Excuse me? NAV is a steaming heap of complete crap.
AVG does the job better, faster, and with far less resource consumption. Every time I have been called on to disinfect a machine which was running NAV, I recommned the owners switch to AVG. Without exception, they comment on how much more responsive their system is. I have little trouble convincing them to support Grisoft by getting the not-for-free version.
The machine I am on right now is running (probably unnecessarily) a full AVG install. It checks my email, it checks my downloads, it checks all of the crud running on the system, and it does this while burning some fraction of 1% of the CPU and a tiny bit of memory.
If you are currently running NAV, disable it (if you can) and try running AVG for a couple of days. I think you'll notice the difference.
GSA is not just another gov't office. Once you are on the GSA Schedule, then many other government offices and agencies can simply buy your product without any additional paperwork. This means that the on-ramp to MySQL just got *much* easier for many groups in the U.S. govenment.
To quote: "With the GSA contract, GS-35F-0131R Schedule 70, government customers will be able to purchase and deploy MySQL through Carahsoft Technology Corp. The GSA schedule is effective Dec. 20, 2005 through Nov. 19, 2009."
See the magic words "GSA Schedule?" This is a Very Good Thing(tm).
You don't really say what type of problems you want to work on and that can make a big difference in what environment you choose. Kernel hacking leads in one direction, and DB-driven websites goes in a completey different direction.
Speaking as a GeezerGeek(tm), here are some of the technologies I have found that are something more than The Next Great Thing ver 31.4.
1. Python. It took me a while to get past the indentation-as-block-structure thing (I still think it was a mistake), but this is a language that tremendous expressive power. If I were still teaching, this is the language I would start my students with, knowing that they could go anywhere they want with it.
2. If you are doing any sort of web work, you will probably have to do a little (a lot?) PHP. Fortunately, v. 5 has fixed some of the nastier aspects of the language, although there appears to be no way to undo some truly horrible naming convention mistakes from its early days.
3. AJAX. It's worth a look if you want to stay within the browser's window. And that means you should get good Javascript/CSS/XML/HTML books.
4. Firefox-as-UI-platform. This is related to the above. I am just beginning to get into this and it looks very promising. Other people know far more than I do. The GreaseMonkey extension is great fun to play with.
5. If you are picking up a DBMS, the obvious choices are MySQL and Postgres. If I were just starting, I think I would go with Postgres, if only for OSS purity reasons. OTOH, I have had no problems with MySQL for the relatively low-level situations I have used it and it is generally more available as part of commercial hosting packages.
"Back in the day" I taught programming, so here are a few recommendations for your first few projects.
A. First, pick something fun and relatively simple. I have found that a great way to get into a new language/platform environment is to implement a simple game (eg. hangman, snake, mastermind). The rules are very straightforward, yet they will force you to at least dip your mental toe into logic flow, class structure, I/O and UI, file storage (for high scores), etc. Most of them can be implemented in a few hours and you get that immediate feedback of success. If you are feeling your oats, you might try things like using Python's generators as nanothreads for animation sprites. See the Lightweight Games Toolkit at http://lgt.berlios.de/ for some ideas. (Obviously, this should *not* be for your first project!:-)
B. Pick an area of application that you are already a domain expert in. This way you can focus on the "how", instead of the "what" or the "why".
C. Find a good OSS project and implement a few new features. For example, if you are interested in photography, you might grab Gallery 2 from gallery.menalto.com and try adding a feature to an existing layout module, or try creating a new layout, using an existing one as a template.
D. Find an interesting-but-broken OSS project and dive into the code. Maybe you can breathe new life into a moribund project.
I agree that insightful is probalby the wrong mod label. How about 'common sense' or maybe 'been there, done that'? I also agree with you that it makes no sense at all **if you understand what techies do** (or, for that matter, if you understand people in general). In a real sense, this is quintessential 'reactionary' behavior.
As I said in response to an earlier reply, most companies (and certainly almost all HR people) have no idea what a senior techie does with his/her day. All they know is that some wizard just gave notice and that means they have to lock up all of the magic potions.
Although I can't speak to having operations personnel leave, I can say that when a senior developer leaves, the company should stay on the best possible terms with him/her. They have unknown treasures locked away in their heads and you may need them as consultants at some future date.
I checked my dictionary and I did spell 'rightfully' correctly.
Of course they don't understand what a senior techie is doing. That goes without saying. What they *do* understand is that this person, who is no longer aligned with the company and who wields power that they have never fully understood, is now 'going away' and that scares the crap out of them.
When I had my own company, I never needed to do this because I understood what was going on and why the person was leaving. Then again, it was only a five person coampny, so...
Based on how you described it, you probably did nothing wrong, and they probably did the right thing.
Companies are rightfully paranoid that a departing employee -- particulalrly one with root access -- may decide to do something nasty on the way out the door. This doesn't mean that *you* would do this, just that they can't take a chance. Of course, if you had intended to do something nasty, you could easily have set it up before tendering your resignation. The best thing to do is act like a professional and understand that what is in your best interest and in the company's best interest are no longer related.
A long, hot shower is, without doubt, the single best environment for doing design work. My employees used to joke that the company would be wise to install a shower in my office. When we lived in the city, my wife would give me a hard time about wasting water. Now that we are in the country, we are on well and septic so we put the water back in the ground about 150 feet from where it came out. I can take a half hour shower and the only downside is I look like a prune. But a prune with great ideas!
So maybe the best environment would be a large shower stall with two or three 20" waterproof displays. (Maybe that wasn't such a great idea, but then I wasn't in the shower when I had it.)
Absolutely! Most server racks these days are booooring. You want blinkenlights? You want a DEC KA-10 with a BBN pager. http://www.opost.com/tenex/kapix.html All of those panels at the tops of the boxes were just filled mit der lovely blinkenlights. Combined with an IMP (http://www.livinginternet.com/g/kleinrock_imp3.jp g) and a little Maui Wowie, you could have a pretty good night debugging.
On an only-slightly-less-serious note, I would love to have something that plugs into a USB port (or something) and that has lots of nice blinkenlights that are somehow related to what the system is doing.
Long version: Most people assume helicopters just jump off the ground and are suddenly flying. The reality is a good deal more complex than that. (Which is a true statement about almost everything to do with helicopters.)
1. When a helicopter first lifts off the ground it is inside its 'ground effect envelope', where part of its lift is coming from pushing air against the ground. Once it is above a certain height (varies by aircraft -- anywhere from 10 feet to 80 feet), the ground effect falls away and it is now fully airborne.
2. Pure hovering (outside of the ground effect) takes an amazing amount of energy. It also has the danger, if maintained in one place on a still day, of creating a torroid of moving air: first pushed down by the blades, then sucked up and over the top to be pushed down again. This means the copter now has to push harder and faster to make up for the fact that the air it is pushing against is already moving down at some speed.
3. Most fly time in a helictopter is spent moving forward in the air. The disc created by the spinning blade generates lift as it moves forward through the air. In fact, helicopters are called 'rotary-wing aricraft'.
4. During takeoff, a heavily loaded helicopter -- or one operating at high alititude -- will want to stay inside its ground effect envelope while building up forward speed. Once it's going fast enough to generate lift forward motion, then they can start to gain altitude and move out of the ground effect.
I stand corrected, but I don't think it invalidates the original point (although it does force a rewording of my case).
The GPL grants certain rights, given certain conditions. If you violate those conditions (e.g. distribute derivatives without source), then you lose your rights. It doesn't matter what caused the volation. In this case, Daimaou's entering into an agreement with his company in no way changes the terms of the GPL.
Daimaou might get fired, and the company might have to rewrite the code, but the GPL lives on.
BTW: Thanks for pointing me at that article. All of the license work my company did was bound up with contracts and I had a slightly fuzzy distinction between them. As always, PJ and Eben are a joy to read.
It is important to keep the two contracts separate. If the GPL applies to the derivative, then it does. Period. When the derivative was created, by whom, where, etc. are all moot with regards to the GPL aspects of the derivative.
Daimaou, on the other hand, may have created a nice little legal swamp for himself, his company may be pissed, they might sue/fire him, and the Red Sox could win the pennant. But none of that affects the applicability of the GPL to the derivative.
Without more specifics it's hard to say. Assuming that Daimaou is using the word 'derived' correctly and is not confusing it with the word 'linked', then it certainly sounds more like your second case.
I also note that LGPL was not mentioned anywhere. If this is a GPLed library (as opposed to an LGPLed library), then even linking propogates the GPLness. Of course, it's probably easier to rewrite something that only mates at the API level, rather than has 5,000 LOC intertwingled with the original code.
All things considered, I would say that the company would be wise to start talking to a *very* good IP attorney before they get their PR balls blown off. On the other hand, if they continue down this road, they might be doing the FOSS world a real favor by creating some nice, clean case law regarding the GPL.
True. But the important condition you added was 'if separable in themselves such that no GPL-derivativeness remains'. But the original clrealy stated, 'but the parts from the above sources were integral pieces and without them, my code wouldn't work'.
Since the code is an inseperable derivative of GPLed code, there is no wiggle room available.
This is actually a fairly clear cut situation. If your code is a derivative of GPLed code, then the derivative is under the GPL, regardless of any other agreements. Your company can either distribute the derived code or not. If they distribute it, they *must* obey the GPL.
If it were any other way, contract law would crumble. Imagine a world where some random Contract X (in this case, your IP agreement) can arbitrarily change the terms and conditions of some other random Contract Y (the GPLed code). A logical extension of this absurdity is that I could then write a contract with you that *somehow* changed a contract between two other, unrelated parties. The law doesn't work that way, no matter how much your Work Overlords would wish otherwise.
Agreed. I have an account on the local MLS system and they only accept 7 characters, no 'special' characters. It's a Windoze server, so I just think about Billy G. having a short dick and it reminds me to use the short version of one of my pasword.
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
I have convinced a majority of my friends & family to at least stop using dictionary words and names of pets. Instead, I have them pick some favorite line from a movie or book and then use the first letter of each word. It's easy to remember, so they don't stick it on the bottom of their keyboard. It also is not a word in the dictionary so at least Crack & friends can't be used to guess it.
For example, if one of my friends is a Dead Head, he might use "stlasom.oticbs" If you're a Dead Head you'll probably be able to guess the lyric. But you *won't* be able to find it in a dictionary.
Not always, just most of the time. If you're buying a system *with* a monitor, you'll probably do better on the home/soho site. Without, start on the Small Business site. I often end up checking both, but sometimes it's a bitch trying to build identical systems.
I find Dell's quality to be generally acceptable, but it's a real PITA trying to get a decent price on exactly the system/service features I want without them suddenly adding in crap I don't want/need. Given a reasonable alternative (and, no, I don't want to build my own any more), I would change in minute. (BTW, their 3000 line of desktops is definitely a step backwards.)
I wish I felt better about HP's PC products, but their build quality just ain't what it used to be.
HP joke circa 1985: Two engineers, one hardware and one software, take an HP workstation up to the roof. Connecting a long extension cord, they boot it up and then drop it three stories to the pavement below. Running down to see the results, the hardware guy says, "Hey! It's still running!", and the software guy says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX"
I was at Xerox in the late 70's (think personal computers, mouse, ethernet) and there were two games that were amazing. One was based on a Star Trek theme and it used so much net bandwidth it was banned during working hours because it interrupted print jobs being sent to the laser printers.
The other one (the name escapes me) placed you in a maze of corridors and gave you a first person view (complete with perspective!) of wandering around the place. If you saw another player (they looked like giant floating eyeballs) you could shoot them.
The most dangerous places were the intersections. It would take you a moment to step out into the new corridor and look around. If someone was lurking there, you were dead before you even knew what hit you. If you stopped just short of the intersection, you could use the right & left mouse buttons to 'peek around the corner' without exposing yourself.
After playing this for an hour or more, I remember heading for the door of my office and... stopping and peeking around the corners to make sure someone wasn't about to shoot me. This happened more than once and I used to think it was probably how a cockroach felt just before it skittered across the kitchen floor.
There is a particular breed of scum-sucking parasite (I believe they are called small plaintiff attorneys) that look for clients that have a kind-of/might-be valid complaint in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. Unlike normal business-oriented attorneys, these a**holes will take the case on contingency. They know what it will cost for you to defend yourself, even if you win. And if you do win, they know there is little that can be done to counter-sue for fees and costs.
I am speaking from direct personal experience on this one. When we got the hit with the lawsuit (99% bogus, you got that, Mark?), I was so angry that I was ready to fight til the end of time. Fortunately, my attorney sat me down and explained how this scam works and then said, 'If you want to waste about a year of your time and also pay for my son's tuition at a nice private school, let's fight back. Otherwise, pay these clowns their money and you can get back to the business of making and selling products.'
He was right I -- but I can still feel my blood pressure go up every time I think about it.
I have seen a number of people making similar comments. I have to wonder if you are speaking from direct experience with greylisting or if you are assuming that you can accurately guess at all of the disadvantages from the peanut gallery.
I am not saying that there aren't a couple of idiosyncracies with greylisting, just that the benefits are huge and the worst-case downside is minimal.
Addressing your specific complaints:
We actually run with a very short block time (less than the default 58 minutes). If there is a delay of four hours, it is the sending SMTP server that is introducing it, not us. I regularly get confirming emails in under 10 minutes. If you need it faster than that, are you sure email is the right communication method?
Sharing a database across servers is trivial. It's a one-line mod to the relaydelay.conf file.
As for greylisting only working until the spammers bother to attack it, I think you (and others) are missing the fact that greylisting is one of several methods (including SPF, spamassassin and firefox junk mail controls) that, used in concert, can give you an almost perfect spam-handling environment. (1) If they don't resend, they're dead. (2) They resend but the SPF info doesn't match, they're dead. (3) They resend and have good SPF, but then get zapped by SA (either by content or by updated RBL), they're dead. (4) They resend, have good SPF, and get past SA, but then they run into your Bayesian filter (firefox/mozilla/netscape junk mail), they're dead.
The result is like running polluted water through a sand filter (takes out the big chunks), followed by ozonation (everything but nitrates), followed by a reverse osmosis filter (nitrates): you end up with sparkling clear water superior to almost any municipality in the world. (Yes, my house is on a well and I know from direct experience that this works just fine.)
Given the incredible gains (reduced resource usage, reduced user time sifting through spam, increased usability of mail) plus the fact the delay is only introduced on the first message with a particular (from, to, IP) triple, I can't imagine a real-world situation where greylisting would not be a huge win with virtually no downside. And when you consider the cost to implement greylisting for a major corporation and compare it to the money/time/resources lost to a tidal wave of spam, the ROI is beyond compelling -- it's a no-brainer.
Try it. Invest a couple of hours RTFMing, installing, configuring, testing. I think you'll be enthusiastic about the results.
I think you're trying to describe greylisting. Although greylisting is amazingly effective, I don't believe that's what is being discussed here (the site is slashdotted).
Our experience with greylisting has been (1) an 90%+ reduction in passed-through email (with no complaints from users about lost mail (yet)), (2) a dramatic decrease in server load because SpamAssassin doesn't see the message until after it gets past greylisting, and (3) people rediscover how useful email is once you get all of the crap out of their inbox.
Marketing Guy: What's the worst that could happen?
Dilbert: Our beta product could turn into an evil robot that annihilates the galaxy.
I am hardly the first person to "explain" greylisting. A far better (and therefore, I suppose, more "damaging") explanation is secretly hidden in the whitepaper at the Greylisting website,
ideas for how to get around it have been well known, almost since its inception,
there is a real difference between someone knowing that a workaround exists and having the spamming "community" actually having two neurons to rub together to implement that workaround.
So here it is, more than a year later, and Greylisting still blocks
approximately the same percentage of spam today (85-95% reduction) as it did a year ago.
After more than a year, spammers still haven't changed their behavior.
In particular, using 1-hour greylisting in conjunction with even a very conservative RBL (which could easily be updated as new spam-tsunamis happen) is almost unbeatable.
When combined with other tools (SPF, SpamAssassin, Bayesian filters, etc.) it is possible to contemplate the joys of an all-ham/no-spam inbox.
"You are caught in a maze of twisty little Sendmail rules, all obscure." -- "Sendmail: Theory and Practice", Avolio and Vixie
I run a friends-and-family hosting site (DNS, mail, web) for about 50 domains, almost all of which have catchall enabled. One user was getting 500+ spams a day, day in and day out. I was seeing 200-300 per day myself.
Four weeks ago I built the latest sendmail with Milter turned on and installed relaydelay.pl. The next day that user received two (2) emails, both of which were from friends. I got 7 emails, only one of which was spam.
Greylisting is the single most powerful anti-spam system out there. It blocks over 95+% of the spam and it doesn't "false positive" because it isn't doing pattern matches, Bayesian filtering or anything like that. It simply gives a TEMPFAIL to any email that has an unknown (from, to, server-IP) triple. If they come back more than X minutes later and less than Y minutes later, they are let through. Spammers almost always are using fire-and-forget SMTP servers so they don't retry, and so you never see their garbage. Positively elegant.
If you are the sysadmin, check it out and install it. Otherwise, hound your admin/ISP to install it. It saves bandwidth, aggravation, and time.
The corks just don't come out the way they used to.
-- My Wife, dealing with one of the new Corqs(tm)
We have a 2001 Prius and just rolled past 50,0000 miles on it. We know (and love) this car -- not based on advertising claims or EPA estimates, but based on day-in, day-out, real-world use. Is it perfect? No. But then neither was my '88 535i or my wife's Audi, both of which cost a lot more to buy, and fix, than the Prius.
As many other hybrid owners have pointed out, driving a hybrid is different from driving a normal car. The way the various components of the drive train interact requires a change in driving habits. An earlier poster mentioned flooring it when the taking off from a light; I completely agree. I practice "goose, ghost, and feather-foot". Which means "get up to your desired cruising speed (plus a bit more) as quickly as possible, then back off for a moment and let the system shift into maximum cruise mode, and then make the smallest speed changes possible".
It's true that driving at 85 does not help the mileage, but I do it anyway and I can live with the hit.
On the flats, playing maximum games, I can still average 54+ MPG. We now live in an area with more hills and I have noticed that the ups-and-downs really cause a hit on the mileage. Instead of the 48-52 overall that we used to get, we now get about 46-48 overall. I have no idea where these 31 MPG numbers are coming from, but our Prius was advertised as "52 city, 45 highway" and it has been doing exactly that for over 3 years.
Finally, we bought this car partly because we believe in the idea. Early Linux was not completely user-friendly, but you used it any way because you knew there had to be an alternative to the Dark Side. If you have the time/money to vote for new directions in the world, then you need to do it. Not everyone should drive a hybrid today, but the only way to move away from the world of the Ford Inexcusable is for some of us to be Early Adopters. We are and we're having a ball!
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me? NAV is a steaming heap of complete crap.
AVG does the job better, faster, and with far less resource consumption. Every time I have been called on to disinfect a machine which was running NAV, I recommned the owners switch to AVG. Without exception, they comment on how much more responsive their system is. I have little trouble convincing them to support Grisoft by getting the not-for-free version.
The machine I am on right now is running (probably unnecessarily) a full AVG install. It checks my email, it checks my downloads, it checks all of the crud running on the system, and it does this while burning some fraction of 1% of the CPU and a tiny bit of memory.
If you are currently running NAV, disable it (if you can) and try running AVG for a couple of days. I think you'll notice the difference.
GSA is not just another gov't office. Once you are on the GSA Schedule, then many other government offices and agencies can simply buy your product without any additional paperwork. This means that the on-ramp to MySQL just got *much* easier for many groups in the U.S. govenment.
To quote: "With the GSA contract, GS-35F-0131R Schedule 70, government customers will be able to purchase and deploy MySQL through Carahsoft Technology Corp. The GSA schedule is effective Dec. 20, 2005 through Nov. 19, 2009."
See the magic words "GSA Schedule?" This is a Very Good Thing(tm).
You don't really say what type of problems you want to work on and that can make a big difference in what environment you choose. Kernel hacking leads in one direction, and DB-driven websites goes in a completey different direction.
:-)
Speaking as a GeezerGeek(tm), here are some of the technologies I have found that are something more than The Next Great Thing ver 31.4.
1. Python. It took me a while to get past the indentation-as-block-structure thing (I still think it was a mistake), but this is a language that tremendous expressive power. If I were still teaching, this is the language I would start my students with, knowing that they could go anywhere they want with it.
2. If you are doing any sort of web work, you will probably have to do a little (a lot?) PHP. Fortunately, v. 5 has fixed some of the nastier aspects of the language, although there appears to be no way to undo some truly horrible naming convention mistakes from its early days.
3. AJAX. It's worth a look if you want to stay within the browser's window. And that means you should get good Javascript/CSS/XML/HTML books.
4. Firefox-as-UI-platform. This is related to the above. I am just beginning to get into this and it looks very promising. Other people know far more than I do. The GreaseMonkey extension is great fun to play with.
5. If you are picking up a DBMS, the obvious choices are MySQL and Postgres. If I were just starting, I think I would go with Postgres, if only for OSS purity reasons. OTOH, I have had no problems with MySQL for the relatively low-level situations I have used it and it is generally more available as part of commercial hosting packages.
"Back in the day" I taught programming, so here are a few recommendations for your first few projects.
A. First, pick something fun and relatively simple. I have found that a great way to get into a new language/platform environment is to implement a simple game (eg. hangman, snake, mastermind). The rules are very straightforward, yet they will force you to at least dip your mental toe into logic flow, class structure, I/O and UI, file storage (for high scores), etc. Most of them can be implemented in a few hours and you get that immediate feedback of success. If you are feeling your oats, you might try things like using Python's generators as nanothreads for animation sprites. See the Lightweight Games Toolkit at http://lgt.berlios.de/ for some ideas. (Obviously, this should *not* be for your first project!
B. Pick an area of application that you are already a domain expert in. This way you can focus on the "how", instead of the "what" or the "why".
C. Find a good OSS project and implement a few new features. For example, if you are interested in photography, you might grab Gallery 2 from gallery.menalto.com and try adding a feature to an existing layout module, or try creating a new layout, using an existing one as a template.
D. Find an interesting-but-broken OSS project and dive into the code. Maybe you can breathe new life into a moribund project.
I agree that insightful is probalby the wrong mod label. How about 'common sense' or maybe 'been there, done that'? I also agree with you that it makes no sense at all **if you understand what techies do** (or, for that matter, if you understand people in general). In a real sense, this is quintessential 'reactionary' behavior.
As I said in response to an earlier reply, most companies (and certainly almost all HR people) have no idea what a senior techie does with his/her day. All they know is that some wizard just gave notice and that means they have to lock up all of the magic potions.
Although I can't speak to having operations personnel leave, I can say that when a senior developer leaves, the company should stay on the best possible terms with him/her. They have unknown treasures locked away in their heads and you may need them as consultants at some future date.
I checked my dictionary and I did spell 'rightfully' correctly.
...
Of course they don't understand what a senior techie is doing. That goes without saying. What they *do* understand is that this person, who is no longer aligned with the company and who wields power that they have never fully understood, is now 'going away' and that scares the crap out of them.
When I had my own company, I never needed to do this because I understood what was going on and why the person was leaving. Then again, it was only a five person coampny, so
Based on how you described it, you probably did nothing wrong, and they probably did the right thing.
Companies are rightfully paranoid that a departing employee -- particulalrly one with root access -- may decide to do something nasty on the way out the door. This doesn't mean that *you* would do this, just that they can't take a chance. Of course, if you had intended to do something nasty, you could easily have set it up before tendering your resignation. The best thing to do is act like a professional and understand that what is in your best interest and in the company's best interest are no longer related.
A long, hot shower is, without doubt, the single best environment for doing design work. My employees used to joke that the company would be wise to install a shower in my office. When we lived in the city, my wife would give me a hard time about wasting water. Now that we are in the country, we are on well and septic so we put the water back in the ground about 150 feet from where it came out. I can take a half hour shower and the only downside is I look like a prune. But a prune with great ideas!
So maybe the best environment would be a large shower stall with two or three 20" waterproof displays. (Maybe that wasn't such a great idea, but then I wasn't in the shower when I had it.)
On an only-slightly-less-serious note, I would love to have something that plugs into a USB port (or something) and that has lots of nice blinkenlights that are somehow related to what the system is doing.
Short version: Yes, helicopters use runways.
Long version: Most people assume helicopters just jump off the ground and are suddenly flying. The reality is a good deal more complex than that. (Which is a true statement about almost everything to do with helicopters.)
1. When a helicopter first lifts off the ground it is inside its 'ground effect envelope', where part of its lift is coming from pushing air against the ground. Once it is above a certain height (varies by aircraft -- anywhere from 10 feet to 80 feet), the ground effect falls away and it is now fully airborne.
2. Pure hovering (outside of the ground effect) takes an amazing amount of energy. It also has the danger, if maintained in one place on a still day, of creating a torroid of moving air: first pushed down by the blades, then sucked up and over the top to be pushed down again. This means the copter now has to push harder and faster to make up for the fact that the air it is pushing against is already moving down at some speed.
3. Most fly time in a helictopter is spent moving forward in the air. The disc created by the spinning blade generates lift as it moves forward through the air. In fact, helicopters are called 'rotary-wing aricraft'.
4. During takeoff, a heavily loaded helicopter -- or one operating at high alititude -- will want to stay inside its ground effect envelope while building up forward speed. Once it's going fast enough to generate lift forward motion, then they can start to gain altitude and move out of the ground effect.
One page with more info: http://www.helicopterpage.com/
Peter
284th AVN Co, ATC, 8th Army
I stand corrected, but I don't think it invalidates the original point (although it does force a rewording of my case).
The GPL grants certain rights, given certain conditions. If you violate those conditions (e.g. distribute derivatives without source), then you lose your rights. It doesn't matter what caused the volation. In this case, Daimaou's entering into an agreement with his company in no way changes the terms of the GPL.
Daimaou might get fired, and the company might have to rewrite the code, but the GPL lives on.
BTW: Thanks for pointing me at that article. All of the license work my company did was bound up with contracts and I had a slightly fuzzy distinction between them. As always, PJ and Eben are a joy to read.
Daimaou, on the other hand, may have created a nice little legal swamp for himself, his company may be pissed, they might sue/fire him, and the Red Sox could win the pennant. But none of that affects the applicability of the GPL to the derivative.
Without more specifics it's hard to say. Assuming that Daimaou is using the word 'derived' correctly and is not confusing it with the word 'linked', then it certainly sounds more like your second case.
I also note that LGPL was not mentioned anywhere. If this is a GPLed library (as opposed to an LGPLed library), then even linking propogates the GPLness. Of course, it's probably easier to rewrite something that only mates at the API level, rather than has 5,000 LOC intertwingled with the original code.
All things considered, I would say that the company would be wise to start talking to a *very* good IP attorney before they get their PR balls blown off. On the other hand, if they continue down this road, they might be doing the FOSS world a real favor by creating some nice, clean case law regarding the GPL.
True. But the important condition you added was 'if separable in themselves such that no GPL-derivativeness remains'. But the original clrealy stated, 'but the parts from the above sources were integral pieces and without them, my code wouldn't work'.
Since the code is an inseperable derivative of GPLed code, there is no wiggle room available.
This is actually a fairly clear cut situation. If your code is a derivative of GPLed code, then the derivative is under the GPL, regardless of any other agreements. Your company can either distribute the derived code or not. If they distribute it, they *must* obey the GPL.
If it were any other way, contract law would crumble. Imagine a world where some random Contract X (in this case, your IP agreement) can arbitrarily change the terms and conditions of some other random Contract Y (the GPLed code). A logical extension of this absurdity is that I could then write a contract with you that *somehow* changed a contract between two other, unrelated parties. The law doesn't work that way, no matter how much your Work Overlords would wish otherwise.
Agreed. I have an account on the local MLS system and they only accept 7 characters, no 'special' characters. It's a Windoze server, so I just think about Billy G. having a short dick and it reminds me to use the short version of one of my pasword.
It's crude, but then so is MS's idea of security.
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
I have convinced a majority of my friends & family to at least stop using dictionary words and names of pets. Instead, I have them pick some favorite line from a movie or book and then use the first letter of each word. It's easy to remember, so they don't stick it on the bottom of their keyboard. It also is not a word in the dictionary so at least Crack & friends can't be used to guess it.
For example, if one of my friends is a Dead Head, he might use "stlasom.oticbs" If you're a Dead Head you'll probably be able to guess the lyric. But you *won't* be able to find it in a dictionary.
Not always, just most of the time. If you're buying a system *with* a monitor, you'll probably do better on the home/soho site. Without, start on the Small Business site. I often end up checking both, but sometimes it's a bitch trying to build identical systems.
I find Dell's quality to be generally acceptable, but it's a real PITA trying to get a decent price on exactly the system/service features I want without them suddenly adding in crap I don't want/need. Given a reasonable alternative (and, no, I don't want to build my own any more), I would change in minute. (BTW, their 3000 line of desktops is definitely a step backwards.)
I wish I felt better about HP's PC products, but their build quality just ain't what it used to be.
HP joke circa 1985: Two engineers, one hardware and one software, take an HP workstation up to the roof. Connecting a long extension cord, they boot it up and then drop it three stories to the pavement below. Running down to see the results, the hardware guy says, "Hey! It's still running!", and the software guy says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX"
I was at Xerox in the late 70's (think personal computers, mouse, ethernet) and there were two games that were amazing. One was based on a Star Trek theme and it used so much net bandwidth it was banned during working hours because it interrupted print jobs being sent to the laser printers.
... stopping and peeking around the corners to make sure someone wasn't about to shoot me. This happened more than once and I used to think it was probably how a cockroach felt just before it skittered across the kitchen floor.
The other one (the name escapes me) placed you in a maze of corridors and gave you a first person view (complete with perspective!) of wandering around the place. If you saw another player (they looked like giant floating eyeballs) you could shoot them.
The most dangerous places were the intersections. It would take you a moment to step out into the new corridor and look around. If someone was lurking there, you were dead before you even knew what hit you. If you stopped just short of the intersection, you could use the right & left mouse buttons to 'peek around the corner' without exposing yourself.
After playing this for an hour or more, I remember heading for the door of my office and
I guess I spent too long in the john: I'm gone 5 minutes and Rummy is history?
Or not....
Can't find anything on news.google.com
I am speaking from direct personal experience on this one. When we got the hit with the lawsuit (99% bogus, you got that, Mark?), I was so angry that I was ready to fight til the end of time. Fortunately, my attorney sat me down and explained how this scam works and then said, 'If you want to waste about a year of your time and also pay for my son's tuition at a nice private school, let's fight back. Otherwise, pay these clowns their money and you can get back to the business of making and selling products.'
He was right I -- but I can still feel my blood pressure go up every time I think about it.
I have seen a number of people making similar comments. I have to wonder if you are speaking from direct experience with greylisting or if you are assuming that you can accurately guess at all of the disadvantages from the peanut gallery.
I am not saying that there aren't a couple of idiosyncracies with greylisting, just that the benefits are huge and the worst-case downside is minimal.
Addressing your specific complaints:
We actually run with a very short block time (less than the default 58 minutes). If there is a delay of four hours, it is the sending SMTP server that is introducing it, not us. I regularly get confirming emails in under 10 minutes. If you need it faster than that, are you sure email is the right communication method?
Sharing a database across servers is trivial. It's a one-line mod to the relaydelay.conf file.
As for greylisting only working until the spammers bother to attack it, I think you (and others) are missing the fact that greylisting is one of several methods (including SPF, spamassassin and firefox junk mail controls) that, used in concert, can give you an almost perfect spam-handling environment. (1) If they don't resend, they're dead. (2) They resend but the SPF info doesn't match, they're dead. (3) They resend and have good SPF, but then get zapped by SA (either by content or by updated RBL), they're dead. (4) They resend, have good SPF, and get past SA, but then they run into your Bayesian filter (firefox/mozilla/netscape junk mail), they're dead.
The result is like running polluted water through a sand filter (takes out the big chunks), followed by ozonation (everything but nitrates), followed by a reverse osmosis filter (nitrates): you end up with sparkling clear water superior to almost any municipality in the world. (Yes, my house is on a well and I know from direct experience that this works just fine.)
Given the incredible gains (reduced resource usage, reduced user time sifting through spam, increased usability of mail) plus the fact the delay is only introduced on the first message with a particular (from, to, IP) triple, I can't imagine a real-world situation where greylisting would not be a huge win with virtually no downside. And when you consider the cost to implement greylisting for a major corporation and compare it to the money/time/resources lost to a tidal wave of spam, the ROI is beyond compelling -- it's a no-brainer.
Try it. Invest a couple of hours RTFMing, installing, configuring, testing. I think you'll be enthusiastic about the results.
Our experience with greylisting has been (1) an 90%+ reduction in passed-through email (with no complaints from users about lost mail (yet)), (2) a dramatic decrease in server load because SpamAssassin doesn't see the message until after it gets past greylisting, and (3) people rediscover how useful email is once you get all of the crap out of their inbox.
Marketing Guy: What's the worst that could happen?
Dilbert: Our beta product could turn into an evil robot that annihilates the galaxy.
- I am hardly the first person to "explain" greylisting. A far better (and therefore, I suppose, more "damaging") explanation is secretly hidden in the whitepaper at the Greylisting website,
- ideas for how to get around it have been well known, almost since its inception,
- there is a real difference between someone knowing that a workaround exists and having the spamming "community" actually having two neurons to rub together to implement that workaround.
If you are interested in the evolving story of greylisting, I highly recommend joining the Greylisting mailing list. I would draw your attention to a recent thread, Greylist gravy train ends in 3-6 months , wherein Regis Wilson expresses the same concern as you have. In particular, read Scott Nelson's reply , where he says: In particular, using 1-hour greylisting in conjunction with even a very conservative RBL (which could easily be updated as new spam-tsunamis happen) is almost unbeatable. When combined with other tools (SPF, SpamAssassin, Bayesian filters, etc.) it is possible to contemplate the joys of an all-ham/no-spam inbox.I run a friends-and-family hosting site (DNS, mail, web) for about 50 domains, almost all of which have catchall enabled. One user was getting 500+ spams a day, day in and day out. I was seeing 200-300 per day myself.
Four weeks ago I built the latest sendmail with Milter turned on and installed relaydelay.pl. The next day that user received two (2) emails, both of which were from friends. I got 7 emails, only one of which was spam.
Greylisting is the single most powerful anti-spam system out there. It blocks over 95+% of the spam and it doesn't "false positive" because it isn't doing pattern matches, Bayesian filtering or anything like that. It simply gives a TEMPFAIL to any email that has an unknown (from, to, server-IP) triple. If they come back more than X minutes later and less than Y minutes later, they are let through. Spammers almost always are using fire-and-forget SMTP servers so they don't retry, and so you never see their garbage. Positively elegant.
If you are the sysadmin, check it out and install it. Otherwise, hound your admin/ISP to install it. It saves bandwidth, aggravation, and time.
The corks just don't come out the way they used to.
-- My Wife, dealing with one of the new Corqs(tm)
As many other hybrid owners have pointed out, driving a hybrid is different from driving a normal car. The way the various components of the drive train interact requires a change in driving habits. An earlier poster mentioned flooring it when the taking off from a light; I completely agree. I practice "goose, ghost, and feather-foot". Which means "get up to your desired cruising speed (plus a bit more) as quickly as possible, then back off for a moment and let the system shift into maximum cruise mode, and then make the smallest speed changes possible". It's true that driving at 85 does not help the mileage, but I do it anyway and I can live with the hit.
On the flats, playing maximum games, I can still average 54+ MPG. We now live in an area with more hills and I have noticed that the ups-and-downs really cause a hit on the mileage. Instead of the 48-52 overall that we used to get, we now get about 46-48 overall. I have no idea where these 31 MPG numbers are coming from, but our Prius was advertised as "52 city, 45 highway" and it has been doing exactly that for over 3 years.
Finally, we bought this car partly because we believe in the idea. Early Linux was not completely user-friendly, but you used it any way because you knew there had to be an alternative to the Dark Side. If you have the time/money to vote for new directions in the world, then you need to do it. Not everyone should drive a hybrid today, but the only way to move away from the world of the Ford Inexcusable is for some of us to be Early Adopters. We are and we're having a ball!
Peter & Maria