The russians said it was... they also said 300k people died in Dresden. The real figure was 30k.
The whitehouse said it was a nuke. Same guys with the WMD in Iraq. They're facing an election and fear has worked well in the past for them.
I have not yet seen a credible scientific source say it was a nuke.
Jim Lehrer's Newshour said it was like 1/2 to 1 kiloton. The technical nerd they had on was useless and gave no sense of how lame that is. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were like 10kt to 20kt each. The biggest nukes ever tested were 20 and 50 MEGAtons. US & Russian icbms are like a megaton apiece. Tactical howitzer shells are more like 1kt to 10kt - don't want to hurt the home team on the battlefield. In the atmosphere, 1/2kt is a fireball a fraction of a mile in size.
OK so 1/2kt is either a pretty lame nuke, or else Kim managed to scrape up 500 tons of TNT and bury it and set it off.
Putting this onto a warhead is a different issue. It's got to be lightweight, unlike an underground test. And it would be nice if the missle could get farther than the other side of Japan. With some accuracy - most of the US is still rural.
It should be reliable - how many devices did Kim set off the same weekend that were duds? They don't show up on seismographs.
OK so they're far away from having a missle lob onto Seattle.
They are not clueless. They are overworked. Just like journalists and teachers who do a bad job.
> You have these IP parasites gaming the system, not real innovators, > and soaking up easy money for the price of a patent application.
First of all, you have to know what you are talking about to file a patent. Probably the people who originally filed this patent, the inventor(s) (Claudio R Ballard from Lloyd Harbor, NY, wherever that is), worked for a small company with a good idea.
Now, when you file a patent, you widen the claims as much as you can untiil it hits prior art. Nobody else patented anything like this, nobody else published anything like this, so Claudio did it.
Then, for all the hard work, you want some money. You know, rent, internet connection, food, stuff like that, it adds up over the years. (Those of you who are independently wealthy won't understand. Trust me.)
So, you could become like Edwin Armstrong, the guy who invented FM radio. And superheterodyne, and superregenerative circuits, and other stuff. He jumped out of a hotel window in 1954 after being shafted out of all of his companies and patents by large corps, like RCA. (See the documentary 'Empire of the Airwaves'.)
Or like Charles Goodyear. The inventor of vulcanized rubber died penniless. (The company Goodyear was founded years after he was gone.)
Both of these guys got patents, and both got screwed over by competitors who were more powerful.
OK, so to turn your years of work - without pay - into money, you sell it to a large company, or someone who has the stomach to commercialize it and fight off competitors.
Sometimes that company is a bunch of legal hacks who have nothing better to do but fight lawsuits. Without them coming up with the money for the inventor, the inventor just wasted his time making the world a better place. Thanks a lot, next time I'll get a job spinning Java on NT boxes and fuck this 'great idea' shit.
well, um, I think the US patent office got its start in the 1800's, maybe 1837? Other countries had patents before us, I think it evolved from British law.
It started cuz too many engineers were keeping trade secrets and taking them to the grave. For instance, Stradivarius violins.
You're talking about more recent events.
And copyrights and trademarks are not going away anytime soon, or all of industry would vaporize. For instance, you get rid of trademark law and then Microsoft can come out with a version of NT labeled "Red Hat Linux". Oracle comes out with a stripped-down, hideously buggy version of their database and allows free download under the name "MySQL", specifically to trash the MySQL name. Please come to the official MySQL website at mysql.oracle.com! Trademark law is not going away anytime soon.
>So what happens if the FIRST recount doesn't make Mr. >Kerry President? Do we ask for ANOTHER recount ala 2000?
Wrong. In 2000, there was no "another" recount. There were ZERO recounts in Florida. The republicans (american flagwavers all) stood in the way of all recounts until it was too late. We now know that Gore would have won if real democracy had happened and the recount went ahead on schedule. And it would have been a landslide for Gore if the phony felons lists hadn't happened.
> IOW, if you want to even think of competing > with the windows world at the desktop level, > you actually have to reduce to the brain-dead > level of explanation, > support or general UI practice.
In some ways, yes. But it's not 'brain-dead' we're looking for. We're not looking for docs that treat the user like an idiot (visualize a balloon tip on a titlebar that says 'Click and drag to move the window'). We're not interested in docs that explain every friggin option and detail in the world.
We're looking for the RIGHT things to be documented - tell me the individual actions I, the human being, must do to take my system from X not installed, to X installed and working. Some suggestions:
- Take a pc, load Linux fresh (distro of your choice or try many). Starting at the end of the Linux install, sttart writing down EVERYTHING you do to get your stuff installed. Everything. Any detail you leave out - think of it as a showstopper for 1000 of your potential users.
- From this transcript, write the first cut of your install doc. Then try it all again, blindly following your doc. Including and especially, if you see yourself working down the wrong path, keep going to see what it's like for your poor user and the mishaps they will encounter. Correct your doc. Repeat.
- Go grab aunt tillie. Or maybe just a coworker. Have them install from your doc. DO NOT TELL THEM ANYTHING OR GIVE THEM HELP, except as follows: Anything you tell them, will also go into the doc somehow. Then update your doc, or (preferably) your code to fix the problem. Repeat with a different human.
- Use real examples, that look like real usage. Nobody is named 'username', nobody names their files 'file1' and 'file2'.
wrong: At the prompt, enter your username and password. login: [username] password: [password]
note it's not clear if the user should type brackets, or which username is involved.
right: At the prompt, log in. login: natalie password: juD=1cow where 'natalie' is your Unix userid and 'juD=1cow' is your password.
- Write confirming steps. The best are those that mirror actual use. example: "Your system may or may not have Blahmail already set up. To see: go to a console and type 'blahmail me@mycompany.com' where me@mycompany.com is your email, and see if you receive the email." With confirming steps, you save the user lots of time and confusion from reinstalling things that are already installed.
Yeah, I've been complaining about this too, but I have little or no visibility, and let's face it, if you complain, you're weak.
I remember when I first got to the Linux world, I kept on looking for someone willing to talk about the user interface problems. nothing, it was like talking about the National Guard in the Bush white house.
Then one day I saw an article in maybe Linux Journal about "User Friendly - the inside story". I quickly turned to the page. Turns out it was about the cartoon strip.
> What's the closest equivalent to AppleScript on a Linux system, also? Is it more like Perl, Python or bash shell scripts? Judging by the sounds of things, it sounds like an even higher level version of bash.
Compared to applescript, Perl and Python and all the shell scripting languages are virtually the same. Yeah, don't think of "scripting" in the Unix sense: you have a text file that's sortoff a list of shell command lines...
Step 1: forget about the command line. Forget about stdin/stdout/stderr for the most part.
Step 2: You have a GUI program. It's got windows, doohickeys in windows, documents, objects, unique commands. Allof this is proprietary to the app of course. So the statements you feed the app are specific to that app. And so are the nouns and data classes you deal with. You learn about these by draggging the app's icon over the AppleScript editor's icon, it'll show you an incomplete quick reference. Without this information, there's usually little you can guess blindly.
Step 3: You are feeding "appleevent" commands to this GUI program, as it's running. You probably don't want to tell it to quit unless you are really done with it.
There is nothing like it on Linux. Probably everybody would hate it if there was. There's some immitations on Windows, but I don't know much about them.
> The change from SMTP to something else is probably > the only thing that will work, in my opinion. > Every other proposed option is a kludgy workaround.
I agree. The reason why IP6 hasn't caught on is cuz IP4 works plenty well enough. (doesn't it?)
How about 1c per email, Paid by the sender, Received by the recipient? Horror upon horrors, some MONEY might get EXCHANGED!! OH NO!!!
But if you converse with a friend, it'll all average out between you.
Why not use SMTP on just a different port number? Say, port 2525. Nobody will allow any SMTP servers to connect to them on port 2525 without setting up a proper micropay account. Doesn't even matter what the rules are on this, it'll all work itself out. You know why I know that for sure? CUZ IT'S WORTH MONEY. The SMTP:2525 server has to pay money in order to deliver all those emails, so it'll make sure it collects up front.
Someone SMTP2525's ten thousand emails to your server, that's $100 they owe you, and you'll be damn sure they'll pay up. Some spammer connects to ANY server, and dumps 10 million spams, that's $100,000, which will pay for a lot of lawyers. Any security holes, any way to cheat, will be fixed ASAP. You know it's going to stop the spam avalance.
The existing port 25 email system remains intact, as it is now. So if you refuse to pay a penny an email, go ahead. When you get sick of the spam firehose, you'll join the 2525 crowd.
> I have to send a few emails a day -- so I'm paying pennies > per day? That's ridiculous.
Let's see, people around here maybe go for $60/hour? Good order of magnitude. That's $1/minute. That's 1.7c per second.
How much time does it take you to compose an email? Maybe 15 seconds, up to maybe 2 hours for a long diatribe. That's 25c to $120.oo. OK so that means the price of sending email goes up anywhere from 4% to like 0.0083%. Gee that sounds prohibitively expensive. not.
How much time do you spend messing around with your Baysian Filter? I'm sure it's a fun toy, so say half price = $30/hour. I'm sure you've spent at least an hour. Probably days but let's say an hour. That's the cost of 3000 emails.
How much time do you spend looking at a spam, going, waydaminit, Don:Plunkett, don't I know a Don Plunkett? Should I open that? No its spam, forget it. No, Don Plunkett, isn't he the guy... What do you think, 5c or 10c worth of time?
How much time am I spending writing this? Gotta go, this is getting too expensive.
> Spam is a problem. But if I had to choose between spammers > and those that would charge for email, I'll take the spammers. > At least I can filter them and it'll probably cost me less to > do so than pay for email.
This is the same thinking that got us into this mess.
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per month, no problem, I can ignore it!".
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per day, no problem, I can delete it!".
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per hour, no problem, my filter can delete 99% of them!".
What brilliant ideas do you have for a few years from now, when it's one spam per second? Whatever they are, we have to get them in place NOW. THinking that the spam density will stay the same is just stupid.
OK, so my vision of the future is this: everybody has two or three layers of spam filters, because when you turn off all but one layer of spam filter, the firehose of spam that comes through cloggs up your disk faster than you can deal with it. Spam volume is increasing faster than disk capacity. It's SKYROCKETING. Pay attention! We have to do something.
One of the biggest problems is this stupid attitude "I don't want to pay money for anything". Guess what. When water is free, some pig hogs it all and belches out pollutants. When trees are free, some pig cuts them all down. When books are free at a library, people steal them, and cut pages out of them. When bathrooms are free, people trash them and walk away. When software is free, somebody wraps it up and charges money for it, at a bigger margin than the for-sale software.
Every single 'commons' that is free, gets abused eventually. And we're in the computer age, so it's all happening faster than yesterday. Every day.
I recently opened up my TiBook to check out the AirPort card. The instructions (which you obviously didn't read) were still kicking around from last year when I installed it. Nice drawings, good tech artists.
Turn upside down. You remove the battery and 8 screws. Do not remove the keyboard or any drives. One small philips screwdriver should do it. Slide case, and off. Then it's right there, next to the battery well - a dedicated PCMCIA slot next to the real PCMCIA slot. You plug it in, connect the antenna connector, and that's it.
Then you boot up and it's working off the shelf, no config, no messing around, integrated into the OS, better than IE is integrated into Windows.:-) And you can stick your laptop into your backpack without snapping off the antenna, cuz it's wrapped around the display. (Truth be known, reception is weak that way. Need an antenna plug, that's what it needs.)
I could see that, if you removed the optical and hard disks, and snipped and filed away at stuff, you'd be pissed. For myself, I swore off doing installs while wasted, specifically for that reason.
> And how many of them have ACPI or FireWire? Not the majority, thats for certain.
All five of the computers in my lab have FireWire. I don't use it much because the machines that it runs well on, basically, the macs, have lots of disk space internally. Then there's the laptop that has to run kernel 2.2 - I really could use it there. Basically, it's USB 2.0, with several years worth of bugfixes under its belt, and ready for the next few speed-doubling upgrades.
Both of the x86 machines have ACPI. If it worked worth a damn on the tower, I'd keep the machine on all the time instead of powering it down, as I do, in favor of the SunBlade which does manage its power nicely, and stays up for months at a time. If it worked worth a damn on the laptop... don't get me started.
>... Solaris... and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. > Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes,...
Ha! I crashed the kernel! Solaris 8 running on a SunBlade 100. Used "link" to make a hardlinked directory. (admittedly foolish. yes as root.) THen, I, dunno, tried to rename it or something. Freeze. bink. reboot.
OK so I've crashed the Linux kernel a few times too. don't ask me about the disk formatting disasters.
I was in the math software industry for well over a decade. My experience is that each manufacturer is irrationally optimistic about their own package, and irrationally pessimistic about competitors. Kindof like commercial software in general, but the venue is more fuzzy, lending to more irrationality.
- the way a user does this or that, varies widely. Often, methods are not obvious, so for one person, "mathblob does gizzyggy calculations" is true, for another, it's false. EG mathcad has (had?) a version of Maple inside, but it was awkward and hokey to use. BUT they could claim all of Maple's capabilities.
- The algorithms vary widely. If MathBlob has a specific optimization for gizzyggy calculations with flipex inversions, then you could say that MathBlob is great at gizzyggy calculations, and the others are useless. These optimizations can easily give you 1000x performance improvement or more (think n^n).
- The domain venues vary widely. Numerical programs typically do zero symbolic stuff, but do the numeric stuff lightyears faster than symbolic programs. A group theory program may have trouble adding floating point numbers. With hardware double floats, you can't get anything past 10^308 or so, which is a disaster to some but no big deal to others. When someone says MathBlob does EVERYTHING, really they mean MathBlob does Everything that I think is important.
So like, I once had Mathematica take like 30 seconds to add 2 + 2. (It had to load in a ton of packages.) Then it reported it was out of memory.
With that said, LiveMath is THE BEST math program in the universe, way better than any of the others here.:-) It's designed to be interactive, rather than a programming language. Check it out at livemath.com
> ISP B passes the cost on to their customer (if he's a legit > spammer) or sics the law on him for theft of services (if he's not)
I think this is a great idea. I think a penny per email per recipient is about right - us$0.01 each. In fact, you could even charge this across-the-board, and not distinguish between spammers and nonspammers. If I send an email to a dozen friends, it costs me 12c, not a big deal. But a spammer's bill goes from $300 to $1 million.
The problem with spam is there is absolutely no incentive for spammers to narrow down their outgoing list. It costs more, actually, to send to less than the whole list, than to sell to the whole list. Therefore, women get penis enlargement ads, children get beach bimbo ads, etc. Spam costs the spammer like $0.000 001 per piece, whereas for instance, paper junk mail costs maybe $0.30 or $1.00. In the latter case, they have a motivation to target their audience.
> Wells Fargo (my bank)nows me as wellsfargo@mydomain.com. > They use this address when they send messages to me and If > I start receiving spam with a recipient wellsfargo@mydomain.com > who do you think will be responsible for this?
In fact I use a similar scheme - but I spell it backwards, like wells fargo would know me as ografsllew@mydomain.com.
Of course I have the luxury of having the whole domain name to myself, anything at blahblah@mydomain.com comes to me. So I don't have to go create something in order to make up yet another email address, I can create it by pencil while standing on a trade show floor.
> Why is it a ripoff? There's nothing misleading here.
Indeed. I think for this poster, anybody who charges money is ripping you off.
Want a ripoff? Here's one. I bought OpenBSD, maybe thirty bucks. Finally tried to install it. It was like pulling teeth. Ran the installer maybe a half dozen times, maybe a dozen if you include the times where I canceled it before it installed allthe bits. That's like 1.5 day. When I finally had it installed, couldn't boot it. No way no how. Not even by using the boot CD. That's like another 0.5 day. Worthless gigs, although it did run briefly after installation, before I rebooted.
Two days work, for me that's maybe $1500. Plus the CD price makes it $1530 down the tubes. I can't afford this shit. Macs are way cheaper.
This is on the PC that multiboots WinME, Solaris 8, and four flavors of Linux with kernels ranging from 2.0 to 2.4. In other words I'm not a dummy, I install this shit. (I had FreeBSD too but removed it to install OpenBSD. Now I'll have to reinstall it again, but at least I know that'll work.)
I remember one time I decided I'd learn TCL. I was reading the installation instructions, and saw an interesting bit. Apparently, at some point in the Windows install, there was a space character stuck in a directory name and TCL couldn't deal with that. BROKE EVERYTHING. So you have to fix it by hand.
> Only people who are not clueless... should submit > directly to the developer's bug tracking system.
This is an example of the general attitude.
I have a BS in applied physics from an Ivy League school, where I also took a few graduate physics courses. I have had people refer to me as "Dr" thinking that I had a PhD. The number of programming languages I've learned is well over 50, the number of machine languages I've programmed in numerically is I dunno a half dozen, in addition to some hardware interfacing I did in school. I've published commercial software, in some cases single-handedly, for decades. In some cases they got top-scoring reviews in national magazines.
In other words, I am not "clueless".
Nevertheless, the source for an entire Linux distro overflows one CD, and as miraculous as it sounds, I just haven't had time to read the whole thing. For most Linux software, I must be considered a mere "user", sometimes spelled by your kind as "luser". I do not understand all of the technical issues of all of the software I use, I cannot definitively isolate the source of a particular bug, and I cannot debug it all myself. In the few cases that I care about, I usually don't have time to file a detailed bug report - you're lucky if I report anything at all.
OK so if you can refer to me and my kind of people as "clueless", that lets you off the hook when you ignore my bug reports, right? In other words, you won't fix any bugs unless it's found by you yourself or a very small circle of insiders who understand the ins and outs of your particular piece of software. And you won't change error messages that are meaningless to me because they refer to these insider concepts.
And you think that Linux is going to make it on the desktop? And you're surprised when Microsoft eats your lunch and Apple swoops down and steals the alternative desktop market out from under you in two years flat.
> After all, if the information in Bugzilla is crap, > then it just wastes developer time...
Indeed. I have never seen a bug tracking system that functioned without human labor - reviewing complaints, clarifying them (= figuring out what user was talking about), verifying that the bug is there and is a bug, unifying with similar or identical bug reports. Judgement calls about whether it really is a bug, or maybe a doc error, or a chronic human error that the software could remedy with a change or two (maybe just a better error message).
In the commercial software dev company, this is called QA. It is much less fun than hacking in new features. Hence a salaried position.
> I imagine that nearly any Free Software hacker would fix your bug if you did your homework beforehand and made sure that it wasn't a duplicate bug. If you provide a simple test case that shows the bug your chances improve dramatically...
yeah, QA work. Frankly, my time is valuable. SOmetimes I notice a bug quickly and don't have time to pursue it. When I do, it's usually a labor of love along the lines of software-quality activist. I hate bugs.
When I do put a few hours into a bug report, it is very rewarding to get a reply email that says "yeah, replicated it, fixed it, thanks for the submission". Even if it's months later. It is not encouraging when I never hear back.
It is downright discouraging when a new version comes out and my bug is still there - that means, I put in those hours and the developer flushed my work down the drain. Under those circumstances, I rarely file a bug report again with the same organization. Perhaps this happens with other bug submitters.
> The fact of the matter is that bad code is better than no code.
Bad code makes Open Source look bad, like a bunch of immature kids who can't be bothered to fix their bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I remain unconvinced that it's a real nuke.
The russians said it was... they also said 300k people died in Dresden. The real figure was 30k.
The whitehouse said it was a nuke. Same guys with the WMD in Iraq. They're facing an election and fear has worked well in the past for them.
I have not yet seen a credible scientific source say it was a nuke.
Jim Lehrer's Newshour said it was like 1/2 to 1 kiloton. The technical nerd they had on was useless and gave no sense of how lame that is. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were like 10kt to 20kt each. The biggest nukes ever tested were 20 and 50 MEGAtons. US & Russian icbms are like a megaton apiece. Tactical howitzer shells are more like 1kt to 10kt - don't want to hurt the home team on the battlefield. In the atmosphere, 1/2kt is a fireball a fraction of a mile in size.
OK so 1/2kt is either a pretty lame nuke, or else Kim managed to scrape up 500 tons of TNT and bury it and set it off.
Putting this onto a warhead is a different issue. It's got to be lightweight, unlike an underground test. And it would be nice if the missle could get farther than the other side of Japan. With some accuracy - most of the US is still rural.
It should be reliable - how many devices did Kim set off the same weekend that were duds? They don't show up on seismographs.
OK so they're far away from having a missle lob onto Seattle.
> The clueless US Patent Office
They are not clueless. They are overworked. Just like journalists and teachers who do a bad job.
> You have these IP parasites gaming the system, not real innovators,
> and soaking up easy money for the price of a patent application.
First of all, you have to know what you are talking about to file a patent. Probably the people who originally filed this patent, the inventor(s) (Claudio R Ballard from Lloyd Harbor, NY, wherever that is), worked for a small company with a good idea.
Now, when you file a patent, you widen the claims as much as you can untiil it hits prior art. Nobody else patented anything like this, nobody else published anything like this, so Claudio did it.
Then, for all the hard work, you want some money. You know, rent, internet connection, food, stuff like that, it adds up over the years. (Those of you who are independently wealthy won't understand. Trust me.)
So, you could become like Edwin Armstrong, the guy who invented FM radio. And superheterodyne, and superregenerative circuits, and other stuff. He jumped out of a hotel window in 1954 after being shafted out of all of his companies and patents by large corps, like RCA. (See the documentary 'Empire of the Airwaves'.)
Or like Charles Goodyear. The inventor of vulcanized rubber died penniless. (The company Goodyear was founded years after he was gone.)
Both of these guys got patents, and both got screwed over by competitors who were more powerful.
OK, so to turn your years of work - without pay - into money, you sell it to a large company, or someone who has the stomach to commercialize it and fight off competitors.
Sometimes that company is a bunch of legal hacks who have nothing better to do but fight lawsuits. Without them coming up with the money for the inventor, the inventor just wasted his time making the world a better place. Thanks a lot, next time I'll get a job spinning Java on NT boxes and fuck this 'great idea' shit.
OK, so that's the inventor's point of view.
> Thus, the entire IP nonsense was born.
well, um, I think the US patent office got its start in the 1800's, maybe 1837? Other countries had patents before us, I think it evolved from British law.
It started cuz too many engineers were keeping trade secrets and taking them to the grave. For instance, Stradivarius violins.
You're talking about more recent events.
And copyrights and trademarks are not going away anytime soon, or all of industry would vaporize. For instance, you get rid of trademark law and then Microsoft can come out with a version of NT labeled "Red Hat Linux". Oracle comes out with a stripped-down, hideously buggy version of their database and allows free download under the name "MySQL", specifically to trash the MySQL name. Please come to the official MySQL website at mysql.oracle.com! Trademark law is not going away anytime soon.
>So what happens if the FIRST recount doesn't make Mr.
>Kerry President? Do we ask for ANOTHER recount ala 2000?
Wrong. In 2000, there was no "another" recount. There were ZERO recounts in Florida. The republicans (american flagwavers all) stood in the way of all recounts until it was too late. We now know that Gore would have won if real democracy had happened and the recount went ahead on schedule. And it would have been a landslide for Gore if the phony felons lists hadn't happened.
> IOW, if you want to even think of competing
> with the windows world at the desktop level,
> you actually have to reduce to the brain-dead
> level of explanation,
> support or general UI practice.
In some ways, yes. But it's not 'brain-dead' we're looking for. We're not looking for docs that treat the user like an idiot (visualize a balloon tip on a titlebar that says 'Click and drag to move the window'). We're not interested in docs that explain every friggin option and detail in the world.
We're looking for the RIGHT things to be documented - tell me the individual actions I, the human being, must do to take my system from X not installed, to X installed and working. Some suggestions:
- Take a pc, load Linux fresh (distro of your choice or try many). Starting at the end of the Linux install, sttart writing down EVERYTHING you do to get your stuff installed. Everything. Any detail you leave out - think of it as a showstopper for 1000 of your potential users.
- From this transcript, write the first cut of your install doc. Then try it all again, blindly following your doc. Including and especially, if you see yourself working down the wrong path, keep going to see what it's like for your poor user and the mishaps they will encounter. Correct your doc. Repeat.
- Go grab aunt tillie. Or maybe just a coworker. Have them install from your doc. DO NOT TELL THEM ANYTHING OR GIVE THEM HELP, except as follows: Anything you tell them, will also go into the doc somehow. Then update your doc, or (preferably) your code to fix the problem. Repeat with a different human.
- Use real examples, that look like real usage. Nobody is named 'username', nobody names their files 'file1' and 'file2'.
wrong:
At the prompt, enter your username and password.
login: [username]
password: [password]
note it's not clear if the user should type brackets, or which username is involved.
right:
At the prompt, log in.
login: natalie
password: juD=1cow
where 'natalie' is your Unix userid and 'juD=1cow' is your password.
- Write confirming steps. The best are those that mirror actual use. example: "Your system may or may not have Blahmail already set up. To see: go to a console and type 'blahmail me@mycompany.com' where me@mycompany.com is your email, and see if you receive the email." With confirming steps, you save the user lots of time and confusion from reinstalling things that are already installed.
Yeah, I've been complaining about this too, but I have little or no visibility, and let's face it, if you complain, you're weak.
I remember when I first got to the Linux world, I kept on looking for someone willing to talk about the user interface problems. nothing, it was like talking about the National Guard in the Bush white house.
Then one day I saw an article in maybe Linux Journal about "User Friendly - the inside story". I quickly turned to the page. Turns out it was about the cartoon strip.
I've heard scandinavian countries with more like 50% to 70% income taxes - yup, you take home less than half.
BUT you get free healthcare and all sorts of other stuff.
[Wonder what taxes are like in mexico...]
> What's the closest equivalent to AppleScript on a Linux system, also? Is it more like Perl, Python or bash shell scripts? Judging by the sounds of things, it sounds like an even higher level version of bash.
Compared to applescript, Perl and Python and all the shell scripting languages are virtually the same. Yeah, don't think of "scripting" in the Unix sense: you have a text file that's sortoff a list of shell command lines...
Step 1: forget about the command line. Forget about stdin/stdout/stderr for the most part.
Step 2: You have a GUI program. It's got windows, doohickeys in windows, documents, objects, unique commands. Allof this is proprietary to the app of course. So the statements you feed the app are specific to that app. And so are the nouns and data classes you deal with. You learn about these by draggging the app's icon over the AppleScript editor's icon, it'll show you an incomplete quick reference. Without this information, there's usually little you can guess blindly.
Step 3: You are feeding "appleevent" commands to this GUI program, as it's running. You probably don't want to tell it to quit unless you are really done with it.
There is nothing like it on Linux. Probably everybody would hate it if there was. There's some immitations on Windows, but I don't know much about them.
> 1. Educate consumers not to respond to spam or its
> enticing advertisements.
Try educating my mom to use email nicknames - she keeps on complaining that she sends emails to us kids and spells the
email address wrong.
> 2. Modify SMTP so that we guarantee we can find the exact
> source of the sender or non-complying ISP.
And run it in parallel with normal SMTP for the rest of the world.
> 3. Create legislation that enables litigation for unsolicited bulk.
> 4. Litigate.
Define 'spam'. I've been on this one mailing list for a few years, all the unsubscribe mechanisms refuse to work. I just filter it off.
I also upgraded to 7.0, from 4.0, which seemed to be suiting me fine, until I got my hands on 7. I don't use the highest-shelf wiz bang stuff, though.
7 Will probably do me until this whole thing blows over, or by then I can move over to Gimp I guess. (Have they got a mac version?)
> FreeBSD may be dying...
on the off chance that SCO gets lucky, I think we'll see a revival of FreeBSD.
(yeah, I think it's unlikely.)
> The change from SMTP to something else is probably
> the only thing that will work, in my opinion.
> Every other proposed option is a kludgy workaround.
I agree. The reason why IP6 hasn't caught on is cuz IP4 works plenty well enough. (doesn't it?)
How about 1c per email, Paid by the sender, Received by the recipient? Horror upon horrors, some MONEY might get EXCHANGED!! OH NO!!!
But if you converse with a friend, it'll all average out between you.
Why not use SMTP on just a different port number? Say, port 2525. Nobody will allow any SMTP servers to connect to them on port 2525 without setting up a proper micropay account. Doesn't even matter what the rules are on this, it'll all work itself out. You know why I know that for sure? CUZ IT'S WORTH MONEY. The SMTP:2525 server has to pay money in order to deliver all those emails, so it'll make sure it collects up front.
Someone SMTP2525's ten thousand emails to your server, that's $100 they owe you, and you'll be damn sure they'll pay up. Some spammer connects to ANY server, and dumps 10 million spams, that's $100,000, which will pay for a lot of lawyers. Any security holes, any way to cheat, will be fixed ASAP. You know it's going to stop the spam avalance.
The existing port 25 email system remains intact, as it is now. So if you refuse to pay a penny an email, go ahead. When you get sick of the spam firehose, you'll join the 2525 crowd.
> I have to send a few emails a day -- so I'm paying pennies
:Plunkett, don't I know a Don Plunkett? Should I open that? No its spam, forget it. No, Don Plunkett, isn't he the guy... What do you think, 5c or 10c worth of time?
> per day? That's ridiculous.
Let's see, people around here maybe go for $60/hour? Good order of magnitude. That's $1/minute. That's 1.7c per second.
How much time does it take you to compose an email? Maybe 15 seconds, up to maybe 2 hours for a long diatribe. That's 25c to $120.oo. OK so that means the price of sending email goes up anywhere from 4% to like 0.0083%. Gee that sounds prohibitively expensive. not.
How much time do you spend messing around with your Baysian Filter? I'm sure it's a fun toy, so say half price = $30/hour. I'm sure you've spent at least an hour. Probably days but let's say an hour. That's the cost of 3000 emails.
How much time do you spend looking at a spam, going, waydaminit, Don
How much time am I spending writing this? Gotta go, this is getting too expensive.
> Spam is a problem. But if I had to choose between spammers
> and those that would charge for email, I'll take the spammers.
> At least I can filter them and it'll probably cost me less to
> do so than pay for email.
This is the same thinking that got us into this mess.
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per month, no problem, I can ignore it!".
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per day, no problem, I can delete it!".
"This month, the spam level is 1 spam per hour, no problem, my filter can delete 99% of them!".
What brilliant ideas do you have for a few years from now, when it's one spam per second? Whatever they are, we have to get them in place NOW. THinking that the spam density will stay the same is just stupid.
OK, so my vision of the future is this: everybody has two or three layers of spam filters, because when you turn off all but one layer of spam filter, the firehose of spam that comes through cloggs up your disk faster than you can deal with it. Spam volume is increasing faster than disk capacity. It's SKYROCKETING. Pay attention! We have to do something.
One of the biggest problems is this stupid attitude "I don't want to pay money for anything". Guess what. When water is free, some pig hogs it all and belches out pollutants. When trees are free, some pig cuts them all down. When books are free at a library, people steal them, and cut pages out of them. When bathrooms are free, people trash them and walk away. When software is free, somebody wraps it up and charges money for it, at a bigger margin than the for-sale software.
Every single 'commons' that is free, gets abused eventually. And we're in the computer age, so it's all happening faster than yesterday. Every day.
RTFM.
:-) And you can stick your laptop into your backpack without snapping off the antenna, cuz it's wrapped around the display. (Truth be known, reception is weak that way. Need an antenna plug, that's what it needs.)
I recently opened up my TiBook to check out the AirPort card. The instructions (which you obviously didn't read) were still kicking around from last year when I installed it. Nice drawings, good tech artists.
Turn upside down. You remove the battery and 8 screws. Do not remove the keyboard or any drives. One small philips screwdriver should do it. Slide case, and off. Then it's right there, next to the battery well - a dedicated PCMCIA slot next to the real PCMCIA slot. You plug it in, connect the antenna connector, and that's it.
Then you boot up and it's working off the shelf, no config, no messing around, integrated into the OS, better than IE is integrated into Windows.
I could see that, if you removed the optical and hard disks, and snipped and filed away at stuff, you'd be pissed. For myself, I swore off doing installs while wasted, specifically for that reason.
> And how many of them have ACPI or FireWire? Not the majority, thats for certain.
All five of the computers in my lab have FireWire. I don't use it much because the machines that it runs well on, basically, the macs, have lots of disk space internally. Then there's the laptop that has to run kernel 2.2 - I really could use it there. Basically, it's USB 2.0, with several years worth of bugfixes under its belt, and ready for the next few speed-doubling upgrades.
Both of the x86 machines have ACPI. If it worked worth a damn on the tower, I'd keep the machine on all the time instead of powering it down, as I do, in favor of the SunBlade which does manage its power nicely, and stays up for months at a time. If it worked worth a damn on the laptop... don't get me started.
> ... Solaris ... and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. ...
> Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes,
Ha! I crashed the kernel! Solaris 8 running on a SunBlade 100. Used "link" to make a hardlinked directory. (admittedly foolish. yes as root.) THen, I, dunno, tried to rename it or something. Freeze. bink. reboot.
OK so I've crashed the Linux kernel a few times too. don't ask me about the disk formatting disasters.
I was in the math software industry for well over a decade. My experience is that each manufacturer is irrationally optimistic about their own package, and irrationally pessimistic about competitors. Kindof like commercial software in general, but the venue is more fuzzy, lending to more irrationality.
:-) It's designed to be interactive, rather than a programming language. Check it out at livemath.com
- the way a user does this or that, varies widely. Often, methods are not obvious, so for one person, "mathblob does gizzyggy calculations" is true, for another, it's false. EG mathcad has (had?) a version of Maple inside, but it was awkward and hokey to use. BUT they could claim all of Maple's capabilities.
- The algorithms vary widely. If MathBlob has a specific optimization for gizzyggy calculations with flipex inversions, then you could say that MathBlob is great at gizzyggy calculations, and the others are useless. These optimizations can easily give you 1000x performance improvement or more (think n^n).
- The domain venues vary widely. Numerical programs typically do zero symbolic stuff, but do the numeric stuff lightyears faster than symbolic programs. A group theory program may have trouble adding floating point numbers. With hardware double floats, you can't get anything past 10^308 or so, which is a disaster to some but no big deal to others. When someone says MathBlob does EVERYTHING, really they mean MathBlob does Everything that I think is important.
So like, I once had Mathematica take like 30 seconds to add 2 + 2. (It had to load in a ton of packages.) Then it reported it was out of memory.
With that said, LiveMath is THE BEST math program in the universe, way better than any of the others here.
(disclaimer: I'm the original author)
I did that too! Boy, that dates me. Us. We're talking 1980.
> ISP B passes the cost on to their customer (if he's a legit
> spammer) or sics the law on him for theft of services (if he's not)
I think this is a great idea. I think a penny per email per recipient is about right - us$0.01 each. In fact, you could even charge this across-the-board, and not distinguish between spammers and nonspammers. If I send an email to a dozen friends, it costs me 12c, not a big deal. But a spammer's bill goes from $300 to $1 million.
The problem with spam is there is absolutely no incentive for spammers to narrow down their outgoing list. It costs more, actually, to send to less than the whole list, than to sell to the whole list. Therefore, women get penis enlargement ads, children get beach bimbo ads, etc. Spam costs the spammer like $0.000 001 per piece, whereas for instance, paper junk mail costs maybe $0.30 or $1.00. In the latter case, they have a motivation to target their audience.
> Wells Fargo (my bank)nows me as wellsfargo@mydomain.com.
> They use this address when they send messages to me and If
> I start receiving spam with a recipient wellsfargo@mydomain.com
> who do you think will be responsible for this?
In fact I use a similar scheme - but I spell it backwards, like wells fargo would know me as ografsllew@mydomain.com.
Of course I have the luxury of having the whole domain name to myself, anything at blahblah@mydomain.com comes to me. So I don't have to go create something in order to make up yet another email address, I can create it by pencil while standing on a trade show floor.
> Why is it a ripoff? There's nothing misleading here.
Indeed. I think for this poster, anybody who charges money is ripping you off.
Want a ripoff? Here's one. I bought OpenBSD, maybe thirty bucks. Finally tried to install it. It was like pulling teeth. Ran the installer maybe a half dozen times, maybe a dozen if you include the times where I canceled it before it installed allthe bits. That's like 1.5 day. When I finally had it installed, couldn't boot it. No way no how. Not even by using the boot CD. That's like another 0.5 day. Worthless gigs, although it did run briefly after installation, before I rebooted.
Two days work, for me that's maybe $1500. Plus the CD price makes it $1530 down the tubes. I can't afford this shit. Macs are way cheaper.
This is on the PC that multiboots WinME, Solaris 8, and four flavors of Linux with kernels ranging from 2.0 to 2.4. In other words I'm not a dummy, I install this shit. (I had FreeBSD too but removed it to install OpenBSD. Now I'll have to reinstall it again, but at least I know that'll work.)
I remember one time I decided I'd learn TCL. I was reading the installation instructions, and saw an interesting bit. Apparently, at some point in the Windows install, there was a space character stuck in a directory name and TCL couldn't deal with that. BROKE EVERYTHING. So you have to fix it by hand.
I went and brushed up on my Perl instead.
> Only people who are not clueless ... should submit
> directly to the developer's bug tracking system.
This is an example of the general attitude.
I have a BS in applied physics from an Ivy League school, where I also took a few graduate physics courses. I have had people refer to me as "Dr" thinking that I had a PhD. The number of programming languages I've learned is well over 50, the number of machine languages I've programmed in numerically is I dunno a half dozen, in addition to some hardware interfacing I did in school. I've published commercial software, in some cases single-handedly, for decades. In some cases they got top-scoring reviews in national magazines.
In other words, I am not "clueless".
Nevertheless, the source for an entire Linux distro overflows one CD, and as miraculous as it sounds, I just haven't had time to read the whole thing. For most Linux software, I must be considered a mere "user", sometimes spelled by your kind as "luser". I do not understand all of the technical issues of all of the software I use, I cannot definitively isolate the source of a particular bug, and I cannot debug it all myself. In the few cases that I care about, I usually don't have time to file a detailed bug report - you're lucky if I report anything at all.
OK so if you can refer to me and my kind of people as "clueless", that lets you off the hook when you ignore my bug reports, right? In other words, you won't fix any bugs unless it's found by you yourself or a very small circle of insiders who understand the ins and outs of your particular piece of software. And you won't change error messages that are meaningless to me because they refer to these insider concepts.
And you think that Linux is going to make it on the desktop? And you're surprised when Microsoft eats your lunch and Apple swoops down and steals the alternative desktop market out from under you in two years flat.
> After all, if the information in Bugzilla is crap, ...
> then it just wastes developer time
Indeed. I have never seen a bug tracking system that functioned without human labor - reviewing complaints, clarifying them (= figuring out what user was talking about), verifying that the bug is there and is a bug, unifying with similar or identical bug reports. Judgement calls about whether it really is a bug, or maybe a doc error, or a chronic human error that the software could remedy with a change or two (maybe just a better error message).
In the commercial software dev company, this is called QA. It is much less fun than hacking in new features. Hence a salaried position.
> I imagine that nearly any Free Software hacker would fix your bug if you did your homework beforehand and made sure that it wasn't a duplicate bug. If you provide a simple test case that shows the bug your chances improve dramatically...
yeah, QA work. Frankly, my time is valuable. SOmetimes I notice a bug quickly and don't have time to pursue it. When I do, it's usually a labor of love along the lines of software-quality activist. I hate bugs.
When I do put a few hours into a bug report, it is very rewarding to get a reply email that says "yeah, replicated it, fixed it, thanks for the submission". Even if it's months later. It is not encouraging when I never hear back.
It is downright discouraging when a new version comes out and my bug is still there - that means, I put in those hours and the developer flushed my work down the drain. Under those circumstances, I rarely file a bug report again with the same organization. Perhaps this happens with other bug submitters.
> The fact of the matter is that bad code is better than no code.
Bad code makes Open Source look bad, like a bunch of immature kids who can't be bothered to fix their bugs.