Because good old Word generated HTML is about as ugly as it gets, and it is not XHTML too boot. It would be much to try and anticipate every piece of garbage they insert. Majix has a nice little DTD that it's documents conform too, so once it gets to the XML it is an easy job for perl (to get rid of angled quotes and other obnoxious Unicode) and XSL to get to XHTML and application logic.
At my company, once a failed startup with new life under the wings of a huge corporate parent, we have been using a homebrewed Web publishing system that takes Word 2000 or XP documents, saves them in RTF format, then uses a utility created by Majix to transform the document to XML. From there we use perl, and some XSL to get the document into XHTML combined with some JSP to produce documents that we deploy on our production env. The good part: the system was entirely free of license fees (other than office and Windows of course). The bad: it was a pain in the behind to get all the parts together.
The steps to produce valid XML from Word are the biggest hack I have ever been a part of as an engineer. We had to write a custom VB DLL we run inside (what else) an IIS server which takes the documents uploaded by authors, then saves the documents as RTF. Control is then handed over to Tomcat, which takes the RTF and uses some custom classes that make Majix a server to transform the documents into XML. All in all we had to use VB, VBA, Java, JSP; two separate server configurations (IIS and Tomcat) and a bunch of really ugly glue to stich all the parts together.
I for one, and I am sure I speak for my entire team, would love a solution which saves us this ugly cludge.
Mozilla probably will play a key role in spearheading the Linux movement
That sounds like a boring dismisal of Mozilla. I use windows regularly at work, and at home, and Mozilla is my browser of choice. I have also successfully converted a number (probably around 20) regular joes who like to call me their tech geek
I think Mozilla needs to promote a consumer oriented browser, particularly now that the AOL cord has been severed. It is certainly light weight enough if you strip all the geek features - Venkman, DOM inspector, Chatzilla, Composer etc... - and I think most web developers who target standards would agree that it is vastly superior to what IE would provide. My team would love to be able to drop IE as an obsolete monster. But its hard to convince users to install the whole Moz suite, let alone Netscape 7.1.
Firebird needs to evolve. And it needs a grass roots movement promoting it. If every developer out there could convert 10 people - and those 10 convert 10 more. Well I don't have to tell geeks how to do math. Do I?
Spamcop.net used to provide a service much like the one earthlink is proposing. I used the original system, but they have since replaced it with a blacklist filtering and SMTP chain verification solution only.
Speaking from experience, the challenge-response solution worked like a charm. Sure the occasional contact made fun of the whole thing, but it was generally intuitive and easy to interact with. There was no image transcription or the like, just a link that the sender had to visit (The assumption there was that spammers never used a real address as the reply-to) so no need to thwart auto-responders.
One other big feature was that the mail recipient always had the ability to release emails from the quarantine, as well as the ability to white list particular senders (very important for mailing lists and other bulk commercial email you actually do want to receive).
In general I loved the challenge-response system, and I was a little peaved when they did away with it. But as it turns out the SMTP chain verification, combined with the filters does a very good job too (Only one piece of spam has passed their filters in the last 9 months or so)
NH? What good does that do. The state is so sparsely populated, you would be hard pressed finding a WIFI signal anyway. You will probably run into more moose driving through NH than WIFI signals!
You also don't die or suffer any physical harm, and with all the repeat "criminals" around, that ensures their future source of revenue. There is a far greater chance that you will repeat your offense if all you lost is some money (as opposed to your life).
The other day a friend of mine checked his email on my XP machine at home. The freaking thing launched Windows Messenger, refused to shut it down until my browser was closed, and then to boot, it added all his junk messages to my Unread Mail Count (which displays on the XP logon screen). You have to hack in the registry to get rid of that!
Remember once upon a time when Microsoft was going to go the way of AT&T.
Yeah, but on the other hand, a freecert.org type CA could provide an easy way for Joe Internet user to add its CA as a root CA in the browser. (One click type play). So whenever someone is using a Cert from Freecert.org, they are bound to present a jump page to the user saying something like:
"Do you trust Freecert.org yet? Freecert.org provides free certs...blah blah... If you would like to trust FreeCert issued certificates, click here to add it to your browsers list of root CA's"
That way, freecert.org's root CA slowly is added to all the browsers in the planet, in a grass roots sort of fashion. Then get some Wired/CNet reporter to write an article about the little guy going against big mighty verisign (the press loves that stuff) and we may just see the dream come true.
This is slashdot after all so we need to find a way to bash the evil empire.
Seriously though, the barrier for entry in the CA market are the browser makers, who hold the almigthy power to annoit this or that CA as trusted. What kind of checks the Redmond crew does to verify that Verisign is actually trustworthy is beyond me, but I would not be surprised if it involves some way that benefits the Bill Gates Foundation.
It would probably not be beyond reason to get the Mozilla crew to push one something like a freeware CA, but with Mozilla owning so little of the market the point may be mute.
So go ahead fellow zealots. Let's bash Bill for creating an oligopoly out of the CA market. The least they could do is make it a little less scary to users when a site presents a self signed certificate....
But then again they were not so nice to you when they gave you the pink slip now were they? Maybe they were and you felt like you owed them for the "generous" severance package you got.
Rule Number 1: Never, ever, ever help out your ex-employer, unless they are willing to pay a very generous fee for your services which they clearly dismissed in the first place. you might even teach them a lesson, that people are not just numbers on a balance sheet. Or maybe you won't. But at least you will not leave with the sense that you just got abused by the same people twice over.
I take issue with your claim that SQL Server 2000 is a GOOD product. It is not even in the same class, actually the same planet, as ORACLE 9.
I am responsible for 4 different web applications written in Java, Cold Fusion and PHP. In all cases, our biggest performance bottleneck was the damn database. And we were running powerful stuff. Clustered Quad Pentium III Xeons with Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
SQL server has this fancy lock escalation policy that is simply absurd. It can cause its own deadlocks that the server cannot recover from. (see http://www.sql-server-performance.com/lock_content ion_tamed_article.asp) Eventually, all your processes end up blocked and your app becomes toast. The only way to recover is to kill the blocking process (manually) or to institute a per connection (!!!) timeout on how much a request will wait for a lock. Or you can instruct developers to use Locking hints in their queries, usually inciting a quizical huh? And what is worse is that you are shooting in the dark. You don''t know if the locking hints will work or not, or whether they will compromise your transactional integrity.
We migrated our apps to Oracle on Solaris (a measly dual Sparc system) and all our database woes were solved. And every single query runs at least 200% faster with minimal index tuning. I can't wait to use all the Oracle power features to make the app really zing.
SQL server sucks. It is a good entry database, or a database for simple e-commerce sites. But try to create a real app on the web, and it is woeful! Which ties back to the common thread from the original post on why so many people use windows. Designing queries with Enterprise Manager is a breeze. And the editable diagrams are a joy to work with. You can make changes straight into it, add relationships etc... But try to use the damn thing in an enterprise environment and the shortcomings are quickly aparent!
Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 1
I guess you never took the time to inspect the source code for the Java libraries? Many of the patterns used therein are exact applications of the patterns described in this book.
For that matter, the XML libraries created by Apache.org, SUN and others for the Java platform use the factory pattern extensively to ensure that parsing tools can be interchanged.
Maybe you need to branch out a little and look at the real programming world circa 2002. When you code modules that are flexible and can be used by programmers in any industry, chances are you are employing many of the concepts exposed in this book.
If you use plenty of the "F" word and the "Sh" word when they will eventually get the message that you are not a cooperative customer. I used to get calls about once a day, until I finally lost my patience and started using plenty of profanity before telling them to insert a broomstick up thier a$$ and hanging up. I so rarely get call nowadays, that I am considering being polite again. Venting on the telemarketers was a great way to relieve the stress from the day.
To Hell with Mr. Novak.
Is it just me, or isn't one of the pillars of the law in this country called "Free Speech".
As I understand it, I can say what I want about Mr. Novak and his petstore, and as long as it is based on opinions of fact, he has no right to sue me. It isn't slandering if I had a bad experience and I tell the world about it. But from Mr. Novak's sick and twisted interpretation of the law, the Better Business Bureau itself should be illegal.
Get a clue A55HOLE.
My suggestion: try to get him to forward the original source of the message he received.
With the original message, it should be a simple matter to trace the SMTP headers to determine where the MX chain was broken and the header was forged. spamcop.net has a nifty tool to accomplish that though you can also use dig yourself to find out where the MX chain is forged.
It should also be simple to determine where (IP Address) the message originated. Wouldn't it be funny if the virus he received was actually from someone within his company.
I have setup all manner of NT, 2K and XP machines. That includes NT server and Workstation, 2K professional and Server and XP Home and Professional.
The option to leave the Administrator password blank, and I reiterate the option, is only available on Windows NT and 2K. But at least it is there. On both versions of XP it is the Norm to leave the administrator password blank. I am not talking about the first user you setup, I am talking about the UserName ADMINISTRATOR. XP setup does not even warn you that such a user is there. I was blown away by that aparent lapse when I setup XP for a friend.
Try it. Logon to your brand new XP setup with username Administrator and no password.
It is mindblowing that "responsible" IT professionals will claim that Windows XP is more secure than Windows 2000. Just because hackers have not gotten around to it, does not mean the threat isn't there. We are talking about the same Kernel (practically) and the lame feature over function drive that seems to plague all Microsoft Operating Systems.
I commend the user that suggested that concerned IT departments use a standard LINUX distro with a tight security policy to distribute to computers on campus. You'll be doing the world and your students a favor, by showing them the power of LINUX.
Slashdot Mirror
Because good old Word generated HTML is about as ugly as it gets, and it is not XHTML too boot. It would be much to try and anticipate every piece of garbage they insert. Majix has a nice little DTD that it's documents conform too, so once it gets to the XML it is an easy job for perl (to get rid of angled quotes and other obnoxious Unicode) and XSL to get to XHTML and application logic.
At my company, once a failed startup with new life under the wings of a huge corporate parent, we have been using a homebrewed Web publishing system that takes Word 2000 or XP documents, saves them in RTF format, then uses a utility created by Majix to transform the document to XML. From there we use perl, and some XSL to get the document into XHTML combined with some JSP to produce documents that we deploy on our production env. The good part: the system was entirely free of license fees (other than office and Windows of course). The bad: it was a pain in the behind to get all the parts together.
The steps to produce valid XML from Word are the biggest hack I have ever been a part of as an engineer. We had to write a custom VB DLL we run inside (what else) an IIS server which takes the documents uploaded by authors, then saves the documents as RTF. Control is then handed over to Tomcat, which takes the RTF and uses some custom classes that make Majix a server to transform the documents into XML. All in all we had to use VB, VBA, Java, JSP; two separate server configurations (IIS and Tomcat) and a bunch of really ugly glue to stich all the parts together.
I for one, and I am sure I speak for my entire team, would love a solution which saves us this ugly cludge.
Just wait until SCO gets a whiff of this and starts demanding their royalties!
That sounds like a boring dismisal of Mozilla. I use windows regularly at work, and at home, and Mozilla is my browser of choice. I have also successfully converted a number (probably around 20) regular joes who like to call me their tech geek
I think Mozilla needs to promote a consumer oriented browser, particularly now that the AOL cord has been severed. It is certainly light weight enough if you strip all the geek features - Venkman, DOM inspector, Chatzilla, Composer etc... - and I think most web developers who target standards would agree that it is vastly superior to what IE would provide. My team would love to be able to drop IE as an obsolete monster. But its hard to convince users to install the whole Moz suite, let alone Netscape 7.1.
Firebird needs to evolve. And it needs a grass roots movement promoting it. If every developer out there could convert 10 people - and those 10 convert 10 more. Well I don't have to tell geeks how to do math. Do I?
Spamcop.net used to provide a service much like the one earthlink is proposing. I used the original system, but they have since replaced it with a blacklist filtering and SMTP chain verification solution only.
Speaking from experience, the challenge-response solution worked like a charm. Sure the occasional contact made fun of the whole thing, but it was generally intuitive and easy to interact with. There was no image transcription or the like, just a link that the sender had to visit (The assumption there was that spammers never used a real address as the reply-to) so no need to thwart auto-responders.
One other big feature was that the mail recipient always had the ability to release emails from the quarantine, as well as the ability to white list particular senders (very important for mailing lists and other bulk commercial email you actually do want to receive).
In general I loved the challenge-response system, and I was a little peaved when they did away with it. But as it turns out the SMTP chain verification, combined with the filters does a very good job too (Only one piece of spam has passed their filters in the last 9 months or so)
NH? What good does that do. The state is so sparsely populated, you would be hard pressed finding a WIFI signal anyway. You will probably run into more moose driving through NH than WIFI signals!
You also don't die or suffer any physical harm, and with all the repeat "criminals" around, that ensures their future source of revenue. There is a far greater chance that you will repeat your offense if all you lost is some money (as opposed to your life).
The other day a friend of mine checked his email on my XP machine at home. The freaking thing launched Windows Messenger, refused to shut it down until my browser was closed, and then to boot, it added all his junk messages to my Unread Mail Count (which displays on the XP logon screen). You have to hack in the registry to get rid of that!
Remember once upon a time when Microsoft was going to go the way of AT&T.
OH NO!!!!
Get it while you can. I doubt the following will pass the certification!
NOT designed for Windows XP"Do you trust Freecert.org yet? Freecert.org provides free certs...blah blah... If you would like to trust FreeCert issued certificates, click here to add it to your browsers list of root CA's"
That way, freecert.org's root CA slowly is added to all the browsers in the planet, in a grass roots sort of fashion. Then get some Wired/CNet reporter to write an article about the little guy going against big mighty verisign (the press loves that stuff) and we may just see the dream come true.
This is slashdot after all so we need to find a way to bash the evil empire. Seriously though, the barrier for entry in the CA market are the browser makers, who hold the almigthy power to annoit this or that CA as trusted. What kind of checks the Redmond crew does to verify that Verisign is actually trustworthy is beyond me, but I would not be surprised if it involves some way that benefits the Bill Gates Foundation. It would probably not be beyond reason to get the Mozilla crew to push one something like a freeware CA, but with Mozilla owning so little of the market the point may be mute. So go ahead fellow zealots. Let's bash Bill for creating an oligopoly out of the CA market. The least they could do is make it a little less scary to users when a site presents a self signed certificate....
Dude, that is just nasty! You should go to jail for just knowing about the existence of pictures like that!
But then again they were not so nice to you when they gave you the pink slip now were they? Maybe they were and you felt like you owed them for the "generous" severance package you got.
Rule Number 1: Never, ever, ever help out your ex-employer, unless they are willing to pay a very generous fee for your services which they clearly dismissed in the first place. you might even teach them a lesson, that people are not just numbers on a balance sheet. Or maybe you won't. But at least you will not leave with the sense that you just got abused by the same people twice over.
I take issue with your claim that SQL Server 2000 is a GOOD product. It is not even in the same class, actually the same planet, as ORACLE 9.
t ion_tamed_article.asp) Eventually, all your processes end up blocked and your app becomes toast. The only way to recover is to kill the blocking process (manually) or to institute a per connection (!!!) timeout on how much a request will wait for a lock. Or you can instruct developers to use Locking hints in their queries, usually inciting a quizical huh? And what is worse is that you are shooting in the dark. You don''t know if the locking hints will work or not, or whether they will compromise your transactional integrity.
I am responsible for 4 different web applications written in Java, Cold Fusion and PHP. In all cases, our biggest performance bottleneck was the damn database. And we were running powerful stuff. Clustered Quad Pentium III Xeons with Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
SQL server has this fancy lock escalation policy that is simply absurd. It can cause its own deadlocks that the server cannot recover from. (see http://www.sql-server-performance.com/lock_conten
We migrated our apps to Oracle on Solaris (a measly dual Sparc system) and all our database woes were solved. And every single query runs at least 200% faster with minimal index tuning. I can't wait to use all the Oracle power features to make the app really zing.
SQL server sucks. It is a good entry database, or a database for simple e-commerce sites. But try to create a real app on the web, and it is woeful! Which ties back to the common thread from the original post on why so many people use windows. Designing queries with Enterprise Manager is a breeze. And the editable diagrams are a joy to work with. You can make changes straight into it, add relationships etc... But try to use the damn thing in an enterprise environment and the shortcomings are quickly aparent!
I guess you never took the time to inspect the source code for the Java libraries? Many of the patterns used therein are exact applications of the patterns described in this book.
For that matter, the XML libraries created by Apache.org, SUN and others for the Java platform use the factory pattern extensively to ensure that parsing tools can be interchanged.
Maybe you need to branch out a little and look at the real programming world circa 2002. When you code modules that are flexible and can be used by programmers in any industry, chances are you are employing many of the concepts exposed in this book.
If you use plenty of the "F" word and the "Sh" word when they will eventually get the message that you are not a cooperative customer. I used to get calls about once a day, until I finally lost my patience and started using plenty of profanity before telling them to insert a broomstick up thier a$$ and hanging up. I so rarely get call nowadays, that I am considering being polite again. Venting on the telemarketers was a great way to relieve the stress from the day.
To Hell with Mr. Novak. Is it just me, or isn't one of the pillars of the law in this country called "Free Speech". As I understand it, I can say what I want about Mr. Novak and his petstore, and as long as it is based on opinions of fact, he has no right to sue me. It isn't slandering if I had a bad experience and I tell the world about it. But from Mr. Novak's sick and twisted interpretation of the law, the Better Business Bureau itself should be illegal. Get a clue A55HOLE.
My suggestion: try to get him to forward the original source of the message he received. With the original message, it should be a simple matter to trace the SMTP headers to determine where the MX chain was broken and the header was forged. spamcop.net has a nifty tool to accomplish that though you can also use dig yourself to find out where the MX chain is forged. It should also be simple to determine where (IP Address) the message originated. Wouldn't it be funny if the virus he received was actually from someone within his company.
I have setup all manner of NT, 2K and XP machines. That includes NT server and Workstation, 2K professional and Server and XP Home and Professional.
The option to leave the Administrator password blank, and I reiterate the option, is only available on Windows NT and 2K. But at least it is there. On both versions of XP it is the Norm to leave the administrator password blank. I am not talking about the first user you setup, I am talking about the UserName ADMINISTRATOR. XP setup does not even warn you that such a user is there. I was blown away by that aparent lapse when I setup XP for a friend.
Try it. Logon to your brand new XP setup with username Administrator and no password.
It is mindblowing that "responsible" IT professionals will claim that Windows XP is more secure than Windows 2000. Just because hackers have not gotten around to it, does not mean the threat isn't there. We are talking about the same Kernel (practically) and the lame feature over function drive that seems to plague all Microsoft Operating Systems.
I commend the user that suggested that concerned IT departments use a standard LINUX distro with a tight security policy to distribute to computers on campus. You'll be doing the world and your students a favor, by showing them the power of LINUX.