Oh, and another idea I've had for quite some time is that IMAP should be extended to have an "outbox," similar to the virtual outbox which most IMAP clients already have. That way you only need one protocol for sending and receiving (to send a message you just put it into the outbox which then puts it into a transmit queue), and you can also do other stuff like putting a "don't transmit until" time on the message which then allows you to retract it before it gets sent out.
That doesn't help with the current spam situation, but it does make it so that SPF would be useful (since you can be sure that mail will only be sent from the IMAP server).
It also doesn't require much in the way of client modification, and current IMAP clients could still be used just fine since you can just save the message as a draft then move it into the outbox, or do an Fcc: to the outbox and then use a null 'black hole' SMTP server (running on localhost or whatever) to keep the SMTP portion of the email client happy.
SPF seems to be an IP-address-based whitelist mechanism. Which means that every possible host which might be serving as an MTA needs to be listed in my whitelist. That's all well and good for a home or office user, but what about when you travel and you're stuck sending mail from, say, the hotel's port 25-filtered network which requires that you use their SMTP server? And what happens when someone just uses that SPF record to see which systems will relay email for my domain and then just uses that server to send out lots of spam which looks like it originates from me, and then even worse is "proven" to be authentic?
smtpauth isn't always an option, and most DNS hosting providers don't make it terribly convenient to keep on adding and removing temporary TXT records as necessary, nor would a company's IT department be terribly happy about needing to do the same for corporate travellers.
What needs to happen instead is a domain having a public key registry (probably provided via NAPTR records; just do a NAPTR query on, for example, username.example.com and then get either NXDOMAIN or the public signature) and then signed messages. Of course, the fun thing then is the limit of the size of an NAPTR record, so it'd have to be a pretty small key. For this purpose I don't think it's necessary to have more than a 128-bit key or so, though, especially since discarding keys is so trivial (just set a TTL of 30 on the records and use dynamic DNS updates or whatever).
One time Pete Domenici, one of our senators, ordered something from the Smithsonian catalog (you know, the museum based in Washington, DC) and his order was rejected because he didn't add an international tariff.
And, I have often been on vacation, someone asks where I'm from, and when I say I'm from New Mexico they say, "Oh, really? You speak really good English!"
You mean the video the whole world saw, presented as an example of the graphics capabilities of the Gamecube, which just happened to involve characters from prior Nintendo titles.
My understanding was that Rare was developing a totally separate game called "Dinosaur Planet" or something, then a Nintendo exec saw it and told them to turn it into a Starfox game.
Keep in mind that movie playback requires a lot more disk I/O than the typical game. In my experience, playing a DVD on a laptop sucks down way more battery than playing a similar-length DivX from hard drive, which in turn sucks down way more power than playing, say, Quake, which only has to touch the disk between levels.
There is no proof that Vorbis is patent-free. "We didn't consult any implementation documents for patented algorithms" is not the same thing as "none of our algorithms are covered by a patent."
Of course, proving the patent-freeness of Vorbis requires searching every single patent with a fine-toothed comb, further indicating how messed-up the whole patent system is at this point.
I just have to wonder how many companies are waiting to pounce on the first major commercial user of Vorbis with a patent suit. (Yes, I know there are commercial users of Vorbis, but none are really big enough to attract patent litigation, especially since none of them are wedded enough to vorbis that they wouldn't be able to just drop it for mp3 support with its well-known and, IMO fairly-reasonable, license fees.)
VoIP service usually sounds at least as good as landline, given a sufficiently high-bitrate CODEC, what with broadband connections having much more bandwidth available than a cellphone which usually gets in the 24-50Kbps range to play with (depending on provider and network type and signal strength and so on).
VoIP to VoIP calls have the potential for sounding as good as the bandwidth will allow, meaning CD-quality. The nice thing about VoIP is that it allows both ends to negotiate which CODECs to use, and so if both ends support, say, mp3 or Vorbis, then you can use those CODECs. For most hardware SIP phones there's several choices as well, such as GSM, uLaw, aLaw, and iLBC.
I agree... I have a Sony Ericsson T610 (which is the same phone except it uses the more standard GSM frequencies) and although it's not a "smartphone" it does every bit of PDA functionality I need, and it syncs beautifully with my Mac via iSync (and it comes with Outlook sync software for Windows which I haven't had an opportunity to play with).
Also, the standard T-Mobile service plan for it is $40/month with 600 anytime minutes, unlimited nights (meaning 7PM-7AM IIRC) and weekends, and comes with free WAP/GPRS access which is great when I'm travelling (the caveat being that you can only access HTTP, SMTP, POP, and IMAP, and you're NATed, so its usefulness as a full-purpose Internet connection for a laptop is somewhat limited; if you want a fully-functional connection you have to pay $10/month, or $20/month if you want a public IP address for whatever reason).
As far as using the T61[06] with other sync software, it just uses the standard iRDA transfer protocols, so it should work with anything which supports that, as long as you can coerce it into going over Bluetooth instead of iRDA (or you could just get an iRDA thing for your computer or a serial data cable or whatever, but syncing wirelessly without even taking it out of my pocket is REALLY handy).
Yes, my point was an attempt at humorously pointing out that the person probably meant for *blind* users to use speaking browsers. Deaf users can use normal web browsers just fine.
Now do you mind telling this to all of the older people who keep complaining to me about the websites they're unable to read, but don't have the patience or inclination to peruse through the depths of IE's configuration dialogs?
Yeah, basically, my client went and hired a graphic designer to create the actual layout (while I was building the site), and said "all you have to do is stick his layout code into the site." Of course, what the graphic designer handed me was a low-quality JPEG which was shoved into an HTML file using Fireworks.
Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to work with, though the client (who is also insistent that the site MUST work on his Treo 600, and LOOK CORRECT even!) also hated some of my accessibility-friendly tweaks, like avoiding horizontal scroll bars whenever possible, so I still ended up needing to use a table for some of the layout. Ugh.
It's possible to do what you describe, but barring any sudden breakthroughs in large-number factorization and other such things (or someone suddenly recognizing a weakness in the md5 algorithm), it'd take as long as 539514153540300709448526457749/N years to do using a cluster of N computers (assuming you can generate and md5sum 20 candidate bogus files a second, which is wildly optimistic). So, not terribly practical just yet.
Though for a more optimistic look we can actually look at the real statistics. So, any candidate file has a 1 in 2128 chance of being the correct one, so the chances of getting a hit in N files is (1-2-128)N. Unfortunately, my TI-85 can't handle this level of precision, so actually computing this probability is left as an exercise for someone else.
Mac OS X also has built-in AES filesystem encryption (which they call FileVault) which is a must-have if you have a laptop, for precisely the reason you mentioned.
You realize that em-sizes are relative to the current font size, right? So if you set your font-size to 1em, you've just said, "Make this font the same size as this font."
But yeah, I always use relative and named sizes, never pixel or point sizes, unless I have an ornery client (like my current one) who insists that the text must be exactly 7 pixels tall, and he doesn't care what sorts of visual impairments people may have! I just roll my eyes and say, "Sure thing." Since at least he's letting me do it in CSS instead of doing it with images like he originally wanted.
Contract web development would be great if it weren't for the clients. Ugh.
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That doesn't help with the current spam situation, but it does make it so that SPF would be useful (since you can be sure that mail will only be sent from the IMAP server).
It also doesn't require much in the way of client modification, and current IMAP clients could still be used just fine since you can just save the message as a draft then move it into the outbox, or do an Fcc: to the outbox and then use a null 'black hole' SMTP server (running on localhost or whatever) to keep the SMTP portion of the email client happy.
smtpauth isn't always an option, and most DNS hosting providers don't make it terribly convenient to keep on adding and removing temporary TXT records as necessary, nor would a company's IT department be terribly happy about needing to do the same for corporate travellers.
What needs to happen instead is a domain having a public key registry (probably provided via NAPTR records; just do a NAPTR query on, for example, username.example.com and then get either NXDOMAIN or the public signature) and then signed messages. Of course, the fun thing then is the limit of the size of an NAPTR record, so it'd have to be a pretty small key. For this purpose I don't think it's necessary to have more than a 128-bit key or so, though, especially since discarding keys is so trivial (just set a TTL of 30 on the records and use dynamic DNS updates or whatever).
And, I have often been on vacation, someone asks where I'm from, and when I say I'm from New Mexico they say, "Oh, really? You speak really good English!"
You mean the video the whole world saw, presented as an example of the graphics capabilities of the Gamecube, which just happened to involve characters from prior Nintendo titles.
My understanding was that Rare was developing a totally separate game called "Dinosaur Planet" or something, then a Nintendo exec saw it and told them to turn it into a Starfox game.
Keep in mind that movie playback requires a lot more disk I/O than the typical game. In my experience, playing a DVD on a laptop sucks down way more battery than playing a similar-length DivX from hard drive, which in turn sucks down way more power than playing, say, Quake, which only has to touch the disk between levels.
Of course, proving the patent-freeness of Vorbis requires searching every single patent with a fine-toothed comb, further indicating how messed-up the whole patent system is at this point.
I just have to wonder how many companies are waiting to pounce on the first major commercial user of Vorbis with a patent suit. (Yes, I know there are commercial users of Vorbis, but none are really big enough to attract patent litigation, especially since none of them are wedded enough to vorbis that they wouldn't be able to just drop it for mp3 support with its well-known and, IMO fairly-reasonable, license fees.)
VoIP to VoIP calls have the potential for sounding as good as the bandwidth will allow, meaning CD-quality. The nice thing about VoIP is that it allows both ends to negotiate which CODECs to use, and so if both ends support, say, mp3 or Vorbis, then you can use those CODECs. For most hardware SIP phones there's several choices as well, such as GSM, uLaw, aLaw, and iLBC.
Also, the standard T-Mobile service plan for it is $40/month with 600 anytime minutes, unlimited nights (meaning 7PM-7AM IIRC) and weekends, and comes with free WAP/GPRS access which is great when I'm travelling (the caveat being that you can only access HTTP, SMTP, POP, and IMAP, and you're NATed, so its usefulness as a full-purpose Internet connection for a laptop is somewhat limited; if you want a fully-functional connection you have to pay $10/month, or $20/month if you want a public IP address for whatever reason).
As far as using the T61[06] with other sync software, it just uses the standard iRDA transfer protocols, so it should work with anything which supports that, as long as you can coerce it into going over Bluetooth instead of iRDA (or you could just get an iRDA thing for your computer or a serial data cable or whatever, but syncing wirelessly without even taking it out of my pocket is REALLY handy).
Ass.
What, you mean Quartz, the OSX display engine?
Voodoo 2s didn't have shader logic. They were very much fixed-function, and very low-precision at that.
Yes, my point was an attempt at humorously pointing out that the person probably meant for *blind* users to use speaking browsers. Deaf users can use normal web browsers just fine.
You've just reinvented kuro5hin.org. Congratulations.
Now do you mind telling this to all of the older people who keep complaining to me about the websites they're unable to read, but don't have the patience or inclination to peruse through the depths of IE's configuration dialogs?
Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to work with, though the client (who is also insistent that the site MUST work on his Treo 600, and LOOK CORRECT even!) also hated some of my accessibility-friendly tweaks, like avoiding horizontal scroll bars whenever possible, so I still ended up needing to use a table for some of the layout. Ugh.
That should read "1 in 2^128 chance," and (1-2^-128)^N.
Also, insert paragraph tags as appropriate. I really should have hit 'preview!'
It's possible to do what you describe, but barring any sudden breakthroughs in large-number factorization and other such things (or someone suddenly recognizing a weakness in the md5 algorithm), it'd take as long as 539514153540300709448526457749/N years to do using a cluster of N computers (assuming you can generate and md5sum 20 candidate bogus files a second, which is wildly optimistic). So, not terribly practical just yet. Though for a more optimistic look we can actually look at the real statistics. So, any candidate file has a 1 in 2128 chance of being the correct one, so the chances of getting a hit in N files is (1-2-128)N. Unfortunately, my TI-85 can't handle this level of precision, so actually computing this probability is left as an exercise for someone else.
Mac OS X also has built-in AES filesystem encryption (which they call FileVault) which is a must-have if you have a laptop, for precisely the reason you mentioned.
Typical that the one place where IE strictly enforces CSS would have to be the one which impairs usability...
Deaf people can use speaking browsers, but not very well.
But yeah, I always use relative and named sizes, never pixel or point sizes, unless I have an ornery client (like my current one) who insists that the text must be exactly 7 pixels tall, and he doesn't care what sorts of visual impairments people may have! I just roll my eyes and say, "Sure thing." Since at least he's letting me do it in CSS instead of doing it with images like he originally wanted.
Contract web development would be great if it weren't for the clients. Ugh.
Oops, brainfart.
The "blue book" (the book being reviewed in this article) is basically the man pages printed out.