I wasn't referring to any detail of the SMTP protocol. If somebody sends a message and it is automatically classified as spam then there are two choices - either the users see it or they don't. If they don't see it then that is what I meant by 'dropped'. If the users do see it, then you're not 'keeping spam away from your users'. The effect of spam is mitigated a little bit if messages are diverted into a special 'spam' folder rather than dropped altogether, but if you have to comb through a folder of mostly-spam to pick out false positives you still waste quite a bit of time and risk missing things.
In Germany, if an employer asks you questions during a job interview that are illegal to ask (like: Are you pregnant?) and telling them that it is illegal, or telling them that you don't want to answer would cost you the job, it is absolutely one hundred percent legal and moral to lie.
It may well be legal, but that has no bearing on whether it is moral. The government does not decide what is moral and what isn't. If it's morally okay to lie to such questions in Germany, it's probably okay in the rest of the world too.
A bit screwed up that your employer can't ask whether you are pregnant or not - it certainly has a real effect on the work you'll be able to do for them over the next couple of years - but employment law seems to be written by special interest groups these days.
I also use every application maximized to the full screen. The behaviour of current window managers, copying Microsoft Windows, makes it just too painful to have overlapping windows. Any click in a window's area forces it to the front, which is a total PITA. I much prefer the model used by ROX where clicking on the title bar forces a window to the front, but otherwise you can interact with a window even while it's overlapped by another. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for better interaction between applications, in particular, drag-and-drop file saving and loading.
Funny - I've usually seen it's the geeks who take the trouble to turn on the 'classic' look and feel in Windows and get rid of all the cloying eye-candy. Meanwhile non-technical users just stick with the default.
All non-trivial software implements patents, some of which are held by companies we dislike. Why give Microsoft a power of veto over what software is included in Debian? You could equally well present them with a printout of the Linux kernel source and ask them to promise not to assert any patents they hold that cover it (even if the claim of "283 software patents" is not substantiated, they must still have quite a few). I find this attitude, that you can't write or package any software without asking Microsoft for permission, extremely strange. (Is VFAT long filename support included in Debian's standard kernel?) The Wine project has no such qualms, and nor does Samba.
They had good episodes, it's just I felt the quality of the writing and the jokes were just a bit... meh. I particularly remember the 'Leela's Homeworld' episode as being boring, followed by 'The Sting' (both season 4). Perhaps I am reading too much into it but I definitely felt a sharp dropoff going from season 2 to 3 in the boxed set.
The important question is, who have they got down to write these new episodes? The funny, sharp writers who made the show so good in seasons 1 and 2? Or will they resort again to the lazy dimwits who made series 3 and 4 a disappointment?
That's a great piece of reading but it doesn't really amount to evidence of 'buying' journalists and bloggers (we all knew that analysts are whores and that Microsoft has a chorus of vendors who back its platform - as indeed does Linux). For that, you would need to provide one or two examples of journalists being 'bought'.
The patent license permits royalty-free redistribution of the Library...
Really? So all that Fedora and other US-based Linux distributions must do to ship ffmpeg legally is to include Google Chrome (either the Windows version or some future Linux release) and use the ffmpeg library (or DLL) from that? Great news!
I should add, you can build stuff with the non-free F# compiler and run it under Mono; and you can run the compiler itself under Mono; but it's still non-free and so not something I'd want to rely on.
Knowing that F# came out of Microsoft Research and that some other.NET code has been released as free software by Microsoft in the past, I was hoping that the F# compiler would be free software too. Sadly this is not the case - at least as far as the licence in fsharp.zip here is concerned; it's distributable for non-commercial use only. So while F# looks very interesting, for now it's something of a Microsoft lock-in, and I won't be adopting it because it removes the possibility of porting to Mono.
Even if someone had a domain for legitimate business uses, they shouldn't be able to sell it when they are through with it, it should just go back into the pool.
Trouble is, that would end any possibility of domains being transferred from one business to another. A business might no longer be using cat-food.com but rather than sell it for $10k on the open market, it makes more sense to keep paying the $10 per year to have it registered and showing a placeholder page, just in case you might want to use it again in future (and to stop competitors getting it).
Here's an example of value being added. Suppose Adam pays $50 to buy a ticket for a concert. Now they're all sold out and Bob would like to go, but he can't get a ticket. Bob really wants to see the concert and it's worth at least $200 to him. Adam would like to see it, but all things considered, he'd be happy to give up his ticket in exchange for $100 to spend on something else.
If an intermediary buys the ticket from Adam for $120 and sells it to Bob for $180 then both benefit. Adam gets his fair value for the ticket he gives up, plus $20 extra. Bob gets his ticket for $20 less than it's worth to him. Of course the intermediary takes the largest share of the profit - but neither party is forced to go through the intermediary, any more than you're forced to buy cars from a used car salesman rather than buying them direct from the original owner. If the intermediary doesn't add enough value to be worth the extra markup he adds, then people wouldn't do business with him.
The best way to get rid of 'scalpers' is to make it easy for concertgoers to buy and sell tickets between themselves at a price they agree on. And of course people do that, putting ads on Craigslist or whatever. Sometimes it is more convenient to buy from a ticket trader who is at the door of the concert, rather than travelling across town to meet the original seller in the flesh; of course you pay a premium for this convenience. That would be eliminated if there were a way to transfer tickets electronically from one person to another, rather than this archaic business of handing over a scrap of paper.
It depends on what it means by 'shrinks'. If it's just gzip compression, then yes you do get that by tunnelling over an ssh proxy. If you want to recompress images as well, use RabbIT. Anything more than that (intelligent summarizing of text? rewriting bloated Javascript?) is an AI-complete problem.
I also found that cutting the overhead of TCP handshakes, DNS lookups etc. by just sending requests to a proxy server over an already-existing ssh tunnel noticeably reduces the delay between clicking on a link and the page starting to appear (the wait period that used to show 'host contacted, waiting for reply...' and all that in early browsers like Netscape). This is before the effect of any content compression.
I would also add that 'scalpers' add value for the original seller of the tickets. It can happen that speculators buy the tickets with the intention of reselling them, but end up stuck with them because nobody wants them. So some risk is transferred from the event organizer to the speculators.
What value does a domain squatter add? They add no value -- actually they destroy value since they are blocking useful entrepreneurship -- and take no risk.
They do take risk, since they must buy the domain to start with, pay the maintenance on it, and perhaps nobody will want to buy it. I agree it's quite hard to see what value is created by taking a previously unused domain, registering it, and waiting for somebody to come along and buy it. But as another poster pointed out, having a secondary market in domain names is a benefit (if you accept the premise that domain names themselves are valuable). If it were really a no-risk business, I would quit my day job now and start trading in domain names.
So, personally, I'd like to see legislation that enforced some sort of simple calculation for squatted domains: $price = $30 x # of years the squatter has squatted on the domain.
So it would not be allowed to transfer domain names for a consideration greater than that amount? This might obstruct worthwhile transactions that benefit both parties and society (for example, I expect the bbc.com domain name was sold by Boston Business Consulting for a fair amount of money, but they wouldn't have been willing to move their business to a different domain just for a few hundred bucks). Of course, in law there is no way to distinguish between a 'squatter' and a 'legitimate' business. Those are moralistic terms used on Slashdot. (In fact 'squatter' is not a fitting analogy; these people are more like absentee landlords who purchase a building or land legitimately but leave it empty. Squatters, on the other hand, take over a building without legal ownership.)
Well, I typed in geniuses and it completely failed to mention the wisest human alive, Steven Wolfram. So I think it's pretty darned incomplete, especially compared to such an unprecedented knowledge-processing breakthrough as Wolfram Alpha.
The last thing you need to realize is that whatever money you give this guy is just going to fund him to buy up more domains and keep his hands on others longer.
That's the same if you buy anything from anybody. Do you believe that domain names should not be bought and sold but handed out by Santa according to who is good and who is naughty? If you accept that people have the right to resell domain names they own, it's entirely their own business what fee to charge. Of course if someone else owns something you want, and won't give it up without payment, it's natural to feel aggrieved and vilify the other person. That doesn't mean they are scum. It is the odd system of domain names and artificial scarcity that causes domain names to have a high value. Either pay what it's worth (and no, what it's worth is not the same as 'the price I think I should be able to buy it for') or choose a different domain.
Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
Didn't your mom teach you not to forcefully shut down any operating system with any file system?
It's 2009. If any system can't handle a power failure without soiling its pants then the system is broken. It's a quite reasonable expectation that config files should not get trashed, and if they are, then some code somewhere is buggy.
The point is that you have expressed all sorts of fear about ext4 - oh no, I'm not letting it near my production boxes - but you have not applied the same standard to the applications that trashed their config files when run on ext4. Even though, strictly speaking, it is the applications that are buggy. You should be equally enthusiastic about getting rid of KDE and any other software that trashes configuration files; otherwise it looks like you are playing favourites and blaming ext4 in order to overlook the bugs in the apps you're attached to.
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I wasn't referring to any detail of the SMTP protocol. If somebody sends a message and it is automatically classified as spam then there are two choices - either the users see it or they don't. If they don't see it then that is what I meant by 'dropped'. If the users do see it, then you're not 'keeping spam away from your users'. The effect of spam is mitigated a little bit if messages are diverted into a special 'spam' folder rather than dropped altogether, but if you have to comb through a folder of mostly-spam to pick out false positives you still waste quite a bit of time and risk missing things.
It may well be legal, but that has no bearing on whether it is moral. The government does not decide what is moral and what isn't. If it's morally okay to lie to such questions in Germany, it's probably okay in the rest of the world too.
A bit screwed up that your employer can't ask whether you are pregnant or not - it certainly has a real effect on the work you'll be able to do for them over the next couple of years - but employment law seems to be written by special interest groups these days.
Of course not. If someone they haven't met sends them mail, and it's dropped as spam, why would they complain? They never even knew about it.
I also use every application maximized to the full screen. The behaviour of current window managers, copying Microsoft Windows, makes it just too painful to have overlapping windows. Any click in a window's area forces it to the front, which is a total PITA. I much prefer the model used by ROX where clicking on the title bar forces a window to the front, but otherwise you can interact with a window even while it's overlapped by another. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for better interaction between applications, in particular, drag-and-drop file saving and loading.
Funny - I've usually seen it's the geeks who take the trouble to turn on the 'classic' look and feel in Windows and get rid of all the cloying eye-candy. Meanwhile non-technical users just stick with the default.
The developer of PulseAudio explains some of the rationale in this interview.
All non-trivial software implements patents, some of which are held by companies we dislike. Why give Microsoft a power of veto over what software is included in Debian? You could equally well present them with a printout of the Linux kernel source and ask them to promise not to assert any patents they hold that cover it (even if the claim of "283 software patents" is not substantiated, they must still have quite a few). I find this attitude, that you can't write or package any software without asking Microsoft for permission, extremely strange. (Is VFAT long filename support included in Debian's standard kernel?) The Wine project has no such qualms, and nor does Samba.
They had good episodes, it's just I felt the quality of the writing and the jokes were just a bit... meh. I particularly remember the 'Leela's Homeworld' episode as being boring, followed by 'The Sting' (both season 4). Perhaps I am reading too much into it but I definitely felt a sharp dropoff going from season 2 to 3 in the boxed set.
The important question is, who have they got down to write these new episodes? The funny, sharp writers who made the show so good in seasons 1 and 2? Or will they resort again to the lazy dimwits who made series 3 and 4 a disappointment?
That's a great piece of reading but it doesn't really amount to evidence of 'buying' journalists and bloggers (we all knew that analysts are whores and that Microsoft has a chorus of vendors who back its platform - as indeed does Linux). For that, you would need to provide one or two examples of journalists being 'bought'.
Uh, evidence? (and no, 'person X used to work for company Y, who once did business with Microsoft' is not evidence)
Really? So all that Fedora and other US-based Linux distributions must do to ship ffmpeg legally is to include Google Chrome (either the Windows version or some future Linux release) and use the ffmpeg library (or DLL) from that? Great news!
That's great news! I'll check it out and see if (when finally made free) it can be packaged for Fedora.
I should add, you can build stuff with the non-free F# compiler and run it under Mono; and you can run the compiler itself under Mono; but it's still non-free and so not something I'd want to rely on.
Knowing that F# came out of Microsoft Research and that some other .NET code has been released as free software by Microsoft in the past, I was hoping that the F# compiler would be free software too. Sadly this is not the case - at least as far as the licence in fsharp.zip here is concerned; it's distributable for non-commercial use only. So while F# looks very interesting, for now it's something of a Microsoft lock-in, and I won't be adopting it because it removes the possibility of porting to Mono.
Trouble is, that would end any possibility of domains being transferred from one business to another. A business might no longer be using cat-food.com but rather than sell it for $10k on the open market, it makes more sense to keep paying the $10 per year to have it registered and showing a placeholder page, just in case you might want to use it again in future (and to stop competitors getting it).
Here's an example of value being added. Suppose Adam pays $50 to buy a ticket for a concert. Now they're all sold out and Bob would like to go, but he can't get a ticket. Bob really wants to see the concert and it's worth at least $200 to him. Adam would like to see it, but all things considered, he'd be happy to give up his ticket in exchange for $100 to spend on something else.
If an intermediary buys the ticket from Adam for $120 and sells it to Bob for $180 then both benefit. Adam gets his fair value for the ticket he gives up, plus $20 extra. Bob gets his ticket for $20 less than it's worth to him. Of course the intermediary takes the largest share of the profit - but neither party is forced to go through the intermediary, any more than you're forced to buy cars from a used car salesman rather than buying them direct from the original owner. If the intermediary doesn't add enough value to be worth the extra markup he adds, then people wouldn't do business with him.
The best way to get rid of 'scalpers' is to make it easy for concertgoers to buy and sell tickets between themselves at a price they agree on. And of course people do that, putting ads on Craigslist or whatever. Sometimes it is more convenient to buy from a ticket trader who is at the door of the concert, rather than travelling across town to meet the original seller in the flesh; of course you pay a premium for this convenience. That would be eliminated if there were a way to transfer tickets electronically from one person to another, rather than this archaic business of handing over a scrap of paper.
It depends on what it means by 'shrinks'. If it's just gzip compression, then yes you do get that by tunnelling over an ssh proxy. If you want to recompress images as well, use RabbIT. Anything more than that (intelligent summarizing of text? rewriting bloated Javascript?) is an AI-complete problem.
I also found that cutting the overhead of TCP handshakes, DNS lookups etc. by just sending requests to a proxy server over an already-existing ssh tunnel noticeably reduces the delay between clicking on a link and the page starting to appear (the wait period that used to show 'host contacted, waiting for reply...' and all that in early browsers like Netscape). This is before the effect of any content compression.
I would also add that 'scalpers' add value for the original seller of the tickets. It can happen that speculators buy the tickets with the intention of reselling them, but end up stuck with them because nobody wants them. So some risk is transferred from the event organizer to the speculators.
They do take risk, since they must buy the domain to start with, pay the maintenance on it, and perhaps nobody will want to buy it. I agree it's quite hard to see what value is created by taking a previously unused domain, registering it, and waiting for somebody to come along and buy it. But as another poster pointed out, having a secondary market in domain names is a benefit (if you accept the premise that domain names themselves are valuable). If it were really a no-risk business, I would quit my day job now and start trading in domain names.
So it would not be allowed to transfer domain names for a consideration greater than that amount? This might obstruct worthwhile transactions that benefit both parties and society (for example, I expect the bbc.com domain name was sold by Boston Business Consulting for a fair amount of money, but they wouldn't have been willing to move their business to a different domain just for a few hundred bucks). Of course, in law there is no way to distinguish between a 'squatter' and a 'legitimate' business. Those are moralistic terms used on Slashdot. (In fact 'squatter' is not a fitting analogy; these people are more like absentee landlords who purchase a building or land legitimately but leave it empty. Squatters, on the other hand, take over a building without legal ownership.)
Well, I typed in geniuses and it completely failed to mention the wisest human alive, Steven Wolfram. So I think it's pretty darned incomplete, especially compared to such an unprecedented knowledge-processing breakthrough as Wolfram Alpha.
That's the same if you buy anything from anybody. Do you believe that domain names should not be bought and sold but handed out by Santa according to who is good and who is naughty? If you accept that people have the right to resell domain names they own, it's entirely their own business what fee to charge. Of course if someone else owns something you want, and won't give it up without payment, it's natural to feel aggrieved and vilify the other person. That doesn't mean they are scum. It is the odd system of domain names and artificial scarcity that causes domain names to have a high value. Either pay what it's worth (and no, what it's worth is not the same as 'the price I think I should be able to buy it for') or choose a different domain.
Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
It's 2009. If any system can't handle a power failure without soiling its pants then the system is broken. It's a quite reasonable expectation that config files should not get trashed, and if they are, then some code somewhere is buggy.
The point is that you have expressed all sorts of fear about ext4 - oh no, I'm not letting it near my production boxes - but you have not applied the same standard to the applications that trashed their config files when run on ext4. Even though, strictly speaking, it is the applications that are buggy. You should be equally enthusiastic about getting rid of KDE and any other software that trashes configuration files; otherwise it looks like you are playing favourites and blaming ext4 in order to overlook the bugs in the apps you're attached to.