So what you're really saying, is that windows is difficult to use properly and therefore unsuitable for non-geek users? This actually tallies up with the story a few days ago about the linux based eee being more popular among general users.
Perhaps give the kids dual boot, and teach them that windows is for games, and ubuntu is for internet and any serious use. Also consider a games console, it's much harder to break one of those.
I would say it "works well enough" for them, but depending on what they need to do, they could probably benefit from ubuntu or something similar and have a system that "works better".
Remember, years ago typewriters and paper filing cabinets worked well enough too... Free (no cost) software running on cheaper hardware with comparable or superior performance is the way forward.
The system folder is even more of a hassle because it's completely disorganized... You have a mix of all kinds of different files dumped in to one place, it's ridiculous.
People will always complain about what they don't know or are less familiar with. Here you see that complaint going against windows, but far more often than not it goes against linux.
But it all goes to show that people will use what they're given, and get used to it fairly quick, users being familiar with something else is only a short term problem and shouldn't stop companies from choosing the better option.
Go based on volume... If a user sends lots of mail to different places, theyre more likely to be spamming, especially if its large quantities of the same mails. Most people have a fairly small group of people they correspond with. You could also run outbound mail through the spamfilter without modifying it, just checking it and flag up any account that sends lots of mail that gets spamflagged.
I do similar to your catchall domain, but i use wildcard dns... thus: anything@name.of.site.mydomain.com will come through. This has the advantage that if i start receiving spams, not only do i know who sold me out, but i can create a dns record for the subdomain to point elsewhere (somewhere invalid, or back at the mailserver of the company that sold me out).
Yes, google tie all this information together, it says so right there in their usage policy... But do you really think that other companies (yahoo, msn/hotmail etc) don't do exactly the same thing?
Spamassassin seems to strip all the bounce spam for me... I looked at the spam archive earlier, and i have thousands of them that got flagged, many for a domain that i only registered recently and never actually used!
Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam..
on
Spammers Choose GMail
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· Score: 1
Which isn't going to stop spams which are sent by other gmail users.
Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam..
on
Spammers Choose GMail
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· Score: 1
I have some spamassassin rules that do something similar, spam using a non english character set or which sufficiently resembles a foreign language that does use the same charset get flagged... I can declare what languages i receive mail in, and it will flag anything else.. Besides, if a mail is written in a foreign language you can't read you're not gonna read the contents anyway.
IBM only produced the hardware, Microsoft produced the software and look where they are now... Apple produce both, by your reckoning Apple would be selling about the same level of hardware that they are now, but selling millions of units of software.
Also when you talk of retaining control, look at the absolutely farcical situation with AmigaOS 4. They are trying so hard to retain control that they've pushed away any customers they might have ever had.
Violates the GPL? Since when? At most, i think it just uses a few GPL libraries (webkit), the kernel, the interface, the core of the os etc are all BSD licensed or closed and owned by apple. There's nothing stopping you downloading webkit yourself.
While i agree they should allow open development, i don't think they're violating the gpl as it stands..
You may know the vendor when you first install it, but you soon forget, especially if you don't run it very often. And a lot of people get programs via tucows and other such sites... Not to mention that many people install apps from physical media...
Well, we need to push the price of copper so high that it becomes viable for the telco to dig up all the expensive copper cables, sell them, and replace them with cheap fibre.
Absolutely, because the package manager is quite clearly described in the menu as being for installing new software.
On the other hand, having downloaded and installed some random app (if the user even got this far), start/programs makes sense enough, but then you often have to remember the vendor name before you can find the app you just installed. Typical linux menu systems are much better, since they categorise programs by their function rather than who wrote them, and presumably having installed a new app you should have some idea what it does and why you installed it.
The OS is already installed, actually installing it isn't something the housewife wants to do.
Additional apps are already installed with the Linux version, XP has a far more limited set of apps... The housewife may or may not want to use those apps.
If she does need additional apps which aren't included by default, which is far more likely with XP, the process to acquire them is much easier in Linux (load up the package manager, select the apps from a list and let them install) as opposed to the XP method or either buying physical media (and reading it with what, these small laptops lack optical drives) or downloading it (from where? cant expect a housewife to search for apps and download them in confidence, especially since she has always been told not to download and run things from the internet), and then manually run the installer, keep hitting next a few times, and once installed try to find out where it is (often in a subsection of the start menu labelled by the program vendor which you can't expect users to know, rather than being categorised by function or even the program's name)
Large companies are far more likely to direct their research towards long term treatments rather than cures, thus significantly decreasing the chance that a cure will be found...
Also if a cure was found and patented, the short term profits wouldn't be all that major, if you priced it too high people would start cloning it, and governments in poor countries with serious aids problems would just pass legislation to ignore your patent and manufacture the treatment themselves. A government that denied an aids cure to a significant portion of it's populace who needed it because the sole manufacturer priced it too high would face riots and possibly be overthrown.
That's exactly what i did in the end, but it's hardly an ideal situation...
I will have to support the nagios3 package myself, the distro won't update it for me.
Plus the compile process didn't seem to offer me any easy way to configure how i would like the package built, unlike gentoo which gives me the following options: [ebuild U ] net-analyzer/nagios-core-3.0.3 [3.0.2] USE="apache2 perl web -debug -lighttpd -vim-syntax" 2,695 kB
So i can choose whether i want my nagios3 build to be configured to use apache2 of lighttpd, i can enable or disable support for perl scripting and i can compile if with extra debugging if i want to (or remove the debugging if i dont want the overhead)..
It also seemed to provide no easy/obvious way to let me set the CFLAGS, wether i would like to compile it with -Os for use on a low memory system, or if i want to set the appropriate cpu type (yes i know this would provide negligible benefit for nagios, but for things like media decoding or encryption telling gcc you have a cpu with support for things like sse2 provides a significant benefit)
I don't know about you, but i strongly disagree with being expected to pay more to get a product which isn't artificially crippled...
Another example is xp pro vs xp home, xp pro was developed first and home actually had additional development work to make the cirppled version, yet it's cheaper? It's not like a physical item where a later cheaper item is actually cheaper to produce (eg ps3, newer versions omit the ps2 hardware, component prices have come down, and some of the chips are built on a newer process resulting in higher yields per wafer and therefore cheaper costs).
It's ridiculous to have a cheaper product where the manufacturer has gone to great expense to cripple the product...
I got in trouble at school for using keyboard shortcuts instead of going through the menus... Many of the people teaching these classes have no idea and just blindly follow a textbook.. Our school sysadmin was the unemployed husband of the school librarian, and needed a job.
Only Mac users are not advocating using the Pentium-1 chips... And these "lame jokes" are based on an actual bug these chips had, whereby it would compute certain things incorrectly.
I too have had similar problems... Binary distributions become a huge pain if you don't have the most up to date bleeding edge version, which can often be highly unstable...
If you try installing the beta packages on your otherwise stable version, you will often find that they depend on new versions of core system packages (glibc, gcc etc), gentoo lets you install the latest apps if and when you want, without having to drag the rest of your system up unnecessarily.
As an example, try installing Nagios 3.x on ubuntu 8.04, there are packages for it in "intrepid" but they are a pain to install without updating the whole thing.
Every system being slightly different has security advantages too... There will be subtle differences in the addresses at which various pieces of code are loaded which can make exploit writing more difficult. With a binary distro, you can just download the binaries yourself and discover the necessary addresses.
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So what you're really saying, is that windows is difficult to use properly and therefore unsuitable for non-geek users?
This actually tallies up with the story a few days ago about the linux based eee being more popular among general users.
Perhaps give the kids dual boot, and teach them that windows is for games, and ubuntu is for internet and any serious use. Also consider a games console, it's much harder to break one of those.
I would say it "works well enough" for them, but depending on what they need to do, they could probably benefit from ubuntu or something similar and have a system that "works better".
Remember, years ago typewriters and paper filing cabinets worked well enough too... Free (no cost) software running on cheaper hardware with comparable or superior performance is the way forward.
The system folder is even more of a hassle because it's completely disorganized... You have a mix of all kinds of different files dumped in to one place, it's ridiculous.
People will always complain about what they don't know or are less familiar with.
Here you see that complaint going against windows, but far more often than not it goes against linux.
But it all goes to show that people will use what they're given, and get used to it fairly quick, users being familiar with something else is only a short term problem and shouldn't stop companies from choosing the better option.
Go based on volume...
If a user sends lots of mail to different places, theyre more likely to be spamming, especially if its large quantities of the same mails. Most people have a fairly small group of people they correspond with.
You could also run outbound mail through the spamfilter without modifying it, just checking it and flag up any account that sends lots of mail that gets spamflagged.
I do similar to your catchall domain, but i use wildcard dns... thus:
anything@name.of.site.mydomain.com will come through.
This has the advantage that if i start receiving spams, not only do i know who sold me out, but i can create a dns record for the subdomain to point elsewhere (somewhere invalid, or back at the mailserver of the company that sold me out).
Yes, google tie all this information together, it says so right there in their usage policy...
But do you really think that other companies (yahoo, msn/hotmail etc) don't do exactly the same thing?
Spamassassin seems to strip all the bounce spam for me...
I looked at the spam archive earlier, and i have thousands of them that got flagged, many for a domain that i only registered recently and never actually used!
Which isn't going to stop spams which are sent by other gmail users.
I have some spamassassin rules that do something similar, spam using a non english character set or which sufficiently resembles a foreign language that does use the same charset get flagged... I can declare what languages i receive mail in, and it will flag anything else..
Besides, if a mail is written in a foreign language you can't read you're not gonna read the contents anyway.
IBM only produced the hardware, Microsoft produced the software and look where they are now...
Apple produce both, by your reckoning Apple would be selling about the same level of hardware that they are now, but selling millions of units of software.
Also when you talk of retaining control, look at the absolutely farcical situation with AmigaOS 4. They are trying so hard to retain control that they've pushed away any customers they might have ever had.
Indeed they do, because the ones who didn't have already been caught and thrown in jail.
Violates the GPL? Since when?
At most, i think it just uses a few GPL libraries (webkit), the kernel, the interface, the core of the os etc are all BSD licensed or closed and owned by apple. There's nothing stopping you downloading webkit yourself.
While i agree they should allow open development, i don't think they're violating the gpl as it stands..
You may know the vendor when you first install it, but you soon forget, especially if you don't run it very often. And a lot of people get programs via tucows and other such sites...
Not to mention that many people install apps from physical media...
Well, we need to push the price of copper so high that it becomes viable for the telco to dig up all the expensive copper cables, sell them, and replace them with cheap fibre.
Nah..
They will just same the same low cap to 120 times as many customers as before...
Absolutely, because the package manager is quite clearly described in the menu as being for installing new software.
On the other hand, having downloaded and installed some random app (if the user even got this far), start/programs makes sense enough, but then you often have to remember the vendor name before you can find the app you just installed.
Typical linux menu systems are much better, since they categorise programs by their function rather than who wrote them, and presumably having installed a new app you should have some idea what it does and why you installed it.
For a housewife...
The OS is already installed, actually installing it isn't something the housewife wants to do.
Additional apps are already installed with the Linux version, XP has a far more limited set of apps... The housewife may or may not want to use those apps.
If she does need additional apps which aren't included by default, which is far more likely with XP, the process to acquire them is much easier in Linux (load up the package manager, select the apps from a list and let them install) as opposed to the XP method or either buying physical media (and reading it with what, these small laptops lack optical drives) or downloading it (from where? cant expect a housewife to search for apps and download them in confidence, especially since she has always been told not to download and run things from the internet), and then manually run the installer, keep hitting next a few times, and once installed try to find out where it is (often in a subsection of the start menu labelled by the program vendor which you can't expect users to know, rather than being categorised by function or even the program's name)
Large companies are far more likely to direct their research towards long term treatments rather than cures, thus significantly decreasing the chance that a cure will be found...
Also if a cure was found and patented, the short term profits wouldn't be all that major, if you priced it too high people would start cloning it, and governments in poor countries with serious aids problems would just pass legislation to ignore your patent and manufacture the treatment themselves. A government that denied an aids cure to a significant portion of it's populace who needed it because the sole manufacturer priced it too high would face riots and possibly be overthrown.
That's exactly what i did in the end, but it's hardly an ideal situation...
I will have to support the nagios3 package myself, the distro won't update it for me.
Plus the compile process didn't seem to offer me any easy way to configure how i would like the package built, unlike gentoo which gives me the following options:
[ebuild U ] net-analyzer/nagios-core-3.0.3 [3.0.2] USE="apache2 perl web -debug -lighttpd -vim-syntax" 2,695 kB
So i can choose whether i want my nagios3 build to be configured to use apache2 of lighttpd, i can enable or disable support for perl scripting and i can compile if with extra debugging if i want to (or remove the debugging if i dont want the overhead)..
It also seemed to provide no easy/obvious way to let me set the CFLAGS, wether i would like to compile it with -Os for use on a low memory system, or if i want to set the appropriate cpu type (yes i know this would provide negligible benefit for nagios, but for things like media decoding or encryption telling gcc you have a cpu with support for things like sse2 provides a significant benefit)
The drivers are the same too...
I don't know about you, but i strongly disagree with being expected to pay more to get a product which isn't artificially crippled...
Another example is xp pro vs xp home, xp pro was developed first and home actually had additional development work to make the cirppled version, yet it's cheaper?
It's not like a physical item where a later cheaper item is actually cheaper to produce (eg ps3, newer versions omit the ps2 hardware, component prices have come down, and some of the chips are built on a newer process resulting in higher yields per wafer and therefore cheaper costs).
It's ridiculous to have a cheaper product where the manufacturer has gone to great expense to cripple the product...
I got in trouble at school for using keyboard shortcuts instead of going through the menus... Many of the people teaching these classes have no idea and just blindly follow a textbook..
Our school sysadmin was the unemployed husband of the school librarian, and needed a job.
Only Mac users are not advocating using the Pentium-1 chips...
And these "lame jokes" are based on an actual bug these chips had, whereby it would compute certain things incorrectly.
I too have had similar problems... Binary distributions become a huge pain if you don't have the most up to date bleeding edge version, which can often be highly unstable...
If you try installing the beta packages on your otherwise stable version, you will often find that they depend on new versions of core system packages (glibc, gcc etc), gentoo lets you install the latest apps if and when you want, without having to drag the rest of your system up unnecessarily.
As an example, try installing Nagios 3.x on ubuntu 8.04, there are packages for it in "intrepid" but they are a pain to install without updating the whole thing.
Every system being slightly different has security advantages too...
There will be subtle differences in the addresses at which various pieces of code are loaded which can make exploit writing more difficult.
With a binary distro, you can just download the binaries yourself and discover the necessary addresses.