Most of the major MTA's will do this nowadays, but with a + rather than a -. I know sendmail does this, and am pretty sure about postfix and exim as well.
Other than the gloomy predictions of doom, I initially shared the same attitude towards the Mozilla project. Creating a "platform" seemed a little misconceived, almost hubristic, and I was very unconvinced that it is the right way to go. After all, the Unix mindset is one of small, flexible tools, and Mozilla is definitely not "small".
After having investigated the project a little more, I have to say that I still agree with my initial reaction. The Mozilla project is trying to do too much. Yeah, most of it is "cool shit" (actually, all of it that I've seen is very cool), but they seem to have lost sight of the fact that, ultimately, what they need to produce is a functional, stable, usable browser. The platform and all that goes along with it are nice, and arguably necessary, but what is wrong with releasing them as version 2.0?
I wonder why they decided to bring in another FBI agent, rather than not just "promote" the Lone Gunmen? Wasn't there talk in the past about a possible Lone Gunmen spin-off? Obviously, there's interest from the fans
The proliferation of the jobs market today with MCSEs so clueless that they shouldn't be put in charge of a pocket calculator. has made the entire certification process a joke.
No, the proliferation of clueless MCSE's make the MCSE useless. Many certification programs still require a lot of thought and training; the Cisco programs come immediately to mind.
I got a few MCPs in a previous life, and I can assure you that the problem is not with the testors, but with the tests themselves. The assumptions that are made are ridiculous and show a flagrant disregard for reality. When I took it, the Win95 test was about 50% to 60% focused on upgrading Windows 3.1 and DOS compatibility. The Windows NT test was so oriented on their interfaces that they glazed over the functionality. Who cares if you know what a subnet mask is, as long as you know where to click to set it?
I think the rush to blame certifications themselves is a little misguided. This is an example of certain certifications clouding everyone's mind about all certifications. (This is also, by the way, why people expect that computers crash regularly... because most of them (i.e., Windows boxen) do.)
Nowadays anyone with enough money (or an employer with enough money), can obtain a certification.
What I've found is these individuals make themselves stand out soon enough. How does that John Andrew Holmes quote go? If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance. The owners of these paper certifications, if they are serious about their chose (and fabricated!) career, they will overcome their initial limitations and learn something. If they don't, or if they're not serious about their career, they'll end up in the same place for years and years, or until they get fired.
The main computer lab in the Science Center is, if I remeber correctly, about 40% Ultrix on DEC Alphas, 40% Macs, and only about 10% or so PC's (as opposed to the public access terminals in question, in the lobby). I wonder what Intel though about that?
The Imac kiosks in the main lobby (I remeber them as being mainly 7xxx's and 8xxx's, though, but it's been about 6 months since I was there) are basically Netscape and telnet boxes, locked down in such a way as to be useless as Macs, i.e., they are effectively dumb terminals, useful only for anonymous web surfing and telnetting to other systems (Harvard's main systems are Solaris and Ultrix).
All things considered, Intel-based systems seem to be in the minority in the Science Center.
While the article doesn't say it, the librarian's information about the problems with filters came, in no small part, from SlashDot discussions
This is interesting, but not really surprising. Slashdot, as a community (without counting the trolls), makes up a significant part of the technical population. Slashdot readers, on the whole, tend to be well educated, informed, and concerned. When a story gets over 500 comments, with 200+ moderated to 2 or higher, chances are pretty good that there is going to be some pretty insightful (legitimately insightful, not "+1 Insightful") stuff in there. There are few ways that are better to get public opinion than a peer-reviewed, peer-moderated community forum.
For officials to take the time to read a public forum, like Slashdot, not only shows some enlightenment on the part of that official, but also shows that democracy does work -- public forums such as slashdot, Kuro5hin, and others, are the vox populi, even ones that are not "officially" sanctioned.
Re:Regexps and... what DOES ++@_[0]; do?
on
The Perl Black Book
·
· Score: 4
@array[0] is a one-element hash slice ($array[0] is the first member of @array), and the pre-increment only does the obvious thing because it is a one-element slice. This is bad programming style, and horribly confusing, not idiomatic Perl. Idiomatic Perl is about saving typing and running time by using shortcuts, and this does neither (array lookups are slower than scalar lookups, as well as the same number of characters to type). Without the context for this statement, however, who knows what it's author meant.
By the way, ++@_[0,1] (a two-element hash slice) increments only $_[1] (the last value).
This is ridiculous. If I was on that list, I would most certainly not create a new account. I would never use Napster again. I would also never buy another Metallica record again (not that I have in years).
If you were one of the people whose account was cancelled, do yourself a favor: Don't use Napster. They obviously don't want you as a user. Here's some more advice: Don't buy anything by Metallica. They obviously don't want you as a fan. Go buy some Limp Bizkit, even if you don't like them; they will never try to dictate what you can do with something you paid money for. Go buy some Grateful Dead, even if you don't like them, for the same reason.
Do you know how to program? Help with the OpenNap project. If you can't program, support them any way you can: Download it and run an opennap server.
[Perl] doesn't scale very well though, even with mod_perl.
This is false. Apache with mod_perl runs at the same speed as Apache -- the combined speed of your computer, network connection, disk, etc. Yes, you can write slow mod_perl stuff (if you use it as glorified CGI), but mod_perl itself has no such limitations.
mod_perl scales very well -- Boston.com serves a few million pages a day using Apache/mod_perl. It's all about how you write your Perl.
But, I will give you this much -- if you run CGI scripts under mod_perl, they do not run nearly as fast as they would if you wrote mod_perl handlers, though they still run much faster than CGI.
How can you dislike the JSP way of doing things, but like PHP? They use an identical model. PHP suffers from many of the same problems as CGI (logic and HTML combined in the same place, etc), but the speed issue is definitely not one of them. However, PHP, even well-written PHP. will never be as fast as a well-written mod_perl handler, for the simple reason that mod_perl handlers are compiled once and live in memory for the life of the Apache server (parent) process. There is no file to read every time it gets called. Plus, PHP (and CGI, and JSP, and servlets) have the limitation that they can only produce output. You want to modify how the URI gets translated into a filename? You can't do that in PHP. You want to customize the authentication process? Nope, you can't do that in JSP. You want to modify the environment for all the other handlers? Not is ASP, you can't. For anything other that generating output, you have to use either C or mod_perl. And the beauty of the whole thing is -- yup, you guessed it, it runs at memory speeds -- no filesystem accesses (unless you write them in specifically), no scripts to stat, no logic/HTML combination to parse.
The problem with the FM is that not only does it not tell you how to handle interactions between RPM installs and source installs, there is no way to handle it. If I install Perl from source, every other RPM I install complains that the Perl dependency fails, and I have to install with --nodeps. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Yup, it does.
Most software doesn't come in RPM format, and when it does, it often comes without the required parameters or options. What then?
There was some previous discussion on a similar topic a while back (The Perfect Distribution), where many of us had the same lament. The general concensus seemed to be a minimal Slackware.
My advice, if you don't want package managers, would be to avoid RedHat like the plague. Avoid Debian. Use Slackware, or use the Linux From Scratch resources to make your own distribution. This route is guaranteed to make you happy (in the long run, at least), but is significantly more difficult than just installing an "established" distribution.
He has a lot of good points, but also misses much
on
Motif's Not Dead
·
· Score: 2
After the first few paragraphs, I assumed the author was just spouting off about Qt and GTK, but upon further reading, I realized that he had a lot of valid points. He seems to be suffering from the Microsoft-esque "If it's not commercial who's going to support it?" line of (faulty) reasoning, but many of the points he raises are significant, and should be heeded by GTK and Qt developers.
Most of what he says comes down to the relative levels of maturity of the toolkits. Of course Motif is going to be more full featured; it's been around for a dozen or so years. I think I'd be pertty disappointed if it wasn't more full featured than 2-year-old GTK.
Lack of support for the Xt component model is key, and is probably the strongest statement of the interview. His emphasis on "point [your] favorite GUI builder at them and they load just like that" is a little misguided, but the point remains: using widgets from another toolkit is impossible. Admit it -- it would be cool to embed a GTK widget in a Qt application. It would also ensure the freedom of choice that Linux users so strongly argue for.
I wish the interviewer had asked him why the Motif developers version costs so $!@#!$ much, and if they were worried about the Free nature of Qt and GTK. I would not be surprised if the timing of this book had something to do with the fact that more and more apps are getting written with Qt and GTK, and that Motif has a bad wrap in the Free Software community, a community whose opinions are getting more and more significant.
Thank goodness for Tipper Gore and the PMRC! They saved me from getting sued! If I hadn't been shown the evils of the Devil's Music (aka "Rock and Roll") I'd be in court right now!
As cynical as this sounds, this article was probably written specifically to get our (collective) goat. Pretty soon the site is going to be slashdotted, and most of you are going to read the Talk Backs and probably enter some of your own. Every single one of these page views is 2 banner ads they push out there! This is all about ad revenue, folks! They have to know that this article is flamebait -- the author may work for PC Week, but ZDNet is not stupid -- but flamebait draws flames, and each flame is half a dozen banner ads.
Whatever you do, view these pages with images off. Don't give them the satisfaction of the ad revenue.
Didn't everyone read the section headline? Rumors and Comment. Obviously this is uninformed drivel, but that's OK -- it's just ZDNet giving the uninformed their say.
He works for PC Week -- of course he's going to be afraid of the Free Software movement, because it promises to set PC's free. PC Week's bread and butter is M$ crap -- they need Microsoft so they can continue to publish their "1001 Ways To Reboot Your Computer" articles.
How useless! Well intentioned, but useless. Currently spammers (sorry, "Senders of UCE") get around these laws by sending the mail from a server in another country. I cannot imagine that a law in Sweden will apply to a spammer in, say, China, whether that law is a modification of an EU law or not. Well intentioned, but destined to fail, in the same way that all of these laws fail. You cannot apply a traditional approach to solving these non-traditional problems.
That said, how can I get on their no-spam list? Every little bit helps (not that I'm getting a lot of mail from Dave.Rhodes@MAKE.MONEY.FAST.se, but it can't hurt.)
Even though the explot was dubbed "realdie.exe", which implies the vulnerability was found on a windows server, Real is offering patches for all versions of their server line. Interesting. I guess it is true that you can write cross-platform bad code.
Is anyone else scared that they named the executable "rmserver"? Gotta make sure you don't put a space between the "m" and the "s", or bad things might happen. I can see it now:
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the major MTA's will do this nowadays, but with a + rather than a -. I know sendmail does this, and am pretty sure about postfix and exim as well.
Look at this reference, for example.
Wasn't this the point of the Real Names system? From their about page:
Take a look at djbdns, from the guy who wrote qmail. It's very different than BIND, but has the same security guarantee as qmail.
Someone ported make to run on Legos...
Other than the gloomy predictions of doom, I initially shared the same attitude towards the Mozilla project. Creating a "platform" seemed a little misconceived, almost hubristic, and I was very unconvinced that it is the right way to go. After all, the Unix mindset is one of small, flexible tools, and Mozilla is definitely not "small".
After having investigated the project a little more, I have to say that I still agree with my initial reaction. The Mozilla project is trying to do too much. Yeah, most of it is "cool shit" (actually, all of it that I've seen is very cool), but they seem to have lost sight of the fact that, ultimately, what they need to produce is a functional, stable, usable browser. The platform and all that goes along with it are nice, and arguably necessary, but what is wrong with releasing them as version 2.0?
I wonder why they decided to bring in another FBI agent, rather than not just "promote" the Lone Gunmen? Wasn't there talk in the past about a possible Lone Gunmen spin-off? Obviously, there's interest from the fans
No, the proliferation of clueless MCSE's make the MCSE useless. Many certification programs still require a lot of thought and training; the Cisco programs come immediately to mind.
I got a few MCPs in a previous life, and I can assure you that the problem is not with the testors, but with the tests themselves. The assumptions that are made are ridiculous and show a flagrant disregard for reality. When I took it, the Win95 test was about 50% to 60% focused on upgrading Windows 3.1 and DOS compatibility. The Windows NT test was so oriented on their interfaces that they glazed over the functionality. Who cares if you know what a subnet mask is, as long as you know where to click to set it?
I think the rush to blame certifications themselves is a little misguided. This is an example of certain certifications clouding everyone's mind about all certifications. (This is also, by the way, why people expect that computers crash regularly... because most of them (i.e., Windows boxen) do.)
What I've found is these individuals make themselves stand out soon enough. How does that John Andrew Holmes quote go? If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance. The owners of these paper certifications, if they are serious about their chose (and fabricated!) career, they will overcome their initial limitations and learn something. If they don't, or if they're not serious about their career, they'll end up in the same place for years and years, or until they get fired.
The main computer lab in the Science Center is, if I remeber correctly, about 40% Ultrix on DEC Alphas, 40% Macs, and only about 10% or so PC's (as opposed to the public access terminals in question, in the lobby). I wonder what Intel though about that?
The Imac kiosks in the main lobby (I remeber them as being mainly 7xxx's and 8xxx's, though, but it's been about 6 months since I was there) are basically Netscape and telnet boxes, locked down in such a way as to be useless as Macs, i.e., they are effectively dumb terminals, useful only for anonymous web surfing and telnetting to other systems (Harvard's main systems are Solaris and Ultrix).
All things considered, Intel-based systems seem to be in the minority in the Science Center.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
This is a pretty cool idea, but I question his methods of determining how much color correction should be applied.
The pictures look great, though they kind of ruin the mental image I (and probably a bunch of people) have of Mars as the "Red Planet".
darren
Cthulhu for President!
This is interesting, but not really surprising. Slashdot, as a community (without counting the trolls), makes up a significant part of the technical population. Slashdot readers, on the whole, tend to be well educated, informed, and concerned. When a story gets over 500 comments, with 200+ moderated to 2 or higher, chances are pretty good that there is going to be some pretty insightful (legitimately insightful, not "+1 Insightful") stuff in there. There are few ways that are better to get public opinion than a peer-reviewed, peer-moderated community forum.
For officials to take the time to read a public forum, like Slashdot, not only shows some enlightenment on the part of that official, but also shows that democracy does work -- public forums such as slashdot, Kuro5hin, and others, are the vox populi, even ones that are not "officially" sanctioned.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
How about this: Sci Fi Literature 101?. It's an "Ask Slashdot" from a few months back.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
@array[0] is a one-element hash slice ($array[0] is the first member of @array), and the pre-increment only does the obvious thing because it is a one-element slice. This is bad programming style, and horribly confusing, not idiomatic Perl. Idiomatic Perl is about saving typing and running time by using shortcuts, and this does neither (array lookups are slower than scalar lookups, as well as the same number of characters to type). Without the context for this statement, however, who knows what it's author meant.
By the way, ++@_[0,1] (a two-element hash slice) increments only $_[1] (the last value).
darren
Cthulhu for President!
This is ridiculous. If I was on that list, I would most certainly not create a new account. I would never use Napster again. I would also never buy another Metallica record again (not that I have in years).
If you were one of the people whose account was cancelled, do yourself a favor: Don't use Napster. They obviously don't want you as a user. Here's some more advice: Don't buy anything by Metallica. They obviously don't want you as a fan. Go buy some Limp Bizkit, even if you don't like them; they will never try to dictate what you can do with something you paid money for. Go buy some Grateful Dead, even if you don't like them, for the same reason.
Do you know how to program? Help with the OpenNap project. If you can't program, support them any way you can: Download it and run an opennap server.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Speaking of culture, Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael discusses Culture and How Things Came To Be The Way They Are. Fascinating read.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
This is false. Apache with mod_perl runs at the same speed as Apache -- the combined speed of your computer, network connection, disk, etc. Yes, you can write slow mod_perl stuff (if you use it as glorified CGI), but mod_perl itself has no such limitations.
mod_perl scales very well -- Boston.com serves a few million pages a day using Apache/mod_perl. It's all about how you write your Perl.
But, I will give you this much -- if you run CGI scripts under mod_perl, they do not run nearly as fast as they would if you wrote mod_perl handlers, though they still run much faster than CGI.
How can you dislike the JSP way of doing things, but like PHP? They use an identical model. PHP suffers from many of the same problems as CGI (logic and HTML combined in the same place, etc), but the speed issue is definitely not one of them. However, PHP, even well-written PHP. will never be as fast as a well-written mod_perl handler, for the simple reason that mod_perl handlers are compiled once and live in memory for the life of the Apache server (parent) process. There is no file to read every time it gets called. Plus, PHP (and CGI, and JSP, and servlets) have the limitation that they can only produce output. You want to modify how the URI gets translated into a filename? You can't do that in PHP. You want to customize the authentication process? Nope, you can't do that in JSP. You want to modify the environment for all the other handlers? Not is ASP, you can't. For anything other that generating output, you have to use either C or mod_perl. And the beauty of the whole thing is -- yup, you guessed it, it runs at memory speeds -- no filesystem accesses (unless you write them in specifically), no scripts to stat, no logic/HTML combination to parse.
You are right about Perl's object model, though.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
The problem with the FM is that not only does it not tell you how to handle interactions between RPM installs and source installs, there is no way to handle it. If I install Perl from source, every other RPM I install complains that the Perl dependency fails, and I have to install with --nodeps. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Yup, it does.
Most software doesn't come in RPM format, and when it does, it often comes without the required parameters or options. What then?
darren
Cthulhu for President!
if this bothers you, there is this construct in C called a comment...
darren
Cthulhu for President!
There was some previous discussion on a similar topic a while back (The Perfect Distribution), where many of us had the same lament. The general concensus seemed to be a minimal Slackware.
My advice, if you don't want package managers, would be to avoid RedHat like the plague. Avoid Debian. Use Slackware, or use the Linux From Scratch resources to make your own distribution. This route is guaranteed to make you happy (in the long run, at least), but is significantly more difficult than just installing an "established" distribution.
Freshmeat has had a few editorials on package managers, incidentally, like The Universal Source Package, which might be of interest to you.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Hmmm....
darren
Cthulhu for President!
After the first few paragraphs, I assumed the author was just spouting off about Qt and GTK, but upon further reading, I realized that he had a lot of valid points. He seems to be suffering from the Microsoft-esque "If it's not commercial who's going to support it?" line of (faulty) reasoning, but many of the points he raises are significant, and should be heeded by GTK and Qt developers.
Most of what he says comes down to the relative levels of maturity of the toolkits. Of course Motif is going to be more full featured; it's been around for a dozen or so years. I think I'd be pertty disappointed if it wasn't more full featured than 2-year-old GTK.
Lack of support for the Xt component model is key, and is probably the strongest statement of the interview. His emphasis on "point [your] favorite GUI builder at them and they load just like that" is a little misguided, but the point remains: using widgets from another toolkit is impossible. Admit it -- it would be cool to embed a GTK widget in a Qt application. It would also ensure the freedom of choice that Linux users so strongly argue for.
I wish the interviewer had asked him why the Motif developers version costs so $!@#!$ much, and if they were worried about the Free nature of Qt and GTK. I would not be surprised if the timing of this book had something to do with the fact that more and more apps are getting written with Qt and GTK, and that Motif has a bad wrap in the Free Software community, a community whose opinions are getting more and more significant.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Thank goodness for Tipper Gore and the PMRC! They saved me from getting sued! If I hadn't been shown the evils of the Devil's Music (aka "Rock and Roll") I'd be in court right now!
darren
Cthulhu for President!
As cynical as this sounds, this article was probably written specifically to get our (collective) goat. Pretty soon the site is going to be slashdotted, and most of you are going to read the Talk Backs and probably enter some of your own. Every single one of these page views is 2 banner ads they push out there! This is all about ad revenue, folks! They have to know that this article is flamebait -- the author may work for PC Week, but ZDNet is not stupid -- but flamebait draws flames, and each flame is half a dozen banner ads.
Whatever you do, view these pages with images off. Don't give them the satisfaction of the ad revenue.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Didn't everyone read the section headline? Rumors and Comment. Obviously this is uninformed drivel, but that's OK -- it's just ZDNet giving the uninformed their say.
He works for PC Week -- of course he's going to be afraid of the Free Software movement, because it promises to set PC's free. PC Week's bread and butter is M$ crap -- they need Microsoft so they can continue to publish their "1001 Ways To Reboot Your Computer" articles.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
How useless! Well intentioned, but useless. Currently spammers (sorry, "Senders of UCE") get around these laws by sending the mail from a server in another country. I cannot imagine that a law in Sweden will apply to a spammer in, say, China, whether that law is a modification of an EU law or not. Well intentioned, but destined to fail, in the same way that all of these laws fail. You cannot apply a traditional approach to solving these non-traditional problems.
That said, how can I get on their no-spam list? Every little bit helps (not that I'm getting a lot of mail from Dave.Rhodes@MAKE.MONEY.FAST.se, but it can't hurt.)
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Even though the explot was dubbed "realdie.exe", which implies the vulnerability was found on a windows server, Real is offering patches for all versions of their server line. Interesting. I guess it is true that you can write cross-platform bad code.
Is anyone else scared that they named the executable "rmserver"? Gotta make sure you don't put a space between the "m" and the "s", or bad things might happen. I can see it now:
$ su -# cd
# rm server
^C^C^C
D'Oh!
darren
Cthulhu for President!