Everything is going somewhere; the Earth is nearly halfway through its annual orbit and the Sun is busy flying around the galactic core.
blogs are here to stay
"Here" is clearly a relative value. Blogs will maintain their general location above the surface of the Earth until such time as off-planet blogging catches on ("The third moonrise this morning made me think of the fragility of life, upon which I shall now expound for the next eight pages.").
Electric Pencil on a TRS-80 in ca. 1980 only took a few seconds to load. Now, 25 years later, people think it's normal to wait 31 seconds, on a CPU that's 1000 times faster?
Others have debunked the "31 seconds" so I'll leave that alone. However, Electric Pencil didn't have a multi-hundred-thousand word dictionary, or support for network printers, or 3rd-party floppy or hard drives, or screen resolutions other than the TRS-80's own standard setup, or components shared with a spreadsheet and database program, or mouse support, or antialiased fonts, or WYSIWYG editing, or crossplatform code, or any of the millions of other things OpenOffice loads whenever you click "New Document".
In other news, my kid can build a Lego car faster than BMW can assemble a Z4.
Sometimes you need to put an ugly fix in it to get it to work right.
That is never true. Sometimes you might be tempted to add an ugly fix to alter some behavior to how you think it should be today, but that doesn't make it right or good.
If the answer is "ad-hoc patch", then you're asking the wrong question.
Chances are good that at the club you hang out at on the weekends half the kids there look just like you.
Scene: Standing outside the Soil goth nightclub in San Diego, '93. Everyone, and I mean everyone in line is wearing a black shirt, black jeans or skirt, and black boots. They are universally wearing white makeup and have black or crimson hair. Except me. I'm wearing blue jeans, brown Doc Martens, and a green polo shirt, and I have short blonde hair and no makeup.
I start trying to chat up the cute goth chick ahead of me (which was the whole reason for being there in the first place), but she cuts me off with "find someone else, you conformist." It never occurred to her that I was, quite literally, the only person there that didn't look exactly like everyone else.
I was also there for the music and poetry readings. Ironically, many people there were far more judgemental of me than I even thought of being toward anyone else there. A few people caught that, though, and enjoyed the novelty of hanging out with the lone prep in their lair.
...because Linus is well renowned for this graphically artistry.
The iLife suite I could see (because I've yet to find an iMove-alike for *ix), but Photoshop? Why not Entourage or VirtualPC if we're picking random apps?
How true! I hate the fact that arts-aware programs are capable of making sound on my alsa-less FreeBSD system.
Not all the world runs Linux. As far as abstraction layers go, arts seems pretty decent.
Re:One of pillars of success: manual
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
PHP manual from the very begining was perfect
I think you got the causality backwards. If PHP's manual wasn't top-notch, then noone would ever be able to figure out the 15 variations on each function (each with arbitrarily different argument ordering). People didn't flock to the PHP manual because PHP is such a great language.
In other words, PHP leans on a strong document set just to make it usable. That's quite different than most other languages commonly in use.
Sometimes I know what's best for me
on
The Death of Folders?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Whenever I create a project-specific folder and put a bunch of files in it, I know that those files are directly related to each other. I don't want to search for "files you think might be related to Project Foo" - I want "files I've explicitly said are related to Project Foo".
There are times when searches are ideal for grouping disjoint sets of information. There are many, many more times when a best guess is completely insufficient. Searches to augment folders? Sure. Searches to replace them? No way.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you think that "PHP" and "KISS" belong in the same sentence (without a negation operator), then you're nuts. Having separate functions (in the main namespace, no less!) for every possible way you might want to sort a list is not simple, reasonable, or the standard accepted way of doing such things.
When you can explain the core language and primary namespace to an interested programmer in under 30 minutes, I'll be glad to revisit the topic. Until then, Python is simple. Perl is even reasonable simple. PHP is not simple in any way, shape, or form (unless you're using the facetious Simple from SMTP, SNMP, and other horridly complex standards).
But honestly I have yet to use anything i learned beyond basic math and trig outside of my work.
Surely I'm not the only one who estimates heights of bridges, etc. by timing a dropped rock and using d=.5at^2. How can you make it through higher math and not find a use for that stuff?
Problem is that when spammers are using bot armies of millions of machines, resource costs aren't such a barrier for them.
Those bots aren't free. If the utility of each is cut by half or more, then their production costs have now doubled. If each bot has to attempt an address ten times, then they can only deliver one tenth the spam and their production costs have jumped 900%.
If they were operating at a 90% profit margin before, then your worst-case scenario has them now breaking even. That's a win for the good guys, I'd say.
to prove how insanely great the print quality is on this thing [...]
...they decided to print page 31 of "Swinging Pad Magazine" (August '73 edition). Remember when people thought those colors were attractive and the turn of the (previous) century was all the rage? All that photo needs is a picture of a bowl-cutted kid wearing Tuff-Skins and a Zoom shirt.
I primarily use IE in conjunction with Window-Eyes as a screen-reading application.
Bet that was really fun at work before they took goatse.cx offline. I imagine the occasional GNAA troll is equally amusing: "I'M GAY AND I LIKE BIG BLACK..." <diving for speaker volume>.
Same here (although for not nearly as long a time), and I'm not about to replace my address - it's too widespread to migrate my friends and family to something else.
I wrote an article about my Postfix + Amavisd + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + Greylisting setup; I'm down from many-thousand spams per day to one or two. We've reached the point where technology can do an excellent job of separating the wheat from the chaff, but people seem slow to adopt it. I'd go as far as to say that if you or your company still get significant amounts of spam, then it's a voluntary decision.
My only wish is that SPF were more widespread. One of my domains, honeypot.net, seems to be a favorite for spoofing, and it wouldn't hurt my feelings to never receive another whiny email from someone who just decided that they've had enough and wants to start fighting back.
Greylisting is a much larger burden to spammers than legitimate mailers, though. Say your server is configured to greylist. I have a finite and rather stable set of people on my system that will want to send mail to your system. If each of my users sends 50 messages to your server (and assuming that the second and subsequent messages are sent after the greylist timeout so that they're not affected), then 2% of the traffic from me to you gets delayed.
On the other hand, a spammer wants to deliver 10,000,000 messages to random users on your system. Depending on whether your greylist takes place before recipient verification, he has to delay 100% of his messages to you before even having the privilege of knowing which ones are potentially going to real users. Additionally, there's a fighiting chance of the spammer being added to a DNSBL between the time they initially begin their transmission and when your server finally stops ignoring their requests.
Even if all spammers upgrade their bots to full SMTP compliance, the result of greylisting is a huge spike in the resources required to transmit a given amount of UCE. The goal isn't to make it impossible for them to transmit their junk, but to make it more expensive than it's worth.
That's a shame. See (pun), no matter how much you like it, and no matter how 1337 it makes you, there is much more to programming than ANSI C.
Do you know any functional languages? Can you (intelligently) debate Perl vs. Python? Do you know why Fortran can be much faster than C? Do you believe that a virtual machine can be faster than assembler? If you said "no" to any of those, yet refuse to look past your C knowledge, then you're depriving yourself of a lot of good learning.
There's a vast difference between "I haven't gotten around to it yet" and "I've already solidified my way of thought". You seem to take pride in the latter, and for that I feel sorry for you.
The nice part is that it only takes one major ISP enabling greylisting to automagically fix those out-of-spec servers. People might not fix their configurations for me, but I'm pretty sure they might respond differently to AOL or Earthlink.
what IT department hasn't locked IM along with everything else down anyhow
The enlightened ones that've installed their own internal Jabber servers, for starters. Our company went from "IM is an interesting experiment" to "kill the email if you must, but keep that Jabber server running!" in a few short months.
IM doesn't have to mean AIM or ICQ anymore. Our internal IM system is every bit as secure as our email service, so sending sensitive data is perfectly acceptable and common.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything is going somewhere; the Earth is nearly halfway through its annual orbit and the Sun is busy flying around the galactic core.
blogs are here to stay
"Here" is clearly a relative value. Blogs will maintain their general location above the surface of the Earth until such time as off-planet blogging catches on ("The third moonrise this morning made me think of the fragility of life, upon which I shall now expound for the next eight pages.").
Others have debunked the "31 seconds" so I'll leave that alone. However, Electric Pencil didn't have a multi-hundred-thousand word dictionary, or support for network printers, or 3rd-party floppy or hard drives, or screen resolutions other than the TRS-80's own standard setup, or components shared with a spreadsheet and database program, or mouse support, or antialiased fonts, or WYSIWYG editing, or crossplatform code, or any of the millions of other things OpenOffice loads whenever you click "New Document".
In other news, my kid can build a Lego car faster than BMW can assemble a Z4.
That is never true. Sometimes you might be tempted to add an ugly fix to alter some behavior to how you think it should be today, but that doesn't make it right or good.
If the answer is "ad-hoc patch", then you're asking the wrong question.
Scene: Standing outside the Soil goth nightclub in San Diego, '93. Everyone, and I mean everyone in line is wearing a black shirt, black jeans or skirt, and black boots. They are universally wearing white makeup and have black or crimson hair. Except me. I'm wearing blue jeans, brown Doc Martens, and a green polo shirt, and I have short blonde hair and no makeup.
I start trying to chat up the cute goth chick ahead of me (which was the whole reason for being there in the first place), but she cuts me off with "find someone else, you conformist." It never occurred to her that I was, quite literally, the only person there that didn't look exactly like everyone else.
I was also there for the music and poetry readings. Ironically, many people there were far more judgemental of me than I even thought of being toward anyone else there. A few people caught that, though, and enjoyed the novelty of hanging out with the lone prep in their lair.
You got the previously hypothetical +1: Christian mod? File that next to "Mac goes Intel" and "Stable Sarge" under Signs of the Apocalypse.
Well, yeah. That's the essence of Slashdot: linking to news stories and commenting on them. I have no idea why that'd surprise someone.
...because Linus is well renowned for this graphically artistry.
The iLife suite I could see (because I've yet to find an iMove-alike for *ix), but Photoshop? Why not Entourage or VirtualPC if we're picking random apps?
How true! I hate the fact that arts-aware programs are capable of making sound on my alsa-less FreeBSD system.
Not all the world runs Linux. As far as abstraction layers go, arts seems pretty decent.
I think you got the causality backwards. If PHP's manual wasn't top-notch, then noone would ever be able to figure out the 15 variations on each function (each with arbitrarily different argument ordering). People didn't flock to the PHP manual because PHP is such a great language.
In other words, PHP leans on a strong document set just to make it usable. That's quite different than most other languages commonly in use.
Congratulations: you just re-invented folders.
We need searches why?
There are times when searches are ideal for grouping disjoint sets of information. There are many, many more times when a best guess is completely insufficient. Searches to augment folders? Sure. Searches to replace them? No way.
When you can explain the core language and primary namespace to an interested programmer in under 30 minutes, I'll be glad to revisit the topic. Until then, Python is simple. Perl is even reasonable simple. PHP is not simple in any way, shape, or form (unless you're using the facetious Simple from SMTP, SNMP, and other horridly complex standards).
That changes next semester. Have fun trying to get your '89 to crank out trig substitution and power series.
Surely I'm not the only one who estimates heights of bridges, etc. by timing a dropped rock and using d=.5at^2. How can you make it through higher math and not find a use for that stuff?
In the Navy: "Strauser, do you know how to start an IV on a violent drunk?"
In college: "Hey, Kirk, do you know how to move furniture?"
At work: "Hey, peon, do you know how to put our FoxPro database on the web?"
At home: "Hey, neighbor, do you know how to use a chainsaw?"
There have been many, many times in my life when I wished that I didn't know how to do what was being asked of me (or that I was a better liar).
Those bots aren't free. If the utility of each is cut by half or more, then their production costs have now doubled. If each bot has to attempt an address ten times, then they can only deliver one tenth the spam and their production costs have jumped 900%.
If they were operating at a 90% profit margin before, then your worst-case scenario has them now breaking even. That's a win for the good guys, I'd say.
...they decided to print page 31 of "Swinging Pad Magazine" (August '73 edition). Remember when people thought those colors were attractive and the turn of the (previous) century was all the rage? All that photo needs is a picture of a bowl-cutted kid wearing Tuff-Skins and a Zoom shirt.
Bet that was really fun at work before they took goatse.cx offline. I imagine the occasional GNAA troll is equally amusing: "I'M GAY AND I LIKE BIG BLACK ..." <diving for speaker volume>.
I wrote an article about my Postfix + Amavisd + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + Greylisting setup; I'm down from many-thousand spams per day to one or two. We've reached the point where technology can do an excellent job of separating the wheat from the chaff, but people seem slow to adopt it. I'd go as far as to say that if you or your company still get significant amounts of spam, then it's a voluntary decision.
My only wish is that SPF were more widespread. One of my domains, honeypot.net, seems to be a favorite for spoofing, and it wouldn't hurt my feelings to never receive another whiny email from someone who just decided that they've had enough and wants to start fighting back.
On the other hand, a spammer wants to deliver 10,000,000 messages to random users on your system. Depending on whether your greylist takes place before recipient verification, he has to delay 100% of his messages to you before even having the privilege of knowing which ones are potentially going to real users. Additionally, there's a fighiting chance of the spammer being added to a DNSBL between the time they initially begin their transmission and when your server finally stops ignoring their requests.
Even if all spammers upgrade their bots to full SMTP compliance, the result of greylisting is a huge spike in the resources required to transmit a given amount of UCE. The goal isn't to make it impossible for them to transmit their junk, but to make it more expensive than it's worth.
Care to post the function for comparison purposes?
Do you know any functional languages? Can you (intelligently) debate Perl vs. Python? Do you know why Fortran can be much faster than C? Do you believe that a virtual machine can be faster than assembler? If you said "no" to any of those, yet refuse to look past your C knowledge, then you're depriving yourself of a lot of good learning.
There's a vast difference between "I haven't gotten around to it yet" and "I've already solidified my way of thought". You seem to take pride in the latter, and for that I feel sorry for you.
The nice part is that it only takes one major ISP enabling greylisting to automagically fix those out-of-spec servers. People might not fix their configurations for me, but I'm pretty sure they might respond differently to AOL or Earthlink.
Good to know - thanks!
The enlightened ones that've installed their own internal Jabber servers, for starters. Our company went from "IM is an interesting experiment" to "kill the email if you must, but keep that Jabber server running!" in a few short months.
IM doesn't have to mean AIM or ICQ anymore. Our internal IM system is every bit as secure as our email service, so sending sensitive data is perfectly acceptable and common.