You're right about the problems with the USB drivers, and the power issues being a smokescreen for that - it's understandable, but frustrating. The current Pis were clearly labelled as for development and quite possibly "not perfected yet" (seen "Octopussy" recently?).
However, being right doesn't make some of what you came up with in that thread helpful or constructive.
Maybe the client is of the opinion that he's screwed already (once bankrupt, does the scale of the debt matter?), so no longer has anything to lose - and hence is quite willing to take a really long shot that he hopes will also inflict maximum damage on the opposition.
In battle, a man who has accepted the inevitability of his death can be far more dangerous an adversary than the one who is still believes he may live, and is therefore hamstrung by fear.
"Our IT department has been tasked with creating a list of authorized software, and only allowing software to be added to such a list after it has been thoroughly tested."
That sort of seems to imply that someone outside of the IT department thinks this is a good idea and the role of the IT department is to do as it's told.
That's so obviously f***ed that you needn't have posted the rest of the comment. The users should be telling IT what they want to get out of this, not how they want it to happen. IT should then get someone who knows what they are doing to come up with a sensible solution. It's not even a security problem that you have, it's a management and process problem.
If the head of IT is sitting back and letting this happen, they need to be moved on. If the non-IT bosses are forcing it this way over the head of IT's objections, the company needs new management at that level.
You seriously think the average developer is capable of #1 and #2?
If your #1 means "amongst developers" then possibly - I'm not sure there would be an equal amount of listening or understanding going on though. And talking amongst themselves is not relevant to the patent anyway. I can't see why you would bother mentioning it anyway if that was what you meant, as it's the "talking to users" for which the patent suggests using the intermediary. And if you think that your average developer can usefully talk to users... well, remember that "Far Side" cartoon of owners talking to dogs and cats, and what the animals actually hear?
#2 then. Um, no. Not for anything remotely complex, anyway. Nor for anything that involves any kind of UI (ooh, pretty much "everything" then).
To be honest, your thinking that developers in general *are* capable of this stuff points at you being one of the ones who can't. Making a few assumptions, but it looks a lot like it (unless you're not a developer at all, or have only ever met really freakishly communicative and understanding ones). The reason I say this is that pretty much every developer I know who actually *is* capable of the kind of communication we're talking about is painfully well aware of how pisspoor most developers are at it.
Of course, that's not to say that a "Program Manager" will be any better -- if the developers are left-brained and the users right-brained, what does that leave the PM?;-)
i) No, it's "queue up", as someone else pointed out. Before someone else again pointed out a completely irrelevant definition of "cue" and took it completely out of context.
ii) If women are "only" 5% more likely than the *population as a whole* to believe in astrology, while men are 9% more likely than *women* to believe in UFOs, who's the more deluded? What do you think the "population as a whole" is made up of? How different do you think the numbers might be if you made a fair comparison?
Lies, damned lies etc.
iii) Who is this "they" who are giving away free passes? Where do I get one?
Yep, in the same way that giving a hitchhiker a ride is depriving a bus company of revenue. Or helping your neighbour install Linux is depriving both MS and your local PC repair shop of revenue. Let's just make "helping people" or "being a good neighbour" illegal in general, shall we?
I guess the real motivation for this being illegal in the UK is to try to reduce the possibility of anyone getting truly anonymous net access. After all, they might be TERRORISTS! Or PAEDOPHILES! Or inconvenient protestors who disagree with the government and are going to do something about it...
I seem to recall that the list of "authorities" was specified separately to the act, and that it originally included all sorts of ridiculous local government agencies, benefit agencies etc.
Does anyone have a reference to the current actual list?
Hah. Probably because the rest of us have had enough of it, lessening the queues for you. I'd never have thought the time would come when I'd prefer to travel via China than the US. But it has.
Seriously, I've been a semi-regular traveller through LAX over the past few years, and it's been a uniformly hateful experience. Outside of the immigration hall, most of the people there are great, helpful etc. -- it's the "system" that screws it up, along with the fact that LAX appears to have pretty much no way of dealing with transit passengers that doesn't involve passing outside the airport building (in the process partly justifying/explaining the immigration nonsense).
Actually, they *are* switching from MS Office to iWork. NeoOffice is only being mentioned as an alternative for those people/schools who think they need more than iWork provides.
The head teacher quoted mentioned that there would be compatibility issues with them using different software, and that it was hard enough teaching students and staff to save things in the right place anyway, never mind having to choose a format to save in. He then went on to say that he wasn't actually familiar with the alternatives that it is being suggested they use (and hence really didn't know whether there would *actually* be issues), but that he was concerned about it anyway.
At that point, I was thinking "lazy fool" - surely teaching kids the general principles to enable them to use any piece of suitable software is precisely what they *should* be doing, not taking the short-cut and getting the kids hooked on MS' bait-and-switch (it's cheap and easy now, but when you want to do it for yourself in a few years' time...).
Anyway, as it went on he also said that he would like to see the whole system move away from MS, and towards Open Source (and I thought maybe he wasn't such an idiot after all;-) ). His beef with the current situation seems to be that schools were told that certain software would be made available to them under a central license, and at that point his school chose to use Macs. Now, the software he was told would be available is going to cost them an extra NZ$4000, when schools who chose to use PCs are not being disadvantaged.
The "man from the ministry" being interviewed at the same time seemed to be knowledgeable and competent, and mentioned that MS had been very helpful (agreeing to remove the macs from the license, which they don't like to do, as I expect anyone with an MCA will tell you), and that is likely that they will be moving more towards Open Source over the next few years. I think I heard NZ$30m over 3 years mentioned in that context, and maybe $5m saved by cutting out Office for Macs.
In short, they were agreeing violently on most issues - but not on whether or not the head's school should be given NZ$4000 to buy MS Office for the machines on which they've decided they really want it. I expect that once they've tried Keynote (it seemed to be Powerpoint he was most worried about) they'll be pretty happy with it.
The real issue here would seem to be the way the press (NZ Herald in particular I believe) have reported this minor or non- issue. I don't know whether they're biased, poor at their job, or just lazy... whichever way, they're full of something that looks & smells like the proverbial.
You make it sound like sharing code is bad these days... I'm sure he could quite easily split out the code into completely separate drivers if bloating things that way would make you happy.
Oh, hang on. It doesn't make any difference, does it? Because this is open source, and all we care about is making things work in the best way possible, rather than marketing and spin and boasting about how many new drivers we've added (or how many new features we've copied from the competition;-) )...
You say "The really hard work is being done all the time by the people making fundamental improvements to their applications." as if making it beautiful is easy.
Well, if it's so damn easy, why are so few of these people not taking the (no doubt small amount of) time necessary to do it?
The answer is because it's bloody hard, and it takes just as much expertise to make an app or system beautiful as it does to make it work.
It seems to me that a lot of the people who are doing what you describe as "the really hard work" just don't want to admit that usability and beauty matter, and are hard -- because they're not good enough to do it. On the other hand, some do realise and admit to this, and go out and find people who are good at UI design and beauty and work with them to create fantastic apps. Their apps are the ones that people will rave about, that will persuade people to switch OS, that people will feel all nostalgic about once they're gone.
If you pride yourself on the quality of your app, you care about the technical quality and the aesthetic quality and the functional quality.
If you're missing any of that, you just don't have what it takes to create (or rather, to direct the creation of) something that people will love.
"Turnitin is not profiting from the student's ideas or work, they are profiting from their own algorithms and databases which are built to provide information to help teachers prevent or deter plagiarism."
So, if they're not profiting from it, um, why do they have it? And why do they go to the expense of all that pesky hardware and software that's required to receive and store submissions?
It's because their service cannot function without the students' work.
If their service requires the students' work in order to operate, and they profit from providing that service, they most certainly are profiting from the students' work -- in combination with their other stuff. The fact that they have added value to the work does not mean that they are suddenly not profiting from the work.
Spamtraps aren't the problem. Clueless users who sign up to something and then forget about it, or then decide they didn't want it after all... I'm sure there are more.
Frankly, Spamcop is a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.
And I don't give a damn whether Spamcop users receive mail from me or not. It's their loss, their problem, their idiot choice to use it. I sure as hell won't be bothering to jump through hoops to get my mailservers delisted if they ever get on there.
Spamcop's design and processes are (from what I have experienced) just not sensible in the Real World.
Yep. It's amazing how far some people get with computers without understanding what a folder *cough* I mean directory is.
I remember explaining the concept of a folder to a user once, and being amazed at what an instant and massive difference it made to them.
I still find it hard to imagine what it must be like trying to use a typical windowing GUI without understanding what a folder is.
The moral of this story is "it's very easy to overestimate how much a user understands" (and waste a lot of effort trying to teach them things when they don't have solid foundations).
Apple won't support OS X on clones. But people will probably make it work in some way shape or form. This won't be good enough for anyone who actually wants to do work on it, just for hobbyists and hackers who find it "cool".
So, no loss in Apple's target market, and they gain potential users who might find that they actually rather like this OS X thing, and want a version that will run reliably and upgrade smoothly etc. - and therefore turn into a new customer.
End result = win for Apple.
That's not to say that they won't do what they can to stop it; I'm sure they will. If they made it too easy to get away with running OS X on clones, some people who would otherwise buy it might do so. However, once they've made it hard enough to stop their target markets doing it, they won't be wasting money on techies or lawyers to make it any harder.
Those saying "NetBSD here I come" might like to think about what this actually means before running away screaming. Basically, it's a *proposal* to help deal with the things that hold Debian back. Nobody is talking about trying less hard to make things work on the "dropped" architectures, rather being clear that Debian is unable to support them to the degree required to provide an official "stable" release.
How many of the MIPS, m68k etc. users here are actually using plain *woody* at the moment anyway, as opposed to sarge or sid?
So how much difference will this really make?
(and if you're really dead set on *BSD, have a look at http://www.debian.org/ports under the "Non-Linux ports" and have a crack at helping get the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports working on your arch!)
Quite -- there is no way Zaphod Beeblebrox would be seen dead in *that*. Let alone bother to steal it...
And as for "Marvin: the depressed robot", he doesn't look capable of sounding depressed. Hey, maybe they'll give him a voice like a bored 12 year-old, that'd be *really* clever...
"You can detune your TV and use it merely for DVDs and video games if you like. You don't have to pay a TV licence then."
Theoretically, yes. In fact, that's what the licensing people suggested I do when I asked them about it.
But I have heard various stories about people saying they've done that and not being believed (especially if you're obviously the kind of person who is more than capable of using the "auto-tune" button on your TV to retune it in seconds flat).
I can't remember exactly what led me to it, but I reckon the best bet is to get a repairman to disable the tuner semi-permanently. It should be dead easy (and easily reversible if necessary).
"Perhaps tuners should be independent of the CRT and controlled via an access card - similar to satellite TV. Services should have recurring fees, not personal property."
Actually it's even simpler than that. In the UK, you have to pay the TV license if you have a device that is capable of receiving broadcast TV. If, for example (as I used to), you want to have a TV and video solely for watching prerecorded videos, just get your TV repairman to disable the tuners in the TV and video.
Then you don't have to pay the license. If any of you want to do this, I suggest that you get a letter from the repairman to confirm what he's done, just in case the TV licensing people don't believe you (I did this but it wasn't needed).
If you want to, you can customise all the "chrome" in Firefox however you like; it's all XUL (google for that).
For example, I have a customised version of Firefox that runs full-screen, with no menubars, no toolbars, and very limited context menus that we use to ensure that users can't get anywhere but the site we want them to browse. We actually use it with Knoppix to create a completely turnkey "kiosk"-style system, but the customisation is equally applicable to Firefox on other platforms.
You are currently part of the problem, like the people who used to insist that they had to run open relays.
Regarding "unknowable", complete rubbish. There's no good excuse for not knowing where your domain's mail should be originating -- other replies have already pointed out some of the solutions. People who run far more complex setups than you are able to sort it out, so should you.
As far as users using your server goes, if the domains from which they are claiming to be sending mail list your server as a legitimate source, then they will be able to send just fine. If their domain admins do not list your server as a legitimate source, then they should use whatever systems their work has set up.
"Whoever came up with SPF" are certainly not idiots, and have clearly thought about it a hell of a lot more than you have.
Please, go away and think about it. Then come back as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about the problems with the USB drivers, and the power issues being a smokescreen for that - it's understandable, but frustrating. The current Pis were clearly labelled as for development and quite possibly "not perfected yet" (seen "Octopussy" recently?).
However, being right doesn't make some of what you came up with in that thread helpful or constructive.
Anyone who was stupid enough to write IE6-dependent web apps will be reaping what they have sown, and deserving every last little bit of it.
Maybe the client is of the opinion that he's screwed already (once bankrupt, does the scale of the debt matter?), so no longer has anything to lose - and hence is quite willing to take a really long shot that he hopes will also inflict maximum damage on the opposition.
In battle, a man who has accepted the inevitability of his death can be far more dangerous an adversary than the one who is still believes he may live, and is therefore hamstrung by fear.
"Our IT department has been tasked with creating a list of authorized software, and only allowing software to be added to such a list after it has been thoroughly tested."
That sort of seems to imply that someone outside of the IT department thinks this is a good idea and the role of the IT department is to do as it's told.
That's so obviously f***ed that you needn't have posted the rest of the comment. The users should be telling IT what they want to get out of this, not how they want it to happen. IT should then get someone who knows what they are doing to come up with a sensible solution. It's not even a security problem that you have, it's a management and process problem.
If the head of IT is sitting back and letting this happen, they need to be moved on. If the non-IT bosses are forcing it this way over the head of IT's objections, the company needs new management at that level.
You seriously think the average developer is capable of #1 and #2?
;-)
If your #1 means "amongst developers" then possibly - I'm not sure there would be an equal amount of listening or understanding going on though. And talking amongst themselves is not relevant to the patent anyway. I can't see why you would bother mentioning it anyway if that was what you meant, as it's the "talking to users" for which the patent suggests using the intermediary. And if you think that your average developer can usefully talk to users... well, remember that "Far Side" cartoon of owners talking to dogs and cats, and what the animals actually hear?
#2 then. Um, no. Not for anything remotely complex, anyway. Nor for anything that involves any kind of UI (ooh, pretty much "everything" then).
To be honest, your thinking that developers in general *are* capable of this stuff points at you being one of the ones who can't. Making a few assumptions, but it looks a lot like it (unless you're not a developer at all, or have only ever met really freakishly communicative and understanding ones). The reason I say this is that pretty much every developer I know who actually *is* capable of the kind of communication we're talking about is painfully well aware of how pisspoor most developers are at it.
Of course, that's not to say that a "Program Manager" will be any better -- if the developers are left-brained and the users right-brained, what does that leave the PM?
As for #3, who is?
i) No, it's "queue up", as someone else pointed out. Before someone else again pointed out a completely irrelevant definition of "cue" and took it completely out of context.
ii) If women are "only" 5% more likely than the *population as a whole* to believe in astrology, while men are 9% more likely than *women* to believe in UFOs, who's the more deluded? What do you think the "population as a whole" is made up of? How different do you think the numbers might be if you made a fair comparison?
Lies, damned lies etc.
iii) Who is this "they" who are giving away free passes? Where do I get one?
Yep, in the same way that giving a hitchhiker a ride is depriving a bus company of revenue. Or helping your neighbour install Linux is depriving both MS and your local PC repair shop of revenue. Let's just make "helping people" or "being a good neighbour" illegal in general, shall we?
I guess the real motivation for this being illegal in the UK is to try to reduce the possibility of anyone getting truly anonymous net access. After all, they might be TERRORISTS! Or PAEDOPHILES! Or inconvenient protestors who disagree with the government and are going to do something about it...
Might want to have a look at TUPE... http://www.dti.gov.uk/employment/trade-union-rights/tupe/page16289.html http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/emplaw/tupe/tupe.htm
I seem to recall that the list of "authorities" was specified separately to the act, and that it originally included all sorts of ridiculous local government agencies, benefit agencies etc.
Does anyone have a reference to the current actual list?
No it doesn't. Many (possibly most?) Linux distributions by default target non-MMX processors for the sake of wider compatibility.
And we're not all Gentoo-style rice, er, I mean D-I-Y-ers who just have to build everything for ourselves.
In fact, these days I would expect that most Linux users are unlikely to build software for themselves very often, if at all.
Hah. Probably because the rest of us have had enough of it, lessening the queues for you. I'd never have thought the time would come when I'd prefer to travel via China than the US. But it has.
Seriously, I've been a semi-regular traveller through LAX over the past few years, and it's been a uniformly hateful experience. Outside of the immigration hall, most of the people there are great, helpful etc. -- it's the "system" that screws it up, along with the fact that LAX appears to have pretty much no way of dealing with transit passengers that doesn't involve passing outside the airport building (in the process partly justifying/explaining the immigration nonsense).
Actually, they *are* switching from MS Office to iWork. NeoOffice is only being mentioned as an alternative for those people/schools who think they need more than iWork provides.
;-) ). His beef with the current situation seems to be that schools were told that certain software would be made available to them under a central license, and at that point his school chose to use Macs. Now, the software he was told would be available is going to cost them an extra NZ$4000, when schools who chose to use PCs are not being disadvantaged.
The head teacher quoted mentioned that there would be compatibility issues with them using different software, and that it was hard enough teaching students and staff to save things in the right place anyway, never mind having to choose a format to save in. He then went on to say that he wasn't actually familiar with the alternatives that it is being suggested they use (and hence really didn't know whether there would *actually* be issues), but that he was concerned about it anyway.
At that point, I was thinking "lazy fool" - surely teaching kids the general principles to enable them to use any piece of suitable software is precisely what they *should* be doing, not taking the short-cut and getting the kids hooked on MS' bait-and-switch (it's cheap and easy now, but when you want to do it for yourself in a few years' time...).
Anyway, as it went on he also said that he would like to see the whole system move away from MS, and towards Open Source (and I thought maybe he wasn't such an idiot after all
The "man from the ministry" being interviewed at the same time seemed to be knowledgeable and competent, and mentioned that MS had been very helpful (agreeing to remove the macs from the license, which they don't like to do, as I expect anyone with an MCA will tell you), and that is likely that they will be moving more towards Open Source over the next few years. I think I heard NZ$30m over 3 years mentioned in that context, and maybe $5m saved by cutting out Office for Macs.
In short, they were agreeing violently on most issues - but not on whether or not the head's school should be given NZ$4000 to buy MS Office for the machines on which they've decided they really want it. I expect that once they've tried Keynote (it seemed to be Powerpoint he was most worried about) they'll be pretty happy with it.
The real issue here would seem to be the way the press (NZ Herald in particular I believe) have reported this minor or non- issue. I don't know whether they're biased, poor at their job, or just lazy... whichever way, they're full of something that looks & smells like the proverbial.
You make it sound like sharing code is bad these days... I'm sure he could quite easily split out the code into completely separate drivers if bloating things that way would make you happy.
;-) )...
Oh, hang on. It doesn't make any difference, does it? Because this is open source, and all we care about is making things work in the best way possible, rather than marketing and spin and boasting about how many new drivers we've added (or how many new features we've copied from the competition
You say "The really hard work is being done all the time by the people making fundamental improvements to their applications." as if making it beautiful is easy.
Well, if it's so damn easy, why are so few of these people not taking the (no doubt small amount of) time necessary to do it?
The answer is because it's bloody hard, and it takes just as much expertise to make an app or system beautiful as it does to make it work.
It seems to me that a lot of the people who are doing what you describe as "the really hard work" just don't want to admit that usability and beauty matter, and are hard -- because they're not good enough to do it. On the other hand, some do realise and admit to this, and go out and find people who are good at UI design and beauty and work with them to create fantastic apps. Their apps are the ones that people will rave about, that will persuade people to switch OS, that people will feel all nostalgic about once they're gone.
If you pride yourself on the quality of your app, you care about the technical quality and the aesthetic quality and the functional quality.
If you're missing any of that, you just don't have what it takes to create (or rather, to direct the creation of) something that people will love.
"Turnitin is not profiting from the student's ideas or work, they are profiting from their own algorithms and databases which are built to provide information to help teachers prevent or deter plagiarism."
So, if they're not profiting from it, um, why do they have it? And why do they go to the expense of all that pesky hardware and software that's required to receive and store submissions?
It's because their service cannot function without the students' work.
If their service requires the students' work in order to operate, and they profit from providing that service, they most certainly are profiting from the students' work -- in combination with their other stuff. The fact that they have added value to the work does not mean that they are suddenly not profiting from the work.
Spamtraps aren't the problem. Clueless users who sign up to something and then forget about it, or then decide they didn't want it after all... I'm sure there are more.
Frankly, Spamcop is a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.
And I don't give a damn whether Spamcop users receive mail from me or not. It's their loss, their problem, their idiot choice to use it. I sure as hell won't be bothering to jump through hoops to get my mailservers delisted if they ever get on there.
Spamcop's design and processes are (from what I have experienced) just not sensible in the Real World.
But like I said, if you want to use it...
Yep. It's amazing how far some people get with computers without understanding what a folder *cough* I mean directory is.
I remember explaining the concept of a folder to a user once, and being amazed at what an instant and massive difference it made to them.
I still find it hard to imagine what it must be like trying to use a typical windowing GUI without understanding what a folder is.
The moral of this story is "it's very easy to overestimate how much a user understands" (and waste a lot of effort trying to teach them things when they don't have solid foundations).
Nipple, surely?
Apple won't support OS X on clones. But people will probably make it work in some way shape or form. This won't be good enough for anyone who actually wants to do work on it, just for hobbyists and hackers who find it "cool".
So, no loss in Apple's target market, and they gain potential users who might find that they actually rather like this OS X thing, and want a version that will run reliably and upgrade smoothly etc. - and therefore turn into a new customer.
End result = win for Apple.
That's not to say that they won't do what they can to stop it; I'm sure they will. If they made it too easy to get away with running OS X on clones, some people who would otherwise buy it might do so. However, once they've made it hard enough to stop their target markets doing it, they won't be wasting money on techies or lawyers to make it any harder.
It'll be interesting, at least.
Those saying "NetBSD here I come" might like to think about what this actually means before running away screaming. Basically, it's a *proposal* to help deal with the things that hold Debian back. Nobody is talking about trying less hard to make things work on the "dropped" architectures, rather being clear that Debian is unable to support them to the degree required to provide an official "stable" release.
How many of the MIPS, m68k etc. users here are actually using plain *woody* at the moment anyway, as opposed to sarge or sid?
So how much difference will this really make?
(and if you're really dead set on *BSD, have a look at http://www.debian.org/ports under the "Non-Linux ports" and have a crack at helping get the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports working on your arch!)
Cheers,
Nick
> I remember it being described as "sleek."
Quite -- there is no way Zaphod Beeblebrox would be seen dead in *that*. Let alone bother to steal it...
And as for "Marvin: the depressed robot", he doesn't look capable of sounding depressed. Hey, maybe they'll give him a voice like a bored 12 year-old, that'd be *really* clever...
*sigh*
"You can detune your TV and use it merely for DVDs and video games if you like. You don't have to pay a TV licence then."
Theoretically, yes. In fact, that's what the licensing people suggested I do when I asked them about it.
But I have heard various stories about people saying they've done that and not being believed (especially if you're obviously the kind of person who is more than capable of using the "auto-tune" button on your TV to retune it in seconds flat).
I can't remember exactly what led me to it, but I reckon the best bet is to get a repairman to disable the tuner semi-permanently. It should be dead easy (and easily reversible if necessary).
Cheers,
Nick
"Perhaps tuners should be independent of the CRT and controlled via an access card - similar to satellite TV. Services should have recurring fees, not personal property."
Actually it's even simpler than that. In the UK, you have to pay the TV license if you have a device that is capable of receiving broadcast TV. If, for example (as I used to), you want to have a TV and video solely for watching prerecorded videos, just get your TV repairman to disable the tuners in the TV and video.
Then you don't have to pay the license. If any of you want to do this, I suggest that you get a letter from the repairman to confirm what he's done, just in case the TV licensing people don't believe you (I did this but it wasn't needed).
Cheers,
Nick
If you want to, you can customise all the "chrome" in Firefox however you like; it's all XUL (google for that).
For example, I have a customised version of Firefox that runs full-screen, with no menubars, no toolbars, and very limited context menus that we use to ensure that users can't get anywhere but the site we want them to browse. We actually use it with Knoppix to create a completely turnkey "kiosk"-style system, but the customisation is equally applicable to Firefox on other platforms.
Cheers,
Nick
You are currently part of the problem, like the people who used to insist that they had to run open relays.
Regarding "unknowable", complete rubbish. There's no good excuse for not knowing where your domain's mail should be originating -- other replies have already pointed out some of the solutions. People who run far more complex setups than you are able to sort it out, so should you.
As far as users using your server goes, if the domains from which they are claiming to be sending mail list your server as a legitimate source, then they will be able to send just fine. If their domain admins do not list your server as a legitimate source, then they should use whatever systems their work has set up.
"Whoever came up with SPF" are certainly not idiots, and have clearly thought about it a hell of a lot more than you have.
Please, go away and think about it. Then come back as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Cheers,
Nick