It is still obviously better to just buy a better screen capable of better black levels.
Well, yes, but trying to find that is probably going to be harder than trying to find a screen that does true 24-bit or 32-bit color, instead of 8-bit or 16-bit with dithering.
It was on their homepage! You didn't define "significant" very well.
Yes it is apples fault. And 90% of Vista's issues are vender related as well.
Microsoft is in a position to change that. Desktop Linux isn't. Furthermore, it is mostly their own doing:
From buggy new drivers which account for most of the instability
Because Microsoft changed the driver model at the last second to support more DRM.
to programs that were written to assume they were running as admin and wrote their settings in appropriate folders and registry components (which account for most of the UAC spam...)
Microsoft had years to fix that properly, and instead allowed "Just run as admin" to be an acceptable solution. They also had the opportunity to perfect an emulation layer this time around, the way Apple has historically done. And they seem to agree that's a good idea.
Then stop ignoring it, because those 'actual contacts/photos/calendar apps' DO NOT EXIST.
They do exist.
There is NOTHING that can sync contacts and calendar to an iphone or ipod touch for linux right now.
That's a separate issue. They can sync contacts with other things, I believe -- haven't tried recently. Give them time, though -- the iPod was reverse engineered, and as far as I know, has stayed that way for music sync support to Amarok.
Most camera's come with some 'lite' program (including in some cases stripped down adobe-ware) that handles their photo libraries.
I was just commenting that I suspect something like Gimp or Krita could fill that role nicely. Most of the complaints against Gimp, in particular, revolve around the lack of professional features, like CMYK.
People shouldn't need to 'borrow a geek' everytime they buy some new gizmo.
Fair enough. But maybe I'm out of the loop -- I don't see people buying gizmos often. Sometimes, yes, but not often. Depending on how bad their Windows setup is, I tend to get people asking me for help with Windows far more often than I see them buying some new gizmo.
The quality and applicability of which is hit and miss.
Quality of the user's search, too. Oh, and there's also Dell support -- I wonder how much that covers?
'this tutorial is for feisty or fc5, and I have gutsy or debian, or fc6, and such and such doesn't work...'
At which point, I turn around and google for "<insert my issue> gutsy", and if that turns up nothing, "<insert my issue> ubuntu" -- being as popular as it is, there's likely to be at least one Ubuntu-specific tutorial, usually on the Ubuntu forums. They tend to vary in quality, yes, but in my experience, significantly less so than the driver CD that comes with some new gizmo.
Not to mention that the tutorials themselves are often 20 steps of apt-get, and creating symlinks, maybe even a make...
I'm sorry, often? I must really not be trying to do the same things you are...
More often, I really end up with more like five steps of apt-get, at most. Not often a make -- more often, adding a repository.
People don't want to search for, and follow a tutorial like that. They want to install the disk, press next a few times and start using their toy.
Both approaches are a bit backwards, I think. But I don't have an answer to that.
Linux is still behind even Apple for 3rd party support
And yet, you almost never hear anywhere near the amount of complaining, or comments, about how horrible Apple's 3rd-party support is. Seems like there's enough general knowledge out there of what works best with a Mac
I don't really see how it could be illegal. After all, it's entirely legal to run a paysite, which may involve access to various machines behind a certain network border...
It may go against the peering agreement, in which case, that needs to be revisited.
And it absolutely is unethical. The right thing to do here would be to just boycott Virgin -- everything Virgin -- until we get an apology.
Or do you mean "not an option" for the practical reasons you've mentioned?
Really? I know almost nobody who ever had to upgrade XP Home to XP Pro
And on XP, Home was actually decent, though not great. Vista, however, has something like five different versions. Home Basic is pretty crippled.
How exactly would that ever motivate Linux ports?
By allowing gamers to move to Linux while running existing games, thus providing a viable install base. Once that's done, developers are going to want to either pay Cedega to port them, or do it themselves, because Cedega can never be as reliable or as fast as a native port.
nowhere near as polished as itunes
It's close enough, and more polished in a few ways.
doesn't support the itms
Apple's fault. It does, however, support last.fm directly, and there are other stores out there.
doesn't support syncing contacts / photos / calendar
I'm just going to continue ignoring that -- it's way beyond what a music app should be responsible for. Maybe if it spawned the actual contacts/photos/calendar apps to handle that...
And sure linux will recognize your digital camera and let you get your pictures off, and there are endless tools to edit images... but its nowhere near as slick and integrated as OS X or even Windows
Care to be specific?
im/video chat
Kopete will do webcams, and Skype has a native version.
touching up their photos (even if its just red eye reduction and resizing/cropping
All the more reason for them to not need Photoshop.
That is one of the big linux hurdles: one hase to constantly search for the foss alternative and take ownership of the problem of finding out how to make it work, the instructions and disks in the box don't work.
Which is why I tend to assume that the initial setup is the hardest part. Borrow a geek for that.
And it is much easier now -- a quick Google search will usually turn up a tutorial.
I think linux itself is ready for the desktop, but the rest of the world isn't ready for linux to be there. The tipping point comes when the rest of hardware/software world recognizes Linux and supports it.
You're expecting users to only download stuff via package managers. That's even more fascist than the Windows world.
I think you're making a false assumption about package managers.
With my proposal even if bad things happen to the repository, as long as the sandbox templates aren't compromised the user has a good chance of still being safe.
What is the mechanism protecting the "sandbox templates"? And why is that mechanism more secure than a repository?
Use the "Remember this" check box then.
Remember it for what -- YouTube? Or for everything?
It's not a "Remember - run this as Admin always" checkbox which would be bad.
See, that's the problem -- exactly what does it remember? I'm sorry if it's not obvious to me how this magical checkbox could read your mind to figure out whether you want to remember just that website at that sandbox, or all websites at that sandbox, or all websites in all sandboxes, etc.
I'm not asking for full implementation details, but maybe at least a fully-formed idea, instead of handwaving.
No, it isn't, and that's my point. That patent could only be infringed by your dd if it also:
Updating a flag, it won't do. Special "recovery utility" absolutely is done, frequently. Boot from the flash device is not done.
My point still holds, I think. Taking a laundry list of obvious things should not make it a patent. If one of them is non-obvious -- being able to boot from the backup, without restoring it, wasn't immediately obvious to me, but still doesn't seem very innovative -- then make that the patent. However, taking a bunch of already-known or immediately obvious techniques, and adding one trivial change, shouldn't be enough to declare a completely new patent.
Well, I agree it's broken. Knee-jerk reactions don't however, help. Patents themselves aren't bad, and neither are companies who patent.
I don't agree that patents themselves aren't bad. And I didn't say anything bad about TiVo, only about their patent.
The Wikipedia article on Suicide seems to be written in that completely dispassionate, apparently unbiased way that all the better Wikipedia articles are. I suppose they neither encourage nor discourage suicide.
It thus reflects the rest of the Internet. If you want to join a cult, there's plenty of information out there -- the Church of Scientology has certainly staked out its own turf. If you want to have all kinds of crazy, kinky sex, there's information on where to buy Gor books, on how to safely suffocate someone almost until they pass out, or how, exactly, to apply a whip or crop for maximum pain but minimum actual injury...
And if you want to commit suicide, you can find out where to get a gun, and how to load it. Or how to hang yourself -- how to set up the drop to be quick and hard enough to snap your neck before you feel any pain.
And if you want to get out of depression, it'll show you all kinds of prescription pills, psychiatrists, meditation, or simply support groups to help you through it.
In other words, the Internet itself is neutral -- due to the sheer amount of diversity out there, what the Internet is to you is exactly what you choose for it to be.
Is that a good thing? Would it be better if Wikipedia actively discouraged suicide?
Oh, one more thing: What I've found to be effective is simply talking to the person. It doesn't matter what you say, or even too much how you say it. It matters more that you are there -- human contact helps.
A real example: Someone told me of her plans to commit suicide. I was sick of trying to help her with her almost daily threatening to do so. So instead, I asked her how she was planning to do it. And I criticized her for her technique, and brainstormed a bit with her on more effective ways of killing herself -- quickly, and without mistakes, so she wouldn't wake up in the hospital.
And after a few minutes of this, she broke out laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
Remember, kids -- anyone who really wants to end their life can do it, quickly, easily, painlessly -- or painfully, if they like. The fact that they are still alive and still talking to you means they aren't going to go through with it.
I can only wonder if the Wikipedia article could have anything like that effect... Or if it's just the opposite, if it's too impersonal.
First off, if I have to boot windows even once a year for taxes I'm paying for it, so the entire ubuntu price advantage is moot.
If you have to boot it once a year, there's not much incentive to keep upgrading the machine. If you have to use it on a daily basis, the new features start to look attractive.
Secondly, if I buy a unit with Vista pre-installed, yes there is a cost for Windows, but the OEM pricing for Vista is pretty small.
I don't think I could live with pre-installed Windows anymore. Entirely too much crapware out of the box, usually, and unless you're paying extra for some "pro" edition, you're setting yourself up to have to upgrade it later.
This software represents an entire class of *daily* use applications, used by tens of millions of 'average people' for which Linux is not suitable.
Question: Are they personal accounting software? Because we've got that on Linux.
Or are they intended for people who work full-time as accountants, managing other people's money? I don't have a solution for that, but if that's the only remaining obstacle, we're doing pretty well.
If the 3rd party responsible for the problem hardware (Apple iPhone) or software (Simply Accounting or Quickbooks...) stepped up and released linux versions Ubuntu would truly be 'over the edge'
No, it wouldn't.
Either that point happened a long time ago, or it never will until you actually start to see some 30% adoption.
Trivial example: I used to think Linux would never make it until you could play games on Linux. Now we've got a few major games ported just for the hell of it -- every Unreal game ever released on Windows, last I checked, and every Doom, every Quake, plus a ton of random stuff from Loki. Wine has actually gotten to where it can play many games reasonably by itself, and Cedega takes that a step further by actually offering paid support for playing games on Linux.
I used to think that we had the games, but driver support sucked. I had an ATI card, and it was awful. Then nVidia started making really good drivers, and ATI has started releasing specs to support open drivers. It's actually getting to where it's reasonable to expect you'll get about as good a gaming experience on Linux, for the games which have been ported, as you would on Windows.
Yet most gamers use Windows, and most games are exclusively for Windows, no matter how good Cedega gets at emulating them. We are over and past what should have been the tipping point, but people still game on Windows. I run as much as I feel I can on Linux, but when I buy new games, I put them on XP, and I boot that.
There is never going to be one tipping point. As you said, your mom has switched, but your dad hasn't. My point here is: For your mom, the tipping point came and went. For your dad, he's one hardware issue and one software port away from that tipping point.
The reason I declared it having come and gone for "average users" is that it seems to me that most average people need web, email, an office suite, their music collection, and maybe one or two other apps. The one or two others vary wildly, but for many people, they will end up being things which are covered -- for example, iPod support in Amarok.
Based on a casual inquiry, most of these people who know about Linux and who haven't switched, haven't done so for rather stupid reasons, like needing to interoperate with Exchange, even though they haven't even enabled any Exchange features beyond SMTP and IMAP.
Obvious means 'Easily seen through because of a lack of subtlety'
We are talking about the ability to manipulate a buffer. Or to work with something half-downloaded. I have personally re-invented this concept, pretty much independently of Tivo -- in this case, it was figuring out that you can play back a file that is partially downloaded, before the download finishes. Looks like YouTube and everyone else are doing the same thing there.
MP3 is patented by side-effect; The MP3 patent covers a particular wavelet function that mp3 decoders need to use. It's entirely possible there's another function that produces the same result, but it's not the act of playing wavelet-compressed sounds that's patented here.
It is, however, the act of playing back any file which conforms to that mp3 standard. Yes, it is by side effect, but the result is the same -- despite the implementation being completely different, and the context being completely different, royalties must be paid.
Perhaps you simply hate patents, and hate TiVO because they patented something?
I don't have TiVo. And I am interested to see how this plays out.
I do hate patents. I feel that they retard progress more than promote it, and thus defeat their own original purpose. And I feel that 15 years is an insanely long time in today's world -- the patented item would either be irrelevant or already dominant within maybe two years.
But I don't actually know enough about the patents in question. However, if the concept is simply "pausing live TV", then it absolutely was an obvious idea, in that anyone forced to use Linux video tools from that time period would likely have come up with the same thing.
Would MythTV have come up with the idea of pausing and rewinding live TV using the method described by TiVO *without* TiVO?
The MythTV project, as is, might not exist. But someone would have.
The MythTV developers seem to think not, do you?
From that page:
It's credited with being a major influence on MythTV...
Nowhere does it say that MythTV could never have come up with the idea without TiVo.
Ah no. There's a very old light bulb which demonstrates that there's a significant amount of wiggle room in both the manufacturing and the materials.
And nothing on that page says anything about the manufacturing or the materials.
Do you just like to post impressive-looking links, hoping that people won't actually read them? Or is there a substance I am missing? That's not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.
You can't patent a mere idea. You patent an *invention*. It has to be something that can be built (although not necessarily work).
Yes, in theory. But that's not what's happening.
Allow me to direct you to this patent on what is effectively "dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/my-flash-device/mbr.img bs=512 count=1"
I could go on. And on. The fact is, the patent system is so thoroughly broken right now that my first reaction to just about any patent is to question whether or not it should actually be a patent. I mean, somebody's got to question it, and the US Patent Office certainly isn't...
Nobody's patented "playing mp3 files" either.
They have, however, patented an "invention" which is required to play MP3 files. Which is the whole point, really -- I can't legally play MP3 files without permission to use that wavelet function, which is, after all, even more general than MP3. It's also, by the way, one reason people are wary of MSOOXML.
So when i point of weaknesses in Ubuntu, the counter is that 'its getting better all the time'
The point about wifi is relevant, I think. It's at the point now where a fresh install of Ubuntu is as likely to support a given wireless card as a fresh install of XP. (Probably Vista, haven't tried.) And if you get Ubuntu pre-loaded, wifi is going to work, just as it would with any pre-loaded OS.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough: Out of the past six or eight laptops that I've used or tested Linux on, one of them needed a complex fix that took a bit of time on Google -- but my friend did that on his own, actually, and he's a Linux newbie. Most of them just work out of the box, and when they do, they work better than Windows. A few of them require maybe ten minutes to set up, and then work flawlessly (native driver, but I have to pull firmware from the Windows drivers). And it doesn't take a full install to find that out -- I can do all of this from the LiveCD.
Keep in mind, these are getting better all the time, across the board, even including new hardware. The Linux community seems to be getting faster at adapting to new hardware, and has more companies simply providing drivers. Windows, on the other hand, seems to be getting worse -- XP worked, out of the box, with just about everything 2k did. Vista is much more likely to not work at all, or to be unstable.
But if you point out the flaws in Vista, which I can counter are also 'getting better all the time' then flaws still count as a reason to switch to Ubuntu?
Even if it was roughly the same, the point is, again, upgrading to Vista costs money, and will provide about the same experience as switching to Ubuntu, or worse. This may change, but if both of them are getting better all the time...
Oh, and when Microsoft finally fixes them more permanently, with Windows 7 -- whenever that might be -- it is going to cost money (again) to upgrade.
Sure, if you use Vista with hardware that its not compatible with, or on hardware for which the vista drivers are flaky you are going to have issues like that. Use compatible hardware.
Substitute "Vista" for "Ubuntu" and you see why I don't care as much about the "wireless issues". Use compatible hardware, and it's not a problem.
I suspect that it is much easier to upgrade the average person to Ubuntu than to Vista.
That was essentially my entire point.
And if they are buying a new computer then upgrading to Vista is a hardly an issue because it can can pre-installed, and the only concern is whether your existing accessory hardware is good with the OS...
And software. Without tons of UAC spam.
I can see where the decade or two of Microsoft dominance has made switching to anything else difficult. However, for awhile, I've thought Linux was better than Windows for many ways that only a geek would care about, and it was always a compromise. Now, I think that if you can possibly use it (boot Windows once a year for taxes), Ubuntu has basically put it over the edge of being better for average users.
I also think we're well past the point where there's a simple one or two sentence answer to sum up the strengths and weaknesses of each.
What you described just shows that AWN's install procedure sucks.
This isn't always true. Firefox 2.0.0.13 for Windows is 5.8MB while the same version for Linux weighs in (compressed) at 9.2MB.
That is true. It is again an example of where this has gone wrong -- Firefox 3.0 for Linux is about a meg, because it splits things into smaller packages (xulrunner probably being a big one).
When apps come bundled in installers with everything they need, it's easy to keep them around or move them from machine to machine without re-downloading them.
Not as large an issue when re-downloading is so quick. I suppose it makes more sense for a proprietary app, though.
It's a tremendous advantage not to be dependent on an Internet connection or a developer to package his or her app for the particular Linux install I happen to be using this hour.
I only very rarely run into apps which don't already have an Ubuntu package in some form -- could probably count them on one hand. In such situations, the procedure really isn't good -- usually involving compiling from source -- but this is easier now, and these are also not necessarily the kind of apps that a normal user needs.
That said, I do think that a package manager could be built to combine the best of both worlds. It's on my long list of things to do Real Soon Now.
Also, I don't have to worry about the windows taskbar or system tray jumping around on me.
Because it's impossible to move. But then, most Linux GUIs start out with these things "locked", forcing me to be a bit more explicit to end up with the taskbar in the wrong place.
Anyway, my point was that it's about on par with modern GNOME and KDE, but other shells are available, work well, and tend not to break apps. And KDE can be customized even more than GNOME, which is already ahead of Windows. So the only good thing about the Windows GUI is that, precisely because you can't customize it very much, it's very easy to find your way around a new Windows system -- as you said, consistency. But ultimately, that's only superficial, and they seem to be breaking it with every major new version of Windows...
It's also an interesting observation, given that most Microsoft applications can be customized to an absurd level. By clicking and dragging, you could accidentally move the Explorer location bar out of place, make it tiny, etc. I actually appreciate this (and see a bit of it in KDE), but if it's good in their apps, why not in the OS? (And vice versa -- if it's bad in the OS, why not in their apps?)
I should note one more thing: Power almost necessarily provides a way to shoot yourself in the foot. Take the web browser. If the homepage could not be changed, and there was no address bar -- if you totally kiosk-ified it -- it would be more user-friendly, and less prone to the user screwing it up in weird ways. But that would defeat the whole point of having th
#2 is a bad thing to encourage. Package managers are generally a more secure and more efficient system than ad-hoc downloads. But you would stil get a prompt.
#3 seems like a case for using another OS, as there's nothing written in the past 9+ years that would have me using Windows as a primary OS. Games, maybe, but those can be run in a VM, and are still not a reason to run anything but the game on Windows. (Which is good for Windows, actually -- the Windows installations that I put nothing but games on are much faster and more reliable than the ones I actually use.)
You could argue that the route Apple took was better. I wouldn't disagree, but these kinds of business decisions are complex. Apple basically gets to say "fuck you" to everyone every ten years and they largely live with it.
Yes and no.
What they get to say is, "No, we won't help you develop new apps with practices which were a bad idea from the beginning."
And what they do is, they actually end up running all that old software, under various layers of emulation and virtualization. I've heard of people running a 68k app on a modern Intel Mac -- that's Rosetta to emulate PPC, so that Classic can emulate OS 9, which then emulates a 68k CPU so the app can run. And it runs better in that environment than it does on the original hardware.
This is also the environment Microsoft is rumored to be planning for Windows 7 -- basically, write a brand-new API that solves all of these issues, and run the old apps in a virtual machine. (I could have told them that five years ago -- run old apps under something like Wine, and either write or borrow a brand-new, rock solid OS.)
Now, Linux gets to say "fuck you" to everyone every six months or so. Basically, the assumption is that old apps can always be recompiled (as most are open source), and sometimes it's easier to just throw away the cruft and deliberately break apps than to carry it around for another generation or so. But that seems to be mostly at the kernel level -- userland has been the way it is for a very long time, so the app support is actually there for us to be able to do very interesting things without having to tell the app about it. (Where is chroot on Windows?)
On Ubuntu, admins can sudo, but they get prompted for their own password.
On Vista, apparently non-admins can sudo, but they get prompted for an admin password. Admins can sudo without a password, but with a prompt.
But yeah, it's pretty much a straight ripoff of sudo, claiming it as their own innovation, and failing miserably because of all the legacy apps which won't cooperate.
As for Linux and OSX, they aren't really more secure than Windows, with both these OSes if Joe Schmoe is about to run something new, he doesn't even know what the program is really going to do till he runs it.
It is, however, everything before and after that point which makes it more secure.
Before Joe runs this app, he downloaded and installed it via his package manager. It is, therefore, an app which has been tested thoroughly by the repository maintainers, and then built from source and cryptographically signed. Joe doesn't have to know any of this unless something goes wrong -- like when a repository maintainer does something stupid, like letting their PGP key expire without sending out a new one first.
And when he does run the app, it's not running as admin, and therefore not causing scary prompts. It can do this because this has been the security practice on Linux since just about day 1, and there are no apps which ask for admin rights when they don't need them.
OS X did something different -- before downloading, there is no package manager, which kind of sucks. However, after downloading, the same is true -- nothing asks for admin rights unless it needs it -- except software which predates OS X, which never asks for admin rights at all, as that software runs in a virtual machine called Classic.
Your suggestions may apply more to OS X people, and they aren't entirely bad -- except the Flash part (Flash needs to die in a fire!) -- but they aren't as badly needed on Linux in particular, where most software is open source, thoroughly tested, and distributed through known and trusted channels. The part where you might download some random crappy shareware app off the Internet and not know whether it's infested with spyware just doesn't apply.
I do think you're a bit naive, though:
It would be far easier to train Joe Schmoe to not run a "flash game" which asks for "Full User Privileges" or even "Full System Privileges" (with all the scary warnings etc) and to only run a "flash game" that asks for a "Guest Game" sandbox.
Again, Flash needs to die in a fire...
That said, no one's going to click through a security dialog, no matter how friendly, every time they go to YouTube. The sane thing to do would be to spontaneously generate lightweight sandboxes, tear them mostly down when the app closes (user goes to another webpage), and manage the disk access as a massive cache. User only really needs to care if things start to use excessive disk space, and browsers would have a sane limit.
Trying to strip out HTML you don't want users to use without mangling the output is very very hard.
Not really. Add a checkbox to enable HTML. If it's not enabled, escape those less than symbols for them -- and detect URLs, and other things.
Preview, blah blah, whatever.
Do the preview in Javascript. Not Ajax, just straight Javascript, client-side, as they type. Gracefully degrade to a preview button.
Unless you're running an intelligent auto-correcting validator like Tidy, or you're parsing the document into a valid object model and then deleting nodes that way (both quite CPU expensive options, compared to running some regular expressions against a string
Regular expressions can be both CPU intensive and wrong. Just look at a real email validator, which I would paste here, but the lameness filter won't let me.
Tell me that isn't error prone, or at least CPU-intensive. (And remember, you're dealing with individual comments, most of them short -- and it's a massively parallizable problem.)
The second reason is convenience features -- instead of making the user write
, you can just have them write [quote=evanbd]It's a web site. You use HTML.[/quote], and the parser will convert that intelligently into valid HTML.
Or you could just make the blockquote by itself, and rely on the fact that a properly threaded view will show who you were replying to, anyway.
There's also manybetter choices for convenience, and most BBCode is going to be generated by the wanna-be-WYSIWYG buttons on the forum.
If you decide down the line that you want to change the code that's outputted for whatever reason, all you need to do is change the application logic and clear out the caches.
Or apply CSS.
And to be fair to the poster, before this new comment system, Slashdot used to say below the post box what HTML could be used.
Oh, they got rid of that? I didn't realize... I'm deliberately still using the old comment system.
<a href="http://example.com/rick_astley">get rick rolled</a>
And in BBCode:
[url=http://example.com/rick_astley]get rick rolled[/url]
It saves you a grand total of three characters. It is arguably more intuitive, at the expense of meaning that someone coming from BBCode won't necessarily understand HTML -- and HTML is actually a web standard. And the fact that every forum seems to use its own markup makes it even worse.
You know what I think? I think BBCode was invented because at some point, someone found it easier to create a parser of something entirely different (and escape out anything HTML-ish) than to simply enforce a subset of HTML. The fact that the second link from Google (after Wikipedia) on a search for bbcode takes me to phpbb is kind of a dead giveaway that it was some lazy PHP coding.
Besides, there are even simpler syntaxes out there, if ease of use or ease of typing was the goal. There's WYSIWYG editors for HTML, there's Markdown,Haml, and more. If I wanted to save people from the horrible complexity of HTML, bbcode would be about dead last on my list.
Which is an ACL, which is part of the Windows security model, but not part of the traditional UNIX one. I think that was the point: You can build Unix with ACLs, but it's harder to build ACLs with Unix.
Not entirely complete, of course -- I'm not sure/dev/video exists, I don't know what xanim is, and there's the matter of whether it's actually mpeg. But the concept is, in fact, blindingly obvious.
Patents can't protect a goal; the fact that you can meet a goal in another way doesn't infringe on the patent.
Define "goal".
For example: I consider playing mp3 files to be a goal. However, the mp3 format is patented, and any implementation must pay ridiculous licensing fees.
So yes, I am kind of worried that TiVo's patents might cover, for example, MythTV.
Seriously, the implementation of a light bulb is trivial, but a Judge would laugh at you if you suggested the idea.
Which shows you how little judges -- or maybe just you -- know about the history of the light bulb. It absolutely was a simple idea. We already had candles, why not use electricity to provide light?
It was, in fact, the implementation that was a bitch -- finding just the right material for the filament which would conduct, but not short out, wouldn't burn up immediately, and would provide a steady amount of light.
As I understand it, these are basically patents on the concept of a DVR. This means that they can sue any implementation of that concept, including MythTV/Fedora (or anyone running it).
Of course, I generally don't care, and I'll run things like libdvdcss, even though that's not technically legal in the US, so that I can play the DVDs I actually bought on the OS/player of my choice. I imagine you do the same. Just thought I should give you a heads up on the legal issues...
What Microsoft needs is for it to be easier to write apps which require the new OS, thus forcing people to upgrade if they want the latest version of that app, or if they want to use all its features.
Unfortunately, we've had six and a half years to get really good at developing apps for XP -- thus, just about anything MS could add to Vista is already done, as a third-party app or library, on XP. So they actually have to go after the customers, with shiny new features -- and again, most of the ones that actually matter already exist on XP. (Want desktop search? Google has one, and Vista apparently backported the Vista one to XP anyway.)
About the only way I see this working is Microsoft giving away their OS and selling apps. There still isn't a complete answer to Office. But I do think that they won't be able to sell Windows to consumers anymore.
I believe the regulations require advertisers to remove one's name from their lists if asked to do so.
And email spam is also illegal. I'm not entirely sure this would be effective, and I'm also fairly sure that it would be a bit of work.
I am not saying I wouldn't ask for an opt-out. But it is a band-aid.
Apparently, there's a regulation allowing people to file to block mail they consider obscene.... if they fill out the appropriate paperwork, the USPS is obligated to block mail from that sender to that recipient
That, I didn't know about. Thanks!
Still has the same problem as opt-out -- it is about a single sender and a single recipient. When I train my spamfilter on v14gr4 spams, I stop getting them, from anyone -- that's the kind of control I'm looking for, although I don't necessarily file everything as spam.
Then again, I get almost no mail spam, so I don't care yet.
Do you honestly believe there are no ways to block junk mail before it is delivered?
Yes.
This will block 90%+ of junk mail, and I actually signed up months ago.
Given that's not a.gov address, I assume what you are talking about is a service which politely asks those companies to stop spamming. This may work in the real world, because it actually costs money to send these things, and they are sent by human beings, not robots.
However, it is not a way to "block" anything. I can't simply create my own filter and have the post office trash anything that matches it as it comes in. And even if I could, someone is still paying to dispose of it.
I'm tempted to throw the good old "your idea will not work" form at you. Even if this does work, it is technically not blocking, and it cannot stop everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, but trying to find that is probably going to be harder than trying to find a screen that does true 24-bit or 32-bit color, instead of 8-bit or 16-bit with dithering.
Where do we start?
It was on their homepage! You didn't define "significant" very well.
Microsoft is in a position to change that. Desktop Linux isn't. Furthermore, it is mostly their own doing:
Because Microsoft changed the driver model at the last second to support more DRM.
Microsoft had years to fix that properly, and instead allowed "Just run as admin" to be an acceptable solution. They also had the opportunity to perfect an emulation layer this time around, the way Apple has historically done. And they seem to agree that's a good idea.
They do exist.
That's a separate issue. They can sync contacts with other things, I believe -- haven't tried recently. Give them time, though -- the iPod was reverse engineered, and as far as I know, has stayed that way for music sync support to Amarok.
I was just commenting that I suspect something like Gimp or Krita could fill that role nicely. Most of the complaints against Gimp, in particular, revolve around the lack of professional features, like CMYK.
Fair enough. But maybe I'm out of the loop -- I don't see people buying gizmos often. Sometimes, yes, but not often. Depending on how bad their Windows setup is, I tend to get people asking me for help with Windows far more often than I see them buying some new gizmo.
Quality of the user's search, too. Oh, and there's also Dell support -- I wonder how much that covers?
At which point, I turn around and google for "<insert my issue> gutsy", and if that turns up nothing, "<insert my issue> ubuntu" -- being as popular as it is, there's likely to be at least one Ubuntu-specific tutorial, usually on the Ubuntu forums. They tend to vary in quality, yes, but in my experience, significantly less so than the driver CD that comes with some new gizmo.
I'm sorry, often? I must really not be trying to do the same things you are...
More often, I really end up with more like five steps of apt-get, at most. Not often a make -- more often, adding a repository.
Both approaches are a bit backwards, I think. But I don't have an answer to that.
And yet, you almost never hear anywhere near the amount of complaining, or comments, about how horrible Apple's 3rd-party support is. Seems like there's enough general knowledge out there of what works best with a Mac
Diablo, I'd expect to run well under Wine; forget a VM.
I guess I'm just to the point now where, even if I was developing an app for Windows, I would much rather be working with a VM and with Linux.
I don't really see how it could be illegal. After all, it's entirely legal to run a paysite, which may involve access to various machines behind a certain network border...
It may go against the peering agreement, in which case, that needs to be revisited.
And it absolutely is unethical. The right thing to do here would be to just boycott Virgin -- everything Virgin -- until we get an apology.
I know I saw some standard protocols -- and also the ability to export to some other format.
*cough* DELL *cough*
Or do you mean "not an option" for the practical reasons you've mentioned?
And on XP, Home was actually decent, though not great. Vista, however, has something like five different versions. Home Basic is pretty crippled.
By allowing gamers to move to Linux while running existing games, thus providing a viable install base. Once that's done, developers are going to want to either pay Cedega to port them, or do it themselves, because Cedega can never be as reliable or as fast as a native port.
It's close enough, and more polished in a few ways.
Apple's fault. It does, however, support last.fm directly, and there are other stores out there.
I'm just going to continue ignoring that -- it's way beyond what a music app should be responsible for. Maybe if it spawned the actual contacts/photos/calendar apps to handle that...
Care to be specific?
Kopete will do webcams, and Skype has a native version.
All the more reason for them to not need Photoshop.
Which is why I tend to assume that the initial setup is the hardest part. Borrow a geek for that.
And it is much easier now -- a quick Google search will usually turn up a tutorial.
Dell has. Asus has. That's starting to happen...
I think you're making a false assumption about package managers.
What is the mechanism protecting the "sandbox templates"? And why is that mechanism more secure than a repository?
Remember it for what -- YouTube? Or for everything?
See, that's the problem -- exactly what does it remember? I'm sorry if it's not obvious to me how this magical checkbox could read your mind to figure out whether you want to remember just that website at that sandbox, or all websites at that sandbox, or all websites in all sandboxes, etc.
I'm not asking for full implementation details, but maybe at least a fully-formed idea, instead of handwaving.
Updating a flag, it won't do. Special "recovery utility" absolutely is done, frequently. Boot from the flash device is not done.
My point still holds, I think. Taking a laundry list of obvious things should not make it a patent. If one of them is non-obvious -- being able to boot from the backup, without restoring it, wasn't immediately obvious to me, but still doesn't seem very innovative -- then make that the patent. However, taking a bunch of already-known or immediately obvious techniques, and adding one trivial change, shouldn't be enough to declare a completely new patent.
I don't agree that patents themselves aren't bad. And I didn't say anything bad about TiVo, only about their patent.
The Wikipedia article on Suicide seems to be written in that completely dispassionate, apparently unbiased way that all the better Wikipedia articles are. I suppose they neither encourage nor discourage suicide.
It thus reflects the rest of the Internet. If you want to join a cult, there's plenty of information out there -- the Church of Scientology has certainly staked out its own turf. If you want to have all kinds of crazy, kinky sex, there's information on where to buy Gor books, on how to safely suffocate someone almost until they pass out, or how, exactly, to apply a whip or crop for maximum pain but minimum actual injury...
And if you want to commit suicide, you can find out where to get a gun, and how to load it. Or how to hang yourself -- how to set up the drop to be quick and hard enough to snap your neck before you feel any pain.
And if you want to get out of depression, it'll show you all kinds of prescription pills, psychiatrists, meditation, or simply support groups to help you through it.
In other words, the Internet itself is neutral -- due to the sheer amount of diversity out there, what the Internet is to you is exactly what you choose for it to be.
Is that a good thing? Would it be better if Wikipedia actively discouraged suicide?
Oh, one more thing: What I've found to be effective is simply talking to the person. It doesn't matter what you say, or even too much how you say it. It matters more that you are there -- human contact helps.
A real example: Someone told me of her plans to commit suicide. I was sick of trying to help her with her almost daily threatening to do so. So instead, I asked her how she was planning to do it. And I criticized her for her technique, and brainstormed a bit with her on more effective ways of killing herself -- quickly, and without mistakes, so she wouldn't wake up in the hospital.
And after a few minutes of this, she broke out laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
Remember, kids -- anyone who really wants to end their life can do it, quickly, easily, painlessly -- or painfully, if they like. The fact that they are still alive and still talking to you means they aren't going to go through with it.
I can only wonder if the Wikipedia article could have anything like that effect... Or if it's just the opposite, if it's too impersonal.
If you have to boot it once a year, there's not much incentive to keep upgrading the machine. If you have to use it on a daily basis, the new features start to look attractive.
I don't think I could live with pre-installed Windows anymore. Entirely too much crapware out of the box, usually, and unless you're paying extra for some "pro" edition, you're setting yourself up to have to upgrade it later.
Question: Are they personal accounting software? Because we've got that on Linux.
Or are they intended for people who work full-time as accountants, managing other people's money? I don't have a solution for that, but if that's the only remaining obstacle, we're doing pretty well.
No, it wouldn't.
Either that point happened a long time ago, or it never will until you actually start to see some 30% adoption.
Trivial example: I used to think Linux would never make it until you could play games on Linux. Now we've got a few major games ported just for the hell of it -- every Unreal game ever released on Windows, last I checked, and every Doom, every Quake, plus a ton of random stuff from Loki. Wine has actually gotten to where it can play many games reasonably by itself, and Cedega takes that a step further by actually offering paid support for playing games on Linux.
I used to think that we had the games, but driver support sucked. I had an ATI card, and it was awful. Then nVidia started making really good drivers, and ATI has started releasing specs to support open drivers. It's actually getting to where it's reasonable to expect you'll get about as good a gaming experience on Linux, for the games which have been ported, as you would on Windows.
Yet most gamers use Windows, and most games are exclusively for Windows, no matter how good Cedega gets at emulating them. We are over and past what should have been the tipping point, but people still game on Windows. I run as much as I feel I can on Linux, but when I buy new games, I put them on XP, and I boot that.
There is never going to be one tipping point. As you said, your mom has switched, but your dad hasn't. My point here is: For your mom, the tipping point came and went. For your dad, he's one hardware issue and one software port away from that tipping point.
The reason I declared it having come and gone for "average users" is that it seems to me that most average people need web, email, an office suite, their music collection, and maybe one or two other apps. The one or two others vary wildly, but for many people, they will end up being things which are covered -- for example, iPod support in Amarok.
Based on a casual inquiry, most of these people who know about Linux and who haven't switched, haven't done so for rather stupid reasons, like needing to interoperate with Exchange, even though they haven't even enabled any Exchange features beyond SMTP and IMAP.
We are talking about the ability to manipulate a buffer. Or to work with something half-downloaded. I have personally re-invented this concept, pretty much independently of Tivo -- in this case, it was figuring out that you can play back a file that is partially downloaded, before the download finishes. Looks like YouTube and everyone else are doing the same thing there.
It is, however, the act of playing back any file which conforms to that mp3 standard. Yes, it is by side effect, but the result is the same -- despite the implementation being completely different, and the context being completely different, royalties must be paid.
I don't have TiVo. And I am interested to see how this plays out.
I do hate patents. I feel that they retard progress more than promote it, and thus defeat their own original purpose. And I feel that 15 years is an insanely long time in today's world -- the patented item would either be irrelevant or already dominant within maybe two years.
But I don't actually know enough about the patents in question. However, if the concept is simply "pausing live TV", then it absolutely was an obvious idea, in that anyone forced to use Linux video tools from that time period would likely have come up with the same thing.
The MythTV project, as is, might not exist. But someone would have.
From that page:
Nowhere does it say that MythTV could never have come up with the idea without TiVo.
And nothing on that page says anything about the manufacturing or the materials.
Do you just like to post impressive-looking links, hoping that people won't actually read them? Or is there a substance I am missing? That's not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.
Yes, in theory. But that's not what's happening.
Allow me to direct you to this patent on what is effectively "dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/my-flash-device/mbr.img bs=512 count=1"
Or maybe you'd like to know about this patent...
I could go on. And on. The fact is, the patent system is so thoroughly broken right now that my first reaction to just about any patent is to question whether or not it should actually be a patent. I mean, somebody's got to question it, and the US Patent Office certainly isn't...
They have, however, patented an "invention" which is required to play MP3 files. Which is the whole point, really -- I can't legally play MP3 files without permission to use that wavelet function, which is, after all, even more general than MP3. It's also, by the way, one reason people are wary of MSOOXML.
The point about wifi is relevant, I think. It's at the point now where a fresh install of Ubuntu is as likely to support a given wireless card as a fresh install of XP. (Probably Vista, haven't tried.) And if you get Ubuntu pre-loaded, wifi is going to work, just as it would with any pre-loaded OS.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough: Out of the past six or eight laptops that I've used or tested Linux on, one of them needed a complex fix that took a bit of time on Google -- but my friend did that on his own, actually, and he's a Linux newbie. Most of them just work out of the box, and when they do, they work better than Windows. A few of them require maybe ten minutes to set up, and then work flawlessly (native driver, but I have to pull firmware from the Windows drivers). And it doesn't take a full install to find that out -- I can do all of this from the LiveCD.
Keep in mind, these are getting better all the time, across the board, even including new hardware. The Linux community seems to be getting faster at adapting to new hardware, and has more companies simply providing drivers. Windows, on the other hand, seems to be getting worse -- XP worked, out of the box, with just about everything 2k did. Vista is much more likely to not work at all, or to be unstable.
Even if it was roughly the same, the point is, again, upgrading to Vista costs money, and will provide about the same experience as switching to Ubuntu, or worse. This may change, but if both of them are getting better all the time...
Oh, and when Microsoft finally fixes them more permanently, with Windows 7 -- whenever that might be -- it is going to cost money (again) to upgrade.
Substitute "Vista" for "Ubuntu" and you see why I don't care as much about the "wireless issues". Use compatible hardware, and it's not a problem.
That was essentially my entire point.
And software. Without tons of UAC spam.
I can see where the decade or two of Microsoft dominance has made switching to anything else difficult. However, for awhile, I've thought Linux was better than Windows for many ways that only a geek would care about, and it was always a compromise. Now, I think that if you can possibly use it (boot Windows once a year for taxes), Ubuntu has basically put it over the edge of being better for average users.
I also think we're well past the point where there's a simple one or two sentence answer to sum up the strengths and weaknesses of each.
With the example you gave, yes. Let me give you another example:
Consider, also, that this is not for a single app. It's for a repository -- Medibuntu has dozens of apps. But even for a single app:
What you described just shows that AWN's install procedure sucks.
That is true. It is again an example of where this has gone wrong -- Firefox 3.0 for Linux is about a meg, because it splits things into smaller packages (xulrunner probably being a big one).
Not as large an issue when re-downloading is so quick. I suppose it makes more sense for a proprietary app, though.
I only very rarely run into apps which don't already have an Ubuntu package in some form -- could probably count them on one hand. In such situations, the procedure really isn't good -- usually involving compiling from source -- but this is easier now, and these are also not necessarily the kind of apps that a normal user needs.
That said, I do think that a package manager could be built to combine the best of both worlds. It's on my long list of things to do Real Soon Now.
Because it's impossible to move. But then, most Linux GUIs start out with these things "locked", forcing me to be a bit more explicit to end up with the taskbar in the wrong place.
Anyway, my point was that it's about on par with modern GNOME and KDE, but other shells are available, work well, and tend not to break apps. And KDE can be customized even more than GNOME, which is already ahead of Windows. So the only good thing about the Windows GUI is that, precisely because you can't customize it very much, it's very easy to find your way around a new Windows system -- as you said, consistency. But ultimately, that's only superficial, and they seem to be breaking it with every major new version of Windows...
It's also an interesting observation, given that most Microsoft applications can be customized to an absurd level. By clicking and dragging, you could accidentally move the Explorer location bar out of place, make it tiny, etc. I actually appreciate this (and see a bit of it in KDE), but if it's good in their apps, why not in the OS? (And vice versa -- if it's bad in the OS, why not in their apps?)
I should note one more thing: Power almost necessarily provides a way to shoot yourself in the foot. Take the web browser. If the homepage could not be changed, and there was no address bar -- if you totally kiosk-ified it -- it would be more user-friendly, and less prone to the user screwing it up in weird ways. But that would defeat the whole point of having th
From what I can tell:
#1 is fine and acceptable.
#2 is a bad thing to encourage. Package managers are generally a more secure and more efficient system than ad-hoc downloads. But you would stil get a prompt.
#3 seems like a case for using another OS, as there's nothing written in the past 9+ years that would have me using Windows as a primary OS. Games, maybe, but those can be run in a VM, and are still not a reason to run anything but the game on Windows. (Which is good for Windows, actually -- the Windows installations that I put nothing but games on are much faster and more reliable than the ones I actually use.)
Yes and no.
What they get to say is, "No, we won't help you develop new apps with practices which were a bad idea from the beginning."
And what they do is, they actually end up running all that old software, under various layers of emulation and virtualization. I've heard of people running a 68k app on a modern Intel Mac -- that's Rosetta to emulate PPC, so that Classic can emulate OS 9, which then emulates a 68k CPU so the app can run. And it runs better in that environment than it does on the original hardware.
This is also the environment Microsoft is rumored to be planning for Windows 7 -- basically, write a brand-new API that solves all of these issues, and run the old apps in a virtual machine. (I could have told them that five years ago -- run old apps under something like Wine, and either write or borrow a brand-new, rock solid OS.)
Now, Linux gets to say "fuck you" to everyone every six months or so. Basically, the assumption is that old apps can always be recompiled (as most are open source), and sometimes it's easier to just throw away the cruft and deliberately break apps than to carry it around for another generation or so. But that seems to be mostly at the kernel level -- userland has been the way it is for a very long time, so the app support is actually there for us to be able to do very interesting things without having to tell the app about it. (Where is chroot on Windows?)
Almost.
On Ubuntu, admins can sudo, but they get prompted for their own password.
On Vista, apparently non-admins can sudo, but they get prompted for an admin password. Admins can sudo without a password, but with a prompt.
But yeah, it's pretty much a straight ripoff of sudo, claiming it as their own innovation, and failing miserably because of all the legacy apps which won't cooperate.
It is, however, everything before and after that point which makes it more secure.
Before Joe runs this app, he downloaded and installed it via his package manager. It is, therefore, an app which has been tested thoroughly by the repository maintainers, and then built from source and cryptographically signed. Joe doesn't have to know any of this unless something goes wrong -- like when a repository maintainer does something stupid, like letting their PGP key expire without sending out a new one first.
And when he does run the app, it's not running as admin, and therefore not causing scary prompts. It can do this because this has been the security practice on Linux since just about day 1, and there are no apps which ask for admin rights when they don't need them.
OS X did something different -- before downloading, there is no package manager, which kind of sucks. However, after downloading, the same is true -- nothing asks for admin rights unless it needs it -- except software which predates OS X, which never asks for admin rights at all, as that software runs in a virtual machine called Classic.
Your suggestions may apply more to OS X people, and they aren't entirely bad -- except the Flash part (Flash needs to die in a fire!) -- but they aren't as badly needed on Linux in particular, where most software is open source, thoroughly tested, and distributed through known and trusted channels. The part where you might download some random crappy shareware app off the Internet and not know whether it's infested with spyware just doesn't apply.
I do think you're a bit naive, though:
Again, Flash needs to die in a fire...
That said, no one's going to click through a security dialog, no matter how friendly, every time they go to YouTube. The sane thing to do would be to spontaneously generate lightweight sandboxes, tear them mostly down when the app closes (user goes to another webpage), and manage the disk access as a massive cache. User only really needs to care if things start to use excessive disk space, and browsers would have a sane limit.
By not asking to be run outside the sandbox.
For that matter, the rumored plans for Windows 7 are to do this the right way: Create a brand-new API, and run legacy apps in a virtual machine.
Not really. Add a checkbox to enable HTML. If it's not enabled, escape those less than symbols for them -- and detect URLs, and other things.
Do the preview in Javascript. Not Ajax, just straight Javascript, client-side, as they type. Gracefully degrade to a preview button.
Regular expressions can be both CPU intensive and wrong. Just look at a real email validator, which I would paste here, but the lameness filter won't let me.
Tell me that isn't error prone, or at least CPU-intensive. (And remember, you're dealing with individual comments, most of them short -- and it's a massively parallizable problem.)
Or you could just make the blockquote by itself, and rely on the fact that a properly threaded view will show who you were replying to, anyway.
There's also many better choices for convenience, and most BBCode is going to be generated by the wanna-be-WYSIWYG buttons on the forum.
Or apply CSS.
Oh, they got rid of that? I didn't realize... I'm deliberately still using the old comment system.
Let's compare. In HTML:
And in BBCode:
It saves you a grand total of three characters. It is arguably more intuitive, at the expense of meaning that someone coming from BBCode won't necessarily understand HTML -- and HTML is actually a web standard. And the fact that every forum seems to use its own markup makes it even worse.
You know what I think? I think BBCode was invented because at some point, someone found it easier to create a parser of something entirely different (and escape out anything HTML-ish) than to simply enforce a subset of HTML. The fact that the second link from Google (after Wikipedia) on a search for bbcode takes me to phpbb is kind of a dead giveaway that it was some lazy PHP coding.
Besides, there are even simpler syntaxes out there, if ease of use or ease of typing was the goal. There's WYSIWYG editors for HTML, there's Markdown, Haml, and more. If I wanted to save people from the horrible complexity of HTML, bbcode would be about dead last on my list.
Which is an ACL, which is part of the Windows security model, but not part of the traditional UNIX one. I think that was the point: You can build Unix with ACLs, but it's harder to build ACLs with Unix.
Oh, come on. Drop the semicolon.
Not entirely complete, of course -- I'm not sure /dev/video exists, I don't know what xanim is, and there's the matter of whether it's actually mpeg. But the concept is, in fact, blindingly obvious.
Define "goal".
For example: I consider playing mp3 files to be a goal. However, the mp3 format is patented, and any implementation must pay ridiculous licensing fees.
So yes, I am kind of worried that TiVo's patents might cover, for example, MythTV.
Which shows you how little judges -- or maybe just you -- know about the history of the light bulb. It absolutely was a simple idea. We already had candles, why not use electricity to provide light?
It was, in fact, the implementation that was a bitch -- finding just the right material for the filament which would conduct, but not short out, wouldn't burn up immediately, and would provide a steady amount of light.
As I understand it, these are basically patents on the concept of a DVR. This means that they can sue any implementation of that concept, including MythTV/Fedora (or anyone running it).
Of course, I generally don't care, and I'll run things like libdvdcss, even though that's not technically legal in the US, so that I can play the DVDs I actually bought on the OS/player of my choice. I imagine you do the same. Just thought I should give you a heads up on the legal issues...
What Microsoft needs is for it to be easier to write apps which require the new OS, thus forcing people to upgrade if they want the latest version of that app, or if they want to use all its features.
Unfortunately, we've had six and a half years to get really good at developing apps for XP -- thus, just about anything MS could add to Vista is already done, as a third-party app or library, on XP. So they actually have to go after the customers, with shiny new features -- and again, most of the ones that actually matter already exist on XP. (Want desktop search? Google has one, and Vista apparently backported the Vista one to XP anyway.)
About the only way I see this working is Microsoft giving away their OS and selling apps. There still isn't a complete answer to Office. But I do think that they won't be able to sell Windows to consumers anymore.
And email spam is also illegal. I'm not entirely sure this would be effective, and I'm also fairly sure that it would be a bit of work.
I am not saying I wouldn't ask for an opt-out. But it is a band-aid.
That, I didn't know about. Thanks!
Still has the same problem as opt-out -- it is about a single sender and a single recipient. When I train my spamfilter on v14gr4 spams, I stop getting them, from anyone -- that's the kind of control I'm looking for, although I don't necessarily file everything as spam.
Then again, I get almost no mail spam, so I don't care yet.
Yes.
Given that's not a .gov address, I assume what you are talking about is a service which politely asks those companies to stop spamming. This may work in the real world, because it actually costs money to send these things, and they are sent by human beings, not robots.
However, it is not a way to "block" anything. I can't simply create my own filter and have the post office trash anything that matches it as it comes in. And even if I could, someone is still paying to dispose of it.
I'm tempted to throw the good old "your idea will not work" form at you. Even if this does work, it is technically not blocking, and it cannot stop everything.