The first time I tried XHTML pages on a site I designed, the very first round of testing came back with Netscape 4.x users viewing the page with extreme degradation (it was ugly, I tried it myself), Netscape 6.x/Mozilla users seeing everything fine, Opera 5+ handling it fine, and Internet Explorer 5.x/6 throwing one error after another...after another...after another. Eventually I went back from XHTML 1.0 Strict to HTML 4.01 Transitional so IE wouldn't gag on it and die.
Flat out, Mozilla beats IE for handling that stuff.
I don't care one way or another, but there are people who will shy away from a system that has to be installed in text mode...and while you are certainly entitled to say "why the **** should we care about their opinions", and you personally don't have to care about their opinions, there are people who are trying to widen the acceptance and usage of free and open-source software, and you'll attract a lot more users with "we have a graphical installer if you want to use it" than you will with "why the **** do you want a graphical installer, I don't care about your opinion"
Many users look at other distributions and see, graphical installers. Will woody have a graphical installer, if not when will we see a
graphical Debian installer.
Well, we should have that, we hope, with the release after woody.
In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?
I just timed it...the CLI version (`tail myfile', but with an actual filename from my own system) was three seconds from starting to type to seeing output (granted, I type pretty fast, but this is the sort of thing that happens when you use a computer a lot, no matter what sort of environment you're using).
OTOH, even with a symlink on the desktop to the appropriate directory, the GUI version (double-click, double-click, scroll) took 6. Not a biased test. And I'm sitting on a workstation that's running a fairly light GNOME environment, with decent processor and plenty of free memory and not much else going on when I did the tests, so it's not that the machine was slow in opening anything.
And I believe that ignorance of the system isn't much of an excuse - don't compare the GUI and the CLI for `power-user'-style efficiency (as people wanted to do in this thread) unless you're going to assume familiarity with the environment. Oherwise, I can just argue that while my experience with typewriters leads me to intuitively understand the keyboard, my unfamiliarity with the conecpt of the mouse might force me to learn how to point and click before I'm productive, and thus the CLI is better for me.
But like I said, each environment has its forte - for a lot of things a GUI is a killer app. But for other tasks, nothing beats a good old-fashioned command line. Again, UNIX-philosopy time - use the tool that's appropriate for the task at hand (same goes for the editor wars, IMO...I love emacs for tasks more akin to word-procesing, and for anything of significant length, but when I'm debugging PHP, vi is my best friend).
It shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to add a line to my index.php telling IE users that "in order to get the most complete viewing experience on my site, it is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla and/or Opera" and give them download links.
Of course, I'll also let them into my site, while MS wouldn't perform the same courtesy for me...
First of all, in the given example (`tail myfile'), the CLI is simply faster. Compare:
Windows-button+r
Wait ~1 second for `run' dialog to open
Type `notepad', hit Enter
Wait ~1-2 seconds for Notepad to open
Ctrl+O and locate file to be opened
Wait ~1 second while file opens
Ctrl+End
Type `tail myfile'
Wait ~1-2 seconds (depending on file size) for output
Don't you dare try to tell me that you could time those with a stopwatch and find the GUI to be faster. Even doing it without the keyboard, it's still going to involve
Double-click an icon on the desktop to open a folder
Wait ~1 second for Explorer window to open and display folder contents.
Scroll through folder contents to locate file
Double-click file
Wait ~1 second for Notepad to open
Scroll to end of file with mouse
The command-line will still be faster, if you have any kind of decent typing ability.
But I take offense at the generalizations in this thread...apparently people think you either have to say the command line is more efficient in all possible situations, or that the GUI is more efficient in all possible situations, and both statements are wrong. The command line handles certain types of tasks extremely well (manipulation of multiple files in a single operation, for example). The GUI is good for other things (interfacing to a program which has many possibly conflicting options, for one). That's why there's an X Windows System and dozens of window managers and desktop environments in addition to traditional command-line shells, and the reason why we have XTerm (or, for true power users, Eterm) windows. Each excels at certain types of tasks, and, true to UNIX philosophy, you should always use the right tool for the job at hand.
Yes, Google does display ads on their site, but Google also makes money from licensing their engine to people (how else do you pay for ~8,000 boxen and billions of hits? Not with ads.)...with Slashdot that's not possible because the code is free.
I just went out and bought a copy of Windows 95, and now they tell me that there's a new version coming out this week? What was the point? Slow down, Microsoft!
I'm sorry, but if you've waited six months or so to download a release, you shouldn't complain when a new one comes out soon after, especially since the new release includes a lot of significant upgrades (GNOME 1.4, Nautilus, GRUB, and a kernel that's probably safe to use out of the box - something 7.1 didn't have).
Windows doesn't have sophisticated printing, it's got crappy printing. I'm currently only able to use Windows on my personal box because Norton Crashguard intercepts the crash in the printing system every time I print something...it will print the document, then promptly crash and try to take the system with it. Linux doesn't do that.
As for going from the lowest piece-of-crap Epson up the chain, well, if I were a business I wouldn't be buying "pieces of crap" for my office...if it's a piece of crap, it's the fault of the printer manufacturer, not the fault of the OS that has trouble printing to it, don't you think? And on the real plus side, most of those POS printers are Windows-only, anyway...so Linux shouldn't have to worry about them.
And now I'm curious...seeing as I've never, not even once had a problem printing any kind of document from Linux, where do you think it's "broken"? I can see that different applications might have problems printing, but those are specific to the application. If Word had a faulty printing routine, would you blame it on the Windows OS, or would you blame it on Word? The Linux printing system is pretty efficient, in my experience, and I don't think it's broken anywhere.
And my point about PostScript still stands - you say it's "much more complex" to render an office document, but whether it is or not, this is the job of the application, which should be responsible for putting out a usable format for the printer (PostScript).
OK, not to be a smart-ass here, but isn't *any* print job, at its fundamental level, "just dumping bits to the printer"? Does your printer use some other form of basic unit of data that no one else knows about? If you're having printer problems, that could be why...
And regarding a "complex office document", where's your point? Of course it will have "fonts, layout, embedded images" and yes, possibly even "embedded objects"...but you know what? That's not going to make it more difficult to print. It might make it a bit of a job for the application to turn into usable output for the printer, but that's the app's problem, not the printer's or the printer driver's, and even then it's just a matter of churning out a PostScript or similar file. And after that, as you so eloquently pointed out, it's no more than dumping bits to the printer.
Anyway, I really don't see your point; people keep saying "wow I've found out that I have great printing in Linux", and you keep answering them with "yes, but do you have good printing? You make no sense.
Windows route: Cost of Win2k (server and however many client licenses you need) + cost of training + cost of WinXP in a few months (another server, more client licenses) + cost of WinXP training + cost of Win2002 next year (another server, more client licenses) + cost of Win2002 training + cost of Win2003 (another server, more client licenses) + cost of Win2003 training...and so on to Windows Aleph-Null in the distant future.
Linux route: Cost of one copy of Red Hat server + one copy of Red Hat Workstation + cost of Linux training (and since it's Red Hat, you can subscribe to their support service, but you were probably already paying for tech support in some form anyway, so the budget just stays the same in that area). The basic UNIX interface hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years or so, and the GUIs stay pretty consistent (cosmetic changes, not huge interface-wide changes like the Win 3.11 ==> Win95 change).
Which one is more cost-effective? The one that has you pay now, and then next year, and then the year after, and every year in the forseeable future, or the one that you pay for once and upgrade for free into infinity?
17000kbps and 16320kbps over a couple minutes, sustained. I guess their "unscheduled maintenance" outage earlier today,combined with the fact that it's 5 AM and I'm in West Virginia scared everyone else off the Net. Gleeful shout. I took a couple screenshots for posterity.
Of course, I remember the heady days before they fixed the meter, when a good day on an aveage LAN could produce "Infinity kbps"...I printed the screen, full-color, so I could remember that one...
No need to fill in the boxes, just click the button and it tells you how big your pipe is at the moment. Currently, I'm getting 1271kbps on Charter Pipeline. I think it's safe to say that beats my old 56k connection any day.
I don't often use KDE, but when I do, I find Opera (since it uses Qt, after all) matches it quite nicely. Of course, in GNOME or Enlightenment it looks like crap and doesn't match anything, since it takes on a dark grey that doesn't match my unaltered basic GTK theme or my Enlightenment themes...
Overall it's pretty nice, though I'm fighting to try to get it to recognize TrueType fonts (everything else on the system sees them and is using them, so why can't Opera show me my website rendered in oh-so-pretty Verdana?).
"Linux" isn't homogeneous. You don't read the occasional distro flame wars that pop up here, do you?
Seriously, take a look at the types of systems out there - you have embedded systems, production systems that still run 2.2.x kernels, home users running 2.4.8, mail/web/FTP servers, home boxen used for surfing and mp3s, workstations for development...there's just no end to the possible configurations of Linux systems lurking out there, and every one is running a different combination of services and software. Whereas Windows comes in...Server and Workstation (err, Professional and Home, these days). And now everything's going to be built on one kernel. Ouch. That's not "homogeneous", that's downright bland.
Linux probably won't ever be homogeneous like Windows because of that simple fact - with Windows, you get two choices. With Linux, you get who knows how many different distros, with thousands of different ways of installing and configuring. End result: Windows boxes are stamped from cookie cutters, but no two Linux machines are ever the same.
They let you set up a limited number of filters - filter the stuff they send you. I have a college account that forwards to my "private" Yahoo box, and by default, anything that isn't to or from the [mycollege].edu domain goes to a "spamfilter" folder that I clean out once a week (the small group of people who have the "private" address don't get filtered out, though...they do let you have mroe than one filter, after all). That lets me use Balsa for convenient POP3 access all the time, and not worry about spam.
WARNING: This email is copyrighted (c) 2001 ubernostrum. All rights reserved. Copy protection schemes are in effect to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of this email message. If you or anyone else attempt to send unauthorized copies of this email message from this computer, the protection scheme will attempt to remove all data on all hard drives on this computer as a preventive measure.
MESSAGE TEXT:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file to ask your advice...
I don't use that particular system myself, but as far as producing a so-called "strong" password (i.e., not a dictionary word, contains both cases of letters, contains numbers/symbols, decent length), it does an OK job for non-critical stuff (I used to use it to generate my webmail and college LAN passwords when I needed to change those) - oh, I need a password, grab a book off the shelf, OK, got one. If you want to go off on a simple system because it's not perfect, feel free; pretty much anything can be cracked given time, resources, and ingenuity - when I need real security, I unplug the network cable from the wall. Unless the script kiddie is going to physically break into my room, I figure that'll make it hard for him to r00t my box...
And I admit, the system I outlined isn't perfect; it's decent at best. The replacement of letters and numbers in 1337 is variable enough that it makes it a chore to develop an effective dictionary; I don't doubt it could be done, though. The question is whether it's worth it; vary the methods of replacement of characters and you could quickly make it almost easier to just use brute-force methods. In addition, the "key" is changing for every password generated. If you devote enough time to the effort, you could crack it, but that's true of anything. The guy was complaining about having to remember all those "strong" passwords - well, this generates decent ones that you can remember. If you want to make them stronger, just apply the same principle, but use different methods (and by that I don't mean rot13 the phrase, either). I typically produce passwords by generating a set of transformations to apply to a given input, and they vary in type and number. But the basic idea is about as sound as a password "system" can be. I end up with unrecognizable strings that I'm able to remember fairly easily, but which are also fairly strong.
I know something similar to this gets posted in nearly every discussion of passwords, but here's a simple way to generate fairly strong passwords that you can remember, so you can stop worrying about how hard it is to remember your strong passwords and change them regularly:
Flip open the Bible, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or similar, to random page, random line. Read the phrase on said page and line.
Commit that phrase to memory.
Now 1337ify the phrase. "To be or not to be" becomes fairly-strong password "70b30rN0770b3" (granted it repeats a lot of characters, but you get the idea). Flipped open John 3:16? "ph0r60d$010v3d7h3W0r1d" seems strong to me.
If you stay suitably random in your replacement of letters with symbols and your switching of lower-case for capitals, you'll avoid normal English distribution of characters (which might otherwise be a problem), and you'll have a fairly strong, easy-to-remember password.
In addition, this system can be safely posted here and used by anyone who likes it, because the important part of the system is the book used, not the process (think cryptosystems - publish your algorithm, keep the key secret). Just don't use the same book consistently, and it should be secure and easy.
And of course, it uses script-kiddie-speak to hold off script kiddies, so it's poetic justice of a sort, too...
People who don't know that pointing a gun at their head and pulling the trigger is a bad thing are idiots? I've seen several slashdotters say that before, but I can't imagine why anyone would think that. Not everyone knows everything about their guns, and you shouldn't expect them to.
RedHat did the right thing w 7.x by locking down most services so you had to open them up if you needed ftp, telnet, etc
Most of the improvements in the 7.x releases are nice. I'm running 7.1 and it's pretty well locked-down. Only thing is that I don't use this box for much more than/., writing papers for school, and maintaining my website (via FTP), which means that Red Hat was still launching some services on boot that I didn't need (ssh for example)...they've made strides, but I'd appreciate something in the installer somewhere that would let me select services to start on boot (other than just cranking the firewall settings to "high" to prevent connections), instead of having to figure out what it starts and then disable things I don't need.
But that's Red Hat's big problem, really...even the "custom" installs put junk on your system you don't need (example: I use Enlightenemnt, and mostly GNOME-based apps. I leave Qt and some other assorted libs around, but don't need KDE. What did it do? Installed a bunch of KDE packages, despite my having conspicuously not checked the box for "KDE" on the menu...first thing I do after an install is run GNOME-RPM and start uninstalling stuff).
Latency hasn't been too bad (hmm, can't ping/., so I ping first random site in my bookmarks and get an average of 50ms)...more annoying is the [insert random reason why OSDN sites are slow this week here], and that's not Charter's problem...
The biggest problem I've had with it is thunderstorms - cable goes down, Internet goes down. Today, for example (as I listen to the thunder roll outside), I've had a couple of small outages that lasted just long enough for me to notice them and start trying to ping my way upstream. On the TV, this manifests itself as a barely noticeable flicker once in a while. On the computer, it's more obvious, because lots of little applications suddenly report that they don't have a connection.
However, once I start getting packets back, I fire up a bandwidth meter and find I'm getting ~700K again, so I'm happy. I just don't do any bandwidth-intensive work or anything requiring constant connectivity when there's lightning outside, which would probably be good policy for any home user.
Comparing that to the hell of AOL that I vacated a month ago for Charter, I'd say it's a good deal (though AOL has cranked up my shipments of free coasters recently).
All in all, Charter's been good to me, and the tech who delivered my modem and installed the line explained that (in my area, at least) they're working to relieve some of the more egregious infrastructure problems.
Or is sending it an exercise of a First Amendment right? That's debatable...unless you view it as humor, the typical "Make $$$ fast while growing your dick six inches and seeing Britney Spears naked, and also lose fifty pounds in a week" email isn't an act of profound creative expression...and while you have a right to say what you like, do you have a right to force me to listen to it? Do I get a choice as to whether my server accepts the message and shows it to me? In most situations I don't - I'm even paying to have your "speech" inflicted on myself. Does your (and note here I'm using "you" as a generic pronoun, not referring to you the author of the above post personally) right to free speech include forcing your email on me, if only for the time it takes the server to apply my filters and send it to my Trash folder? Or is SPAM really just commercial junk, and thus subject to regulation like any other sort of commercial junk?
That said, you raise an interesting point about it being censorship (though I'm not sure I buy it), one not often considered, and I hope you get modded up for it...this needs to generate some discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
The first time I tried XHTML pages on a site I designed, the very first round of testing came back with Netscape 4.x users viewing the page with extreme degradation (it was ugly, I tried it myself), Netscape 6.x/Mozilla users seeing everything fine, Opera 5+ handling it fine, and Internet Explorer 5.x/6 throwing one error after another...after another...after another. Eventually I went back from XHTML 1.0 Strict to HTML 4.01 Transitional so IE wouldn't gag on it and die.
Flat out, Mozilla beats IE for handling that stuff.
I don't care one way or another, but there are people who will shy away from a system that has to be installed in text mode...and while you are certainly entitled to say "why the **** should we care about their opinions", and you personally don't have to care about their opinions, there are people who are trying to widen the acceptance and usage of free and open-source software, and you'll attract a lot more users with "we have a graphical installer if you want to use it" than you will with "why the **** do you want a graphical installer, I don't care about your opinion"
In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?
I just timed it...the CLI version (`tail myfile', but with an actual filename from my own system) was three seconds from starting to type to seeing output (granted, I type pretty fast, but this is the sort of thing that happens when you use a computer a lot, no matter what sort of environment you're using).
OTOH, even with a symlink on the desktop to the appropriate directory, the GUI version (double-click, double-click, scroll) took 6. Not a biased test. And I'm sitting on a workstation that's running a fairly light GNOME environment, with decent processor and plenty of free memory and not much else going on when I did the tests, so it's not that the machine was slow in opening anything.
And I believe that ignorance of the system isn't much of an excuse - don't compare the GUI and the CLI for `power-user'-style efficiency (as people wanted to do in this thread) unless you're going to assume familiarity with the environment. Oherwise, I can just argue that while my experience with typewriters leads me to intuitively understand the keyboard, my unfamiliarity with the conecpt of the mouse might force me to learn how to point and click before I'm productive, and thus the CLI is better for me.
But like I said, each environment has its forte - for a lot of things a GUI is a killer app. But for other tasks, nothing beats a good old-fashioned command line. Again, UNIX-philosopy time - use the tool that's appropriate for the task at hand (same goes for the editor wars, IMO...I love emacs for tasks more akin to word-procesing, and for anything of significant length, but when I'm debugging PHP, vi is my best friend).
It shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to add a line to my index.php telling IE users that "in order to get the most complete viewing experience on my site, it is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla and/or Opera" and give them download links.
Of course, I'll also let them into my site, while MS wouldn't perform the same courtesy for me...
First of all, in the given example (`tail myfile'), the CLI is simply faster. Compare:
- Type `tail myfile'
- Wait ~1-2 seconds (depending on file size) for output
Don't you dare try to tell me that you could time those with a stopwatch and find the GUI to be faster. Even doing it without the keyboard, it's still going to involve- Double-click an icon on the desktop to open a folder
- Wait ~1 second for Explorer window to open and display folder contents.
- Scroll through folder contents to locate file
- Double-click file
- Wait ~1 second for Notepad to open
- Scroll to end of file with mouse
The command-line will still be faster, if you have any kind of decent typing ability.But I take offense at the generalizations in this thread...apparently people think you either have to say the command line is more efficient in all possible situations, or that the GUI is more efficient in all possible situations, and both statements are wrong. The command line handles certain types of tasks extremely well (manipulation of multiple files in a single operation, for example). The GUI is good for other things (interfacing to a program which has many possibly conflicting options, for one). That's why there's an X Windows System and dozens of window managers and desktop environments in addition to traditional command-line shells, and the reason why we have XTerm (or, for true power users, Eterm) windows. Each excels at certain types of tasks, and, true to UNIX philosophy, you should always use the right tool for the job at hand.
Yes, Google does display ads on their site, but Google also makes money from licensing their engine to people (how else do you pay for ~8,000 boxen and billions of hits? Not with ads.)...with Slashdot that's not possible because the code is free.
I just went out and bought a copy of Windows 95, and now they tell me that there's a new version coming out this week? What was the point? Slow down, Microsoft!
I'm sorry, but if you've waited six months or so to download a release, you shouldn't complain when a new one comes out soon after, especially since the new release includes a lot of significant upgrades (GNOME 1.4, Nautilus, GRUB, and a kernel that's probably safe to use out of the box - something 7.1 didn't have).
Windows doesn't have sophisticated printing, it's got crappy printing. I'm currently only able to use Windows on my personal box because Norton Crashguard intercepts the crash in the printing system every time I print something...it will print the document, then promptly crash and try to take the system with it. Linux doesn't do that.
As for going from the lowest piece-of-crap Epson up the chain, well, if I were a business I wouldn't be buying "pieces of crap" for my office...if it's a piece of crap, it's the fault of the printer manufacturer, not the fault of the OS that has trouble printing to it, don't you think? And on the real plus side, most of those POS printers are Windows-only, anyway...so Linux shouldn't have to worry about them.
And now I'm curious...seeing as I've never, not even once had a problem printing any kind of document from Linux, where do you think it's "broken"? I can see that different applications might have problems printing, but those are specific to the application. If Word had a faulty printing routine, would you blame it on the Windows OS, or would you blame it on Word? The Linux printing system is pretty efficient, in my experience, and I don't think it's broken anywhere.
And my point about PostScript still stands - you say it's "much more complex" to render an office document, but whether it is or not, this is the job of the application, which should be responsible for putting out a usable format for the printer (PostScript).
And regarding a "complex office document", where's your point? Of course it will have "fonts, layout, embedded images" and yes, possibly even "embedded objects"...but you know what? That's not going to make it more difficult to print. It might make it a bit of a job for the application to turn into usable output for the printer, but that's the app's problem, not the printer's or the printer driver's, and even then it's just a matter of churning out a PostScript or similar file. And after that, as you so eloquently pointed out, it's no more than dumping bits to the printer.
Anyway, I really don't see your point; people keep saying "wow I've found out that I have great printing in Linux", and you keep answering them with "yes, but do you have good printing? You make no sense.
Consider the options:
- Windows route: Cost of Win2k (server and however many client licenses you need) + cost of training + cost of WinXP in a few months (another server, more client licenses) + cost of WinXP training + cost of Win2002 next year (another server, more client licenses) + cost of Win2002 training + cost of Win2003 (another server, more client licenses) + cost of Win2003 training...and so on to Windows Aleph-Null in the distant future.
- Linux route: Cost of one copy of Red Hat server + one copy of Red Hat Workstation + cost of Linux training (and since it's Red Hat, you can subscribe to their support service, but you were probably already paying for tech support in some form anyway, so the budget just stays the same in that area). The basic UNIX interface hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years or so, and the GUIs stay pretty consistent (cosmetic changes, not huge interface-wide changes like the Win 3.11 ==> Win95 change).
Which one is more cost-effective? The one that has you pay now, and then next year, and then the year after, and every year in the forseeable future, or the one that you pay for once and upgrade for free into infinity?17000kbps and 16320kbps over a couple minutes, sustained. I guess their "unscheduled maintenance" outage earlier today,combined with the fact that it's 5 AM and I'm in West Virginia scared everyone else off the Net. Gleeful shout. I took a couple screenshots for posterity.
Of course, I remember the heady days before they fixed the meter, when a good day on an aveage LAN could produce "Infinity kbps"...I printed the screen, full-color, so I could remember that one...
Try CNET: http://webservices.cnet.com/bandwidth/.
No need to fill in the boxes, just click the button and it tells you how big your pipe is at the moment. Currently, I'm getting 1271kbps on Charter Pipeline. I think it's safe to say that beats my old 56k connection any day.
I've already been through that one with the Opera support guys - the dynamically-linked versions are just as ugly as the static ones.
I don't often use KDE, but when I do, I find Opera (since it uses Qt, after all) matches it quite nicely. Of course, in GNOME or Enlightenment it looks like crap and doesn't match anything, since it takes on a dark grey that doesn't match my unaltered basic GTK theme or my Enlightenment themes...
Overall it's pretty nice, though I'm fighting to try to get it to recognize TrueType fonts (everything else on the system sees them and is using them, so why can't Opera show me my website rendered in oh-so-pretty Verdana?).
"Linux" isn't homogeneous. You don't read the occasional distro flame wars that pop up here, do you?
Seriously, take a look at the types of systems out there - you have embedded systems, production systems that still run 2.2.x kernels, home users running 2.4.8, mail/web/FTP servers, home boxen used for surfing and mp3s, workstations for development...there's just no end to the possible configurations of Linux systems lurking out there, and every one is running a different combination of services and software. Whereas Windows comes in...Server and Workstation (err, Professional and Home, these days). And now everything's going to be built on one kernel. Ouch. That's not "homogeneous", that's downright bland.
Linux probably won't ever be homogeneous like Windows because of that simple fact - with Windows, you get two choices. With Linux, you get who knows how many different distros, with thousands of different ways of installing and configuring. End result: Windows boxes are stamped from cookie cutters, but no two Linux machines are ever the same.
They let you set up a limited number of filters - filter the stuff they send you. I have a college account that forwards to my "private" Yahoo box, and by default, anything that isn't to or from the [mycollege].edu domain goes to a "spamfilter" folder that I clean out once a week (the small group of people who have the "private" address don't get filtered out, though...they do let you have mroe than one filter, after all). That lets me use Balsa for convenient POP3 access all the time, and not worry about spam.
WARNING: This email is copyrighted (c) 2001 ubernostrum. All rights reserved. Copy protection schemes are in effect to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of this email message. If you or anyone else attempt to send unauthorized copies of this email message from this computer, the protection scheme will attempt to remove all data on all hard drives on this computer as a preventive measure.
MESSAGE TEXT:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file to ask your advice...
I don't use that particular system myself, but as far as producing a so-called "strong" password (i.e., not a dictionary word, contains both cases of letters, contains numbers/symbols, decent length), it does an OK job for non-critical stuff (I used to use it to generate my webmail and college LAN passwords when I needed to change those) - oh, I need a password, grab a book off the shelf, OK, got one. If you want to go off on a simple system because it's not perfect, feel free; pretty much anything can be cracked given time, resources, and ingenuity - when I need real security, I unplug the network cable from the wall. Unless the script kiddie is going to physically break into my room, I figure that'll make it hard for him to r00t my box...
And I admit, the system I outlined isn't perfect; it's decent at best. The replacement of letters and numbers in 1337 is variable enough that it makes it a chore to develop an effective dictionary; I don't doubt it could be done, though. The question is whether it's worth it; vary the methods of replacement of characters and you could quickly make it almost easier to just use brute-force methods. In addition, the "key" is changing for every password generated. If you devote enough time to the effort, you could crack it, but that's true of anything. The guy was complaining about having to remember all those "strong" passwords - well, this generates decent ones that you can remember. If you want to make them stronger, just apply the same principle, but use different methods (and by that I don't mean rot13 the phrase, either). I typically produce passwords by generating a set of transformations to apply to a given input, and they vary in type and number. But the basic idea is about as sound as a password "system" can be. I end up with unrecognizable strings that I'm able to remember fairly easily, but which are also fairly strong.
I know something similar to this gets posted in nearly every discussion of passwords, but here's a simple way to generate fairly strong passwords that you can remember, so you can stop worrying about how hard it is to remember your strong passwords and change them regularly:
- Flip open the Bible, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or similar, to random page, random line. Read the phrase on said page and line.
- Commit that phrase to memory.
- Now 1337ify the phrase. "To be or not to be" becomes fairly-strong password "70b30rN0770b3" (granted it repeats a lot of characters, but you get the idea). Flipped open John 3:16? "ph0r60d$010v3d7h3W0r1d" seems strong to me.
If you stay suitably random in your replacement of letters with symbols and your switching of lower-case for capitals, you'll avoid normal English distribution of characters (which might otherwise be a problem), and you'll have a fairly strong, easy-to-remember password.In addition, this system can be safely posted here and used by anyone who likes it, because the important part of the system is the book used, not the process (think cryptosystems - publish your algorithm, keep the key secret). Just don't use the same book consistently, and it should be secure and easy.
And of course, it uses script-kiddie-speak to hold off script kiddies, so it's poetic justice of a sort, too...
People who don't know that pointing a gun at their head and pulling the trigger is a bad thing are idiots? I've seen several slashdotters say that before, but I can't imagine why anyone would think that. Not everyone knows everything about their guns, and you shouldn't expect them to.
But that's Red Hat's big problem, really...even the "custom" installs put junk on your system you don't need (example: I use Enlightenemnt, and mostly GNOME-based apps. I leave Qt and some other assorted libs around, but don't need KDE. What did it do? Installed a bunch of KDE packages, despite my having conspicuously not checked the box for "KDE" on the menu...first thing I do after an install is run GNOME-RPM and start uninstalling stuff).
Latency hasn't been too bad (hmm, can't ping /., so I ping first random site in my bookmarks and get an average of 50ms)...more annoying is the [insert random reason why OSDN sites are slow this week here], and that's not Charter's problem...
The biggest problem I've had with it is thunderstorms - cable goes down, Internet goes down. Today, for example (as I listen to the thunder roll outside), I've had a couple of small outages that lasted just long enough for me to notice them and start trying to ping my way upstream. On the TV, this manifests itself as a barely noticeable flicker once in a while. On the computer, it's more obvious, because lots of little applications suddenly report that they don't have a connection.
However, once I start getting packets back, I fire up a bandwidth meter and find I'm getting ~700K again, so I'm happy. I just don't do any bandwidth-intensive work or anything requiring constant connectivity when there's lightning outside, which would probably be good policy for any home user.
Comparing that to the hell of AOL that I vacated a month ago for Charter, I'd say it's a good deal (though AOL has cranked up my shipments of free coasters recently).
All in all, Charter's been good to me, and the tech who delivered my modem and installed the line explained that (in my area, at least) they're working to relieve some of the more egregious infrastructure problems.
Or is sending it an exercise of a First Amendment right? That's debatable...unless you view it as humor, the typical "Make $$$ fast while growing your dick six inches and seeing Britney Spears naked, and also lose fifty pounds in a week" email isn't an act of profound creative expression...and while you have a right to say what you like, do you have a right to force me to listen to it? Do I get a choice as to whether my server accepts the message and shows it to me? In most situations I don't - I'm even paying to have your "speech" inflicted on myself. Does your (and note here I'm using "you" as a generic pronoun, not referring to you the author of the above post personally) right to free speech include forcing your email on me, if only for the time it takes the server to apply my filters and send it to my Trash folder? Or is SPAM really just commercial junk, and thus subject to regulation like any other sort of commercial junk?
That said, you raise an interesting point about it being censorship (though I'm not sure I buy it), one not often considered, and I hope you get modded up for it...this needs to generate some discussion.