Actually, I often make my purchase decisions based on the negative reviews. Any book, no matter how bad, will get positive reviews. I find that it's more useful to see what people _didn't_ like about the book.
Sometimes there's useful information in the positive reviews, too. I was once making a purchase decision between two similarly-priced, similarly-specced printers; the reviews of both were positively glowing, but there was a difference in writing style. The one (a deskjet model, IIRC) was consistently called "awesome" in every review. The other (ESC900) got comments like "The print quality is exemplary for a model in this price range." Guess which one I bought? (Nothing against HP, mind you; I was only comparing two specific models, not the two companies in general.)
Review moderation? I don't need it, because I have some discernment. Just let people tell me in their own words what they think, and I'll figure out if it's something I want to buy, not just based on whether they liked it but on the details of what they said about it and how they said it.
Now, the ratings (N stars) are mostly worthless to me, because they don't convey enough information. But the reviews are useful.
I work at a public library. A year or so ago, I was at a conference held by our library catalog software vendor, and at one point they asked the open-ended question, what feature did we most want. I raised my hand without hesitation and said, "The ability to search the full text of every item in the library." They laughed, which I pretty much expected, because I realise the difficulty of making such a thing happen, but it's true: that's the feature I want.
If Amazon helps get the ball rolling toward that end, then I say, Go Amazon. They can even patent it, I don't care, as long as they'll license it to library software vendors and other interested parties. Seriously, we've been waiting for this feature for a LONG TIME, and it hasn't been happening. Star Trek made us drool over this feature a long time ago, but nobody stepped up to implement it in the real world. It's about time! My opinion of Amazon just shot up a couple of notches because they're even thinking seriously about finally really doing this; when/if they actually roll it out, they'll be the closest corporate thing to my personal hero.
And yeah, just nonfiction for now, but once the proof-of-concept is done, I suspect it'll prove so useful that lots of genres of book will be added. Though, I have to admit, it would be _most_ useful for nonfiction.
> I still want to hear you defend your DOS statement. > That should be good for a few laughs.
Oooh, oooh, let me do it... There are actually two ways to support his statement that DOS can do anything WinXP can do.
The first way is to talk about Turing Equivalence. This is the same argument used to say that C (or for that matter BASIC) is just as powerful as a VHLL (e.g., Perl). It is technically true that the one can do anything the other can do; it's just a question of how well and how easily and how quickly and so on it can do those things, not _whether_ it can do them.
The second way to support his statement is to point out that he said "any thing", not "any set of things". DOS only does one thing at a time, but any given individual thing it can do just fine. (Protected memory? In a single-tasking environment, you get that for free; only one app is running anyhow; and even if you need to reboot between apps (which is almost always unnecessary), rebooting DOS takes about the same amount of time as closing an app and opening another in WinXP.)
Personally I've become addicted to having my computer do more than one thing at a time, so I've switched from DOS to an OS that can do multiple things at once. (WinXP is not the OS I switched to, but that's neither here nor there.) But if some theoretical person existed who had no need for the computer to do multiple things at the same time (as unimaginable as that may be), DOS might still be a viable option for that person. There are very few upgrades in the DOS world, very few new apps, but one might plausibly argue that that's because it's a stable and mature platform. (Hey, that argument works for VMS, why not for DOS?)
The only issue I've had with motherboards is getting any OS (not just Linux, but Windows too) to use the slipshot onboard junk (onboard sound and video mostly; the onboard LAN has only given me trouble a couple of times). I've basically concluded that when you buy a motherboard you should assume if you don't know otherwise that you will have to buy separate sound and video cards even if they are supposedly included onboard, so you shouldn't consider a board that lacks these onboard components to be inferior in any way; if anything, it's probably better.
And I agree about motherboards not having bad Linux support (if you discount problems with cheap onboard sound and video; as far as onboard LAN, given the price of ethernet cards these days, I'm dubious as to why anyone would care whether the onboard LAN works). I've had trouble with soundcards, been lucky with modems (which seem to give a lot of people trouble), and heard horror stories about video cards (my advice: buy Matrox unless you really need the gamer-style 3D junk; my Mystique has worked OOTB with every OS I've tried it with and does great 2D), but I've not had Linux give me trouble about running on any particular motherboard yet.
> A small business CANNOT afford to employ a full time > UNIX administrator.
A small business doesn't _NEED_ a full-time Unix admin. Advertise for an entry-level computer administrator; from the stack of eighty resumes you get, throw out all the ones that list Microsoft Word as a primary job-related skill, as well as all the ones that list salaries outside your budget. Interview the rest; during the interview ask them what operating systems they've used; also ask them what "usenet" is. First one who says something about experimenting with Linux and gives you a good definition of usenet, offer him $10 an hour. If he turns you down, go to the next. He won't know everything he ought to know, but he'll be able to find out most routine things inside of 48 hours (hence the usenet requirement). For an extra one-time investment, get a couple hundred bucks' worth of relevant O'Reilly books to keep on the shelf.
If he's any good, and if he improves his knowledge constantly, give him regular raises or you won't keep him. But starting at $10 an hour you can give him regular raises for a while before you hit "full-time Unix admin" salary.
Internet service providers (such as AOL) were and are the largest part of hope for an alternative browser to gain market share against IE on the Windows platform. (On the other platforms, the conclusion is of course foregone; MSIE is basically irrelevant on all other platforms except Mac, and Safari is set to make it irrelevant there by the end of the next upgrade cycle.)
What I think will happen is different. MS is discontinuing the standalone browser upgrade. This means webmasters will be unable to dupe themselves into believing any longer that users are willing to upgrade to the latest version -- since users will be unable to do that. This will draw to a close (finally) what Netscape started circa 1994 -- the "this page best viewed with" webmaster mindset.
Either that, or webmasters, unable to get users to upgrade MSIE and unable to test their page with multiple versions of MSIE due to the inability for multiple versions of it to be installed simultaneously, will start pushing users to other browsers. But my prediction is that site design that relies on specific versions of specific browsers (at specific resolutions, usually, with specific font scales) will _finally_ die. It's about time.
It may be too, that with all the web-enabled handheld devices out there, Microsoft saw that coming anyway (it's been gradually edging its way in among the better web designers for some time now) and decided not to fight it. That means, essentially, letting the browser become a commodity and abandoning schemes to get webmasters to design toward a specific browser.
That actually could be a good thing. Here's to a more accessible web.
Incidentally, Mozilla reached critical mass some time ago; its development will be slowed by the current organisational changes, but that will pass, and it'll continue to be developed. Maybe in three years the mail/news client will even be good, in addition to the browser. One can hope.
The way Be handled this was to declare all other filesystems to be inferior and tell you that you shouldn't try to store data on other filesystems, or if you _had_ to, that you should put it in a.zip file first. This was of course an inane answer, since it is not in any way reasonable to expect people who multiboot to store their data on a filesystem that only one OS can access, but it was their answer. I suppose it worked for people who never wanted to use any other OS.
> I never heard anyone who wasn't in a Yahoo commercial use Yahoo > as a verb. Ever.
No, neither have I, but I *have* heard any number of people ask, "Do you have Yahoo on your computer?". These are of course people who don't know the difference between an internet service provider and a browser, much less understand that Yahoo is in southern California, but that doesn't matter.
Yahoo is still big. They were the original and canonical ubiquilink, and they've used that fame to their advantage, but they're no longer known for being the way to find stuff. Now they're mostly known for webmail and games and stock quotes and other cheesy end-user junk that's largely worthless to geeks, so of course their image on slashdot is poor.
Actually, though, dir.yahoo.com is still highly useful. People who know what an FQDN is can go directly there and skip the main page. It's not useful for the same sorts of things as Google is, but it's useful just the same -- much as usenet is still useful even though it's not the web.
Google _does_ have advertisements. It just doesn't have sixty billion blinky flashy banners that make the site take forever to load. Also, Google's advertisements are _targeted_, based on your search criteria, so you don't see an ads that aren't related in some way to what you searched for.
Also, there are other outfits that lease Google's technology.
> Come on. Is it really that hard to download a mail content > filter, or hit delete?
If you can even ask that question, it's obvious you don't get very much spam.
Mail content filters, even the best ones (full bayesian classification is at this time the best available) mostly don't work, or require huge amounts of effort to "train" them and then still partly don't work. As for hitting delete, if I get RSI that way, can I send you my medical bills?
The fact that the contact method is email shouldn't matter: any outfit that contacts you seventy times a day and refuses to identify itself and refuses to stop, for _years_, is actively harrassing you. That's criminal, and I want them incarcerated and jailed. If they were using the phone instead of email, that's exactly what would happen. No, telemarketers, though annoying, are not the same; we get maybe five calls a day tops, and any given outfit never calls us more than once a day, usually not that often. Spam pours in continuously, every hour day and night. Additionally, you can tell a telemarketer not to call you anymore and generally that specific telemarketing firm will abide by that. If you try to ask a spammer not to send you any more, they put you on their "lots and lots of spam" list. (Yeah, I read the article about the wealthy spammer who claimed to honor no-more-spam requests, but even assuming she was telling the truth about that, she would be in the minority.)
> We can filter by IPs or keywords or addresses or whatever, but > they one thing they can never disguise is their message: it has > to be available or they're just sending static.
I would have thought so too. I mean, what you say makes sense. But it's wrong: more than a third of the spam I get I can say with certitude that it has no message (in some cases, no text in the body at all), and two-thirds of the rest is in character sets I can't read (mostly Hangeul and ideographs that I presume are Chinese). In other words, they're mostly sending static.
Re:I have said it before and I will say it again..
on
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning > hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal > too?
In a word? Yes. That would be an unsolicited chain forward, i.e., a message that had already been forwarded to the forwarder and was now, without request of the recipient, being forwarded again. There is no valid reason ever to do that.
However, the reversed-charges argument for making spam illegal is, as far as I'm concerned, the icing on the cake. The really strong reasons why it should be illegal have to do with fraud and harrassment.
Vanishingly close to 100% of spam is fraudulent, at least in terms of forging headers. (Fraudulent content in the body is quite common as well, but it's the headers primarily that concern me.) Even if only non-fraudulent spam were legal, that would be a tremendous improvement. Since the spammers would have to register a fresh domain name in order to force me to update my filters, it would not be ecconomically feasible to do that for each and every message. I could prewash the spam out with a blacklist, saving lots of CPU cycles for my bayesian classification system.
Now, the harrassment argument, which IMO is the truly rock-solid one: if I got anything like anywhere near approaching close to as many unsolicited phone calls per day from the same outfit, and if they behaved in the same fashion (refused to identify themselves, refused to stop contacting me), law enforcement would be all over the case, and if they could track down the people responsible, they would go to jail. That the contact is by email rather than phone shouldn't matter: these creeps should go to jail. There's one particular spamhaus in Asia that I would pay good money to know who they are and be able to shut them down, because they just won't leave me alone. I'm tired of getting seventy messages a day from these cretins.
Second NICs for some reason seem to be more of a problem. It would probably have detected the second one fine if the first one weren't there. (I'm not trying to make an excuse; it _ought_ to detect both, certainly.)
> You know I miss the good old days of having to get under the > hood when you install a new distro.
So, umm, use the LFS distro. Only, instead of Linux, use a different kernel, BSD or Hurd or something. Then you can get under the hood a little. Better yet, write your own operating system from scratch.
> Shell scripts aren't terribly portable. makefiles aren't either. >/bin/sh (Bourne shell) and POSIX makefiles should be more portable > than Perl.
Only in theory.
In practice, some systems use csh as the default sh. In practice, getting any sh at all on some systems means installing an entire POSIX layer that doesn't come standard, but Perl can be installed without that. In practice, some POSIX systems don't implement the full POSIX standard, so you end up tracking down niggling bugs where one platform's version of some command doesn't have the option you were using. Also in practice, Perl is more than a replacement for sh and whatnot; it is in many cases a replacement for C and C++, and it is distinctly more portable than those.
Of course, the ultimate holy grail in portability is to just write all your software to target the z-machine, compile once, and then it can be run on anything from IBM mainframes to the TRS80 to the gameboy, using standard z-machine emulators available for every platform known to man (and several that are generally considered unknown). The problem with this approach, of course, is that you can't do things outside the scope of the z-machine's abilities. It's turing-complete in theory, but it suffers in terms of I/O because of certain assumptions it doesn't make. (For example, the z-machine does not assume it's running on a platform that has a filesystem or can allocate memory at runtime.)
I had a kernel panic just two weeks ago, with Mandrake 9.1. (Of course, I had re-arranged my IDE cables so that the drives had different identifiers (e.g., hda became hdc), and I got the panic while booting before mounting any read/write filesystems, and I fixed it by re-installing LILO, but nevermind all that stuff, I got a kernel panic, and I deserve geek points for that, or something.)
> It is a thousand times easier to find bugs that have been found.
This is why you do a release when the supply of known bugs dwindles to next-to-nothing and the deluge of bug reports is an intermittent trickle. The kernel guys know what they're doing, I suspect: no sense doing a release to _find_ more bugs intil the found ones are all fixed up.
We already knew reiser4 wasn't going to make the cut, back when the discussions were taking place about people who did and didn't get their proposals in while Linus was on that cruise. Reiser didn't finish in time, so it won't go in until the feature thaw.
This doesn't mean distributions won't add reiser patches to their versions of the kernels, though. It just means kernel.org won't carry it at this time.
As long as the format is regular, it's pretty trivial to write a simple script to do the transformation. XML helps enforce a certain amount of regularity, but it's by no means the only regular format.
Personally, I like XML pretty well in general, and I really like what OO.o has done with it in particular.
I'm less enamored with Java, but that's another thread for another day.
So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action
opportunity by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals
according to an open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively
leverage agglutinative team dynamics and team-building best practices
to create bottom-up holistic synergy through the empowerment and
integration of key team players on the front lines of our sales and
production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so as to
focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant,
results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate
strategic core competencies in our interpersonal assets management,
foster win-win outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set
networking and group-to-group issues collaboration ecosystem, set us
on a critical path to achieve total quality in our quality-driven,
services-oriented resources management game plan, monetize the
reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and up-sell the
competition in the new economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I often make my purchase decisions based on the negative
reviews. Any book, no matter how bad, will get positive reviews.
I find that it's more useful to see what people _didn't_ like about
the book.
Sometimes there's useful information in the positive reviews, too.
I was once making a purchase decision between two similarly-priced,
similarly-specced printers; the reviews of both were positively
glowing, but there was a difference in writing style. The one (a
deskjet model, IIRC) was consistently called "awesome" in every
review. The other (ESC900) got comments like "The print quality
is exemplary for a model in this price range." Guess which one I
bought? (Nothing against HP, mind you; I was only comparing two
specific models, not the two companies in general.)
Review moderation? I don't need it, because I have some
discernment. Just let people tell me in their own words what
they think, and I'll figure out if it's something I want to buy,
not just based on whether they liked it but on the details of
what they said about it and how they said it.
Now, the ratings (N stars) are mostly worthless to me, because
they don't convey enough information. But the reviews are useful.
I work at a public library. A year or so ago, I was at a conference
held by our library catalog software vendor, and at one point they
asked the open-ended question, what feature did we most want. I
raised my hand without hesitation and said, "The ability to search
the full text of every item in the library." They laughed, which
I pretty much expected, because I realise the difficulty of making
such a thing happen, but it's true: that's the feature I want.
If Amazon helps get the ball rolling toward that end, then I say,
Go Amazon. They can even patent it, I don't care, as long as they'll
license it to library software vendors and other interested parties.
Seriously, we've been waiting for this feature for a LONG TIME, and
it hasn't been happening. Star Trek made us drool over this feature
a long time ago, but nobody stepped up to implement it in the real
world. It's about time! My opinion of Amazon just shot up a couple
of notches because they're even thinking seriously about finally
really doing this; when/if they actually roll it out, they'll be
the closest corporate thing to my personal hero.
And yeah, just nonfiction for now, but once the proof-of-concept
is done, I suspect it'll prove so useful that lots of genres of
book will be added. Though, I have to admit, it would be _most_
useful for nonfiction.
> I still want to hear you defend your DOS statement.
> That should be good for a few laughs.
Oooh, oooh, let me do it... There are actually two ways to
support his statement that DOS can do anything WinXP can do.
The first way is to talk about Turing Equivalence. This is the
same argument used to say that C (or for that matter BASIC) is
just as powerful as a VHLL (e.g., Perl). It is technically true
that the one can do anything the other can do; it's just a question
of how well and how easily and how quickly and so on it can do
those things, not _whether_ it can do them.
The second way to support his statement is to point out that he
said "any thing", not "any set of things". DOS only does one thing
at a time, but any given individual thing it can do just fine.
(Protected memory? In a single-tasking environment, you get that
for free; only one app is running anyhow; and even if you need to
reboot between apps (which is almost always unnecessary), rebooting
DOS takes about the same amount of time as closing an app and
opening another in WinXP.)
Personally I've become addicted to having my computer do more than
one thing at a time, so I've switched from DOS to an OS that can
do multiple things at once. (WinXP is not the OS I switched to,
but that's neither here nor there.) But if some theoretical person
existed who had no need for the computer to do multiple things at
the same time (as unimaginable as that may be), DOS might still be
a viable option for that person. There are very few upgrades in
the DOS world, very few new apps, but one might plausibly argue
that that's because it's a stable and mature platform. (Hey, that
argument works for VMS, why not for DOS?)
The only issue I've had with motherboards is getting any OS (not just
Linux, but Windows too) to use the slipshot onboard junk (onboard
sound and video mostly; the onboard LAN has only given me trouble
a couple of times). I've basically concluded that when you buy
a motherboard you should assume if you don't know otherwise that
you will have to buy separate sound and video cards even if they
are supposedly included onboard, so you shouldn't consider a board
that lacks these onboard components to be inferior in any way; if
anything, it's probably better.
And I agree about motherboards not having bad Linux support (if
you discount problems with cheap onboard sound and video; as far
as onboard LAN, given the price of ethernet cards these days, I'm
dubious as to why anyone would care whether the onboard LAN works).
I've had trouble with soundcards, been lucky with modems (which
seem to give a lot of people trouble), and heard horror stories
about video cards (my advice: buy Matrox unless you really need
the gamer-style 3D junk; my Mystique has worked OOTB with every
OS I've tried it with and does great 2D), but I've not had Linux
give me trouble about running on any particular motherboard yet.
> A small business CANNOT afford to employ a full time
> UNIX administrator.
A small business doesn't _NEED_ a full-time Unix admin. Advertise
for an entry-level computer administrator; from the stack of eighty
resumes you get, throw out all the ones that list Microsoft Word
as a primary job-related skill, as well as all the ones that list
salaries outside your budget. Interview the rest; during the
interview ask them what operating systems they've used; also ask
them what "usenet" is. First one who says something about
experimenting with Linux and gives you a good definition of usenet,
offer him $10 an hour. If he turns you down, go to the next. He
won't know everything he ought to know, but he'll be able to find
out most routine things inside of 48 hours (hence the usenet
requirement). For an extra one-time investment, get a couple
hundred bucks' worth of relevant O'Reilly books to keep on the
shelf.
If he's any good, and if he improves his knowledge constantly,
give him regular raises or you won't keep him. But starting at
$10 an hour you can give him regular raises for a while before
you hit "full-time Unix admin" salary.
> "IT group"? In a company whose total budget for a new machine
> running a mission-critical service is $50k?
s/company/organization/; # Make the above fit my job description.
Internet service providers (such as AOL) were and are the largest part
of hope for an alternative browser to gain market share against IE on
the Windows platform. (On the other platforms, the conclusion is of
course foregone; MSIE is basically irrelevant on all other platforms
except Mac, and Safari is set to make it irrelevant there by the end
of the next upgrade cycle.)
What I think will happen is different. MS is discontinuing the
standalone browser upgrade. This means webmasters will be unable
to dupe themselves into believing any longer that users are willing
to upgrade to the latest version -- since users will be unable to
do that. This will draw to a close (finally) what Netscape started
circa 1994 -- the "this page best viewed with" webmaster mindset.
Either that, or webmasters, unable to get users to upgrade MSIE and
unable to test their page with multiple versions of MSIE due to the
inability for multiple versions of it to be installed simultaneously,
will start pushing users to other browsers. But my prediction is
that site design that relies on specific versions of specific
browsers (at specific resolutions, usually, with specific font
scales) will _finally_ die. It's about time.
It may be too, that with all the web-enabled handheld devices out
there, Microsoft saw that coming anyway (it's been gradually
edging its way in among the better web designers for some time now)
and decided not to fight it. That means, essentially, letting the
browser become a commodity and abandoning schemes to get webmasters
to design toward a specific browser.
That actually could be a good thing. Here's to a more accessible
web.
Incidentally, Mozilla reached critical mass some time ago; its
development will be slowed by the current organisational changes,
but that will pass, and it'll continue to be developed. Maybe in
three years the mail/news client will even be good, in addition to
the browser. One can hope.
The way Be handled this was to declare all other filesystems to be .zip
inferior and tell you that you shouldn't try to store data on other
filesystems, or if you _had_ to, that you should put it in a
file first. This was of course an inane answer, since it is not in
any way reasonable to expect people who multiboot to store their
data on a filesystem that only one OS can access, but it was their
answer. I suppose it worked for people who never wanted to use any
other OS.
> I never heard anyone who wasn't in a Yahoo commercial use Yahoo
> as a verb. Ever.
No, neither have I, but I *have* heard any number of people ask,
"Do you have Yahoo on your computer?". These are of course people
who don't know the difference between an internet service provider
and a browser, much less understand that Yahoo is in southern
California, but that doesn't matter.
Yahoo is still big. They were the original and canonical ubiquilink,
and they've used that fame to their advantage, but they're no longer
known for being the way to find stuff. Now they're mostly known for
webmail and games and stock quotes and other cheesy end-user junk
that's largely worthless to geeks, so of course their image on
slashdot is poor.
Actually, though, dir.yahoo.com is still highly useful. People who
know what an FQDN is can go directly there and skip the main page.
It's not useful for the same sorts of things as Google is, but it's
useful just the same -- much as usenet is still useful even though
it's not the web.
Advertisements.
Google _does_ have advertisements. It just doesn't have sixty
billion blinky flashy banners that make the site take forever to
load. Also, Google's advertisements are _targeted_, based on
your search criteria, so you don't see an ads that aren't related
in some way to what you searched for.
Also, there are other outfits that lease Google's technology.
> Come on. Is it really that hard to download a mail content
> filter, or hit delete?
If you can even ask that question, it's obvious you don't get very
much spam.
Mail content filters, even the best ones (full bayesian classification
is at this time the best available) mostly don't work, or require
huge amounts of effort to "train" them and then still partly don't
work. As for hitting delete, if I get RSI that way, can I send you
my medical bills?
The fact that the contact method is email shouldn't matter: any
outfit that contacts you seventy times a day and refuses to identify
itself and refuses to stop, for _years_, is actively harrassing you.
That's criminal, and I want them incarcerated and jailed. If they
were using the phone instead of email, that's exactly what would
happen. No, telemarketers, though annoying, are not the same; we
get maybe five calls a day tops, and any given outfit never calls
us more than once a day, usually not that often. Spam pours in
continuously, every hour day and night. Additionally, you can
tell a telemarketer not to call you anymore and generally that
specific telemarketing firm will abide by that. If you try to ask
a spammer not to send you any more, they put you on their "lots
and lots of spam" list. (Yeah, I read the article about the
wealthy spammer who claimed to honor no-more-spam requests, but
even assuming she was telling the truth about that, she would be in
the minority.)
> We can filter by IPs or keywords or addresses or whatever, but
> they one thing they can never disguise is their message: it has
> to be available or they're just sending static.
I would have thought so too. I mean, what you say makes sense.
But it's wrong: more than a third of the spam I get I can say
with certitude that it has no message (in some cases, no text
in the body at all), and two-thirds of the rest is in character
sets I can't read (mostly Hangeul and ideographs that I presume
are Chinese). In other words, they're mostly sending static.
> Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning
> hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal
> too?
In a word? Yes. That would be an unsolicited chain forward, i.e.,
a message that had already been forwarded to the forwarder and was
now, without request of the recipient, being forwarded again. There
is no valid reason ever to do that.
However, the reversed-charges argument for making spam illegal is,
as far as I'm concerned, the icing on the cake. The really strong
reasons why it should be illegal have to do with fraud and
harrassment.
Vanishingly close to 100% of spam is fraudulent, at least in terms
of forging headers. (Fraudulent content in the body is quite
common as well, but it's the headers primarily that concern me.)
Even if only non-fraudulent spam were legal, that would be a
tremendous improvement. Since the spammers would have to register
a fresh domain name in order to force me to update my filters, it
would not be ecconomically feasible to do that for each and every
message. I could prewash the spam out with a blacklist, saving
lots of CPU cycles for my bayesian classification system.
Now, the harrassment argument, which IMO is the truly rock-solid
one: if I got anything like anywhere near approaching close to
as many unsolicited phone calls per day from the same outfit,
and if they behaved in the same fashion (refused to identify
themselves, refused to stop contacting me), law enforcement
would be all over the case, and if they could track down the
people responsible, they would go to jail. That the contact
is by email rather than phone shouldn't matter: these creeps
should go to jail. There's one particular spamhaus in Asia
that I would pay good money to know who they are and be able
to shut them down, because they just won't leave me alone. I'm
tired of getting seventy messages a day from these cretins.
Nah, mate, we're only supposed to hold 'im until Mic gets back.
Second NICs for some reason seem to be more of a problem. It would
probably have detected the second one fine if the first one weren't
there. (I'm not trying to make an excuse; it _ought_ to detect both,
certainly.)
> You know I miss the good old days of having to get under the
> hood when you install a new distro.
So, umm, use the LFS distro. Only, instead of Linux, use a
different kernel, BSD or Hurd or something. Then you can get
under the hood a little. Better yet, write your own operating
system from scratch.
> Shell scripts aren't terribly portable. makefiles aren't either. /bin/sh (Bourne shell) and POSIX makefiles should be more portable
>
> than Perl.
Only in theory.
In practice, some systems use csh as the default sh. In practice,
getting any sh at all on some systems means installing an entire
POSIX layer that doesn't come standard, but Perl can be installed
without that. In practice, some POSIX systems don't implement the
full POSIX standard, so you end up tracking down niggling bugs
where one platform's version of some command doesn't have the
option you were using. Also in practice, Perl is more than a
replacement for sh and whatnot; it is in many cases a replacement
for C and C++, and it is distinctly more portable than those.
Of course, the ultimate holy grail in portability is to just write
all your software to target the z-machine, compile once, and then
it can be run on anything from IBM mainframes to the TRS80 to the
gameboy, using standard z-machine emulators available for every
platform known to man (and several that are generally considered
unknown). The problem with this approach, of course, is that you
can't do things outside the scope of the z-machine's abilities.
It's turing-complete in theory, but it suffers in terms of I/O
because of certain assumptions it doesn't make. (For example,
the z-machine does not assume it's running on a platform that
has a filesystem or can allocate memory at runtime.)
> Thank god make isnt' written to use perl as its language. *shudder*
If the software were written in pure Perl, you wouldn't need make
to install it.
I had a kernel panic just two weeks ago, with Mandrake 9.1. (Of
course, I had re-arranged my IDE cables so that the drives had
different identifiers (e.g., hda became hdc), and I got the panic
while booting before mounting any read/write filesystems, and I
fixed it by re-installing LILO, but nevermind all that stuff, I got
a kernel panic, and I deserve geek points for that, or something.)
> It is a thousand times easier to find bugs that have been found.
This is why you do a release when the supply of known bugs dwindles
to next-to-nothing and the deluge of bug reports is an intermittent
trickle. The kernel guys know what they're doing, I suspect: no
sense doing a release to _find_ more bugs intil the found ones are
all fixed up.
We already knew reiser4 wasn't going to make the cut, back when
the discussions were taking place about people who did and didn't
get their proposals in while Linus was on that cruise. Reiser
didn't finish in time, so it won't go in until the feature thaw.
This doesn't mean distributions won't add reiser patches to their
versions of the kernels, though. It just means kernel.org won't
carry it at this time.
Shell scripts aren't terribly portable. makefiles aren't either.
Just write everything in Perl, and you don't have these problems.
As long as the format is regular, it's pretty trivial to write a
simple script to do the transformation. XML helps enforce a certain
amount of regularity, but it's by no means the only regular format.
Personally, I like XML pretty well in general, and I really like
what OO.o has done with it in particular.
I'm less enamored with Java, but that's another thread for another day.
So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action opportunity by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals according to an open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively leverage agglutinative team dynamics and team-building best practices to create bottom-up holistic synergy through the empowerment and integration of key team players on the front lines of our sales and production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so as to focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant, results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate strategic core competencies in our interpersonal assets management, foster win-win outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set networking and group-to-group issues collaboration ecosystem, set us on a critical path to achieve total quality in our quality-driven, services-oriented resources management game plan, monetize the reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and up-sell the competition in the new economy.
> The gamma progression
I should have put a third footnote there:
Colloquially, "factorial".