Re:I Think of 'Feersum Endjin'
on
Broken Angels
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· Score: 1
I'm not reading Banks right now because, well, he's not writing anything right now. I heard he's taking a short break or something.
That said, I do so love his Culture books (pretty much everything by Iain _M_ Banks, except for Feersum Endjin). I've got a bunch of sigquotes that came out of those books. I love the "I can wipe out starsystems but still play practical jokes on my crew" AIs.
His Iaim Banks (no 'M') stuff is a lot more variable. I dug The Wasp Factory pretty much, and a Song of Stone wasn't _too_ bad. But I never bothered to finish the Bridge.
I'll note that in general his stuff is very, very, very different from Morgan's stuff. His protagonists are often far more tragic than Morgan's protagonist (yeah, Takeshi suffers, but he always comes out ahead of the game).
I'm not sure it's time for them to throw in the towel yet (nor the time for some of their fans to throw the towel in), but it is... interesting. Google makes a big deal out of their "Don't Be Evil" directive. As they grow, mature, and become more corporatized, are they on the path to the dark side? Or is this particular story perhaps not accurately reflecting all sides of the issue?
> how about increasing fuel efficiency? (yes, even more or making them safer (fundementally instead of bigger and heavier)
These are the Japanese we're talking about here, not the American auto industry. Their cars are the most gas-efficient mass-produced cars you can get in the US. They're making some larger SUVs, but only because that's what Americans want to buy. You can still buy a high-efficiency Civic.
>or better communication integration for the ever-pressed-to-the-ear cell phones
Have you seen the Acura's Bluetooth integration?
>or better collision avoidance systems
So we can have every slashdotter bitch about how that takes away from their control and they can't trust an automated system to do their avoidance for them?
>or making headlights that can be "ub3r" that don't blind everyone on the road
Yeah, what's up with that? We want lights that put out tons of visible light and throw it out far, but that won't blind anyone who looks at them. Is that so hard?
There are no SPF machines. SPF is entirely decentralized. Entities who are responsible for mail systems by definition are also responsible for DNS servers, which are the necessary publishing medium for SPF.
As for the small user: How small? An MUA-equipped user doesn't need to know about SPF, but someone running an MTA -- again, by definition, anyone with a domain that receives email -- will eventually potentially have to know about SPF. What if they don't know and can't be bothered? Fuck'em. Same answer as if you asked "what if the small user doesn't know how to secure their server against open relaying?" Plus, it takes all of two minutes to use the SPF wizard to figure out what your SPF record should look like. Can't do it? Don't know what IP addresses are? Don't know how to manage a DNS server? That means you're not qualified to manage a domain/MTA. Go back to using someone else's resources and let them worry about managing this.
The only possible problem with that scenario is that Apple has not been a serious competitor to Microsoft for the last, oh, ten years.
Seriously, Apple makes some good shit -- most people will acknowledge this -- but they're at about 10% of the market and they're not aiming to become ubiquitous, they're aiming to solidly dominate their niche. Remember, MS sank about what, $100M into Apple a few years back when it was having problems? It needs Apple to point at and say "look, there are cmpetitors to us who are doing really well!" without having to worry about having their market share seriously challenged (they can't do the same with Linux -- it's too much of a real threat).
Apple threatens Microsoft like BMW Z8s threaten Honda Civics.
Except, of course, that all of these have been done. In other words, you've not come up with an original idea.
A bank branch that's oriented toward providing coffee, child areas, etc, however, hasn't been done. I'll point to the fact no bank I know does this as proof.
Hence, unlike your ideas, WaMu came up with an actual original idea and patented.
After about ten years of using Sendmail (I was using Sendmail back when you had to understand rulesets and how to hack LHS/RHS of rules), I switched to Postfix. I am happier than a pig in mud for a whole bunch of reasons and consider Postfix a superior MTA.
I have at least one acquaintance who, on his very large enterprise, runs Sendmail at the edge (and Exchange internally, but that's not his choice). Why? Because that way, he doesn't need to worry about separate patch management for his MTA -- Sun makes sure his MTA is up to date, and he doesn't have to document "this is how to install the MTA" separately.
Is he using an inferior MTA? I believe so. So does he. But the ways in which Sendmail is less good don't affect him nearly as much as the way in which it is better -- by lowering maintenance costs (or, really, just rolling them into the ridiculous amount he pays Sun -- though he could get the patches for free, of course).
With respects to my fellow sysadmins here -- obviously, some of you are vastly superior to me in all matters technical -- we really should know by now that sometimes, we make technical decisions for reasons that are not purely technical. The reasons people choose Sendmail over Postfix are usually in that sort of category, as well as the reason people choose BIND over other DNS servers (BTW, BIND is also the default DNS server on Solaris).
I don't see this as a huge problem, except for (I guess) people who take it personally that not 'enough' people use the software they developed with great effort (though I don't see Wietse complaining "more people should be using Postfix!"). Unlike the Windows situation, it's not like the fact that, likely, most people I communicate with use Sendmail means I'm forced into using Sendmail. UNIX-based MTAs (Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, exim, other custom MTAs) mostly seem to be fairly standards-compliant, much like DNS servers (go ahead. Point out some obscure thing that 99% of people don't use where BIND doesn't follow the spec, just so I can laugh at you). So BIND and Sendmail dominate? Fine. I'll still run Postfix and... well, BIND. Who cares?
Re:Reap what you sow
on
The 3Com Saga
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It sounds like when they investigated him the act was not in force yet and they had to actually get a judge to agree to the tap; that makes this not a particularly interesting or scary story -- judges have had the ability to approve taps to compromise our privacy for a long, long time now.
It looks like PROTECT might make this at the discretion of the prosecutor which is, obviously a Very Bad Thing[tm], but it's not all that relevant in this case, it seems.
Google's business model[s] seem[s] to be based on the concept of charging vendors, rather than users. Is there a single google service that costs money for the average consumer to use? I don't pay to search, to blog, or to get my mail (gmail). I'd be surprised if their first foray into charging customers, if it ever happened, was in the field of online music (especially since I suspect they might have a hard time doing online music and abiding by the whole "don't be evil" thing -- they can't exactly do it without DRM).
I just tried this, by the way. I got no ads, much like the other beta tester. In fact, the only amusing ad placement I've found was when trying to see what hugs, kisses, and french kisses would result in. So I wrote myself a letter full of 'xoxoxo', 'hugs,' 'kisses', and 'french kiss.'
Unfortunately, I did this from work, which is a financial institution where they insert a huge (~15 lines) disclaimer to all outbound emails about not sending sensitive/urgent information, trades, etc.
Result? Gmail ignored my sexual content and gave me ads for financial services firms.
That crack you're on is really, really good. Where can I get one?
I've been managing UNIX systems for about fourteen years now, with a focus on Solaris. I've installed my share of W95/W98/W2K/WXP systems. I've pretty much always had an install that ended up being what I expected it to be. I have read *no* documentation on how to install Windows. Ever. I'm pretty sure that I've never even watched someone install Windows.
I've installed Linux a few times. I had to tell it what serial mouse I was using and what video card I was using. I had to figure out how to apportion swap. Mind you, figuring out what swap was was easy for me coming from the UNIX world, but for the average person? And the tool to repartition the filesystem was... well, less intuitive than Windows. We'll leave it at that.
Look, Windows is the scourge of humanity, there's no disagreement there. But claiming it's as easy to install Linux as it is to install Windows? That way lies insanity.
You're wrong on two counts, one minor and one major.
First, the minor one: They don't block attachments.
Now, the major one:
Gmail has a *LOT* going for it other than simply publicity. I'd like to believe I'm in the top 20% of hard-core CLI mail users -- I've been using UNIX CLI tools to read my mail for about fourteen years now, starting with Mail, then MH, mail, pine, and now mutt (I've backslid, I know -- MH is by far the most powerful of these). I hate webmail systems (I've got a Yahoo account and I implemented SquirrelMail at home, in addition to playing with OWA). They feel too restrictive.
And you know what? GMail doesn't completely solve this problem. It's still not as fast and efficient as using just the keyboard. But aside from the limitations imposed by the media, it's pretty fucking sweet. Seriously, it just rocks. I haven't found any way in which it significantly sucks and some pretty significant ways in which it really rocks. Including: 1. The label system is really, really cool. Remember the whole 'categorize, don't delete' concept they're advocating? That's done by applying labels to a message and making it very, very easy to find all messages with a given label. You control the number and naming of labels, of course. This of course means you can label a message with more than one label. They still can't search for "has label X and label Y," but I've made that a feature request. 2. There's some limited keyboard interactivity capability (c for compose, j for older, k for newer, etc) 3. It's fast. Faster than Yahoo in switching between views. 4. Ad presentation is unobtrusive. I also like the fact that it *first* displays your mail and then, once it figured out what the ads are going to be, it displays them. So there's no delay while they pay the bills. 5. The ability to add filters with actions is nice (though for disclosure's sake, I'd note it's hardly procmail-strength. They only support three headers right now, and they don't do regexps; I've submitted a feature request for that, so we'll see). 6. Log in, and it puts you in http mode; change the URL to https: and log out. Next time you log in, you'll go straight to https mode. Sweet!. Disclosure: Exists across sessions but only for lifetime of browser. Feature request submitted. 7. The spel cheker is nice and streemlined, and the interface to it is very easy and intuitive. Not an isue for me, becoz I dont knead one, but it's worth nothing.
Overall, of all the webmail systems I've used, this one really, really rocks. It probably rocks as hard as any pure webmail system can. It helps that it's offered by a company with, so far, an impeccably ethical track record. Will I migrate away from having my own UNIX machine doing my own mail serving? Hell no -- I *like* having access to a mail spool, running procmail and CRM114, and offering lists via Mailman. But I'll definitely keep my gmail account (and not only because being an early signer means I got to have my second-most-preferred email address -- my first, the address I've maintained across countless systems in the last decade and a half, was too short for them:( ). It's sweet.
Oh, one more thing: Since I started keeping track (2003-02-14, for some strange reason), my mail volume has averaged 3386 messages a week and an average message size of 5049 bytes. That includes a huge amount of spam (my MTA only filters out.exe/.bat/.pif etc), which Gmail should theoretically be able to deal with for me. Either way, at that volume it would take me 198,059 messages at that volume to get to 1gb and at my rate that's approximately 58 weeks. A little more than a year.
If I was working for Google, or had any serious hope of working for google, I'd disclose them here. But I don't.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Free Software guru Richard Stallman was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to F/OSS. Truly an American icon.
CEOs get massively compensated if their company's fortune rises because they are considered responsible for that fortune through their hiring decisions.
It makes perfect sense to hold them responsible for the decisions of their underlings if their hiring decisions prove unfortuitous. You'd have a hard time convincing me to feel bad for them if they hired some schmuck to do their internal security and then didn't bother to audit that person independently -- we expect them to do it with the accountants, so why not with the IT folks?
Not to get sidetracked, but actually -- not a lot of spam comes from aol.com. Check out the headers. aol.com has lately been a damn good corporate citizen on this front.
Oh, and discounting asymmetric routing tricks, good luck establishing an outbound port 25 connection from inside the aol.com network.
What definition of 'absolutely necessary' are we using here?
Quick anecdote: I used to work for a large company that made web authoring tools. At some point we had to ask ourselves whether we still wanted NFR versions of our rather expensive software available to every employee on the intranet. Was it absolutely necessary for the receptionist to install an HTML editing environment? Creating HTML was not part of his job.
Our decision was that if our receptionist takes an interest in our own products and wants to play with them, that's a Good Thing[tm Martha Stewart] and should be encouraged. It'll make him more interested in the company and a more committed employee; we might find out that he's actually a decent designer and can contribute more to the company in our web design group. Did the NFR products get 'pilfered' every once in a while? Sure. But I'll bet you that 95%+ of the pilfering that was going on with them was to people who wouldn't have purchased them anyway -- but now were using them, and talking about them (mostly positively, we hoped:) ).
I work now for a company that doesn't allow general internet access for 90%+ of its employees. I think disallowing general internet access is symptomatic of a certain sort of relationship the company wishes to maintain with its employees and is indicative of how it thinks of them -- and it's not indicative of a particularly high level of trust in, or care for, the employees.
Left to my own devices, I'd rather put in a robust anti-virus and anti-malicious-code system coupled with employee education and discipline for people who break the minimal rules and then let the employees loose. Will some of them surf during work hours and damage their productivity? Indubitably. I still think that the overall benefit in employee morale and easy access to information is going to be worth the occasional loss from someone who can't control his surfing.
darnok's already covered most of the salient points as to why Python's the shits. I was in something of your shoes -- doing IT work with a big chunk of development for the last fourteen years. I got into Perl back in the 4.x days and loved it; started doing PHP about three years ago and discovered Python a year ago (I might be out of P* languages by now). It's not tremendously fair to compare Python to PHP -- PHP doesn't have much of an existence outside the context of a web server (yes, I know you've got the CLI, but you're still essentially writing HTML pages with PHP embedded into them). That said:
At least last time I had to do PHP, I had a bitch of a time trying to get it to act as an HTTP _client_. I ended up having to open straight socket connections and hand-crufting[sic] my HTTP calls. Ugh;
Object orientation is bolted onto PHP; it's built into Python.
[Yes, I know this is one of those religious issues] mandating whitespaces makes Python code much more readable (until someone edits your code and uses a tab instead of four spaces:) ).
It's the easiest, most intuitive language I've ever used (this includes Perl, LISP, TCL, and PHP, among others). Most times, if I think "well, I'll just put this code in and see if it does what I want it to do," that's what happens -- it makes it much easier to prototype.
Zope, built on Python, is also quite nice. Reasons for it include the fact it mandates the separation between presentation, business, and database logic (well, you could work around that, but they make it easy to do it The Right Way), and (again) the rapid prototyping of web applications.
I should note, by the way, that Zope is one of those F/OSS projects that's phenomenally coded and absolutely horrendously, horrifically badly documented. Oh well.
Oh, and 'Zope Security' is something of an oxymoron. I don't like the in-band management of it (if you've got a Zope server running on http://host:8001, then you manage it by going to http://host:8001/manage. This is one of the reasons you want to front it with Apache and do ProxyDeny for a whole bunch of special URLs)
Wait, Nanking as in China? As in where the Japanese engaged in slavery, torture, and human experiments?
No, that part sucks. But I don't have too much of a problem with those kids volunteering to fly their planes into carriers. I don't think any of them was forced into it, was he?
There is, technically speaking, no moral or ethical reason why human bombs (AKA suicide bombers) are a Bad Thing[tm]. Remember, we saw an instance of this in WWII with the Japanese Kamikaze.
It is usually going to be easier to breach defenses one-way than to go in, hit the enemy, and leave. Arriving with the intent of blowing up frees you to focus on the task rather than be distracted by 'misguided' attempts to survive the execution of it.
Where it gets less great is when you do one of two things: 1. Not clearly identify yourself as a hostile target, causing the other side to naturally suspect EVEYRONE on your side and probably qualifying you as an unlawful combatant (the Law of Armed Conflict requires distinctive markings); or (much more seriously) 2. Target civilians, which is when you become not just a weapon, but a terrorist weapon.
There's no fundamental difference between a Palestinian wearing a uniform and a bomb blowing themselves up with a bunch of soldiers and, say, a US soldier storming a Japanese pillbox with a grenade knowing he's going to die. The issue is whether or not he's clearly marked and, more importantly, whether he's attacking soldiers on duty or civilians.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not reading Banks right now because, well, he's not writing anything right now. I heard he's taking a short break or something.
That said, I do so love his Culture books (pretty much everything by Iain _M_ Banks, except for Feersum Endjin). I've got a bunch of sigquotes that came out of those books. I love the "I can wipe out starsystems but still play practical jokes on my crew" AIs.
His Iaim Banks (no 'M') stuff is a lot more variable. I dug The Wasp Factory pretty much, and
a Song of Stone wasn't _too_ bad. But I never bothered to finish the Bridge.
I'll note that in general his stuff is very, very, very different from Morgan's stuff. His protagonists are often far more tragic than Morgan's protagonist (yeah, Takeshi suffers, but he always comes out ahead of the game).
I'm not sure it's time for them to throw in the towel yet (nor the time for some of their fans to throw the towel in), but it is ... interesting. Google makes a big deal out of their "Don't Be Evil" directive. As they grow, mature, and become more corporatized, are they on the path to the dark side?
Or is this particular story perhaps not accurately reflecting all sides of the issue?
These are the Japanese we're talking about here, not the American auto industry. Their cars are the most gas-efficient mass-produced cars you can get in the US. They're making some larger SUVs, but only because that's what Americans want to buy. You can still buy a high-efficiency Civic.
>or better communication integration for the ever-pressed-to-the-ear cell phones
Have you seen the Acura's Bluetooth integration?
>or better collision avoidance systems
So we can have every slashdotter bitch about how that takes away from their control and they can't trust an automated system to do their avoidance for them?
>or making headlights that can be "ub3r" that don't blind everyone on the road
Yeah, what's up with that? We want lights that put out tons of visible light and throw it out far, but that won't blind anyone who looks at them. Is that so hard?
Err, what crack is you on?
There are no SPF machines. SPF is entirely decentralized. Entities who are responsible for mail systems by definition are also responsible for DNS servers, which are the necessary publishing medium for SPF.
As for the small user: How small? An MUA-equipped user doesn't need to know about SPF, but someone running an MTA -- again, by definition, anyone with a domain that receives email -- will eventually potentially have to know about SPF. What if they don't know and can't be bothered? Fuck'em. Same answer as if you asked "what if the small user doesn't know how to secure their server against open relaying?" Plus, it takes all of two minutes to use the SPF wizard to figure out what your SPF record should look like. Can't do it? Don't know what IP addresses are? Don't know how to manage a DNS server? That means you're not qualified to manage a domain/MTA. Go back to using someone else's resources and let them worry about managing this.
Sheesh.
The only possible problem with that scenario is that Apple has not been a serious competitor to Microsoft for the last, oh, ten years.
Seriously, Apple makes some good shit -- most people will acknowledge this -- but they're at about 10% of the market and they're not aiming to become ubiquitous, they're aiming to solidly dominate their niche. Remember, MS sank about what, $100M into Apple a few years back when it was having problems? It needs Apple to point at and say "look, there are cmpetitors to us who are doing really well!" without having to worry about having their market share seriously challenged (they can't do the same with Linux -- it's too much of a real threat).
Apple threatens Microsoft like BMW Z8s threaten Honda Civics.
Except, of course, that all of these have been done. In other words, you've not come up with an original idea.
A bank branch that's oriented toward providing coffee, child areas, etc, however, hasn't been done. I'll point to the fact no bank I know does this as proof.
Hence, unlike your ideas, WaMu came up with an actual original idea and patented.
OK, that makes sense to me.
After about ten years of using Sendmail (I was using Sendmail back when you had to understand rulesets and how to hack LHS/RHS of rules), I switched to Postfix. I am happier than a pig in mud for a whole bunch of reasons and consider Postfix a superior MTA.
... well, BIND. Who cares?
I have at least one acquaintance who, on his very large enterprise, runs Sendmail at the edge (and Exchange internally, but that's not his choice). Why? Because that way, he doesn't need to worry about separate patch management for his MTA -- Sun makes sure his MTA is up to date, and he doesn't have to document "this is how to install the MTA" separately.
Is he using an inferior MTA? I believe so. So does he. But the ways in which Sendmail is less good don't affect him nearly as much as the way in which it is better -- by lowering maintenance costs (or, really, just rolling them into the ridiculous amount he pays Sun -- though he could get the patches for free, of course).
With respects to my fellow sysadmins here -- obviously, some of you are vastly superior to me in all matters technical -- we really should know by now that sometimes, we make technical decisions for reasons that are not purely technical. The reasons people choose Sendmail over Postfix are usually in that sort of category, as well as the reason people choose BIND over other DNS servers (BTW, BIND is also the default DNS server on Solaris).
I don't see this as a huge problem, except for (I guess) people who take it personally that not 'enough' people use the software they developed with great effort (though I don't see Wietse complaining "more people should be using Postfix!"). Unlike the Windows situation, it's not like the fact that, likely, most people I communicate with use Sendmail means I'm forced into using Sendmail. UNIX-based MTAs (Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, exim, other custom MTAs) mostly seem to be fairly standards-compliant, much like DNS servers (go ahead. Point out some obscure thing that 99% of people don't use where BIND doesn't follow the spec, just so I can laugh at you). So BIND and Sendmail dominate? Fine. I'll still run Postfix and
*cough* Dell *cough*
It sounds like when they investigated him the act was not in force yet and they had to actually get a judge to agree to the tap; that makes this not a particularly interesting or scary story -- judges have had the ability to approve taps to compromise our privacy for a long, long time now.
It looks like PROTECT might make this at the discretion of the prosecutor which is, obviously a Very Bad Thing[tm], but it's not all that relevant in this case, it seems.
No, wait, here's what you need to do:
Get a Sun system that supports those wacki SunPC SBUS cards Sun used to make -- you know, with an actual Intel desktop processor on them.
Install Linux. This gives you 'Linux inside Solaris.'
Install VMWare on that Linux.
Install Windows XP through VMWare. You now have XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.
*NOW* use Pear and install MacOS X, giving you OSX Inside XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.
Way 1337er.
I'd be shocked.
Google's business model[s] seem[s] to be based on the concept of charging vendors, rather than users. Is there a single google service that costs money for the average consumer to use? I don't pay to search, to blog, or to get my mail (gmail). I'd be surprised if their first foray into charging customers, if it ever happened, was in the field of online music (especially since I suspect they might have a hard time doing online music and abiding by the whole "don't be evil" thing -- they can't exactly do it without DRM).
I just tried this, by the way. I got no ads, much like the other beta tester. In fact, the only amusing ad placement I've found was when trying to see what hugs, kisses, and french kisses would result in. So I wrote myself a letter full of 'xoxoxo', 'hugs,' 'kisses', and 'french kiss.'
Unfortunately, I did this from work, which is a financial institution where they insert a huge (~15 lines) disclaimer to all outbound emails about not sending sensitive/urgent information, trades, etc.
Result? Gmail ignored my sexual content and gave me ads for financial services firms.
Doh.
Double negatives do not sometimes fail to not make your point clearer.
For example, in this comment you seem to suggest that you believe RH/FEdora is alone in shipping with a heavily patched and customized kernel.
That crack you're on is really, really good. Where can I get one?
... well, less intuitive than Windows. We'll leave it at that.
I've been managing UNIX systems for about fourteen years now, with a focus on Solaris. I've installed my share of W95/W98/W2K/WXP systems. I've pretty much always had an install that ended up being what I expected it to be. I have read *no* documentation on how to install Windows. Ever. I'm pretty sure that I've never even watched someone install Windows.
I've installed Linux a few times. I had to tell it what serial mouse I was using and what video card I was using. I had to figure out how to apportion swap. Mind you, figuring out what swap was was easy for me coming from the UNIX world, but for the average person? And the tool to repartition the filesystem was
Look, Windows is the scourge of humanity, there's no disagreement there. But claiming it's as easy to install Linux as it is to install Windows? That way lies insanity.
You're wrong on two counts, one minor and one major.
:( ). It's sweet.
.exe/.bat/.pif etc), which Gmail should theoretically be able to deal with for me. Either way, at that volume it would take me 198,059 messages at that volume to get to 1gb and at my rate that's approximately 58 weeks. A little more than a year.
First, the minor one: They don't block attachments.
Now, the major one:
Gmail has a *LOT* going for it other than simply publicity. I'd like to believe I'm in the top 20% of hard-core CLI mail users -- I've been using UNIX CLI tools to read my mail for about fourteen years now, starting with Mail, then MH, mail, pine, and now mutt (I've backslid, I know -- MH is by far the most powerful of these). I hate webmail systems (I've got a Yahoo account and I implemented SquirrelMail at home, in addition to playing with OWA). They feel too restrictive.
And you know what? GMail doesn't completely solve this problem. It's still not as fast and efficient as using just the keyboard. But aside from the limitations imposed by the media, it's pretty fucking sweet. Seriously, it just rocks. I haven't found any way in which it significantly sucks and some pretty significant ways in which it really rocks. Including:
1. The label system is really, really cool. Remember the whole 'categorize, don't delete' concept they're advocating? That's done by applying labels to a message and making it very, very easy to find all messages with a given label. You control the number and naming of labels, of course. This of course means you can label a message with more than one label. They still can't search for "has label X and label Y," but I've made that a feature request.
2. There's some limited keyboard interactivity capability (c for compose, j for older, k for newer, etc)
3. It's fast. Faster than Yahoo in switching between views.
4. Ad presentation is unobtrusive. I also like the fact that it *first* displays your mail and then, once it figured out what the ads are going to be, it displays them. So there's no delay while they pay the bills.
5. The ability to add filters with actions is nice (though for disclosure's sake, I'd note it's hardly procmail-strength. They only support three headers right now, and they don't do regexps; I've submitted a feature request for that, so we'll see).
6. Log in, and it puts you in http mode; change the URL to https: and log out. Next time you log in, you'll go straight to https mode. Sweet!. Disclosure: Exists across sessions but only for lifetime of browser. Feature request submitted.
7. The spel cheker is nice and streemlined, and the interface to it is very easy and intuitive. Not an isue for me, becoz I dont knead one, but it's worth nothing.
Overall, of all the webmail systems I've used, this one really, really rocks. It probably rocks as hard as any pure webmail system can. It helps that it's offered by a company with, so far, an impeccably ethical track record. Will I migrate away from having my own UNIX machine doing my own mail serving? Hell no -- I *like* having access to a mail spool, running procmail and CRM114, and offering lists via Mailman. But I'll definitely keep my gmail account (and not only because being an early signer means I got to have my second-most-preferred email address -- my first, the address I've maintained across countless systems in the last decade and a half, was too short for them
Oh, one more thing: Since I started keeping track (2003-02-14, for some strange reason), my mail volume has averaged 3386 messages a week and an average message size of 5049 bytes. That includes a huge amount of spam (my MTA only filters out
If I was working for Google, or had any serious hope of working for google, I'd disclose them here. But I don't.
Hey, I resent that! I did that as a joke, not a troll.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Free Software guru Richard Stallman was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to F/OSS. Truly an American icon.
for line in file("/var/log/messages"):
CEOs get massively compensated if their company's fortune rises because they are considered responsible for that fortune through their hiring decisions.
It makes perfect sense to hold them responsible for the decisions of their underlings if their hiring decisions prove unfortuitous. You'd have a hard time convincing me to feel bad for them if they hired some schmuck to do their internal security and then didn't bother to audit that person independently -- we expect them to do it with the accountants, so why not with the IT folks?
Not to get sidetracked, but actually -- not a lot of spam comes from aol.com. Check out the headers. aol.com has lately been a damn good corporate citizen on this front.
Oh, and discounting asymmetric routing tricks, good luck establishing an outbound port 25 connection from inside the aol.com network.
-roy
What definition of 'absolutely necessary' are we using here?
:) ).
Quick anecdote: I used to work for a large company that made web authoring tools. At some point we had to ask ourselves whether we still wanted NFR versions of our rather expensive software available to every employee on the intranet. Was it absolutely necessary for the receptionist to install an HTML editing environment? Creating HTML was not part of his job.
Our decision was that if our receptionist takes an interest in our own products and wants to play with them, that's a Good Thing[tm Martha Stewart] and should be encouraged. It'll make him more interested in the company and a more committed employee; we might find out that he's actually a decent designer and can contribute more to the company in our web design group. Did the NFR products get 'pilfered' every once in a while? Sure. But I'll bet you that 95%+ of the pilfering that was going on with them was to people who wouldn't have purchased them anyway -- but now were using them, and talking about them (mostly positively, we hoped
I work now for a company that doesn't allow general internet access for 90%+ of its employees. I think disallowing general internet access is symptomatic of a certain sort of relationship the company wishes to maintain with its employees and is indicative of how it thinks of them -- and it's not indicative of a particularly high level of trust in, or care for, the employees.
Left to my own devices, I'd rather put in a robust anti-virus and anti-malicious-code system coupled with employee education and discipline for people who break the minimal rules and then let the employees loose. Will some of them surf during work hours and damage their productivity? Indubitably. I still think that the overall benefit in employee morale and easy access to information is going to be worth the occasional loss from someone who can't control his surfing.
darnok's already covered most of the salient points as to why Python's the shits. I was in something of your shoes -- doing IT work with a big chunk of development for the last fourteen years. I got into Perl back in the 4.x days and loved it; started doing PHP about three years ago and discovered Python a year ago (I might be out of P* languages by now). It's not tremendously fair to compare Python to PHP -- PHP doesn't have much of an existence outside the context of a web server (yes, I know you've got the CLI, but you're still essentially writing HTML pages with PHP embedded into them). That said:
:) ).
At least last time I had to do PHP, I had a bitch of a time trying to get it to act as an HTTP _client_. I ended up having to open straight socket connections and hand-crufting[sic] my HTTP calls. Ugh;
Object orientation is bolted onto PHP; it's built into Python.
[Yes, I know this is one of those religious issues] mandating whitespaces makes Python code much more readable (until someone edits your code and uses a tab instead of four spaces
It's the easiest, most intuitive language I've ever used (this includes Perl, LISP, TCL, and PHP, among others). Most times, if I think "well, I'll just put this code in and see if it does what I want it to do," that's what happens -- it makes it much easier to prototype.
Zope, built on Python, is also quite nice. Reasons for it include the fact it mandates the separation between presentation, business, and database logic (well, you could work around that, but they make it easy to do it The Right Way), and (again) the rapid prototyping of web applications.
I should note, by the way, that Zope is one of those F/OSS projects that's phenomenally coded and absolutely horrendously, horrifically badly documented. Oh well.
Oh, and 'Zope Security' is something of an oxymoron. I don't like the in-band management of it (if you've got a Zope server running on http://host:8001, then you manage it by going to http://host:8001/manage. This is one of the reasons you want to front it with Apache and do ProxyDeny for a whole bunch of special URLs)
OK, how many people here were expecting someone, you know, kinda hot?
SHE'S FOUR YEARS OLD! HAVE YOU NO DECENCY ?!
-roy
Wait, Nanking as in China? As in where the Japanese engaged in slavery, torture, and human experiments?
No, that part sucks. But I don't have too much of a problem with those kids volunteering to fly their planes into carriers. I don't think any of them was forced into it, was he?
There is, technically speaking, no moral or ethical reason why human bombs (AKA suicide bombers) are a Bad Thing[tm]. Remember, we saw an instance of this in WWII with the Japanese Kamikaze.
It is usually going to be easier to breach defenses one-way than to go in, hit the enemy, and leave. Arriving with the intent of blowing up frees you to focus on the task rather than be distracted by 'misguided' attempts to survive the execution of it.
Where it gets less great is when you do one of two things:
1. Not clearly identify yourself as a hostile target, causing the other side to naturally suspect EVEYRONE on your side and probably qualifying you as an unlawful combatant (the Law of Armed Conflict requires distinctive markings); or (much more seriously)
2. Target civilians, which is when you become not just a weapon, but a terrorist weapon.
There's no fundamental difference between a Palestinian wearing a uniform and a bomb blowing themselves up with a bunch of soldiers and, say, a US soldier storming a Japanese pillbox with a grenade knowing he's going to die. The issue is whether or not he's clearly marked and, more importantly, whether he's attacking soldiers on duty or civilians.