Re:Oranges vs. apples, from an orange producer
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
There's a part you didn't understand in my post : comparing an old,
outdated, text email client to a new shiny web-based one is complete
nonsense. Therefore, the guy can prefer pine all he wants, nobody will care
about his preferences anyway because nobody wants to run pine...
In what sense is pine outdated? What makes you so sure that nobody wants to run pine? I happily use pine every day, and don't expect to change that any time soon.
Just because you prefer webmail doesn't mean that everyone does. I personally find webmail to be a fundamentally bad idea. gmail seems to be the best webmail implementation out there, but that's a pretty low bar.
(And coincidentally, I use it to read mail from my employer: Google. No, I don't know who wrote this comparison, and I haven't even read it; it's every bit as down for me as for you.)
How can something be both "ultra-modern" and "industry standard".
The phrase "industry standard" could mean a couple of different things. It could, as you suggest, mean something which is the most common thing used in an industry. Or it could, as Apple seems to mean, be something that is a published and finalized standard that's available to the industry as a whole. Probably best characterized as "the industry standard" versus "an industry standard".
The clearest example that comes to mind is ipv6. Close to no one uses it, and yet it is unquestionably a standard, and could plausibly be described as "ultra-modern."
I think all they were trying to convey there was "really, this isn't just some shit we made up. This isn't another ADB or LocalTalk; this is a recognized standard that's also used by not-us people."
Um. This is consistent with the way every ordered list view that I've ever seen anywhere works. I would have guessed that your HCI degree might have covered a fairly standard convention on which every gui I've seen standardized decades ago:
list views can be sorted by any of the columns;
this is invoked by clicking on the appropriate column header;
highlighting of the column header indicates on which one the list is sorted;
a small arrow in the header indicates the sort direction.
If you have the list sorted by artist name, then it's sorted by artist name; no amount of dragging things around will, or should change that.
If you have files in a finder (or explorer or whatever you people use) window sorted by, say, size, what would you expect dragging files up and down in that window to do? Change the size of the files? Make an exception to the sorting? (That would be signified how?)
Similarly, my mail viewer has messages sorted by datestamp. Why would dragging messages up and down in that list be a meaningful operation? What would you expect it to do?
For another, a lot of those are that way because *iTunes* did not get the CDDB data,...
Despite your repetitions of it, I'm afraid I can't explain why you're the only person in the world for whom itunes does not offer cddb support. Perhaps it doesn't like you; I have to admit that I'm kind of starting to not.
...and I had to manually enter the artist and album tags.
Okay, so even if you have the world's only copy of itunes that mysteriously does not act as a cddb client, enter the artist and album tags into the id3 tags (via itunes or any other tool you like), and it'll propagate that to filenames and directory structure for you.
Or, as many other people have suggested, if you've already made the odd choice to manually enter this data as filenames and directory structure but not id3 tags, you can use either your own or someone else's tools to propagate that information in the other direction.
The worst experience was when I lost a lot of music after a HDD crash and the only source was on my iPod - plugging it into another system (for the first time) just wiped out the contents of my iPod. I wonder what the hell Apple engineers were thinking, really.
It seems clear from your flurry of posts that it is not possible to convince you to not hate itunes, but I'll give in and answer this anyway.
What Apple engineers were thinking is that an ipod is an accessory to a computer, and its job is to mirror whatever content is on the computer to which it's connected. It is only intended to pair with one computer at a time, and the copy of music is always intended to be from the computer to the pod, never the other direction.
This seems fairly sane to me. It's by far the simplest and most reliable way for the peripheral to work. If you really do want to use the pod as a storage device in order to move music or any other files around, it's happy to also behave as a normally-mountable volume. But that's a very different function than being a music player.
The only flaw in the interaction you describe is that itunes should inform you and ask for confirmation before altering the contents of a pod that was previously mated to a different computer. Which... it has for years now. Just not in the ancient version that you're inexplicably running.
Sure, I'm perfectly willing to accept that 180 Solutions is a well-known name among, as you say, anyone who actually deals with spyware.
But the set of people who deal with spyware is not the same as the set of people who read slashdot. All I'm suggesting is that it would have been helpful to clarify somewhere that this article was intended for the former group, not the latter.
Perhaps the previous summaries provided more information about what was being discussed, clarifying for me that it was a topic in which I have no interest, and I moved on without memorizing the company's name. I've never used Windows, never plan to, never support anyone doing so, so spyware companies are not a topic to which I devote a lot of attention. But this summary said nothing more specific than "IT" and "security", which covers a lot of ground in which I am interested.
Explaining Linux is hardly a meaningful comparison. Linux has been the primary thing covered by this site since its Chips & Dips days, and something that most of us use and discuss day in and day out. Some random spyware company is not.
I'm not suggesting that a lengthy history need be included in every summary. But would it really have detracted from anyone's experience to s/180 Solutions/Spyware Company 180 Solutions/g ?
By far the worst thing about slashdot editors--worse than the dupes, the typos, the mischaracterizations--is their apparent inability to write headlines and summaries that mean a damn thing to readers who don't already know every bit of obscure trivia about what's being discussed. I'm longstanding geek, I read slashdot more or less daily; I'm smack in the middle of the target audience. And yet, at least once a week I see a "summary" that's completely incomprehensible gibberish to me.
One has to wonder why, if the editors submit writeups that are meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know exactly what's being said, they bother writing anything at all.
If your list of product names starts off with "gbook," "gpod," "gtunes," and "gmail," I think there's a pretty strong argument for staying as far as you can away from the term "grape."
Anyway the word "possible" and "rumor" apear a couple times in my post so
how about some reading and critical thinking before comparing me to a
bigot?
Well, sure, but so do phrases like "There is most definately an exploit involving the Dire Maul instance that is causing the increased lag." Which sounds a bit more concrete than the evidence that any of us have about the situation.
I certainly retract the implications of racism; that wasn't really what I'd been meaning to imply anyway, and was certainly not merited by your post. But it does still feel to me as if it's superstitious reasoning to think that the lag is being caused by the presence of farmers, when more plausible explanations seem abundant.
Asserting that a group of people you dislike are, in some unidentified way, causing an effect that everyone dislikes seems kind of creepy. That feels like the cultish superstition that I would've expected to mostly be gone in recent centuries.
Do you also find yourself thinking that it's all of those damn gays that are causing bird flu? Or that illegal immigrants are the real reason for that drought last year?
Slowness and instability on the part of Blizzard's systems seem more than adequately explained by incompetence, without needing to invoke some magical aura of badness created by farmers.
Your argument made me think of qmail. The author wanted it to be more
secure than sendmail, and designed it to be secure. I think he has a large
cash reward to anyone who finds a bug in it. And to date, no-one has ever
found a security bug in it.
qmail is an interesting case. Yes, djb's code can be at least arguably described as bug-free. (That's at least partially because he's refused to add any new features, which results in many people applying third-party patches to it, which then introduce bugs.)
But one of the big architectural decisions of qmail was to use compartmentalization very aggressively. The actual parts that run with elevated privileges are quite tiny. This seems like another example of the model I was advocating: centralize most of your security risk in a relatively small amount of code, which you then have a shot at auditing comprehensively.
Doing this at the application layer not only has all the usual downsides of doing anything at the application layer, but is antithetical to the whole model. eg, djb has written his own security compartmentalization, openssh has written their own privsep, and so on. So it seems like a reasonable next step that this should be a service provided by the platform, thus reducing the total quantity of extra-critical code even further.
VM code: Slow but speedy development
Native code: Fast but slow development
Sometimes you just need a solution that works, and sometimes you need the fastest and most compact execution possible.
So you're asserting that Microsoft's big problem with Visthorn is that they have too much developer time on their hands and not enough to accomplish, so they choose to burn extra work on making a super-speedy Notepad.exe?
Having a hard time buying it. I think that the case here is that writing to.net is not as easy and fast as Microsoft has been billing it as being. And in an attempt to actually ship something ever, they've given up on going through the contortions necessary to use it, and have fallen back to actually just writing bare code, which they feel they know how to do. (Despite evidence to the contrary.)
Hm, I'm not quite sure I agree with your assessment which one of those is the "real" solution and which is the bandaid.
If the past three decades of computer science have taught us a single thing, it's that intelligent, conscientious, meticulous coders will still write code that has simple vulnerabilities like buffer overflows. Now, I'm not suggesting that we just give up on trying to write good code. But it's hard to argue that it's anything other than a win to reduce the damage of such errors when they--inevitably--occur.
Writing unexploitable code is great, but it needs to be executed perfectly by every single developer, writing every single line of code, forever. Every time you find and fix one bug, you've only fixed that one, but haven't done anything about future ones; that seems like the epitome of bandaidness. A single centralized sandbox api could conceivably address such bugs categorically, in a finite amount of code.
I don't actually know anything about.net, so I can't speak to how well it accomplishes this goal. But generally approaching the problem in this way seems sound. An actually-existing approach that seems analogous is the privsep model of recent years' opensshd.
Hm. You seem to be a little fuzzy on how to reply to an article as a whole rather than to a specific and unrelated post. You also seem to use some wacky, non-html markup that's employed by some other game-specific boards. And you appear to be amazingly defensive about any criticism of this game, and far too eager to interpret complaints about it as praise of a few competitors.
I'm usually hesitant to jump to conclusions like this, but in light of your behaviour I'm having a really hard time not seeing you as a paid shill, or at least in some way connected to this game or its creators.
I hope I'm wrong. But even if I am, you might find it advantageous to try and tone down that air of astroturf you give off.
"Currently Dungeons and Dragons Online only supports certain Windows
operating systems. There are no plans at this time to make a Macintosh
compatible version."
Guess that means I'll stick with WoW.
Right there with you (and confused about why you were modded redundant).
By this review, the game sounds pretty awful. But I find all of the shortcomings described here to be secondary to the fact that it'll run only on so atrocious an operating system.
Perhaps these are the reasons that you want the citizenry to arm themselves. However, it seems fairly clear that the authors of the Bill of Rights were very much aware of the importance of allowing for the violent overthrow of government, and that this right was intended to allow that to remain possible.
So while your interpretation is the one unsurprisingly advocated by members of the government, I think it's completely unrelated to the intents of the framers.
Shooting burglars should be criminal vigilanteism. Shooting any government official or law-enforcement officer should be a Constitutionally-protected right.
I'm not so sure. If you just bound a few buttons to pasting in "lol", "nub", "wtf", and "hax!", I think it would be sadly difficult to distinguish from most existing players.
You seem to have an odd tendency to describe spammers as "pleasing" or "catering to" google--as if they're doing google a favor, and google appreciates their actions.
But of course what they're actually attempting to do is "scam" or "trick" google. What google wants to find and serve are valid, relevant, unique, contentful, non-spam pages; spammers attempt to thwart that by impersonating those traits however they can.
Believe me, there is no one in the world who wants "optimizing your site for google" to become passe more than google does.
But if you are going to book a room at the Wynn, MGM, or Palms hotel, you better pick up the phone and call, because you won't be able to browse the rates at your leisure from their site.
If those business can't be bothered to create civilized websites, then I'll happily take my custom to another company that can.
Like I said, they had to pull me kicking and screaming away from Lynx and on to Netscape, but hey, the times they change whether we like it or not.
Sorry to hear about your luck. Allow me to recommend that you try out w3m; it's my primary browser, and makes me quite happy.
The obnoxious flash crap and dynamic content is the wave of the future unfortunately, and the only people who will be obsessively putting up "W3C Approved" pages will be those trying their best kiss Google's royal behind so that they may throw a click their way.
I'm a little confused by this. Because writing standards-compliant pages makes them more accessible (to everything, including google's crawler), and some spammers therefore write standards-compliant pages, you're holding standards to blame for spammers' actions? That... seems a little wacky.
If google also ranked pages more highly for having correct capitalization and punctuation, would you at this moment be railing against the evils of capitalizing the first words of sentences?
Given that Flash does nothing but obfuscate content, and I'm grateful to any search engine that will filter it out for me. About the first thing I'd do if I happened upon a Flash-only site is leave and find a civilized site anyway, so I'm happy to have that step skipped for me.
Well, that's what "overrated" and "underrated" are for. They're just "I'd like to adjust the score of this post up or down one, for no reason that's specifically offered here."
I agree that we could use slightly more and better moderation categories, but the particular need for miscellaneous moderation is already covered.
I have tried Quake 3 (which the WoW engine is based on)...
I don't... think that's correct, is it? I don't particularly follow the games industry, but I've never heard this asserted before, some very light research now doesn't seem to produce anything supporting it. The only places google can find people mentioning warcraft and quake at the same time seem to be general gaming pages that include them unrelatedly.
I'd find it pretty surprising if they had any common ancestry, as they differ in many fundamental design choices. WoW does not have collisions between mobile entities; does not have any of the sort "hitbox" for detecting shot success as shots are not aimed as such; does not have the detailed reflections on object surfaces that I seem to recall seeing in quake; is based around being played third-person, and rotating the camera and character independently.
I'm not saying it's impossible that was some relationship, but I think that the "put some textures on some surfaces" code that would actually be shared between the two is so small that I would be surprised if Blizzard would have bothered licensing it. And even if they did so, they would have had to modify it enough that it probably shouldn't be considered "the same engine" from a performance standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you prefer webmail doesn't mean that everyone does. I personally find webmail to be a fundamentally bad idea. gmail seems to be the best webmail implementation out there, but that's a pretty low bar.
(And coincidentally, I use it to read mail from my employer: Google. No, I don't know who wrote this comparison, and I haven't even read it; it's every bit as down for me as for you.)
The clearest example that comes to mind is ipv6. Close to no one uses it, and yet it is unquestionably a standard, and could plausibly be described as "ultra-modern."
I think all they were trying to convey there was "really, this isn't just some shit we made up. This isn't another ADB or LocalTalk; this is a recognized standard that's also used by not-us people."
If you have the list sorted by artist name, then it's sorted by artist name; no amount of dragging things around will, or should change that.
If you have files in a finder (or explorer or whatever you people use) window sorted by, say, size, what would you expect dragging files up and down in that window to do? Change the size of the files? Make an exception to the sorting? (That would be signified how?)
Similarly, my mail viewer has messages sorted by datestamp. Why would dragging messages up and down in that list be a meaningful operation? What would you expect it to do?
Or, as many other people have suggested, if you've already made the odd choice to manually enter this data as filenames and directory structure but not id3 tags, you can use either your own or someone else's tools to propagate that information in the other direction.
What Apple engineers were thinking is that an ipod is an accessory to a computer, and its job is to mirror whatever content is on the computer to which it's connected. It is only intended to pair with one computer at a time, and the copy of music is always intended to be from the computer to the pod, never the other direction.
This seems fairly sane to me. It's by far the simplest and most reliable way for the peripheral to work. If you really do want to use the pod as a storage device in order to move music or any other files around, it's happy to also behave as a normally-mountable volume. But that's a very different function than being a music player.
The only flaw in the interaction you describe is that itunes should inform you and ask for confirmation before altering the contents of a pod that was previously mated to a different computer. Which... it has for years now. Just not in the ancient version that you're inexplicably running.
Sure, I'm perfectly willing to accept that 180 Solutions is a well-known name among, as you say, anyone who actually deals with spyware.
But the set of people who deal with spyware is not the same as the set of people who read slashdot. All I'm suggesting is that it would have been helpful to clarify somewhere that this article was intended for the former group, not the latter.
Explaining Linux is hardly a meaningful comparison. Linux has been the primary thing covered by this site since its Chips & Dips days, and something that most of us use and discuss day in and day out. Some random spyware company is not.
I'm not suggesting that a lengthy history need be included in every summary. But would it really have detracted from anyone's experience to s/180 Solutions/Spyware Company 180 Solutions/g ?
By far the worst thing about slashdot editors--worse than the dupes, the typos, the mischaracterizations--is their apparent inability to write headlines and summaries that mean a damn thing to readers who don't already know every bit of obscure trivia about what's being discussed. I'm longstanding geek, I read slashdot more or less daily; I'm smack in the middle of the target audience. And yet, at least once a week I see a "summary" that's completely incomprehensible gibberish to me.
One has to wonder why, if the editors submit writeups that are meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know exactly what's being said, they bother writing anything at all.
If your list of product names starts off with "gbook," "gpod," "gtunes," and "gmail," I think there's a pretty strong argument for staying as far as you can away from the term "grape."
I certainly retract the implications of racism; that wasn't really what I'd been meaning to imply anyway, and was certainly not merited by your post. But it does still feel to me as if it's superstitious reasoning to think that the lag is being caused by the presence of farmers, when more plausible explanations seem abundant.
Asserting that a group of people you dislike are, in some unidentified way, causing an effect that everyone dislikes seems kind of creepy. That feels like the cultish superstition that I would've expected to mostly be gone in recent centuries.
Do you also find yourself thinking that it's all of those damn gays that are causing bird flu? Or that illegal immigrants are the real reason for that drought last year?
Slowness and instability on the part of Blizzard's systems seem more than adequately explained by incompetence, without needing to invoke some magical aura of badness created by farmers.
But one of the big architectural decisions of qmail was to use compartmentalization very aggressively. The actual parts that run with elevated privileges are quite tiny. This seems like another example of the model I was advocating: centralize most of your security risk in a relatively small amount of code, which you then have a shot at auditing comprehensively.
Doing this at the application layer not only has all the usual downsides of doing anything at the application layer, but is antithetical to the whole model. eg, djb has written his own security compartmentalization, openssh has written their own privsep, and so on. So it seems like a reasonable next step that this should be a service provided by the platform, thus reducing the total quantity of extra-critical code even further.
Having a hard time buying it. I think that the case here is that writing to .net is not as easy and fast as Microsoft has been billing it as being. And in an attempt to actually ship something ever, they've given up on going through the contortions necessary to use it, and have fallen back to actually just writing bare code, which they feel they know how to do. (Despite evidence to the contrary.)
If the past three decades of computer science have taught us a single thing, it's that intelligent, conscientious, meticulous coders will still write code that has simple vulnerabilities like buffer overflows. Now, I'm not suggesting that we just give up on trying to write good code. But it's hard to argue that it's anything other than a win to reduce the damage of such errors when they--inevitably--occur.
Writing unexploitable code is great, but it needs to be executed perfectly by every single developer, writing every single line of code, forever. Every time you find and fix one bug, you've only fixed that one, but haven't done anything about future ones; that seems like the epitome of bandaidness. A single centralized sandbox api could conceivably address such bugs categorically, in a finite amount of code.
I don't actually know anything about .net, so I can't speak to how well it accomplishes this goal. But generally approaching the problem in this way seems sound. An actually-existing approach that seems analogous is the privsep model of recent years' opensshd.
Hm. You seem to be a little fuzzy on how to reply to an article as a whole rather than to a specific and unrelated post. You also seem to use some wacky, non-html markup that's employed by some other game-specific boards. And you appear to be amazingly defensive about any criticism of this game, and far too eager to interpret complaints about it as praise of a few competitors.
I'm usually hesitant to jump to conclusions like this, but in light of your behaviour I'm having a really hard time not seeing you as a paid shill, or at least in some way connected to this game or its creators.
I hope I'm wrong. But even if I am, you might find it advantageous to try and tone down that air of astroturf you give off.
By this review, the game sounds pretty awful. But I find all of the shortcomings described here to be secondary to the fact that it'll run only on so atrocious an operating system.
So while your interpretation is the one unsurprisingly advocated by members of the government, I think it's completely unrelated to the intents of the framers.
Shooting burglars should be criminal vigilanteism. Shooting any government official or law-enforcement officer should be a Constitutionally-protected right.
And... why exactly would gay people be any more likely to say something sexually explicit to an eight-year-old than straight people?
(And why exactly would an eight-year-old be playing a game rated "Teen" that features constant murder and dismemberment?)
I'm not so sure. If you just bound a few buttons to pasting in "lol", "nub", "wtf", and "hax!", I think it would be sadly difficult to distinguish from most existing players.
And would it have killed you to throw in some mention of what the hell a "CNR" is?
You seem to have an odd tendency to describe spammers as "pleasing" or "catering to" google--as if they're doing google a favor, and google appreciates their actions.
But of course what they're actually attempting to do is "scam" or "trick" google. What google wants to find and serve are valid, relevant, unique, contentful, non-spam pages; spammers attempt to thwart that by impersonating those traits however they can.
Believe me, there is no one in the world who wants "optimizing your site for google" to become passe more than google does.
If google also ranked pages more highly for having correct capitalization and punctuation, would you at this moment be railing against the evils of capitalizing the first words of sentences?
Given that Flash does nothing but obfuscate content, and I'm grateful to any search engine that will filter it out for me. About the first thing I'd do if I happened upon a Flash-only site is leave and find a civilized site anyway, so I'm happy to have that step skipped for me.
Well, that's what "overrated" and "underrated" are for. They're just "I'd like to adjust the score of this post up or down one, for no reason that's specifically offered here."
I agree that we could use slightly more and better moderation categories, but the particular need for miscellaneous moderation is already covered.
I'd find it pretty surprising if they had any common ancestry, as they differ in many fundamental design choices. WoW does not have collisions between mobile entities; does not have any of the sort "hitbox" for detecting shot success as shots are not aimed as such; does not have the detailed reflections on object surfaces that I seem to recall seeing in quake; is based around being played third-person, and rotating the camera and character independently.
I'm not saying it's impossible that was some relationship, but I think that the "put some textures on some surfaces" code that would actually be shared between the two is so small that I would be surprised if Blizzard would have bothered licensing it. And even if they did so, they would have had to modify it enough that it probably shouldn't be considered "the same engine" from a performance standpoint.