Just another reason to not rely on that crap and instead opt for judicious use of crypto at layer 3 wherever possible. Having your router only accept DHCP and IPSec traffic is a pretty good start if you're paranoid. Just turning off SSID broadcasting seems good enough if all you want is to keep out the neighbors, though.
Part of the reason nthash doesn't include a salt is because MS has an idiotic fondness for challenge-response password protocols which require that actual passwords themselves (or ridiculously weak, non-salted hashes) be stored instead of a strong, salted cryptographic hash of that password. Challenge-response password protocols are completely worthless, and the sooner MS ditches them, the better off they'll be.
Funny that you should mention an RPN calculator. Emacs has a really good one built into it!;-)
Emacs certainly does have a poor reputation for points a) and b) in your list, but those are things that the Emacs developers are definitely aware of and have improved over the years. As a person who uses both Emacs and Vim quite regularly, I feel that, for the basic editing set, the two really aren't all that much different anymore. I find myself using Ctrl-KEY chords a lot more than I'd like in Vim, and once I found out that tapping the Esc key in Emacs is the same as holding down Meta, I'm doing a lot less chording in Emacs. (The secret sauce is mapping Caps Lock to Esc instead of Ctrl as Emacsers tend to want to do!) I find both editors' keybinding mnemonics to be reasonably predictable once you've gotten some experience using them as well.
Where Emacs wins big for me is in its extension language which is vastly more powerful and easy to use than Vim's. There is a reason that you can read mail, chat on IRC, and play games in Emacs: because it was easy to program! That also means that if there is some new behavior I want for editing, it is typically easy to add myself instead of waiting around for months for someone else to do it. To be sure I've done the same with Vim, and it wasn't especially hard either, but I found Vimscript to be less adept in general than elisp and considerably more inscrutable.
If your wife doesn't know what DRM is, that means you've missed an opportunity to educate her about it. Whenever my family members or friends and myself talk about music, movies, and computers, I often take the opportunity to tell them earnestly why I don't like the iTunes Music Store or Plays For Sure, and give them good, concrete examples of why DRM is bad. My family might not understand the nitty-gritty details of it, but they trust my opinion because they know I have a vested interest in pursuing good technologies and leaving bad ones behind.
This is very important to do because I know that my family also talks about media and computers with other people who aren't necessarily tech savvy as well. When I can arm my loved ones with good, strong reasons why stuff like DRM is bad and ultimately hurts them, they'll share that knowledge with others and word will spread.
To see a list of dependencies for a package (and other info) do this:
cd/usr/ports ; make search name=SOMEPACKAGE
To globally enable or disable features, see make.conf(5). Not all options are listed, unfortunately, but most will make sense and require only a minimal understanding of makefiles to figure out.
Portage is a little fancier, though, I'll give it that.
To Lanier, that horrible language is a feature. Those with little of value to say often cloak their meanings (or lack thereof) in flowery prose to try to conjure substance where none exists.
Especially now in Washington State. The State Supreme Court rules last year that non-compete agreements are only enforceable in exchange for some consideration like increased wages, bonuses, or guaranteed terms of employment. Guess how many companies are willing to pay their employees extra or guarantee them work?
The guitar-string level is the most aggravating thing on the face of the planet. I still can't win it using any string smaller than the second from left.:-(
There is a lot to be said of aesthetics. I know that I have a much harder time being productive if my workspace is cluttered, whether or not I can just jump straight to the app I want in a couple of keystrokes. I also feel more comfortable working in a clean-looking space (be it virtual or physical).
Just because you can reach your hand into a pile of papers and always pull out the right one doesn't mean you won't get a papercut along the way, sometimes.
I know someone who works at MS not because she believes they are a great company, but because she thinks they stink and they could do a better job, even if only slightly, with her help. She sees their products as sub-par in a lot of ways, but since she knows so many people who use them, she wants to help the software become be good products that people will enjoy using instead of using them merely because it is the only option they have.
I think there is something to be said about the person willing to go into a bad situation with the intent of making it better, don't you? That said, I also know plenty of Microsofties who have drank more than their fair share of the Kool-Aid. But you never know which one is which until you actually talk to them.
Seems like it would be a bad move to make a blanket assessment about someone based upon where they work.
It's a lot of both. The owners/founders are a pretty geeky bunch, their engineers are ass-kicking, and even their dedicated account reps all tend to have a pretty technical background. When there is a problem it is fixed rapidly and competently. I'm very happy to do business with Speakeasy.
Exactly. FileMaker is meant to fill that role, and it does an OK job of it. If you're on the Mac and you need an easy-to-use database, go FileMaker. (Heck, they're owned by Apple.)
Ah, but the more money the EFF has at it's disposal, the more power they will have to do just that. Of course, with more money comes a greater tendency towards corruption since money = power in this country...
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox.
It's not so odd really. Remember that our government is still composed primarily of old guys. The thing about old guys (and most guys) is that they think they know how a car works, and think it is silly that a person can't work on a car if they want to. Every single one of them has probably gotten his hands dirty fiddling with the carburetor on an old clunker and likely misses those days from his youth.
Computers, on the other hand, are Magic Boxes. They don't know how a computer works, are possibly afraid to learn, and hate it that 14 year old boys know more about it than they do and can cause so much trouble with one. They see the results and power of these fine general problem-solving tools but don't know how to harness it for themselves which frightens them, so they think it's better to regulate it until they do (or so that they don't have to worry about it anymore).
I grant that this is a pretty broad generalization and there are certainly counter examples of my characterization of these men (for instance Al Gore or maybe Jay Inslee) but never underestimate the pride and ego of an old man. It's practically a force of nature.
One quibble is that most IMAP clients know that people expect that from POP3 and will usually cache all messages, or parts of messages, locally.
However, you're right that there are few reliable IMAP servers that deal with mbox files. However, if you felt like switching your MTA to Postfix or Exim, or your MDA to procmail, you could use Courier IMAP or Binc IMAP on Maildir stores, both of which are incredibly stable (been using Courier in production for years and Binc in production for the last 6 months) very bug-free and highly compatible with pretty much every IMAP client I've tried especially Binc which is a lot more flexible in mailbox naming semantics than Courier. Both are pretty lightweight and fast as well, so if you're concerned about server resources they'll please you greatly.
I am particularly fond of Maildir stores because of the lower chance of mailbox corruption and the ease of converting them to an mbox file should the need present itself. I'm fond of squeezing every bit of stability and crash-proofness out of my servers as possible.
Perhaps y'all should consider implementing a feature which checks all the URLs in a given post and compares that to an index of URLs used in past posts and warns you of a possible duplicate.
This would work great for sites like Slashdot, because the important content of 98% of the "articles" posted is not the text, but the URLs they link to. Since Slashdot is basically a link filter, filtering the links directly for duplicates makes a lot of sense to me.
Give TeXShop a spin. It's pretty spiffy, and also fairly easy to install. TeX (say it like "tech") is pretty powerful and was written for the needs of scientists more than anything, but it's great for documents where you value structure and content over presentation. It lets you focus almost purely on your content, and then renders it in a very readable fashion for consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Just another reason to not rely on that crap and instead opt for judicious use of crypto at layer 3 wherever possible. Having your router only accept DHCP and IPSec traffic is a pretty good start if you're paranoid. Just turning off SSID broadcasting seems good enough if all you want is to keep out the neighbors, though.
Part of the reason nthash doesn't include a salt is because MS has an idiotic fondness for challenge-response password protocols which require that actual passwords themselves (or ridiculously weak, non-salted hashes) be stored instead of a strong, salted cryptographic hash of that password. Challenge-response password protocols are completely worthless, and the sooner MS ditches them, the better off they'll be.
Funny that you should mention an RPN calculator. Emacs has a really good one built into it! ;-)
Emacs certainly does have a poor reputation for points a) and b) in your list, but those are things that the Emacs developers are definitely aware of and have improved over the years. As a person who uses both Emacs and Vim quite regularly, I feel that, for the basic editing set, the two really aren't all that much different anymore. I find myself using Ctrl-KEY chords a lot more than I'd like in Vim, and once I found out that tapping the Esc key in Emacs is the same as holding down Meta, I'm doing a lot less chording in Emacs. (The secret sauce is mapping Caps Lock to Esc instead of Ctrl as Emacsers tend to want to do!) I find both editors' keybinding mnemonics to be reasonably predictable once you've gotten some experience using them as well.
Where Emacs wins big for me is in its extension language which is vastly more powerful and easy to use than Vim's. There is a reason that you can read mail, chat on IRC, and play games in Emacs: because it was easy to program! That also means that if there is some new behavior I want for editing, it is typically easy to add myself instead of waiting around for months for someone else to do it. To be sure I've done the same with Vim, and it wasn't especially hard either, but I found Vimscript to be less adept in general than elisp and considerably more inscrutable.
If your wife doesn't know what DRM is, that means you've missed an opportunity to educate her about it. Whenever my family members or friends and myself talk about music, movies, and computers, I often take the opportunity to tell them earnestly why I don't like the iTunes Music Store or Plays For Sure, and give them good, concrete examples of why DRM is bad. My family might not understand the nitty-gritty details of it, but they trust my opinion because they know I have a vested interest in pursuing good technologies and leaving bad ones behind.
This is very important to do because I know that my family also talks about media and computers with other people who aren't necessarily tech savvy as well. When I can arm my loved ones with good, strong reasons why stuff like DRM is bad and ultimately hurts them, they'll share that knowledge with others and word will spread.
I didn't want to be the one to let the cat out of the bag, but it's a little-known fact that Aerosmith is Spinal Tap!
To see a list of dependencies for a package (and other info) do this:
/usr/ports ; make search name=SOMEPACKAGE
cd
To globally enable or disable features, see make.conf(5). Not all options are listed, unfortunately, but most will make sense and require only a minimal understanding of makefiles to figure out.
Portage is a little fancier, though, I'll give it that.
To Lanier, that horrible language is a feature. Those with little of value to say often cloak their meanings (or lack thereof) in flowery prose to try to conjure substance where none exists.
Especially now in Washington State. The State Supreme Court rules last year that non-compete agreements are only enforceable in exchange for some consideration like increased wages, bonuses, or guaranteed terms of employment. Guess how many companies are willing to pay their employees extra or guarantee them work?
Because Emacs already is an operating system.
What else is there to do around here? Have an intelligent conversation? *snort*
The guitar-string level is the most aggravating thing on the face of the planet. I still can't win it using any string smaller than the second from left. :-(
Whoa.
Except for the keyboard, that exactly describes my current computing setup at home.
There is a lot to be said of aesthetics. I know that I have a much harder time being productive if my workspace is cluttered, whether or not I can just jump straight to the app I want in a couple of keystrokes. I also feel more comfortable working in a clean-looking space (be it virtual or physical).
Just because you can reach your hand into a pile of papers and always pull out the right one doesn't mean you won't get a papercut along the way, sometimes.
I know someone who works at MS not because she believes they are a great company, but because she thinks they stink and they could do a better job, even if only slightly, with her help. She sees their products as sub-par in a lot of ways, but since she knows so many people who use them, she wants to help the software become be good products that people will enjoy using instead of using them merely because it is the only option they have.
I think there is something to be said about the person willing to go into a bad situation with the intent of making it better, don't you? That said, I also know plenty of Microsofties who have drank more than their fair share of the Kool-Aid. But you never know which one is which until you actually talk to them.
Seems like it would be a bad move to make a blanket assessment about someone based upon where they work.
It's a lot of both. The owners/founders are a pretty geeky bunch, their engineers are ass-kicking, and even their dedicated account reps all tend to have a pretty technical background. When there is a problem it is fixed rapidly and competently. I'm very happy to do business with Speakeasy.
Exactly. FileMaker is meant to fill that role, and it does an OK job of it. If you're on the Mac and you need an easy-to-use database, go FileMaker. (Heck, they're owned by Apple.)
Ugh! More version soup! That's as bad as Sun Java2 5.0 version 1.5.0. Is customer/user confusion now the watchword of the day?
Hell, I don't care what the oil companies do: My newest cell phone runs on biodiesel! No more filling up at the cell-phone station for me.
Ah, but the more money the EFF has at it's disposal, the more power they will have to do just that. Of course, with more money comes a greater tendency towards corruption since money = power in this country...
You say that as though no one pays tuition to go to college. I think in the business/retail world they call it a 'hidden cost'.
Computers, on the other hand, are Magic Boxes. They don't know how a computer works, are possibly afraid to learn, and hate it that 14 year old boys know more about it than they do and can cause so much trouble with one. They see the results and power of these fine general problem-solving tools but don't know how to harness it for themselves which frightens them, so they think it's better to regulate it until they do (or so that they don't have to worry about it anymore).
I grant that this is a pretty broad generalization and there are certainly counter examples of my characterization of these men (for instance Al Gore or maybe Jay Inslee) but never underestimate the pride and ego of an old man. It's practically a force of nature.
However, you're right that there are few reliable IMAP servers that deal with mbox files. However, if you felt like switching your MTA to Postfix or Exim, or your MDA to procmail, you could use Courier IMAP or Binc IMAP on Maildir stores, both of which are incredibly stable (been using Courier in production for years and Binc in production for the last 6 months) very bug-free and highly compatible with pretty much every IMAP client I've tried especially Binc which is a lot more flexible in mailbox naming semantics than Courier. Both are pretty lightweight and fast as well, so if you're concerned about server resources they'll please you greatly.
I am particularly fond of Maildir stores because of the lower chance of mailbox corruption and the ease of converting them to an mbox file should the need present itself. I'm fond of squeezing every bit of stability and crash-proofness out of my servers as possible.
Perhaps y'all should consider implementing a feature which checks all the URLs in a given post and compares that to an index of URLs used in past posts and warns you of a possible duplicate.
This would work great for sites like Slashdot, because the important content of 98% of the "articles" posted is not the text, but the URLs they link to. Since Slashdot is basically a link filter, filtering the links directly for duplicates makes a lot of sense to me.
Give TeXShop a spin. It's pretty spiffy, and also fairly easy to install. TeX (say it like "tech") is pretty powerful and was written for the needs of scientists more than anything, but it's great for documents where you value structure and content over presentation. It lets you focus almost purely on your content, and then renders it in a very readable fashion for consumption.