Many mail delivery systems will do something like the following (I know this from a black-box-user perspective, not someone who's implemented it). They'll look up the MX record for the domain, and if one is nonexistant, look for an A record. If there is an A record, it will attempt to directly deliver the email to any SMTP server running on the host.
I like this style of functionality quite a bit -- it means that I can simply send mail to user@static-domain-name. In any event, all those systems inevitably dump mail at SiteFinder.
I've tried gnus, but not seriously -- the emacs mail client that I tried seriously was vm. I decided that the LISP-based code just wasn't responsive enough when my mailboxes got large, and that mutt tends to be more featureful -- and while I like emacs and tried the working-entirely-within-emacs approach, I've decided that many emacs-based apps just aren't as good as their external-to-emacs equivalents. I'm trying to remember my gnus experience. Either vm or gnus uses a bunch of weird font sizes and styles (I *hate* italics onscreen) that I had to go through and disable. IIRC, vm could get a bit cranky if I accidently started multiple instances. Mutt just tries to combine changes from multiple running instances, which is really nice -- pine takes a "last started gets write access" approach, which is kind of annoying.
Note that this is not unique to Thunderbird. I had the pleasure of finding out the even the excellent fetchmail had run into problems recently. I had to use pine to remove mail from the server. Ick.
The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.
There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...
Europe tries, but it's kind of amazing how disorganized things get.
It's really frusterating hearing about stuff that my country does to other countries and thinking "Damn, that was all that tax money they took from me that did that. Rats."
Last time I looked at pricing for such services in Australia the costs were astronomous.
Think about the population density in much of Australia. It's the second-lowest in the world, right after barren Mongolia, according to about.com. It's expensive to run phone cables out to remote sheep ranches in the middle of the desert.
That being said, I'm still amazed that Aussies have such a anti-tech hard-core conservative political bent, what with all their censorship laws and the like.
Realize that it's the same argument. The fact is you want the software and you don't want to pay for it, despite the fact that the law says that you must.
In most cases, I don't. When the item is fungible, I purchase it from another vendor. When it is not, I generally avoid it. If I'm stuck without other options, then I pirate it. Every dollar that Microsoft recieves results in money going to attack Linux, to play dirty tricks in the industry, etc.
Finally, it's a tough argument to claim that raping a girl is analogous to pirating software. Yes, pirating software means that a potential sale (in my case, a zero percentage chance, since if I couldn't pirate the software, I wouldn't use it *anyway*) is lost. That's quite different from the kind of physical and mental impact that raping a girl can have.
I do purchase products and services from companies that I don't like. Microsoft is a single exception -- they go so far beyond what I consider reasonable and acceptable that I refuse to provide them with funding. If the cost to me is a miniscule chance of a fine, I will take that cost more than willingly.
Microsoft funds research, but research funded by them ends up in a mess of patents intended to maintain their monopoly. It's not at all the same thing as giving money to a university researcher.
I am certainly not playing by the rules that society has built (though to be fair, not in an era of software) to be appropriate.
Microsoft has violated a lot of rules that society has built as well. They happen to have a large number of lawyers and can afford to pay money to political campaigns, so they can get away with it. I think that few people would dispute a claim that a significant portion of the reason that Microsoft is where it is today is because they are willing to play dirty.
This is my own form (along with attempting to find good alternatives to Microsoft products and improving those and encouraging others to use them) of poking back at Microsoft.
I'm not trying to claim that it's a particularly noble way of doing so. I am not an activist. I have no interest in crusading. I am simply a person that has a deep dislike for a company that has had a negative impact on me over the years. Perhaps some of this is just self-justification, and perhaps some is irrational. [shrug] I don't know. I do know that I find your arguments not in the least convincing when it comes to interesting me in giving Microsoft any money.
If Microsoft doesn't want you to use their software without paying for it, you don't use the software.
Ah, but see, I think few people are interested in really using Microsoft's software. How many people are really deeply affectionat of Windows and want to use it? Now, how many people are forced to use their products because Microsoft has produced a market in which they and they alone have a system that is compatible with products other vendors are selling? Perhaps you find this reasonable and equitable; I do not.
I know that many people use, say, RAM Doubler, or Kaleidoscope, and say "Wow, this is a really nice piece of software." They are convinced that they should use it because it is good software that provides them with functionality that they want at a good price. I, at least, feel that Windows does not do this, that most of the value of Windows lies in the fact that it is the only system that is compatible with application software out there.
Can I universalize this, a la Kant? Probably not. But it's what I intend to do -- not let more of my money slide into Microsoft's coffers than must be.
11) You're right. You can't get it all for free. Bummer. Some people need to live.
For users for whom LaTeX and GIMP are acceptable, this is a significant concern. The actual cost of a legal Windows software setup, once one factors in the cost of software that is only available commercially for Windows, is exorbant (note that this is not necessarily Microsoft's fault, but it is a fact of life). For most users, it is probably multiple times the cost of their computer.
If they sell at a price that makes sense in Thailand, they get accused of "dumping".
That is ridiculous. "Dumping" is only an issue when:
a) One is selling below cost. The per-unit production cost of Windows is nominal. It would be *very* hard to argue that Microsoft is selling below cost.
b) The intent is to drive someone else out of the market. There is *one* provider of Windows, and that is Microsoft. Industrial-style economic terms just don't make sense here.
I am really amazed -- I haven't been following MMOs, but this sort of thing looks like it's getting closer to the kind of Metaverse that Stephenson described (there are some important structural differences, such as where tasks are handled).
...and keep in mind that this is about as unofficial a statistic as you can get, given that it was given as the "out-of-the-blue questionaire" for an underground newspaper (readme) at Carnegie Mellon University. The sample size is probably quite small as well.
Anyway, the questionaire showed that, at least in terms of conscious sexual appeal, a pretty large proportion of women interviewed on campus found large penis girth to be significantly more highly valued than long penis length.
This matches up with the claim here. I suppose there's probably someone that's done serious studies in this field, given the marketing power of sex.
I dunno. Seems pretty shrewd. If you can pick up a nice set of damages and can come off as looking slick and doing a service for society into the bargain, I'd say that you're doing pretty well.
I'd suggest watching it. If you're a Yank, like myself, it takes a while to get used to the accents and figure out what folks are saying -- it took me a rewatch to really get a number of the lines. However, the movie is *great*.
There is an almost idential movie (though, I feel, not quite as good) called Snatch that is also a good watch.
True, to an extent. However, most decent programmers (henceforth, this will be an appendix to my definition of decent) would like their software to run in the future, as well as the present.
Really? What's the expected salable lifetime of a game? A year? Two? Maybe three? How many times, aside from very rare engine licensing examples like id's work, does code get used in enough games to make the extra finesse (requiring extra production time or lack of features) worthwhile? Maybe an engine gets used for an expansion pack or two, and then that code gets dumped in an archive somewhere to rot.
If you decide to use hack #8812 to get your software to run on XP, then (by my definition) you suck, as there is no reason to believe that it will run on any future (or past) versions of windows even.
But deliberate hacks aren't (generally) the main issue. They're mistakes in doing something properly that don't show up on system A, but do on system B. Furthermore, how much code do you really think is fully and properly portable? How many projects on Freshmeat are really fully and entirely ANSI (or whatever spec the developers are coding to) C compliant and work on any POSIX system?
Admitedly though, I am not a game developer. It is even more shameful in my line of work (custom applications) for someone to not follow this principle as usually performance isn't much of an issue (giving up half of the performance is fine, if it reduces the number of dependencies on outside hardware/software).
Neither am I. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to avoid game development -- clean, maintainable code is not given the emphasis that it is in most other fields.
1) Use standards, especially standards that are widely available and not dependent on a single vendor (java/opengl vs directX/c#). Avoid non-standard extensions like the plague, though apparently that's hard to do in OpenGL right now....
Mmmf. Java tends to impose performance limitations, and makes it a pain in the ass to package and support software, since now you have a bunch of VMs in the equation. It makes sense for a lot of things, but I don't think it's a great idea for Windows-directed games.
2) Patch for deficiencies very carefully (check os version before executing the 'quirks' mode of a module, make sure the module has a 'non quirks' mode in case the software one day actually works correctly).
Yup. I think things have improved a lot in this area in the Windows software world with the death of the 9x line.
Java is a lingua franca of computing code because it is basically the most strict language out there in common use.
Ugh. I can't agree. I find that Java is expanding and changing incredibly rapidly (understandable, given its youth, but still frusterating). I remember grading a student assignment where a student had written a secure mail client and chosen to use Java. I had just downloaded and installed an up-to-date JDK the previous month, and he had used some function that Sun had *just* put in an even newer JDK release. Download, install, rerun. It *did* work when done, but left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
Porting from java to basically anything is easy,
I think you mean any GCed language. Porting from Java to C or C++ isn't all that convenient.
There are some reasons that C or C++ can be much more attractive than Java for games (rather than custom apps, which are a Java stronghold). Performance matters a lot, both in CPU cycles and on generally RAM-starved consumer machines. Java isn't great in either area. Stability is less a concern in games than in almost any other software field, so improvements in stability that Java grants are minimized. There is a tremendous amount of inertia and Microsoft backing for C/C++ in games. The major benefits of Java (clean multithreading and RPC, easy lightweight TCP networking, easy cross-platform *widget-oriented* GUIs) just don't p
How hard is it generally to go from one to the other properly? How difficult is it to support both? Not many games do that any more, but there are still a few...
Mmmff...now you're getting a bit out of my league. I think that precompiled vertex arrays and display lists are handled differently between the two. If someone ties some of the more elaborate 2d functions in DirectX into Direct3d, they may have some porting to do.
John Carmack does read Slashdot, and hopefully he'll consider responding if he sees your post -- I'm simply not a good source.
If you weren't building off the person I originally responded to, there is no problem.
He said I was under the impression that meta-data is data stored within the file, about the file. and you said that "Metadata can be inside and outside of a file".
I figured that you were just building off of his statement, and retaining an implied "about the file".
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that was the whole point of having Tourette's Syndrome.
Yeah, I can't see any reason to have it if you can't randomly swear either.
Because then you would have massive numbers of name collisions between names like foo.net and foo and foo.bar, etc.
Futhermore, the administrative structure of DNS is also based on the hierarchy, and having a flat name system would cause all kinds of issues.
This would also prvent the introduction of new TLDs for fear of a name collision with the TLD itself.
*Finally*, why would we alias *.com to a TLD? Folks in, say, the UK, might prefer *.co.uk.
If you want "slashdot" to resolve to "slashdot.org", you can add it to your hosts file and get the effect without causing massive network problems.
Many mail delivery systems will do something like the following (I know this from a black-box-user perspective, not someone who's implemented it). They'll look up the MX record for the domain, and if one is nonexistant, look for an A record. If there is an A record, it will attempt to directly deliver the email to any SMTP server running on the host.
I like this style of functionality quite a bit -- it means that I can simply send mail to user@static-domain-name. In any event, all those systems inevitably dump mail at SiteFinder.
I've tried gnus, but not seriously -- the emacs mail client that I tried seriously was vm. I decided that the LISP-based code just wasn't responsive enough when my mailboxes got large, and that mutt tends to be more featureful -- and while I like emacs and tried the working-entirely-within-emacs approach, I've decided that many emacs-based apps just aren't as good as their external-to-emacs equivalents. I'm trying to remember my gnus experience. Either vm or gnus uses a bunch of weird font sizes and styles (I *hate* italics onscreen) that I had to go through and disable. IIRC, vm could get a bit cranky if I accidently started multiple instances. Mutt just tries to combine changes from multiple running instances, which is really nice -- pine takes a "last started gets write access" approach, which is kind of annoying.
Note that this is not unique to Thunderbird. I had the pleasure of finding out the even the excellent fetchmail had run into problems recently. I had to use pine to remove mail from the server. Ick.
I thought the funding to that got cancelled after Theo made some decidedly unpolitic statements.
The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.
There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...
Your "business" is a travesty of every artistic intention the authors of those works had.
It'd be a ton of fun to lock a copyright nut like you and an anti-IP nut like Stallman in a room with observation windows and see what happens.
Europe tries, but it's kind of amazing how disorganized things get.
It's really frusterating hearing about stuff that my country does to other countries and thinking "Damn, that was all that tax money they took from me that did that. Rats."
Last time I looked at pricing for such services in Australia the costs were astronomous.
Think about the population density in much of Australia. It's the second-lowest in the world, right after barren Mongolia, according to about.com. It's expensive to run phone cables out to remote sheep ranches in the middle of the desert.
That being said, I'm still amazed that Aussies have such a anti-tech hard-core conservative political bent, what with all their censorship laws and the like.
Realize that it's the same argument. The fact is you want the software and you don't want to pay for it, despite the fact that the law says that you must.
In most cases, I don't. When the item is fungible, I purchase it from another vendor. When it is not, I generally avoid it. If I'm stuck without other options, then I pirate it. Every dollar that Microsoft recieves results in money going to attack Linux, to play dirty tricks in the industry, etc.
Finally, it's a tough argument to claim that raping a girl is analogous to pirating software. Yes, pirating software means that a potential sale (in my case, a zero percentage chance, since if I couldn't pirate the software, I wouldn't use it *anyway*) is lost. That's quite different from the kind of physical and mental impact that raping a girl can have.
I do purchase products and services from companies that I don't like. Microsoft is a single exception -- they go so far beyond what I consider reasonable and acceptable that I refuse to provide them with funding. If the cost to me is a miniscule chance of a fine, I will take that cost more than willingly.
Microsoft funds research, but research funded by them ends up in a mess of patents intended to maintain their monopoly. It's not at all the same thing as giving money to a university researcher.
I am certainly not playing by the rules that society has built (though to be fair, not in an era of software) to be appropriate.
Microsoft has violated a lot of rules that society has built as well. They happen to have a large number of lawyers and can afford to pay money to political campaigns, so they can get away with it. I think that few people would dispute a claim that a significant portion of the reason that Microsoft is where it is today is because they are willing to play dirty.
This is my own form (along with attempting to find good alternatives to Microsoft products and improving those and encouraging others to use them) of poking back at Microsoft.
I'm not trying to claim that it's a particularly noble way of doing so. I am not an activist. I have no interest in crusading. I am simply a person that has a deep dislike for a company that has had a negative impact on me over the years. Perhaps some of this is just self-justification, and perhaps some is irrational. [shrug] I don't know. I do know that I find your arguments not in the least convincing when it comes to interesting me in giving Microsoft any money.
If Microsoft doesn't want you to use their software without paying for it, you don't use the software.
Ah, but see, I think few people are interested in really using Microsoft's software. How many people are really deeply affectionat of Windows and want to use it? Now, how many people are forced to use their products because Microsoft has produced a market in which they and they alone have a system that is compatible with products other vendors are selling? Perhaps you find this reasonable and equitable; I do not.
I know that many people use, say, RAM Doubler, or Kaleidoscope, and say "Wow, this is a really nice piece of software." They are convinced that they should use it because it is good software that provides them with functionality that they want at a good price. I, at least, feel that Windows does not do this, that most of the value of Windows lies in the fact that it is the only system that is compatible with application software out there.
Can I universalize this, a la Kant? Probably not. But it's what I intend to do -- not let more of my money slide into Microsoft's coffers than must be.
Yes, isn't XP installation and configuration easy compared to Linux's?
It's not a nice thing. Price discrimination, barring side effects of said discrimination, provides the discriminator with more money.
Governments are not stupid. They are quite aware that Microsoft makes insane profits per copy sold.
On the other hand, the fact that Microsoft is willing to give in to negotiation is quite a big deal.
Note that anything Microsoft removes will tend to fragment the global Windows market, a plus for non-Windows OSes.
11) You're right. You can't get it all for free. Bummer. Some people need to live.
For users for whom LaTeX and GIMP are acceptable, this is a significant concern. The actual cost of a legal Windows software setup, once one factors in the cost of software that is only available commercially for Windows, is exorbant (note that this is not necessarily Microsoft's fault, but it is a fact of life). For most users, it is probably multiple times the cost of their computer.
If they sell at a price that makes sense in Thailand, they get accused of "dumping".
That is ridiculous. "Dumping" is only an issue when:
a) One is selling below cost. The per-unit production cost of Windows is nominal. It would be *very* hard to argue that Microsoft is selling below cost.
b) The intent is to drive someone else out of the market. There is *one* provider of Windows, and that is Microsoft. Industrial-style economic terms just don't make sense here.
I am really amazed -- I haven't been following MMOs, but this sort of thing looks like it's getting closer to the kind of Metaverse that Stephenson described (there are some important structural differences, such as where tasks are handled).
...one realizes that beer is actually LSD?
...and keep in mind that this is about as unofficial a statistic as you can get, given that it was given as the "out-of-the-blue questionaire" for an underground newspaper (readme) at Carnegie Mellon University. The sample size is probably quite small as well.
Anyway, the questionaire showed that, at least in terms of conscious sexual appeal, a pretty large proportion of women interviewed on campus found large penis girth to be significantly more highly valued than long penis length.
This matches up with the claim here. I suppose there's probably someone that's done serious studies in this field, given the marketing power of sex.
Rich white criminals don't land in pound-me-in-the-ass prisons.
America's judicial system may be better than a lot of systems around the world, but neither is it free of corruptino.
I dunno. Seems pretty shrewd. If you can pick up a nice set of damages and can come off as looking slick and doing a service for society into the bargain, I'd say that you're doing pretty well.
I'd suggest watching it. If you're a Yank, like myself, it takes a while to get used to the accents and figure out what folks are saying -- it took me a rewatch to really get a number of the lines. However, the movie is *great*.
There is an almost idential movie (though, I feel, not quite as good) called Snatch that is also a good watch.
True, to an extent. However, most decent programmers (henceforth, this will be an appendix to my definition of decent) would like their software to run in the future, as well as the present.
Really? What's the expected salable lifetime of a game? A year? Two? Maybe three? How many times, aside from very rare engine licensing examples like id's work, does code get used in enough games to make the extra finesse (requiring extra production time or lack of features) worthwhile? Maybe an engine gets used for an expansion pack or two, and then that code gets dumped in an archive somewhere to rot.
If you decide to use hack #8812 to get your software to run on XP, then (by my definition) you suck, as there is no reason to believe that it will run on any future (or past) versions of windows even.
But deliberate hacks aren't (generally) the main issue. They're mistakes in doing something properly that don't show up on system A, but do on system B. Furthermore, how much code do you really think is fully and properly portable? How many projects on Freshmeat are really fully and entirely ANSI (or whatever spec the developers are coding to) C compliant and work on any POSIX system?
Admitedly though, I am not a game developer. It is even more shameful in my line of work (custom applications) for someone to not follow this principle as usually performance isn't much of an issue (giving up half of the performance is fine, if it reduces the number of dependencies on outside hardware/software).
Neither am I. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to avoid game development -- clean, maintainable code is not given the emphasis that it is in most other fields.
1) Use standards, especially standards that are widely available and not dependent on a single vendor (java/opengl vs directX/c#). Avoid non-standard extensions like the plague, though apparently that's hard to do in OpenGL right now....
Mmmf. Java tends to impose performance limitations, and makes it a pain in the ass to package and support software, since now you have a bunch of VMs in the equation. It makes sense for a lot of things, but I don't think it's a great idea for Windows-directed games.
2) Patch for deficiencies very carefully (check os version before executing the 'quirks' mode of a module, make sure the module has a 'non quirks' mode in case the software one day actually works correctly).
Yup. I think things have improved a lot in this area in the Windows software world with the death of the 9x line.
Java is a lingua franca of computing code because it is basically the most strict language out there in common use.
Ugh. I can't agree. I find that Java is expanding and changing incredibly rapidly (understandable, given its youth, but still frusterating). I remember grading a student assignment where a student had written a secure mail client and chosen to use Java. I had just downloaded and installed an up-to-date JDK the previous month, and he had used some function that Sun had *just* put in an even newer JDK release. Download, install, rerun. It *did* work when done, but left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
Porting from java to basically anything is easy,
I think you mean any GCed language. Porting from Java to C or C++ isn't all that convenient.
There are some reasons that C or C++ can be much more attractive than Java for games (rather than custom apps, which are a Java stronghold). Performance matters a lot, both in CPU cycles and on generally RAM-starved consumer machines. Java isn't great in either area. Stability is less a concern in games than in almost any other software field, so improvements in stability that Java grants are minimized. There is a tremendous amount of inertia and Microsoft backing for C/C++ in games. The major benefits of Java (clean multithreading and RPC, easy lightweight TCP networking, easy cross-platform *widget-oriented* GUIs) just don't p
How hard is it generally to go from one to the other properly? How difficult is it to support both? Not many games do that any more, but there are still a few...
Mmmff...now you're getting a bit out of my league. I think that precompiled vertex arrays and display lists are handled differently between the two. If someone ties some of the more elaborate 2d functions in DirectX into Direct3d, they may have some porting to do.
John Carmack does read Slashdot, and hopefully he'll consider responding if he sees your post -- I'm simply not a good source.
If you weren't building off the person I originally responded to, there is no problem.
He said I was under the impression that meta-data is data stored within the file, about the file. and you said that "Metadata can be inside and outside of a file".
I figured that you were just building off of his statement, and retaining an implied "about the file".