"You believe that one license will offer more "freedom" then the other."
No I don't and I'll think you not to put words in my mouth.
I believe no such thing. I select a license for specific reasons the way I would select a tool for carpentry. I don't believe that the tool will create joy, I just pick the tool that fits the job. I can hope that my finished product will generate some emotional response, but that's not a product of the tool, but of my craftsmanship.
The GPL, BSD license, MPL, etc. are well crafted tools, and that's as far as it goes. Only in a very hyperbolic sense could you say that I "believe" in them (sure, I believe that they exist, and that they will have meaning in our legal system the same way I "believe" that gcc exists and that it will compile my code), and if you're using the word in that way, then you should specifically call it out rather than letting the reader think that there's some real act of faith involved here.
"How does an "exchange" of photographs constitute a private "discussion" of any sort?"
The exchange of any information between two individuals, regardless of how that information might be interpreted should, IMHO, be treated the same way in electronic form as physical. If I rent an apartment to you, you could invite people over and show them dirty pictures. Does that mean that all apartments should be monitored? Why is it any different on-line?
"I can believe in privacy and free speech without allowing my home to be used as a secure forum and mail drop for the Ku Klux Klan."
You can believe in privacy and free speech, but I would suggest that you are truer to your values if you provide a secure means for ALL people to have private conversations. What you are saying boils down to this: privacy allows for secrets, and some secrets are bad. I get that, I really do. I hope that you understand that the converse is: having no secrets means no privacy and some secrets are good.
"Government and business are usually slow-moving and pragmatic. Those who wield power are generally aware of it's limits. Rather I fear more the idealist who would impose his absolutist values on everyone."
Government and business are slow moving? How fast did the DMCA get thrown into place? Look at the PATRIOT Act. McCarthy certainly didn't take his time putting together a "list". Hoover was able to get along with business and keep things moving along quite nicely, actually.
No, as our society becomes more and more dependent on on-line communications, I strongly believe that if we don't preserve the same level of privacy as we had in the physical word that our freedoms will be drastically eroded. The Net is a powerful tool, and by resorting to such emotional, hyperbolic arguments, you are allowing those who would misuse it to take several steps forward.
"I distrust so easy and careless a distinction between the "real and "online" worlds. In the end, there can be only one. You attack an enemy where he is active and vulnerable, you are not obliged to provide him with a safe haven anywhere."
Well, at least in the US you ARE required to provide a large number of safe havens. Attorney/client communications, information gained under duress or without a warrant, and any number of other means of gaining information are not allowed. Keep in mind that if you have a warrant, you can put a keyboard and monitor relay on someone's machine while they're at work, or you can place a miniature camera in their home to watch what they're doing. The reason you need to be able to evesdrop on on-line communications is so that you don't have to know who your target is. Otherwise, you already have the means at your disposal to gather evidence. On this matter, US law is quite clear. We consider it a severe violation of the rights of the individual to violate the privacy of large groups in order to learn of any criminal activity. If you know that a group is doing something criminal as a group (and not that some member might be doing something wrong independently), THEN you can go after the group. That's not what we're discussing though.
"The child might beg to differ, when images of her rape are distributed over the net."
And there you have a crime, one which can be delt with by obtaining a warrant and going after the individuals involved. Problem solved. If you don't know that that crime as occurred, and just want a way to be sure it hasnt... sorry, not possible.
What you're asking for is a way to be sure that bits that move over the Net aren't "bad bits", and without severe encroachments on the freedoms we hold dear, you cannot have that. I'm sorry, really. I'm very sorry that we can't just turn over the keys to our lives to the authorities and trust that the right thing will happen. Woefully, the people who take public office are just human beings, and some of them do things just as henious as what you're discussing, if not more so.
"The Adium developers must believe in the GPL and don't believe in the MPL."
You know, I'm a developer, and when I choose a license, it has never had anything at all to do with belief. Instead, it has to do with how I see one particular project and how I want it to be used. If I don't mind it being used as a code repository for proprietary software to pull from, I throw it under the BSD license or something like it. If I want people who use it to always have the freedom that source code allows, then I put it under the GPL or LGPL.
If you try to divide the world up into "us" and "them", you're always going end up foolishly rooting for something that just isn't worth the effort. Software licenses are probably the best example, though I did once hear a heated debate over engine parts manufacturers based on how much the mechanics in question thought the companies CARED about them. Heh.
"I hear all the posters and academics argue about "free speech means tolerating speech you don't like"... but free speech != exploitation of the innocent. Adult porn is one thing... you can at least make the argument that they're consenting adults just making a living... child porn is simply vile... it's sexual exploitation of someone too weak to fight, and mentally unable to understand and/or consent."
The idea behind systems like this is that what people exchange electronically should be very much like what they discuss in private. By partaking in such a system you are helping to ensure that the concept of online privacy isn't just the types of privacy that the combination of business and government decide to leave you with.
Will some of that "discussion" be of a nature that would shock or disgust you? Sure, it will. That, however, is none of your business. People who engage in child abuse of any sort should be sought out and punished to the full extent of the law. I have no qualms about this, but you attack that problem in the real world, not on-line. On-line communication is NOT child abuse; it's just communication. It would be nice from a law-enforcement perspective if we could monitor all such speach for the most heinous of crimes without damaging our freedom in the process, but we cannot.
By opening some of your resources to arbitrary, unmonitored use, you are providing yourself and others with a measure of privacy. This is a good thing.
Yes, as I mention in the docs (though I don't get into specifics, so you might not have realized that this is what I was saying), a program also called mkpasswd that comes with the "expect" package does this. My mkpasswd pre-dates the other, but since mine wasn't out there to be seen at the time, the expect folks didn't realize they were conflicting with my name. Sigh.
With my program you could easily just filter the results using grep. Something like:
Keep in mind, of course, that by doing this you severely limit the search space for passwords, so there is a trade off in terms of security. Also, passwords are sometimes just as easy (if not easier) to type if that have some repetition in terms of side of keyboard, but alternate overall. This would require a more complex pattern, but would limit the password space less, which is good.
Ah, so when we say "growth", we mean in terms of install base, not features/quality. Fine, I would agree then, though I wouldn't much care. After all, since competition (even poor competition) is likely to promote development in areas that might otherwise lay dormant, I consider it a worth while trade-off.
I would argue that the movies being released today are at least as good as the movies being released at just about any period in movie-making history. There are some stunning examples of really good movie-making right along side with mountains of utter self-involved tripe. This is as it has always been. What's a bit different now is that the industry has managed to create two reasonably self-contained development tracks. One is for the big-budget media-fests and one is for the work that is to be judged on merit, rather than number of toy tie-ins.
We call these "studio" and "independent" films, but that distinction is a fiction. In reality there are simply two modes of marketing a film. One involves a formulaic involvement from the studio from day one, and has a much higher success rate at the box office. The other involves far more risk, but the studios offload that risk to the film-makers and "buy in" at a stage where the quality of the product has been established.
This is done because it has worked so well in the cable television market, where some of the best shows from the fiction and non-fiction market have been created this way (pretty much all of PBS, Discovery, SciFi, etc. are done this way).
Personally, I think this is a good thing. It gives us more of what we want on a visceral level (blood, boobs and beasts) and at the same time a natural selection process that highlights and rewards good film-makers who take risks.
Spammers don't spam abuse and postmaster addresses mostly because they're far less likely to go to users who are likely marks. If that starts to change....
PS: JavaBear... I'm shocked that someone with such an old account is someone I've never heard of before. Drop me a line sometime.
I don't think this was off-topic. The primary topic was gmail spam, but the posting also provided a link to a password generator. I provided a link to a different password generator, for those who might be interested. YMMV, but for what it's worth both programs could be used to generate gmail usernames. Mine even gives you more flexibility in generating usernames of a format that you want... if you want to use it for that, I recommend:
As for "advertising for your own software," I don't quite see why it shoudl be a problem that people mention their open source projects on Slashdot of all places. Would you have been upset if I had posted the same thing, but wasn't the author? Seems strange to me.
"and still somehow manage to get modded way up"... perhaps others actually found the information useful? Just a guess.
Well, if you're going to cut-and-paste my own documentation like that, you might as well take the comments from the source, which provide more detail:
# There are many statistical problems with this program, including: # # W3-4 chooses between 3 and 4 letter words 50/50, not based on # the number of 3 and 4 letter words available. # # S, T and C syntax needs to be overhauled to allow arbitrary percentages. #
So let me see if I get this right. By way of analogy, if you got a car and then added your favorite bits to the engine, went back to the dealer and said, "it's not working," then you would expect the dealer to support your modifications?
What's more (and this is the part that really breaks my brain), you don't consider the company saying that the car, as sold, is supported to be a valid statement?
Personally, when I buy an OS (or a car), I want it to be configured well, and if it's not, I'll feed back to the comapny and tell them where it's not. I then install the updates/fixes provided. At home, I download source, twiddle with the various bits that interest me and have fun, but if I'm supporting hundreds or thousands of boxes, the last thing I'm looking to do is make the support organization's job harder when it comes to helping me do MY job!
This is all moot, however. You are replying to a topic that specifically refers to one magazine doing a test, and requiring that support be available in terms of initial setup. No user modifications to the Spam Assassin rule base would have been required, and the test could have taken place with standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux support (which Red Hat's PR folks might even offer for free for evaluations like this, I don't know).
Well of course. Red Hat supports SpamAssassin, not your code base, which uses SpamAssassin. Why would this be shocking? Do you have any concept how much money they (or anyone for that matter) would have to charge to reasonably make money from supporting any random thing that anyone wanted to do with the over 700 packages that make up a distribution? You would essentially be hiring a Red Hat employee.
The key to good password generation is allowing the user to describe how it's to be done. This increases the ability to memorize passwords and makes it harder for an attacker to guess.
To that end, I have created a sort of reverse regular expression syntax where you describe the password to the program using general patterns. Try it out.
"I said you were being a dick because you interpreted my assertion that "they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable" to mean that I'm too stupid to know..."
Ok, we can stop right there. Did I say "stupid" at any point in anything I said? You can pick my points apart all you like, but please don't add to them without making it clear that they are YOUR comments. I doubt that you're stupid at all. I just think you're someone who doesn't know the current state of Gnutella usage very well (hardly the mark of stupidity), and you took a shot at it on Slashdot (more haste and poor judgement than stupidity).
Like I said in my last post, if you want to interpret this as some kind of personal attack, then have at it. That's not how it was intended, and I've yet to see anything specific that you've said to counter my original point.
"what most people want is to type in what they're looking for and get it"
I find that too difficult. I prefer to click on a link. This works very well with a magnet-URI-capable web client. There are also sites that review Gnutella-based content and others that index it. Harken back to the dawn of the Web and you'll see many parallels.
As for DC++, it's a nice effort, but is currently as limited as Gnutella used to be when it was first introduced, lacking the features of BitTorrent or modern Gnutella in terms of chunking/swarming and UDP-notification. These features make downloads far, far faster and more reliable for large, popular content. See DC++'s FAQ for more information. For small things, like songs or images, you probably don't care, but when you start downloading whole operating system images, you're going to want more than one source per target active at a time. A LOT more.
I'm sure they'll add this functionality to their network, or perhaps they'll decide to merge their protocol with Gnutella and take advantage of thousands upon thousands of download sources already using it. Either way, I'm glad people are thinking about these problems rather than just sounding off like you and me;-)
"Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it"
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is specifically geared to this market (to the exclusion of smaller business customers, who are generally priced out of Red Hat's support pricing), and ships with SA as a supported piece of the OS.
Those are times for Windows. I believe that OOo is using some library emulation for their port to Linux, so I would not be surprised to see longer (or maybe even shorter, though I doubt it) startup times under Linux.
If anyone has run the new code and cares to comment....
They say, "Although a few well-meaning souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors."
I can only wonder what it was that they asked and who they asked. There are several companies that provide products based on SA, and the developers are very responsive.
I'll have to look in more depth later and see if any of the products they reviewed were SA-based.
Still, a review that does not cover common open source implementations such as DSPAM and SA is not a review that I would put much stake in.
Having not resorted to name-calling, and also having specifically stuck to only the facts involved, I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're getting at.
"the point is that if it's not easy for someone to figure out how to find stuff"
That's as may be, and that might make Gnutella less useful to you than something that's centrallized, but you made one very specific assertion: "Gnutella seems pretty safe, but they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable"
I in turn asserted, "do not assume that because you can't figure out how to find something that it's automatically useless to all users". This is a simple reality. I could say that the Web is useless because there's so many porn and squatter sites (the combination of which far outweigh the useful content), but those of us who know how to use the Web find the useful bits anyway. The same is true for Gnutella. It's a popular way for everyone to share anything they want, so of course 99.99% of it is crap. Magnet URIs, search sites, content indexes, client-side search filtering and various other technologies make Gnutella VERY usable, and far and away better than any other decentralized technology I've seen.
This is not a personal attack, and if you insist on taking it that way... well, have fun I guess.
Site's a bit slow right now. Does anyone know if the new release is trimmed down at all? Initial startup times for me can range from 10 to 30 seconds, and perhaps I'm just spoiled, but even celestia (a program that plots the locations of millions of stars, galaxies and other celestial bodies and displays them using OpenGL) starts up faster than that!
I like the feature-set of OOo, but I keep using Gnumeric and AbiWord for performance reasons.:-(
Gnutella is far from useless. Using magnet links, I share a great deal of data including photography and open source software. Please, do not assume that because you can't figure out how to find something that it's automatically useless to all users.
Face it, the GNU toolchain will never be as secure as OpenBSD
That's a very nice bit of speculation / opinion. It, however, has nothing to do with my post in any way whatsoever.
Please, folks, if you're BSD bigots or Linux bigots or Windows bigots or whatever, go find a post that says, "<your favorite tool/os/language> sucks," and reply with your rant. Meanwhile, take your non-sequitors and file them.
You wrote a BSD vs GPL flame in response to a post which mentioned neither. That is pretty much exactly my definition of a BSD vs. GPL fanatic.
Licenses are fascinating bits of legal hackery, but when it comes to software, one should never be so distracted by such toys that one forgets that the software and the community built around that software is the real value.
Slashdot Mirror
"You believe that one license will offer more "freedom" then the other."
No I don't and I'll think you not to put words in my mouth.
I believe no such thing. I select a license for specific reasons the way I would select a tool for carpentry. I don't believe that the tool will create joy, I just pick the tool that fits the job. I can hope that my finished product will generate some emotional response, but that's not a product of the tool, but of my craftsmanship.
The GPL, BSD license, MPL, etc. are well crafted tools, and that's as far as it goes. Only in a very hyperbolic sense could you say that I "believe" in them (sure, I believe that they exist, and that they will have meaning in our legal system the same way I "believe" that gcc exists and that it will compile my code), and if you're using the word in that way, then you should specifically call it out rather than letting the reader think that there's some real act of faith involved here.
"How does an "exchange" of photographs constitute a private "discussion" of any sort?"
The exchange of any information between two individuals, regardless of how that information might be interpreted should, IMHO, be treated the same way in electronic form as physical. If I rent an apartment to you, you could invite people over and show them dirty pictures. Does that mean that all apartments should be monitored? Why is it any different on-line?
"I can believe in privacy and free speech without allowing my home to be used as a secure forum and mail drop for the Ku Klux Klan."
You can believe in privacy and free speech, but I would suggest that you are truer to your values if you provide a secure means for ALL people to have private conversations. What you are saying boils down to this: privacy allows for secrets, and some secrets are bad. I get that, I really do. I hope that you understand that the converse is: having no secrets means no privacy and some secrets are good.
"Government and business are usually slow-moving and pragmatic. Those who wield power are generally aware of it's limits. Rather I fear more the idealist who would impose his absolutist values on everyone."
Government and business are slow moving? How fast did the DMCA get thrown into place? Look at the PATRIOT Act. McCarthy certainly didn't take his time putting together a "list". Hoover was able to get along with business and keep things moving along quite nicely, actually.
No, as our society becomes more and more dependent on on-line communications, I strongly believe that if we don't preserve the same level of privacy as we had in the physical word that our freedoms will be drastically eroded. The Net is a powerful tool, and by resorting to such emotional, hyperbolic arguments, you are allowing those who would misuse it to take several steps forward.
"I distrust so easy and careless a distinction between the "real and "online" worlds. In the end, there can be only one. You attack an enemy where he is active and vulnerable, you are not obliged to provide him with a safe haven anywhere."
Well, at least in the US you ARE required to provide a large number of safe havens. Attorney/client communications, information gained under duress or without a warrant, and any number of other means of gaining information are not allowed. Keep in mind that if you have a warrant, you can put a keyboard and monitor relay on someone's machine while they're at work, or you can place a miniature camera in their home to watch what they're doing. The reason you need to be able to evesdrop on on-line communications is so that you don't have to know who your target is. Otherwise, you already have the means at your disposal to gather evidence. On this matter, US law is quite clear. We consider it a severe violation of the rights of the individual to violate the privacy of large groups in order to learn of any criminal activity. If you know that a group is doing something criminal as a group (and not that some member might be doing something wrong independently), THEN you can go after the group. That's not what we're discussing though.
"The child might beg to differ, when images of her rape are distributed over the net."
And there you have a crime, one which can be delt with by obtaining a warrant and going after the individuals involved. Problem solved. If you don't know that that crime as occurred, and just want a way to be sure it hasnt... sorry, not possible.
What you're asking for is a way to be sure that bits that move over the Net aren't "bad bits", and without severe encroachments on the freedoms we hold dear, you cannot have that. I'm sorry, really. I'm very sorry that we can't just turn over the keys to our lives to the authorities and trust that the right thing will happen. Woefully, the people who take public office are just human beings, and some of them do things just as henious as what you're discussing, if not more so.
"The Adium developers must believe in the GPL and don't believe in the MPL."
You know, I'm a developer, and when I choose a license, it has never had anything at all to do with belief. Instead, it has to do with how I see one particular project and how I want it to be used. If I don't mind it being used as a code repository for proprietary software to pull from, I throw it under the BSD license or something like it. If I want people who use it to always have the freedom that source code allows, then I put it under the GPL or LGPL.
If you try to divide the world up into "us" and "them", you're always going end up foolishly rooting for something that just isn't worth the effort. Software licenses are probably the best example, though I did once hear a heated debate over engine parts manufacturers based on how much the mechanics in question thought the companies CARED about them. Heh.
"I hear all the posters and academics argue about "free speech means tolerating speech you don't like"... but free speech != exploitation of the innocent. Adult porn is one thing... you can at least make the argument that they're consenting adults just making a living... child porn is simply vile... it's sexual exploitation of someone too weak to fight, and mentally unable to understand and/or consent."
The idea behind systems like this is that what people exchange electronically should be very much like what they discuss in private. By partaking in such a system you are helping to ensure that the concept of online privacy isn't just the types of privacy that the combination of business and government decide to leave you with.
Will some of that "discussion" be of a nature that would shock or disgust you? Sure, it will. That, however, is none of your business. People who engage in child abuse of any sort should be sought out and punished to the full extent of the law. I have no qualms about this, but you attack that problem in the real world, not on-line. On-line communication is NOT child abuse; it's just communication. It would be nice from a law-enforcement perspective if we could monitor all such speach for the most heinous of crimes without damaging our freedom in the process, but we cannot.
By opening some of your resources to arbitrary, unmonitored use, you are providing yourself and others with a measure of privacy. This is a good thing.
With my program you could easily just filter the results using grep. Something like:for example, I just got, "biendnape7" doing that.
Keep in mind, of course, that by doing this you severely limit the search space for passwords, so there is a trade off in terms of security. Also, passwords are sometimes just as easy (if not easier) to type if that have some repetition in terms of side of keyboard, but alternate overall. This would require a more complex pattern, but would limit the password space less, which is good.
Ah, so when we say "growth", we mean in terms of install base, not features/quality. Fine, I would agree then, though I wouldn't much care. After all, since competition (even poor competition) is likely to promote development in areas that might otherwise lay dormant, I consider it a worth while trade-off.
With the crap that coming out the theatres
I would argue that the movies being released today are at least as good as the movies being released at just about any period in movie-making history. There are some stunning examples of really good movie-making right along side with mountains of utter self-involved tripe. This is as it has always been. What's a bit different now is that the industry has managed to create two reasonably self-contained development tracks. One is for the big-budget media-fests and one is for the work that is to be judged on merit, rather than number of toy tie-ins.
We call these "studio" and "independent" films, but that distinction is a fiction. In reality there are simply two modes of marketing a film. One involves a formulaic involvement from the studio from day one, and has a much higher success rate at the box office. The other involves far more risk, but the studios offload that risk to the film-makers and "buy in" at a stage where the quality of the product has been established.
This is done because it has worked so well in the cable television market, where some of the best shows from the fiction and non-fiction market have been created this way (pretty much all of PBS, Discovery, SciFi, etc. are done this way).
Personally, I think this is a good thing. It gives us more of what we want on a visceral level (blood, boobs and beasts) and at the same time a natural selection process that highlights and rewards good film-makers who take risks.
How does slowing growth come out of competition?
Yeah, I think we've crossed paths once or twice in the past (too lazy to go figure out where ;-).
Looks like JavaBear just posts very rarely.
Spammers don't spam abuse and postmaster addresses mostly because they're far less likely to go to users who are likely marks. If that starts to change....
PS: JavaBear... I'm shocked that someone with such an old account is someone I've never heard of before. Drop me a line sometime.
So let me see if I get this right. By way of analogy, if you got a car and then added your favorite bits to the engine, went back to the dealer and said, "it's not working," then you would expect the dealer to support your modifications?
What's more (and this is the part that really breaks my brain), you don't consider the company saying that the car, as sold, is supported to be a valid statement?
Personally, when I buy an OS (or a car), I want it to be configured well, and if it's not, I'll feed back to the comapny and tell them where it's not. I then install the updates/fixes provided. At home, I download source, twiddle with the various bits that interest me and have fun, but if I'm supporting hundreds or thousands of boxes, the last thing I'm looking to do is make the support organization's job harder when it comes to helping me do MY job!
This is all moot, however. You are replying to a topic that specifically refers to one magazine doing a test, and requiring that support be available in terms of initial setup. No user modifications to the Spam Assassin rule base would have been required, and the test could have taken place with standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux support (which Red Hat's PR folks might even offer for free for evaluations like this, I don't know).
Well of course. Red Hat supports SpamAssassin, not your code base, which uses SpamAssassin. Why would this be shocking? Do you have any concept how much money they (or anyone for that matter) would have to charge to reasonably make money from supporting any random thing that anyone wanted to do with the over 700 packages that make up a distribution? You would essentially be hiring a Red Hat employee.
For an account name, apg is fine. For passwords, I've created a far more flexible system which I distribute with documentation describing password generation from my site.
The key to good password generation is allowing the user to describe how it's to be done. This increases the ability to memorize passwords and makes it harder for an attacker to guess.
To that end, I have created a sort of reverse regular expression syntax where you describe the password to the program using general patterns. Try it out.
"I said you were being a dick because you interpreted my assertion that "they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable" to mean that I'm too stupid to know..."
;-)
Ok, we can stop right there. Did I say "stupid" at any point in anything I said? You can pick my points apart all you like, but please don't add to them without making it clear that they are YOUR comments. I doubt that you're stupid at all. I just think you're someone who doesn't know the current state of Gnutella usage very well (hardly the mark of stupidity), and you took a shot at it on Slashdot (more haste and poor judgement than stupidity).
Like I said in my last post, if you want to interpret this as some kind of personal attack, then have at it. That's not how it was intended, and I've yet to see anything specific that you've said to counter my original point.
"what most people want is to type in what they're looking for and get it"
I find that too difficult. I prefer to click on a link. This works very well with a magnet-URI-capable web client. There are also sites that review Gnutella-based content and others that index it. Harken back to the dawn of the Web and you'll see many parallels.
As for DC++, it's a nice effort, but is currently as limited as Gnutella used to be when it was first introduced, lacking the features of BitTorrent or modern Gnutella in terms of chunking/swarming and UDP-notification. These features make downloads far, far faster and more reliable for large, popular content. See DC++'s FAQ for more information. For small things, like songs or images, you probably don't care, but when you start downloading whole operating system images, you're going to want more than one source per target active at a time. A LOT more.
I'm sure they'll add this functionality to their network, or perhaps they'll decide to merge their protocol with Gnutella and take advantage of thousands upon thousands of download sources already using it. Either way, I'm glad people are thinking about these problems rather than just sounding off like you and me
"Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it"
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is specifically geared to this market (to the exclusion of smaller business customers, who are generally priced out of Red Hat's support pricing), and ships with SA as a supported piece of the OS.
Next concern?
Those are times for Windows. I believe that OOo is using some library emulation for their port to Linux, so I would not be surprised to see longer (or maybe even shorter, though I doubt it) startup times under Linux.
If anyone has run the new code and cares to comment....
They say, "Although a few well-meaning souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors."
I can only wonder what it was that they asked and who they asked. There are several companies that provide products based on SA, and the developers are very responsive.
I'll have to look in more depth later and see if any of the products they reviewed were SA-based.
Still, a review that does not cover common open source implementations such as DSPAM and SA is not a review that I would put much stake in.
"no need to be a dick"
Having not resorted to name-calling, and also having specifically stuck to only the facts involved, I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're getting at.
"the point is that if it's not easy for someone to figure out how to find stuff"
That's as may be, and that might make Gnutella less useful to you than something that's centrallized, but you made one very specific assertion: "Gnutella seems pretty safe, but they've managed to pollute the network enough to make it almost unusable"
I in turn asserted, "do not assume that because you can't figure out how to find something that it's automatically useless to all users". This is a simple reality. I could say that the Web is useless because there's so many porn and squatter sites (the combination of which far outweigh the useful content), but those of us who know how to use the Web find the useful bits anyway. The same is true for Gnutella. It's a popular way for everyone to share anything they want, so of course 99.99% of it is crap. Magnet URIs, search sites, content indexes, client-side search filtering and various other technologies make Gnutella VERY usable, and far and away better than any other decentralized technology I've seen.
This is not a personal attack, and if you insist on taking it that way... well, have fun I guess.
Site's a bit slow right now. Does anyone know if the new release is trimmed down at all? Initial startup times for me can range from 10 to 30 seconds, and perhaps I'm just spoiled, but even celestia (a program that plots the locations of millions of stars, galaxies and other celestial bodies and displays them using OpenGL) starts up faster than that!
:-(
I like the feature-set of OOo, but I keep using Gnumeric and AbiWord for performance reasons.
Gnutella is far from useless. Using magnet links, I share a great deal of data including photography and open source software. Please, do not assume that because you can't figure out how to find something that it's automatically useless to all users.
you posted the exact same shit the last time
I did? Could you point to the previous post, please? I don't recall having posted to a previous Slashdot story about CVS.
Face it, the GNU toolchain will never be as secure as OpenBSD
That's a very nice bit of speculation / opinion. It, however, has nothing to do with my post in any way whatsoever.
Please, folks, if you're BSD bigots or Linux bigots or Windows bigots or whatever, go find a post that says, "<your favorite tool/os/language> sucks," and reply with your rant. Meanwhile, take your non-sequitors and file them.
"I am not a fanatic about BSD vs. GPL"
You wrote a BSD vs GPL flame in response to a post which mentioned neither. That is pretty much exactly my definition of a BSD vs. GPL fanatic.
Licenses are fascinating bits of legal hackery, but when it comes to software, one should never be so distracted by such toys that one forgets that the software and the community built around that software is the real value.