That is a very good point. Nobody I know of significant intelligent that I know uses email (outside of work). It is slow and a poor form of digital communication.
I'd have to disagree with you - I email several friends on a constant basis, and I love it. When two intelligent people email, you have something that combines the spontaneity of chat with the beauty and eloquence of a letter.
Writing emails to my couple of regular, serious correspondents is one of the most intellectually satisfying activities that I know of.
Problem is, that doesn't affect the main problem, which is that 3 million lines of options code is a LOT harder to keep bug free among all the different combinations than 1 million loc.
But isn't most of that code base specific drivers for specific hardware, maintained by individuals who wrote that code? Are you saying that instead of including possibly buggy drivers, it would be better to leave them out and give no support at all to people who happen to have that hardware??
Remember, any potential bugs in drivers won't affect anyone who doesn't have that hardware - these drivers are compiled in default kernel distributions as modules and never get loaded unless they're needed. All it means is that the kernel modules take up a bit of disk space, which is trivial compared to the sizes of current hard disks. They don't impede performance and they don't do any other harm. I really can't work out what all the fuss is about...
For example, I recently installed mandrake on a machine for a friend (simple default install) to find it loading support for pcmcia, bluetooth, and many other completely unnecessary modules and services. What newbie knows how to disable services or build a more customized kernel?
The only loaded modules would be ones for the hardware your friend actually had, I should think. That's the beauty of modules - they won't load unless they're needed.
As for services, yes, there's many services installed in any distro, in any OS, that most users don't require. And it's usually fairly easy to stop them (there's generally a GUI to change which services are run automatically; the last time I looked at Mandrake it was in the main Mandrake control panel software, so pretty easy to find). But that's not a kernel issue and it's not even an OS issue, so it's hardly relevant here.
They come in 3's, as they are a part of a famous Alpine range. So... what is Jungfrau, the 3rd mountain in the range?
Having seen just how big the Eiger and Monch are, I'm guessing the names were chosen to represent MS code bloat. Of course, the Jungfrau is even more enormous, so that'll be reserved for a Longhorn thin client OS...:-)
Not being able to embed fonts is a very draconian restriction. Very few commercial proprietary fonts have this restriction, which will end up making GPL fonts *less* free than most proprietary fonts.
Agreed, which is probably why the GPL FAQ (quoted in the grandparent to my original post) suggests adding an addendum to the GPL that allows the font specifically to be embedded without restriction. It's obviously not an intentional aspect of the GPL (they haven't deliberately set out to be draconian), just an unintended consequence of a license which has always had software code as a focus, rather than artwork.
Also from the GPL Faq is that you need to specifically add the exception text to the license. If this was not done then yes there is a problem.. Otherwise then there wouldn't be... As per usual the slashdot blurb is a bit sensationalist...
Actually, the important point in the FAQ you quoted is that it only applies to embedded fonts. Thus the/. blurb is completely wrong AFAICS - you can use the font without any license restrictions being imparted on your own documents provided you don't embed it in the document. So while this may be an issue if you send off artwork to a printhouse, if you don't embed the fonts but just include a copy of each font (and relevant license info) along with the artwork I'm guessing that should be fine.
I have never met a Mac user that would even consider Linux, not in 15 years.
Well, now you have. I was a die-hard Mac user until 1995, so that's only 10 years ago. At which point I realised that the concept of a company trying to gain a monopoly over both OS and hardware was wrong, especially when the hardware was overpriced and proprietary. So I switched to linux on whiteboxes and haven't looked back.
I'd have a lot more respect for current powerbooks if they came with three mouse buttons (vital for *nix) and if you could run OS-X apps within X (not the other way round), thus bypassing the toy GUI and letting me use a decent window manager. But as it stands, if someone gave me a powerbook I'd wipe the drive and install linux on it.
Windows actually starts pretty fast, not much more than 15 seconds. This is because it is still loading stuff after it displays the desktop, while you are trying to start up Word, Firefox and whatnot.
Now, I'm not by any means a MS fan, but while what you say is technically true, the extra time for those backgrounded services to load on a modern desktop machine is about five seconds. It's a very fast boot process and incredibly it's one of the few things MS ever got right.
IMHO it's quite annoying, I would rather the boot process take longer and it be ready to go the moment the desktop pops-up.
As I said above, it's called backgrounding. Most people don't want the alternative, found in most linux bootscripts, that foregrounds everything and then waits for each to exit with a return value before going onto the next one. (Yes, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of rc.d scripts in any system do not background, and even the ones that do are still launched from a master script that waits for all backgrouded processes to finish at the end of the script and get return values, so it doesn't really save much time at all)
Personally, I edit all the bootscripts to (a) cut out all the crap I don't need and (b) background as much as I can - but it still takes my linux system 35 seconds from loading the kernel to a display manager login prompt, and that's a lot less impressive than Windows.
Coders seem very likely to use such sentences in my experience, as they're trained to nesting complex expressions (usally involving brackets (such as these)) anyway:-)
Hmmm... I had a play with E17 on my AthlonXP system and it seemed to be eating a lot of processing power - I'm surprised it runs OK on hardware that slow!
My big gripe with E is that the config files are so unfriendly. There's really no reason why they couldn't be text based or at the very least XML-based. And trying to create your own themes is a nightmare...
E is not lightweight or fast in the same way of Blackbox or Fluxbox. I've used it and it crawled. I watch other people use it and it crawls.
I used to use E16 on a P133 with 48Mb of RAM, and it flew. Don't know what hardware you were using, but that seems pretty good to me. In the end I got sick of the crazy database config files that broke faster than you could say "I'd like to lose all my customisations now, please", and started playing with IceWM (which is faster still). But I'd say E16 was about as fast as a *box WM. And E had the best pager ever - it could provide an real-time snapshot of each desktop:-)
I've tried both IceWM and Fluxbox, and to tell the truth I didnt see any speed increase over IceWM with fluxbox. And since IceWM had anti-aliased fonts and a nice toolbar, I started using it as my main light weight WM.
Personally I find IceWM noticably faster than Fluxbox on my system. I really want to like the *box varients - there's a lot of nice things about them, especially tabs - but IceWM beats them all in speed, look and feel, and as a result has been my only WM for over four years now.
Well, that's not unique. There are a number: GMX.net, and Yahoo in most countries (except the US, but you can still use them) for example.
Not so sure about this: the gmx.net page is in German so I can't check it up, but according to yahoo.co.uk and yahoo.com.au you can only get POP3 access (no SMTP server) when paying (see, for example http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/mail/plus/ - if they provide an SMTP server they're not letting on).
Personally, after being burnt by losing a bunch of mail when a free service just went dead one day, I keep all my mail on my PC, and back it up periodically.
Hence the point about using Gmail with POP3 and SMTP to have copies of all sent and received mail at home and at work/on holiday. Mind you, if google (or for that matter yahoo) go dead, there's probably bigger things to worry about than your mail!
What ISP doesn't have a POP3/IMAP mail server and 500 free email addresses? But that's not the point. The thing that makes Gmail unique as a free email provider, AFAIK, is that it provides both POP3 and SMTP and in doing so allows you to download all the mail that's sent to that account, whilst still keeping it on the server, and send mail through an email client and keep a copy of that on the server too.
The post that I was responding to was referring to the virtues of a free email IMAP server as it allowed the user to have access to the same mail at home or at work or anywhere in the world. My point was that if you can't have access to your sent mail from another IMAP client/the web, then that's not much use.
The thing with fastmail is that (AFAIK) while they provide IMAP access, you have to pay to send mail through their SMTP server. So unless you're actually running a mail server yourself (and if so, why bother using a free email service?) or you want to pay money, you're going to have trouble sending replies to all your nicely filtered mail!
I'm not sure about Gmail POP3 since I've not personally used it... but I have a friend who uses POP3/SMTP at home and the Gmail web interface at work, and AFAIK all email sent and recieved through SMTP/POP3 is filtered correctly on the Gmail end. Naturally the filters at home don't automagically match the labels on the web, but if you rarely make new folders that's not really much of a hassle.
Personally, the thing that turned me off FM was the interface - I don't know if they've updated it recently but I found it too ugly for words when I was using it last year. Gmail's javascript interface, by comparison, is just incredibly beautiful stuff...
(OOC, do you ever get much organisation-specific spam that you can't trace to the address being available on the web somewhere?)
Do you like graphic ads or do you like Google to go through your e-mails header, content, etc and find out your mother recently passed waway and you need funeral service and here are a few funeral homes in your area?
Hmmm... as someone's already pointed out, your email is already being scanned to give it a spam rank, etc, by most free providers - how is that any differnt. And let's not even go into things like the Echelon project...
The thing is, if you really cared about that sort of thing you could use Gmail over POP3 and SMTP with PGP so google can't read a word of anything that you send. But personally I don't really care if a computer scans my mail looking for keywords, any more than I care about running grep over my files ten times a day...
Eh?? Mine doesn't! I think you're getting confused with the ability in Yahoo to check your other POP3 accounts under Yahoo... To access your Yahoo mail via POP3 you need to upgrade to what they call "Mail Plus" which is $20 per year, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong...
People who don't write correctly formed English make me froth at the mouth, especially if I have to decode their crap in my professional capacity. Mostly it scares me that so many people have to go to special effort not to sound like chimpanzees. And it's not just email - these people usually produce the same kind of garbage on paper too.
The problem is that kids these days do most of their "writing" via either chat or SMS and are exposed to it at a very young age. I have a friend who teaches secondary science and maths, who constantly gets assignments written in "SMS-speak"... and when she tells them off they're astonished that it's considered wrong to write like that.
Of course, there's another school of thought (i.e. most linguists) that would suggest that all language, spoken or written, is in a state of flux and the only requirement is that the majority of people understand what's being said (thus, for example, double-negatives are perfectly acceptable as a form of negative emphasis). So maybe we're simply backward for not adopting the "new" spellings and grammar...;-)
Ah, Gmail misinformation. It's a wonderful thing...
A big thing is privacy. Google may be wonderful, but what about tomorrow?
If you're that concerned about privacy, you could still use POP3 and SMTP with GPG or similar. Why would you bother, then? Well, having a non-ISP linked email address is a highly useful thing - for those of the community who don't run a mail server (e.g. don't have broadband or don't have the skills) this is vital to being able to switch providers and get the best deal.
The other is web interfaces suck.
You've obviously never tried Gmail then. I was a diehard PINE user before seeing Gmail, I hated Yahoo, Hotmail, Fastmail, etc interfaces and thought Gmail might be a good mailing list replacement for my yahoo account because of the greater storage space. I think it took about three days to forward all my mail to it and use it as my primary account. It's a beautiful interface, runs with some incredibly neat javascript - you have to see it to believe it.
A third is the problem of using POP3 access, but still having to hike your mail client mail via SMTP. If you use your own ISP, you're at risk of getting flagged at some point in the future of failing SPF.
But, you see, Gmail actually provides an SMTP server for you to use. That's right! You get POP3 and SMTP. And if they ever decide to stop that, there's still mail forwarding so you can throw everything else over to the email address of your choice.
Sounds nice in theory... until the day I locked the keys in my Civic. It was then that I noticed that because I couldn't lock the car door without holding up the handle, that I had gotten into the habit of *always* holding up the handle while closing the door, even when I didn't want to lock it.... You can't fix a behavioural problem with a technological solution.
Personally I drive a Mitsubishi Mirage, which has the locking mechanism so cunningly concealed that I've got into the habit of never using it, but locking the car with the keys from the outside, instead - just because it's easier to do. It's a rather useful habit, to say the least!:-) So that's a way you can fix a behavioural problem - you make it so difficult to do it the other way that people choose the safe way simply because it's easier. That's what firefox has tried to do with XPI installs (whitelist only allowed by default, wait three seconds before clicking the install button, etc) and it's probably what Sun Java should be doing too.
In fact, a better way would be for firefox to come with a java whitelist (initally blank) which the user adds to on the rare occasions that they want to run java applet. After all, how many useful java applets do you use on a daily basis?
Sure, but in context of the thread, they have purchased the router, and thus have the binary and have not been supplied with the source. Therefore, a is out and that leaves b and c for consideration.
Sorry:( - I thought you were talking in general terms: the idea that the author of GPL'd software has to make the source available to everyone on the internet is a common misconception. So as far as those linux phones go, you're right - the manufacturers should be providing the source of the kernel they're using or a link to that source.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
[My emphasis]
Thus you only have to comply with one of either (a), (b) or (c) and it is perfectly legitimate to sell GPL software and only provide the source with the purchased binary (thereby meeting the requirements of section a). Mind you, anyone who buys it can then quite happily make it available for free download if they want...
Slashdot Mirror
That is a very good point. Nobody I know of significant intelligent that I know uses email (outside of work). It is slow and a poor form of digital communication.
I'd have to disagree with you - I email several friends on a constant basis, and I love it. When two intelligent people email, you have something that combines the spontaneity of chat with the beauty and eloquence of a letter.
Writing emails to my couple of regular, serious correspondents is one of the most intellectually satisfying activities that I know of.
Problem is, that doesn't affect the main problem, which is that 3 million lines of options code is a LOT harder to keep bug free among all the different combinations than 1 million loc.
...
But isn't most of that code base specific drivers for specific hardware, maintained by individuals who wrote that code? Are you saying that instead of including possibly buggy drivers, it would be better to leave them out and give no support at all to people who happen to have that hardware??
Remember, any potential bugs in drivers won't affect anyone who doesn't have that hardware - these drivers are compiled in default kernel distributions as modules and never get loaded unless they're needed. All it means is that the kernel modules take up a bit of disk space, which is trivial compared to the sizes of current hard disks. They don't impede performance and they don't do any other harm. I really can't work out what all the fuss is about
For example, I recently installed mandrake on a machine for a friend (simple default install) to find it loading support for pcmcia, bluetooth, and many other completely unnecessary modules and services. What newbie knows how to disable services or build a more customized kernel?
The only loaded modules would be ones for the hardware your friend actually had, I should think. That's the beauty of modules - they won't load unless they're needed.
As for services, yes, there's many services installed in any distro, in any OS, that most users don't require. And it's usually fairly easy to stop them (there's generally a GUI to change which services are run automatically; the last time I looked at Mandrake it was in the main Mandrake control panel software, so pretty easy to find). But that's not a kernel issue and it's not even an OS issue, so it's hardly relevant here.
n the other hand if you cannot download 40 megs buy a distribution on cd/dvd or use windoze
...
Or just download the patch instead. That's what those patches are there for, you know
They come in 3's, as they are a part of a famous Alpine range. So... what is Jungfrau, the 3rd mountain in the range?
... :-)
Having seen just how big the Eiger and Monch are, I'm guessing the names were chosen to represent MS code bloat. Of course, the Jungfrau is even more enormous, so that'll be reserved for a Longhorn thin client OS
Not being able to embed fonts is a very draconian restriction. Very few commercial proprietary fonts have this restriction, which will end up making GPL fonts *less* free than most proprietary fonts.
Agreed, which is probably why the GPL FAQ (quoted in the grandparent to my original post) suggests adding an addendum to the GPL that allows the font specifically to be embedded without restriction. It's obviously not an intentional aspect of the GPL (they haven't deliberately set out to be draconian), just an unintended consequence of a license which has always had software code as a focus, rather than artwork.
Also from the GPL Faq is that you need to specifically add the exception text to the license. If this was not done then yes there is a problem.. Otherwise then there wouldn't be... As per usual the slashdot blurb is a bit sensationalist...
/. blurb is completely wrong AFAICS - you can use the font without any license restrictions being imparted on your own documents provided you don't embed it in the document. So while this may be an issue if you send off artwork to a printhouse, if you don't embed the fonts but just include a copy of each font (and relevant license info) along with the artwork I'm guessing that should be fine.
Actually, the important point in the FAQ you quoted is that it only applies to embedded fonts. Thus the
I have never met a Mac user that would even consider Linux, not in 15 years.
Well, now you have. I was a die-hard Mac user until 1995, so that's only 10 years ago. At which point I realised that the concept of a company trying to gain a monopoly over both OS and hardware was wrong, especially when the hardware was overpriced and proprietary. So I switched to linux on whiteboxes and haven't looked back.
I'd have a lot more respect for current powerbooks if they came with three mouse buttons (vital for *nix) and if you could run OS-X apps within X (not the other way round), thus bypassing the toy GUI and letting me use a decent window manager. But as it stands, if someone gave me a powerbook I'd wipe the drive and install linux on it.
Windows actually starts pretty fast, not much more than 15 seconds. This is because it is still loading stuff after it displays the desktop, while you are trying to start up Word, Firefox and whatnot.
Now, I'm not by any means a MS fan, but while what you say is technically true, the extra time for those backgrounded services to load on a modern desktop machine is about five seconds. It's a very fast boot process and incredibly it's one of the few things MS ever got right.
IMHO it's quite annoying, I would rather the boot process take longer and it be ready to go the moment the desktop pops-up.
As I said above, it's called backgrounding. Most people don't want the alternative, found in most linux bootscripts, that foregrounds everything and then waits for each to exit with a return value before going onto the next one. (Yes, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of rc.d scripts in any system do not background, and even the ones that do are still launched from a master script that waits for all backgrouded processes to finish at the end of the script and get return values, so it doesn't really save much time at all)
Personally, I edit all the bootscripts to (a) cut out all the crap I don't need and (b) background as much as I can - but it still takes my linux system 35 seconds from loading the kernel to a display manager login prompt, and that's a lot less impressive than Windows.
Coders seem very likely to use such sentences in my experience, as they're trained to nesting complex expressions (usally involving brackets (such as these)) anyway :-)
but (beware (lisp (write (those who)))
I use E17 on a 266 with 128MB RAM
... I had a play with E17 on my AthlonXP system and it seemed to be eating a lot of processing power - I'm surprised it runs OK on hardware that slow!
...
Hmmm
My big gripe with E is that the config files are so unfriendly. There's really no reason why they couldn't be text based or at the very least XML-based. And trying to create your own themes is a nightmare
E is not lightweight or fast in the same way of Blackbox or Fluxbox. I've used it and it crawled. I watch other people use it and it crawls.
:-)
I used to use E16 on a P133 with 48Mb of RAM, and it flew. Don't know what hardware you were using, but that seems pretty good to me. In the end I got sick of the crazy database config files that broke faster than you could say "I'd like to lose all my customisations now, please", and started playing with IceWM (which is faster still). But I'd say E16 was about as fast as a *box WM. And E had the best pager ever - it could provide an real-time snapshot of each desktop
I've tried both IceWM and Fluxbox, and to tell the truth I didnt see any speed increase over IceWM with fluxbox. And since IceWM had anti-aliased fonts and a nice toolbar, I started using it as my main light weight WM.
Personally I find IceWM noticably faster than Fluxbox on my system. I really want to like the *box varients - there's a lot of nice things about them, especially tabs - but IceWM beats them all in speed, look and feel, and as a result has been my only WM for over four years now.
Well, that's not unique. There are a number: GMX.net, and Yahoo in most countries (except the US, but you can still use them) for example.
... ;-)
Not so sure about this: the gmx.net page is in German so I can't check it up, but according to yahoo.co.uk and yahoo.com.au you can only get POP3 access (no SMTP server) when paying (see, for example http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/mail/plus/ - if they provide an SMTP server they're not letting on).
Personally, after being burnt by losing a bunch of mail when a free service just went dead one day, I keep all my mail on my PC, and back it up periodically.
Hence the point about using Gmail with POP3 and SMTP to have copies of all sent and received mail at home and at work/on holiday. Mind you, if google (or for that matter yahoo) go dead, there's probably bigger things to worry about than your mail!
Trust No One with your data.
Ah. Now that's another matter entirely
What ISP doesn't have an SMTP server?
What ISP doesn't have a POP3/IMAP mail server and 500 free email addresses? But that's not the point. The thing that makes Gmail unique as a free email provider, AFAIK, is that it provides both POP3 and SMTP and in doing so allows you to download all the mail that's sent to that account, whilst still keeping it on the server, and send mail through an email client and keep a copy of that on the server too.
The post that I was responding to was referring to the virtues of a free email IMAP server as it allowed the user to have access to the same mail at home or at work or anywhere in the world. My point was that if you can't have access to your sent mail from another IMAP client/the web, then that's not much use.
Actually, yes, you do.
... wonder why they don't advertise it on the web then ... ??
OK, that's cool
Why is everyone so hung up on "free" mail? for $20.00 a _year_ you can get Yahoo Mail Plus with 2GB, POP3 and no ads.
But do you get SMTP access as well as POP3?
Hey Bron! Funny meeting you here ...
... but I have a friend who uses POP3/SMTP at home and the Gmail web interface at work, and AFAIK all email sent and recieved through SMTP/POP3 is filtered correctly on the Gmail end. Naturally the filters at home don't automagically match the labels on the web, but if you rarely make new folders that's not really much of a hassle.
...
The thing with fastmail is that (AFAIK) while they provide IMAP access, you have to pay to send mail through their SMTP server. So unless you're actually running a mail server yourself (and if so, why bother using a free email service?) or you want to pay money, you're going to have trouble sending replies to all your nicely filtered mail!
I'm not sure about Gmail POP3 since I've not personally used it
Personally, the thing that turned me off FM was the interface - I don't know if they've updated it recently but I found it too ugly for words when I was using it last year. Gmail's javascript interface, by comparison, is just incredibly beautiful stuff
(OOC, do you ever get much organisation-specific spam that you can't trace to the address being available on the web somewhere?)
Do you like graphic ads or do you like Google to go through your e-mails header, content, etc and find out your mother recently passed waway and you need funeral service and here are a few funeral homes in your area?
... as someone's already pointed out, your email is already being scanned to give it a spam rank, etc, by most free providers - how is that any differnt. And let's not even go into things like the Echelon project ...
...
Hmmm
The thing is, if you really cared about that sort of thing you could use Gmail over POP3 and SMTP with PGP so google can't read a word of anything that you send. But personally I don't really care if a computer scans my mail looking for keywords, any more than I care about running grep over my files ten times a day
Yahoo mail also allows POP3 access.
... To access your Yahoo mail via POP3 you need to upgrade to what they call "Mail Plus" which is $20 per year, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong ...
;-)
Eh?? Mine doesn't! I think you're getting confused with the ability in Yahoo to check your other POP3 accounts under Yahoo
And adblock fixes Yahoo's ads nicely.
That's true. Pity adblock can't correct Yahoo's fugly interface, too!
People who don't write correctly formed English make me froth at the mouth, especially if I have to decode their crap in my professional capacity. Mostly it scares me that so many people have to go to special effort not to sound like chimpanzees. And it's not just email - these people usually produce the same kind of garbage on paper too.
... and when she tells them off they're astonished that it's considered wrong to write like that.
... ;-)
The problem is that kids these days do most of their "writing" via either chat or SMS and are exposed to it at a very young age. I have a friend who teaches secondary science and maths, who constantly gets assignments written in "SMS-speak"
Of course, there's another school of thought (i.e. most linguists) that would suggest that all language, spoken or written, is in a state of flux and the only requirement is that the majority of people understand what's being said (thus, for example, double-negatives are perfectly acceptable as a form of negative emphasis). So maybe we're simply backward for not adopting the "new" spellings and grammar
Ah, Gmail misinformation. It's a wonderful thing ...
A big thing is privacy. Google may be wonderful, but what about tomorrow?
If you're that concerned about privacy, you could still use POP3 and SMTP with GPG or similar. Why would you bother, then? Well, having a non-ISP linked email address is a highly useful thing - for those of the community who don't run a mail server (e.g. don't have broadband or don't have the skills) this is vital to being able to switch providers and get the best deal.
The other is web interfaces suck.
You've obviously never tried Gmail then. I was a diehard PINE user before seeing Gmail, I hated Yahoo, Hotmail, Fastmail, etc interfaces and thought Gmail might be a good mailing list replacement for my yahoo account because of the greater storage space. I think it took about three days to forward all my mail to it and use it as my primary account. It's a beautiful interface, runs with some incredibly neat javascript - you have to see it to believe it.
A third is the problem of using POP3 access, but still having to hike your mail client mail via SMTP. If you use your own ISP, you're at risk of getting flagged at some point in the future of failing SPF.
But, you see, Gmail actually provides an SMTP server for you to use. That's right! You get POP3 and SMTP. And if they ever decide to stop that, there's still mail forwarding so you can throw everything else over to the email address of your choice.
Sounds nice in theory... until the day I locked the keys in my Civic. It was then that I noticed that because I couldn't lock the car door without holding up the handle, that I had gotten into the habit of *always* holding up the handle while closing the door, even when I didn't want to lock it .... You can't fix a behavioural problem with a technological solution.
:-) So that's a way you can fix a behavioural problem - you make it so difficult to do it the other way that people choose the safe way simply because it's easier. That's what firefox has tried to do with XPI installs (whitelist only allowed by default, wait three seconds before clicking the install button, etc) and it's probably what Sun Java should be doing too.
Personally I drive a Mitsubishi Mirage, which has the locking mechanism so cunningly concealed that I've got into the habit of never using it, but locking the car with the keys from the outside, instead - just because it's easier to do. It's a rather useful habit, to say the least!
In fact, a better way would be for firefox to come with a java whitelist (initally blank) which the user adds to on the rare occasions that they want to run java applet. After all, how many useful java applets do you use on a daily basis?
Sure, but in context of the thread, they have purchased the router, and thus have the binary and have not been supplied with the source. Therefore, a is out and that leaves b and c for consideration.
:( - I thought you were talking in general terms: the idea that the author of GPL'd software has to make the source available to everyone on the internet is a common misconception. So as far as those linux phones go, you're right - the manufacturers should be providing the source of the kernel they're using or a link to that source.
Sorry
This is incorrect. Read section 3 in context
Quoting from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
[My emphasis]
Thus you only have to comply with one of either (a), (b) or (c) and it is perfectly legitimate to sell GPL software and only provide the source with the purchased binary (thereby meeting the requirements of section a). Mind you, anyone who buys it can then quite happily make it available for free download if they want