Funny, when someone does propose an anti-spam solution, people here can't poke holes in it fast enough.
That's because 90% of the so-called "solutions" for spam have serious flaws. They usually end up blocking legitimate email and usually can be worked around by some means. Really, for ordinary users forced to endure some largely unaccountable sysadmins idea of what email should be, the only workable environment involves a combination of Bayesian-style filters coupled with white lists for known good addresses (to ensure they're not accidentally dropped.) For those of us able to administer SMTP servers, seperate email addresses for each entity that needs to contact us with no published permanent "public" addresses generally works.
The "solutions" we see posted from time to time rarely are as straightforward or effective. SPEWS type filtering blocks customers of ISPs regardless of whether they themselves are abusive or not. The DUL blocks by a criteria which has nothing, on the face of it, to do with spam, and simply makes things like configuration-free email an impossibility and roaming more difficult. ISP-lead outgoing port 25 blocking makes configuration-free email impossible and undermines user privacy. ISP-lead incoming port 25 blocking makes it impossible for knowledgable end users to deploy certain effective methods of spam block. The SPF, in an environment in which port 25 blocks and the DUL are active and in which ISPs rarely offer "authenticated SMTP" connections for external users will make roaming even more difficult.
And those are just the current methods taken seriously and proposed at every turn. Meanwhile, people propose all sorts of "solutions" like using encrypted authentication and even getting rid of SMTP which are about as easy as creating world peace ("All we have to do is stop fighting each other!"), and which open all sorts of new cans of worms.
In the case of this article, someone was seriously contemplating having the FTC create a Do-Not-Spam list, a list that wouldn't have applied to foreign owned businesses and one that would have, if anything, legitimized spam ("Hey, we're only posting to people off the list, leave us alone!")
When people stop proposing daft and damaging ideas, people on Slashdot will stop poking holes in them. Spam is a solvable problem, but an unholy alliance of BOFHs and zealots is causing immeasurable damage without actually making much of a dent, if any, in the volumes we're talking about. Interestingly, by-and-large, the solutions that work involve enfranchising the receiver, a principle the current anti-spam culture is reluctant to accept.
An AC earlier said that Apple doesn't always give back to the community. S/he gave the example of X11. After a long discussion about what the AC meant, someone asked me to give an example of where Apple hadn't "given back". I repeated the AC's example of X11.
How is whether Apple "clamps down" on X11 users relevent to the question of whether Apple has a proprietary X11 server built on originally F/OSS code? I don't think anyone's suggesting Apple has done anything of the sort. What is clear is that when Apple takes F/OSS code, it doesn't contribute F/OSS code back in equal measure.
Indeed, for all of Darwin's supposed open sourciness, the code is often missing for quite low level and critical operations. An example would be the device drivers for CD and DVD burners (That's DiscRecording.framework, in case you need to know) which Apple seems to have gone out of their way to keep closed so they can dictate the burners people can and can't use (something which had a major impact when DVD+R started to become popular.)
What Apple is legally or morally obliged to do is a different debate and will depend on the licenses of the code (former) or ethics of the person arguing (latter.) But on a basic, non-partisan, non-judgemental, objective level, Apple, while it gives far more to the F/OSS communities than, say, Microsoft, does not give as much as it benefits. I find it ironic really that Slashdotters tend to "like" Apple for this and yet will abuse Sun, who really have given more than they've taken, without a single thought.
I'm going to probably continue to flit between the two until Firefox supports middle clicking links to open them in new tabs. Right now you have Right-Click and select from a menu, which annoys me no end.
I can't imagine how beefy the Citrix server would have to be.
Probably not enough given the number of times I call the company that might be AT&T Wireless Services* and the poor support rep informs me that he's just been booted out of the system again and could I hold a second (clickity-click) I'm so sorry about this (more typing and clicking) ok, I have your details here now let me... oh, it's just booted me out again, I'm so sorry hold on...;-)
You know, client server is a good thing, but one thing I've learned the hard way is that thin servers and fat clients tend to make better partners than the other way around - sometimes to a degree that surprised me (like putting huge amounts of logic in JavaScript if you can get away with it can mean you need a pretty trivial web server. Not that I think that's a good solution, given there are better application platforms than web browsers, but I'm just saying.)
* An additional surcharge of $1.75 will be added to your Slashdot bill to cover the costs of making this message conform to Government mandated standards. Additional taxes may apply.
The only reason people keep them around is that they're too lazy to delete them themselves. Not because they want to refer back to them.
Speak for yourself! I do deliberately keep my email, and it pisses me off no end when I get some sort of hard disk crash that causes me to lose old archived email.
Yahoo gives a warning when your mailbox reaches a certain size anyway, so it's easy to do some quick maintenance like delete that email with the absurdly large attachment to get the space back. But 100megs will certainly help.
True, but is it a requirement that they have to give back ALL their changes given that the license doesn't require it?
Legally, no, it isn't a requirement. Please, re-read my comment. And also bear in mind I'm not the original AC.
OK, that f---ing stupid two minute thing has kicked in again. So it's time to find a joke at random and post it.
The founder of an international nail company wants a new ad campaign,
so he hires an ad agency to come up with a good TV commercial for his
Wilson Nails.
Tens of thousands of dollars later, the ad agency has a meeting with
the director to premier their commercial. The ad begins with a flying
shot that zooms over a mountain (to stirring music, of course!) and
begins closing in on three figures on the hillside. It zooms closer
and closer and the viewers can now tell two of the men are dressed as
guards and are nailing the third to a cross. The camera continues to
zoom in - right up to the Wilson symbol on the head of the nail
protruding from the crucified man's hand.
"Wilson nails - for the toughest jobs." says the announcer.
Well, the head of Wilson Nails is livid. He cannot believe the ad
agency was so flippant with the religious angle. He demands that they
reshoot the commercial for free - and they better come up with
something good this time or they're fired.
After another few weeks, the ad agency has just completed reshooting
the commercial and the head of Wilson wants it aired right away - he
has no time to preview it this time, trusting them to have fixed the
problem. He is at home that night when the commercial airs. As before,
the camera flies over the mountain and begins closing in on two
figures this time. It gets closer and closer, until the viewers see
the two guards standing beside a lone cross. In the distance, a man
with a sheet around his waist can be seen running down the mountain.
One guard turns to the other and says, "See, I told you we should have
used Wilson Nails".
Well, it's better to mention it late than not mention it at all.
I don't know. I think the Internet has real potential for opening up the airwaves, or will do once we have reasonable, open, unmetered wireless systems so someone can be in the middle of nowhere, flick a switch, and listen to anything, be it the excellent All Things Considered NPR news program, or just someone in their basement mixing music they love that you can't hear anywhere else. It's a matter though of building the infrastructure. We need an infrastructure for the unfettered redistribution of free content (that's consensually free content all you Kazaa fiends), we need - whether it's volunteer-run 802.11 or 802.16 networks or 3G - methods of making data available anywhere, and we need...
You know, here at squiggleslash we know you appreciate good posting, and we strive to bring you the good posting you want and need. But good posting doesn't come for free. There are bills to pay, actors to hire, trolls to write, and topics to research, and they all cost money. We can only keep squiggleslash online with the help and financial support of readers like you. As little as $50 a year can help us keep up outputting the high quality content you want from squiggleslash. So give generously. Call our volunteers now on 555-0113. That's Five Five Five, Zero One One Three. Call now and make your pledge.
I think the objection the AC had wasn't that Apple were disobeying a license, but that they weren't behaving as described by the text s/he quoted:
You say that as if what Apple did wasn't wholly in keeping with the Open Source philosiphy--and, arguably, compatable with the Free Software philosiphy.
Clearly taking and not giving back is not in keeping with either Free Software or Open Source principles, whether the license requires you or not.
Not that I'm sure this is actually relevent to anything real.
Do you have the same functionality on your Palm? Would the lack of that functionality mean it's not a PDA?
What about the Nokia Communicator series? My 9290 lacks WiFi (but will have it in the next version), but has emulators for various games machines, MPEG playback, Word and Excel compatable apps, and GPS/mapping software is available if you want it.
Just like what we call "PDAs", cellphones vary in the amount of functionality available. And there's always Java, if the app you want isn't built in: of the four GSM phones I've bought in the last three years, three (Nokia 9290, Seimens S46, Motorola T720) allow you to install Java programs.
A jump drive won't display the contacts and calender. An iPod will.
On my second generation (original form factor but with a touch wheel) iPod with 1.3 of the firmware, they're under Extras->Contacts and Extras->Calendar.
I'm not sure a laptop will ever make a reasonable replacement for a PDA given the whole PDA thing is about size and convenience.
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
I quoted "PDAs" in the above because in a sense, that means that cellphones are the next generation PDAs, a device you keep in your pocket, that stores your contacts, calendar, and general notes, can perform calculations, let you play games when you're bored, etc - that happens to incorporate an additional function PDAs never had, the ability to contact anyone in the world - by message or voice - in seconds.
Half the mobile phones I see sold these days support Bluetooth, which makes connectivity to laptops, wireless hands free kits (both personal and car-kits), and even one another much easier.
So I'm having difficulty understanding why you see it as useless. It does what it does, and does it well.
I'm not suggesting that you replace the call centers with speech recognition. That would never work, you're always going to need (until we have massive advances in AI!) humans somewhere in the loop. However, an accent-translation system ought to be possible and relatively cheap.
I wonder if this has gotten worse or it's just a matter of different experiences.
I used to have Sprint PCS from 1998 to 2002, and really liked the company themselves, the support group especially. The major issue I had was that they were trying to operate as cheap a service as possible (I don't mean the tariffs, though they were cheap too, and I guess you get what you pay for) which meant the service was frequently overloaded and dropped calls were frequent in this area; the somewhat limited IS-95 ("CDMA") network didn't have the features I wanted either.
But the support I got was excellent. I had one billing problem which they dealt with straight away. Calls were generally answered fairly quickly. Plan changes were easy. [I'd say switching phones - something else I did - was relatively easy too except that you shouldn't have to call customer support and then wait 24 hours to change a phone! (I note they now let you do it on their website, which is nice as long as you're near a computer I guess. Still doesn't beat SIM cards by a long stretch.)] Customer service was always friendly and helpful.
Either it's gotten really bad in the space of two years, or we've just had different experiences.
By comparison, T-Mobile is good on the web but slow and with the usual incomprehensibility issues on the phone. AT&T is awful on the web, and I've had mixed experiences on the phone trying to change plans with jobs being half done and no follow up contact when problems arose. Cingular I can't comment on as I didn't really end up contacting support.
If Sprint PCS had chosen GSM (or just some SIM-card enabled location-independent version of IS-95 - apparently it exists) and been a little less cheap (even at the expense of giving less minutes for the same amount of money), I'd still be with them.
That being said, there is still a barrier. Despite English being the common language between India and the U.S., Most Americans cannot understand the Indian accent and get rather frustrated. (I am sure it works both ways. ) Also, some of the Indians take a "Brahman" or intellectualy superior view and treat their American customers like crap, especially women.
I wonder if this will change over time. I note that voice recognition is finally hitting the mainstream. I don't believe it's prime-time yet, but presumably we're not far off a situation where someone can speak in one voice, and a phone can spit out the same words in an entirely different accent. Kind of a higher-technology version of those "Voice gender changers" that used to be popular in the late eighties (but did a much simpler job.)
No, I don't know where that thought came from either.
Slashdot Mirror
SPF is the answer. Unfortunately, nobody's discovered what the question is to go with that answer ;-)
The "solutions" we see posted from time to time rarely are as straightforward or effective. SPEWS type filtering blocks customers of ISPs regardless of whether they themselves are abusive or not. The DUL blocks by a criteria which has nothing, on the face of it, to do with spam, and simply makes things like configuration-free email an impossibility and roaming more difficult. ISP-lead outgoing port 25 blocking makes configuration-free email impossible and undermines user privacy. ISP-lead incoming port 25 blocking makes it impossible for knowledgable end users to deploy certain effective methods of spam block. The SPF, in an environment in which port 25 blocks and the DUL are active and in which ISPs rarely offer "authenticated SMTP" connections for external users will make roaming even more difficult.
And those are just the current methods taken seriously and proposed at every turn. Meanwhile, people propose all sorts of "solutions" like using encrypted authentication and even getting rid of SMTP which are about as easy as creating world peace ("All we have to do is stop fighting each other!"), and which open all sorts of new cans of worms.
In the case of this article, someone was seriously contemplating having the FTC create a Do-Not-Spam list, a list that wouldn't have applied to foreign owned businesses and one that would have, if anything, legitimized spam ("Hey, we're only posting to people off the list, leave us alone!")
When people stop proposing daft and damaging ideas, people on Slashdot will stop poking holes in them. Spam is a solvable problem, but an unholy alliance of BOFHs and zealots is causing immeasurable damage without actually making much of a dent, if any, in the volumes we're talking about. Interestingly, by-and-large, the solutions that work involve enfranchising the receiver, a principle the current anti-spam culture is reluctant to accept.
I'm trying to work out what you mean by this. Surely both comments are identical in meaning or is there an emphasis point I'm missing?
Sure, it will not run Panther without hacks, but I doubt my six-seven year old 32Mb P166MMX Thinkpad will run Windows XP either.
Yes, it works on Linux. We're talking about Mac OS X however (you can't run Camino under Linux...)
Thanks. I thought this was a limitation of the way Gecko/XUL/etc were implemented on OS X, but I may be wrong. I'll try it tonight...
And there was me thinking that we'd Slashdotted Yahoo after the article about increased Yahoo mail limits earlier today...
Or is it just those of us in Florida that's having "issues" connecting to Yahoo this (EDT) morning?
An AC earlier said that Apple doesn't always give back to the community. S/he gave the example of X11. After a long discussion about what the AC meant, someone asked me to give an example of where Apple hadn't "given back". I repeated the AC's example of X11.
How is whether Apple "clamps down" on X11 users relevent to the question of whether Apple has a proprietary X11 server built on originally F/OSS code? I don't think anyone's suggesting Apple has done anything of the sort. What is clear is that when Apple takes F/OSS code, it doesn't contribute F/OSS code back in equal measure.
Indeed, for all of Darwin's supposed open sourciness, the code is often missing for quite low level and critical operations. An example would be the device drivers for CD and DVD burners (That's DiscRecording.framework, in case you need to know) which Apple seems to have gone out of their way to keep closed so they can dictate the burners people can and can't use (something which had a major impact when DVD+R started to become popular.)
What Apple is legally or morally obliged to do is a different debate and will depend on the licenses of the code (former) or ethics of the person arguing (latter.) But on a basic, non-partisan, non-judgemental, objective level, Apple, while it gives far more to the F/OSS communities than, say, Microsoft, does not give as much as it benefits. I find it ironic really that Slashdotters tend to "like" Apple for this and yet will abuse Sun, who really have given more than they've taken, without a single thought.
It may sound minor, but I'm a heavy tabs user ;)
You know, client server is a good thing, but one thing I've learned the hard way is that thin servers and fat clients tend to make better partners than the other way around - sometimes to a degree that surprised me (like putting huge amounts of logic in JavaScript if you can get away with it can mean you need a pretty trivial web server. Not that I think that's a good solution, given there are better application platforms than web browsers, but I'm just saying.)
* An additional surcharge of $1.75 will be added to your Slashdot bill to cover the costs of making this message conform to Government mandated standards. Additional taxes may apply.
Yahoo gives a warning when your mailbox reaches a certain size anyway, so it's easy to do some quick maintenance like delete that email with the absurdly large attachment to get the space back. But 100megs will certainly help.
OK, that f---ing stupid two minute thing has kicked in again. So it's time to find a joke at random and post it.
The founder of an international nail company wants a new ad campaign, so he hires an ad agency to come up with a good TV commercial for his Wilson Nails.
Tens of thousands of dollars later, the ad agency has a meeting with the director to premier their commercial. The ad begins with a flying shot that zooms over a mountain (to stirring music, of course!) and begins closing in on three figures on the hillside. It zooms closer and closer and the viewers can now tell two of the men are dressed as guards and are nailing the third to a cross. The camera continues to zoom in - right up to the Wilson symbol on the head of the nail protruding from the crucified man's hand.
"Wilson nails - for the toughest jobs." says the announcer.
Well, the head of Wilson Nails is livid. He cannot believe the ad agency was so flippant with the religious angle. He demands that they reshoot the commercial for free - and they better come up with something good this time or they're fired.
After another few weeks, the ad agency has just completed reshooting the commercial and the head of Wilson wants it aired right away - he has no time to preview it this time, trusting them to have fixed the problem. He is at home that night when the commercial airs. As before, the camera flies over the mountain and begins closing in on two figures this time. It gets closer and closer, until the viewers see the two guards standing beside a lone cross. In the distance, a man with a sheet around his waist can be seen running down the mountain. One guard turns to the other and says, "See, I told you we should have used Wilson Nails".
I believe the application mentioned was X11.
I don't know. I think the Internet has real potential for opening up the airwaves, or will do once we have reasonable, open, unmetered wireless systems so someone can be in the middle of nowhere, flick a switch, and listen to anything, be it the excellent All Things Considered NPR news program, or just someone in their basement mixing music they love that you can't hear anywhere else. It's a matter though of building the infrastructure. We need an infrastructure for the unfettered redistribution of free content (that's consensually free content all you Kazaa fiends), we need - whether it's volunteer-run 802.11 or 802.16 networks or 3G - methods of making data available anywhere, and we need...
You know, here at squiggleslash we know you appreciate good posting, and we strive to bring you the good posting you want and need. But good posting doesn't come for free. There are bills to pay, actors to hire, trolls to write, and topics to research, and they all cost money. We can only keep squiggleslash online with the help and financial support of readers like you. As little as $50 a year can help us keep up outputting the high quality content you want from squiggleslash. So give generously. Call our volunteers now on 555-0113. That's Five Five Five, Zero One One Three. Call now and make your pledge.
Ah, you would be talking about "F--- ClearChannel", or an agency with the same initials anyway...
Not that I'm sure this is actually relevent to anything real.
What about the Nokia Communicator series? My 9290 lacks WiFi (but will have it in the next version), but has emulators for various games machines, MPEG playback, Word and Excel compatable apps, and GPS/mapping software is available if you want it.
Just like what we call "PDAs", cellphones vary in the amount of functionality available. And there's always Java, if the app you want isn't built in: of the four GSM phones I've bought in the last three years, three (Nokia 9290, Seimens S46, Motorola T720) allow you to install Java programs.
On my second generation (original form factor but with a touch wheel) iPod with 1.3 of the firmware, they're under Extras->Contacts and Extras->Calendar.
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
I quoted "PDAs" in the above because in a sense, that means that cellphones are the next generation PDAs, a device you keep in your pocket, that stores your contacts, calendar, and general notes, can perform calculations, let you play games when you're bored, etc - that happens to incorporate an additional function PDAs never had, the ability to contact anyone in the world - by message or voice - in seconds.
So I'm having difficulty understanding why you see it as useless. It does what it does, and does it well.
I'm not suggesting that you replace the call centers with speech recognition. That would never work, you're always going to need (until we have massive advances in AI!) humans somewhere in the loop. However, an accent-translation system ought to be possible and relatively cheap.
I used to have Sprint PCS from 1998 to 2002, and really liked the company themselves, the support group especially. The major issue I had was that they were trying to operate as cheap a service as possible (I don't mean the tariffs, though they were cheap too, and I guess you get what you pay for) which meant the service was frequently overloaded and dropped calls were frequent in this area; the somewhat limited IS-95 ("CDMA") network didn't have the features I wanted either.
But the support I got was excellent. I had one billing problem which they dealt with straight away. Calls were generally answered fairly quickly. Plan changes were easy. [I'd say switching phones - something else I did - was relatively easy too except that you shouldn't have to call customer support and then wait 24 hours to change a phone! (I note they now let you do it on their website, which is nice as long as you're near a computer I guess. Still doesn't beat SIM cards by a long stretch.)] Customer service was always friendly and helpful.
Either it's gotten really bad in the space of two years, or we've just had different experiences.
By comparison, T-Mobile is good on the web but slow and with the usual incomprehensibility issues on the phone. AT&T is awful on the web, and I've had mixed experiences on the phone trying to change plans with jobs being half done and no follow up contact when problems arose. Cingular I can't comment on as I didn't really end up contacting support.
If Sprint PCS had chosen GSM (or just some SIM-card enabled location-independent version of IS-95 - apparently it exists) and been a little less cheap (even at the expense of giving less minutes for the same amount of money), I'd still be with them.
No, I don't know where that thought came from either.