Re:traceability, or send-risks-paying?
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
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· Score: 2, Informative
One thing, which works fairly well, and works now, is SPEWS (www.spews.org).
SPEWS is used but you will find it very hard to find any ISP that admits to it. The problem is that SPEWS is amazingly careless and sloppy.
There are now 400 blacklists and as a result ISPs rarely do very much if they get listed now. They might contact MAPS and get unlisted, but MAPS is not that effective at blocking spammers any more. The ISPs have decided that the sooner everyone is on SPEWS the better, trying to get off the blacklists would cost a fortune.
It was quite noticable at the FTC panel that even the blacklist people could see that there were enormous problems with what they were doing. Their answers were pretty evasive and they kept contradicting themselves. Julian started out by saying his was a 'high collateral damage' list, use it as one input to the filtering decision. Then a few minutes later he says that blacklists are the only way you can filter without having to accept the email and tie up your server - so what is it.
Of course the reason we have irresponsible blacklists like SPEWS is because of the legal tactics of the spammers. E-MarkettingAmerica is not in business to make the world a better place. Their lawyer served two of the blacklist people with writs during the conference and was somewhat emotional during one of the sessions.
Do I have any regrets? Yes, that the funniest item in the book probably isn't anything we wrote, but is Dennis Ritchie's anti-forword. (We had asked Dennis to write a forword, thinking that since he was doing Plan 9 at that time, it would give him an opportunity to talk about how he had moved on from Unix and fixed its flaws in his next OS.
Well first off, Plan 9 did not attempt to address a single one of the problems identified in the haters handbook. So it should not be a surprise that Ritchie did not read the book as a fix it
One of the curious things about the UNIx crowd is that they are the only people who had that degree of success that when asked what they would have done different seem to always answer 'nothing'. Ask Tim or me or any of the Web crowd what we did wrong and you get a laundry list, like top of mine is that we did not put a lightweight compressed encoding into the default libraries from the start. That would have saved a mass of bandwidth and speeded up dialup links two to threefold.
Second, I think Dennis tried to give the MIT guys the exact opposite of the answer they wanted because he knew that it would be funnier than the other content.
You have a very warped idea of what St. Constantine was up to.
Go read your history books, just a couple of weeks before the council he had half his own family executed. He was not exactly the nicest of folk.
Constantine's objectives were purely political. He wanted to unite the empire under a single state religion. It was clear that the rule of Rome could not continue without some stronger cohesive force than the Imperium.
The deal that the church struck was that it would become the favored state religion in return for complete support for the state.
"...a year after the Council of Nicea, he (Constantine) sanctioned the confiscation and destruction of all works that challenged orthodox teachings - works by pagan authors that referred to Jesus, as well as works by "heretical" Christians. He also arranged for a fixed income to be allocated to the Church and installed the bishop of Rome in the Lateran Palace
Constantine himself was not baptised until he was on his deathbed. Before that he was a follower of Sol Invictus. The political stroke of genius lay in realising that he could merge the two religions into one. That is why we have SUNday as the holy day, it was actually the holy day of Sol Invictus first.
Other transfers from the pagan cults include the Eucharist itself which was described as one of the rites of Bachanalia 200 odd years BC. That caused some problems in the middle ages with the accepted explanation being that this was the work of the devil anticipating Christ.
We have no idea what the true new testament said. None of the documents that have survived are earlier than about 400AD. Diocletian ordered all documents destroyed in 303AD leaving the field wide open for the editors at Nicea.
But hey, why bother with the problems of 350AD when half the church still uses the Received version text which is based on Erasmus's hastily thrown together edition of 1515.
We have no basis whatsoever for any claim wrt the authority of the church or the Empire that was not manufactured by the church in colusion with the state.
Actually, I think that a prostiute is lest morally detestable than a telemarketer - at least prostitutes can feasably enjoy their job, and it pays better.
I don't see what your objection is. If the work is consensual I can think of an awful lot of professions that are far more demeaning than prostitution.
Telemarketing is pretty much the worst of the worst. There are some customer relations people who fit in the same category though. When I had problems with MCI cramming my phone bill I found their debt collection agency far more helpful than their alledged sustomer service. When I explained that the bill was not paid because nothing was owed they appologised and never called again.
Republican, (hell no make that any US) politician has to be below telemarketer. I mean poor Cheney and Bush whoring for Enron and then finds that the company was so corrupt it won't last long enough to repay the favors. It must take a special kind of self-respect to go round selling legislation and tax breaks for campaign contributions.
Televangelists rank lower than whores too. Just think of all those pensioners being bilked by the likes of Pat Robertson to contribute to their 'ministries'. Pat Robertson has made a billion dollars out of his ministries, yet he still begs for cash weekly. I seem to remember something about money changers in the temple...
While we are at it how about those members of the supreme court who voted to stop the votes being counted in Florida?
Also anyone who works for Fox News, that is pretty much a given.
Compared to what is legal in this country, working girls provide a fine and valuable social service.
Jesus never advocated open rebellion, against Israel or Rome or even the local rabbis in a town.
I don't know which Bible you read, but mine has this statement in Luke 22:36-38 -
[36] He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. [37] It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment."
[38] The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords."
"That is enough," he replied.
The version of the bible we have today is the post-Constantine version. Clearly there is a chunk missing from the end of acts. There are a number of other bits that show signs of editing. Basically what Constantine did was to lock up all the church elders and force them to agree on a common version of the new testament. Anyone who did not agree to it was immediately executed.
Of course the lord works in mysterious ways and this is of course merely another of his ways of communicating. But it has no relevance to the telemarketer issue so take your literalist interpretations of allegories elsewhere please.
That's very quotable. But before I go sticking it in a sig or something, can you explain what precisely it is you're referring to?
Suborning the supreme court to prevent the votes being counted in Florida of course, an act that means that he will always be a "President" with an asterix after his name.
Rutherford Hayes did the same thing in 1776, only there the votes were counted, they were just disqualified to prevent Tilden from winning.
Lets face it "President" Bush's answer on every issue is either a tax cut that benefits only the wealthy or a war. In both cases the costs of his policies are going to fall on future administrations.
If you're serious about *character*, and not *politics*, then I sure hope you were turning your/. comments into rants about the only impeached president a few years ago...
The only President that came close to conviction and removal from office is of course the Republican Richard Nixon. That guy had real character problems, lying, anti-semitism, bigottry. Not the sort of things the media tells us are character problems but that is what most people call them.
If the GOP did not have a big chip on its shoulder about Watergate they would never have tried to even the score.
As it is GWB is the first president since rutherford Hayes to break the inaugural oath before actually taking it. Given his military 'career' this should hardly surprise.
Well I have never used VMS so please excuse my ignorance but doesn't VMS have like 200 options just for the set command?
I don't remember that being the case. I certainly remember extensive issues in Unix trying to set environment variables and shell variables and finding that each of the different shells seemed to treat what is a pretty simple concept entirely differently.
At least in VMS you could always ask for HELP. In Unix you can't even consult the manual until you pretty much know what you are looking for.
Isn't VMS also written in C?
No, VMS predates C becoming a mainstream language. VMS is written mostly in Bliss32. There are parts of the O/S written in every one of the VAX supported languages however. The engineers apparently did this to ensure that DEC had to ship the runtime for every language with the o/S.
Didn't unix come out first and of course be behind?
Not really, the very first version of UNIX did come out before VMS, however there was no significant use of UNIX until the BSD release which was developed on a VAX which had originally shiped with VMS loaded.
Also does VMS have the everything is a file metaphore like Unix? If not then its a disadvantage to adminster.
No, VMS does not make that mistake. Things that are not usefully described as files are not represented as files.
As far as I can tell the disadvantages are gone and no other os is as easy to both use as well as hack and customize as Linux/Unix.
But as you yourself admit, you have no knowledge of the alternatives so how can you claim to have an informed opinion?
Hey guys, you are missing something important, when we were running the unix-haters list at the AI lab WindowsNT did not exist, Windows 3.1 was a toy O/S that did not even pretend to be a serious contender.
Most of the people who were on the haters list were actually VMS and Multics users, or like me they had used so many different O/S and written bits of them that they were in a position to make comparisons.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era. The command line interpreter is garbage, the documentation abysmal and as for security - Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking. Today we are unlearning that mistake with Java and C# which both have memory management and memory bounds checking.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
However take a read through the security chapter and then ask yourself whether any of the major security flaws in the UNIX architecture was an impediment to its success? If the answer is no then don't bet on the 'security issue' keeping Windows out of the data center for long. That did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
Security is pretty much like the 'character' issue in elections. The candidate that raised the 'character' issue in the last campaign was the recovering alcoholic with an undeclared criminal conviction for DUI, who had been a director of a company with Enron style accounting, had sold shares and illegally failed to report the sales to the SEC - twice, who had dodged the draft by getting his father to pull strings to parachute him into a draft-safe spot in the Texas national guard and then went AWOL for over a year.
Agreed. This is like trying to rewrite C++ just because the syntax isn't organized well enough. Most ivory tower type idea I've heard in awhile.
Well tell that to James Gosling, who is currently more concerned about the threat of C# than C++.
It is certainly possible to replace SMTP but unlikely to happen because SMTP is not that baddly broken and any new system would be written in layers anyway. So when you start to look at the difference between SMTP and the new system it would amount to little more than efficiency improvements.
We went through all this with HTTP-NG, got nowhere.
There is one radical shift in play for anti-spam measures, we are going to move all the mailing list traffic onto a protocol like RSS that is a pull mode protocol rather than push. This removes all the horrid problems you get from the push model, like I can't unsubscribe and jane is sending spam and so on. You also get authentication and even encryption built in for free. But don't expect the legacy mailing lists to go away any time soon!
A replacement for the SMTP push protocol is simply not on the cards. Even if it was what would we use for it, heck yes it would be XML and Web services so forget about your performance problems!
This whole story is bogus, the patent is incredibly narrow, it is not pardigmatic and not essential to web services.
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation [yale.edu] patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
Even so there is nothing in Web Services that was not previously invented in CORBA or previous systems. I published the idea of using the Web for machine/machine interaction in 1993, I don't hink I was the first, Tim probably discussed it in 1992 at Annecy. Try to remember what we were doing there folks, controlling real time physics experiments.
The language of this patent, 'brokers' etc is all from CORBA.
My guess is that they'll adapt, and take their new place to the left and just below the Throne of the Great Penguin.
I was discussing the problem of BIND security the other day. I explained that things had been better for a long time until DNSSEC came along and a whole slew of completely unchecked code had just got jammed into the kernel. This led to the observation that unglamorous stuff like testing is something that it is realy hard to get people to do for OSS projects. Especially since there is something of a suck it and see toss it over the fence attitude. Why spend my time testing, the user bozos can do that!
So before you nail stability and security to the mast as the colors of the good ship OSS ask yourselves if you really want to win the game on those terms. I remember asking the same thing of Netscape when they decided to take Microsoft on by inventing new features faster than Redmond...
The interesting thing about Windows 2003 is the support for.NET. If you are running Web Services then you want Windows 2003. If you are not then well, any feature you are likely to need is likely to have been supported long ago. The PKI support is much improved.
There you go again with your fuzzy math. There is enough money to save medicare and social security and eliminate all taxes for people who earn $500,000 a year.
Its not 97.8 Billion, it is 97.8 billion EACH, thats almost $400 million, which is more than enough to balance the budget. All we have to do is to seize the assets of the RIAA and imprision Paul Krugman as an Enemy Combattant and we are done.
Whats really annoying me now is that I'm getting spam selling anti-spam software. I mean how stupid do spammers think I am. I know how stupid they are
In most cases that is not quite what is going on, sale implies that they own the goods in question which most spammers do not. Basically they are taking credit card numbers in return for the promise of spam software.
In many cases you don't get the spam software anyway, if you do it probably won't be a legal copy and you are likely to find your credit card billed for very substantially more.
Of course then there are clueless services like spam arrest that have a challenge/response spam filter scheme. Then they spam all the people who tried to send email to their customers. Privacy abuse and spam all in one go!
The challenge response schemes are in any case a way of displacing spam, not reducing it. Everyone who sends a user of those vile schemes a message gets a spam set back in return. If everyone used them we would spend all our time answering callbacks and the spam senders would quickly adjust to autoreply. If someone's email has a callback loop on it I send them a fax or fed-ex and add in a note that their email seems to be broken.
As for REST being some bit of hype, perhaps you should spend a little time reading Fielding's thesis
That is my point, REST ain't a standard, it IS hype.
Further, REST had a large impact on the HTTP spec (or is it just coincidence that Fielding was one of the authors of RFC 2396)
He was an editor, that means he did the edits, it does not mean he did the design. I was an author and no, REST had no influence on the design, he didn't write his thesis until the spec was long finished. I never heard the term mentioned until after the spec went to proposed so I have a hard time believing it to have been important.
I know that Roy has been busy trying to promote REST as being the great insight, that does not make it so.
The thing about Web Services is that they are pretty much designed like Perl to be the duct tape of the Internet. Perl itself is evolving in pretty much the way Basic did, more structure, more consistency but still pretty easy to suck it and see.
The thing I don't quite get is the reference to the REST standard. That is some hype Roy Fielding put in his thesis. It was never agreed upon by the other members of the Web team and there is no real trace of its influence on the development of web standards for the simple reason that the thesis only came out long after the fact.
Why not just control the swing with a couple of magnets mounted at the ends of the pendulum's arc? It would surely be cheaper and easier to maintain than a camera and mechanical arm
These are not grandfather clocks, they are large public clocks and the movements are very old. The objective is to avoid human contact since people tend to break them advancing or retarding them for summertime.
So this is not a Rube Goldberg device, it is a piece of conservation technology:-)
The Westminster Tower Clock, with its famous bell 'Big Ben' is kept accurate by a warden who runs (ok shuffles, most jobs of that type go to aged war veterans) up a flight of stairs and adds or removes pre-decimal pennies from the pendulum bob. Ah you cry, but the time taken by a pendulum does not depend on the weight, well yes but the pennies slightly raise the center of gravity of the bob you see...
The camera bit sounds a little over the top, surely an led and a receiver???
Actually this was a project I had in mind, but it can be done with much less kludge.
My plan was to put a magnet on the pendulum and then put the regulation mechanism on the reverse. This would measure each swing of the pendulum from the emf induced in a coil on the back of the clock. This would also be used to advance or retard the pendulum if necessary.
Bush will ensure that the was isn't over before elections (even if it's just "mopping up"), thus guaranteeing him the election.
If the "cakewalk", "7-10" day war isn't over by the fall the GOP will be starting impeachment proceedings of their own accord.
Jimmy Cater did not loose in 1980 because of the hostage crisis, he lost because the rescue attempt was horribly botched and went wrong. If the war is still going on this fall then something has gone horribly wrong.
Of course that isn't to say that there won't be any fighting going on, when the Israelis first invaded Lebanon they were greeted with open arms by the same millitias who shot at them on their way out ten years later. The smart move for any Iraqi would be dictator is to let the US take out Saddam then wear down the US. Meanwhile the guy Rumsfeld and his neocon hawks want to install as the new dictator is a convicted con-man whose bank failled owing $300 million in an S&L type scam.
Of course Bush might have started the Iran or Syria campaigns that the NeoCons in the Pentagon are calling for by that time.
but they DO KILL BABIES - you can see the dead and dying on Al Jazeera every day if you can live with yourself afterwards.
They would have only grown up to be terrorists.
Oh sorry, must have watched too much Fox news there.
Question for Fox news, why is Peter Arnett's interview to Iraqi TV worse than Rivera giving the Iraqi's details of coalition troop positions and plans?
NBC meanwhile have a great graphic showing the balance of forces arround Baghdad, with the Iraqis outnumbered 2 to one. Only by all accounts the Coalition has only a division in the whole of Iraq and there are six Republican guard divisions in Baghdad.
CNN are instead interviewing a GOP blimp still trying to convince people that the Iraqis are going to be giving the troops flowers just as soon as Saddam is out of the way. He is right about one thing, "The US can do anything it puts its mind to". Yes quite including loosing this war if they really try.
Why did the Administration tell us that the war would be over in a week and a half (and yes the damn well did tell us that)? Even the French managed to last six weeks against the Germans! And the Germans were right next door so there were no supply chain issues.
Support our troops, replace the idiot civilians who think you can take an entire country with a single division with people who have some sense. Replace Ari Fleicher with someone who does not tell people horseshit like claiming Saddam may be dead, if he is dead the regime must be one heck of a lot more robust than was claimed earlier. And most of all, stop the cowardly hiding behing the troops and the flag each time you make a mistake, criticism of Bush is not criticism of the troops.
The design of the mirror was perfect, it was the manufacture and testing that were flawed. To add insult to injury Kodak made a perfect mirror that was used in the vehicle testing... It is still sitting at Nasa...
I am a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Britich Computer Society, most programmers in the UK are not. Only a percentage would qualify. Who do you call a programmer? Some HTML and perl monkey who does nothing but setup simple websites with frontpage? Someone who writes an Excell macro? Thats programming but it isn't engineering.
To be a chartered engineer you have to be more than just a grunt worker. You have to have a certain level of responsibility, usually responsibility for a budget, you have to have an architectural input. In short you need to be a professional and have equivalent skills to a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer.
That does not mean you are guaranteed to be any good, there are a lot of useless doctors arround (who thought that lobotomies would be a good idea), there are losts of incompetent accountants (Enron, Sunbeam, Harken, etc.) and there are plenty of duff lawyers.
The real test is whether you can get kicked out of the association if you screw up big time, although in fact few doctors or lawyers get struck off for incomptence, its more usually having sex with a patient or embezlement, or in one case sending spam (ok it was only 2 years for the spam).
If you want to know all the specifics about why OZ is better, you should check out their site [sourceforge.net].
Err, what makes you think I didn't. The site did not state one single benefit of openZaurus over the original install.
As for the 'stability' you state, I have never had a single stability problem with my Zaurus, the 802.11b card does not work but the system is 'stable'. So more stability but apps not running is not my definition of improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
SPEWS is used but you will find it very hard to find any ISP that admits to it. The problem is that SPEWS is amazingly careless and sloppy.
There are now 400 blacklists and as a result ISPs rarely do very much if they get listed now. They might contact MAPS and get unlisted, but MAPS is not that effective at blocking spammers any more. The ISPs have decided that the sooner everyone is on SPEWS the better, trying to get off the blacklists would cost a fortune.
It was quite noticable at the FTC panel that even the blacklist people could see that there were enormous problems with what they were doing. Their answers were pretty evasive and they kept contradicting themselves. Julian started out by saying his was a 'high collateral damage' list, use it as one input to the filtering decision. Then a few minutes later he says that blacklists are the only way you can filter without having to accept the email and tie up your server - so what is it.
Of course the reason we have irresponsible blacklists like SPEWS is because of the legal tactics of the spammers. E-MarkettingAmerica is not in business to make the world a better place. Their lawyer served two of the blacklist people with writs during the conference and was somewhat emotional during one of the sessions.
Well first off, Plan 9 did not attempt to address a single one of the problems identified in the haters handbook. So it should not be a surprise that Ritchie did not read the book as a fix it
One of the curious things about the UNIx crowd is that they are the only people who had that degree of success that when asked what they would have done different seem to always answer 'nothing'. Ask Tim or me or any of the Web crowd what we did wrong and you get a laundry list, like top of mine is that we did not put a lightweight compressed encoding into the default libraries from the start. That would have saved a mass of bandwidth and speeded up dialup links two to threefold.
Second, I think Dennis tried to give the MIT guys the exact opposite of the answer they wanted because he knew that it would be funnier than the other content.
Hey, tell that one to Ariana Huffington, a 3 day cooling off period for purchasers of SUV's!
Could join it to Megan's law, force SUV owners to place a sign on their front lawn 'environmental disaster area lives here'.
Go read your history books, just a couple of weeks before the council he had half his own family executed. He was not exactly the nicest of folk.
Constantine's objectives were purely political. He wanted to unite the empire under a single state religion. It was clear that the rule of Rome could not continue without some stronger cohesive force than the Imperium.
The deal that the church struck was that it would become the favored state religion in return for complete support for the state.
"...a year after the Council of Nicea, he (Constantine) sanctioned the confiscation and destruction of all works that challenged orthodox teachings - works by pagan authors that referred to Jesus, as well as works by "heretical" Christians. He also arranged for a fixed income to be allocated to the Church and installed the bishop of Rome in the Lateran Palace
Constantine himself was not baptised until he was on his deathbed. Before that he was a follower of Sol Invictus. The political stroke of genius lay in realising that he could merge the two religions into one. That is why we have SUNday as the holy day, it was actually the holy day of Sol Invictus first.
Other transfers from the pagan cults include the Eucharist itself which was described as one of the rites of Bachanalia 200 odd years BC. That caused some problems in the middle ages with the accepted explanation being that this was the work of the devil anticipating Christ.
We have no idea what the true new testament said. None of the documents that have survived are earlier than about 400AD. Diocletian ordered all documents destroyed in 303AD leaving the field wide open for the editors at Nicea.
But hey, why bother with the problems of 350AD when half the church still uses the Received version text which is based on Erasmus's hastily thrown together edition of 1515.
We have no basis whatsoever for any claim wrt the authority of the church or the Empire that was not manufactured by the church in colusion with the state.
I don't see what your objection is. If the work is consensual I can think of an awful lot of professions that are far more demeaning than prostitution.
Telemarketing is pretty much the worst of the worst. There are some customer relations people who fit in the same category though. When I had problems with MCI cramming my phone bill I found their debt collection agency far more helpful than their alledged sustomer service. When I explained that the bill was not paid because nothing was owed they appologised and never called again.
Republican, (hell no make that any US) politician has to be below telemarketer. I mean poor Cheney and Bush whoring for Enron and then finds that the company was so corrupt it won't last long enough to repay the favors. It must take a special kind of self-respect to go round selling legislation and tax breaks for campaign contributions.
Televangelists rank lower than whores too. Just think of all those pensioners being bilked by the likes of Pat Robertson to contribute to their 'ministries'. Pat Robertson has made a billion dollars out of his ministries, yet he still begs for cash weekly. I seem to remember something about money changers in the temple...
While we are at it how about those members of the supreme court who voted to stop the votes being counted in Florida?
Also anyone who works for Fox News, that is pretty much a given.
Compared to what is legal in this country, working girls provide a fine and valuable social service.
I don't know which Bible you read, but mine has this statement in Luke 22:36-38 -
[36] He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. [37] It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment."
[38] The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords."
"That is enough," he replied.
The version of the bible we have today is the post-Constantine version. Clearly there is a chunk missing from the end of acts. There are a number of other bits that show signs of editing. Basically what Constantine did was to lock up all the church elders and force them to agree on a common version of the new testament. Anyone who did not agree to it was immediately executed.
Of course the lord works in mysterious ways and this is of course merely another of his ways of communicating. But it has no relevance to the telemarketer issue so take your literalist interpretations of allegories elsewhere please.
Suborning the supreme court to prevent the votes being counted in Florida of course, an act that means that he will always be a "President" with an asterix after his name.
Rutherford Hayes did the same thing in 1776, only there the votes were counted, they were just disqualified to prevent Tilden from winning.
Lets face it "President" Bush's answer on every issue is either a tax cut that benefits only the wealthy or a war. In both cases the costs of his policies are going to fall on future administrations.
Oh dear, you apparently don't know about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. That was also a manufactured case.
The only President that came close to conviction and removal from office is of course the Republican Richard Nixon. That guy had real character problems, lying, anti-semitism, bigottry. Not the sort of things the media tells us are character problems but that is what most people call them.
If the GOP did not have a big chip on its shoulder about Watergate they would never have tried to even the score.
As it is GWB is the first president since rutherford Hayes to break the inaugural oath before actually taking it. Given his military 'career' this should hardly surprise.
I don't remember that being the case. I certainly remember extensive issues in Unix trying to set environment variables and shell variables and finding that each of the different shells seemed to treat what is a pretty simple concept entirely differently.
At least in VMS you could always ask for HELP. In Unix you can't even consult the manual until you pretty much know what you are looking for.
Isn't VMS also written in C?
No, VMS predates C becoming a mainstream language. VMS is written mostly in Bliss32. There are parts of the O/S written in every one of the VAX supported languages however. The engineers apparently did this to ensure that DEC had to ship the runtime for every language with the o/S.
Didn't unix come out first and of course be behind?
Not really, the very first version of UNIX did come out before VMS, however there was no significant use of UNIX until the BSD release which was developed on a VAX which had originally shiped with VMS loaded.
Also does VMS have the everything is a file metaphore like Unix? If not then its a disadvantage to adminster.
No, VMS does not make that mistake. Things that are not usefully described as files are not represented as files.
As far as I can tell the disadvantages are gone and no other os is as easy to both use as well as hack and customize as Linux/Unix.
But as you yourself admit, you have no knowledge of the alternatives so how can you claim to have an informed opinion?
Most of the people who were on the haters list were actually VMS and Multics users, or like me they had used so many different O/S and written bits of them that they were in a position to make comparisons.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era. The command line interpreter is garbage, the documentation abysmal and as for security - Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking. Today we are unlearning that mistake with Java and C# which both have memory management and memory bounds checking.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
However take a read through the security chapter and then ask yourself whether any of the major security flaws in the UNIX architecture was an impediment to its success? If the answer is no then don't bet on the 'security issue' keeping Windows out of the data center for long. That did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
Security is pretty much like the 'character' issue in elections. The candidate that raised the 'character' issue in the last campaign was the recovering alcoholic with an undeclared criminal conviction for DUI, who had been a director of a company with Enron style accounting, had sold shares and illegally failed to report the sales to the SEC - twice, who had dodged the draft by getting his father to pull strings to parachute him into a draft-safe spot in the Texas national guard and then went AWOL for over a year.
Well tell that to James Gosling, who is currently more concerned about the threat of C# than C++.
It is certainly possible to replace SMTP but unlikely to happen because SMTP is not that baddly broken and any new system would be written in layers anyway. So when you start to look at the difference between SMTP and the new system it would amount to little more than efficiency improvements.
We went through all this with HTTP-NG, got nowhere.
There is one radical shift in play for anti-spam measures, we are going to move all the mailing list traffic onto a protocol like RSS that is a pull mode protocol rather than push. This removes all the horrid problems you get from the push model, like I can't unsubscribe and jane is sending spam and so on. You also get authentication and even encryption built in for free. But don't expect the legacy mailing lists to go away any time soon!
A replacement for the SMTP push protocol is simply not on the cards. Even if it was what would we use for it, heck yes it would be XML and Web services so forget about your performance problems!
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation [yale.edu] patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
Even so there is nothing in Web Services that was not previously invented in CORBA or previous systems. I published the idea of using the Web for machine/machine interaction in 1993, I don't hink I was the first, Tim probably discussed it in 1992 at Annecy. Try to remember what we were doing there folks, controlling real time physics experiments.
The language of this patent, 'brokers' etc is all from CORBA.
I was discussing the problem of BIND security the other day. I explained that things had been better for a long time until DNSSEC came along and a whole slew of completely unchecked code had just got jammed into the kernel. This led to the observation that unglamorous stuff like testing is something that it is realy hard to get people to do for OSS projects. Especially since there is something of a suck it and see toss it over the fence attitude. Why spend my time testing, the user bozos can do that!
So before you nail stability and security to the mast as the colors of the good ship OSS ask yourselves if you really want to win the game on those terms. I remember asking the same thing of Netscape when they decided to take Microsoft on by inventing new features faster than Redmond...
The interesting thing about Windows 2003 is the support for .NET. If you are running Web Services then you want Windows 2003. If you are not then well, any feature you are likely to need is likely to have been supported long ago. The PKI support is much improved.
Haven't you heard of overheads?
Jeez, it takes $400 million in tax breaks to Enron to get a lousy $2 million campaign contribribetion and a loan of the exec-jet.
Seriously though, methinks the RIAA have screwed up with this type of demand, it is the sort of games that can seriously piss off a judge.
Say what you like about John Ashcroft though, nobody can complain about him.
There you go again with your fuzzy math. There is enough money to save medicare and social security and eliminate all taxes for people who earn $500,000 a year.
Its not 97.8 Billion, it is 97.8 billion EACH, thats almost $400 million, which is more than enough to balance the budget. All we have to do is to seize the assets of the RIAA and imprision Paul Krugman as an Enemy Combattant and we are done.
In most cases that is not quite what is going on, sale implies that they own the goods in question which most spammers do not. Basically they are taking credit card numbers in return for the promise of spam software.
In many cases you don't get the spam software anyway, if you do it probably won't be a legal copy and you are likely to find your credit card billed for very substantially more.
Of course then there are clueless services like spam arrest that have a challenge/response spam filter scheme. Then they spam all the people who tried to send email to their customers. Privacy abuse and spam all in one go!
The challenge response schemes are in any case a way of displacing spam, not reducing it. Everyone who sends a user of those vile schemes a message gets a spam set back in return. If everyone used them we would spend all our time answering callbacks and the spam senders would quickly adjust to autoreply. If someone's email has a callback loop on it I send them a fax or fed-ex and add in a note that their email seems to be broken.
Brave, inquisitive and amazingly reckless.
Its a bit like the invention of bungee jumping, base jumping etc. exactly what would the loss to humanity be if people had not invented them?
Apart from a new way for millionaires to go for thrill rides there does not appear to be a major payoff here.
I would be much more interested in a cheap way to stick a bot on the moon or on mars.
That is my point, REST ain't a standard, it IS hype.
Further, REST had a large impact on the HTTP spec (or is it just coincidence that Fielding was one of the authors of RFC 2396)
He was an editor, that means he did the edits, it does not mean he did the design. I was an author and no, REST had no influence on the design, he didn't write his thesis until the spec was long finished. I never heard the term mentioned until after the spec went to proposed so I have a hard time believing it to have been important.
I know that Roy has been busy trying to promote REST as being the great insight, that does not make it so.
The thing I don't quite get is the reference to the REST standard. That is some hype Roy Fielding put in his thesis. It was never agreed upon by the other members of the Web team and there is no real trace of its influence on the development of web standards for the simple reason that the thesis only came out long after the fact.
These are not grandfather clocks, they are large public clocks and the movements are very old. The objective is to avoid human contact since people tend to break them advancing or retarding them for summertime.
So this is not a Rube Goldberg device, it is a piece of conservation technology :-)
The Westminster Tower Clock, with its famous bell 'Big Ben' is kept accurate by a warden who runs (ok shuffles, most jobs of that type go to aged war veterans) up a flight of stairs and adds or removes pre-decimal pennies from the pendulum bob. Ah you cry, but the time taken by a pendulum does not depend on the weight, well yes but the pennies slightly raise the center of gravity of the bob you see...
The camera bit sounds a little over the top, surely an led and a receiver???
My plan was to put a magnet on the pendulum and then put the regulation mechanism on the reverse. This would measure each swing of the pendulum from the emf induced in a coil on the back of the clock. This would also be used to advance or retard the pendulum if necessary.
If the "cakewalk", "7-10" day war isn't over by the fall the GOP will be starting impeachment proceedings of their own accord.
Jimmy Cater did not loose in 1980 because of the hostage crisis, he lost because the rescue attempt was horribly botched and went wrong. If the war is still going on this fall then something has gone horribly wrong.
Of course that isn't to say that there won't be any fighting going on, when the Israelis first invaded Lebanon they were greeted with open arms by the same millitias who shot at them on their way out ten years later. The smart move for any Iraqi would be dictator is to let the US take out Saddam then wear down the US. Meanwhile the guy Rumsfeld and his neocon hawks want to install as the new dictator is a convicted con-man whose bank failled owing $300 million in an S&L type scam.
Of course Bush might have started the Iran or Syria campaigns that the NeoCons in the Pentagon are calling for by that time.
They would have only grown up to be terrorists.
Oh sorry, must have watched too much Fox news there.
Question for Fox news, why is Peter Arnett's interview to Iraqi TV worse than Rivera giving the Iraqi's details of coalition troop positions and plans?
NBC meanwhile have a great graphic showing the balance of forces arround Baghdad, with the Iraqis outnumbered 2 to one. Only by all accounts the Coalition has only a division in the whole of Iraq and there are six Republican guard divisions in Baghdad.
CNN are instead interviewing a GOP blimp still trying to convince people that the Iraqis are going to be giving the troops flowers just as soon as Saddam is out of the way. He is right about one thing, "The US can do anything it puts its mind to". Yes quite including loosing this war if they really try.
Why did the Administration tell us that the war would be over in a week and a half (and yes the damn well did tell us that)? Even the French managed to last six weeks against the Germans! And the Germans were right next door so there were no supply chain issues.
Support our troops, replace the idiot civilians who think you can take an entire country with a single division with people who have some sense. Replace Ari Fleicher with someone who does not tell people horseshit like claiming Saddam may be dead, if he is dead the regime must be one heck of a lot more robust than was claimed earlier. And most of all, stop the cowardly hiding behing the troops and the flag each time you make a mistake, criticism of Bush is not criticism of the troops.
The design of the mirror was perfect, it was the manufacture and testing that were flawed. To add insult to injury Kodak made a perfect mirror that was used in the vehicle testing... It is still sitting at Nasa...
I am a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Britich Computer Society, most programmers in the UK are not. Only a percentage would qualify. Who do you call a programmer? Some HTML and perl monkey who does nothing but setup simple websites with frontpage? Someone who writes an Excell macro? Thats programming but it isn't engineering.
To be a chartered engineer you have to be more than just a grunt worker. You have to have a certain level of responsibility, usually responsibility for a budget, you have to have an architectural input. In short you need to be a professional and have equivalent skills to a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer.
That does not mean you are guaranteed to be any good, there are a lot of useless doctors arround (who thought that lobotomies would be a good idea), there are losts of incompetent accountants (Enron, Sunbeam, Harken, etc.) and there are plenty of duff lawyers.
The real test is whether you can get kicked out of the association if you screw up big time, although in fact few doctors or lawyers get struck off for incomptence, its more usually having sex with a patient or embezlement, or in one case sending spam (ok it was only 2 years for the spam).
Err, what makes you think I didn't. The site did not state one single benefit of openZaurus over the original install.
As for the 'stability' you state, I have never had a single stability problem with my Zaurus, the 802.11b card does not work but the system is 'stable'. So more stability but apps not running is not my definition of improvement.