Those apps, for the most part, will have been designed three or four years ago, when hardware requirements were lesser. As such, running them under Rosetta is almost certainly "as good as" getting a native version.
The big exception, which neither Rosetta nor shared binaries really addresses, are "Classic" apps. The Intel Macs will not have Classic support. This is going to be a bigger PITA, for example, there is no native OS X Microsoft Exchange client. (No, Entourage isn't an Exchange client, it uses IMAP and users of it are "second class citizens" on all but the most recent Exchange Servers, and then only not if certain features have been turned on. Urgh.
I would guess actually the latter. The major issues are - does it compile with the Apple supported tools (my understand is, yes, it uses GCC etc, it just doesn't access them via the XTools GUI), and will it require modifications to deal with endianisms etc (my guess is almost certainly no, because it's based upon the already architecture independent OpenOffice.org, with some additional code written in Java.)
So for the most part, even if generating a univeral binary is "hard" (and I doubt it will be, I don't have access to Tiger so can't use the latest XCode but I'd be surprised if it's not just the old NEXTSTEP "one binary per architecture in a certain directory, with all the shared files in Resources as usual" thing, generating a binary that'll work on "the other architecture" will be a simple matter of compiling it there.
I wouldn't buy an Apple laptop right now, unless it was very, very, cheap. Apple laptops right now are under powered, and it's very clear Apple knows this.
On the other hand, I see no reason not to get a Dual G5 PowerMac. Those represent good value for money. And with Universal Binaries being the order of the day for the next four or five years (you think software makers are going to ignore the vast majority of Mac owners, catering only for an Intel using minority?), it's not a platform that'll be "obsolete" any time soon.
Remember, in about seven to twelve months, Apple will release some Intel based machines. While, from what I see of eBay, Mac users seem to be in a panic, a fact confirmed by very poor sales at the Apple Store right now, it's unlikely that the vast majority of Mac users will consider replacing their machines soon. So even after the switch, even after Apple stops selling PowerPC based machines, it'll be years before ix86 surpasses PowerPC as the dominant Mac OS X platform.
Relax. Decide if you want a Mac. If you do, get one. Unless it's a laptop. Then hold out.
The F&F lists are overloaded with things they're supposed to be. For example, the same list has to be used to get recent journal entries from people I want to read as it does to highlight postings from those same people. If I want to subscribe to someone's blacklist, I have to make them a friend and then make foes of friends -6, but if I do that I get that person's JEs (whether I want them or not), and more importantly, all the foes of all the people whose journals I read get hidden too.
It's overloaded to the point of being absurd. The only way to make effective use of it in all the ways CmdrTaco intended is to essentially have two or more accounts, one to browse with, the other to friend and foe individuals, yet another to mark journals you want to read.
Impressive work by Slashdotters there, especially as I'd have expected them to wait until tuesday to be this mean.
On a more serious note, it'd be nice to know why the LA Times had these problems but services like Wikipedia have generally avoided it. I'm going to make a guess that Wikipedia et al have had to put up with it but over time have (a) become boring as targets for defacers and (b) have grown to add procedures that discourage simple defacing in this way.
Unlike Slashdot, whose moderation and IP restriction systems seem to consistantly avoid doing anything about the problems while causing the rest of us no end of grief.
That's the abstact, not the patent, the claims themselves are the critical part of the system.
As far as the other comment goes, it says in TFA that the patent holder has been trying to negotiate the issue with Apple since some time last year. The case is going to court because Apple doesn't want to settle on the patent holder's terms.
I quite agree. There's nobody who enjoys a joke as much as I do, but nevertheless, there must be a place we can draw the line, and when there is the risk, indeed, some would say the certainty, of miscommunication and misunderstanding merely because of the use of irony, or worse still its crude and vulgar cousin, sarcasm, we must ask ourselves if such "jokes" are actually necessary and appropriate.
Now, I've never been one to take offense at a good joke. I have as excellent a sense of humour as the next man (or woman.) I spend a good portion of my day passing on jokes I have received from others on the Internet to my friends. But these jokes have a context. They're not intermingled with serious content. And they certainly do not undermine the understanding of serious discussion material by including quotes from the President of the United States of America. When I must write serious, thoughtful, articles, I do not debase the very subjects I write about by including irrelevent pot-shots at our fine American Southern brethren, who certainly can't help being a little less able to communicate using correct English than the rest of us.
I do hope the article submitter is reading this and is aware of our strong views on the subject. Slashdot is "News for nerds, stuff that matters", an informal but nonetheless unambigious mission statement that leaves no room for humour.
As a general rule I would avoid contracts that put any restriction on my personal life, even the idea of it offends me. I completely understand that this may not be always be possible, and in your case you have a very valid point there.
FWIW, I'm living in America but on a work visa, if they fire me, I have to move 3,000 miles. So when they put the agreement in front of me at my last review, I didn't really feel like I had a lot of choice.
I'd otherwise agree. Had my circumstances been a little more flexible, I'd have procrastinated and in the mean time looked for a new job.
Hex-numbers are often all you have. What does it matter what Apple is encouraging if you're using an already configured, often not by yourself, WAP?
Assuming the dialog is in a Cocoa.nib, it'd have taken about thirty seconds to add a box on there saying "If you have been given a password like "01 23 45...", precede it with a dollar in the password field. Or even better, the system could have figured it out itself, eg "Is this a valid format for a hex password? If so, try it. Doesn't work or wasn't hex to begin with? Ok, try it as an ASCII password". How long would it have taken for them to implement that?
And you do this how? Beyond using some third party hack, that is?
Not that I particularly want to do this. It just always amazes me when someone suggests using some feature that doesn't actually exist, unless you're going to install some additional, non-Apple, app that almost certainly breaks between operating system refreshes.
FWIW, I use a keyboard that has no Apple or Windows button (no Cmd effectively.) I hack the USB driver to change Left-Alt to Command. It works, the system is thus usable and I get to use the keyboard I actually want. Would I dismiss someone's concerns about not being able to (usefully) use a command-less keyboard with OS X by saying "Huh? Just configure your left Alt to be Command"? Of course not. It'd be stupid even if it's technically possible.
I wouldn't necessarily look at the "giving up copyright" thing as always a bad thing, even leaving aside the obvious benefit that it's easier to protect the copyrights of the project if the copyright ownership is unified.
I'm considering using it myself, because it neutralizes an unfair part of my work contract (not in any unfair or dubious way) - which requires that work I do at home on my own time becomes my employer's property should my employer consider it part of their business at any time in the future (while I work there.) So, for example, I could write a tool today totally unrelated to anything my employer does, and in three years some part of the company could start using it, and - wham - because I own the copyright in 2008 and work for them, my employer suddenly has the rights to it and can effectively quash development of the project, or quash further Free Software updates to it from me, the lead programmer. With current management, that's probably not a problem. But I'm looking at anyone who was unfortunate enough to work for, say, SCO, knowing that time changes a lot of things.
Giving away the copyrights today, to a trusted party (which Sun isn't, because while I like Sun and don't understand the stick they get from so many in the FOSS camps, they are, just like my employer, beholden to their shareholders and a quick change of management could put anyone in charge with any agenda; but the FSF is) would fix that. At worst, if my employer didn't like it, they would fire me. But lawsuits and murky fogs of ownership (such as that that almost killed BSD) would be out of the question.
I'm sure a lot of people don't like the idea of handing over their copyrights to a third party. That's fine. It's just not automatically a bad thing. Perhaps the FSF, and Sun for that matter, should put together a fund to compensate people who do financially. That'd make a major difference and probably remove one of the biggest reasons ("I'd like to make a commercial version!") for refusing to hand it over.
There's no requirement, from what I've seen, that you assign copyright to the FSF to get a project on Savannah.
The reasons why Savannah is smaller are:
- Savannah is newer. There's been less time to add projects, and it has a smaller "mindshare".
- Savannah has a vetting process. Projects have to be approved by Savannah's admins.
- Savannah has stricter licensing and deployment requirements. For example, Yet Another 3D Game Engine for Windows will not be approved, the main reason being that it is for a non-free OS. If, however, the project is altered to be a cross-platform engine (and the features are at least as comprehensive on free platforms as non-free platforms) then it'll be approved.
GNU is a specific project, and each addition to it has to be approved by RMS. Of course the barrier is higher. GNU is not "every open source/free software project in existance".
osama101: so, when we put our plan into operation, the infidels will tremble in fear and have no choice but to cede our demands! evlhnchmn21: *lol* *LOL* *LOLOL* The West will tremble and beg for our mercy! osama101: *rofl* *ROFL* *LOL* They will never guess a plot they've already seen on their television show "24"! sidekick60: *LOL* Except done correctly with technology that actually exists, of course! *** nycmale23 has entered channel #Al-Queda nycmale23: ne1 want to cyber? osama101: go away nycmale23: osama101 a/s/l? evlhnchmn21: wtf?
Anti-spammers don't promote systems that prevent spam,
That, of course, is liable to be misinterpreted. In this case, I'm referring to the type of anti-spammer we've been talking about. As I've shown, I'm technically an "anti-spammer", I have systems on my own email to prevent spam from being sent. But I choose systems that do not result in false positives, that actually work and punish the spammers themselves.
So you believe the onus for ensuring delivery of any particular message lies with the intended recipient, not the sender?
No, and you're making interpretations of what I said up that no rational person would read into it, which I assume means you have no argument. In any transaction, for an email to be sent, the sender has to try to send it and the receiver has to try to receive it, with those in the middle who have agreed with the receiver to perform the work of storing their email also agreeing to do their part. If one or other of the parties doesn't do this, then the email cannot be sent. Whichever party falls down on the job is entirely responsible for the email not being transfered.
You can pretend it's the sender's fault as long as you like, but the sender is doing everything they're technically required to do. It is the third party that sits between the sender and receiver who's preventing the transaction from taking place. It is that third party that has consciously made the decisions that have prevented the email from being sent. They ARE to blame. Not the sender. The sender didn't do anything wrong. Not some spammer, the spammer's responsible for any problems he causes and no more. Not some ISP, the ISP is responsible for allowing a spammer to spam, and no more. The person who takes the technical measures he does to prevent an email from being sent out of ideology is directly to blame.
Firstly, let's not forget who are the real villains here : it is the *spammers* who are damaging the utility of email.
Oh bollocks. That was true ten years ago when spam started, when spammers tied up mail servers. It isn't true today. Spammers are not preventing emails from being delivered, and the obsessive, insane, methods adopted by a large minority of "anti-spammers" have only caused the problems they complain about to get worse, by encouraging spammers to increase their output more and more in the hope that, somehow, their messages will get through. And a quick look at, say, my Yahoo mailbox, shows that they're working. Because the measures the ideologues adopt are, 99% of the time, easily defeatable by simple changes to the methods used.
The real villians are those who are intentionally disabling email in order to try to involve third parties who aren't spamming and have no connection with spam to get involved. They're deliberately, as a matter of policy, trying to cause damage to those collaterally effected in the hope that they'll put pressure on their ISPs to deal with a rather minor problem.
These people are the villians. They are fucking it up for everyone. They eschew real anti-spam methods for computerized blackmail. I'm not about to support those who resort to extremist methods simply because I don't like one of the same groups of people they're fighting (one of, because they have three targets - spammers, ISPs that have had spammers as customers, and other, innocent, customers of ISPs that have had spammers as customers.)
If my neighbour speeds in my development, he's an arsehole. If someone smashes the windows of his landlord, they're arseholes too. If that someone smashes the windows of my neighbour's landlord, and the windows of his landlord's other tenants, then the window-smashers are the villian.
If you're part of this, you're the problem: if you are, stop looking at yourself as better than what you attack, because you're not. Spam is a resolvable issue. Anti-spammers don't promote systems that prevent spam, they merely promote systems that cause damage. They should be run off the Internet.
Actually, he should be contacting the ISP and other mail server runners with the configuration problem that's causing his emails to be blocked. Those are the #1 problem here.
Whether Yahoo! happens to have a spammer today or not is largely irrelevent, no ISP has a fool-proof anti-spammer policy, and spammers are going to come and go no matter how much work ISPs can do to fix this.
There are several guilty parties here. If I had to put everything by order of "This guy caused this email to be blocked", I'd say the order was:
Destination postmaster (and their employer)
Blacklist operator
Spammer
Yahoo
These parties can reasonably be said to have had some role in blocking the message. The person who administers email for the person who wants to receive it but can't is the person clearly most responsible. The blacklist operators are too, for putting this "ingredient" (Yahoo is a spammer) in the drug they're trying to push, and for pushing it. The spammer is clearly at fault for being part of a group that caused a problem in the first place. And Yahoo might be at fault if they knowingly allowed the spammer to operate.
But let's be reasonable. Complaints should start with the people who can fix the problem, not at dubiously related parties for not being a loud enough member of an ideological crusade.
This nonsense has repeated so many times it's unbelievable those promoting the argument still have any karma left.
It doesn't prevent a third party receiving an email. It prevents a sender from sending it. Just because the logic is implemented by the third party doesn't mean that the email can magically be sent. If an email cannot be received, it cannot be sent. It is not physically possible to send something for it not to be received.
I used the term "third party" because while it's occasionally the receipient who would block the mail, 99% of the time it's their ISP or employer's system administrator, a third party in the transaction. Blacklists would be a lot less controvertial (and probably a lot less used by themselves with no systems to bypass for trusted senders given their implications!) if it were actual email receipients that choose whether to use them or not, on an individual basis.
Speaking as someone who administers my own email, I might add that despite doing a lot of ecommerce (Amazon, eBay, banks, other online stores, etc), I rarely get spam. I've had two this year. All through the trivially simple process of assigning independent, turn-offable, incoming email addresses to each entity I do business with. No filters, blacklists, bayesian or Mail.app AI, or any other BS. Not a single false positive, and only two false negatives in a period of six months during which time I've received hundreds of email messages. There are systems that work, and there are systems that punish innocent third parties. Changing the definition of "not innocent" to include "someone who unknowingly signs up with an ISP that unknowingly also signed up another customer who turned out to be a spammer whose account was eventually terminated but not without tooing and froing from the various clueless PHBs who didn't understand the implications of that" doesn't help either, because even if you're so extreme as to accept that tortured logic, the customer of the ISP that blocks the email is as much a victim as the person trying to send it.
Let's stop destroying email and let's tackle spam using appropriate, sensible, measures. If it generates false positives, preventing an email, send from one individual addressed to another, that the intended recipient wants to receive from being received, it shouldn't be under consideration.
However, a decade or two ago it wasn't really frowned upon to share mix tapes with friends, who would share them with friends, etc. I don't know if it was covered under Fair Use, but the music industry didn't care.
...but that would be analoguous, today, to someone emailing you an MP3 or something. There are certain major differences between this and the P2P systems its generally compared to: the major one is that the scale of the copying is limited by the fact that the people involved know one-another.
If someone tells me about a band, I'll download a track or an album by them, and if it's something I like I'll buy the CD.
I'm sincerely glad you do and have friends who do likewise. Unfortunately I know why the content industry is up in arms about P2P, it's that too many people don't, and while there were quite a few people who'd use "Oh, my friend can burn me a copy of his CD/tape me a copy of his album" as a substitute for buying, the sheer scale of the P2P systems makes the situation entirely incomparable.
My personal thoughts are that there ought to be a way legitimate (legal or not, at present) P2P uses and the industry that funds the creation of the content that populates P2P systems could meet half way on this. In particular, P2P clients implementing a "permission check" to determine that someone, somewhere, has indicated that they are responsible for file such as an MP3 and are happy to see it redistributed, would be a simple thing to implement in P2P clients if everyone could agree on a protocol and if the music industry would agree to at least put a sizable group of files on that list, perhaps by including something in the protocol so that an end user can easily look up what album, etc, the music is a part of and immediately be directed to a website where they can buy it, or just tip the authors.
To get to that stage, P2P client authors have to be willing to implement such a thing as the big, evil, terrible, etc, music industry has to be willing to support it. So far as I've seen, there's little willingness to do so. For the most part, every new "innovation" in P2P seems to be about making use more and more decentralized and less and less tracable. I've yet to hear about anyone promoting anything so simple as a tip-jar, let alone a simple "User's client will not upload this file unless someone steps up and makes themselves accountable for its distribution" check which, at the very least, would help end-users prevent themselves from unintentional copyright infringement.
The current situation though is unsustainable. It's illegal, despite many people thinking that just because it's non-profit it's "fair use", or just because they try to be ethical and use it as nothing more than a "try before you buy" system, somehow most other people do. A bunch of companies have deliberately sold software they know will be used illegally, often apparently deliberately taking advantage of their customer's ignorance (and then blaming the victims when the victim copyright owner sues the only person they can, the (now also a victim) P2P app user. There has to be a better way than this.
Nope, there was a program called AppleWorks for the Apple II before ClarisWorks, but that was a completely different program. The history of ClarisWorks is here.
Slashdot Mirror
The big exception, which neither Rosetta nor shared binaries really addresses, are "Classic" apps. The Intel Macs will not have Classic support. This is going to be a bigger PITA, for example, there is no native OS X Microsoft Exchange client. (No, Entourage isn't an Exchange client, it uses IMAP and users of it are "second class citizens" on all but the most recent Exchange Servers, and then only not if certain features have been turned on. Urgh.
So for the most part, even if generating a univeral binary is "hard" (and I doubt it will be, I don't have access to Tiger so can't use the latest XCode but I'd be surprised if it's not just the old NEXTSTEP "one binary per architecture in a certain directory, with all the shared files in Resources as usual" thing, generating a binary that'll work on "the other architecture" will be a simple matter of compiling it there.
On the other hand, I see no reason not to get a Dual G5 PowerMac. Those represent good value for money. And with Universal Binaries being the order of the day for the next four or five years (you think software makers are going to ignore the vast majority of Mac owners, catering only for an Intel using minority?), it's not a platform that'll be "obsolete" any time soon. Remember, in about seven to twelve months, Apple will release some Intel based machines. While, from what I see of eBay, Mac users seem to be in a panic, a fact confirmed by very poor sales at the Apple Store right now, it's unlikely that the vast majority of Mac users will consider replacing their machines soon. So even after the switch, even after Apple stops selling PowerPC based machines, it'll be years before ix86 surpasses PowerPC as the dominant Mac OS X platform.
Relax. Decide if you want a Mac. If you do, get one. Unless it's a laptop. Then hold out.
Sorry.
It's overloaded to the point of being absurd. The only way to make effective use of it in all the ways CmdrTaco intended is to essentially have two or more accounts, one to browse with, the other to friend and foe individuals, yet another to mark journals you want to read.
On a more serious note, it'd be nice to know why the LA Times had these problems but services like Wikipedia have generally avoided it. I'm going to make a guess that Wikipedia et al have had to put up with it but over time have (a) become boring as targets for defacers and (b) have grown to add procedures that discourage simple defacing in this way.
Unlike Slashdot, whose moderation and IP restriction systems seem to consistantly avoid doing anything about the problems while causing the rest of us no end of grief.
The patent was granted in 1999. It was applied for on February 13th, 1996.
As far as the other comment goes, it says in TFA that the patent holder has been trying to negotiate the issue with Apple since some time last year. The case is going to court because Apple doesn't want to settle on the patent holder's terms.
Let's hope it doesn't have "colour clash."
No offense taken. I was just explaining, 'is all :)
Now, I've never been one to take offense at a good joke. I have as excellent a sense of humour as the next man (or woman.) I spend a good portion of my day passing on jokes I have received from others on the Internet to my friends. But these jokes have a context. They're not intermingled with serious content. And they certainly do not undermine the understanding of serious discussion material by including quotes from the President of the United States of America. When I must write serious, thoughtful, articles, I do not debase the very subjects I write about by including irrelevent pot-shots at our fine American Southern brethren, who certainly can't help being a little less able to communicate using correct English than the rest of us.
I do hope the article submitter is reading this and is aware of our strong views on the subject. Slashdot is "News for nerds, stuff that matters", an informal but nonetheless unambigious mission statement that leaves no room for humour.
I'd otherwise agree. Had my circumstances been a little more flexible, I'd have procrastinated and in the mean time looked for a new job.
Assuming the dialog is in a Cocoa .nib, it'd have taken about thirty seconds to add a box on there saying "If you have been given a password like "01 23 45 ...", precede it with a dollar in the password field. Or even better, the system could have figured it out itself, eg "Is this a valid format for a hex password? If so, try it. Doesn't work or wasn't hex to begin with? Ok, try it as an ASCII password". How long would it have taken for them to implement that?
Not that I particularly want to do this. It just always amazes me when someone suggests using some feature that doesn't actually exist, unless you're going to install some additional, non-Apple, app that almost certainly breaks between operating system refreshes.
FWIW, I use a keyboard that has no Apple or Windows button (no Cmd effectively.) I hack the USB driver to change Left-Alt to Command. It works, the system is thus usable and I get to use the keyboard I actually want. Would I dismiss someone's concerns about not being able to (usefully) use a command-less keyboard with OS X by saying "Huh? Just configure your left Alt to be Command"? Of course not. It'd be stupid even if it's technically possible.
I'm considering using it myself, because it neutralizes an unfair part of my work contract (not in any unfair or dubious way) - which requires that work I do at home on my own time becomes my employer's property should my employer consider it part of their business at any time in the future (while I work there.) So, for example, I could write a tool today totally unrelated to anything my employer does, and in three years some part of the company could start using it, and - wham - because I own the copyright in 2008 and work for them, my employer suddenly has the rights to it and can effectively quash development of the project, or quash further Free Software updates to it from me, the lead programmer. With current management, that's probably not a problem. But I'm looking at anyone who was unfortunate enough to work for, say, SCO, knowing that time changes a lot of things.
Giving away the copyrights today, to a trusted party (which Sun isn't, because while I like Sun and don't understand the stick they get from so many in the FOSS camps, they are, just like my employer, beholden to their shareholders and a quick change of management could put anyone in charge with any agenda; but the FSF is) would fix that. At worst, if my employer didn't like it, they would fire me. But lawsuits and murky fogs of ownership (such as that that almost killed BSD) would be out of the question.
I'm sure a lot of people don't like the idea of handing over their copyrights to a third party. That's fine. It's just not automatically a bad thing. Perhaps the FSF, and Sun for that matter, should put together a fund to compensate people who do financially. That'd make a major difference and probably remove one of the biggest reasons ("I'd like to make a commercial version!") for refusing to hand it over.
The reasons why Savannah is smaller are:
- Savannah is newer. There's been less time to add projects, and it has a smaller "mindshare".
- Savannah has a vetting process. Projects have to be approved by Savannah's admins.
- Savannah has stricter licensing and deployment requirements. For example, Yet Another 3D Game Engine for Windows will not be approved, the main reason being that it is for a non-free OS. If, however, the project is altered to be a cross-platform engine (and the features are at least as comprehensive on free platforms as non-free platforms) then it'll be approved.
GNU is a specific project, and each addition to it has to be approved by RMS. Of course the barrier is higher. GNU is not "every open source/free software project in existance".
You can pretend it's the sender's fault as long as you like, but the sender is doing everything they're technically required to do. It is the third party that sits between the sender and receiver who's preventing the transaction from taking place. It is that third party that has consciously made the decisions that have prevented the email from being sent. They ARE to blame. Not the sender. The sender didn't do anything wrong. Not some spammer, the spammer's responsible for any problems he causes and no more. Not some ISP, the ISP is responsible for allowing a spammer to spam, and no more. The person who takes the technical measures he does to prevent an email from being sent out of ideology is directly to blame.
Oh bollocks. That was true ten years ago when spam started, when spammers tied up mail servers. It isn't true today. Spammers are not preventing emails from being delivered, and the obsessive, insane, methods adopted by a large minority of "anti-spammers" have only caused the problems they complain about to get worse, by encouraging spammers to increase their output more and more in the hope that, somehow, their messages will get through. And a quick look at, say, my Yahoo mailbox, shows that they're working. Because the measures the ideologues adopt are, 99% of the time, easily defeatable by simple changes to the methods used.The real villians are those who are intentionally disabling email in order to try to involve third parties who aren't spamming and have no connection with spam to get involved. They're deliberately, as a matter of policy, trying to cause damage to those collaterally effected in the hope that they'll put pressure on their ISPs to deal with a rather minor problem.
These people are the villians. They are fucking it up for everyone. They eschew real anti-spam methods for computerized blackmail. I'm not about to support those who resort to extremist methods simply because I don't like one of the same groups of people they're fighting (one of, because they have three targets - spammers, ISPs that have had spammers as customers, and other, innocent, customers of ISPs that have had spammers as customers.)
If my neighbour speeds in my development, he's an arsehole. If someone smashes the windows of his landlord, they're arseholes too. If that someone smashes the windows of my neighbour's landlord, and the windows of his landlord's other tenants, then the window-smashers are the villian.
If you're part of this, you're the problem: if you are, stop looking at yourself as better than what you attack, because you're not. Spam is a resolvable issue. Anti-spammers don't promote systems that prevent spam, they merely promote systems that cause damage. They should be run off the Internet.
Ah ok. I thought you meant that Appleworks "became" ClarisWorks and back again and that was the shuffling.
If your attitude is typical, that's great news for those trying to convert "Grandma" over to GNU/Linux.
"I can't get the Internet to work"
"Are you stupid? The Internet works fine. I'm on it now on my computer. Duh. You really are a maroon."
Whether Yahoo! happens to have a spammer today or not is largely irrelevent, no ISP has a fool-proof anti-spammer policy, and spammers are going to come and go no matter how much work ISPs can do to fix this.
There are several guilty parties here. If I had to put everything by order of "This guy caused this email to be blocked", I'd say the order was:
- Destination postmaster (and their employer)
- Blacklist operator
- Spammer
- Yahoo
These parties can reasonably be said to have had some role in blocking the message. The person who administers email for the person who wants to receive it but can't is the person clearly most responsible. The blacklist operators are too, for putting this "ingredient" (Yahoo is a spammer) in the drug they're trying to push, and for pushing it. The spammer is clearly at fault for being part of a group that caused a problem in the first place. And Yahoo might be at fault if they knowingly allowed the spammer to operate.But let's be reasonable. Complaints should start with the people who can fix the problem, not at dubiously related parties for not being a loud enough member of an ideological crusade.
It doesn't prevent a third party receiving an email. It prevents a sender from sending it. Just because the logic is implemented by the third party doesn't mean that the email can magically be sent. If an email cannot be received, it cannot be sent. It is not physically possible to send something for it not to be received.
I used the term "third party" because while it's occasionally the receipient who would block the mail, 99% of the time it's their ISP or employer's system administrator, a third party in the transaction. Blacklists would be a lot less controvertial (and probably a lot less used by themselves with no systems to bypass for trusted senders given their implications!) if it were actual email receipients that choose whether to use them or not, on an individual basis.
Speaking as someone who administers my own email, I might add that despite doing a lot of ecommerce (Amazon, eBay, banks, other online stores, etc), I rarely get spam. I've had two this year. All through the trivially simple process of assigning independent, turn-offable, incoming email addresses to each entity I do business with. No filters, blacklists, bayesian or Mail.app AI, or any other BS. Not a single false positive, and only two false negatives in a period of six months during which time I've received hundreds of email messages. There are systems that work, and there are systems that punish innocent third parties. Changing the definition of "not innocent" to include "someone who unknowingly signs up with an ISP that unknowingly also signed up another customer who turned out to be a spammer whose account was eventually terminated but not without tooing and froing from the various clueless PHBs who didn't understand the implications of that" doesn't help either, because even if you're so extreme as to accept that tortured logic, the customer of the ISP that blocks the email is as much a victim as the person trying to send it.
Let's stop destroying email and let's tackle spam using appropriate, sensible, measures. If it generates false positives, preventing an email, send from one individual addressed to another, that the intended recipient wants to receive from being received, it shouldn't be under consideration.
My personal thoughts are that there ought to be a way legitimate (legal or not, at present) P2P uses and the industry that funds the creation of the content that populates P2P systems could meet half way on this. In particular, P2P clients implementing a "permission check" to determine that someone, somewhere, has indicated that they are responsible for file such as an MP3 and are happy to see it redistributed, would be a simple thing to implement in P2P clients if everyone could agree on a protocol and if the music industry would agree to at least put a sizable group of files on that list, perhaps by including something in the protocol so that an end user can easily look up what album, etc, the music is a part of and immediately be directed to a website where they can buy it, or just tip the authors.
To get to that stage, P2P client authors have to be willing to implement such a thing as the big, evil, terrible, etc, music industry has to be willing to support it. So far as I've seen, there's little willingness to do so. For the most part, every new "innovation" in P2P seems to be about making use more and more decentralized and less and less tracable. I've yet to hear about anyone promoting anything so simple as a tip-jar, let alone a simple "User's client will not upload this file unless someone steps up and makes themselves accountable for its distribution" check which, at the very least, would help end-users prevent themselves from unintentional copyright infringement.
The current situation though is unsustainable. It's illegal, despite many people thinking that just because it's non-profit it's "fair use", or just because they try to be ethical and use it as nothing more than a "try before you buy" system, somehow most other people do. A bunch of companies have deliberately sold software they know will be used illegally, often apparently deliberately taking advantage of their customer's ignorance (and then blaming the victims when the victim copyright owner sues the only person they can, the (now also a victim) P2P app user. There has to be a better way than this.
Nope, there was a program called AppleWorks for the Apple II before ClarisWorks, but that was a completely different program. The history of ClarisWorks is here.