We use both SpamAssassin and OpenBSD's spamd, to great effect. spamd does most of the work, though. Daniel Hartmeier (site down ATM, unfortunately) has an example of how to tie SA scores back into spamd for blacklisting, which is just awesome. I'd implement it here, but our current setup is effective enough as to not make it worth my time.
You missed my point. I'm not advocating that Intel should allow us to create interference; I'm saying that Intel's keeping drivers in binary form to prevent users from creating interference is a red herring. If a user wants to broadcast at a different frequency, they can have it easily. Intel is keeping parts of the driver closed for other reasons.
It does appear that Intel has changed their stance wrt to redistributing the microcode binaries. It is unclear, however, if this would meet the requirements needed by, say, OpenBSD. There is mention that the microcode requires a user-space regulatory daemon in some cases-- this probably wouldn't fly with that project.
That's not exactly what Lewis talks about in the National Review article. He's claiming that Kyoto failed on the cost/benefit analysis. It's a fair argument. The reference to Chirac is merely to point out that Kyoto's undoing wasn't entirely Bush's fault (which is only half-true; after all, doesn't the President have say over national priorities and international treaties?). You're point is to scare up the old "look, it's another attempt by the French to undermine our sovereignty!" which is untrue, and frankly, stupid.
The "we kept it in binary to appease the FCC" is bogus argument. Anyone can build a transmitter that interferes on any nearly frequency they so desire with simple analog electronics. If Intel was really so concerned-- why not prevent the device from broadcasting on those frequencies in hardware? Also, why not allow free redistribution of the firmware? The GPL/BSD drivers are useless without it. No, Intel's using that argument to distract you from the fact that the binaries compensate for garbage hardware, and they don't really give a shit about F/OSS.
I heard the lead-in for the story you mention this morning, over breakfast, but I did not hear the story myself (left to catch the train to work). But I remember wondering if they were going to mention the accident, and if not, then maybe NPR was running a fluff piece for CERN. You know, essentially recycling a positive press release that CERN may have put out in light of their recent embarrassment. The fact that you say they didn't makes me suspicious that this may be the case.
After a minute of searching, here's the NPR piece that ran this morning.
When you know how something is done efficiently, it doesn't matter at all what environment you get pushed into, it doesn't matter if someone comes up with the next generation of code creation tools, you will grow into it smoothly. This is true. I reached awhile ago, when which programming language I used didn't matter so much anymore. Nearly all modern languages offer the same features, and syntax is something you must get through, but once you know how to frame a problem in your mind, the solution usually just falls out. When a language is unfamiliar to me, pseudocode is very useful in this regard, until I can straighten out how to write the program in the new environment. I even find myself writing pseudocode for decisions I need to make in my everyday life-- it's a great way of abstracting a problem.
Anyhow, back to programming language not mattering-- I am not a proficient speaker of foreign languages (me "speaking French" is like a script kiddie "writing code"), but I do wonder if multi-lingual people, for whom languages come easy, think of it the same way.
Exactly. And for small and medium-sized businesses (200 employees), Exchange is very good at what it does. My problem with Exchange is that it requires an Active Directory, which means you now need to purchase another pile of machines to do DC work, fill your FSMO roles, run backups of said DCs, and so on. And, of course, if your userbase platform is not Windows, your Exchange client options are either a joke (Entourage on the Mac) or non-existent (Linux, BSD). It all adds up to a lot of money just to run an email/calendar server. Of course, if you already have 1) Windows clients, 2) an Active Directory, and 3) don't mind locking yourself in even further, then Exchange is a no-brainer. Once you're in... good luck getting out.
My company is 80% Windows, 20% Mac. We spend 0% of the time eliminating malware. Everyone is required to use Firefox, except in special cases (like intranet apps). I was worried that this number would go up once we removed our ageing web proxy. It hasn't.
Macs are certainly easier for the end-user, but they are most definitely not easier for the administrator. We use radmind here, and that made rollouts and patches easier, but MacOS/Open Directory's support for the kinds of group policy that are available via Active Directory still do not exist. Apple has the added burden of making Macs easily integratable into AD, which they've only been halfway successful with.
That said, scripting Macs is a breeze, especially since you can start them up and shut them down on a schedule; this is useful if you want to run maintenance jobs in the middle of the night. But Mac hardware-- it's simply gone from OK to worse. The old G4 machines were at least essentially standard PCs with a nonstandard mobo and processor. Newer machines have weird form factors and require special tools. Reminds me of the old days when you needed a 12" long Torx driver to work on your all-in-one Mac. Anyway, parts are expensive and generally not user-servicable. This is a necessity if you have a large installation. It is much more costly to have the company IT worker spending time on the phone with Apple diagnosing the problem (that the IT worker has usually already diagnosed himself), shipping the machine back to Apple for repair and then waiting for it to return, than it is just to pull a commodity part off the shelf for a PC and pop it in. Apple has a lot more work to do if they want the corporate environment.
Dude, everything breaks. Hard drives aren't better because they're in Apple machines. They're the same ones you find in PCs. Many of the other components as well (mobo: Intel, graphics: ATI, CD/DVD: Matsushita, etc). Unfortunately, the reality distortion field does not apply to components.
Someone who puts whiteout on the screen isn't going to have a hard time with jacks in their head? I don't think I want to be a party to the tech support call when they discover that plugging the coffee maker into their head wasn't such a good idea.
I understand the whole 'brain plasticity' argument. My point is this: why fucking bother? I don't think that the problem right now is that our input devices aren't up to the task; it's that most software sucks. If the last 40 years of software design is any indication of the future, I don't see software suckage changing much. Most software is bloated, buggy crap-- you want me to plug that into my head? No. Fucking. Way.
People can't 'use computers' because they need better software, not because the interface sucks. This is the classic 'solution in need of a problem'.
Is this still the case, though? Business-class airline tickets are going through the roof right now. My 5,000-ish-person company just dropped their deal with American Express (which runs a travel agency) because AmEx wanted to nearly triple our rates. We couldn't bargain them down. Since we frequently need to travel between Boston, NYC, and Virginia on short notice, paying the going airline rates was not feasible. We've switched to Acela whenever we need a quick trip-- but Acela is getting hard to book on short notice due to demand. I suspect we're not the only ones in this position.
Something like Acela, which is clearly a success (compare the time spent waiting in the airport to fly from Boston to New York, and the actual amount of time it takes to get to New York from Boston on the train-- Acela wins), makes me think that if Amtrak can't get that service profitable, they're doing something very wrong. Of course, I know nothing about Amtrak, except that it has been in the middle of a political tug-o-war for a long time-- maybe that's why they can't get their shit together.
Your're right. Spot on. I work with sales reps who have NJ as their territory. Combine 'salesman' with 'New Jersey', and holy shit... when their computers break, I'd rather unplug the phone and let them email me instead. The California reps are laid back to a fault. Not to stereotype. Or anything.
Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. Oh, wait, you mean, like with a screen, keyboard, and mouse? Not to belittle future improvements to the man-machine interface, but there's a reason why the video display/keyboard/mouse combination has been around so long: it works well with a minimum amount of training. That's not to say that using other senses won't enhance our computing experience (the belt mentioned in TFA is pretty cool), but I think KVM is a very flexible way of accomplishing this already.
It's funny. Now that I think of it, one of my favorite games of all time, Starflight II, had great box art. I bought the game simply because I loved the original game; no thought as to the artwork. But I do remember how intensely the pictures captured my imagination on the long car ride home from the store in the back of the family minivan (I lived in the boonies of Maine at the time). In fact, when I pictured what my own crew looked like, I pictured the crew shown on the cover.
Of course one of my other favorite games, Spaceward Ho!... not so good. IIRC, the "packaging" was photocopied (which explains why I can't find an example on the web). The game itself was fantastic.
Having volunteered many hours of my time to the FSF, I can say that I'm no stranger to them, and I think GNU has contributed immensely to the goal of software freedom. I think that making Free Software a "movement" was a good idea, and it attracted many people, like myself, who think that we should remove artifical barriers to computation. However, I feel that with the GPLv3, the FSF has strayed from their goal. Let's face it, the GPLv3 puts more restrictions on what you can do with software, not fewer. I am of the opinion that once a piece of software is written, it shouldn't have to be rewritten except to improve or adapt it. GPLv3 forces certain people to rewrite because they aren't ideologically aligned with the FSF.
When I write a piece of software, I want it to be free. That's why I don't use the GPL anymore, and that's why I won't be using the GPLv3 in the future. Presently, I use the ISC license and the WTFPL.
All "hardware" firewalls run software. Most of them run some variant of BSD or Linux. E.g., of the two "hardware" firewalls we bought at work ("enterprise-grade"), both were actually modified versions of FreeBSD.
You can skip the hardware firewall if you use a better OS.
The question is, if the FSF decides to take a hard stance on this and move their entire toolchain, utilities, and apps to the GPLv3, will their developer base follow them? I personally wouldn't see a reason to, and if I had a FSF-owned project, I would most certainly fork it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha, silly admin. My money's on greylisting.
We use both SpamAssassin and OpenBSD's spamd, to great effect. spamd does most of the work, though. Daniel Hartmeier (site down ATM, unfortunately) has an example of how to tie SA scores back into spamd for blacklisting, which is just awesome. I'd implement it here, but our current setup is effective enough as to not make it worth my time.
You missed my point. I'm not advocating that Intel should allow us to create interference; I'm saying that Intel's keeping drivers in binary form to prevent users from creating interference is a red herring. If a user wants to broadcast at a different frequency, they can have it easily. Intel is keeping parts of the driver closed for other reasons.
It does appear that Intel has changed their stance wrt to redistributing the microcode binaries. It is unclear, however, if this would meet the requirements needed by, say, OpenBSD. There is mention that the microcode requires a user-space regulatory daemon in some cases-- this probably wouldn't fly with that project.
That's not exactly what Lewis talks about in the National Review article. He's claiming that Kyoto failed on the cost/benefit analysis. It's a fair argument. The reference to Chirac is merely to point out that Kyoto's undoing wasn't entirely Bush's fault (which is only half-true; after all, doesn't the President have say over national priorities and international treaties?). You're point is to scare up the old "look, it's another attempt by the French to undermine our sovereignty!" which is untrue, and frankly, stupid.
The "we kept it in binary to appease the FCC" is bogus argument. Anyone can build a transmitter that interferes on any nearly frequency they so desire with simple analog electronics. If Intel was really so concerned-- why not prevent the device from broadcasting on those frequencies in hardware? Also, why not allow free redistribution of the firmware? The GPL/BSD drivers are useless without it. No, Intel's using that argument to distract you from the fact that the binaries compensate for garbage hardware, and they don't really give a shit about F/OSS.
I heard the lead-in for the story you mention this morning, over breakfast, but I did not hear the story myself (left to catch the train to work). But I remember wondering if they were going to mention the accident, and if not, then maybe NPR was running a fluff piece for CERN. You know, essentially recycling a positive press release that CERN may have put out in light of their recent embarrassment. The fact that you say they didn't makes me suspicious that this may be the case.
After a minute of searching, here's the NPR piece that ran this morning.
Anyhow, back to programming language not mattering-- I am not a proficient speaker of foreign languages (me "speaking French" is like a script kiddie "writing code"), but I do wonder if multi-lingual people, for whom languages come easy, think of it the same way.
Exactly. And for small and medium-sized businesses (200 employees), Exchange is very good at what it does. My problem with Exchange is that it requires an Active Directory, which means you now need to purchase another pile of machines to do DC work, fill your FSMO roles, run backups of said DCs, and so on. And, of course, if your userbase platform is not Windows, your Exchange client options are either a joke (Entourage on the Mac) or non-existent (Linux, BSD). It all adds up to a lot of money just to run an email/calendar server. Of course, if you already have 1) Windows clients, 2) an Active Directory, and 3) don't mind locking yourself in even further, then Exchange is a no-brainer. Once you're in... good luck getting out.
My company is 80% Windows, 20% Mac. We spend 0% of the time eliminating malware. Everyone is required to use Firefox, except in special cases (like intranet apps). I was worried that this number would go up once we removed our ageing web proxy. It hasn't.
Macs are certainly easier for the end-user, but they are most definitely not easier for the administrator. We use radmind here, and that made rollouts and patches easier, but MacOS/Open Directory's support for the kinds of group policy that are available via Active Directory still do not exist. Apple has the added burden of making Macs easily integratable into AD, which they've only been halfway successful with.
That said, scripting Macs is a breeze, especially since you can start them up and shut them down on a schedule; this is useful if you want to run maintenance jobs in the middle of the night. But Mac hardware-- it's simply gone from OK to worse. The old G4 machines were at least essentially standard PCs with a nonstandard mobo and processor. Newer machines have weird form factors and require special tools. Reminds me of the old days when you needed a 12" long Torx driver to work on your all-in-one Mac. Anyway, parts are expensive and generally not user-servicable. This is a necessity if you have a large installation. It is much more costly to have the company IT worker spending time on the phone with Apple diagnosing the problem (that the IT worker has usually already diagnosed himself), shipping the machine back to Apple for repair and then waiting for it to return, than it is just to pull a commodity part off the shelf for a PC and pop it in. Apple has a lot more work to do if they want the corporate environment.
"Unlimiteder."
Dude, everything breaks. Hard drives aren't better because they're in Apple machines. They're the same ones you find in PCs. Many of the other components as well (mobo: Intel, graphics: ATI, CD/DVD: Matsushita, etc). Unfortunately, the reality distortion field does not apply to components.
One more: putting Macrovision on their shit. Completely and utterly fucks with radmind. Fuck you, Adobe.
Someone who puts whiteout on the screen isn't going to have a hard time with jacks in their head? I don't think I want to be a party to the tech support call when they discover that plugging the coffee maker into their head wasn't such a good idea.
I understand the whole 'brain plasticity' argument. My point is this: why fucking bother? I don't think that the problem right now is that our input devices aren't up to the task; it's that most software sucks. If the last 40 years of software design is any indication of the future, I don't see software suckage changing much. Most software is bloated, buggy crap-- you want me to plug that into my head? No. Fucking. Way.
People can't 'use computers' because they need better software, not because the interface sucks. This is the classic 'solution in need of a problem'.
Is this still the case, though? Business-class airline tickets are going through the roof right now. My 5,000-ish-person company just dropped their deal with American Express (which runs a travel agency) because AmEx wanted to nearly triple our rates. We couldn't bargain them down. Since we frequently need to travel between Boston, NYC, and Virginia on short notice, paying the going airline rates was not feasible. We've switched to Acela whenever we need a quick trip-- but Acela is getting hard to book on short notice due to demand. I suspect we're not the only ones in this position.
Something like Acela, which is clearly a success (compare the time spent waiting in the airport to fly from Boston to New York, and the actual amount of time it takes to get to New York from Boston on the train-- Acela wins), makes me think that if Amtrak can't get that service profitable, they're doing something very wrong. Of course, I know nothing about Amtrak, except that it has been in the middle of a political tug-o-war for a long time-- maybe that's why they can't get their shit together.
If only I had mod points left.
Your're right. Spot on. I work with sales reps who have NJ as their territory. Combine 'salesman' with 'New Jersey', and holy shit... when their computers break, I'd rather unplug the phone and let them email me instead. The California reps are laid back to a fault. Not to stereotype. Or anything.
Danke. If I learned that once, it was most certainly lost in the folds of my brain.
It's funny. Now that I think of it, one of my favorite games of all time, Starflight II, had great box art. I bought the game simply because I loved the original game; no thought as to the artwork. But I do remember how intensely the pictures captured my imagination on the long car ride home from the store in the back of the family minivan (I lived in the boonies of Maine at the time). In fact, when I pictured what my own crew looked like, I pictured the crew shown on the cover.
Of course one of my other favorite games, Spaceward Ho!... not so good. IIRC, the "packaging" was photocopied (which explains why I can't find an example on the web). The game itself was fantastic.
Huh?
/. -- can't put in angle brackets!]
#include "stdio.h"
int main () {
char str = '4';
printf ("%i\n", (int) str);
return 0;
}
'4' is obviously 52. No problems comparing it to (int) 4.0 here!
[ed: stupid
Cool. I finally know what ??? means.
Which is exactly what I said the first time around.
In fact, she weighs next to nothing.
HAND.
Having volunteered many hours of my time to the FSF, I can say that I'm no stranger to them, and I think GNU has contributed immensely to the goal of software freedom. I think that making Free Software a "movement" was a good idea, and it attracted many people, like myself, who think that we should remove artifical barriers to computation. However, I feel that with the GPLv3, the FSF has strayed from their goal. Let's face it, the GPLv3 puts more restrictions on what you can do with software, not fewer. I am of the opinion that once a piece of software is written, it shouldn't have to be rewritten except to improve or adapt it. GPLv3 forces certain people to rewrite because they aren't ideologically aligned with the FSF.
When I write a piece of software, I want it to be free. That's why I don't use the GPL anymore, and that's why I won't be using the GPLv3 in the future. Presently, I use the ISC license and the WTFPL.
All "hardware" firewalls run software. Most of them run some variant of BSD or Linux. E.g., of the two "hardware" firewalls we bought at work ("enterprise-grade"), both were actually modified versions of FreeBSD.
You can skip the hardware firewall if you use a better OS.
The question is, if the FSF decides to take a hard stance on this and move their entire toolchain, utilities, and apps to the GPLv3, will their developer base follow them? I personally wouldn't see a reason to, and if I had a FSF-owned project, I would most certainly fork it.