If they're going to take my vote down on electrons, I want to get something I can take away which records that vote, so that it can be compared to the official records in case of an investigation. (For that matter, I could authorize an unofficial tally organization to recount my vote -- if enough people did that, irregularities might become apparent.)
There's lots of technicalities about signatures and timestamps and encryption and such, but the point is that if they're going to take away the property that my vote has a *visible* path through the system and can be *visually* verified and audited at each step in the process, then that's not OK and I want a way to make them prove that the vote tallied for me is the one I cast.
The good old mechanical lever-type machines we had (:-( )in Marion County since time immemorial still look like better security design *and* better user interface design than anything else I've seen, be it paper or electronic. Definite visual and tactile feedback, Braille- and multilingual-capable, no electricity required, no system crashes, no possibility of erroneous multi-marking, and the counters locked inside a steel case -- what more is needed? (Okay the counters could be electronically readable via authenticated secure channel from a central tally office, but what *else* would you have?)
"people like them because their light more closely approximates the light of the sun."
Some of us reluctantly continue using incandescents because they are the only things you can hook to those solid-state remote controls without risk of fire from a burning ballast.:-( I'd have a mix of cool- and warm-white fluorescents all through the house if they were dimmable.
"The outdoor low-pressure sodium lighting renders all colors as tones of yellow or gray."
ISTR Edwin Land showed that this is not necessarily a problem. There is still quite a lot of color information in images formed with light of extremely limited chromatic range. And sodium-vapor lamps are not nearly so limited as that.
"As far as lighting goes, suburbanites have an insane fear of dark streets. They'll gladly pay until their entire environment is brightly lit."
What's the point of moving away from the big-city crime if you don't make life hard for the criminals who follow the money? Would you rather the suburban nights were full of little red laser-sight beams?
"The real culprit, though, is incredibly cheap, bright lights. I don't like these because of their pink glow."
Uhhuh. Sodium-vapor lamps. They *are* cheap -- to operate, since they burn so much *less* electricity than incandescents or even mercury-vapor fluorescents. Next time you see the hateful things, thank an environmentalist.
Uh, guys, it all started with a circle of firelight to keep the animals away. Of course it's hard on the wildlife -- it's meant to be. Darkness is enemy territory.
Doggone it, people build cities to keep the animals out. That's where the concentrated night-light is. Then, if the light disturbs our sleep, we build walls to provide darkness on demand. We call it civilization.
" See iFolder and iPrint, that don't require a client32 50MB install to use - just a browser."
As opposed to the VLM client which still works just fine and can file and print without a 100MB browser, or huge fat GUIs, or anything else that doesn't fit on a single floppy? F&P is not exclusively about somebody sitting in front of a screen pushing buttons and looking at pretty pictures. It's the way we load and refresh hundreds of public workstations, for example.
Much as I like Linux, an end to Netware as we know it leaves me feeling like I'm being punished for all those years of brand loyalty.
As with most television programming, most web content, while valuable, would not be bought if it were sold, because the perceived value is not worth the hassle of all those little payments. But if you have a concentrated source of high-value stuff and offer it on decent terms, you will have subscribers and I believe you can make it self-sustaining and even profitable.
For the rest of us, a gift culture just works better because you don't have to hassle with all that bookkeeping and settling-up, and if ad.s allow us to break even more often than not then I can stand it. Enduring the advertising is less painful than writing a thousand checks/month or having to fill in a payment form every ten seconds.
START TLS already identifies the source MTA. No START TLS -> full filtering; certificate of known trusted source -> avoid unnecessary filtering.
One thing *is* needed -- I don't recall any standardized way to provide a trace of all certificates for relayed messages. We need something like Received: only for cert.s, or a standard way to insert/extract cert.s in Received: lines.
It's interesting to note that, without a certificate trace, current practice (using, in some cases *forcing*, relay through faceless ISPs' MUAs to sanitize outgoing mail) works *agains* real secure SMTP exchanges. The transport layer can't verify the identity of a sending system if it only knows the identity of the last relay. (But note that the application layer can still apply the model given above: if it's from someone known and trusted, don't bother to apply filters.)
All of the proposals I've seen for replacing SMTP want to replace it with something so cut-down and locked-down that it only serves a small sub-community's ideas about what email should do. The nice thing about SMTP is that it is general enough to encompass a lot of different models.
As far as creating an additional load on the helpdesk, I can't recall the last time I asked ours for help with Linux. Oh, wait, now I remember...it was "never". (But sometimes I *give* help with Linux. Does that make my HD cost negative?)
It's my understanding that the only thing I have to do in order to receive the copyright for my work is to create the work. I can file paperwork with the government to indicate my intent to defend my rights, but it's not necessary and anyway placing "Copyright 2003 Mark H. Wood" in the work also serves notice of such intent. What I make is mine, unless it is a "work for hire."
"If you have a music (or other copyrighted work) file, and you didn't buy it, technically you stole it."
Um, I have to point out two other possibilities: you received it as a gift, or you created it.
I have lots of stuff on my computer that I didn't buy, including the operating system. It's all Free or Open Source Software, and I received it as a gift. Other stuff on my computer that I didn't buy are things that I wrote (for which I automatically receive the copyright at the instant that I create it).
The stuff I wrote is mine, to do with as I wish. The gifts are licensed to me and I can upload them if the license says I can.
I *like* using disjoing namespaces to organize disjoint functions or concepts. I like having separate tools that do one job well, rather than having to stop and think about what tool X's operation *means* in this part of the namespace.
I've been doing Unix for a decade and I *still* think that/dev is an off-the-wall idea. I certainly don't want the filesystem on *my* machines to become even more ambiguous.
Oh, it's WAY older than 1985. See TOPS-10, Multics, GECOS, etc. As for unloading stuff from memory, see "virtual memory", which was invented by some British university team before IBM decided they liked the idea and started splashing "virtual" all over everything in the '70s.
It's called "timesharing", and we had it back in the '60s. If they mean switching the display among multiple graphical contexts, Linux has had that for ages.
*sigh* Great. Organizations build critical systems which are easy to attack, hard to defend, and difficult to repair, and then try to hush it up, instead of saying, "thank you," and rushing to fix the problems. Bah! Why didn't they build rugged, defensible, maintainable systems in the first place?
I think this thing is really a map of all the places where you could say, "no engineer has looked at this or, if one has, he was overruled."
If people had remembered that "spam" (the electronic phenomenon) refers to inappropriately multiply-cross-posted *netnews*, the usage would never have escaped into the mass media, nobody would be naming products SpamWhatever, and Hormel would have nothing to defend against.
I must remember "UCEless". Here are some more, free to good home: DisUCE, AbUCE, NoUCE.
"Cell phones are great with a camera built in, perhaps even the ability to take a 5 second video, but there is realy no need for a cell phone which is a video camera, no matter how cool it may be to own one. Video cameras do a much better job of capturing video."
Hear, hear. Think "modular". Gimme a cell phone which will let me plug my video camera into it for the 1-2min/yr that I need to transmit videos instantly. Better, just gimme a cell phone that will let me plug all *sorts* of stuff into it as needed, via a standard interface, and don't worry too much about *what* I plug into it. Taking signals in a certain range of bit rates from here to there is what telecom devices do, and they shouldn't try to specialize too much.
"when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. Last I checked, that was a technology issue rather than an interface design issue."
Just don't make *me* use one. I want to know what the machine is doing. When it behaves unexpectedly, *you* may be able to figure out the cause through astral projection or whatever, but *I* require diagnostic messages.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're going to take my vote down on electrons, I want to get something I can take away which records that vote, so that it can be compared to the official records in case of an investigation. (For that matter, I could authorize an unofficial tally organization to recount my vote -- if enough people did that, irregularities might become apparent.)
There's lots of technicalities about signatures and timestamps and encryption and such, but the point is that if they're going to take away the property that my vote has a *visible* path through the system and can be *visually* verified and audited at each step in the process, then that's not OK and I want a way to make them prove that the vote tallied for me is the one I cast.
The good old mechanical lever-type machines we had (:-( )in Marion County since time immemorial still look like better security design *and* better user interface design than anything else I've seen, be it paper or electronic. Definite visual and tactile feedback, Braille- and multilingual-capable, no electricity required, no system crashes, no possibility of erroneous multi-marking, and the counters locked inside a steel case -- what more is needed? (Okay the counters could be electronically readable via authenticated secure channel from a central tally office, but what *else* would you have?)
"people like them because their light more closely approximates the light of the sun."
:-( I'd have a mix of cool- and warm-white fluorescents all through the house if they were dimmable.
Some of us reluctantly continue using incandescents because they are the only things you can hook to those solid-state remote controls without risk of fire from a burning ballast.
"The outdoor low-pressure sodium lighting renders all colors as tones of yellow or gray."
ISTR Edwin Land showed that this is not necessarily a problem. There is still quite a lot of color information in images formed with light of extremely limited chromatic range. And sodium-vapor lamps are not nearly so limited as that.
"As far as lighting goes, suburbanites have an insane fear of dark streets. They'll gladly pay until their entire environment is brightly lit."
What's the point of moving away from the big-city crime if you don't make life hard for the criminals who follow the money? Would you rather the suburban nights were full of little red laser-sight beams?
"The real culprit, though, is incredibly cheap, bright lights. I don't like these because of their pink glow."
Uhhuh. Sodium-vapor lamps. They *are* cheap -- to operate, since they burn so much *less* electricity than incandescents or even mercury-vapor fluorescents. Next time you see the hateful things, thank an environmentalist.
Uh, guys, it all started with a circle of firelight to keep the animals away. Of course it's hard on the wildlife -- it's meant to be. Darkness is enemy territory.
Doggone it, people build cities to keep the animals out. That's where the concentrated night-light is. Then, if the light disturbs our sleep, we build walls to provide darkness on demand. We call it civilization.
" See iFolder and iPrint, that don't require a client32 50MB install to use - just a browser."
As opposed to the VLM client which still works just fine and can file and print without a 100MB browser, or huge fat GUIs, or anything else that doesn't fit on a single floppy? F&P is not exclusively about somebody sitting in front of a screen pushing buttons and looking at pretty pictures. It's the way we load and refresh hundreds of public workstations, for example.
Much as I like Linux, an end to Netware as we know it leaves me feeling like I'm being punished for all those years of brand loyalty.
...what about the *file and print services*, which is the only thing I wanted Netware for in the first place? Hello? Guys? Remember file service?
...will it look as snazzy as a General Products #2 hull?
As with most television programming, most web content, while valuable, would not be bought if it were sold, because the perceived value is not worth the hassle of all those little payments. But if you have a concentrated source of high-value stuff and offer it on decent terms, you will have subscribers and I believe you can make it self-sustaining and even profitable.
For the rest of us, a gift culture just works better because you don't have to hassle with all that bookkeeping and settling-up, and if ad.s allow us to break even more often than not then I can stand it. Enduring the advertising is less painful than writing a thousand checks/month or having to fill in a payment form every ten seconds.
START TLS already identifies the source MTA. No START TLS -> full filtering; certificate of known trusted source -> avoid unnecessary filtering.
One thing *is* needed -- I don't recall any standardized way to provide a trace of all certificates for relayed messages. We need something like Received: only for cert.s, or a standard way to insert/extract cert.s in Received: lines.
It's interesting to note that, without a certificate trace, current practice (using, in some cases *forcing*, relay through faceless ISPs' MUAs to sanitize outgoing mail) works *agains* real secure SMTP exchanges. The transport layer can't verify the identity of a sending system if it only knows the identity of the last relay. (But note that the application layer can still apply the model given above: if it's from someone known and trusted, don't bother to apply filters.)
All of the proposals I've seen for replacing SMTP want to replace it with something so cut-down and locked-down that it only serves a small sub-community's ideas about what email should do. The nice thing about SMTP is that it is general enough to encompass a lot of different models.
As far as creating an additional load on the helpdesk, I can't recall the last time I asked ours for help with Linux. Oh, wait, now I remember...it was "never". (But sometimes I *give* help with Linux. Does that make my HD cost negative?)
Um, apparently nobody told you that you can get Word Viewer from Microsoft for free, legally.
Or you could hop onto a Linux|*BSD box and use Abiword or OpenOffice for free, legally.
Eh? If my friends are all criminals, then *I* am the one who's a bad friend to have? I think you have that backwards.
It's my understanding that the only thing I have to do in order to receive the copyright for my work is to create the work. I can file paperwork with the government to indicate my intent to defend my rights, but it's not necessary and anyway placing "Copyright 2003 Mark H. Wood" in the work also serves notice of such intent. What I make is mine, unless it is a "work for hire."
"If you have a music (or other copyrighted work) file, and you didn't buy it, technically you stole it."
Um, I have to point out two other possibilities: you received it as a gift, or you created it.
I have lots of stuff on my computer that I didn't buy, including the operating system. It's all Free or Open Source Software, and I received it as a gift. Other stuff on my computer that I didn't buy are things that I wrote (for which I automatically receive the copyright at the instant that I create it).
The stuff I wrote is mine, to do with as I wish. The gifts are licensed to me and I can upload them if the license says I can.
I *like* using disjoing namespaces to organize disjoint functions or concepts. I like having separate tools that do one job well, rather than having to stop and think about what tool X's operation *means* in this part of the namespace.
/dev is an off-the-wall idea. I certainly don't want the filesystem on *my* machines to become even more ambiguous.
I've been doing Unix for a decade and I *still* think that
Oh, it's WAY older than 1985. See TOPS-10, Multics, GECOS, etc. As for unloading stuff from memory, see "virtual memory", which was invented by some British university team before IBM decided they liked the idea and started splashing "virtual" all over everything in the '70s.
It's called "timesharing", and we had it back in the '60s. If they mean switching the display among multiple graphical contexts, Linux has had that for ages.
...another attempt to save us from the need to learn to write well.
...which means it won't run right with Linux.
*sigh* Great. Organizations build critical systems which are easy to attack, hard to defend, and difficult to repair, and then try to hush it up, instead of saying, "thank you," and rushing to fix the problems. Bah! Why didn't they build rugged, defensible, maintainable systems in the first place?
I think this thing is really a map of all the places where you could say, "no engineer has looked at this or, if one has, he was overruled."
"perhaps the pizza hut delivery line will have adverts for others before you get to order your pizza."
I hope the folks at Pizza Hut are smart enough to figure out that if they do that, I'll stop ordering from Pizza Hut.
If people want to advertise, let them pay for space in the newspaper where I only see it if I'm *looking* for it. Don't call us; we'll call you.
Hear, hear! I try always to use the proper term.
If people had remembered that "spam" (the electronic phenomenon) refers to inappropriately multiply-cross-posted *netnews*, the usage would never have escaped into the mass media, nobody would be naming products SpamWhatever, and Hormel would have nothing to defend against.
I must remember "UCEless". Here are some more, free to good home: DisUCE, AbUCE, NoUCE.
"Cell phones are great with a camera built in, perhaps even the ability to take a 5 second video, but there is realy no need for a cell phone which is a video camera, no matter how cool it may be to own one. Video cameras do a much better job of capturing video."
Hear, hear. Think "modular". Gimme a cell phone which will let me plug my video camera into it for the 1-2min/yr that I need to transmit videos instantly. Better, just gimme a cell phone that will let me plug all *sorts* of stuff into it as needed, via a standard interface, and don't worry too much about *what* I plug into it. Taking signals in a certain range of bit rates from here to there is what telecom devices do, and they shouldn't try to specialize too much.
"when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. Last I checked, that was a technology issue rather than an interface design issue."
Just don't make *me* use one. I want to know what the machine is doing. When it behaves unexpectedly, *you* may be able to figure out the cause through astral projection or whatever, but *I* require diagnostic messages.