is law. But, obviously, they dominate the market.
These people that believe that ALL commercial software should disappear and everything should be free need a clue. Open source and free is great for many projects and not applicable to others. Linux zealots (and I am a very happy Linux user myself) need to realize that commercial software is a part of reality and will continue to be a part of reality. It's great that a lot of software is free and open source--especially the operating system itself--but as long as Linux zealots bash commercial software you'll find very little commercial software for Linux... and those that need that commercial software will have to choice but to stick with Windows.
We must welcome both commercial and free software, both closed-source and open-source for Linux.
That's a good way to keep Linux at its current (low) marketshare.
I think open source is great. I don't deny that I use many open source apps, primarily those that come with my Linux distribution. But I also paid $89 for Win4Lin so I can still use my Windows legacy apps under Linux. It's a good app that blows away Wine and is well worth the $89. VMWare is another option if you need compatability that the open-source community hasn't been able to provide--but that costs several hundred dollars. Both are closed-source.
The fact is, open source is great but it isn't for every company and product. You're not going to see Oracle go open source. I doubt you'll see VMWare or Win4Lin go open source. All those cool Windows games (which I don't play but apparently many others do) are never going to be open-source yet seem to be one of the main reasons people give for Linux being slow to be adopted at home. There are plenty of good applications we need on Linux--but if you're going to encourage closed-source to stay away then you'll never see these apps on Linux and Linux we will continue to live in a Microsoft-dominated world where nothing commercial, be it games or end user apps, is available for Linux.
This problem isn't really a problem if you go with open source approach. If it's open source and the program has enough users, it'll not only fix this problem, but also improve the overall quality of the program. If the source is out there, someone will provide binaries for whatever platforms there are.
99.5% of the users in the world aren't going to know how to make a given source compile under their particular Linux version. And probably 99% don't even want to compile it, they want to run an install program and it's done. And probably 90% will be tired of looking for an app and finding it available for every Linux distribution and version EXCEPT, apparently,the one they have. I'm a software developer and that's what *I* want.
Installing Win4Lin was a dream because I just ran a setup program and it ran. I don't have to go out and find a ton of dependencies and install and/or compile them.
My target market is microcontroller compilers. This is a niche market and those that are interested in the product are few and far between, and also probably not Linux hackers. To expect that the app would flourish under open-source is wrong. Rather, my target customers will just get a Windows app that they can install and get to their real work.
I understand the interest of open source and I can't argue with its success in many apps. But you are wrong if you think that Linux doesn't need closed-source apps. The lack of commercial, closed-source apps is what's keeping people on Windows. If the Win4Lin closed-source app wasn't available I wouldn't have been able to make the decision to upgrade to Linux. So you can thank that closed-source, binary-only application for winning one more user from Windows to Linux.
Which is, of course, a *big* problem that Linux still has. I've migrated completely to Linux and, even as a software developer, my concern is that I really have no clue if/when a binary will break in terms of going to a new version of Linux.
I once wrote a CD Player application for Windows 95 back when the Windows 95's CD player sucked. I stuck it online and sold it as shareware for $15 a pop. I stopped caring about the program sometime around Windows 98 but there are apparently sites out there that still have it available for downloading. And if you install it on Windows XP, guess what? It still works. It's been 8 years since I compiled that binary and it still works on the latest version of Windows even though Microsoft compilers have gone through, what, 4 or 5 major versions sicne then?
I personally am tired of both Microsoft and Windows. That, and a lot of other standard reasons, is why I upgraded to Linux. But the whole situation where a binary program stops working at some point is bad news. There are some apps I'd like to develop for Linux but, quite frankly, I'm not inclined to do so at this point because it's a huge effort to test the applications on so many different versions of so many different distributions. And when some new version comes along it's entirely probable that the binary will stop working. It's just not worth it.
That's nonsense. I worked briefly as a network administrator/PC support for a 100-seat company in the early 90's--but I'm really a software developer and that's what I've done my entire professional career except for my 1.5-year stint as the network admin.
As a software developer I can assure you that I *always* try to make my code bug-free with as many features as possible. Like everyone, I never achieve that goal 100%. It's not because I want to milk the customers--it's because sooner or later you have to get the product out the door. Forgot sales-related deadlines and think practically: If you're developing a product you can just keep adding all the cool stuff you know you want, but you'll never sell a single copy until you get version 1.0 out there. Then you can have some income to add the rest of the stuff. A company that waits until it's product is "done" is a company that will go out of business because it will never have a single sale since it's product will be in development perpetually. Whether you should charge your customers an upgrade fee to move from 1.x to 2.0 is questionable, though.
I can also tell you, when I was in charge of that company's network and hardware I would definitely pick the most reliable hardware I could. I'm not thinking "Oh, my job is at risk if I make things so reliable they don't need me." You do the best job you can with the money available. Unfortunately, I didn't have an infinite budget so I bought the best computers I could with the budget available.
The whole idea that software developers intentionally make their own lives harder by "installing" bugs and/or that IT departments would increase their daily support burden on purpose is both cynical and silly. I've been in both positions and have never seen anything of the sort.
Sorry, I don't usually bicker about movie details in Slashdot posts--but this has always been something that bothered me since I was a kid. What were the odds of a single drone happpening upon the rebel base on an entire planet?
There is no inherent reason why deregulation will cause problems. In fact, the opposite is true. But electric deregulation combined with new environmental regulation is definitely a bad thing. You have the electric sector needing to do one thing and an environmental sector impeding that. Which is more important is open to debate, but you can't ignore the fact that environmental regulations limit what often needs to be done to keep the electrical sector functioning.
Oh, the ones perpetuated by Clinton instead of reaching a solution to the problem during his nearly decade in office?
Had to go and invade the place and bomb them back into the dark ages to add insult to injury?
At least in 10 years Iraq will probably be in pretty good shape. Had decisive action been taken any time during Clinton's time in office Iraq would either be well on the way to recovery or pretty much totally recovered by now.
Oh well.
- David Boies' law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, represents SCO. Boies represented former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election recount and tried the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft.
Wow... Sounds like just the winning lawyer I'd want on my side in a battle against a multi-billion dollar company.Perhaps. But I don't think that such decisions come down to "how many years of life am I risking" as much as "I am risking not being alive tomorrow." When you make a decision regarding a dangerous activity I don't think "Well, I wouldn't have done this 30 years ago, but now that I only have probably 20 years left to gamble, what the heck."
In fact, people generally do more life-threatening, foolish things when they are younger. That's partly due to the immortality one feels being young and also due to a lack of judgement--but everything I've seen in life suggests that people become more risk-averse as they grow older and have less time left rather than the opposite being true.
Like someone else said, that's more than the Justice Department was able to do in 5 years.
A friend of mine in San Antonio--also not a computer wizard--who works from home over a cable modem also was hit early in the day. Her computer was rebooting every 5 minutes or so. She couldn't even stay online long enough to get an IM conversation--she eventually called me on the phone and asked what I thought. I hadn't heard about the virus yet so I told her that her Windows had either gone unstable and she'd probably have to reinstall Windows, or she had been hit by a virus and also might have to reinstall Windows.
Then I read about this. So I don't know exactly who is or isn't affected, nor if there's some other way the worm can get loosed in a local network (I assume the university in Mexico has a firewall!), but it's definitely causing problems for many mortals. :)
I am happily running Linux behind a wirewall, though, so I just get to watch and grin at the hidden message left by the virus writer. "Billy gates why do you let this happen? Stop making money and fix your software." :)
Can businesses afford to deploy Linux with the SCO "threat"? My question is: Cant they afford NOT to? :)
In the past QuickBooks has pretty much been it for small businesses, and is one of the reasons I bought Win4Lin when I migrated to Linux--so I could still run QuickBooks. But I hate it with a passion.
I've been wanting to investigate GnuCash for sometime. When I was on RedHat 7.3 I couldn't even get the damn thing to compile and I couldn't resolve all the dependency issues, so I eventually gave up. Now that I've upgraded to RedHat 9.0 GnuCash was one of the installable packages--and I installed it.
It is my intention to play around with it and see if I can migrate my small business finances to it and abandon QuickBooks altogether. Even if GnuCash were to suck as bad as QuickBooks I'd like to ditch QuickBooks just on principle. QuickBooks doesn't even support multiple currencies, which is just silly.
"They" is "me." Or rather "us." But I was one of the primary developers.
Better would be if the software would be running at your ISP instead of some other company that will fetch all your mail and filter it. I'm sure more people would be comfortable with an extra-charge spamfilter from their ISP than with some external party filtering all their mail.
A valid point, and we do plan on making it available to ISPs. One step at a time, though. :)
My ISP offers spam filtering but it is based on DNS blacklists that filter on sending or relaying SMTP server address. That sucks.
True, that's always been a rather ineffective way at blocking spam--at least when you consider the potential false positives. We are thinking, though, of making DNS-based blacklists available--i.e., that whether or not a given IP is currently in a DNS blacklist can be used as part of the decision-making process in rating a message as spam or not. A DNS blacklist can be useful at helping making a decision regarding whether a specific message is spam, but I wouldn't certainly make it the ONLY factor in the decision.
Really, all the people that think that server-side Bayesian filtering is impossible are confused. No, you can't have a single corpus that applies to everyone on the server--that defeats the purpose of Bayesian. But you definitely can do the user-specific filtering on the server. Let the server do the work, you only download the good stuff, and there's nothing to install locally.
Nah, all spam filters (including Bayesian) should be implemented at the *server* before the user has to download spam... but even though the filters are on the server they should be configurable and applicable to each individual user. Then you get the benefit of user-specific spam filtering but it happens at the server where it belongs.
Probable troll, but... Can you provide any references for that allegation? I find the claim to be very suspicious.
Anyway, been there, seen that, been filtered by my Bayesian. :)
Little did I know at the time that even in 2003 law enforcement scarcely cares about outright fraud conducted online--in retrospect I'm sure I could've gotten away with it in 1985 and we all would have had some fun with some money in play. Oh well.