How well does this program and GunCash work with online banking systems? I've read that they both do it, but how well does it work in the real world, and how does it compare in terms of ease of use to Quicken or Money?
If you're an admin with users (ie., not just running your own system), it would be pretty hard to ban incoming mail from AOL.
A year or two ago, I had AOL trouble with my free colocated server. The people who gave me the server were using IP addresses from a T1 line that they bought from a cable modem company. It wasn't on a net connected via a cable modem, but it was part of the cable modem company's block.
So AOL just silently deleted my messages. It's very frustrating, they don't tell you anything, you can't find documentation, no one will answer an email, etc.
It would be nice, at least for the first few days after they start the policy, to bounce messages with some sort of explanation, rather than just tossing them out.
I don't really have a problem with them trying to block spam -- I had access to a bigger, upstream SMTP server, so I could relay -- but it sucks that they don't tell anyone what's going on.
At the very least an AOL mail admin could post something on a mail admin's email list, so that a google search would turn up the answer. What would that take, five minutes?
I think that these issues are important. Google is probably the most significant reference work in the world. It's made very fundamental changes in the ways people do research. news.google.com is already one of my main news sites -- I use it all the time.
So I think that these issues are very important.
I'm a huge google fan, both of the site and the people who run it. I think they're doing their best to sort through these issues. Government rules are a reality that has to be dealt with.
The thing that I think that google could be criticized for, in all of this, is a lack of transparency. I think they should explain, in detail, what they're doing and why, and make some effort to listen to people who disagree with their policies.
I'm not saying that they should open it up to a vote, or that they should do things that aren't in their company's best interests. Just that they should listen, and tell us what they're doing.
Google looms large in the world's conciousness, and it's getting bigger all the time. It would be an overstatement to say that leaving something out of google erases the fact from the world in an orwellian sense. But it does seem to me that leaving stuff out does take a step down that road.
One use for this sort of thing might be to get a palladium system to do something it's not supposed to. In that case you'd have access to your own machine.
Palladium is just a specialized VM that runs on tamper proof hardware, that's designed to let other people trust the results of some computations performed on your machine.
I'm not sure the university's WAPs are open -- they don't use passwords, but you have to give your wireless card's MAC address to the computing services people before you can talk.
You could clone someone -- this has happened to me, or at least I assume that it has, because I had an IP address collision -- but that's kind of lame.
Re:The really interesting thing about dupes
on
IETF to Look at Spam
·
· Score: 1
I don't know -- how many stories get posted in a day? I don't think it would be that much harder than reading a newspaper. I doubt it's harder than what you have to do for your job, or for what most people have to do for their jobs.
I'm not suggesting that people ought to be blamed for not remembering a story from 3 months ago -- but 3 days ago seems reasonable.
I don't believe that an automated system to detect dupes would be simple or effective. There are often different articles about the same thing, and often dupes come through someone submitting a completely different article. I don't think that it's usually from the same submitter (although I haven't checked that), and repeated word scans seem to be something that would be very difficult to pull off.
The really interesting thing about dupes
on
IETF to Look at Spam
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
The really interesting thing about dupes is that they tend to suggest that there are large numbers of readers who pay more attention to the site than the guys running it.
If I was running slashdot, I'd probably push the people who had the power to approve stories to read each and every story that gets approved. It seems like a reasonable minimal committment to the community even for volunteers, and presumably some of these guys are drawing actual paychecks for the work they do here.
The dupes show that the guys approving the stories don't really care enough to take the time to do that.
The problem is really that most p2p software doesn't make much of an attempt to take the physical network's topology into account when it creates the virtual network of peers.
Years ago, before napster took off, I described what was essentially an idea for streaming p2p (didn't call it that) to a friend who is a very smart networking specialist, and he was horrified. I think he had visions of chunks of video being passed from kansas to hong kong to iowa to france, etc. I was too lazy and not skilled enough to follow up on my idea, so I lost my place in history.
But my friend's criticism was valid then, and it's valid now, and as these services become more popular, the chickens are coming home to roost.
It seems to me that if p2p software allowed people from a specific school to look for files on each other's computers first, and to go outside of the campus only when necessary, a lot of bandwidth would be saved.
I know this is heresey, but I don't think that The Castle of Cagliostro stands up with Miyazaki's best work. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but his best stuff seems to be suffused with a kind of human warmth, a real fondness for and understanding of people, that doesn't come through in Cagliostro. It's not that Cagliostro is a bad movie -- it's not -- it just doesn't seem to have the force of some of the others.
For me the definitive Miyazaki scene is in Tonari no Totoro, when they're at the bus stop, and Totoro shows up. That moment when they're standing there in the rain, and she loans him her umbrella. There's so much that's good in that moment -- wonder, kindness, etc. -- and it all fits together perfectly.
If the band doesn't want to sign, the labels can always find someone else to push through the pipeline. If the labels aren't interested (and the big ones have an oligarchy), the band doesn't have many options.
Or at least they didn't. That's why online music distribution is so scary. Piracy is a real threat to the music industry; but so is a distribution system that gives everyone equal access.
I feel that the focus on piracy -- and people's insistence that it's ok -- have diverted attention from the other issue, open access to distribution. We need a system that lets musicians sell their music to global audiences without middlemen taking out substantial chunks.
If someone wants to make a deal with a label because the label can hook them up with producers or songwriters, or because the label can promote them, that's fine. But they shouldn't be coerced into these deals just to reach the market place.
It's not just the labels that do this. If you want to sell your house, you have to pay a broker to put it in the MLS -- why isn't there a web site that charges you $4.95 to list the house for 6 months? People tried to set those sites up, and they failed in the face of opposition from large real estate brokers, who fought to keep their inventories off of them. People who have set up tollbooths fight pretty hard to hold on to them.
I haven't had any problems, which is a testament to the quality of VMWare's product.
When you install VMWare, it sets up some kernel modules and modifies your start up scripts to fire up a couple of VMWare services. I think -- haven't really thought about it -- that these services do things that you can't do with a user's privilages.
I start up VMWare as an unpriv'd user, and I can do networking, for example. You can configure your network from within the VM, which is running under linux as that unpriv'd user. So I think it uses the services that are launched with root privs.
I think that when a distro is officially supported, that means that the installer will have prebuilt kernel modules and that it will be certain to be able to modify your start up scripts.
LFS isn't officially supported -- but the installer is good enough to get around it. The install script builds kernel modules for your kernel if it can't find something on the shelf.
When I build a newer kernel, I get an error message at start up -- the vmware scripts say that I have to rerun a script to build new kernel modules. But running the script has always brought things back into balance.
I'm a huge fan of vmware. I've been using it for a few versions now, and they make it better all the time. They do a great job.
The great thing about VMWare is that even if it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything. There's no way the software could do anything to the real disk, the damage would be limited to the virtual disk, which is only a file.
This stuff is really cool, and I'm glad the industry is starting to wake up to the possibilities.
I see this as something that's more likely to popularize virtual computer technology, rather than something that's likely to eliminate our options. Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball, and I could be wrong.
I have a box that I use mostly to run VMware client OSs. Linux is my host OS, I have a very sparse and clean linux from scratch system set up on the box. I've got all kinds of stuff stashed away in various VMs.
The great thing about this sort of setup is the flexibility. The client OSs are basically just data files on the host os. If you copy the files, you've backed up the system, or cloned it.
You can move the files to other machines that have different hardware -- you don't have to worry about the sound and video card drivers.
And you can even replace the host OS without being too disruptive. I used to run redhat as the host OS, but I copied off the data files, set up my linux from scratch system, and brought the data files back in. Everything was fine.
The result of this is that the chains of dependency that exist between hardware, operating system installations, and applications become much less restrictive.
Another result is that it's trivial to play with new systems -- I don't run OpenBSD, for example, but everytime they could out with a new one, I install it, just to keep my hand in.
All this is, at bottom, is just a more flexible way of looking at OSs. An OS becomes a blob of data that's easier to move around from one hunk of hardware to another. And it's easier to keep lots of those OS blobs on a given machine.
It's a great way to deal with "staging" servers. You can take a production server (which is really a VM), copy it, and do whatever you want to the copy, without damaging anything. When everything is working properly, you can slide the new server into place. If you need to revert, you can just go back to the old data.
I suspect that this functionality is part of what MS is after.
The film industry is huge, with all kinds of different people working in it.
The people who retouch frames of films probably make good salaries but not extravagant ones, and for all practical purposes are living on another planet than people like Valenti or the movie stars.
My very limited contact with that world makes me think that this particular segment is pretty geeky -- movie geeky and technology geeky. Good folk.
If movie piracy cuts into the bottom line, a certain number of these people will probably lose their jobs.
(I said it, and what's worse, I believe it, so mod me down! Lobby the/. crew for a new negative category, counterrevolutionary!)
I've never used gestures, so I don't know if this is true or not, but I think I remember reading somewhere that gestures tend to exacerbate repetitive stress problems.
It starts out with a parody of Dennis the Menace, which is probably not so relevant to the younger people here. But it was really well done. Bart was Dennis, Bush was Mr. Wilson, and Barbara Bush was Mrs. Wilson.
Who would think of that?
Then it goes into a very bizzare feud between Homer and Bush. I loved the rainbow wig, the cardboard cutouts of the bush boys, and Bush not being willing to back down in front of Gorbachov -- I can't show weakness in front of the Russians!
The Gerald Ford bit at the end was great, too. Do you like nachos? Do you like football? Maybe we could watch football and eat some nachos.
If you go to the warehouse grocery store, you pay less than you do at 7-11. And if you use a big vehicle, you get a better price per kg. There are economies of scale.
But what if what you're lofting doesn't weight 40x as much? Wouldn't it be nice to get the good price anyway? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to 7-11 and the a single can of soda for the same price you pay for a can when you buy a case at the warehouse store?
This guy is no dummy, and I'm sure he's identified a market.
There's a pretty interesting architecture book called "The Timeless Way of Building" by a guy named Christopher Alexander. I read it because it's the book that introduced the idea of a pattern language, which inspired the talk of patterns in software design.
One of the ideas of the book was that these modular buildings, where everything is the same, don't "live" in the way that many older buildings do. His argument is fairly complicated, and I'm not sure I've mastered it well enough to summarize it here, but it has a lot to do with the way things get put together, the process of building, and how it fits in with the community, the site, the culture, and the way human beings work.
The "house n" page linked in the story has a quote from Le Corbusier, and Alexander makes a pretty good critique of his work, I think. It's kind of sterile.
The basic point is that if you're approaching housing from a starting point of modular components, instead of from ideas about how buildings and open spaces affect how people live, if you go for modular housing because it can be mass produced, you're going to end up with a pretty soulless neighborhood.
The best way to understand this, for me at least, is to think about the places you've been that struck you as being particularly nice, and to think about how those buildings and neighborhoods got put together.
It's not necessarily a money thing -- I was in Duluth, of all places, a while ago, and the houses in the hills overlooking lake superior were all incredible. It was just a nice place to be. The houses weren't lavish or excessively luxurious, they just fit into the hill and into the neighborhood.
I don't see how places like that could come into existence with these proposed methods.
Whenever they make a Dick book into a movie they change things around, but his characters tend to be schlubby middle aged guys teetering on the brink of loserdom.
In Blade Runner Decker is a guy whose greatest ambition in life is to have a sheep, a real one, not a synthetic animal.
Dick's view of the future was all about the countless new ways things will suck.
And then there's the madness that crept in at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
How well does this program and GunCash work with online banking systems? I've read that they both do it, but how well does it work in the real world, and how does it compare in terms of ease of use to Quicken or Money?
If you're an admin with users (ie., not just running your own system), it would be pretty hard to ban incoming mail from AOL.
A year or two ago, I had AOL trouble with my free colocated server. The people who gave me the server were using IP addresses from a T1 line that they bought from a cable modem company. It wasn't on a net connected via a cable modem, but it was part of the cable modem company's block.
So AOL just silently deleted my messages. It's very frustrating, they don't tell you anything, you can't find documentation, no one will answer an email, etc.
It would be nice, at least for the first few days after they start the policy, to bounce messages with some sort of explanation, rather than just tossing them out.
I don't really have a problem with them trying to block spam -- I had access to a bigger, upstream SMTP server, so I could relay -- but it sucks that they don't tell anyone what's going on.
At the very least an AOL mail admin could post something on a mail admin's email list, so that a google search would turn up the answer. What would that take, five minutes?
I think that they're hoping that people will buy binary licenses, so they don't have to GPL their changes.
I googled his name, and found out he's a Republican. (I had expected him to be a Democrat, don't know why.)
Just thought that was a fact that people should know.
I think that these issues are important. Google is probably the most significant reference work in the world. It's made very fundamental changes in the ways people do research. news.google.com is already one of my main news sites -- I use it all the time.
So I think that these issues are very important.
I'm a huge google fan, both of the site and the people who run it. I think they're doing their best to sort through these issues. Government rules are a reality that has to be dealt with.
The thing that I think that google could be criticized for, in all of this, is a lack of transparency. I think they should explain, in detail, what they're doing and why, and make some effort to listen to people who disagree with their policies.
I'm not saying that they should open it up to a vote, or that they should do things that aren't in their company's best interests. Just that they should listen, and tell us what they're doing.
Google looms large in the world's conciousness, and it's getting bigger all the time. It would be an overstatement to say that leaving something out of google erases the fact from the world in an orwellian sense. But it does seem to me that leaving stuff out does take a step down that road.
One use for this sort of thing might be to get a palladium system to do something it's not supposed to. In that case you'd have access to your own machine.
Palladium is just a specialized VM that runs on tamper proof hardware, that's designed to let other people trust the results of some computations performed on your machine.
I'm not sure the university's WAPs are open -- they don't use passwords, but you have to give your wireless card's MAC address to the computing services people before you can talk.
You could clone someone -- this has happened to me, or at least I assume that it has, because I had an IP address collision -- but that's kind of lame.
I don't know -- how many stories get posted in a day? I don't think it would be that much harder than reading a newspaper. I doubt it's harder than what you have to do for your job, or for what most people have to do for their jobs.
I'm not suggesting that people ought to be blamed for not remembering a story from 3 months ago -- but 3 days ago seems reasonable.
I don't believe that an automated system to detect dupes would be simple or effective. There are often different articles about the same thing, and often dupes come through someone submitting a completely different article. I don't think that it's usually from the same submitter (although I haven't checked that), and repeated word scans seem to be something that would be very difficult to pull off.
The really interesting thing about dupes is that they tend to suggest that there are large numbers of readers who pay more attention to the site than the guys running it.
If I was running slashdot, I'd probably push the people who had the power to approve stories to read each and every story that gets approved. It seems like a reasonable minimal committment to the community even for volunteers, and presumably some of these guys are drawing actual paychecks for the work they do here.
The dupes show that the guys approving the stories don't really care enough to take the time to do that.
The problem is really that most p2p software doesn't make much of an attempt to take the physical network's topology into account when it creates the virtual network of peers.
Years ago, before napster took off, I described what was essentially an idea for streaming p2p (didn't call it that) to a friend who is a very smart networking specialist, and he was horrified. I think he had visions of chunks of video being passed from kansas to hong kong to iowa to france, etc. I was too lazy and not skilled enough to follow up on my idea, so I lost my place in history.
But my friend's criticism was valid then, and it's valid now, and as these services become more popular, the chickens are coming home to roost.
It seems to me that if p2p software allowed people from a specific school to look for files on each other's computers first, and to go outside of the campus only when necessary, a lot of bandwidth would be saved.
I know this is heresey, but I don't think that The Castle of Cagliostro stands up with Miyazaki's best work. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but his best stuff seems to be suffused with a kind of human warmth, a real fondness for and understanding of people, that doesn't come through in Cagliostro. It's not that Cagliostro is a bad movie -- it's not -- it just doesn't seem to have the force of some of the others.
For me the definitive Miyazaki scene is in Tonari no Totoro, when they're at the bus stop, and Totoro shows up. That moment when they're standing there in the rain, and she loans him her umbrella. There's so much that's good in that moment -- wonder, kindness, etc. -- and it all fits together perfectly.
...is that they're making a sequel to the Scooby-Doo movie.
It's because the labels control distribution.
If the band doesn't want to sign, the labels can always find someone else to push through the pipeline. If the labels aren't interested (and the big ones have an oligarchy), the band doesn't have many options.
Or at least they didn't. That's why online music distribution is so scary. Piracy is a real threat to the music industry; but so is a distribution system that gives everyone equal access.
I feel that the focus on piracy -- and people's insistence that it's ok -- have diverted attention from the other issue, open access to distribution. We need a system that lets musicians sell their music to global audiences without middlemen taking out substantial chunks.
If someone wants to make a deal with a label because the label can hook them up with producers or songwriters, or because the label can promote them, that's fine. But they shouldn't be coerced into these deals just to reach the market place.
It's not just the labels that do this. If you want to sell your house, you have to pay a broker to put it in the MLS -- why isn't there a web site that charges you $4.95 to list the house for 6 months? People tried to set those sites up, and they failed in the face of opposition from large real estate brokers, who fought to keep their inventories off of them. People who have set up tollbooths fight pretty hard to hold on to them.
I haven't had any problems, which is a testament to the quality of VMWare's product.
When you install VMWare, it sets up some kernel modules and modifies your start up scripts to fire up a couple of VMWare services. I think -- haven't really thought about it -- that these services do things that you can't do with a user's privilages.
I start up VMWare as an unpriv'd user, and I can do networking, for example. You can configure your network from within the VM, which is running under linux as that unpriv'd user. So I think it uses the services that are launched with root privs.
I think that when a distro is officially supported, that means that the installer will have prebuilt kernel modules and that it will be certain to be able to modify your start up scripts.
LFS isn't officially supported -- but the installer is good enough to get around it. The install script builds kernel modules for your kernel if it can't find something on the shelf.
When I build a newer kernel, I get an error message at start up -- the vmware scripts say that I have to rerun a script to build new kernel modules. But running the script has always brought things back into balance.
I'm a huge fan of vmware. I've been using it for a few versions now, and they make it better all the time. They do a great job.
The great thing about VMWare is that even if it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything. There's no way the software could do anything to the real disk, the damage would be limited to the virtual disk, which is only a file.
This stuff is really cool, and I'm glad the industry is starting to wake up to the possibilities.
I see this as something that's more likely to popularize virtual computer technology, rather than something that's likely to eliminate our options. Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball, and I could be wrong.
I have a box that I use mostly to run VMware client OSs. Linux is my host OS, I have a very sparse and clean linux from scratch system set up on the box. I've got all kinds of stuff stashed away in various VMs.
The great thing about this sort of setup is the flexibility. The client OSs are basically just data files on the host os. If you copy the files, you've backed up the system, or cloned it.
You can move the files to other machines that have different hardware -- you don't have to worry about the sound and video card drivers.
And you can even replace the host OS without being too disruptive. I used to run redhat as the host OS, but I copied off the data files, set up my linux from scratch system, and brought the data files back in. Everything was fine.
The result of this is that the chains of dependency that exist between hardware, operating system installations, and applications become much less restrictive.
Another result is that it's trivial to play with new systems -- I don't run OpenBSD, for example, but everytime they could out with a new one, I install it, just to keep my hand in.
All this is, at bottom, is just a more flexible way of looking at OSs. An OS becomes a blob of data that's easier to move around from one hunk of hardware to another. And it's easier to keep lots of those OS blobs on a given machine.
It's a great way to deal with "staging" servers. You can take a production server (which is really a VM), copy it, and do whatever you want to the copy, without damaging anything. When everything is working properly, you can slide the new server into place. If you need to revert, you can just go back to the old data.
I suspect that this functionality is part of what MS is after.
The film industry is huge, with all kinds of different people working in it.
/. crew for a new negative category, counterrevolutionary!)
The people who retouch frames of films probably make good salaries but not extravagant ones, and for all practical purposes are living on another planet than people like Valenti or the movie stars.
My very limited contact with that world makes me think that this particular segment is pretty geeky -- movie geeky and technology geeky. Good folk.
If movie piracy cuts into the bottom line, a certain number of these people will probably lose their jobs.
(I said it, and what's worse, I believe it, so mod me down! Lobby the
I've never used gestures, so I don't know if this is true or not, but I think I remember reading somewhere that gestures tend to exacerbate repetitive stress problems.
Is that true? Or is it just an urban legend?
I wouldn't want people I was managing screwing around with p2p software at work.
For managers, this is going to be a no-brainer.
I really like the George Bush episode.
It starts out with a parody of Dennis the Menace, which is probably not so relevant to the younger people here. But it was really well done. Bart was Dennis, Bush was Mr. Wilson, and Barbara Bush was Mrs. Wilson.
Who would think of that?
Then it goes into a very bizzare feud between Homer and Bush. I loved the rainbow wig, the cardboard cutouts of the bush boys, and Bush not being willing to back down in front of Gorbachov -- I can't show weakness in front of the Russians!
The Gerald Ford bit at the end was great, too. Do you like nachos? Do you like football? Maybe we could watch football and eat some nachos.
What sorts of specific things about the linux GUIs (KDE? Gnome? The widget sets?) compared to OS X are a problem?
If you go to the warehouse grocery store, you pay less than you do at 7-11. And if you use a big vehicle, you get a better price per kg. There are economies of scale.
But what if what you're lofting doesn't weight 40x as much? Wouldn't it be nice to get the good price anyway? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to 7-11 and the a single can of soda for the same price you pay for a can when you buy a case at the warehouse store?
This guy is no dummy, and I'm sure he's identified a market.
There's a pretty interesting architecture book called "The Timeless Way of Building" by a guy named Christopher Alexander. I read it because it's the book that introduced the idea of a pattern language, which inspired the talk of patterns in software design.
One of the ideas of the book was that these modular buildings, where everything is the same, don't "live" in the way that many older buildings do. His argument is fairly complicated, and I'm not sure I've mastered it well enough to summarize it here, but it has a lot to do with the way things get put together, the process of building, and how it fits in with the community, the site, the culture, and the way human beings work.
The "house n" page linked in the story has a quote from Le Corbusier, and Alexander makes a pretty good critique of his work, I think. It's kind of sterile.
The basic point is that if you're approaching housing from a starting point of modular components, instead of from ideas about how buildings and open spaces affect how people live, if you go for modular housing because it can be mass produced, you're going to end up with a pretty soulless neighborhood.
The best way to understand this, for me at least, is to think about the places you've been that struck you as being particularly nice, and to think about how those buildings and neighborhoods got put together.
It's not necessarily a money thing -- I was in Duluth, of all places, a while ago, and the houses in the hills overlooking lake superior were all incredible. It was just a nice place to be. The houses weren't lavish or excessively luxurious, they just fit into the hill and into the neighborhood.
I don't see how places like that could come into existence with these proposed methods.
Are there any sites that talk about how to get a 64 bit AMD system going? How expensive are they?
I'm a big fan of P.K. Dick.
Whenever they make a Dick book into a movie they change things around, but his characters tend to be schlubby middle aged guys teetering on the brink of loserdom.
In Blade Runner Decker is a guy whose greatest ambition in life is to have a sheep, a real one, not a synthetic animal.
Dick's view of the future was all about the countless new ways things will suck.
And then there's the madness that crept in at the end.