I'd like to encourage through donation specifically the development of a non-Java version. There doesn't appear to be much progress on alternative implementations (I read somewhere that that was in part due to constantly shifting specs and lack of a fixed API -- sounds like a nightmare for everyone off the main branch), so perhaps donations would help.
On the other hand, without a fixed API, this ain't going anyware.
They should plug into the OS, at the filesystem level.
Yes, a very good point, as a plugin for a player wouldn't normally be usable in any other any application. Plug into the OS, by all means! Write once, use many places.
The plugins must not be kernel modules though, for obvious security/stability reasons, but should attach to the kernel as clients --- a Unix domain pipe or SysV IPC would do fine as the means of communication.
I'm afraid you're right. Relying on courts, governments and lawyers was a mistake from the start. I guess we can all see that now, with the benefit of hindsight.
We're good at technology, so let's apply a technological solution that isn't at the mercy of people who's minds are rooted in the past.
Instead of trying to get the single DeCSS guinea pig accepted, with all the room for litigation and corporate control that that implies, many alternative implementations could be developed by different groups, and made available as plugins.
This would allow generic players to be created and published safely on websites, supplied only with a plugin for accessing unencrypted content. Meanwhile, an unstoppable rain of alternative plugins would be available over Usenet.
It strikes me that, perhaps, the US government has just about finished its transformation from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a government of the businesses, by the businesses, and for the businesses.
ClayJar's item seems both insightful and very nicely written. The fact that, as he says later, he's dismissed as a radical merely by mentioning that our freedoms are being usurped by big business really does highlight the key problem which underpins the whole DeCSS/MPAA and DMCA issue --- the majority of the public seems to be blindly accepting or oblivious of what's going on, and therefore government and big business can proceed with whichever agenda suits them best with impunity.
Yes, in what's allegedly a democracy, that's definitely the key problem.
I suppose it's natural to be forever hopeful that the government of one's country is going to do the right thing for its citizenry, but if you remove the rose-tinted spectacles, that hope turns into wishful thinking.
Given the realities of the situation, the online community went about the DeCSS problem in the wrong way. Instead of hoping for sanity from the courts and government, dozens of alternative mechanisms should have been created by different groups, and made available as plugins.
This would allow generic players to be created and published safely on websites, supplied only with a plugin for accessing unencrypted content. Meanwhile, an unstoppable rain of alternative plugins would be available over Usenet.
From the MPEGs it's easy to see that he's using the ThermoMicroscopes Explorer AFM for this work, as it has a very distinguished shape.
Also, he mentions using ordinary cantilevers and tips, which are totally ubiquitous these days --- you can even buy them on the web (this is the above manufacturer's retail outlet for the Explorer's cantilever supplies).
But this leaves me with a big question. I think this is great work for an MIT postgrad, and a very nicely presented set of results, but if he's using ordinary equipment and ordinary AFM techniques, then what is there new in this work?
It sounds like Bill Joy has found a wonderfully matched partner then: the deaf arm-in-arm with the blind and both totally insensitive to anything except their own agendas.
I didn't know about Hatch, but Bill Joy is notorious in nanotech circles for his Proposal to relinquish development of robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, ie. abandon the research that the world's top visionaries see as not only the next major phase of engineering, but also quite possibly the next major milestone in the evolution of Mankind.
Be that as it may, Bill Joy is totally oblivious to even the simplest and most clearcut of arguments when it conflicts with his own point of view, to the point of farce. The fact that abandoning robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would be the most unenforceable directive in the history of ineffective directives seems to matter not at all to him --- it doesn't support his position, so it can't be relevant and isn't even worth a response.
Even if there were a significant buy-in to the idea of relinquishment in the west, which there is most patently not, a single undercover research team achieving any significant advance in the nanotech field would have the potential to effectively destroy the western economy and possibly a lot more, unless counter-agents are developed before that time. Given that a simple SPM (one of the primary tools in nanotech research) can be created for just a few thousand dollars in nothing more fancy than a school lab, Joy's proposal is so akin to trying to bury our collective head in the sand that it's quite astounding.
I think you're missing a key aspect of the piece you quoted:
I would thus like to ask you to change the name OpenSSH to... something that is clearly different and doesn't cause confusion.... The confusion is made even worse by the fact that OpenSSH is also a derivative of my original SSH Secure Shell product, and it still looks very much like my product
Tatu is being very disingenuous here, because it was entirely on the back of his original ssh1 that SSH the protocol became famous, and so his commercial sales of ssh2 are primarily a consequence of the so-called "confusion" (actually a mental association) with ssh1 and hence OpenSSH by his own admission in the mind of the buyer. Nobody buys ssh2 in isolation; they buy it because it is an implementation of the SSH protocol, and very commonly the decision is also strongly influenced by community support for the protocol which arose through using ssh1 and/or OpenSSH.
In other words, it goes something like this. As a sysadmin at a commercial site, I hear from the open software and security communities that SSH the protocol is good. So, I look for an implementation, I try out either ssh1 or OpenSSH and I like it, then if I want support I buy the commercial version of ssh2 from Ylonen, otherwise I stick with ssh1 or with OpenSSH. These are all implementations of the SSH protocol, and the fact that there is a choice of implementations doesn't cause confusion --- it merely creates multiple associations, a "confusion" I "struggle" with every time that I want bread and have to decide whether to buy Sunblest or Hovis. Ssh1 and OpenSSH are no less an implementation of the SSH protocol than ssh2.
[In fact, the only source of confusion that there has ever been was caused by Tatu himself when he created a new product and made it partly incompatible with the tool that he himself had earlier called "ssh".]
OpenSSH through being similar to ssh1 continues to lay the groundwork on which Ylonen's commercial success is based, just like his old product did. Many people will buy ssh2 as a result of trying ssh1 or OpenSSH annd associating it with ssh2. It is utterly disingenuous that Ylonen should even think of preventing them from associating the SSH protocol with pre-ssh2 implementations when the whole existence of his enterprise is based on people's earlier associations between protocol and product.
So what? Reconfigure your box. Surely you have the 30 seconds to spare,
You either understand full well that it's not a time issue, or else you're missing the point through a total lack of understanding. Virtually nobody that is trying to run a quality setup at home in order to have some semblance of control over mail delivery by holding mail in their local queue until it is accepted by the remote mail exchanger (like virtually all the people I know who run Unix-type boxes on personal LANs) is going to reconfigure their box just because you want them to. You may not mind your mail being at the mercy of your local ISP's sysadmins but that doesn't necessarily mean that others think likewise. The only people I know who would accept what you propose are those running Windows, and that's because for the most part they've installed an ISP's software off some CDROM and there's no MTA capability in their DUN and so they know no other way of working.
Since I've been doing this internet stuff (about 15 years now)...
OK, so you joined the party late, but that's no excuse for proposing a newbie-style solution that not only runs utterly counter to the values on which the Internet was built, but actually breaks normal usage to boot.
... it's never been the "norm" for individual boxes to deliver mail straight to the destination MX.
ROFL. End of discussion then, because our experiences differ utterly and you don't accept that the people who I describe exist, so you will never be able to propose an anti-spam solution that captures their requirements. That simply eliminates you from the ISP market place in that area.
There's another aspect to the "they think computer skills are all that matters" issue which is just as important as the other things you describe. The young writer "ageless" claims:
I've done so many different things, like filling bosses' requests to build an online app that does something complex in a short time
This is both wonderful and also sad: here's a person that knows how to do things but almost certainly doesn't know when not to do them. Caution, cynicism, wisdom and downright bloody-mindedness come with long-term experience, and a youngster with long-term experience is a rarity. Furthermore, young employees rarely have the guts and/or self-confidence to say 'NO' to requests from their employers, and that's the true test of being of value to society rather than being just a skilled techie.
I know that's not the answer that "ageless" was seeking (everyone thinks that they're experienced enough to be respected), but here's one way of possibly understanding the problem. Look at someone even younger than yourself and ask yourself the question, "Why is he less wise than me?"
it's not like this stops them from doing anything legitimate.
You're wrong.
Perhaps that's the case for Microsoft users who have little option but to deliver all their mail to a smarthost, but it's certainly not the case for Unix/Linux/BSD users. The norm there is for their MTAs to manage their own queues and to deliver direct to the destination mail exchangers in accordance with DNS/MX, not only because that is the default for Unix machines out of the box, but also because that's the normal method of delivery for MTAs on the Internet, as opposed to those on internal networks.
They are paying to be on the Internet, so blocking their MTAs from delivering outbound traffic in the normal way for Internet machinery is definitely stopping totally legitimate activity.
Fighting spam is important, but if you do so by blocking ports then you're on the slippery slope from being a supplier of Internet connectivity to running a closed and restricted environment like MSN or the old Compuserve. If that's the business you want to be in, fine, but then don't call your business an ISP, or at least be honest and advertise your connectivity as restricted.
Just because some people are criminals, you don't put everyone in jail on the offchance that they might commit a crime.
I follow my better judgement so that at the end of the day I can be proud of myself and my work. I like to go to bed happy, and get up looking forward to my day.
As virtually everyone does, myself included. But if you think that people (including yourself) do as they do because ethics directs their lives then you haven't done any deep introspection. Dive below the easy answers and you'll find that what really controls what "good" people do (good by your very own standard) is their personal need to do what they consider effective and to be seen to do it well. Ethics overlaps with this only minimally.
Like yourself, I'm a developer, and I strive to develop high quality, well engineered, scalable, extensible and maintainable code that performs useful functions, does so efficiently, and also satisfies the business needs of those that are paying for it. I take pride in a job well done, well done by my personal standards which have developed gradually over the years. I bet it's the same for you, because I know it's the same for many other developers who I come across. But the relationship between this and real ethics is minimal, probably as little as the fact that one had a reasonably ethical upbringing and has continued in roughly the same ballpark ever since. Well, that's not ethics at work, it's sheer commonsense and getting on with your neighbour and even political correctness of sorts, an inherently local "getting on" within the communities that one inhabits. It makes the world go 'round, fairly effectively though definitely not fairly, whereas ethical codes have a dangerous propensity to lead to coercion and strife, probably owing to their goal of universalism in a world where values are definitely not universal.
No, ethics is a motherhood-and-apple-pie word that in reality is not very helpful except as a distant backdrop to the real world. That doesn't mean that the real world is wholly unethical, it just means that ethics falls very short of being a grand unified theory.
All an ISP has to do to prevent customers from doing their own SMTP deliveries, is tell their router to block outbound connections to TCP port 25
Ha ha, very funny. In other words, all an ISP has to do is to cut off its customers from the Internet on port 25. Great. It's that kind of pragmatism that put several million Jews in the gas chambers in the last war. Do you have any solutions for the common cold that don't involve cutting off the head?
Evidently you aren't aware that people go to an Internet Service Provider in order to be connected to the Internet, not to be blocked from it. Sheesh.
Remind me not to hire you when I have any hard problems to resolve.
Are the Thumb and ARM instruction sets on the XScale mutually exclusive, or is there some way for Linux to use Thumb instructions --- for example in user-mode processes only?
And an even more fundamental question: does gcc support the Thumb instruction set at all?
Finally, what is the relationship between the XScale and Atmel's 91AT series, which also features a combination of ARM and Thumb instruction sets?
The question of ethics does sound reasonable on the face of it, but in reality it has only the slightest relevance in the current technical, political and economic climate.
The western world runs on deals and power and money and technology, not on ethics. Ethics is given lip service occasionally, but only in the context of "if one doesn't stay roughly in the ethical/PC ballpark known and loved by Joe Six-pack then markets or politicians may suffer and that would be bad". That's the only real relevance of "ethics" in our third of the globe, ie. the relevance is minimal, and I'm sure that for many even mentioning the word ethics in such a barely ethical context is a travesty.
Consultants merely play their part in this scheme of things. Some may recommend GPL'd software for the Navy and some may recommend Microsoft, but don't look for reasons based on ethics for their decisions. The driving force may be power, money, freedom, technological competence or lack thereof, and personal or institutional politics of many different types, but not ethics. And for that matter the recommendations won't be objective either, regardless of the side of the fence on which one sits.
Whether that's good or bad is a totally different question, and not necessarily one with an obvious or simple answer. But for better or for worse, that's how our world works today.
Smarthosts that allow relay from the entire world are open relays. They have been and will be abused for large amounts of spam. There are plenty of solutions to circumvent this problem. The simplest is to let people use the SMTP server of their access-provider
Yes, you're 100% correct, but I was referring not to the more amateurish ISPs that still run open relays since the issue there is obvious, but exclusively to the major ISPs who provide CLOSED relays for private use by their customers and by nobody else. There all non-customers are blocked from relaying completely. ORBS still blacklists such ISPs, not just those running open relays like most people think, and therein lies the problem for ORBS because it makes them look like cowboys. Now re-read what I said in that context.
[If they only blacklisted ISPs that run open relays then ORBS wouldn't be in the continual doghouse that it's in, and there wouldn't be any war between them and MAPS.]
The quality of the relaying info in the ORBS database seems to be rather poor anyway --- much of the time the nomination "evidence" seems only a weak excuse for blacklisting ISPs just for the hell of it. Most people think that ORBS merely blacklist ISPs for running their MTAs as open relays, which would be sensible, but if you look closely this is not so.
If you examine the entries for blacklist-nominated ISPs on their site where the ISP's smarthosts are not open relays but the ISP is still under threat of blacklisting, you'll see that ORBS offers the ISPs two ways of avoiding the blacklisting being imposed:
- either the ISP must not allow its customers to post mail to the Internet through the SMTP smarthosts that those customers are paying to use [hilariously funny];
- or alternatively they must ensure that their customers do not run open SMTP software on their own PCs. In other words ORBS implies that ISPs must require their customers to allow the ISP to vet/check their PCs or else offer only a "managed end-user equipment" service [impossibly costly].
As should be obvious, neither of these alternatives constitutes a viable option in the large-scale ISP market, so ORBS really have no intention of acting in a constructive manner in this area. There must be a few tens of millions of ISP-connected PCs in the US alone that contravene ORBS' requirements, and I bet that many of their own administrators' home PCs do as well, ie. those that use their ISP's smarthosts. ORBS are merely exercising their hatred for spam in a vengeful way, without any regard at all for whether what they demand is possible or not.
Well, ORBS's policy is ORBS's business, but if they sincerely want to reduce the amount of spam on the net then they've got to use policies that make it possible for ISPs to comply. Their current ones do not allow this, so it's not surprising that ORBS is getting more and more marginalized and treated as unprofessional.
The Citadel/UX project is developing a robust communications server that will compete with products like OpenMail, Groupwise, and Exchange.
On the face of it, this statement makes no sense at all. The big mail communications servers these days are the Internet MTAs, which in all the major ISPs handle typically many millions of messages per day on behalf of millions of customers per ISP. As others on this thread have mentioned, Exchange runs out of steam if you push it beyond some 2000 users per server -- it just doesn't scale, so it's not "Enterprise Grade" by any stretch of the imagination, it's out by 2-3 orders of magnitude. You've got to stop believing manufacturer's propaganda.
You should compare Citadel/UX to qmail or Exim installations in large ISPs, not against toy systems. Server farms with dozens of hierarchically-organized, multi-CPU MTAs which provide the massive underpinning to the world's Internet mail traffic, those are the "Enterprise grade" systems of today, not the relatively puny corporate systems of yesteryear being portrayed as "Enterprise grade" by manufacturers of personal computer software with more money than experience.
I feel I must also comment on your novel use of the word "robust". If one compares the reliability, availability and robustness of a flat file to that of even the simplest database system, the mind boggles that anyone could consider the database system as anything but the less reliable of the two by a collosal amount.
We run massive database systems here from the best regarded RDBMS manufacturer in the industry and configured with their help, yet even our DBAs will admit that the reliability of their databases is not brilliant. In contrast, the reliability of Exim is, er, well, it has never failed, so I guess the reliability is infinite. And I hear that qmail is likewise excellent in that respect. How the hell is a database going to improve on that kind of reliability and robustness?
Even the best databases crash and corrupt data every once in a while, and a new database could easily be less stable rather than more. But I've never had a flat file crash on me.
If it makes you feel any better, Unix is a sort of combined I/O multiplexer and storage mechanism, which inevitably makes it a particular kind of database too. To get the most out of it you should leverage its capabilities instead of trying to impose a totally different semantic on top of it. You'll never gain robustness by adding complexity.
For the greatest flexibility, the central star-point of a communications I/O multiplexer has to be the operating system, not a windows manager as in W95 (partly) nor an application as in Protozilla.
We're seeing the same old and discredited mistakes of yesteryear repeated here. Yes, this makes Mozilla vastly more powerful, and it is easy to see how its developers would appreciate such a facility for experimental purposes, but for the end user it is the wrong approach. Architecturally, it is the wrong design, and pragmatically it's the wrong thing to do as well: when Mozilla crashes, you do not want a pile of network services to go down with it.
Yes, I know it's advertised primarily as a hook for experimentation in protocols, but if any real service is ever delivered over it then we all lose.
Seriously, there must be more to this than meets the eye, because "RMS got confused" is very unlikely judging by the history of the man. Quite a lot of work went into preparing the ground for the GNUpedia project announcement, and it's just not the kind of thing that "got confused" can adequately explain.
I guess it'll all come out into the open eventually, hopefully in a clear note from RMS, because a lot rests on our faith in the people in the movement, and I'm sure he knows it. He wouldn't want any question marks hovering unanswered above this little episode, IMO, and he must value the goodwill of the many Nupedia authors. We'll have to wait and see what develops.
Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved...:-(
Don't worry, that time will come again once we all get so fed up with the current patent idiocy on the Internet that we decide to do something about it. There are a number of alternative solutions:
1. Shoot all patent lawyers. This would undoubtedly be the most satisfying solution (although many would object that it wouldn't be painful enough), but it's not practical simply because in unenlightened countries like ours it would be considered illegal. So scratch that.
2. Go through the political system and get the application of patent law to the Internet banned. This would require sentience on the part of politicians and justice on the part of the judiciary. So scratch that.
3. Create a new Internet cryptographically separated from the current one and available only to people that are not patent lawyers. Since patent lawyers could gain access to it only by deception, anything they say in court about patents in use on this new medium would be either inadmissable in court or else provably uninformed, so all patent action would fail.
There is some truth in this, in the general case. When something is easy to use, you don't need to be a professional to use it. And when you're not a professional you will in general make a less-than-professional job of it, even if it looks OK to you --- you just don't have the background to judge good from bad.
I just can't understand the problem that so many people and their institutions seem to be having with nudity and sexual material. What's the big issue here?
Nude is what we all are under our clothes, even when we're walking down the high street. What does it mattter how much skin is showing? Why does the context matter at all?
As for sex, it's the most hilariously ridiculous act practiced by an otherwise rationally acting homo sapiens, as squishy bits rub together and froth and bubble while hormones bring our otherwise rationally thinking synapses into a natural drug-induced frenzy. The only extraordinary thing about sex is that we're not all catatonic from laughter while pumping and squeeezing away with everything we've got.
But what's the big deal about viewing such materials at work? Wasting time while being paid for being productive is understandably frowned on, but this is something different. What gives? Is the world mad?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to encourage through donation specifically the development of a non-Java version. There doesn't appear to be much progress on alternative implementations (I read somewhere that that was in part due to constantly shifting specs and lack of a fixed API -- sounds like a nightmare for everyone off the main branch), so perhaps donations would help.
On the other hand, without a fixed API, this ain't going anyware.
They should plug into the OS, at the filesystem level.
Yes, a very good point, as a plugin for a player wouldn't normally be usable in any other any application. Plug into the OS, by all means! Write once, use many places.
The plugins must not be kernel modules though, for obvious security/stability reasons, but should attach to the kernel as clients --- a Unix domain pipe or SysV IPC would do fine as the means of communication.
I'm afraid you're right. Relying on courts, governments and lawyers was a mistake from the start. I guess we can all see that now, with the benefit of hindsight.
We're good at technology, so let's apply a technological solution that isn't at the mercy of people who's minds are rooted in the past.
Instead of trying to get the single DeCSS guinea pig accepted, with all the room for litigation and corporate control that that implies, many alternative implementations could be developed by different groups, and made available as plugins.
This would allow generic players to be created and published safely on websites, supplied only with a plugin for accessing unencrypted content. Meanwhile, an unstoppable rain of alternative plugins would be available over Usenet.
It strikes me that, perhaps, the US government has just about finished its transformation from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a government of the businesses, by the businesses, and for the businesses.
ClayJar's item seems both insightful and very nicely written. The fact that, as he says later, he's dismissed as a radical merely by mentioning that our freedoms are being usurped by big business really does highlight the key problem which underpins the whole DeCSS/MPAA and DMCA issue --- the majority of the public seems to be blindly accepting or oblivious of what's going on, and therefore government and big business can proceed with whichever agenda suits them best with impunity.
Yes, in what's allegedly a democracy, that's definitely the key problem.
I suppose it's natural to be forever hopeful that the government of one's country is going to do the right thing for its citizenry, but if you remove the rose-tinted spectacles, that hope turns into wishful thinking.
Given the realities of the situation, the online community went about the DeCSS problem in the wrong way. Instead of hoping for sanity from the courts and government, dozens of alternative mechanisms should have been created by different groups, and made available as plugins.
This would allow generic players to be created and published safely on websites, supplied only with a plugin for accessing unencrypted content. Meanwhile, an unstoppable rain of alternative plugins would be available over Usenet.
From the MPEGs it's easy to see that he's using the ThermoMicroscopes Explorer AFM for this work, as it has a very distinguished shape.
Also, he mentions using ordinary cantilevers and tips, which are totally ubiquitous these days --- you can even buy them on the web (this is the above manufacturer's retail outlet for the Explorer's cantilever supplies).
But this leaves me with a big question. I think this is great work for an MIT postgrad, and a very nicely presented set of results, but if he's using ordinary equipment and ordinary AFM techniques, then what is there new in this work?
It sounds like Bill Joy has found a wonderfully matched partner then: the deaf arm-in-arm with the blind and both totally insensitive to anything except their own agendas.
I didn't know about Hatch, but Bill Joy is notorious in nanotech circles for his Proposal to relinquish development of robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, ie. abandon the research that the world's top visionaries see as not only the next major phase of engineering, but also quite possibly the next major milestone in the evolution of Mankind.
Be that as it may, Bill Joy is totally oblivious to even the simplest and most clearcut of arguments when it conflicts with his own point of view, to the point of farce. The fact that abandoning robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would be the most unenforceable directive in the history of ineffective directives seems to matter not at all to him --- it doesn't support his position, so it can't be relevant and isn't even worth a response.
Even if there were a significant buy-in to the idea of relinquishment in the west, which there is most patently not, a single undercover research team achieving any significant advance in the nanotech field would have the potential to effectively destroy the western economy and possibly a lot more, unless counter-agents are developed before that time. Given that a simple SPM (one of the primary tools in nanotech research) can be created for just a few thousand dollars in nothing more fancy than a school lab, Joy's proposal is so akin to trying to bury our collective head in the sand that it's quite astounding.
I think you're missing a key aspect of the piece you quoted:
... something that is clearly different and doesn't cause confusion. ... The confusion is made even worse by the fact that OpenSSH is also a derivative of my original SSH Secure Shell product, and it still looks very much like my product
I would thus like to ask you to change the name OpenSSH to
Tatu is being very disingenuous here, because it was entirely on the back of his original ssh1 that SSH the protocol became famous, and so his commercial sales of ssh2 are primarily a consequence of the so-called "confusion" (actually a mental association) with ssh1 and hence OpenSSH by his own admission in the mind of the buyer. Nobody buys ssh2 in isolation; they buy it because it is an implementation of the SSH protocol, and very commonly the decision is also strongly influenced by community support for the protocol which arose through using ssh1 and/or OpenSSH.
In other words, it goes something like this. As a sysadmin at a commercial site, I hear from the open software and security communities that SSH the protocol is good. So, I look for an implementation, I try out either ssh1 or OpenSSH and I like it, then if I want support I buy the commercial version of ssh2 from Ylonen, otherwise I stick with ssh1 or with OpenSSH. These are all implementations of the SSH protocol, and the fact that there is a choice of implementations doesn't cause confusion --- it merely creates multiple associations, a "confusion" I "struggle" with every time that I want bread and have to decide whether to buy Sunblest or Hovis. Ssh1 and OpenSSH are no less an implementation of the SSH protocol than ssh2.
[In fact, the only source of confusion that there has ever been was caused by Tatu himself when he created a new product and made it partly incompatible with the tool that he himself had earlier called "ssh".]
OpenSSH through being similar to ssh1 continues to lay the groundwork on which Ylonen's commercial success is based, just like his old product did. Many people will buy ssh2 as a result of trying ssh1 or OpenSSH annd associating it with ssh2. It is utterly disingenuous that Ylonen should even think of preventing them from associating the SSH protocol with pre-ssh2 implementations when the whole existence of his enterprise is based on people's earlier associations between protocol and product.
So what? Reconfigure your box. Surely you have the 30 seconds to spare,
...
... it's never been the "norm" for individual boxes to deliver mail straight to the destination MX.
You either understand full well that it's not a time issue, or else you're missing the point through a total lack of understanding. Virtually nobody that is trying to run a quality setup at home in order to have some semblance of control over mail delivery by holding mail in their local queue until it is accepted by the remote mail exchanger (like virtually all the people I know who run Unix-type boxes on personal LANs) is going to reconfigure their box just because you want them to. You may not mind your mail being at the mercy of your local ISP's sysadmins but that doesn't necessarily mean that others think likewise. The only people I know who would accept what you propose are those running Windows, and that's because for the most part they've installed an ISP's software off some CDROM and there's no MTA capability in their DUN and so they know no other way of working.
Since I've been doing this internet stuff (about 15 years now)
OK, so you joined the party late, but that's no excuse for proposing a newbie-style solution that not only runs utterly counter to the values on which the Internet was built, but actually breaks normal usage to boot.
ROFL. End of discussion then, because our experiences differ utterly and you don't accept that the people who I describe exist, so you will never be able to propose an anti-spam solution that captures their requirements. That simply eliminates you from the ISP market place in that area.
There's another aspect to the "they think computer skills are all that matters" issue which is just as important as the other things you describe. The young writer "ageless" claims:
I've done so many different things, like filling bosses' requests to build an online app that does something complex in a short time
This is both wonderful and also sad: here's a person that knows how to do things but almost certainly doesn't know when not to do them. Caution, cynicism, wisdom and downright bloody-mindedness come with long-term experience, and a youngster with long-term experience is a rarity. Furthermore, young employees rarely have the guts and/or self-confidence to say 'NO' to requests from their employers, and that's the true test of being of value to society rather than being just a skilled techie.
I know that's not the answer that "ageless" was seeking (everyone thinks that they're experienced enough to be respected), but here's one way of possibly understanding the problem. Look at someone even younger than yourself and ask yourself the question, "Why is he less wise than me?"
it's not like this stops them from doing anything legitimate.
You're wrong.
Perhaps that's the case for Microsoft users who have little option but to deliver all their mail to a smarthost, but it's certainly not the case for Unix/Linux/BSD users. The norm there is for their MTAs to manage their own queues and to deliver direct to the destination mail exchangers in accordance with DNS/MX, not only because that is the default for Unix machines out of the box, but also because that's the normal method of delivery for MTAs on the Internet, as opposed to those on internal networks.
They are paying to be on the Internet, so blocking their MTAs from delivering outbound traffic in the normal way for Internet machinery is definitely stopping totally legitimate activity.
Fighting spam is important, but if you do so by blocking ports then you're on the slippery slope from being a supplier of Internet connectivity to running a closed and restricted environment like MSN or the old Compuserve. If that's the business you want to be in, fine, but then don't call your business an ISP, or at least be honest and advertise your connectivity as restricted.
Just because some people are criminals, you don't put everyone in jail on the offchance that they might commit a crime.
I follow my better judgement so that at the end of the day I can be proud of myself and my work. I like to go to bed happy, and get up looking forward to my day.
As virtually everyone does, myself included. But if you think that people (including yourself) do as they do because ethics directs their lives then you haven't done any deep introspection. Dive below the easy answers and you'll find that what really controls what "good" people do (good by your very own standard) is their personal need to do what they consider effective and to be seen to do it well. Ethics overlaps with this only minimally.
Like yourself, I'm a developer, and I strive to develop high quality, well engineered, scalable, extensible and maintainable code that performs useful functions, does so efficiently, and also satisfies the business needs of those that are paying for it. I take pride in a job well done, well done by my personal standards which have developed gradually over the years. I bet it's the same for you, because I know it's the same for many other developers who I come across. But the relationship between this and real ethics is minimal, probably as little as the fact that one had a reasonably ethical upbringing and has continued in roughly the same ballpark ever since. Well, that's not ethics at work, it's sheer commonsense and getting on with your neighbour and even political correctness of sorts, an inherently local "getting on" within the communities that one inhabits. It makes the world go 'round, fairly effectively though definitely not fairly, whereas ethical codes have a dangerous propensity to lead to coercion and strife, probably owing to their goal of universalism in a world where values are definitely not universal.
No, ethics is a motherhood-and-apple-pie word that in reality is not very helpful except as a distant backdrop to the real world. That doesn't mean that the real world is wholly unethical, it just means that ethics falls very short of being a grand unified theory.
All an ISP has to do to prevent customers from doing their own SMTP deliveries, is tell their router to block outbound connections to TCP port 25
Ha ha, very funny. In other words, all an ISP has to do is to cut off its customers from the Internet on port 25. Great. It's that kind of pragmatism that put several million Jews in the gas chambers in the last war. Do you have any solutions for the common cold that don't involve cutting off the head?
Evidently you aren't aware that people go to an Internet Service Provider in order to be connected to the Internet, not to be blocked from it. Sheesh.
Remind me not to hire you when I have any hard problems to resolve.
Are the Thumb and ARM instruction sets on the XScale mutually exclusive, or is there some way for Linux to use Thumb instructions --- for example in user-mode processes only?
And an even more fundamental question: does gcc support the Thumb instruction set at all?
Finally, what is the relationship between the XScale and Atmel's 91AT series, which also features a combination of ARM and Thumb instruction sets?
The question of ethics does sound reasonable on the face of it, but in reality it has only the slightest relevance in the current technical, political and economic climate.
The western world runs on deals and power and money and technology, not on ethics. Ethics is given lip service occasionally, but only in the context of "if one doesn't stay roughly in the ethical/PC ballpark known and loved by Joe Six-pack then markets or politicians may suffer and that would be bad". That's the only real relevance of "ethics" in our third of the globe, ie. the relevance is minimal, and I'm sure that for many even mentioning the word ethics in such a barely ethical context is a travesty.
Consultants merely play their part in this scheme of things. Some may recommend GPL'd software for the Navy and some may recommend Microsoft, but don't look for reasons based on ethics for their decisions. The driving force may be power, money, freedom, technological competence or lack thereof, and personal or institutional politics of many different types, but not ethics. And for that matter the recommendations won't be objective either, regardless of the side of the fence on which one sits.
Whether that's good or bad is a totally different question, and not necessarily one with an obvious or simple answer. But for better or for worse, that's how our world works today.
I don't see what your gripe is, here.
Oops, unfortunately you misunderstood me totally.
Smarthosts that allow relay from the entire world are open relays. They have been and will be abused for large amounts of spam. There are plenty of solutions to circumvent this problem. The simplest is to let people use the SMTP server of their access-provider
Yes, you're 100% correct, but I was referring not to the more amateurish ISPs that still run open relays since the issue there is obvious, but exclusively to the major ISPs who provide CLOSED relays for private use by their customers and by nobody else. There all non-customers are blocked from relaying completely. ORBS still blacklists such ISPs, not just those running open relays like most people think, and therein lies the problem for ORBS because it makes them look like cowboys. Now re-read what I said in that context.
[If they only blacklisted ISPs that run open relays then ORBS wouldn't be in the continual doghouse that it's in, and there wouldn't be any war between them and MAPS.]
The quality of the relaying info in the ORBS database seems to be rather poor anyway --- much of the time the nomination "evidence" seems only a weak excuse for blacklisting ISPs just for the hell of it. Most people think that ORBS merely blacklist ISPs for running their MTAs as open relays, which would be sensible, but if you look closely this is not so.
If you examine the entries for blacklist-nominated ISPs on their site where the ISP's smarthosts are not open relays but the ISP is still under threat of blacklisting, you'll see that ORBS offers the ISPs two ways of avoiding the blacklisting being imposed:
- either the ISP must not allow its customers to post mail to the Internet through the SMTP smarthosts that those customers are paying to use [hilariously funny];
- or alternatively they must ensure that their customers do not run open SMTP software on their own PCs. In other words ORBS implies that ISPs must require their customers to allow the ISP to vet/check their PCs or else offer only a "managed end-user equipment" service [impossibly costly].
As should be obvious, neither of these alternatives constitutes a viable option in the large-scale ISP market, so ORBS really have no intention of acting in a constructive manner in this area. There must be a few tens of millions of ISP-connected PCs in the US alone that contravene ORBS' requirements, and I bet that many of their own administrators' home PCs do as well, ie. those that use their ISP's smarthosts. ORBS are merely exercising their hatred for spam in a vengeful way, without any regard at all for whether what they demand is possible or not.
Well, ORBS's policy is ORBS's business, but if they sincerely want to reduce the amount of spam on the net then they've got to use policies that make it possible for ISPs to comply. Their current ones do not allow this, so it's not surprising that ORBS is getting more and more marginalized and treated as unprofessional.
The Citadel/UX project is developing a robust communications server that will compete with products like OpenMail, Groupwise, and Exchange.
On the face of it, this statement makes no sense at all. The big mail communications servers these days are the Internet MTAs, which in all the major ISPs handle typically many millions of messages per day on behalf of millions of customers per ISP. As others on this thread have mentioned, Exchange runs out of steam if you push it beyond some 2000 users per server -- it just doesn't scale, so it's not "Enterprise Grade" by any stretch of the imagination, it's out by 2-3 orders of magnitude. You've got to stop believing manufacturer's propaganda.
You should compare Citadel/UX to qmail or Exim installations in large ISPs, not against toy systems. Server farms with dozens of hierarchically-organized, multi-CPU MTAs which provide the massive underpinning to the world's Internet mail traffic, those are the "Enterprise grade" systems of today, not the relatively puny corporate systems of yesteryear being portrayed as "Enterprise grade" by manufacturers of personal computer software with more money than experience.
I feel I must also comment on your novel use of the word "robust". If one compares the reliability, availability and robustness of a flat file to that of even the simplest database system, the mind boggles that anyone could consider the database system as anything but the less reliable of the two by a collosal amount.
We run massive database systems here from the best regarded RDBMS manufacturer in the industry and configured with their help, yet even our DBAs will admit that the reliability of their databases is not brilliant. In contrast, the reliability of Exim is, er, well, it has never failed, so I guess the reliability is infinite. And I hear that qmail is likewise excellent in that respect. How the hell is a database going to improve on that kind of reliability and robustness?
Even the best databases crash and corrupt data every once in a while, and a new database could easily be less stable rather than more. But I've never had a flat file crash on me.
If it makes you feel any better, Unix is a sort of combined I/O multiplexer and storage mechanism, which inevitably makes it a particular kind of database too. To get the most out of it you should leverage its capabilities instead of trying to impose a totally different semantic on top of it. You'll never gain robustness by adding complexity.
For the greatest flexibility, the central star-point of a communications I/O multiplexer has to be the operating system, not a windows manager as in W95 (partly) nor an application as in Protozilla.
We're seeing the same old and discredited mistakes of yesteryear repeated here. Yes, this makes Mozilla vastly more powerful, and it is easy to see how its developers would appreciate such a facility for experimental purposes, but for the end user it is the wrong approach. Architecturally, it is the wrong design, and pragmatically it's the wrong thing to do as well: when Mozilla crashes, you do not want a pile of network services to go down with it.
Yes, I know it's advertised primarily as a hook for experimentation in protocols, but if any real service is ever delivered over it then we all lose.
Seriously, there must be more to this than meets the eye, because "RMS got confused" is very unlikely judging by the history of the man. Quite a lot of work went into preparing the ground for the GNUpedia project announcement, and it's just not the kind of thing that "got confused" can adequately explain.
I guess it'll all come out into the open eventually, hopefully in a clear note from RMS, because a lot rests on our faith in the people in the movement, and I'm sure he knows it. He wouldn't want any question marks hovering unanswered above this little episode, IMO, and he must value the goodwill of the many Nupedia authors. We'll have to wait and see what develops.
Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(
Don't worry, that time will come again once we all get so fed up with the current patent idiocy on the Internet that we decide to do something about it. There are a number of alternative solutions:
1. Shoot all patent lawyers. This would undoubtedly be the most satisfying solution (although many would object that it wouldn't be painful enough), but it's not practical simply because in unenlightened countries like ours it would be considered illegal. So scratch that.
2. Go through the political system and get the application of patent law to the Internet banned. This would require sentience on the part of politicians and justice on the part of the judiciary. So scratch that.
3. Create a new Internet cryptographically separated from the current one and available only to people that are not patent lawyers. Since patent lawyers could gain access to it only by deception, anything they say in court about patents in use on this new medium would be either inadmissable in court or else provably uninformed, so all patent action would fail.
Hmmm, damn, I guess there's only one way to go.
The BBC produces popular content too, not just high-brow stuff. Oddly enough, skimpily clad girls are popular here.
There is some truth in this, in the general case. When something is easy to use, you don't need to be a professional to use it. And when you're not a professional you will in general make a less-than-professional job of it, even if it looks OK to you --- you just don't have the background to judge good from bad.
Because it is not socially accepted.
Yes, but why?
I just can't understand the problem that so many people and their institutions seem to be having with nudity and sexual material. What's the big issue here?
Nude is what we all are under our clothes, even when we're walking down the high street. What does it mattter how much skin is showing? Why does the context matter at all?
As for sex, it's the most hilariously ridiculous act practiced by an otherwise rationally acting homo sapiens, as squishy bits rub together and froth and bubble while hormones bring our otherwise rationally thinking synapses into a natural drug-induced frenzy. The only extraordinary thing about sex is that we're not all catatonic from laughter while pumping and squeeezing away with everything we've got.
But what's the big deal about viewing such materials at work? Wasting time while being paid for being productive is understandably frowned on, but this is something different. What gives? Is the world mad?