I think you are misunderstanding the poster. The point is-- do not accept nondelivery (aka "bounce") messages from senders with misconfigured SMTP relays. This would be very easy to implement: bounce senders always set the "MAIL FROM" field to "[less than][greater than]". So if you receive an email from "[less than][greater than]", check it against the list. If it's from a misconfigured server, drop it.
This is one area where greylisting (taking advantage of the SMTP protocol to implement some primitive challenge-response) does not work, because MTAs involved in backscatter are indeed real SMTP servers.
BTW, interpret the "[less than][greater than]" as the actual angle braces. Stupid/. filter.
There are times when even braindead movies are enjoyable. Like when, say, you just finished your discrete math exam. So since I have this exam tonight, and Speed Racer isn't going to be out for another week, I'll just have to watch the old standby: Clint Eastwood. The only question is: Dirty Harry or westerns?
This is a great idea, low-tech, and often overlooked. I saw this a lot when I was hiking in the southern US-- hiking hostels would often set them up because they were cheap, easy to maintain, and worked well enough to satisfy us relatively undiscriminating hikers. We were used to jumping into cold mountain streams, so a solar shower that hit 90 degrees, even if we only had 2-3 minutes of hot water, was just glorious. I'm planning on doing this myself when I eventually have my own house, because it is such an elegant solution. I think some minor modifications to the designs I saw out there would make this even acceptable to skeptical folks like my girlfriend who like taking long-ish showers.
Very interesting! I was just speaking with my father about his early computer-controlled experiments the other day. He had a PDP-11/70 taking data from their interferometer. All of the software was written in assembly-- he even gave me the book to look at as I am learning IA-32 assembly at the moment (a vastly different beast, from the looks of it). His software was very sophisticated. So I just don't buy it when people say that languages like BASIC are worthless nowadays. Modern languages may make some tasks a lot simpler for a good programmer, but they also make understanding the operation of the program much harder! Even though I work in more "modern" languages all day (C++, PHP, Perl), I still feel like languages like C have an elegance-- a balance-- that newer languages lack.
Simple solution is to check the MD5. If it matches, you're fine. If you're worried about hogging the project's bandwidth, buy a CD set. The $50 will go to a good cause.
I think there will always be a place for beginner/simple languages, for two reasons:
* Not everyone wants to be a programmer-- some people just want to get stuff done. I trained a (very hesitant) group of people how to use SQL today; by the end of the session, they were surprised with the expressiveness and simplicity of the language. But it's not a "real" language. It's domain-specific, and that's fine. Same with regexps-- great at one thing; other things would totally suck. But do I really want to build my own pattern-matching (and more) state machine in C++? No f'ing way!
* You have to start somewhere. My first language was TI Extended BASIC, followed by QuickBASIC. I learned C when I was in middle school, but the jump was difficult. I don't think I truly understood modern languages until I was in college, after I learned about set theory, programming paradigms, and compiler design-- actually, I'm still learning every day. You can't ask a beginner to grasp all of that at once. You want to give them something simple, straightforward, expressive, but most importantly FUN. I had a ton of fun as a kid with BASIC, LOGO, and my all-time favorite as a kid, RoboWar. A sneaky way to teach a kid trig, I'll tell ya!
Anyhow, those goofy little languages were what kept me focused on honing my skills all those years. We definitely need them.
Since Canonical is a for-profit company, this raises an interesting question. Namely, how exactly are they making money? Easy: support. Software is free, but you need to pay if you want help. I don't see anything wrong with this, especially since it removes the desirability of keeping your customers on an upgrade treadmill. In my experience with so-called "enterprise" systems, the support contracts really are often worth it.
Just as a point of reference, I have a Soekris net4801-60 connected to a USB-audio adapter, PCI USB2 card and external USB hard disk, and this machine plays MP3s just fine. It was a little bit of a gamble when I purchased the hardware, since I did not know if it was fast enough, but I did some tests using mpg123 on a similar machine (AMD K6) and it handled MP3 playback just fine. I briefly thought I was in trouble when I discovered that the USB-audio device could only playback audio at 48KHz, but surprisingly, the Soekris is fast enough even to upsample 44KHz to 48KHz and play it back. It works well as long as I don't do big network transfers while I am playing music. BTW, the box runs OpenBSD, not Linux-- more out of familiarity on my part than technical merit. We're talking about a 586-class machine here, so I suspect that the machines in the article will do MP3 playback just fine. Ogg, I don't know-- I don't use it.
You know, I hear this criticism of Star Trek a lot, but in my opinion (from an admittedly pro-Trek standpoint), there's a lot more character depth than you'd see at first. If you're quickly turned off by, say, Kirk's melodrama, and you stop watching, then you're going to miss the better, more candid moments. Star Trek II, for example, where there's a subtext of old age and death vs. new life. The original series, I think, is remarkable for TV of that time for showing characters with their flaws. Kirk often makes the wrong decisions-- there's one episode where Spock repeatedly makes wrong decisions resulting in all of the red shirts in a landing party being skewered by savage aliens. Then, there's the love-hate tension between Spock and McCoy, which was revisited in Star Trek III. I could go on, but I think I might seriously jeopardize my opinion of myself...;^)
But this is a good use for yard waste in sub/urban areas. Boston is now switching to actually doing something with yard waste (capturing methane from a compost pile), but in a lot of places, this just gets dumped somewhere and ignored. I would prefer that people use yard waste to, you know, fertilize their lawns (instead of doing the chemlawn thing), but it's pretty clear that the reason they don't is because they want a beautiful, leaf-free lawn. I personally just want to see lawns go away in general.
OTOH, Apple's been around for nearly a decade longer than Dell, and people have been predicting Apple's demise since before even Dvorak began his torrent of verbal excrement. And yet, Apple has managed to persevere and surprise all of us over and over again. You may not like Apple, but you can't deny that they know how to weather ups and downs. Steve Jobs seems especially good at getting people excited about even their mundane products. I think Dell should be looking at Apple.
Hrm-- I don't remember paying that much. Maybe they've raised the price? It used to be called Idokorro SSH.
Looks like there's a free SSH client here, but I've never used it myself, so I can't tell you if it's any good. I've wondered how hard it would be to port an existing SSH implementation to the Blackberry-- unfortunately for me, I am not a Java developer (Blackberry SDK is Java). Now if there were only C bindings...
As far as the device being locked down-- it depends on who runs it for you. Mine is tied to a corporate BES server, which normally would mean bad things, except that I am the BES administrator for my company. But I think if you have a standalone device, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
The flipside to this is to make technology disruptive enough that there is no privacy for anyone, politicians included. That will result in either some kind of broad social values shift, or a massive backpedaling on the part of lawmakers.
I used to care about this subject a lot, and I spent a lot of time looking into one-time pads and other clever tricks. But then I my company sprung for a Blackberry-- problem solved. I now access my important information via SSH. EDGE ain't the fastest thing, but it's fast enough. In fact, it's faster than the old PBX modems we used to use when I was in college (19.2), so I find that PINE is quite useable on the device. Only downside: no arrow keys (or, at least, I can't figure out how to make the terminal emulator do them). So no curses-based games. Oh, and the Opera mini web browser is pretty sweet. I'm not a big fan of Opera on the desktop, but they've put together a very nice mobile version.
Another option is a PocketMail device, which just wins my geek heart over for bringing acoustically-coupled modems back into style. They were extremely popular about 5 years ago when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. All you need is a payphone, which is often easier to find than an internet cafe when traveling abroad. I would have picked one up myself, but then the aforementioned Blackberry came into my life.
It's a shame that burial costs so much. After all, we have our own dirt and shovels. I like the idea of a muslin bag "coffin". OTOH, does "being thrown by a trebuchet" count as a donation to science?;^)
Good idea, but you'd want to make sure that Phalanx@Home is a securely-written (e.g., privilege-separated, full-paranoia input validation, all passed communication is unreadable by the node, etc...) application so that it cannot be taken over by a 'bad' botnet operator. Otherwise, thanks for the botnet, UDub!
Tell that to an IT department that wants to stop using Windows. There are some applications that you cannot get rid of, without great pain, e.g., payroll software. Thinstall looks very appealing to them.
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I think you are misunderstanding the poster. The point is-- do not accept nondelivery (aka "bounce") messages from senders with misconfigured SMTP relays. This would be very easy to implement: bounce senders always set the "MAIL FROM" field to "[less than][greater than]". So if you receive an email from "[less than][greater than]", check it against the list. If it's from a misconfigured server, drop it.
/. filter.
This is one area where greylisting (taking advantage of the SMTP protocol to implement some primitive challenge-response) does not work, because MTAs involved in backscatter are indeed real SMTP servers.
BTW, interpret the "[less than][greater than]" as the actual angle braces. Stupid
Now a Voltron movie-- that would get us off our asses!
There are times when even braindead movies are enjoyable. Like when, say, you just finished your discrete math exam. So since I have this exam tonight, and Speed Racer isn't going to be out for another week, I'll just have to watch the old standby: Clint Eastwood. The only question is: Dirty Harry or westerns?
True. Good idea.
This is a great idea, low-tech, and often overlooked. I saw this a lot when I was hiking in the southern US-- hiking hostels would often set them up because they were cheap, easy to maintain, and worked well enough to satisfy us relatively undiscriminating hikers. We were used to jumping into cold mountain streams, so a solar shower that hit 90 degrees, even if we only had 2-3 minutes of hot water, was just glorious. I'm planning on doing this myself when I eventually have my own house, because it is such an elegant solution. I think some minor modifications to the designs I saw out there would make this even acceptable to skeptical folks like my girlfriend who like taking long-ish showers.
Cool article. Thanks.
Very interesting! I was just speaking with my father about his early computer-controlled experiments the other day. He had a PDP-11/70 taking data from their interferometer. All of the software was written in assembly-- he even gave me the book to look at as I am learning IA-32 assembly at the moment (a vastly different beast, from the looks of it). His software was very sophisticated. So I just don't buy it when people say that languages like BASIC are worthless nowadays. Modern languages may make some tasks a lot simpler for a good programmer, but they also make understanding the operation of the program much harder! Even though I work in more "modern" languages all day (C++, PHP, Perl), I still feel like languages like C have an elegance-- a balance-- that newer languages lack.
Whew! Somebody needs a timeout. List of MD5s.
Why not? What is your criticism of BASIC? GOTOs?
Simple solution is to check the MD5. If it matches, you're fine. If you're worried about hogging the project's bandwidth, buy a CD set. The $50 will go to a good cause.
I think there will always be a place for beginner/simple languages, for two reasons:
* Not everyone wants to be a programmer-- some people just want to get stuff done. I trained a (very hesitant) group of people how to use SQL today; by the end of the session, they were surprised with the expressiveness and simplicity of the language. But it's not a "real" language. It's domain-specific, and that's fine. Same with regexps-- great at one thing; other things would totally suck. But do I really want to build my own pattern-matching (and more) state machine in C++? No f'ing way!
* You have to start somewhere. My first language was TI Extended BASIC, followed by QuickBASIC. I learned C when I was in middle school, but the jump was difficult. I don't think I truly understood modern languages until I was in college, after I learned about set theory, programming paradigms, and compiler design-- actually, I'm still learning every day. You can't ask a beginner to grasp all of that at once. You want to give them something simple, straightforward, expressive, but most importantly FUN. I had a ton of fun as a kid with BASIC, LOGO, and my all-time favorite as a kid, RoboWar. A sneaky way to teach a kid trig, I'll tell ya!
Anyhow, those goofy little languages were what kept me focused on honing my skills all those years. We definitely need them.
Just as a point of reference, I have a Soekris net4801-60 connected to a USB-audio adapter, PCI USB2 card and external USB hard disk, and this machine plays MP3s just fine. It was a little bit of a gamble when I purchased the hardware, since I did not know if it was fast enough, but I did some tests using mpg123 on a similar machine (AMD K6) and it handled MP3 playback just fine. I briefly thought I was in trouble when I discovered that the USB-audio device could only playback audio at 48KHz, but surprisingly, the Soekris is fast enough even to upsample 44KHz to 48KHz and play it back. It works well as long as I don't do big network transfers while I am playing music. BTW, the box runs OpenBSD, not Linux-- more out of familiarity on my part than technical merit. We're talking about a 586-class machine here, so I suspect that the machines in the article will do MP3 playback just fine. Ogg, I don't know-- I don't use it.
You know, I hear this criticism of Star Trek a lot, but in my opinion (from an admittedly pro-Trek standpoint), there's a lot more character depth than you'd see at first. If you're quickly turned off by, say, Kirk's melodrama, and you stop watching, then you're going to miss the better, more candid moments. Star Trek II, for example, where there's a subtext of old age and death vs. new life. The original series, I think, is remarkable for TV of that time for showing characters with their flaws. Kirk often makes the wrong decisions-- there's one episode where Spock repeatedly makes wrong decisions resulting in all of the red shirts in a landing party being skewered by savage aliens. Then, there's the love-hate tension between Spock and McCoy, which was revisited in Star Trek III. I could go on, but I think I might seriously jeopardize my opinion of myself... ;^)
But this is a good use for yard waste in sub/urban areas. Boston is now switching to actually doing something with yard waste (capturing methane from a compost pile), but in a lot of places, this just gets dumped somewhere and ignored. I would prefer that people use yard waste to, you know, fertilize their lawns (instead of doing the chemlawn thing), but it's pretty clear that the reason they don't is because they want a beautiful, leaf-free lawn. I personally just want to see lawns go away in general.
OTOH, Apple's been around for nearly a decade longer than Dell, and people have been predicting Apple's demise since before even Dvorak began his torrent of verbal excrement. And yet, Apple has managed to persevere and surprise all of us over and over again. You may not like Apple, but you can't deny that they know how to weather ups and downs. Steve Jobs seems especially good at getting people excited about even their mundane products. I think Dell should be looking at Apple.
Hrm-- I don't remember paying that much. Maybe they've raised the price? It used to be called Idokorro SSH.
Looks like there's a free SSH client here, but I've never used it myself, so I can't tell you if it's any good. I've wondered how hard it would be to port an existing SSH implementation to the Blackberry-- unfortunately for me, I am not a Java developer (Blackberry SDK is Java). Now if there were only C bindings...
As far as the device being locked down-- it depends on who runs it for you. Mine is tied to a corporate BES server, which normally would mean bad things, except that I am the BES administrator for my company. But I think if you have a standalone device, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
The flipside to this is to make technology disruptive enough that there is no privacy for anyone, politicians included. That will result in either some kind of broad social values shift, or a massive backpedaling on the part of lawmakers.
Sounds like there are too many friend functions fouling up Congress.
I used to care about this subject a lot, and I spent a lot of time looking into one-time pads and other clever tricks. But then I my company sprung for a Blackberry-- problem solved. I now access my important information via SSH. EDGE ain't the fastest thing, but it's fast enough. In fact, it's faster than the old PBX modems we used to use when I was in college (19.2), so I find that PINE is quite useable on the device. Only downside: no arrow keys (or, at least, I can't figure out how to make the terminal emulator do them). So no curses-based games. Oh, and the Opera mini web browser is pretty sweet. I'm not a big fan of Opera on the desktop, but they've put together a very nice mobile version.
Another option is a PocketMail device, which just wins my geek heart over for bringing acoustically-coupled modems back into style. They were extremely popular about 5 years ago when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. All you need is a payphone, which is often easier to find than an internet cafe when traveling abroad. I would have picked one up myself, but then the aforementioned Blackberry came into my life.
It's a shame that burial costs so much. After all, we have our own dirt and shovels. I like the idea of a muslin bag "coffin". OTOH, does "being thrown by a trebuchet" count as a donation to science? ;^)
Good idea, but you'd want to make sure that Phalanx@Home is a securely-written (e.g., privilege-separated, full-paranoia input validation, all passed communication is unreadable by the node, etc...) application so that it cannot be taken over by a 'bad' botnet operator. Otherwise, thanks for the botnet, UDub!
Tell that to an IT department that wants to stop using Windows. There are some applications that you cannot get rid of, without great pain, e.g., payroll software. Thinstall looks very appealing to them.
Yes, and they are an ecological disaster.