> So please tell me how I send user friendly emails to my Mom with clickable references
Well any modern email client will be able to convert an undecorated URL into a clickable one.
> embedded pictures
You wont.
> and formatted for easy reading to accomodate aging eyes.
That should be a receiver option, not a sender option. i.e. your mother should have whatever accessibility features she needs in her email client. Those could include the default font being very large. The sender should not have to know about her (or anyone elses) preferences. HTML is evil because it allows the sender to set the display options.
I travel regularly on a large American airline. I sometimes get upgraded to First because I travel so much.
In first class they give me a plastic knife and fork. And then they hand me two _glass_ wine glasses. I've never tried smashing one, but I assume that they are not specially hardened and therefore would be breakable and usable as a weapon.
The person asking the question states that their desktop is sucking down 250W for PC plus monitor. My laptop (Fujitsu C2220 running Linux 2.4Ghz P4 and 512Mb) has a power supply rated at 100W and draws around 90W. Previously I've had Dell laptops that draw 60W. If you go get an Apple iBook instead then they draw only 45W.
Laptops make perfectly good computers, except as very high-end workstations/gaming machines. I have not owned a desktop machine for at least the last ten years. The small amount you are behind in terms of graphics processor or CPU is more than made up for by the ability to take the thing with you.
John.
No need to get a used copy, get the 3rd edition
on
Systemantics
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> We're saying the "Safety Experts" were stupid. They should have taken precautions in both the physical and electronic realms.
So to fix the problem that the "researchers" exposed you need a participant to submit _prior_ to the conference some token that only they would know or have. So they could have demanded a photo, fingerprint, eye scan, urine sample before hand. Then they could have demanded the same when getting your badge.
But you have to ask whether that would be an appropriate level of security for this event, and that comes down to assessing the level of threat.
Rather than being "stupid" I suspect that the security people didn't believe that such a high level of identification was necessary. They seemed to have used the same level that any US airport would use: show me a government issued ID and I'll accept it as genuine.
Huh? If you RTFA you'll find that what they did was use a fake ID with the name of a real participant to obtain a badge. Nothing very clever about that.
Basically the "researchers" represented themselves as being someone else and used a fake (potentially) illegal piece of identification. Doesn't seem clever, just seems fraudulent.
They then go on to speculate about how "data mining" and RFID might be used for all sorts of nasty tricks and end up sounding like a bunch of paranoid crack-pots.
So, if I buy a fake passport on a street corner and then use it enter Germany, did I just "crack" Germany's security and can I get my picture on Slashdot?
This story seems to have little merit. All it tells you is that MIT outsourced the development of some software to Sapient who did the work in India, and that they used Gartner as a source of information when choosing the software platform.
Doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary here: major organization X outsources some menial task to US company Y that does it cheaply in country Z. Along the way Y relies on Gartner for information: that's what Gartner's there for! (Of course, it would be nice if they'd done some evaluation of the software, but hey).
Of course the story does have merit if "India" eq "Bad", and if that's the racist slant the Slashdot is pushing on its front page then the editors should reconsider.
The article never says, for example, the work was done in India:
1. And was overbudget 2. And was badly written 3. And was delivered late
No criticism, just the fact that it was done India. WTF, Slashdot? This is news?
1. Hayes: Dennis Hayes stays with company, guy who did the technical work, Dale Heatherington, leaves 2. Microsoft: Bill Gates stays with company, guy who did the techincal work, Paul Allen, leaves 3. Apple: Steve Jobs stays with the company, guy who did the techincal work, Steve Wozniak, leaves
So seems like techies have all the fun: start a company, keep a low profile, get rich, and then quit. That way the techie gets to spend the rest of their lives with enough money to just hack!
Sweet.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
The book contains a short piece by Bill Gates (here: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/soft.php) and reproduced below. It's an interesting read because I still hear him talk about similar themes even today.
------------------
Today's software is too hard. Usually designed to work well for any and all potential buyers, a few years and hundreds of hours of interaction later a software package will still interface with you exactly as it did at the time of purchase. Your special use may make some uncommon program command the one most often employed, but you'll have to punch any number of extra keys every time you invoke it. Today's software fails to remold itself to express a history of use, and this can lead to incredible inefficiency.
There are programs that allow the advanced user to adjust default values, which are those responses the programmer decided would be most typical for users of a specific application when the software was first booted up. There are also programs that can store a series of often invoked keystrokes and can tell the machine to take the sequence you've named and perform it again. These keyboard macros, the most trivial form of softer software, force you to go through a special set of operations to enter and record changes to the program.
Why shouldn't software automatically adapt to your needs, e.g., learn from experience to change the interpretation of a command, when this is done on a human level all the time? In-human-to-human communication, we adapt our terminology and our method of understanding to our previous history of interaction with each individual. There's no reason computer software should not be as flexible.
"Softer software" is the term I invented to avoid using the poorly understood term "artificial intelligence." In fact, it is a form of artificial intelligence, though not like speech recognition or the expert data base systems that are based on specific algorithms and do not really learn dynamically. Softer software is capable of getting better and better because it has advanced pattern recognition capabilities and can change its performance accordingly.
In general, making software softer requires storing information about a user's history of program commands and analyzing its patterns. This is a form of learning, since the software can build expectations of what the user may do later. Individual characteristics of users, what they're good at and what they're not good at, can be used to establish a reasonably unique dialogue with the computer.
A data management program, for example, could recognize that you always query its files by employee name rather than by an individual's address or hair color. Taking advantage of this pattern and predicting what will be your most common operations on data, the program could customize its query file structure to put information within easier reach. Or maybe it could learn to be forgiving of your most common keyboard mistakes by ignoring misspellings.
Software softness becomes very difficult when recognizing semantics rather than specific operations is required. Say you go into a document, move the mouse to bring the cursor to a certain position and make a word boldface, then go to another position and do it again. Instead of storing up the exact positions where this takes place and trying to match them to later entries pixel by pixel, you may want your software to draw the general conclusion that you boldface the first word in a paragraph and to position the cursor appropriately. Matching things, recording and playing them back at the semantic level: this is the hard part of softening software.
It is possible to say that we have certain types of softness built into software today and that over time we will see a clear progression as programs record a greater number of user events, recognizing more general patterns and building up the dialogue throughout the computer's history. Truly softer software is still some years away, but we are on an evolutionary path where at som
Seems to me that the act is pretty pro-business all around. It's pro-business in the spammer sense since it lets marketers send unsolicited mail and it's pro-business in the anti-spammer sense since the existence of spam will keep anti-spammers in business!
What more would you expect from a capitalist country?
> You think you know how to parse a domain name for validity?
Yes, I do, and if you _read_ the RFC you'll see that nothing changes, these domain names are encoded into the same character set as the current DNS system. And hence if you give me a URL I can validate it with existing scripts. There's an example which shows that Bucher.ch (with an umlaut on the u) would be translated to: xn--bcher-kva.ch which looks totally parseable to me.
"We compare a collection of recent operating systems: Windows XP Professional, Mac OS X Panther, Debian GNU/Linux 0.91".
Seriously, InfoWorld, SpamAssassin 2.44 was released in February, all the other vendors you compared were constantly updating their products to cope with the ever changing nature of spam.
> Fence off the innocuous Linux deployments (such > as network-edge solutions) from the > performance-intensive ones. Where feasible, delay > deployment of high-performance systems until the > end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.
and
> If high-performance Linux systems are in > production, develop plans that would enable a > quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable > judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be >substantially changed. Unix systems are the best alternatives.
Which I read as "do your best to not use Linux for the time-being, and if you are be prepared to switch".
Congratulations, Slashdot editors, this is a dupe.
And I'm a subscriber.
And I emailed you before it was posted saying it was a dupe of this story: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/10/161920 6&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126. Anybody there?
And you don't have the guts to fling your insult without hiding behind "Anonymous Coward". Either insult me to my face, or provide a constructive criticism of what I said.
What happened was the people using the machine were sucking up the DSL bandwidth. First the user sees is "my Internet connection is slow". So who do they call...
I agree that once a machine is trojaned it's possible that it makes an outbound connection to the Internet the inbound blocking does nothing.
But that does not deny the fact that default inbound blocking would prevent worms like CodeRed from spreading, and other "buffer overflow" style attacks initiated from across the Internet (e.g. recent Windows DCOM) problems would be eliminated. All this for the price being paid that ISPs would have to administer these blocks.
Frankly this functionality should be in the DSL/cable modem and administered by the non-Internet side user through a web interface. That's how it works on my home router and it's very easy to open a hole for say SSH if I need it.
Blocking the ports would mean that trojans would have to arrive via some other method (e.g. file transfers and email) which are easily caught using current anti-virus technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
> So please tell me how I send user friendly emails to my Mom with clickable references
Well any modern email client will be able to convert an undecorated URL into a clickable one.
> embedded pictures
You wont.
> and formatted for easy reading to accomodate aging eyes.
That should be a receiver option, not a sender option. i.e. your mother should have whatever accessibility features she needs in her email client. Those could include the default font being very large. The sender should not have to know about her (or anyone elses) preferences. HTML is evil because it allows the sender to set the display options.
John.
Yes, yes, yes.
HTML email is an abomination that must be stopped. It's bigger than necessary, it's ugly and it's the spammer's friend.
John.
I travel regularly on a large American airline. I sometimes get upgraded to First because I travel so much.
In first class they give me a plastic knife and fork. And then they hand me two _glass_ wine glasses. I've never tried smashing one, but I assume that they are not specially hardened and therefore would be breakable and usable as a weapon.
This seems like a bad idea.
John.
The person asking the question states that their desktop is sucking down 250W for PC plus monitor. My laptop (Fujitsu C2220 running Linux 2.4Ghz P4 and 512Mb) has a power supply rated at 100W and draws around 90W. Previously I've had Dell laptops that draw 60W. If you go get an Apple iBook instead then they draw only 45W.
Laptops make perfectly good computers, except as very high-end workstations/gaming machines. I have not owned a desktop machine for at least the last ten years. The small amount you are behind in terms of graphics processor or CPU is more than made up for by the ability to take the thing with you.
John.
It's only $27.95 from here.
John.
> We're saying the "Safety Experts" were stupid. They should have taken precautions in both the physical and electronic realms.
So to fix the problem that the "researchers" exposed you need a participant to submit _prior_ to the conference some token that only they would know or have. So they could have demanded a photo, fingerprint, eye scan, urine sample before hand. Then they could have demanded the same when getting your badge.
But you have to ask whether that would be an appropriate level of security for this event, and that comes down to assessing the level of threat.
Rather than being "stupid" I suspect that the security people didn't believe that such a high level of identification was necessary. They seemed to have used the same level that any US airport would use: show me a government issued ID and I'll accept it as genuine.
John.
Huh? If you RTFA you'll find that what they did was use a fake ID with the name of a real participant to obtain a badge. Nothing very clever about that.
Basically the "researchers" represented themselves as being someone else and used a fake (potentially) illegal piece of identification. Doesn't seem clever, just seems fraudulent.
They then go on to speculate about how "data mining" and RFID might be used for all sorts of nasty tricks and end up sounding like a bunch of paranoid crack-pots.
So, if I buy a fake passport on a street corner and then use it enter Germany, did I just "crack" Germany's security and can I get my picture on Slashdot?
John.
The last time (October) this was asked: here
Weird how both people asked about "Digital 35mm".
John.
During the late 1990s I incorrectly assumed I would be a .com multimillionaire by now and am stuck with monthly payments on a Gulfstream V :-)
John.
This story seems to have little merit. All it tells you is that MIT outsourced the development of some software to Sapient who did the work in India, and that they used Gartner as a source of information when choosing the software platform.
Doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary here: major organization X outsources some menial task to US company Y that does it cheaply in country Z. Along the way Y relies on Gartner for information: that's what Gartner's there for! (Of course, it would be nice if they'd done some evaluation of the software, but hey).
Of course the story does have merit if "India" eq "Bad", and if that's the racist slant the Slashdot is pushing on its front page then the editors should reconsider.
The article never says, for example, the work was done in India:
1. And was overbudget
2. And was badly written
3. And was delivered late
No criticism, just the fact that it was done India. WTF, Slashdot? This is news?
John.
Just look at:
1. Hayes: Dennis Hayes stays with company, guy who did the technical work, Dale Heatherington, leaves
2. Microsoft: Bill Gates stays with company, guy who did the techincal work, Paul Allen, leaves
3. Apple: Steve Jobs stays with the company, guy who did the techincal work, Steve Wozniak, leaves
So seems like techies have all the fun: start a company, keep a low profile, get rich, and then quit. That way the techie gets to spend the rest of their lives with enough money to just hack!
Sweet.
The story was meant to be a sad reflection on Hayes-the-man, ended up making me feel good about being a geek.
John.
Here
John.
The book contains a short piece by Bill Gates (here: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/soft.php) and reproduced below. It's an interesting read because I still hear him talk about similar themes even today.
------------------
Today's software is too hard. Usually designed to work well for any and all potential buyers, a few years and hundreds of hours of interaction later a software package will still interface with you exactly as it did at the time of purchase. Your special use may make some uncommon program command the one most often employed, but you'll have to punch any number of extra keys every time you invoke it. Today's software fails to remold itself to express a history of use, and this can lead to incredible inefficiency.
There are programs that allow the advanced user to adjust default values, which are those responses the programmer decided would be most typical for users of a specific application when the software was first booted up. There are also programs that can store a series of often invoked keystrokes and can tell the machine to take the sequence you've named and perform it again. These keyboard macros, the most trivial form of softer software, force you to go through a special set of operations to enter and record changes to the program.
Why shouldn't software automatically adapt to your needs, e.g., learn from experience to change the interpretation of a command, when this is done on a human level all the time? In-human-to-human communication, we adapt our terminology and our method of understanding to our previous history of interaction with each individual. There's no reason computer software should not be as flexible.
"Softer software" is the term I invented to avoid using the poorly understood term "artificial intelligence." In fact, it is a form of artificial intelligence, though not like speech recognition or the expert data base systems that are based on specific algorithms and do not really learn dynamically. Softer software is capable of getting better and better because it has advanced pattern recognition capabilities and can change its performance accordingly.
In general, making software softer requires storing information about a user's history of program commands and analyzing its patterns. This is a form of learning, since the software can build expectations of what the user may do later. Individual characteristics of users, what they're good at and what they're not good at, can be used to establish a reasonably unique dialogue with the computer.
A data management program, for example, could recognize that you always query its files by employee name rather than by an individual's address or hair color. Taking advantage of this pattern and predicting what will be your most common operations on data, the program could customize its query file structure to put information within easier reach. Or maybe it could learn to be forgiving of your most common keyboard mistakes by ignoring misspellings.
Software softness becomes very difficult when recognizing semantics rather than specific operations is required. Say you go into a document, move the mouse to bring the cursor to a certain position and make a word boldface, then go to another position and do it again. Instead of storing up the exact positions where this takes place and trying to match them to later entries pixel by pixel, you may want your software to draw the general conclusion that you boldface the first word in a paragraph and to position the cursor appropriately. Matching things, recording and playing them back at the semantic level: this is the hard part of softening software.
It is possible to say that we have certain types of softness built into software today and that over time we will see a clear progression as programs record a greater number of user events, recognizing more general patterns and building up the dialogue throughout the computer's history. Truly softer software is still some years away, but we are on an evolutionary path where at som
Did I say I didn't like it in the USA? No.
Am I a communist? No.
Am I a coward who hides behind an Anonymous Coward name? No.
Seems to me that the act is pretty pro-business all around. It's pro-business in the spammer sense since it lets marketers send unsolicited mail and it's pro-business in the anti-spammer sense since the existence of spam will keep anti-spammers in business!
What more would you expect from a capitalist country?
John.
> You think you know how to parse a domain name for validity?
Yes, I do, and if you _read_ the RFC you'll see that nothing changes, these domain names are encoded into the same character set as the current DNS system. And hence if you give me a URL I can validate it with existing scripts. There's an example which shows that Bucher.ch (with an umlaut on the u) would be translated to: xn--bcher-kva.ch which looks totally parseable to me.
John.
"We compare a collection of recent operating systems: Windows XP Professional, Mac OS X Panther, Debian GNU/Linux 0.91".
Seriously, InfoWorld, SpamAssassin 2.44 was released in February, all the other vendors you compared were constantly updating their products to cope with the ever changing nature of spam.
John.
OSDL PDF/FSF HTML RPT WRT SCO GPL FUD
John.
The rest of this text is because the Slashdot lameness filter thinks that I am shouting which in fact I am now because the lameness filter is lame.
For some strange reason my piles of crap and boxes of who-knows-what got organized real quick soon after.
Added benefit of this organization technique is that it comes with a free "relationship" thrown in. Did I say "free"? Whoops.
John.
The paper also says:
> Fence off the innocuous Linux deployments (such
> as network-edge solutions) from the
> performance-intensive ones. Where feasible, delay
> deployment of high-performance systems until the
> end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.
and
> If high-performance Linux systems are in
> production, develop plans that would enable a
> quick changeover in case SCO wins a favorable
> judgment and requires the Linux kernel code to be
>substantially changed. Unix systems are the best
alternatives.
Which I read as "do your best to not use Linux for the time-being, and if you are be prepared to switch".
John.
Everyone knows that the LGM (lone gunman) was on the grassy knoll, why ask NASA?
Oh wait you mean Little Green Men: that's my sister you insensitive clod.
John.
Congratulations, Slashdot editors, this is a dupe.
0 6&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126. Anybody there?
And I'm a subscriber.
And I emailed you before it was posted saying it was a dupe of this story: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/10/16192
John.
And you don't have the guts to fling your insult without hiding behind "Anonymous Coward". Either insult me to my face, or provide a constructive criticism of what I said.
John.
> Why would your friend complain to his ISP?
What happened was the people using the machine were sucking up the DSL bandwidth. First the user sees is "my Internet connection is slow". So who do they call...
John.
I agree that once a machine is trojaned it's possible that it makes an outbound connection to the Internet the inbound blocking does nothing.
But that does not deny the fact that default inbound blocking would prevent worms like CodeRed from spreading, and other "buffer overflow" style attacks initiated from across the Internet (e.g. recent Windows DCOM) problems would be eliminated. All this for the price being paid that ISPs would have to administer these blocks.
Frankly this functionality should be in the DSL/cable modem and administered by the non-Internet side user through a web interface. That's how it works on my home router and it's very easy to open a hole for say SSH if I need it.
Blocking the ports would mean that trojans would have to arrive via some other method (e.g. file transfers and email) which are easily caught using current anti-virus technologies.
John.