For instance, false positives could be greatly reduced by automatically whitelisting recipient addresses on outgoing messages, the theory being that anyone I SEND email too will not be sending me spam.
You need not even integrate this functionality into the email client -- a simple smtp proxy with access to the whitelist could do the trick in an email client-agnostic way. This is actually on my "stuff to do in my non-existent spare time" list -- and smtp proxy that handles automagically updating the spamassasin per-user or system whitelist.
Back up a little. So these Machines mentioned Before -- they're like Carriages, only without Horses? From whence do they derive their Motive Force -- some kind of Magnetikal Effect?
-- Poor Dick
I DO sort lower scoring spam into another folder -- which helps with the false positives (but I get a LOT of low-scoring spam), but once my incoming spam rate hits 600/day, even the percentage that get through will be a nuisance -- this will be especially true if I've been gone for, say, a week. Ultimately, the writing is on the wall. If not this year, then certainly next year my current address will be pretty much unusable. It's too bad. The thing that really gets me is that despite the fact that spammers are operating on record low margins, despite the advent of effective filtering (and SA is remarkably effective) and despite the widespread use of blacklists, my spam load continues to double. Sad, really -- I believe we're witnessing the end of email, at least as we've known it over the last 15 years or so.
I've had two email addresses since back in the day when domain names were free. waste.com was my initial domain -- I sold waste of in 95 and got a new email address -- swampgas.com. I have had the same address on each of those, and have been pretty stubborn about leaving that single address more or less public (although obfuscated when posting to usenet)-- but that's about to change.
About the time I switced to the new domain, I began seeing a significant amount of email spam. As of 2000, I began to see my rate doubling about once per year. Last year I got about 150/day -- this year it's up to 300 or so. Even using spamassasin, the emails that get through are a major annoyance, especially if I've been away from email for more than a day or two. At this point, it looks like I'll be switching to using multiple addresses, one semi-public, one for ecommerce, and one given out only to friends and family -- I really see no other way at this point (although even THAT isn't a perfect solution).
Of course, maybe it's because I live in St. Tammany Parish (a parish in LA is like a county in other states) -- the same parish as Slidell. In fact, Ron Scelson was our old babysitter's son in law. Maybe the massive spam load is some kind of weird misdirected digital karma bullet, that just happened to hit me instead of the nearby spammer. Dunno -- but I suspect its just the inevitable consequence of keeping a vary public email address.
In any case -- yes -- spam is a major problem for me, and I'm reasonably savy with most of the available anti-spam tools out there.
My uncle is older, and got fascinated with digital technology once it hit his radar screen (he isn't a professional photographer). He once remarked that "Ansel would have LOVED this stuff...". I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get him to elaborate, but this probably backs up the author's assertion (at least anecdotaly).
Dean, a far-left candidate, is campaigning to the far-left in order to win the nomination. He has given little thought to the "middle": a group which is necessary to win the election. He has Bush landslide written all over his face.
Open source is more likely to be stable and bug-free because the code will be widely inspected by thousands of eyes
This may be true for a minority of widely used projects, but for most applications, I've never bought this argument. Bug swatting, and especially code inspection, is and always will be a tedious process, not well-suited for a volunteer-only development community. The only advantage I see for open source in this area is that bugs can be fixed as they are encountered -- but this only works where the end user has the required skills to do the fixing in the first place.
There is the issue of expectations, however. Nobody expects that an iPod will do spreadsheets, just as nobody expects a game console to do word processing.
If, however, Sun will be marketing these alongside cut-rate PCs at the local Wal-Mart, then they're going to have contend with the fact that their boxes will be far less functional than their windows cousins and lower consumer expectations accordingly (and prices steeply). Even if they managed to do that, I'm wondering what is to keep these boxes from going the way of the I-Opener -- which seems like a less problematic product, given the lack of hardware issues. Maybe the buying public has changed radically since 2002, but I doubt it.
One interesting barometer for how well all this will work out would be retail sales figures for Lindows PCs. Haven't been able to find these, though.
A rather newbie sounding question but can anyone explain solid reasons to use this instead of the standard linksys firewall that comes with the router? Note that I'm talking about a home user with less critical requirements than a business.
I used to use a Linux box for firewalling/masquerading and had to switch to a LinkSys because of DHCP issues with my broadband provider. One big advantage of the Linux setup was the additional functionality offered by the IP masquerading helper modules; stuff that couldn't normally be masqueraded (CuSeeMe comes to mind) could have "helper" kernel modules that allowed traffic to be masqueraded properly. You could also do web caching to disk on the same machine -- obviously not possible with the linksys.
Look at the success of WebTV and those little $99 email terminals.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be holding these up as models -- last I checked WebTV (now MSN-TV) had declined to somethting on the order of 50,000 users total (down from a high of something like 2.4% of all internet users in the late 90s). The email terminal/network appliance business NEVER really took off (probably killed as much by falling PC prices as by the device's own liimitations), despite the hype.
Having said that, your point about phones is interesting. I've always thpought that Linux would ultimately get to the consumer desktop by way of the corporate desktop. I suppose, though, that it's entirely possible that linux will get into the hands of consumers much faster as an embedded OS in various consumer electronics.
There's more to games than what most people around here think of as games. We're not neccessarily talking Unreal here. Instead, think Mathblaster, Barbie Detective, Spyfox -- all titles for the younger set. Or Scrabble, ChessMaster or any one of 10 different Bridge games. Think of that perennial walmart favorite, "Deer Hunter". Entertainment software as a whole is not just confined to the "gamer" market -- it's a much larger and broader market than the gamer demographic.
As for hardware drivers, the real issue is that they cost both to develop and support, and manufacturers will need a REAL reason to spend the money, especially given the razor-slim margins on consumer PC hardware. I can't think of ANY compelling argument Sun can make in order for that to happen without FIRST having significant market share, which will be difficult without first having the hardware support. Chicken and Egg. I doubt the proliferation of Linux distro's is an issue -- a driver is a driver. It shouldn't be affected much by distro (perhaps kernel version is some cases), except maybe on the install side.
Driver support is more likely to improve as linux begins to penetrate the corporate desktop -- ultimately, this is going to be the route to the consumer desktop.
No -- I think you're still making assumptions about usage patterns of this "next generation" user that really aren't backed up. Notice that I said "entertainment software". What happens when this non-hardcore-gamer waitress finds out that that copy of "Reader Rabbit" she just bought for her kid doesn't work? Or when she has to return that USB webcam because it doesn't work with her new machine?
The primary application for ANY consumer computer is as likely to be entertainment software as it is wordprocessing and web surfing.
I hear this business about how "Joe User really only wants to word process, surf the web and do email" all the time around here. I think this assumption is just plain wrong. If I'm wrong, I'd certainly like to see some proof. As it is, there's a string of failed ventures that seem to back me up. The most sucessful of these I can think of is WebTV -- need I say more?
Anecdotaly, even among all the non-techies I know, NOBODY who would buy this if informed of the limited application software and hardware available. Even if these people only use the box for email, they almost certainly have family members who will want to do a bit more. Might be Unreal Tournament, might be a geneaology program.
I think your assumptions about what this "next generation" of walmart shoppers want is incomplete. Unfortunately, they'll also want:
Popular off-the-shelf games and other entertainment software.
Cheap off-the-shelf peripherals -- scanners, digital cameras, usb wecams and the like. They'll expect this stuff to work.
Both of these will pretty much kill the Sun initiative. I think we can be fairly confident that this will fail. Linux on the desktop (basically what this is) would do FAR better if targeted at business users rather than consumers.
Save for the fact that software is being used to help the process along. I find this less worrying than it appears -- ultimately the advantage gained by gerrymandering is slim and short term, since demographic change is inevitable, especially in a society as mobile as the US.
It's generally bad practice to write C (or C++) programs that retrn void, since this generally leads to a garbage exit code which may confuse calling processes, or any other process that examines the exit code.
But as a practical matter, this is nit-picking for a Hello World program. But then, this is/.
Note that I didn't condemn the initiative as a bad thing. To the contrary (depending on its reach) it could be a very good thing. I just don't thing that this has much hope of coming to pass.
I think the kinds of consensus required to get this thing off the ground will almost certaily elude the UN. Too many major players (the US especially, but others as well ) will be unwilling to cede even the tiny amount of sovereignty required to make this work.
Expect this initiative to languish in various committees until the end of time...
I'm sure the parent will get modded down as a troll, but he has a point: the original series was REALLY cheesy. Typical 70s series fare in s sci-fi setting with decent (for the day) special effects.
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No, you're thinking of the Icelandic diva and prolific shell coder, Bjork.
You need not even integrate this functionality into the email client -- a simple smtp proxy with access to the whitelist could do the trick in an email client-agnostic way. This is actually on my "stuff to do in my non-existent spare time" list -- and smtp proxy that handles automagically updating the spamassasin per-user or system whitelist.
Back up a little. So these Machines mentioned Before -- they're like Carriages, only without Horses? From whence do they derive their Motive Force -- some kind of Magnetikal Effect? -- Poor Dick
I DO sort lower scoring spam into another folder -- which helps with the false positives (but I get a LOT of low-scoring spam), but once my incoming spam rate hits 600/day, even the percentage that get through will be a nuisance -- this will be especially true if I've been gone for, say, a week. Ultimately, the writing is on the wall. If not this year, then certainly next year my current address will be pretty much unusable. It's too bad. The thing that really gets me is that despite the fact that spammers are operating on record low margins, despite the advent of effective filtering (and SA is remarkably effective) and despite the widespread use of blacklists, my spam load continues to double. Sad, really -- I believe we're witnessing the end of email, at least as we've known it over the last 15 years or so.
About the time I switced to the new domain, I began seeing a significant amount of email spam. As of 2000, I began to see my rate doubling about once per year. Last year I got about 150/day -- this year it's up to 300 or so. Even using spamassasin, the emails that get through are a major annoyance, especially if I've been away from email for more than a day or two. At this point, it looks like I'll be switching to using multiple addresses, one semi-public, one for ecommerce, and one given out only to friends and family -- I really see no other way at this point (although even THAT isn't a perfect solution).
Of course, maybe it's because I live in St. Tammany Parish (a parish in LA is like a county in other states) -- the same parish as Slidell. In fact, Ron Scelson was our old babysitter's son in law. Maybe the massive spam load is some kind of weird misdirected digital karma bullet, that just happened to hit me instead of the nearby spammer. Dunno -- but I suspect its just the inevitable consequence of keeping a vary public email address.
In any case -- yes -- spam is a major problem for me, and I'm reasonably savy with most of the available anti-spam tools out there.
My uncle is older, and got fascinated with digital technology once it hit his radar screen (he isn't a professional photographer). He once remarked that "Ansel would have LOVED this stuff...". I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get him to elaborate, but this probably backs up the author's assertion (at least anecdotaly).
Leiberman? Is that you?
This may be true for a minority of widely used projects, but for most applications, I've never bought this argument. Bug swatting, and especially code inspection, is and always will be a tedious process, not well-suited for a volunteer-only development community. The only advantage I see for open source in this area is that bugs can be fixed as they are encountered -- but this only works where the end user has the required skills to do the fixing in the first place.
Yes -- this would have been nearly impossible to guess..
It's all that separates us from the apes.
If, however, Sun will be marketing these alongside cut-rate PCs at the local Wal-Mart, then they're going to have contend with the fact that their boxes will be far less functional than their windows cousins and lower consumer expectations accordingly (and prices steeply). Even if they managed to do that, I'm wondering what is to keep these boxes from going the way of the I-Opener -- which seems like a less problematic product, given the lack of hardware issues. Maybe the buying public has changed radically since 2002, but I doubt it.
One interesting barometer for how well all this will work out would be retail sales figures for Lindows PCs. Haven't been able to find these, though.
I used to use a Linux box for firewalling/masquerading and had to switch to a LinkSys because of DHCP issues with my broadband provider. One big advantage of the Linux setup was the additional functionality offered by the IP masquerading helper modules; stuff that couldn't normally be masqueraded (CuSeeMe comes to mind) could have "helper" kernel modules that allowed traffic to be masqueraded properly. You could also do web caching to disk on the same machine -- obviously not possible with the linksys.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be holding these up as models -- last I checked WebTV (now MSN-TV) had declined to somethting on the order of 50,000 users total (down from a high of something like 2.4% of all internet users in the late 90s). The email terminal/network appliance business NEVER really took off (probably killed as much by falling PC prices as by the device's own liimitations), despite the hype.
Having said that, your point about phones is interesting. I've always thpought that Linux would ultimately get to the consumer desktop by way of the corporate desktop. I suppose, though, that it's entirely possible that linux will get into the hands of consumers much faster as an embedded OS in various consumer electronics.
As for hardware drivers, the real issue is that they cost both to develop and support, and manufacturers will need a REAL reason to spend the money, especially given the razor-slim margins on consumer PC hardware. I can't think of ANY compelling argument Sun can make in order for that to happen without FIRST having significant market share, which will be difficult without first having the hardware support. Chicken and Egg. I doubt the proliferation of Linux distro's is an issue -- a driver is a driver. It shouldn't be affected much by distro (perhaps kernel version is some cases), except maybe on the install side.
Driver support is more likely to improve as linux begins to penetrate the corporate desktop -- ultimately, this is going to be the route to the consumer desktop.
The primary application for ANY consumer computer is as likely to be entertainment software as it is wordprocessing and web surfing.
I hear this business about how "Joe User really only wants to word process, surf the web and do email" all the time around here. I think this assumption is just plain wrong. If I'm wrong, I'd certainly like to see some proof. As it is, there's a string of failed ventures that seem to back me up. The most sucessful of these I can think of is WebTV -- need I say more?
Anecdotaly, even among all the non-techies I know, NOBODY who would buy this if informed of the limited application software and hardware available. Even if these people only use the box for email, they almost certainly have family members who will want to do a bit more. Might be Unreal Tournament, might be a geneaology program.
- Popular off-the-shelf games and other entertainment software.
- Cheap off-the-shelf peripherals -- scanners, digital cameras, usb wecams and the like. They'll expect this stuff to work.
Both of these will pretty much kill the Sun initiative. I think we can be fairly confident that this will fail. Linux on the desktop (basically what this is) would do FAR better if targeted at business users rather than consumers."See these naked pics of grandma!"
Not necessarily. You're making assumptions about which language he's using.
Save for the fact that software is being used to help the process along. I find this less worrying than it appears -- ultimately the advantage gained by gerrymandering is slim and short term, since demographic change is inevitable, especially in a society as mobile as the US.
It's generally bad practice to write C (or C++) programs that retrn void, since this generally leads to a garbage exit code which may confuse calling processes, or any other process that examines the exit code. But as a practical matter, this is nit-picking for a Hello World program. But then, this is /.
Expect this initiative to languish in various committees until the end of time...
I'm sure the parent will get modded down as a troll, but he has a point: the original series was REALLY cheesy. Typical 70s series fare in s sci-fi setting with decent (for the day) special effects.
Mmmm. The previous post was just my Tourettes acting up (again). Bark. Bark. Kindly disregard it. Bark.
Well, Fedora does the distinct advantage of existence (sorta)...