The snippets of text in the article imply that Linux was the part that no longer makes sense, but I suspect that switching to Itanium was also part of the reason they stopped. I can't believe that attaching massive Itanium use to any major infrastructure would increase its cost competitiveness. Sure, you could argue that Itanium in a few niche areas gave better bang for the buck than x86, but for the global IT infracstructure of a company? It can't be a good idea.
It seems that my fingers remember which keyboards and qwerty and which are dvorak. That is, whether switching between dvorak and qwerty is hard or easy depends on this:
If a computer is always dvorak, or always qwerty, it is easy. So I can work at my desk in dvorak, run into the lab and type on a qwerty machine, no problem.
If a computer is sometimes dvorak, sometimes qwerty, I'm a complete mess with it. So if somebody else logs into "my" computer, and I try to sit down and type something, it feels like my fingers are crippled. Horribly frustrating. Also, if I log in as myself on a lab machine that is usually qwerty, it feels just as bad!
Not sure if everybody else is the same as me, but overall if I just manage things properly it's not bad at all to switch back and forth. This has been the case all along for me. I'd recommend you give dvorak a try, but realize that for the first few weeks typing will suddenly become very difficult, so don't do it when you have a deadline looming!
Analog input on a digital monitor is pretty much required. If you leave it out, you'll have angry customers who buy it for their non-DVI card. So by adding DVI, you will not save any money.
On top of that, DVI isn't as cheap as you might think. Adding any connector to a system means extra pins on the chips inside, and those aren't free...often today the pins cost more than the logic on the chips. So even though digital is the "native" format for an LCD monitor, it still costs more.
Sum it up: Analog = required, DVI = optional and not as cheap as you might think. For a cheap LCD monitor, it's not surprising to see only analog.
There is tons of oil all over the world. It's just a matter of the cost required to extract it. Right now we're mostly sucking it from big underground pools, where it's cheap to get. But many large rock deposits have oil mixed in, and it is possible to extract the oil - just too expensive. When the cheap oil runs out, we'll still have oil, it will just be at a price that is much higher than we pay today. It may or may not be more expensive than solar or wind power.
In reality, before we totally run out of oil, we will have utterly cooked ourselves to death on global warming. Lucky for the oil companies, ignoring global warming is a lot easier than the problem they would face if we really were running out of oil.
Give it a rest. I was a coworker of Randal at the time that he committed his felonies. My opinion, which was shared by the other coworkers I spoke with ath te time, was that he was guilty of two things: lack of common sense combined with making enemies within the organization.
As an aside, he was probably the best sysadmin I ever worked with. When you wanted something done, he got it done.
The kind of country where companies realize, if free stuff is banned, then people will have to pay for it instead.
Heck, if a company can write the laws to force people to buy your product, then it sounds like a pretty good plan. Almost (but not quite) makes you want to help out Ralph Nader, doesn't it?
I have seen the traditional double-slit experiment work. We used a glass sheet painted black, then held two razor blades together to make the two close-together slits in the paint. For the light, I don't remember what we used, but I would guess that a single wavelength would be best because the spacing of the peaks is based on the wavelength of the light, so if you had many wavelengths the bands would be muddied - or is visible light a narrow enough band that this wouldn't matter? Not sure.
Anyway, try that setup. It was high school physics where we did it, so it certainly didn't require any expensive or specialized equipment - just the class, the screen, the paint, and the razor blades. Oh, and the light source, which as I said above I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm sure it was nothing expensive or hard to get. Once it was working, the results were extremely easy to see, a very nice demonstration of the properties of light!
It's 19x19. There are 18 squares on a side when you look at the board, but as you point out, the stones are placed on the vertices, so the playable positions form a 19x19 grid.
A few months back I got a job at a place that had started using subversion. I liked it enough to switch my main project to subversion also.
As expected, there were some hassles at first, due mostly to me not knowing subversion as well as I knew CVS. But in the end, my view is, it's much much better.
Improvements are what you list. The only minus that I've found is that the "svn:externals" entry isn't as good in some ways as the CVS submodule system...that is, if I have a several projects in a repository that share some library code, the only real way to do this is to pull the shared code in via svn:externals. But when you do this, you have to do separate commits on the project and on each so-called "external" library, even though they are all from the same svn database. In CVS, this wasn't necessary, you can pull in submodules all you want and they commit with one command (of course internally CVS breaks them up into separate commands due to the CVS multi-directory problems, but at least it looks like a single checking). It's not a huge issue, but it's the only thing I can find where subversion is clearly worse than CVS.
End result: the switch was definitely worth it to me. Love being able to move and/or copy files and have the history carry over. Love being able to truly delete a directory, not just blow away all files. Love the system wide version numbering. Love getting rid of the crufty x.y.z.p.d.q.r.s.t numbering system of CVS. Overall, once you have the system down, you'll be glad you switched.:-)
I run a web site much smaller than yours. On a good month, I do thousands of dollars in traffic per month, rather than per hour. But, speaking as somebody who has written credit card processing code (I go through authorize.net's AIM system), I can say that it's not very hard. I wrote my own shopping card/connection software because the protocols to authorize.net were simpler than the APIs of any of the shopping cart systems I could find. It took about two weeks to write and test it. That's it.
So, one person (me) can write code to connect to a gateway in two weeks. I pay about $15 per month to the gateway. If I did enough business to need redundancy, I would do another two weeks work to write code for the 2nd gateway, another $15 or so per month, then have a switch so that system admins could choose gateway 1, 2, or both...done. 1 engineer month and a few dollars monthly to pay for the 2nd gateway, and there is your redundant credit card processing system.
I think your choice is clear: Pay a programmer to spend a month writing the code you need to handle both gateways from your web site. Pay for both gateways. Problem solved.
Umm, ok, I'm puzzled. To be honest, both scans look pretty bad to me.
The cops scan clearly has the color way off. Not saturated enough, or not enough contrast, maybe both, maybe more problems than this. Since this was the flatbed, problems like this aren't too surprising.
But the FS2710 scan (of the boy) also has some big problems with noise levels. Looking at any part of the picture that should have a very smooth color (like the boy's left arm for example) instead is covered in speckles of different colors - the average color looks pretty good, but the noise is very distracting to look at all the same!
So what gives? Why isn't the FS2710 image better looking? Is there a good reason, or is the FS2710 just not very good either?
Did you two (the parent & grandparent of this) really read the article? It's not about programming in English, it's not about syntax, it's about structure.
For example, they pointed out that people think about tasks in an event-driven way, their example is "when pac-man is out of lives, the game is over". But they must program by finding where in the program the number of lives goes down, and inserting the code there. An event driven language would simplify.
Their other example was that most languages make people think in loops, when they really want to operate on a group. Saying "for (i = 0; i len; ++i) { x[i] += 10; }" it a really clumsy way to express what people thought, which was "add 10 to everything in x".
Anyway, I agree that parts of the article don't sound too helpful, but they aren't talking about writing in English; they're talking about changing the structure of languages to more closely match what people think.
The forwarding you describe works perfectly under SPF. As long as the "From:" says the account that forwarded the email, SPF does what it is supposed to.
Some people have two mailboxes; mailbox A is configured to forward - headers *unmodified* - all mail to mailbox B. This will not work with SPF, which will claim "This mail's headers say it comes from gates@microsoft.com, but it actually came from mailbox A's SMTP host, which isn't allowed to spit out microsoft email."
There's a solution (which I use for my domain): msstate.edu's mail servers need to turn on authentication (hopefully with SSL), and allow your mail to be relayed if it is authenticated.
Then tell your mail client to route all mail through smtp.msstate.edu (or whatever their SMTP server is running on), and presto! The outside world will see mail come from an SPF-authorized msstate.edu mail relay, with an @msstate.edu sender.
Now, if msstate.edu turns on SPF and *doesn't* turn on something like this, then right, you're screwed. But in that case, it's because SPF isn't being set up properly, it's not because SPF is inherently broken.
Uhhhh...it looks like they did work out what they want to do (gravity wave research), and how to do it (with a 256 node beowulf cluster), then they got the grant. The only thing left is to find a vendor for their hardware. The guy writing this probably isn't the researcher who got the grant, he's an IT person who needs to help figure out who to buy it from.
Since it can take over a year to get a grant in some cases, picking out the vendor before the grant arrives is usually stupid. By the time it arrives, the hardware and price you settled on won't be competitive any more, and they actual hardware may not even be available!
At a large company where I worked, the sales team (or maybe some department of coporate motivation, don't remember exactly) emailed out - companywide! - the advice to "use a word for your password that will motivate you. For example, make your password 'sales' so that every time you log in, you are motivating yourself to sell!"
This was followed up about 24 hours later with a letter from the IT department, which said pretty much "ignore sales, they are idiots, do not ever take their advice on passwords."
I have used it sitewide (small site, about a dozen active mailboxes) for a few months. Currently it has an error rate of about 1 or 2 mistakes per week per mailbox (in mailboxs that get 100+ spams per day). I did have to do a lot of work to configure it properly though, which may be the reason the authors saw poor performance from it; the "forward to yourself to train" didn't work at all because both my IMAP server and my mail reader would slightly reformat my headers, meaning that CRM114 was training on different text then it saw when it was filtering! So I put together my own system to save pristine copies of all inbound mail and train on them as needed. Maybe the reason CRM114 fared so poorly is the difficulty in setting it up properly?
> This test proves that Sun's optimized Java compiler and VM are faster on Red Hat than gcc.
It also proves something even more interesting: It proves that the speed difference of C++ vs. Java is smaller than the speed difference of a good vs. a not-no-good compiler.
So, in other words, if you choose to use C++ over Java for the speed difference, then use any old C++ compiler you have handy, you're not making very smart decisions. They days when you could just assume that Java would be half the speed (or worse!) compared to any old C++ compiler are over.
I think the argument was even dumber than you make out. Basically, the argument is, "spatial browsing is a metaphor for desktops with real files and contentents, thus it is good." But, the whole point of metaphors is to make things easier to use; that is, we pick a metaphor that fits what we want to do, we don't adjust what we want to do to fit the metaphor! Spatial browsing, to a lot of people, adds a lot of work and clutter from taking care of all the intermediate steps to get to their ultimate destination, so if the desktop and file metaphore leads to spatial browsing that people hate, then the answer is to change the metaphor! Not to insist that people live with SB because the metaphor says it is the right way to do things.
Step 1: Patent a crabgrass variant. Step 2: Sue the hell out of every poor sucker who ends with MY crabgrass in THEIR lawns. Step 3: Do I even need to say?
...eventually you will move up to the real go servers like Kiseido or Panda, both located in Japan.
Speaking as the author and head administrator of the Kiseido Go Server, I can say for sure that it is not located in Japan. Kiseido, the sponsor, is a Japanese company, but the server was developed in the United States and has always been hosted there too. We have cheaper dedicated hosting than Japan, after all, so there is little reason to move!
But on this Go v. Chess topic, let me add that I read an article a while back (don't have the URL, sorry, may have even been a print article) that examined stroke victims. Strong Go players who suffered brain damage to one of their hemispheres but not the other would play a worse game, but the nature of the loss of playing skill would be very different depending on whether the stroke hit the one half of the brain than the other; one side (don't remember whether left or right) would lose their tactical/fighting ability in the game, the other side would lose their ability to work with large abstract territories. The article pointed out that chess players would lose basically all their chess ability when the damage was to one side of the brain (the one that matched tactics in go), and would lose very little ability when they suffered damage to the other side.
Anyway, it indicates that one of the ways that go is very different from chess is that it needs skills associated with the abstract/intuitive side of your brain and skills associated with the logical part of your brain, while chess needs primarily skills associated with the logical part. Perhaps this is why some people prefer one game over the other? If you love chess for its tactical reading, then you might not care for the abstract parts of go, which you would find boring. Meanwhile, a player who enjoys all of the game of go might find chess interesting but "lacking something."
Anyway, I'm not going to argue which game is better, just play what you like and let other people play what they like, no need to criticize either group.
I was in about the same situation - existing ongoing work for a side business, but getting hired full time with an employment contract that says everthing I say do or think belongs to the company. I just wrote in a paragraph at the end saying that work related to my preexisting business is exempted, initialed it, had my new manager initial it, and that was that. I've done this twice, both times the manager was OK with it after they checked with their lawyers.
Look, who has the clout in congress to get the patent mess cleaned up? Big companies. Thus, the fastest way to clean it up, have big companies get harassed with expensive lawsuits like this. A lot. If Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc., waste enough money fighting stupid patents (note - I know nothing about the Patriot patents, they may or may not be stupid), then you can bet that things will change.
Just a thought. Of course, laws would probably change in a way that makes it harder for anobody to sue big companies, but leave it just as easy for big companies to patent "one click instead of two to buy an item" type idiocy, but we can hope, can't we?
Hey, if anybody wants to start a class action suit against SPEWS, let me know.
It would be costly and time consuming for me to move my server. When I signed up with the ISP, it was fairly clean. Now SPEWS lists my IP address as a source of spam, and advises mail servers to refuse my email - from my point of view, that's libel, and they're libelling a hell of a lot of people.
In fact, since they refuse to take me off the list, and tell me to move to get out of their blacklist, it could be argued that they are blackmailing me; they threaten to tell people to refuse my email unless I do what they want (which is change ISPs).
So wonderful wonderful SPEWS is committing libel and blackmail against a large number of totally innocent server operators. Hey, all I have to do is spend money and time to move, then I'm safe from these clowns...oh but wait, what if my new service provider later lets in a spammer...oops.
Seriously, if anybody sues, let me know, I'll join.
For a DNS provider to let you set text records would be easy, they just have no reason to do it so most don't. The hope is that once SPF starts to catch on, DNS providers will finally have a reason to let you edit TXT records, so they will.
If SPF becomes common and your DNS provider still doesn't let you edit your TXT records, then I'd say that it's time to find a new DNS provider.
Slashdot Mirror
The snippets of text in the article imply that Linux was the part that no longer makes sense, but I suspect that switching to Itanium was also part of the reason they stopped. I can't believe that attaching massive Itanium use to any major infrastructure would increase its cost competitiveness. Sure, you could argue that Itanium in a few niche areas gave better bang for the buck than x86, but for the global IT infracstructure of a company? It can't be a good idea.
It seems that my fingers remember which keyboards and qwerty and which are dvorak. That is, whether switching between dvorak and qwerty is hard or easy depends on this:
Not sure if everybody else is the same as me, but overall if I just manage things properly it's not bad at all to switch back and forth. This has been the case all along for me. I'd recommend you give dvorak a try, but realize that for the first few weeks typing will suddenly become very difficult, so don't do it when you have a deadline looming!
Actually, it sort of makes sense.
Analog input on a digital monitor is pretty much required. If you leave it out, you'll have angry customers who buy it for their non-DVI card. So by adding DVI, you will not save any money.
On top of that, DVI isn't as cheap as you might think. Adding any connector to a system means extra pins on the chips inside, and those aren't free...often today the pins cost more than the logic on the chips. So even though digital is the "native" format for an LCD monitor, it still costs more.
Sum it up: Analog = required, DVI = optional and not as cheap as you might think. For a cheap LCD monitor, it's not surprising to see only analog.
There is tons of oil all over the world. It's just a matter of the cost required to extract it. Right now we're mostly sucking it from big underground pools, where it's cheap to get. But many large rock deposits have oil mixed in, and it is possible to extract the oil - just too expensive. When the cheap oil runs out, we'll still have oil, it will just be at a price that is much higher than we pay today. It may or may not be more expensive than solar or wind power.
In reality, before we totally run out of oil, we will have utterly cooked ourselves to death on global warming. Lucky for the oil companies, ignoring global warming is a lot easier than the problem they would face if we really were running out of oil.
Give it a rest. I was a coworker of Randal at the time that he committed his felonies. My opinion, which was shared by the other coworkers I spoke with ath te time, was that he was guilty of two things: lack of common sense combined with making enemies within the organization.
As an aside, he was probably the best sysadmin I ever worked with. When you wanted something done, he got it done.
The kind of country where companies realize, if free stuff is banned, then people will have to pay for it instead.
Heck, if a company can write the laws to force people to buy your product, then it sounds like a pretty good plan. Almost (but not quite) makes you want to help out Ralph Nader, doesn't it?
I have seen the traditional double-slit experiment work. We used a glass sheet painted black, then held two razor blades together to make the two close-together slits in the paint. For the light, I don't remember what we used, but I would guess that a single wavelength would be best because the spacing of the peaks is based on the wavelength of the light, so if you had many wavelengths the bands would be muddied - or is visible light a narrow enough band that this wouldn't matter? Not sure.
Anyway, try that setup. It was high school physics where we did it, so it certainly didn't require any expensive or specialized equipment - just the class, the screen, the paint, and the razor blades. Oh, and the light source, which as I said above I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm sure it was nothing expensive or hard to get. Once it was working, the results were extremely easy to see, a very nice demonstration of the properties of light!
Uh, no.
It's 19x19. There are 18 squares on a side when you look at the board, but as you point out, the stones are placed on the vertices, so the playable positions form a 19x19 grid.
A few months back I got a job at a place that had started using subversion. I liked it enough to switch my main project to subversion also.
:-)
As expected, there were some hassles at first, due mostly to me not knowing subversion as well as I knew CVS. But in the end, my view is, it's much much better.
Improvements are what you list. The only minus that I've found is that the "svn:externals" entry isn't as good in some ways as the CVS submodule system...that is, if I have a several projects in a repository that share some library code, the only real way to do this is to pull the shared code in via svn:externals. But when you do this, you have to do separate commits on the project and on each so-called "external" library, even though they are all from the same svn database. In CVS, this wasn't necessary, you can pull in submodules all you want and they commit with one command (of course internally CVS breaks them up into separate commands due to the CVS multi-directory problems, but at least it looks like a single checking). It's not a huge issue, but it's the only thing I can find where subversion is clearly worse than CVS.
End result: the switch was definitely worth it to me. Love being able to move and/or copy files and have the history carry over. Love being able to truly delete a directory, not just blow away all files. Love the system wide version numbering. Love getting rid of the crufty x.y.z.p.d.q.r.s.t numbering system of CVS. Overall, once you have the system down, you'll be glad you switched.
I run a web site much smaller than yours. On a good month, I do thousands of dollars in traffic per month, rather than per hour. But, speaking as somebody who has written credit card processing code (I go through authorize.net's AIM system), I can say that it's not very hard. I wrote my own shopping card/connection software because the protocols to authorize.net were simpler than the APIs of any of the shopping cart systems I could find. It took about two weeks to write and test it. That's it.
So, one person (me) can write code to connect to a gateway in two weeks. I pay about $15 per month to the gateway. If I did enough business to need redundancy, I would do another two weeks work to write code for the 2nd gateway, another $15 or so per month, then have a switch so that system admins could choose gateway 1, 2, or both...done. 1 engineer month and a few dollars monthly to pay for the 2nd gateway, and there is your redundant credit card processing system.
I think your choice is clear: Pay a programmer to spend a month writing the code you need to handle both gateways from your web site. Pay for both gateways. Problem solved.
Umm, ok, I'm puzzled. To be honest, both scans look pretty bad to me.
The cops scan clearly has the color way off. Not saturated enough, or not enough contrast, maybe both, maybe more problems than this. Since this was the flatbed, problems like this aren't too surprising.
But the FS2710 scan (of the boy) also has some big problems with noise levels. Looking at any part of the picture that should have a very smooth color (like the boy's left arm for example) instead is covered in speckles of different colors - the average color looks pretty good, but the noise is very distracting to look at all the same!
So what gives? Why isn't the FS2710 image better looking? Is there a good reason, or is the FS2710 just not very good either?
Did you two (the parent & grandparent of this) really read the article? It's not about programming in English, it's not about syntax, it's about structure.
For example, they pointed out that people think about tasks in an event-driven way, their example is "when pac-man is out of lives, the game is over". But they must program by finding where in the program the number of lives goes down, and inserting the code there. An event driven language would simplify.
Their other example was that most languages make people think in loops, when they really want to operate on a group. Saying "for (i = 0; i len; ++i) { x[i] += 10; }" it a really clumsy way to express what people thought, which was "add 10 to everything in x".
Anyway, I agree that parts of the article don't sound too helpful, but they aren't talking about writing in English; they're talking about changing the structure of languages to more closely match what people think.
The forwarding you describe works perfectly under SPF. As long as the "From:" says the account that forwarded the email, SPF does what it is supposed to.
Some people have two mailboxes; mailbox A is configured to forward - headers *unmodified* - all mail to mailbox B. This will not work with SPF, which will claim "This mail's headers say it comes from gates@microsoft.com, but it actually came from mailbox A's SMTP host, which isn't allowed to spit out microsoft email."
There's a solution (which I use for my domain): msstate.edu's mail servers need to turn on authentication (hopefully with SSL), and allow your mail to be relayed if it is authenticated.
Then tell your mail client to route all mail through smtp.msstate.edu (or whatever their SMTP server is running on), and presto! The outside world will see mail come from an SPF-authorized msstate.edu mail relay, with an @msstate.edu sender.
Now, if msstate.edu turns on SPF and *doesn't* turn on something like this, then right, you're screwed. But in that case, it's because SPF isn't being set up properly, it's not because SPF is inherently broken.
Uhhhh...it looks like they did work out what they want to do (gravity wave research), and how to do it (with a 256 node beowulf cluster), then they got the grant. The only thing left is to find a vendor for their hardware. The guy writing this probably isn't the researcher who got the grant, he's an IT person who needs to help figure out who to buy it from.
Since it can take over a year to get a grant in some cases, picking out the vendor before the grant arrives is usually stupid. By the time it arrives, the hardware and price you settled on won't be competitive any more, and they actual hardware may not even be available!
At a large company where I worked, the sales team (or maybe some department of coporate motivation, don't remember exactly) emailed out - companywide! - the advice to "use a word for your password that will motivate you. For example, make your password 'sales' so that every time you log in, you are motivating yourself to sell!"
This was followed up about 24 hours later with a letter from the IT department, which said pretty much "ignore sales, they are idiots, do not ever take their advice on passwords."
I have used it sitewide (small site, about a dozen active mailboxes) for a few months. Currently it has an error rate of about 1 or 2 mistakes per week per mailbox (in mailboxs that get 100+ spams per day). I did have to do a lot of work to configure it properly though, which may be the reason the authors saw poor performance from it; the "forward to yourself to train" didn't work at all because both my IMAP server and my mail reader would slightly reformat my headers, meaning that CRM114 was training on different text then it saw when it was filtering! So I put together my own system to save pristine copies of all inbound mail and train on them as needed. Maybe the reason CRM114 fared so poorly is the difficulty in setting it up properly?
> This test proves that Sun's optimized Java compiler and VM are faster on Red Hat than gcc.
It also proves something even more interesting: It proves that the speed difference of C++ vs. Java is smaller than the speed difference of a good vs. a not-no-good compiler.
So, in other words, if you choose to use C++ over Java for the speed difference, then use any old C++ compiler you have handy, you're not making very smart decisions. They days when you could just assume that Java would be half the speed (or worse!) compared to any old C++ compiler are over.
I think the argument was even dumber than you make out. Basically, the argument is, "spatial browsing is a metaphor for desktops with real files and contentents, thus it is good." But, the whole point of metaphors is to make things easier to use; that is, we pick a metaphor that fits what we want to do, we don't adjust what we want to do to fit the metaphor! Spatial browsing, to a lot of people, adds a lot of work and clutter from taking care of all the intermediate steps to get to their ultimate destination, so if the desktop and file metaphore leads to spatial browsing that people hate, then the answer is to change the metaphor! Not to insist that people live with SB because the metaphor says it is the right way to do things.
Step 1: Patent a crabgrass variant.
Step 2: Sue the hell out of every poor sucker who ends with MY crabgrass in THEIR lawns.
Step 3: Do I even need to say?
But on this Go v. Chess topic, let me add that I read an article a while back (don't have the URL, sorry, may have even been a print article) that examined stroke victims. Strong Go players who suffered brain damage to one of their hemispheres but not the other would play a worse game, but the nature of the loss of playing skill would be very different depending on whether the stroke hit the one half of the brain than the other; one side (don't remember whether left or right) would lose their tactical/fighting ability in the game, the other side would lose their ability to work with large abstract territories. The article pointed out that chess players would lose basically all their chess ability when the damage was to one side of the brain (the one that matched tactics in go), and would lose very little ability when they suffered damage to the other side.
Anyway, it indicates that one of the ways that go is very different from chess is that it needs skills associated with the abstract/intuitive side of your brain and skills associated with the logical part of your brain, while chess needs primarily skills associated with the logical part. Perhaps this is why some people prefer one game over the other? If you love chess for its tactical reading, then you might not care for the abstract parts of go, which you would find boring. Meanwhile, a player who enjoys all of the game of go might find chess interesting but "lacking something."
Anyway, I'm not going to argue which game is better, just play what you like and let other people play what they like, no need to criticize either group.
I was in about the same situation - existing ongoing work for a side business, but getting hired full time with an employment contract that says everthing I say do or think belongs to the company. I just wrote in a paragraph at the end saying that work related to my preexisting business is exempted, initialed it, had my new manager initial it, and that was that. I've done this twice, both times the manager was OK with it after they checked with their lawyers.
Look, who has the clout in congress to get the patent mess cleaned up? Big companies. Thus, the fastest way to clean it up, have big companies get harassed with expensive lawsuits like this. A lot. If Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc., waste enough money fighting stupid patents (note - I know nothing about the Patriot patents, they may or may not be stupid), then you can bet that things will change.
Just a thought. Of course, laws would probably change in a way that makes it harder for anobody to sue big companies, but leave it just as easy for big companies to patent "one click instead of two to buy an item" type idiocy, but we can hope, can't we?
Hey, if anybody wants to start a class action suit against SPEWS, let me know.
It would be costly and time consuming for me to move my server. When I signed up with the ISP, it was fairly clean. Now SPEWS lists my IP address as a source of spam, and advises mail servers to refuse my email - from my point of view, that's libel, and they're libelling a hell of a lot of people.
In fact, since they refuse to take me off the list, and tell me to move to get out of their blacklist, it could be argued that they are blackmailing me; they threaten to tell people to refuse my email unless I do what they want (which is change ISPs).
So wonderful wonderful SPEWS is committing libel and blackmail against a large number of totally innocent server operators. Hey, all I have to do is spend money and time to move, then I'm safe from these clowns...oh but wait, what if my new service provider later lets in a spammer...oops.
Seriously, if anybody sues, let me know, I'll join.
For a DNS provider to let you set text records would be easy, they just have no reason to do it so most don't. The hope is that once SPF starts to catch on, DNS providers will finally have a reason to let you edit TXT records, so they will.
If SPF becomes common and your DNS provider still doesn't let you edit your TXT records, then I'd say that it's time to find a new DNS provider.