I actually welcome the influx of infected email from my customer through my servers. Sure it increases load on my hardware but it greatly lessens the amount of I1 bandwidth I have to purchase and negative publicity we receive by having infected customers.
I agree - if I know outgoing mail is all virus scanned then it'll help prevent load on somebody else's system, and quite possibly mine in the end! The trouble is that some of my customers (including myself) can't send mail directly to my mail server because the ISP blocks outbound port 25 access unless it is to their servers.
I've started redirecting another port on the server to the local port 25 as another way in for those of us behind restrictive ISPs, but this just complicates matters in the larger picture. We need a better solution than having people trying to change their account SMTP port to whatever a particular hosting company uses.
This is the part that doesn't make sense. Ok, so your home ISP limits outgoing SMTP so you have to connect to their server to send email; that is, mail from your-domain.org is sent from mail1.big-isp.com. Create an SPF record for your-domain.org [which I assume you control] that says mail1.big-isp.com is allowed to send email from you@your-domain.org.
Yep, that's all very well, but there are a few ISPs now that are implementing this outgoing SMTP filtering. The ISP I'm with is one of the largest and most well-known in the UK (Freeserve/Wanadoo) and there was a/. article recently about a large US ISP planning the same. I don't want to spend my life trying to keep the SPF records up to date with all the ISPs that impose this ban.
As I said in my follow-up to ckaminski's post, if more ISPs go this way of blocking outbound SMTP, then it wouldn't surprise me if we saw zombie machines trying to send to their ISP's mail server just to get around SPF if hosted domains included common ISP mail servers.
I just don't see it working for hosting companies where they don't know from which server people will be sending their e-mails.
A VPN isn't a good solution - I run a small website hosting company so my customers are varied in their technical ability, and I don't want anything to do with their PCs.
I agree with you about the company name/domain thing, however I wasn't clear enough in my last post. It is annoying though that I can't implement SPF (it won't do any harm, only a TXT record) because some people are restricted in this way. Unless somebody's made a list of these servers, but the trouble is that through my ISP's mail server, I can use whatever from address I like as long as I'm connecting through their network. So if there was a list of mail servers that people were forced to go through, it wouldn't be hard to spam via these mail servers...
Still I'm in favor of forcing all dynamic-class users to use their provider's SMTP server. There are a few exceptions of course, such as the user that works at a big company that uses SMTP-AUTH/TLS to let employees securely send email from home.
I agree, it's a good solution (until worms start trying to send via common ISP SMTP servers) but the problem is for somebody who uses an authed SMTP connection normally. I looked into setting up SPF on the domains our company hosts, but then I hit upon a problem - some ISPs (for example my home ISP) limit outgoing SMTP to just their server, so in my SPF records, I need to specify every other restricted SMTP server my clients may send mail through.
Chip + pin will work well in shops I'm sure, but what about websites? I've seen a couple Flash demos for Verified by Visa and so on, but it looks tremendously easy to fake especially for your average user. I haven't seen it in person though.
Perhaps this is an area where the likes of third-party merchant services such as 2checkout.com, Paysystems, and iBill can really shine. Ignoring the problems these specific merchant services have had, the model of passing the user to a secure page provided by a "trusted" company to enter credit card details could be a good marketing gimmick.
I agree - WorldPay is a good one in my experience too. I'm planning to use it on a new site as I've used it elsewhere to pay for all sorts of things, including subscription payments.
Funny you should say that. I looked at a PC a few days ago which had a very similar mouse. IIRC it was a Packard Bell (ergh), in a smallish case, possibly mini-ITX. The mouse was wireless but not optical and it had a small red ball sticking up quite high from the level of the buttons (higher and bigger than the IBM pic).
Very useful for scrolling long documents, maybe this sort of thing could be incorporated on the side of the mouse perhaps where some mice have extra buttons? I liked it, but to scroll just a couple of lines, I prefer the wheel which is easier to move about over short distances.
Hierarchical trees are horrible ways to manage data, especially if it's a bunch of data that can be classified multiple ways and you typically won't remember everything you save.
Very much like Opera's mail client M2 uses labels (and GMail also I believe, but Opera was there first). Multiple labels can apply to a single message, and they're used instead of a folder system.
I used to use it, and it's a far far superior way to manage e-mails. If you get a mailing list message arrive, it gets filed under the label for that mailing list (rule based) but when you read it, you could apply another label to find it another way (i.e. To Do).
The only thing that held it back for me and made me move back to a traditional e-mail client was that I used IMAP, and IMAP can't store e-mail in this fashion so when I got back to webmail I had no organisation of my mail whatsoever.
Most users I know have everything in one folder, maybe a couple of nested folders and that's it. Not too hard to find stuff if there's one or two places to look.
That's part of the problem I expect they're trying to address. Many users do exactly what you said - no sort of ordering at all. And they tend to give files some of the most stupid names you can imagine "letter for thingy", "a letter", "my spreadsheet" and so on. If somebody can create a scheme that lets them find their files based on how they think about the content then I expect you're onto a winner.
Look at Google - they help people find pages based on how they relate to them (keywords) and how other people relate to them (pagerank). I doubt this project will have much standing though - this sort of thing really needs to be built into the file system upwards IMO - it's an entirely different way of thinking about storage, not just a quick hack.
If you know you're under attack by zombie hordes that are going to repeatedly ask for a file, why not give it to them s--l--o--w--l--y?
I dare say if you're being DDoSed, you're doing that already. Hasn't your time on/. shown you that?
Re:unified desktop
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's my take on it:
I use Linux on my systems (with Gnome as a DE) and I know what you mean some times. Part of the problem is that people write programs for different purposes - e.g. some people will write a program using Qt and the KDE libraries causing the programs to look one way, while somebody else will use Gtk or another toolkit.
It obviously isn't just down to the toolkit, but also depending on who the application is targetted at, most developers (generalising I know) don't have the time (or don't want to, or don't have lots of experience) to make their application pixel perfect.
Gnome has some usability guidelines and I think anybody would testify to the fact that Gnome itself and applications based around the HIGs have a very consistent feel. Likewise KDE has some HIGs (currently redrafting I think) but it doesn't have anywhere near the emphasis on the programs in the KDE collection IMO.
As well as defining the HIGs, part of the problem is to educate interface programmers and try to ask them to follow the guidelines - and more importantly, for people who have experience in usability (and that includes all users) to comment, suggest changes etc.
An interesting example was on the KDE Usability mailing list the other day - Celeste Paul posted a usability report on KHangman. The coder behind it appeared shortly after and immediately began following the conclusions of the report. I'm sure almost every programmer will be happy to accept constructive criticism for their work.
If you think a menu item or something isn't right, file a bug report against it - and try to include a suggestion (even if it isn't a complete solution) for how it could be improved. It only takes a few minutes.
</rant>
It needs an "update software" program which shows a list of programs (not libraries), and installs necessary updates. Then it needs a "new software browser" which can browse and search the library of available programs (not libraries) and can install them. This would be it.
There's a decent GTK2 based package manager for Debian - Synaptic. It can handle upgrades and everything that you need for the apt system.
I think for a newbie, the sheer number of packages would make it hard to find a package that they want, but have no idea of its name however this isn't the fault of Synaptic - purely that there is so much choice:)
Although for that, Googling packages.debian.org is very useful, and synaptic can search package descriptions etc also.
I'd like it if there could be a database where if a subject header is reported as spam by one user it effects other users' scoring.
There are a few databases out there that take hashes of spam e-mails (either sent to spam traps or reported) and use them for spam tagging. SpamAssassin can use their client programs to help tag messages also - I don't know if there's an extension or anything for Thunderbird, I don't use it.
The three that come to mind are DCC, Razor and Pyzor.
All have their advantages or disadvantages, but you have to remember that you're relying on somebody else's judgement. I think it's DCC that you can easily configure to say that you need x reports of the message before you class the message as spam, which gives you more control. But you only need one person who doesn't use it correctly to ruin the system and introduce lots of false positives.
You could always set up SpamAssassin on your local machine and proxy messages through that.
Yep - the default useragent for Opera is the MSIE one, which is a rather unfortunate position for Opera to take IMO. A position where it seems that they have to pretend to be IE just because there are some naive webmasters out there.
Opera can spoof a few Mozilla useragents or have a true Opera tag - this is a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+I/O from memory) and within a couple clicks in the menu.
The closest I've found is SPEC CPU2000 results (warning, large page). Loads of various systems, put against a common benchmark, CPU2000. Should be details on the website about how it tests them.
There are a few links at this link to various CPU2000 results for specific tests - integer tests, floating point tests and throughput.
portage is a start, an easy to use graphical portage would be even more of a start.
I believe there's a graphical front end to Portage, was reading about it recently. Also for Debian's packaging, Synaptic is a very good GUI to the system.
Well, why don't the just market it as "with speakers and tuner add $330 dollars".
Panasonic did before this year. They used to sell everything as separates - you'd get the set, external speakers, external tuner etc. However the boxes were thin but fairly big and people basically didn't like them. And the cost was far more than $330...
I've forgotten the specifics now, but you also required some special custom cable to connect up the tuner to the television which retailed at a stupid price (ISTR one customer needing a 15m cable for his new system - the retail was about £160 (~$300)).
It really depends on the situation - the new Panasonic plasmas will appeal to more people now they've got rid of another box cluttering up the shelves around the TV. Now they have (at least in the UK), terrestrial analogue and digital receivers built in.
From what I remember, the new models with all the built in kit weighed in cheaper than the old ones - although they did get you a bit by the fact you'd need a wall bracket or a stand (the stands were £400, £500, £600 for 39", 42" and 50" respectively IIRC). But that sort of thing is considered normal...
Slashdot Mirror
I actually welcome the influx of infected email from my customer through my servers. Sure it increases load on my hardware but it greatly lessens the amount of I1 bandwidth I have to purchase and negative publicity we receive by having infected customers.
I agree - if I know outgoing mail is all virus scanned then it'll help prevent load on somebody else's system, and quite possibly mine in the end! The trouble is that some of my customers (including myself) can't send mail directly to my mail server because the ISP blocks outbound port 25 access unless it is to their servers.
I've started redirecting another port on the server to the local port 25 as another way in for those of us behind restrictive ISPs, but this just complicates matters in the larger picture. We need a better solution than having people trying to change their account SMTP port to whatever a particular hosting company uses.
This is the part that doesn't make sense. Ok, so your home ISP limits outgoing SMTP so you have to connect to their server to send email; that is, mail from your-domain.org is sent from mail1.big-isp.com. Create an SPF record for your-domain.org [which I assume you control] that says mail1.big-isp.com is allowed to send email from you@your-domain.org.
/. article recently about a large US ISP planning the same. I don't want to spend my life trying to keep the SPF records up to date with all the ISPs that impose this ban.
Yep, that's all very well, but there are a few ISPs now that are implementing this outgoing SMTP filtering. The ISP I'm with is one of the largest and most well-known in the UK (Freeserve/Wanadoo) and there was a
As I said in my follow-up to ckaminski's post, if more ISPs go this way of blocking outbound SMTP, then it wouldn't surprise me if we saw zombie machines trying to send to their ISP's mail server just to get around SPF if hosted domains included common ISP mail servers.
I just don't see it working for hosting companies where they don't know from which server people will be sending their e-mails.
A VPN isn't a good solution - I run a small website hosting company so my customers are varied in their technical ability, and I don't want anything to do with their PCs.
I agree with you about the company name/domain thing, however I wasn't clear enough in my last post. It is annoying though that I can't implement SPF (it won't do any harm, only a TXT record) because some people are restricted in this way. Unless somebody's made a list of these servers, but the trouble is that through my ISP's mail server, I can use whatever from address I like as long as I'm connecting through their network. So if there was a list of mail servers that people were forced to go through, it wouldn't be hard to spam via these mail servers...
No win situation with SPF.
Still I'm in favor of forcing all dynamic-class users to use their provider's SMTP server. There are a few exceptions of course, such as the user that works at a big company that uses SMTP-AUTH/TLS to let employees securely send email from home.
I agree, it's a good solution (until worms start trying to send via common ISP SMTP servers) but the problem is for somebody who uses an authed SMTP connection normally. I looked into setting up SPF on the domains our company hosts, but then I hit upon a problem - some ISPs (for example my home ISP) limit outgoing SMTP to just their server, so in my SPF records, I need to specify every other restricted SMTP server my clients may send mail through.
Stuff that.
Anybody have a better solution?
Chip + pin will work well in shops I'm sure, but what about websites? I've seen a couple Flash demos for Verified by Visa and so on, but it looks tremendously easy to fake especially for your average user. I haven't seen it in person though.
Perhaps this is an area where the likes of third-party merchant services such as 2checkout.com, Paysystems, and iBill can really shine. Ignoring the problems these specific merchant services have had, the model of passing the user to a secure page provided by a "trusted" company to enter credit card details could be a good marketing gimmick.
I agree - WorldPay is a good one in my experience too. I'm planning to use it on a new site as I've used it elsewhere to pay for all sorts of things, including subscription payments.
Funny you should say that. I looked at a PC a few days ago which had a very similar mouse. IIRC it was a Packard Bell (ergh), in a smallish case, possibly mini-ITX. The mouse was wireless but not optical and it had a small red ball sticking up quite high from the level of the buttons (higher and bigger than the IBM pic).
Very useful for scrolling long documents, maybe this sort of thing could be incorporated on the side of the mouse perhaps where some mice have extra buttons? I liked it, but to scroll just a couple of lines, I prefer the wheel which is easier to move about over short distances.
Could be worse, though... they could be making networking hardware again...
I've seen some MS branded Wifi equipment around... wouldn't go near it with a barge pole though.
Hi, can you give some more examples of what Gmail does/doesn't do, and what other better options would be?
Disclaimer: I don't have a GMail account, but I briefly tried somebody else's account.
How about GPG signed/encrypted e-mails?
Hierarchical trees are horrible ways to manage data, especially if it's a bunch of data that can be classified multiple ways and you typically won't remember everything you save.
Very much like Opera's mail client M2 uses labels (and GMail also I believe, but Opera was there first). Multiple labels can apply to a single message, and they're used instead of a folder system.
I used to use it, and it's a far far superior way to manage e-mails. If you get a mailing list message arrive, it gets filed under the label for that mailing list (rule based) but when you read it, you could apply another label to find it another way (i.e. To Do).
The only thing that held it back for me and made me move back to a traditional e-mail client was that I used IMAP, and IMAP can't store e-mail in this fashion so when I got back to webmail I had no organisation of my mail whatsoever.
Most users I know have everything in one folder, maybe a couple of nested folders and that's it. Not too hard to find stuff if there's one or two places to look.
That's part of the problem I expect they're trying to address. Many users do exactly what you said - no sort of ordering at all. And they tend to give files some of the most stupid names you can imagine "letter for thingy", "a letter", "my spreadsheet" and so on. If somebody can create a scheme that lets them find their files based on how they think about the content then I expect you're onto a winner.
Look at Google - they help people find pages based on how they relate to them (keywords) and how other people relate to them (pagerank). I doubt this project will have much standing though - this sort of thing really needs to be built into the file system upwards IMO - it's an entirely different way of thinking about storage, not just a quick hack.
Yep - this has been discussed a bit on the KDE Usability mailing list in the last few days mainly in relation to KControl.
g
An early proposal screenshot was posted: http://www.avenheim.online.fr/kcontrol3/search.pn
I believe they'll be making it list things by relevancy, and linking directly to the part of the module that has the relevant setting etc.
If you know you're under attack by zombie hordes that are going to repeatedly ask for a file, why not give it to them s--l--o--w--l--y?
/. shown you that?
I dare say if you're being DDoSed, you're doing that already. Hasn't your time on
Here's my take on it:
I use Linux on my systems (with Gnome as a DE) and I know what you mean some times. Part of the problem is that people write programs for different purposes - e.g. some people will write a program using Qt and the KDE libraries causing the programs to look one way, while somebody else will use Gtk or another toolkit.
It obviously isn't just down to the toolkit, but also depending on who the application is targetted at, most developers (generalising I know) don't have the time (or don't want to, or don't have lots of experience) to make their application pixel perfect.
Gnome has some usability guidelines and I think anybody would testify to the fact that Gnome itself and applications based around the HIGs have a very consistent feel. Likewise KDE has some HIGs (currently redrafting I think) but it doesn't have anywhere near the emphasis on the programs in the KDE collection IMO.
As well as defining the HIGs, part of the problem is to educate interface programmers and try to ask them to follow the guidelines - and more importantly, for people who have experience in usability (and that includes all users) to comment, suggest changes etc.
An interesting example was on the KDE Usability mailing list the other day - Celeste Paul posted a usability report on KHangman. The coder behind it appeared shortly after and immediately began following the conclusions of the report. I'm sure almost every programmer will be happy to accept constructive criticism for their work.
If you think a menu item or something isn't right, file a bug report against it - and try to include a suggestion (even if it isn't a complete solution) for how it could be improved. It only takes a few minutes. </rant>
Sell "execution privs" on a ebay to the highest bidder.
Just had an e-mail arrive that might help you out - would you like me to forward it on?
Subject: Are you Selling on eBay yet? Free Siminar will Show you how!
This is news?
This is Slashdot...
and because it's available by default on every WinXP PC
Reminds me of the lawsuits surrounding the bundling of IE with Windows...
It's the same here in the UK I find - everybody I come across uses MSN, but all my American contacts use AIM or sometimes MSN.
It needs an "update software" program which shows a list of programs (not libraries), and installs necessary updates. Then it needs a "new software browser" which can browse and search the library of available programs (not libraries) and can install them. This would be it.
:)
There's a decent GTK2 based package manager for Debian - Synaptic. It can handle upgrades and everything that you need for the apt system.
I think for a newbie, the sheer number of packages would make it hard to find a package that they want, but have no idea of its name however this isn't the fault of Synaptic - purely that there is so much choice
Although for that, Googling packages.debian.org is very useful, and synaptic can search package descriptions etc also.
I'd like it if there could be a database where if a subject header is reported as spam by one user it effects other users' scoring.
There are a few databases out there that take hashes of spam e-mails (either sent to spam traps or reported) and use them for spam tagging. SpamAssassin can use their client programs to help tag messages also - I don't know if there's an extension or anything for Thunderbird, I don't use it.
The three that come to mind are DCC, Razor and Pyzor.
All have their advantages or disadvantages, but you have to remember that you're relying on somebody else's judgement. I think it's DCC that you can easily configure to say that you need x reports of the message before you class the message as spam, which gives you more control. But you only need one person who doesn't use it correctly to ruin the system and introduce lots of false positives.
You could always set up SpamAssassin on your local machine and proxy messages through that.
Yep - the default useragent for Opera is the MSIE one, which is a rather unfortunate position for Opera to take IMO. A position where it seems that they have to pretend to be IE just because there are some naive webmasters out there.
Opera can spoof a few Mozilla useragents or have a true Opera tag - this is a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+I/O from memory) and within a couple clicks in the menu.
I'm interested too.
The closest I've found is SPEC CPU2000 results (warning, large page). Loads of various systems, put against a common benchmark, CPU2000. Should be details on the website about how it tests them.
There are a few links at this link to various CPU2000 results for specific tests - integer tests, floating point tests and throughput.
Displaying my ignorance, what does Bonzi Buddy actually do?
portage is a start, an easy to use graphical portage would be even more of a start. I believe there's a graphical front end to Portage, was reading about it recently. Also for Debian's packaging, Synaptic is a very good GUI to the system.
Well, why don't the just market it as "with speakers and tuner add $330 dollars".
Panasonic did before this year. They used to sell everything as separates - you'd get the set, external speakers, external tuner etc. However the boxes were thin but fairly big and people basically didn't like them. And the cost was far more than $330...
I've forgotten the specifics now, but you also required some special custom cable to connect up the tuner to the television which retailed at a stupid price (ISTR one customer needing a 15m cable for his new system - the retail was about £160 (~$300)).
It really depends on the situation - the new Panasonic plasmas will appeal to more people now they've got rid of another box cluttering up the shelves around the TV. Now they have (at least in the UK), terrestrial analogue and digital receivers built in.
From what I remember, the new models with all the built in kit weighed in cheaper than the old ones - although they did get you a bit by the fact you'd need a wall bracket or a stand (the stands were £400, £500, £600 for 39", 42" and 50" respectively IIRC). But that sort of thing is considered normal...
Haven't heard that said about Google's systems before. Any links? I assume you mean just the indexes...