I work for a CLEC, and it wouldn't be that hard or that expensive to get pipes far bigger than OC-3's to our colo facilities.
Yes, I'd expect that to be no problem. 100 megabit FTTH has been available in Japan about three years now, and it works quite well.
8 megabit DSL also showed up there about 3 years ago, and 40 megabit DSL is available right now, at least in some places.
It all works. When you need more bandwidth, you just pile on more. If an OC-3 isn't enough, run an OC-12. If that doesn't do it, get more than one. I was a network engineer at an ISP in Japan, and one thing I (and you, too, seeing as you work at a CLEC) can tell people is that there's always more bandwidth available. Just open your checkbook:-)
Just to clarify (gotta preview more often:-p) it boosts our business by making spam worse, thus driving more customers our way in search of relief from spam.
And yes, I really do advocate public executions of spammers.
Do I have to take a number and stand in line to execute some of them?:-)
Seriously, one of the reasons they aren't going forward with it is that they believe the list would mostly just serve as a golden list of known good addresses for spammers, who don't much care about legality and even less about ethics, anyway. I work for a large email security firm, and I completely agree with that. I have a front-row seat to the effect that YOU CAN SPAM act had on reducing spam, and it was zero, at best. At worst, it encouraged it by superceding existing state laws while simultaneously granting spammers free reign to spam as long as they put in a working remove link.
Some put in the link, most don't. Among the ones that do, it seems to be the case that they remove you only from that one list but not from all their lists. And since you have now confirmed your address as working, you probably go on their gold master list.
The CAN SPAM act seems like something the DMA must have bought and paid for. It's certainly no friend of spam victims, but to the extent that it boost our business by granting a (queue James Bond music) License to Spam, it helps companies like mine.
I was a web developer before I switched to being a sysadmin, and while you make some good points, you also make some basic errors:
You must conform to IE; it's > 90% of the browser market, to "give up on IE" is to admit you create shoddy sites or intranets.
Is a 100% W3C-compliant site shoddy if it doesn't render properly in IE, or is IE shoddy? I agree with you that for commercial websites, they have to render properly in IE because of its overwhelming market share, but IE, and least in the days when I was last a web developer, was well-known to break W3C compliance all over the place. I would be pretty surprised if anything has changed. To call a site shoddy because it won't render in IE even if it's clearly the browser's fault because the site is just wrong thinking.
Sadly, Netscape/Mozilla in those days wasn't fully W3C-compliant either, but it did a much better job than IE. To make a site really perfect for both required (and probably still requires) some Javascript magic to serve up a page that is broken in the right ways for the target browser. This can be necessary on a commercial site, for obvious reasons.
However, on a site that is your own personal page, it is perfectly justified (and I have done this) to just put up a notice that says "This site is 100% W3C-compliant; if it doesn't look right in your browser, get a better browser." That's telling it like it is, and you have no obligation to do anything else on your personal site.
IE doesn't conform to standards?
Well, since Microsoft has been a W3C member for years, then it's about time they get off their asses and fix their browser. That doesn't mean it can't also render MSHTML (that horrid, crufty mess), but as a starting point, it must render W3C-compliant sites correctly. To do less is to just admit they created (and continue to release) a shoddy browser.
There's no way I'd fly in it. With a name like that, it can't go more than a few days without crashing. Plus, any time the pilot changed any control, you'd have to land and take off again, so even if it didn't crash, it would take forever to get anywhere.
Your experience must be pretty narrow, then. I lived in Japan for eight years and Viet Nam for one, and everywhere, the pronunciation issues that make up what we would call a Japanese or Vietnamese accent made their way into writing, frequently even among advanced speakers such as my wife.
If you have many (or any) Japanese friends, you've probably noticed, for instance, that when faced with an "Is that word spelled with an L or an R?" choice, they will usually get it wrong. A close friend of mine has a master's degree in EE, works for a large Japanese electronics company, spends many months out of the year in the United States (in places where there aren't a lot of Japanese), speaks English extremely well, and still flubs the l/r thing all the time.
The guy's spelling level is in line with his overall grammar, and we don't know anything about his educational background. He may have learned English at a conversation school, where spelling isn't taught at all.
He may be going on nothing but what he learned in high school plus his experience since then.
The guy was obtuse. Unbelievably, and that's not a moronic comment. It's the truth. And if you met him, seeing as you hate spatial browsing, you'd likely think he was obtuse yourself.
If you're going to (wrongly) call people moronic, you should at least have the guts to log in. Afraid of losing some precious karma for being modded flamebait? How obtuse;-)
Open up Windows Explorer and what do you get? A nice sensible directory tree in the left pane, and a file list for the CWD in the right pane.
Open up Konqueror and what do you get? A system view and LAN browser on the left, and a single pane (or perhaps I should say pain) for the file/directory tree on the right. If you want to drag and drop files between two directories, you need to open another instance of Konqueror, which bears a disturbing resemblance to being spatial.
Yes, Nautilus, Konq, and Windows Explorer all do the same thing, viewed from a high level. But when you get down to the implementation level, Windows Explorer kicks ass on the others. I wish that wasn't true, but it is.
Konqueror is my browser of choice and I love it. Before Konqueror got tabbed browsing, I used Galeon. Before that, I used regular Mozilla. Web browsers are one of those areas where open source is really showing them how its done. The only major browser today to still not have tabbed browsing is IE. That from the company that talks so much about innovation:-) The sad fact is, MS just doesn't innovate much anymore, not in any meaningful way. They're too focused on Palladium on one hand, geegaws, on the other, and on yet a few more, circling the wagons and fighting off the fierce Linux hordes.
Windows Explorer was innovative, but they did it along time ago and it hasn't changed much in ages. That's a Good Thing.
You're perfectly right that Konqueror does things that Windows Explorer doesn't. But sometimes less is more. Sometimes just different is more. Windows Explorer doesn't try to be a Swiss Army Knife. It's just a file manager. Konqueror tries to be both a browser and a file manager. It succeeds very well at one of those things.
Don't worry, I won't shoot you. Saving all my bullets for Spatial Gnome:-)
Well, if you only go on one photoshoot in 2001, that might work, but I took a lot of pictures at a lot of different places and times in 2001, and sometimes the same place more than once at different times of the year. That wouldn't fly too well if I dumped it all in a folder called "Photoshoot2001" even if there weren't duplicate file names (which there would be).
I don't really see, though, what's different in those examples, except they have a lot less stuff and a lot less depth. My stuff is also organized by type/place/general date, so you can see things like this:
~/PHOTO/PLACES/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2001.08.01
If I don't look at any of those pictures for six months or a year, I may not remember the full path right off the top of my head, but if I want to see the pictures at took at the Sagami-ko Hanabi Taikai 2001, I can find them pretty darned quickly anyway.
That is highly organized.
Is that what Spatial Nautilus is telling you to do? Uh, gee, no. The reviewer is telling you to screw organization and dump all your stuff in just a couple or so levels of folders to make Spatial Nautilus work well, because it doesn't work well with well-organized, properly thought-out, deeply hierarchical filesystems.
OK, I have to shoot you once for getting what they are telling you so wrong. Bang!:-)
Put another way, if your home directory isn't a mess, Spatial Nautilus can't handle it, so you should make a mess of your home directory just to conform yourself to the shortcomings of the software.
There's a reason why spatial file browsers have fallen by the wayside. They suck. Now, the Gnome project rediscovers them and calls it innovation. That was innovation when Apple invented the Mac and its OS. Of course, some innovations prove unworkable, and spatial file browsing was one of them. Too bad the Gnome project didn't get the message. That's why I switched to KDE from Gnome when KDE 3 came out. They leaped so far ahead of Gnome that I figured I had to switch and Gnome would never catch up. They still haven't, and Spacy Nautilus actually makes them slide further behind.
Easy to plant someone's blood or semen on the scene of a crime?
Uh, yeah, every cop carries a vial of someone's blood and a condom full of his splooge around in the trunk of the patrol car.
Seriously, though, look at the way DNA is used in law enforcement cases. DNA evidence is sometimes used to convict, and it's highly reliable. Something people in this thread seem to be paying no attention to, though, is the number of recent cases where a person previously convicted of a crime has been freed because DNA evidence conclusively proved they could not possibly have done it.
Now, if a DNA fingerprint database had been available at the time of their convictions - many of which were 10-20 years ago - they would never have gone to trial in the first place, let alone be convicted.
As far as your objection to a full search of a DNA database to find a suspect, I wonder if you object to doing a full search of the existing fingerprint database to find a suspect? Because that's a routine procedure anytime fingerprints are lifted from a crime scene, and while it does help the police catch suspects and probably no one thinks it's a bad idea, it is far more prone to error - both human and technical - than a DNA fingerprint database would be.
If you get a match on the DNA database, it's far more certain than a fingerprint match, and really, certain far beyond a reasonable doubt. Would DNA evidence alone be enough for a conviction? Not in most cases. You'd need something else. It would be a powerful piece of evidence, especially in a case that was purely circumstantial, but if you had nothing else, it would not be enough.
For example, let's consider an alleged rape, the area where there is the most potential for abuse. A victim claims to have been raped, the police recover semen and take a DNA sample. There's nothing in the database, but they catalog it. One day a few months later, somebody is arrested for, say, felony drunk driving after he crashes his car into a tree and is found to be way beyond the legal limit. They take a DNA sample and find that it matches the one taken from the alleged rape victim.
At this point, he is likely to be charged with rape, but it still has to be proven. Right now, we have a he said/she said, and he is probably going to say it was consensual sex. The DA will have to take it to court and convince a jury it wasn't. Essentially, then, you have the same thing as we have with the Kobe Bryant case. She says she was raped, he says it was consensual. All other evidence is circumstantial. DNA would presumably prove he had sex with her, but he doesn't deny that.
While there is a distant potential for abuse, the potential is much lower than there is for abuse of the fingerprint database. And by the way, you might not know how lax the standards are for getting into the fingerprint database. Let me tell you. I once worked for a bank. Everyone who works for a bank is fingerprinted - all ten fingers - and their prints go into the FBI database. I suppose they probably stay their permanently. I haven't worked their for over 15 years, but my fingerprints are still on file with the FBI. So what?
Finally, as others have said, the only difference between a DNA fingerprint database and a database of actual fingerprints, is the DNA print database is far more accurate. Everyone arrested on felony charges is fingerprinted and those prints go into the database. Doing the same with DNA prints is nothing but a Good Thing.
Who sits in front of their computer staring at a webcam talking to other people?
Hmmm... Well, when you're halfway around the world from your wife and kids, have been for more than 7 months and will be for 3 - 6 more months, a webcam and voice chat look pretty darned good. My youngest was 2 weeks old the last time I saw her, and now she propels herself around in a walker. I'd have nothing but still photos if not for that webcam.
Of course, I use Yahoo for that, not AIM, and I certainly hope it will continue to be free.
OK, that sounds interesting. How close is a real-world implementation of a db-filesystem? What kind of performance benchmarks could expect to see on it, especially as a filesystem gets big.
My company has a MySQL database of over 3 terabytes, and even on something as fast as MySQL, performance issues crop up at that level. I don't expect to ever have a three terabyte/home, but some people do have, shall we say, rather large collections of binary files. How would performance of a db-filesystem compare to a hierarchical filesystem? Got any cool links to recommend on this topic?
I mean, uh, "Speaking of Poland." Gotta remember to use that dang Preview button more often:-)
And as a slight follow-up, the idea of getting into a plane with that guy at the controls terrifies me. I hope he never got a U.S. commercial pilot's license. I can just imagine him arguing with the ground controllers about what they really mean by entering a holding pattern at 14,000 feet, and that maybe 14,000 is really the same thing as 10,000 so he'll just go there instead. He was that obtuse, truly.
I do things the way you do, but I often have 20 - 30 tabs open on various bits of documentation and what not. Just because I have to let something sit for a couple of days and come back to it later, that doesn't mean I necessarily want to close the tabs relevant to it.
Flying to Poland, yeah, I wasn't gonna go there, but since you did, let me give you this anecdote.
In college, I worked in the campus tutoring center, tutoring (mostly) ESL students in English. I had this one student, he was from Poland. He said he'd been an airline pilot there, and hoped to one day get a commercial pilot's license in the United States. Now let me tell you, he was the most obtuse individual I have ever encountered, anywhere, ever. He would read some standard work of literature (Madame Bovary, for instance) and draw conclusions about what the author was trying to say that no rational person could possibly draw. His teachers sent him to the tutoring center halfway for help with the mechanics of English, and probably halfway because of his nutty conclusions. I helped him with the former, there was no helping him with the latter. He thought what he thought, and that was it.
Looking back, he was probably just the kind of obtuse person who might like spatial Nautilus, and he was from Poland, too. Coincidence? Maybe.
That sounds like a good idea, but as the other poster mentioned, that can lead to very long load times if you have thousands of photos in a single folder.
Moreover, as I mentioned in my own reply to someone else, there is the issue of filename collisions. It's a lot harder to have a unique filename among 5000 photos all dumped in the same folder than among 50 or 60 photos that have a globally unique path name and the filename only needs to be unique within the last folder at the end. How does iPhoto handle this? Or do you have to manually come up with a globally unique name for each photo?
I handle it, as I said, in the path. For example: ~/PHOTO/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2001.08.0 1
Now, I can guarantee that there are probably photos with the same filename in ~/PHOTO/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2000.08.01, but so what? The path is globally unique, it doesn't matter if the filename is or not.
I'm not familiar with BeFS, so that was interesting, thanks. In that context, the MIME-type approach sounds like it might actually be a good idea.
However, WRT the pseudo-db filesystem, does that mean it does away wholly or partly with directories? If so, doesn't this tend to lead to filename collisions, especially among thousands of photos? I wouldn't want to have to work to come up with a globally unique (within my system, of course) filename in place of having a hierarchical directory structure provide the uniqueness.
I'm only running a mid-range computer (Athlon XP 2200+, 512 meg, Radeon 9000, Software RAID 1 on two WD 120 gig drives), but it xfe literally leapt onto the screen as soon as I hit enter. It took one second to load.
XFE isn't just fast to load, either. It's amazingly responsive to use, too.
Bash will remain my file manager of choice, but thanks much for this tip. I can really recommend XFE to people who demand a GUI file manager.
Oh, the reviewer has a ready answer to that. You shouldn't use nested directories because they are a "bad habit':
What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits. It's really hard to use a spatial file browser if someone keeps his or her files in a ten-folder-deep structure.
OK, fine. I'll just take all of my thousands of digital photos collected over the years, which are now organized in nested directories so that I can easily find photos of my kids that I took last November, or of fireworks at Sagami-ko, in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 2001, and dump all those pictures into one big folder so that Spatial Nautilus can deal with them better? Riiiiight...
I typically have four levels deep below my PHOTOS directory, and in some places it's six. Drilling down to the bottom of that would leave me with a lot of desktop clutter, to say the least. His answer to that? Well, he's got a couple, and one we've already seen: just get rid of your nice, well-organized directory structure (and we're going to call being organized an old bad habit now, too; I wonder if he uses drawer dividers in his desk, or just throws everything into the drawers in one big pile? I think I can guess).
His other answer is to cause the parent window to automatically close by either double-clicking the middle button to open something, or using shift + double-click. This puts extra burden on the user; automatically closing the parent should be the default, and if you want to keep it, you should have to double middle-click.
He also praises the old Apple Finder for being spatial. As a person who used a Mac in those days, I have to tell you that Finder's spatial behavior (I just called it "pain in the ass") was horrible. It drove me crazy, and I found Windows Explorer to be an incredible breath of fresh air in comparison. It's so much easier to drag a bunch of files from one folder to another in a tree view than it is in a spatial view (and of course, now as a convert to Linux, I find it easiest to move a bunch of files from point A to point B by using cp in a shell; beats graphical file managers easily). He might want to consider the reason that nobody uses spatial file managers anymore is that they were just a failure in practice, no matter how good they sound on paper. I fully agree with the OSNews EIC's opinion: spatial browsers and hierarchical filesystems don't mix. I am not, however, convinced that the future of a MIME-based (ugh!) or db-based (maybe) file system is the answer.
Overall, the reviewer's defense of Spatial Nautilus seems to be based on two things:
It's the new thing, it's what they've done, so you must like it. If you don't like it, you are Wrong
General perversity of mind, like when he discusses tabbed browsing and says:
I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs
Uh, hello! That's the whole point of tabbed browsing; so that you don't have to have a bunch of browser windows open at once. I only open a second one if I have too many tabs in the first one and they're too small to see.
In the end, the reviewer is just grasping at straws to try and defend the horrible idea that is Spatial Gnome, and he accuses those who dislike it of only disliking it because it doesn't work like Windows Explorer. It would seem that he is bound to the idea that because it comes from Microsoft, Windows Explorer cannot be good. Could it be, just maybe, that the reason people like Windows Explorer is because it works so well? I dislike Microsoft the company, and I don't much care for most of their products either, but Windows Explorer is quite simply the best thing they've ever done.
My file manager of choice is a bash shell, so it doesn't matter a great deal to me what's on the desktop as a file manager. When I was a Gnome user I never use
Of course, I have a counterpoint, and I'm not trolling you:-)
Not a large percentage, it's true, but some of that spam does get routed through Belgium on its way back to mailboxes here in the United States. It wouldn't be that hard for them to put in a set of automatic filters to discard anything that wasn't and then go after the the relay points, if that's within their power.
Another option, if you can afford it and it's available in your area (not you in particular, jrockway, but people in general who need speed and no cap) is to get Roadrunner Business class. I've had it for about a year, I pay $80 for 2 meg down, 512 kbps up, another 10 for a static IP, and no restrictions. I can do whatever I want, transfer whatever I want, with the usual caveat that it has to be legal (but I bet no one is watching, although I'm sure a person spamming would hear from them in short order).
I've never had an outage, never experienced any speed fluctuation, it's been great. I can count on wire speed at any time of the day or night.
The CPE is a Zyxel Prestige 944 router with a built-in four-port 10/100 switch. Of course, not trusting anything I don't control, I have a router of my own connected to the Zyxel, and that's the one that actually NATs my internal network.
It's a nice setup, and if you have a question and need to talk to support, you get to talk to polite, courteous, and knowledgeable people.
The only problem I've ever experienced was the first router they gave me died the day after it was installed (a Saturday, naturally), but they had someone out there with a new router Monday, and a week or two later I actually got a letter of apology from a vice-president who is the area manager around here. I practically fell off my chair at that!
And no, I'm not a shill or an employee of Roadrunner Business Class:-) I am a really happy customer, though.
Speaking as a professional spam fighter (kind of a nice job to have, really), I fully concur. I can't imagine what Halo1 was thinking of by obfuscating an email address for reporting spam. You are absolutely correct in your "cutting out the middleman" analysis, and the person who de-obfuscated the address should indeed be modded Insightful.
In the late 1990s I got an old PC in a LUG raffle.
It had been donated by a company, and had apparently been used by someone in the financial department.
How do I know? Windows and all of that person's spreadsheets and other documents, filled with confidential financial information, were still on it, the disk was totally untouched.
I got their contact info from the LUG and let them know what I'd found and asked if they wanted the thing back, or at least the disk out of it. The response was basically that if I was honest enough to report it and offer to give it back (and I did offer to give it to them; I didn't ask for anything for it, not even the price of my raffle ticket), they trusted me to destroy the data myself, so I could keep it. I didn't go to any great lengths to do that, but I did repartition it and install Linux. I don't remember what became of the PC. The disk eventually died and I destroyed it before disposing of it, even though the information was by then quite obsolete.
A few minor details of this story have been embellished a bit, basically to protect the guilty:-) However, any of the principals in those events would still recognize this story.
For that matter, I bet things like this are common enough that a lot of people who were not involved may nevertheless recognize this story and think it was the one they were involved in:-)
Well, since we're all so far OT (or are we, since this started out in the context of charitable giving of a computer to a church), I'll keep right on down that road.
Thank you. I'm sick and tired of all these atheists and their sympathizers forcing their beliefs (or lack thereof) on others. If they don't believe in God, why don't they just shut up and believe what they believe (or don't) privately instead of evangelizing it all over the place to the point where atheism is - gasp! - a de facto religion.
Don't you atheists hate it when someone turns your empty and bogus arguments against you?:_)
I'll tell you a few things. First, nothing in the constitution says anyone has a right not to be offended, so if militant homosexuals can march in gay pride parades dressed as nuns and we Christians just have to shut up and take it because they are exercising their right to free speech, when we evangelize and preach the gospel of the Risen Christ, Savior of the world, you are going to just shut up and take it while we exercise our constitutional right to free speech. Who knows? A few of you might even be saved.
There are things that we all would be quite happy to see people shut up and not talk about. I don't like Nazis and what they say. I wish they'd shut up and go away. I dislike the KKK just as much. My wife isn't white and our children are half-white and half not, and they would say their is something wrong with me and them for that.
I don't like liberals who throw around the word Nazi as a term of derision for anyone they don't like and/or disagree with. It profanes what the millions of Jews and others suffered at the hands of real Nazis. I don't like conservatives who throw around the word communist about anyone they disagree with or don't like. It profanes what even greater numbers of people suffered at the hands of communist despots like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. There are real Communists and real Nazis out there, and we need to reserve those epithets for them.
I have a whole laundry list of words and thoughts I wish people would never say and never think. Those of you who disagree with me probably have a different but similarly long list of your own, and you don't like it when you hear people say that President Bush is a good and honest man and Saddam Hussein was and is an evil and dishonest one and the United States, Iraq, and the entire world are better off with him in a prison cell and Iraq on track for true sovereignty and free elections. It's funny that people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who were true liberals, have the most in common not with those who today call themselves liberals, but who call themselves conservatives. Most liberals have far more beliefs in common with dictators of the left or right (but mostly of the left) than they do with Washington, Jefferson, or any other true liberals. And I bet that truth hurts and you wish I'd shut up and not say it.
Tough. If you don't like freedom of speech, go move to some country that doesn't have it, and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Just be sure you pick one that suppresses the kind of speech you don't like and allows that kind that you do, and hope they never change their minds on that and throw you in jail for speaking. Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say anything you want, while others have to shut theirs mouths and agree with you, or at least shut their mouths. You may not like to hear people talk about God in public, but it's their right. Live with it.
Finally, a word about "Forcing beliefs on others." A person speaking about God in a public place is forcing no belief on anyone. Indeed, that sort of thing usually comes from the left. Examples? Barring students from exercising their constitutional right to pray at school because you don't like it. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof." Most of you on the left like to pretend
Intent doesn't have to be proven. All that has to be proven is that you did it. Catching you with your camcorder switched on and pointed at the screen is more than sufficient:-)
Also, previous nefarious activity proves nothing, and is usually not even admissible as evidence. The fact that you've done it before doesn't prove you did it this time. Now, to a reasonable person, it makes your guilt more likely, but lots of reasonable things are not allowed in court. Commonly, only evidence directly proving or disproving guilty is allowed.
IANAL but I will take that LSAT this summer. How's that for a disclaimer?:-)
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Yes, I'd expect that to be no problem. 100 megabit FTTH has been available in Japan about three years now, and it works quite well.
8 megabit DSL also showed up there about 3 years ago, and 40 megabit DSL is available right now, at least in some places.
It all works. When you need more bandwidth, you just pile on more. If an OC-3 isn't enough, run an OC-12. If that doesn't do it, get more than one. I was a network engineer at an ISP in Japan, and one thing I (and you, too, seeing as you work at a CLEC) can tell people is that there's always more bandwidth available. Just open your checkbook :-)
Just to clarify (gotta preview more often :-p) it boosts our business by making spam worse, thus driving more customers our way in search of relief from spam.
Do I have to take a number and stand in line to execute some of them?
Seriously, one of the reasons they aren't going forward with it is that they believe the list would mostly just serve as a golden list of known good addresses for spammers, who don't much care about legality and even less about ethics, anyway. I work for a large email security firm, and I completely agree with that. I have a front-row seat to the effect that YOU CAN SPAM act had on reducing spam, and it was zero, at best. At worst, it encouraged it by superceding existing state laws while simultaneously granting spammers free reign to spam as long as they put in a working remove link.
Some put in the link, most don't. Among the ones that do, it seems to be the case that they remove you only from that one list but not from all their lists. And since you have now confirmed your address as working, you probably go on their gold master list.
The CAN SPAM act seems like something the DMA must have bought and paid for. It's certainly no friend of spam victims, but to the extent that it boost our business by granting a (queue James Bond music) License to Spam, it helps companies like mine.
You must conform to IE; it's > 90% of the browser market, to "give up on IE" is to admit you create shoddy sites or intranets.
Is a 100% W3C-compliant site shoddy if it doesn't render properly in IE, or is IE shoddy? I agree with you that for commercial websites, they have to render properly in IE because of its overwhelming market share, but IE, and least in the days when I was last a web developer, was well-known to break W3C compliance all over the place. I would be pretty surprised if anything has changed. To call a site shoddy because it won't render in IE even if it's clearly the browser's fault because the site is just wrong thinking.
Sadly, Netscape/Mozilla in those days wasn't fully W3C-compliant either, but it did a much better job than IE. To make a site really perfect for both required (and probably still requires) some Javascript magic to serve up a page that is broken in the right ways for the target browser. This can be necessary on a commercial site, for obvious reasons.
However, on a site that is your own personal page, it is perfectly justified (and I have done this) to just put up a notice that says "This site is 100% W3C-compliant; if it doesn't look right in your browser, get a better browser." That's telling it like it is, and you have no obligation to do anything else on your personal site.
IE doesn't conform to standards?
Well, since Microsoft has been a W3C member for years, then it's about time they get off their asses and fix their browser. That doesn't mean it can't also render MSHTML (that horrid, crufty mess), but as a starting point, it must render W3C-compliant sites correctly. To do less is to just admit they created (and continue to release) a shoddy browser.
There's no way I'd fly in it. With a name like that, it can't go more than a few days without crashing. Plus, any time the pilot changed any control, you'd have to land and take off again, so even if it didn't crash, it would take forever to get anywhere.
Your experience must be pretty narrow, then. I lived in Japan for eight years and Viet Nam for one, and everywhere, the pronunciation issues that make up what we would call a Japanese or Vietnamese accent made their way into writing, frequently even among advanced speakers such as my wife.
If you have many (or any) Japanese friends, you've probably noticed, for instance, that when faced with an "Is that word spelled with an L or an R?" choice, they will usually get it wrong. A close friend of mine has a master's degree in EE, works for a large Japanese electronics company, spends many months out of the year in the United States (in places where there aren't a lot of Japanese), speaks English extremely well, and still flubs the l/r thing all the time.
The guy's spelling level is in line with his overall grammar, and we don't know anything about his educational background. He may have learned English at a conversation school, where spelling isn't taught at all.
He may be going on nothing but what he learned in high school plus his experience since then.
I'm sure he really is a native Chinese speaker.
The guy was obtuse. Unbelievably, and that's not a moronic comment. It's the truth. And if you met him, seeing as you hate spatial browsing, you'd likely think he was obtuse yourself.
;-)
If you're going to (wrongly) call people moronic, you should at least have the guts to log in. Afraid of losing some precious karma for being modded flamebait? How obtuse
It's not what it does, it's the way it does it.
:-) The sad fact is, MS just doesn't innovate much anymore, not in any meaningful way. They're too focused on Palladium on one hand, geegaws, on the other, and on yet a few more, circling the wagons and fighting off the fierce Linux hordes.
Open up Windows Explorer and what do you get? A nice sensible directory tree in the left pane, and a file list for the CWD in the right pane.
Open up Konqueror and what do you get?
A system view and LAN browser on the left, and a single pane (or perhaps I should say pain) for the file/directory tree on the right. If you want to drag and drop files between two directories, you need to open another instance of Konqueror, which bears a disturbing resemblance to being spatial.
Yes, Nautilus, Konq, and Windows Explorer all do the same thing, viewed from a high level. But when you get down to the implementation level, Windows Explorer kicks ass on the others. I wish that wasn't true, but it is.
Konqueror is my browser of choice and I love it. Before Konqueror got tabbed browsing, I used Galeon. Before that, I used regular Mozilla. Web browsers are one of those areas where open source is really showing them how its done. The only major browser today to still not have tabbed browsing is IE. That from the company that talks so much about innovation
Windows Explorer was innovative, but they did it along time ago and it hasn't changed much in ages. That's a Good Thing.
You're perfectly right that Konqueror does things that Windows Explorer doesn't. But sometimes less is more. Sometimes just different is more. Windows Explorer doesn't try to be a Swiss Army Knife. It's just a file manager. Konqueror tries to be both a browser and a file manager. It succeeds very well at one of those things.
Don't worry, I won't shoot you. Saving all my bullets for Spatial Gnome :-)
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:-)
Well, if you only go on one photoshoot in 2001, that might work, but I took a lot of pictures at a lot of different places and times in 2001, and sometimes the same place more than once at different times of the year. That wouldn't fly too well if I dumped it all in a folder called "Photoshoot2001" even if there weren't duplicate file names (which there would be).
I don't really see, though, what's different in those examples, except they have a lot less stuff and a lot less depth. My stuff is also organized by type/place/general date, so you can see things like this:
~/PHOTO/PLACES/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2001.08.0
If I don't look at any of those pictures for six months or a year, I may not remember the full path right off the top of my head, but if I want to see the pictures at took at the Sagami-ko Hanabi Taikai 2001, I can find them pretty darned quickly anyway.
That is highly organized.
Is that what Spatial Nautilus is telling you to do?
Uh, gee, no. The reviewer is telling you to screw organization and dump all your stuff in just a couple or so levels of folders to make Spatial Nautilus work well, because it doesn't work well with well-organized, properly thought-out, deeply hierarchical filesystems.
OK, I have to shoot you once for getting what they are telling you so wrong. Bang!
Put another way, if your home directory isn't a mess, Spatial Nautilus can't handle it, so you should make a mess of your home directory just to conform yourself to the shortcomings of the software.
There's a reason why spatial file browsers have fallen by the wayside. They suck. Now, the Gnome project rediscovers them and calls it innovation. That was innovation when Apple invented the Mac and its OS. Of course, some innovations prove unworkable, and spatial file browsing was one of them. Too bad the Gnome project didn't get the message. That's why I switched to KDE from Gnome when KDE 3 came out. They leaped so far ahead of Gnome that I figured I had to switch and Gnome would never catch up. They still haven't, and Spacy Nautilus actually makes them slide further behind.
Easy to plant someone's blood or semen on the scene of a crime?
Uh, yeah, every cop carries a vial of someone's blood and a condom full of his splooge around in the trunk of the patrol car.
Seriously, though, look at the way DNA is used in law enforcement cases. DNA evidence is sometimes used to convict, and it's highly reliable. Something people in this thread seem to be paying no attention to, though, is the number of recent cases where a person previously convicted of a crime has been freed because DNA evidence conclusively proved they could not possibly have done it.
Now, if a DNA fingerprint database had been available at the time of their convictions - many of which were 10-20 years ago - they would never have gone to trial in the first place, let alone be convicted.
As far as your objection to a full search of a DNA database to find a suspect, I wonder if you object to doing a full search of the existing fingerprint database to find a suspect? Because that's a routine procedure anytime fingerprints are lifted from a crime scene, and while it does help the police catch suspects and probably no one thinks it's a bad idea, it is far more prone to error - both human and technical - than a DNA fingerprint database would be.
If you get a match on the DNA database, it's far more certain than a fingerprint match, and really, certain far beyond a reasonable doubt. Would DNA evidence alone be enough for a conviction? Not in most cases. You'd need something else. It would be a powerful piece of evidence, especially in a case that was purely circumstantial, but if you had nothing else, it would not be enough.
For example, let's consider an alleged rape, the area where there is the most potential for abuse. A victim claims to have been raped, the police recover semen and take a DNA sample. There's nothing in the database, but they catalog it. One day a few months later, somebody is arrested for, say, felony drunk driving after he crashes his car into a tree and is found to be way beyond the legal limit. They take a DNA sample and find that it matches the one taken from the alleged rape victim.
At this point, he is likely to be charged with rape, but it still has to be proven. Right now, we have a he said/she said, and he is probably going to say it was consensual sex. The DA will have to take it to court and convince a jury it wasn't. Essentially, then, you have the same thing as we have with the Kobe Bryant case. She says she was raped, he says it was consensual. All other evidence is circumstantial. DNA would presumably prove he had sex with her, but he doesn't deny that.
While there is a distant potential for abuse, the potential is much lower than there is for abuse of the fingerprint database. And by the way, you might not know how lax the standards are for getting into the fingerprint database. Let me tell you. I once worked for a bank. Everyone who works for a bank is fingerprinted - all ten fingers - and their prints go into the FBI database. I suppose they probably stay their permanently. I haven't worked their for over 15 years, but my fingerprints are still on file with the FBI. So what?
Finally, as others have said, the only difference between a DNA fingerprint database and a database of actual fingerprints, is the DNA print database is far more accurate. Everyone arrested on felony charges is fingerprinted and those prints go into the database. Doing the same with DNA prints is nothing but a Good Thing.
Who sits in front of their computer staring at a webcam talking to other people?
Hmmm... Well, when you're halfway around the world from your wife and kids, have been for more than 7 months and will be for 3 - 6 more months, a webcam and voice chat look pretty darned good. My youngest was 2 weeks old the last time I saw her, and now she propels herself around in a walker. I'd have nothing but still photos if not for that webcam.
Of course, I use Yahoo for that, not AIM, and I certainly hope it will continue to be free.
OK, that sounds interesting. How close is a real-world implementation of a db-filesystem? What kind of performance benchmarks could expect to see on it, especially as a filesystem gets big.
/home, but some people do have, shall we say, rather large collections of binary files. How would performance of a db-filesystem compare to a hierarchical filesystem? Got any cool links to recommend on this topic?
My company has a MySQL database of over 3 terabytes, and even on something as fast as MySQL, performance issues crop up at that level.
I don't expect to ever have a three terabyte
I mean, uh, "Speaking of Poland." Gotta remember to use that dang Preview button more often :-)
And as a slight follow-up, the idea of getting into a plane with that guy at the controls terrifies me. I hope he never got a U.S. commercial pilot's license. I can just imagine him arguing with the ground controllers about what they really mean by entering a holding pattern at 14,000 feet, and that maybe 14,000 is really the same thing as 10,000 so he'll just go there instead. He was that obtuse, truly.
Only 10 tabs? Wimp ;-)
I do things the way you do, but I often have 20 - 30 tabs open on various bits of documentation and what not. Just because I have to let something sit for a couple of days and come back to it later, that doesn't mean I necessarily want to close the tabs relevant to it.
Flying to Poland, yeah, I wasn't gonna go there, but since you did, let me give you this anecdote.
In college, I worked in the campus tutoring center, tutoring (mostly) ESL students in English. I had this one student, he was from Poland. He said he'd been an airline pilot there, and hoped to one day get a commercial pilot's license in the United States. Now let me tell you, he was the most obtuse individual I have ever encountered, anywhere, ever. He would read some standard work of literature (Madame Bovary, for instance) and draw conclusions about what the author was trying to say that no rational person could possibly draw. His teachers sent him to the tutoring center halfway for help with the mechanics of English, and probably halfway because of his nutty conclusions. I helped him with the former, there was no helping him with the latter. He thought what he thought, and that was it.
Looking back, he was probably just the kind of obtuse person who might like spatial Nautilus, and he was from Poland, too. Coincidence? Maybe.
That sounds like a good idea, but as the other poster mentioned, that can lead to very long load times if you have thousands of photos in a single folder.
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Moreover, as I mentioned in my own reply to someone else, there is the issue of filename collisions. It's a lot harder to have a unique filename among 5000 photos all dumped in the same folder than among 50 or 60 photos that have a globally unique path name and the filename only needs to be unique within the last folder at the end. How does iPhoto handle this? Or do you have to manually come up with a globally unique name for each photo?
I handle it, as I said, in the path. For example:
~/PHOTO/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2001.08.
Now, I can guarantee that there are probably photos with the same filename in ~/PHOTO/JAPAN/HANABI/SAGAMI-KO/2000.08.01, but so what? The path is globally unique, it doesn't matter if the filename is or not.
I'm not familiar with BeFS, so that was interesting, thanks. In that context, the MIME-type approach sounds like it might actually be a good idea.
However, WRT the pseudo-db filesystem, does that mean it does away wholly or partly with directories? If so, doesn't this tend to lead to filename collisions, especially among thousands of photos? I wouldn't want to have to work to come up with a globally unique (within my system, of course) filename in place of having a hierarchical directory structure provide the uniqueness.
apt-get install xfe, and wow!
That thing is *fast*
I'm only running a mid-range computer (Athlon XP 2200+, 512 meg, Radeon 9000, Software RAID 1 on two WD 120 gig drives), but it xfe literally leapt onto the screen as soon as I hit enter. It took one second to load.
XFE isn't just fast to load, either. It's amazingly responsive to use, too.
Bash will remain my file manager of choice, but thanks much for this tip. I can really recommend XFE to people who demand a GUI file manager.
What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits. It's really hard to use a spatial file browser if someone keeps his or her files in a ten-folder-deep structure.
OK, fine. I'll just take all of my thousands of digital photos collected over the years, which are now organized in nested directories so that I can easily find photos of my kids that I took last November, or of fireworks at Sagami-ko, in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 2001, and dump all those pictures into one big folder so that Spatial Nautilus can deal with them better? Riiiiight...
I typically have four levels deep below my PHOTOS directory, and in some places it's six. Drilling down to the bottom of that would leave me with a lot of desktop clutter, to say the least. His answer to that? Well, he's got a couple, and one we've already seen: just get rid of your nice, well-organized directory structure (and we're going to call being organized an old bad habit now, too; I wonder if he uses drawer dividers in his desk, or just throws everything into the drawers in one big pile? I think I can guess).
His other answer is to cause the parent window to automatically close by either double-clicking the middle button to open something, or using shift + double-click. This puts extra burden on the user; automatically closing the parent should be the default, and if you want to keep it, you should have to double middle-click.
He also praises the old Apple Finder for being spatial. As a person who used a Mac in those days, I have to tell you that Finder's spatial behavior (I just called it "pain in the ass") was horrible. It drove me crazy, and I found Windows Explorer to be an incredible breath of fresh air in comparison. It's so much easier to drag a bunch of files from one folder to another in a tree view than it is in a spatial view (and of course, now as a convert to Linux, I find it easiest to move a bunch of files from point A to point B by using cp in a shell; beats graphical file managers easily). He might want to consider the reason that nobody uses spatial file managers anymore is that they were just a failure in practice, no matter how good they sound on paper. I fully agree with the OSNews EIC's opinion: spatial browsers and hierarchical filesystems don't mix. I am not, however, convinced that the future of a MIME-based (ugh!) or db-based (maybe) file system is the answer.
Overall, the reviewer's defense of Spatial Nautilus seems to be based on two things:
I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs
Uh, hello! That's the whole point of tabbed browsing; so that you don't have to have a bunch of browser windows open at once. I only open a second one if I have too many tabs in the first one and they're too small to see.
In the end, the reviewer is just grasping at straws to try and defend the horrible idea that is Spatial Gnome, and he accuses those who dislike it of only disliking it because it doesn't work like Windows Explorer. It would seem that he is bound to the idea that because it comes from Microsoft, Windows Explorer cannot be good. Could it be, just maybe, that the reason people like Windows Explorer is because it works so well? I dislike Microsoft the company, and I don't much care for most of their products either, but Windows Explorer is quite simply the best thing they've ever done.
My file manager of choice is a bash shell, so it doesn't matter a great deal to me what's on the desktop as a file manager. When I was a Gnome user I never use
OK, you have a valid point there.
:-)
Of course, I have a counterpoint, and I'm not trolling you
Not a large percentage, it's true, but some of that spam does get routed through Belgium on its way back to mailboxes here in the United States. It wouldn't be that hard for them to put in a set of automatic filters to discard anything that wasn't and then go after the the relay points, if that's within their power.
Another option, if you can afford it and it's available in your area (not you in particular, jrockway, but people in general who need speed and no cap) is to get Roadrunner Business class. I've had it for about a year, I pay $80 for 2 meg down, 512 kbps up, another 10 for a static IP, and no restrictions. I can do whatever I want, transfer whatever I want, with the usual caveat that it has to be legal (but I bet no one is watching, although I'm sure a person spamming would hear from them in short order).
:-) I am a really happy customer, though.
I've never had an outage, never experienced any speed fluctuation, it's been great. I can count on wire speed at any time of the day or night.
The CPE is a Zyxel Prestige 944 router with a built-in four-port 10/100 switch. Of course, not trusting anything I don't control, I have a router of my own connected to the Zyxel, and that's the one that actually NATs my internal network.
It's a nice setup, and if you have a question and need to talk to support, you get to talk to polite, courteous, and knowledgeable people.
The only problem I've ever experienced was the first router they gave me died the day after it was installed (a Saturday, naturally), but they had someone out there with a new router Monday, and a week or two later I actually got a letter of apology from a vice-president who is the area manager around here. I practically fell off my chair at that!
And no, I'm not a shill or an employee of Roadrunner Business Class
Speaking as a professional spam fighter (kind of a nice job to have, really), I fully concur. I can't imagine what Halo1 was thinking of by obfuscating an email address for reporting spam. You are absolutely correct in your "cutting out the middleman" analysis, and the person who de-obfuscated the address should indeed be modded Insightful.
In the late 1990s I got an old PC in a LUG raffle.
:-) However, any of the principals in those events would still recognize this story.
:-)
It had been donated by a company, and had apparently been used by someone in the financial department.
How do I know? Windows and all of that person's spreadsheets and other documents, filled with confidential financial information, were still on it, the disk was totally untouched.
I got their contact info from the LUG and let them know what I'd found and asked if they wanted the thing back, or at least the disk out of it. The response was basically that if I was honest enough to report it and offer to give it back (and I did offer to give it to them; I didn't ask for anything for it, not even the price of my raffle ticket), they trusted me to destroy the data myself, so I could keep it. I didn't go to any great lengths to do that, but I did repartition it and install Linux. I don't remember what became of the PC. The disk eventually died and I destroyed it before disposing of it, even though the information was by then quite obsolete.
A few minor details of this story have been embellished a bit, basically to protect the guilty
For that matter, I bet things like this are common enough that a lot of people who were not involved may nevertheless recognize this story and think it was the one they were involved in
Well, since we're all so far OT (or are we, since this started out in the context of charitable giving of a computer to a church), I'll keep right on down that road.
:_)
Thank you. I'm sick and tired of all these atheists and their sympathizers forcing their beliefs (or lack thereof) on others. If they don't believe in God, why don't they just shut up and believe what they believe (or don't) privately instead of evangelizing it all over the place to the point where atheism is - gasp! - a de facto religion.
Don't you atheists hate it when someone turns your empty and bogus arguments against you?
I'll tell you a few things. First, nothing in the constitution says anyone has a right not to be offended, so if militant homosexuals can march in gay pride parades dressed as nuns and we Christians just have to shut up and take it because they are exercising their right to free speech, when we evangelize and preach the gospel of the Risen Christ, Savior of the world, you are going to just shut up and take it while we exercise our constitutional right to free speech. Who knows? A few of you might even be saved.
There are things that we all would be quite happy to see people shut up and not talk about. I don't like Nazis and what they say. I wish they'd shut up and go away. I dislike the KKK just as much. My wife isn't white and our children are half-white and half not, and they would say their is something wrong with me and them for that.
I don't like liberals who throw around the word Nazi as a term of derision for anyone they don't like and/or disagree with. It profanes what the millions of Jews and others suffered at the hands of real Nazis. I don't like conservatives who throw around the word communist about anyone they disagree with or don't like. It profanes what even greater numbers of people suffered at the hands of communist despots like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. There are real Communists and real Nazis out there, and we need to reserve those epithets for them.
I have a whole laundry list of words and thoughts I wish people would never say and never think. Those of you who disagree with me probably have a different but similarly long list of your own, and you don't like it when you hear people say that President Bush is a good and honest man and Saddam Hussein was and is an evil and dishonest one and the United States, Iraq, and the entire world are better off with him in a prison cell and Iraq on track for true sovereignty and free elections. It's funny that people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who were true liberals, have the most in common not with those who today call themselves liberals, but who call themselves conservatives. Most liberals have far more beliefs in common with dictators of the left or right (but mostly of the left) than they do with Washington, Jefferson, or any other true liberals. And I bet that truth hurts and you wish I'd shut up and not say it.
Tough. If you don't like freedom of speech, go move to some country that doesn't have it, and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Just be sure you pick one that suppresses the kind of speech you don't like and allows that kind that you do, and hope they never change their minds on that and throw you in jail for speaking. Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say anything you want, while others have to shut theirs mouths and agree with you, or at least shut their mouths. You may not like to hear people talk about God in public, but it's their right. Live with it.
Finally, a word about "Forcing beliefs on others." A person speaking about God in a public place is forcing no belief on anyone. Indeed, that sort of thing usually comes from the left. Examples? Barring students from exercising their constitutional right to pray at school because you don't like it. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof." Most of you on the left like to pretend
Go use HotJava in a Solaris install, then come back and tell us about how negligible the performance hit is
Intent doesn't have to be proven. All that has to be proven is that you did it. Catching you with your camcorder switched on and pointed at the screen is more than sufficient :-)
:-)
Also, previous nefarious activity proves nothing, and is usually not even admissible as evidence. The fact that you've done it before doesn't prove you did it this time. Now, to a reasonable person, it makes your guilt more likely, but lots of reasonable things are not allowed in court. Commonly, only evidence directly proving or disproving guilty is allowed.
IANAL but I will take that LSAT this summer. How's that for a disclaimer?