This is the wrong way to to. MS should lose market share for being insecure, that's certainly true, but the #1 reason that we suffer so much from MS' operating systems is the homogeneity of the OS market, and while they've fought as hard to stay on top as any other corporation would have, I'm not willing to say that it's their fault that everyone has been saying "screw security, I need Word" for 10 years.
We knew better, but we got burned. Now is the time to take responsibility for our actions and switch to non-MS products.
Unless this observation was done in a wavelength atenuated by atmosphere (e.g. in near UV), then I don't see why the fate of Hubble is relevant. Ground-based scopes out-power hubble and new scopes that are planned out-power those.
Hubble should be replaced at some point. My only question (as asked previously here on/.) is: should we build it as an orbital device like Hubble, or should we put it on the moon? A moon-based scope has many advantages and disadvantages which should be considered.
Yeah, this is definitely a win. However, you're going to find that most small Web applications are going to run in a hosted environment which will probably provide MySQL as a default database.
Still, the interface should be the same in your PHP code, so you don't really care what the back-end is unless you're doing something funky. I'm just glad to see more and more open source databases getting play.
Under Unix and Unix-like systems, the vector of attack and what you do with it are usually two different things (though, in reality, modern Windows attacks are starting to look more like this, as attackers are starting to get a bit more methodical).
Intrusion detection "scanners" under Unix have taken two forms: the signature scanner and the proactive snapshot.
The former is what I'm refering to (and chkrootkit was a good, if primative example). The latter would inlcude tools like tripwire.
So, while I might not trust that we know all of the holes in, say, my Web server, I do have a pretty good idea of the sorts of tools that an attacker would use once they got in, and I can look for those.
Perfect? No, nothing in the security business is. It's still good to look for what you know.
Well, sort of. What he was trying to do was not to show that the systems were buggy and insecure, because everyone knew that to one degree or another. Sendmail, for example, had had a debug mode that allowed remote shell access for years, and everyone who had done significant sendmail admin knew it.
The problem was that it was never a priority for anyone to fix the problems because there was always something more important.
In a way, Morris' (sue me) bug was actually more of a feature, since it prevented any kind of reasonable and proportional response to the problem (everyone killed finger daemons, and dozens of mail and ftp server replacements sprang up).
Woefully, the only way to do that was to really anoy people to the point that they pressed criminal charges. I wonder what the Net would be like today if the Internet Worm had never happened. Maybe the same... but I doubt it. I think the response in 1991 to as wide-spread a worm would have been much more reactionary.
No, they got the memo, but this is one of those things that Disney does. They strangle the life out of the public domain by paying millions into congressional coffers to get laws passed that circumvent the Constitution, and then they turn around and give away 7 patents that never would have made them any money anyway for the good press (in the pyrotechnics industry, waiting out a patent's expiration is like waiting for a 100-mile-an-hour fastball to land in a catcher's glove... it's not an industry that leaps on new technology that fast, and for good reason).
Disney might have lost as much as half a million on this. The PR they get with the people they shafted on copyright just to protect Steamboat Willie is worth many, many times that.
Yes, absolutely. I've written these before, but they're of limited usefulness unless you can keep up with them, and I had too much work to do. We still use one of my old ones here at work, though as a "something is better than nothing" approach.
You need a many-pronged approach, and ways to deal with the fact that a compromised UNIX or UNIX-like system is one of the most fearsome anti-security tools there are. You need to be able to establish the state of system security WITHOUT knowing that it was secure when you started running.
Tripwire or the like will tell you if anything changes, but what you really want to know is "what state is this box in now, BEFORE I install any security software.
One such tool was chkrootkit. It was ok for a pile of shell scripts (and a few small C programs), but really needed to be cleaned up and turned into something that could be configured remotely by config updates and find some way to ensure that the system wasn't lying to it.
Virus scanners are for people who want to leave security holes open and then get information about the damage.
No, they're for the people who don't trust that every security hole is known of first by the white-hats.
Is your system secure? Are you sure? What abotu 5 minutes before you applied that last ssh update? Wouldn't a virus / trojan / root kit scanner give you one more level of assurance?
No, the movie hackers popularized a kind of hip-hopified version of phreaking that had little or nothing to do with the controversy that had surrounded the word hacker since the press got ahold of it in 1987 had continued to use it through the early 90s. Check out any report of a new DOS virus between 1990 and 1994. Also take a look at USENET archives for PROLIFIC discussion on the topic (you might even find a few of my posts;-) from that time period.
You're thinking more of the phreaking crowd, I think, and I never heard of law enforcement using the term hacker... though it may have happened, it was not a wide-spread phenomenon until 1987.
And one note on Mr Morris, who I actually respect a fair amount for his successful bid to bring computer security into the spotlight. I don't advocate writing worms or viruses (the so-called Internet Worm actually classified as both, depending on which attack vector it was using at the time), but in the case of Morris' program, his intent was a reasonable one, even if his actions were not. For that, he deserves a nod: he took a big fall in order to get us to stop pretending holes didn't exist, and CERT was formed as a direct response to his actions.
I know, he also cost us a huge amount of lost productivity, but can you imagine the chaos that someone who DID have malicious intentions would have caused just five years later?! We took that hit to productivity because there was a problem, and though people like Bob Page (who wrote one of the better papers on the worm, and was in charge of sysadmin at my school at the time) were not amused, I do think they were better off in the long term.
Now, if Morris' code hadn't had that fatal bug that caused it to replicate out of control.... heh;-)
If you're wondering when the word "hacker" came to mean something sinister, the answer is 1987.
As far as I can tell, it was the the US media that got that ball rolling when they were trying to investigate the 1987 "Internet Worm" released by Robert Morris Jr. The Worm caught the news media off-balance because 1) they did not know what this "internet" thing was 2) there was no terminology for this kind of crime.
Remember, this was before the World Wide Web (which some of you may not realize is a layer ON TOP OF the Internet, not the same thing), and the news only knew that the military had been connecting computers for research, but even that information was kind of sketchy if you weren't in the thick of it.
So, they asked around and got some experts on the phone and the word that kept coming up was "hacker". Well, the reporters in question didn't realize that a "hacker" was a fairly old term used by the MIT Tech Model Railroad club and later spread around the word as term for a "productive enthusiast". They just knew that Morris the Younger was a "hacker who broke into thousands of computers", and that was news!
We've all tried to stop that land-slide ever since because those of us who called ourselves hackers pre-87 are not too thrilled with the perversion of the word's meaning, but at this point it has become clear that it's simply going to be a matter of dialect. In certain circles the word has one meaning and in the rest of society (not just English-speaking society) it has a very different one... oh well.
Ah, I didn't realize you were talking about a different system. Most of them are reply-based. Since I read my home mail using mutt, "clicking" is a meaningless term, and I would have ignored your mail. Out of curiousity, does your "click here" blurb trip SpamAssassin's click-through tests? It's quite possible, you'll still get through, but raising the odds of your "I'll never see your mail unless you see this" message getting trashed by spam filters seems like a bad plan.
Oooh, cut-n-paste ranting about the movie. Next time pick something that doesn't start with flaming about politics, it kind of sets the reader up to expect that it's not actually about the movie (which 90% of this rant is not).
Apparently the spammers decided to go ahead and click on the little link, or they used a real person's return address, and when that person got they autoreply, they were too stupid to understand what was going on.
I respond to those all the time. I politely send a "please don't auto-reply to forged spam" message. It's not my fault that your anti-spam solution is stupid enough to re-define an email reply to mean that you should accept forged mail.
I am FAR more worried that the person I ran into at the bar last night will go home, and use hotmail, and send poorly formed HTML-only email, or mail via a relay that happens to have been obnoxiously picked up by SORBS or NJABL, or maybe they just used too many lines of ALL CAPS...will erroneously get picked up by my spam filter
Ah and that's exactly why you need a system that analyzes mail from many different directions. SpamAssassin is one such example, but there are other efforts that make the effort to step outside of a limited box of knee-jerk testing and weight the probabilities in a controled way.
Over the time that I've used SA it has become far more powerful than I could have imagined a mail filter being, and while it's still not perfect, it IS the reason that being ajs@ajs.com is not the electronic equivalent of a death sentence.
People who are frustrated by spam can use this system and it will work exactly as well as sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "neener, neener!"
I'm not going to pay to send you email. You might not care about that because you don't know me, and assume you'll never want to hear from me. But what about the person you ran into at the bar last night and gave your email address to? Will THEY pay to send you mail? What have you lost by ignoring them?
What about the job offer from a company that decides that adding a micropayment to your already substantial requested hiring bonus is just insulting?
You see, it's not the general case that's scary, it's that 10,000th message that you drop on the floor that turns out to be REALLY important. This is who learning filters are ultimately the right solution. They will continue to improve, and spam is ultimately doomed in the face of such technology.
Actually, the horses and spaceships thing got me too. I think Whedon needed to spend a bit more time introducing the idea that planet-bound folk are generally poorer and that not ever planet has the resources to build a megaopolis around every landing site.
However, in his defense, the commentary on the DVDs makes it quite clear that he never had the chance to sit down and think about that sort of thing becuase Fox was doing the same note-avalanche sorts of things to him that TNT did to JMS on Crusade (also a show that comes off as broken and disjoint without a reasonable transition point into the story because of station/studio interference).
If they're not virtual, then they're not virtual folders...
That's just an optimized filtering/filing system, which is fine as far as it goes, but like I say, I can open up my virtual spam folder which contains all of my spam for all of my IMAP accounts, select all, deselect one message and then press delete. That one message is still in its original server/folder, but the ones I delete are all GONE from their original servers/folders.
With a caching folder system like the one you referenced, you leave the one orginal message, but you can't delete the original spam from their source folders.
With a filtering folder (a filter that moves the mail into folders) you can delete all of the spam (assuming your filters work across servers), but you can't leave the one message in its original server/folder.
This is basically just an abstraction on top of a tagging/marking system like mutt has, but it's a very powerful abstraction. Try out VM inside Emacs or Evolution's virtual folders somtime. It's rather an addictive feature.
I usually have about 20 virtual folders, and they have a large intersection with each other. Sometimes I even have virtual folders derived from other virtual folders (e.g. all the mail from my boss, based on the all the mail to me virtual folder), and it makes my life much easier given that I get thousands of messages a day.
transgaming wanted free tech support from real developers
The first thing an open source advocate will say to a software company thinking of open sourcing their stuff (I've said it myself) is, "you get thousands of people not just complaining, but actually fixing the problems they care about."
But when a company gives out their source to said developers for free we call that "wanting free tech support"... well, yeah! You're exactly right. Did you have a point?
You continue, "while making normal users pay for the software."
Well let's define "normal user" here. I'm a normal user. I don't write code for Trans Gaming, but I can use WineX without buying it... hmmm, developers get it free. I get it free... the only people who don't get it free are the folks who don't know what source code is in the first place.
And further you continue, "They threatened to make the CVS accessible only to subscribers if there was "abuse"."
And that's a bad thing why?
Look, I was the first to say, back in the bad-old Qt days that a restrictive license on top of a source relese doesn't make you open source. Fine, that's said and done. But the bottom line is that it doesn't make you "evil" either. These folks have the right to do what they want and you have the right to not use their stuff if that bothers you. But, complaining about the fact that they won't let you ship CDs that set up your average end-user for download-and-compile is... well, kind of antithetical to the open source philosophy, not to mention bad form.
If it really bothers you, go write something better. Wine is still out there, you can go contribute. But, I think WineX is great stuff, and I'm happy to use it and contribute where I can. Open source is ultimately a process, not a specific thing, and Trans Gaming is exploring ways that that process can work best for them... if it doesn't work for you, just ignore them.
Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.
I disagree with that a bit. There are things that mutt is faster at than Evolution (I use these two as examples because I use them both), but other things that Evolution is much faster at.
Most of the things that Evolution is faster at are a result of the graphical mode of interaction. For example, selecting the last 1/3rd of the messages in a folder can be eye-balled in Evolution, but you have to think about what the numbers involved are in mutt (assuming you have large folders to start with).
Mutt's pride and joy is the vi-like "motions". I have to say, there's just nothing like "~hautolearn=no;|sa-learn --spam", though as user-interfaces go it lacks something, it's certainly powerful.
Evolution's virtual mailboxes (a concept from VM, the Emacs-based mailer and to some extent MH as well) are similar in many ways, but have some strengths and weaknesses that don't map exactly onto mutt.
I find them both quite powerful, and often comparably fast. Evolution takes longer to start, but once it's running, there's nothing quite like being able to select all of your spam from 6 IMAP-based accounts on different servers as fast as you can click on the virtual folder for your spam and press control-a! You can problably guess what the next key usually is;-)
start using more OSS-based applications / operating systems there will probably be a marked increase in viruses / worms that affect those platforms
While that's certainly true, it's also much easier to contain such beasts. There have been many "root kits" with various strategies of entry for Linux and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems, but they tend to spread slowly (even after accounting for the smaller installed base) and fizzle out faster.
Why?
Well, several reasons:
* Lack of homogeneity in Linuxes * Security-to-taste * A variety of install strategies * Linux systems tend to be behind firewalls * Opt-in/out service model in SysV init
Only after you get past that list do you get to:
* It's easier to supply security updates * Security updates are released faster
Which are usually the cited reasons.
Microsoft's monoculture (abused word, though it is) simply cannot match most of the security advantages of open source, because most of them RELY on the diversity of Linux.
None the less, it's their call, and you don't get to release your code under a permissive license and then say, "those bastards are doing exactly what our license told them they could." It's not only bad form, but it sort of makes you look like you didn't read your own license.
As for CVS... I don't get to second-guess them on that either. Perhaps they're concerned about getting kicked off of SF.net because of the burden of gentoo-builds, perhaps they just don't want to worry about trying to support (or explain the lack of support to) users who have problems with fresh-out-of-CVS builds. It's their ball, they can do what they like with it. Besides one other company (CodeWeaver) who has made a larger set of contributions to Wine than TransGaming? Granted they forked, but the source available from them makes the technical advances in emulating Windows core APIs available to all emulation projects.
The story-lines in B7 were great, though the FX were decidedly not 'special', and some of the acting was ropey.
I'll take a story-driven TV show or movie over expensive actors or special effects any day. Heck, in the case of B5 it worked in our (the audience's) favor, since restrictive special effects budgets meant that it was worth it to try out new techniques and generate some (for the day and for TV) stunning special effects. But even if B5 had been done with a Dr Who special effects budget and actors, I'd have watched every episode. Even after JMS was horribly burned out in the late 4th and all of the 5th season, and he was trying to juggle stories around for reasons of possible cancelation it was better than 80% of the Trek franchise. That says a lot about how important the story is.
Then again, I guess you could make the latter complaint about B5 too (Sinclair? Thank the gods he was given the boot for seasons 2-5).
You've got to see the man on stage sometime. His problem was that he only knew stage acting, and that style of acting comes across as very wooden on the little screen. Watch the episodes he's in. He's focusing on stance, pojection and emphasis, where the TV is picking up only facial expression, subtleties of delivery and reaction.
He's not a bad actor, but he WAS the WRONG actor. I'm glad that he and JMS both realized that, though the story arc for Sinclair would have been a doozy: it was his destiny to be the one to "die" at Za'ha'dum and then come back to kick the Shadows and Vorlons out and THEN be sent back with B4 to become Valen. I suspect, but am not sure, that it was then to be Ivanova who took over and brought the fight back to Earth and take over as President of the Alliance.... Too bad.
Your counter-argument comes down to this: given a good idea, Paramount will file the corners off and make it child-safe.
If that's going to be true for the next thing they do, then a "how to save the Star Trek franchise" treatment from JMS isn't going to do them any good no matter what the subject matter is. Hell, look at the borg! They made a human-looking alien force (the logistical bane of SF TV) into as alien and threatening a menace as you possibly could... and then they filed off all of the corners and made them into care bears.
If they can do THAT to the Borg, then we can shoot down ANY story/series idea on that basis. Instead, Paramount should say, "screw the fans and what would bother them or make them uncomfortable... what kinds of stories will make people sit up and take notice, and maybe... maybe even start THINKING?"
SFA is a fine place to start, but showing them sliming up with disinfectant goo while playing porno music isn't going to do it... you need STORIES. You need WRITERS with the authority to tell the stories without question. You need CHALLENGES to the audience.
This is why the first 3 seasons of B5, The West Wing and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer were such hits. They took something that everyone thought was dead material (B5/JMS was told that only Star Trek could be a successful SF series; WW/Sorkin was told that a dramatic show about politics was career suicide; BtVS/Whedon was told that a cute girl fighting vampires could never be made interesting) and told great stories therein. The lesson to be learned from those shows is that you need a strong writer backed up by mid-3rd season "good relief pitching by a fresh arm" (to quote The West Wing).
To sum up: it's not the setting or the age of the characters: it's the writing, stupid (that last is directed at the studios, not the poster to whom I am replying).
Slashdot Mirror
This is the wrong way to to. MS should lose market share for being insecure, that's certainly true, but the #1 reason that we suffer so much from MS' operating systems is the homogeneity of the OS market, and while they've fought as hard to stay on top as any other corporation would have, I'm not willing to say that it's their fault that everyone has been saying "screw security, I need Word" for 10 years.
We knew better, but we got burned. Now is the time to take responsibility for our actions and switch to non-MS products.
Unless this observation was done in a wavelength atenuated by atmosphere (e.g. in near UV), then I don't see why the fate of Hubble is relevant. Ground-based scopes out-power hubble and new scopes that are planned out-power those.
/.) is: should we build it as an orbital device like Hubble, or should we put it on the moon? A moon-based scope has many advantages and disadvantages which should be considered.
Hubble should be replaced at some point. My only question (as asked previously here on
Yeah, this is definitely a win. However, you're going to find that most small Web applications are going to run in a hosted environment which will probably provide MySQL as a default database.
Still, the interface should be the same in your PHP code, so you don't really care what the back-end is unless you're doing something funky. I'm just glad to see more and more open source databases getting play.
You're thinking in terms of Windows.
Under Unix and Unix-like systems, the vector of attack and what you do with it are usually two different things (though, in reality, modern Windows attacks are starting to look more like this, as attackers are starting to get a bit more methodical).
Intrusion detection "scanners" under Unix have taken two forms: the signature scanner and the proactive snapshot.
The former is what I'm refering to (and chkrootkit was a good, if primative example). The latter would inlcude tools like tripwire.
So, while I might not trust that we know all of the holes in, say, my Web server, I do have a pretty good idea of the sorts of tools that an attacker would use once they got in, and I can look for those.
Perfect? No, nothing in the security business is. It's still good to look for what you know.
Well, sort of. What he was trying to do was not to show that the systems were buggy and insecure, because everyone knew that to one degree or another. Sendmail, for example, had had a debug mode that allowed remote shell access for years, and everyone who had done significant sendmail admin knew it.
The problem was that it was never a priority for anyone to fix the problems because there was always something more important.
In a way, Morris' (sue me) bug was actually more of a feature, since it prevented any kind of reasonable and proportional response to the problem (everyone killed finger daemons, and dozens of mail and ftp server replacements sprang up).
Woefully, the only way to do that was to really anoy people to the point that they pressed criminal charges. I wonder what the Net would be like today if the Internet Worm had never happened. Maybe the same... but I doubt it. I think the response in 1991 to as wide-spread a worm would have been much more reactionary.
No, they got the memo, but this is one of those things that Disney does. They strangle the life out of the public domain by paying millions into congressional coffers to get laws passed that circumvent the Constitution, and then they turn around and give away 7 patents that never would have made them any money anyway for the good press (in the pyrotechnics industry, waiting out a patent's expiration is like waiting for a 100-mile-an-hour fastball to land in a catcher's glove... it's not an industry that leaps on new technology that fast, and for good reason).
Disney might have lost as much as half a million on this. The PR they get with the people they shafted on copyright just to protect Steamboat Willie is worth many, many times that.
Yes, absolutely. I've written these before, but they're of limited usefulness unless you can keep up with them, and I had too much work to do. We still use one of my old ones here at work, though as a "something is better than nothing" approach.
You need a many-pronged approach, and ways to deal with the fact that a compromised UNIX or UNIX-like system is one of the most fearsome anti-security tools there are. You need to be able to establish the state of system security WITHOUT knowing that it was secure when you started running.
Tripwire or the like will tell you if anything changes, but what you really want to know is "what state is this box in now, BEFORE I install any security software.
One such tool was chkrootkit. It was ok for a pile of shell scripts (and a few small C programs), but really needed to be cleaned up and turned into something that could be configured remotely by config updates and find some way to ensure that the system wasn't lying to it.
Virus scanners are for people who want to leave security holes open and then get information about the damage.
No, they're for the people who don't trust that every security hole is known of first by the white-hats.
Is your system secure? Are you sure? What abotu 5 minutes before you applied that last ssh update? Wouldn't a virus / trojan / root kit scanner give you one more level of assurance?
No, the movie hackers popularized a kind of hip-hopified version of phreaking that had little or nothing to do with the controversy that had surrounded the word hacker since the press got ahold of it in 1987 had continued to use it through the early 90s. Check out any report of a new DOS virus between 1990 and 1994. Also take a look at USENET archives for PROLIFIC discussion on the topic (you might even find a few of my posts ;-) from that time period.
You're thinking more of the phreaking crowd, I think, and I never heard of law enforcement using the term hacker... though it may have happened, it was not a wide-spread phenomenon until 1987.
And one note on Mr Morris, who I actually respect a fair amount for his successful bid to bring computer security into the spotlight. I don't advocate writing worms or viruses (the so-called Internet Worm actually classified as both, depending on which attack vector it was using at the time), but in the case of Morris' program, his intent was a reasonable one, even if his actions were not. For that, he deserves a nod: he took a big fall in order to get us to stop pretending holes didn't exist, and CERT was formed as a direct response to his actions.
;-)
I know, he also cost us a huge amount of lost productivity, but can you imagine the chaos that someone who DID have malicious intentions would have caused just five years later?! We took that hit to productivity because there was a problem, and though people like Bob Page (who wrote one of the better papers on the worm, and was in charge of sysadmin at my school at the time) were not amused, I do think they were better off in the long term.
Now, if Morris' code hadn't had that fatal bug that caused it to replicate out of control.... heh
If you're wondering when the word "hacker" came to mean something sinister, the answer is 1987.
As far as I can tell, it was the the US media that got that ball rolling when they were trying to investigate the 1987 "Internet Worm" released by Robert Morris Jr. The Worm caught the news media off-balance because 1) they did not know what this "internet" thing was 2) there was no terminology for this kind of crime.
Remember, this was before the World Wide Web (which some of you may not realize is a layer ON TOP OF the Internet, not the same thing), and the news only knew that the military had been connecting computers for research, but even that information was kind of sketchy if you weren't in the thick of it.
So, they asked around and got some experts on the phone and the word that kept coming up was "hacker". Well, the reporters in question didn't realize that a "hacker" was a fairly old term used by the MIT Tech Model Railroad club and later spread around the word as term for a "productive enthusiast". They just knew that Morris the Younger was a "hacker who broke into thousands of computers", and that was news!
We've all tried to stop that land-slide ever since because those of us who called ourselves hackers pre-87 are not too thrilled with the perversion of the word's meaning, but at this point it has become clear that it's simply going to be a matter of dialect. In certain circles the word has one meaning and in the rest of society (not just English-speaking society) it has a very different one... oh well.
Ah, I didn't realize you were talking about a different system. Most of them are reply-based. Since I read my home mail using mutt, "clicking" is a meaningless term, and I would have ignored your mail. Out of curiousity, does your "click here" blurb trip SpamAssassin's click-through tests? It's quite possible, you'll still get through, but raising the odds of your "I'll never see your mail unless you see this" message getting trashed by spam filters seems like a bad plan.
Oooh, cut-n-paste ranting about the movie. Next time pick something that doesn't start with flaming about politics, it kind of sets the reader up to expect that it's not actually about the movie (which 90% of this rant is not).
Apparently the spammers decided to go ahead and click on the little link, or they used a real person's return address, and when that person got they autoreply, they were too stupid to understand what was going on.
I respond to those all the time. I politely send a "please don't auto-reply to forged spam" message. It's not my fault that your anti-spam solution is stupid enough to re-define an email reply to mean that you should accept forged mail.
I am FAR more worried that the person I ran into at the bar last night will go home, and use hotmail, and send poorly formed HTML-only email, or mail via a relay that happens to have been obnoxiously picked up by SORBS or NJABL, or maybe they just used too many lines of ALL CAPS...will erroneously get picked up by my spam filter
Ah and that's exactly why you need a system that analyzes mail from many different directions. SpamAssassin is one such example, but there are other efforts that make the effort to step outside of a limited box of knee-jerk testing and weight the probabilities in a controled way.
Over the time that I've used SA it has become far more powerful than I could have imagined a mail filter being, and while it's still not perfect, it IS the reason that being ajs@ajs.com is not the electronic equivalent of a death sentence.
People who are frustrated by spam can use this system and it will work exactly as well as sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "neener, neener!"
I'm not going to pay to send you email. You might not care about that because you don't know me, and assume you'll never want to hear from me. But what about the person you ran into at the bar last night and gave your email address to? Will THEY pay to send you mail? What have you lost by ignoring them?
What about the job offer from a company that decides that adding a micropayment to your already substantial requested hiring bonus is just insulting?
You see, it's not the general case that's scary, it's that 10,000th message that you drop on the floor that turns out to be REALLY important. This is who learning filters are ultimately the right solution. They will continue to improve, and spam is ultimately doomed in the face of such technology.
Actually, the horses and spaceships thing got me too. I think Whedon needed to spend a bit more time introducing the idea that planet-bound folk are generally poorer and that not ever planet has the resources to build a megaopolis around every landing site.
However, in his defense, the commentary on the DVDs makes it quite clear that he never had the chance to sit down and think about that sort of thing becuase Fox was doing the same note-avalanche sorts of things to him that TNT did to JMS on Crusade (also a show that comes off as broken and disjoint without a reasonable transition point into the story because of station/studio interference).
If they're not virtual, then they're not virtual folders...
That's just an optimized filtering/filing system, which is fine as far as it goes, but like I say, I can open up my virtual spam folder which contains all of my spam for all of my IMAP accounts, select all, deselect one message and then press delete. That one message is still in its original server/folder, but the ones I delete are all GONE from their original servers/folders.
With a caching folder system like the one you referenced, you leave the one orginal message, but you can't delete the original spam from their source folders.
With a filtering folder (a filter that moves the mail into folders) you can delete all of the spam (assuming your filters work across servers), but you can't leave the one message in its original server/folder.
This is basically just an abstraction on top of a tagging/marking system like mutt has, but it's a very powerful abstraction. Try out VM inside Emacs or Evolution's virtual folders somtime. It's rather an addictive feature.
I usually have about 20 virtual folders, and they have a large intersection with each other. Sometimes I even have virtual folders derived from other virtual folders (e.g. all the mail from my boss, based on the all the mail to me virtual folder), and it makes my life much easier given that I get thousands of messages a day.
transgaming wanted free tech support from real developers
... well, kind of antithetical to the open source philosophy, not to mention bad form.
The first thing an open source advocate will say to a software company thinking of open sourcing their stuff (I've said it myself) is, "you get thousands of people not just complaining, but actually fixing the problems they care about."
But when a company gives out their source to said developers for free we call that "wanting free tech support"... well, yeah! You're exactly right. Did you have a point?
You continue, "while making normal users pay for the software."
Well let's define "normal user" here. I'm a normal user. I don't write code for Trans Gaming, but I can use WineX without buying it... hmmm, developers get it free. I get it free... the only people who don't get it free are the folks who don't know what source code is in the first place.
And further you continue, "They threatened to make the CVS accessible only to subscribers if there was "abuse"."
And that's a bad thing why?
Look, I was the first to say, back in the bad-old Qt days that a restrictive license on top of a source relese doesn't make you open source. Fine, that's said and done. But the bottom line is that it doesn't make you "evil" either. These folks have the right to do what they want and you have the right to not use their stuff if that bothers you. But, complaining about the fact that they won't let you ship CDs that set up your average end-user for download-and-compile is
If it really bothers you, go write something better. Wine is still out there, you can go contribute. But, I think WineX is great stuff, and I'm happy to use it and contribute where I can. Open source is ultimately a process, not a specific thing, and Trans Gaming is exploring ways that that process can work best for them... if it doesn't work for you, just ignore them.
Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.
;-)
I disagree with that a bit. There are things that mutt is faster at than Evolution (I use these two as examples because I use them both), but other things that Evolution is much faster at.
Most of the things that Evolution is faster at are a result of the graphical mode of interaction. For example, selecting the last 1/3rd of the messages in a folder can be eye-balled in Evolution, but you have to think about what the numbers involved are in mutt (assuming you have large folders to start with).
Mutt's pride and joy is the vi-like "motions". I have to say, there's just nothing like "~hautolearn=no;|sa-learn --spam", though as user-interfaces go it lacks something, it's certainly powerful.
Evolution's virtual mailboxes (a concept from VM, the Emacs-based mailer and to some extent MH as well) are similar in many ways, but have some strengths and weaknesses that don't map exactly onto mutt.
I find them both quite powerful, and often comparably fast. Evolution takes longer to start, but once it's running, there's nothing quite like being able to select all of your spam from 6 IMAP-based accounts on different servers as fast as you can click on the virtual folder for your spam and press control-a! You can problably guess what the next key usually is
start using more OSS-based applications / operating systems there will probably be a marked increase in viruses / worms that affect those platforms
While that's certainly true, it's also much easier to contain such beasts. There have been many "root kits" with various strategies of entry for Linux and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems, but they tend to spread slowly (even after accounting for the smaller installed base) and fizzle out faster.
Why?
Well, several reasons:
* Lack of homogeneity in Linuxes
* Security-to-taste
* A variety of install strategies
* Linux systems tend to be behind firewalls
* Opt-in/out service model in SysV init
Only after you get past that list do you get to:
* It's easier to supply security updates
* Security updates are released faster
Which are usually the cited reasons.
Microsoft's monoculture (abused word, though it is) simply cannot match most of the security advantages of open source, because most of them RELY on the diversity of Linux.
None the less, it's their call, and you don't get to release your code under a permissive license and then say, "those bastards are doing exactly what our license told them they could." It's not only bad form, but it sort of makes you look like you didn't read your own license.
As for CVS... I don't get to second-guess them on that either. Perhaps they're concerned about getting kicked off of SF.net because of the burden of gentoo-builds, perhaps they just don't want to worry about trying to support (or explain the lack of support to) users who have problems with fresh-out-of-CVS builds. It's their ball, they can do what they like with it. Besides one other company (CodeWeaver) who has made a larger set of contributions to Wine than TransGaming? Granted they forked, but the source available from them makes the technical advances in emulating Windows core APIs available to all emulation projects.
This is a good thing.
He's not a bad actor, but he WAS the WRONG actor. I'm glad that he and JMS both realized that, though the story arc for Sinclair would have been a doozy: it was his destiny to be the one to "die" at Za'ha'dum and then come back to kick the Shadows and Vorlons out and THEN be sent back with B4 to become Valen. I suspect, but am not sure, that it was then to be Ivanova who took over and brought the fight back to Earth and take over as President of the Alliance.... Too bad.
Your counter-argument comes down to this: given a good idea, Paramount will file the corners off and make it child-safe.
If that's going to be true for the next thing they do, then a "how to save the Star Trek franchise" treatment from JMS isn't going to do them any good no matter what the subject matter is. Hell, look at the borg! They made a human-looking alien force (the logistical bane of SF TV) into as alien and threatening a menace as you possibly could... and then they filed off all of the corners and made them into care bears.
If they can do THAT to the Borg, then we can shoot down ANY story/series idea on that basis. Instead, Paramount should say, "screw the fans and what would bother them or make them uncomfortable... what kinds of stories will make people sit up and take notice, and maybe... maybe even start THINKING?"
SFA is a fine place to start, but showing them sliming up with disinfectant goo while playing porno music isn't going to do it... you need STORIES. You need WRITERS with the authority to tell the stories without question. You need CHALLENGES to the audience.
This is why the first 3 seasons of B5, The West Wing and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer were such hits. They took something that everyone thought was dead material (B5/JMS was told that only Star Trek could be a successful SF series; WW/Sorkin was told that a dramatic show about politics was career suicide; BtVS/Whedon was told that a cute girl fighting vampires could never be made interesting) and told great stories therein. The lesson to be learned from those shows is that you need a strong writer backed up by mid-3rd season "good relief pitching by a fresh arm" (to quote The West Wing).
To sum up: it's not the setting or the age of the characters: it's the writing, stupid (that last is directed at the studios, not the poster to whom I am replying).