There are a
whole bunch of webmail implementations on Freshmeat; do any of them fail to suck?
My friends who use Yahoo all also have other ISPs, including web pages, and only use Yahoo so that they can check their mail from anywhere. (They then download their Yahoo mail into a "real" mail reader via the formerly-free POP3 service, in order to archive it at home.)
It seems to me that if these folks were to install a webmail CGI on their own web pages for their private use only, they wouldn't need to use Yahoo at all to get location-independence. That's something most people would be able to do without needing root access on the HTTP server machine, assuming the ISP allows the running of CGIs at all. But there are so many packages, it's hard to guess whether any of them work, or whether any are of similar levels of usability to Yahoo's CGIs.
Any opinions?
Failing that, are there any decent "screen scrapers" that can log in to Yahoo's CGI interface and extract the HTML presentation of the messages into a Eudora/Netscape-compatible "mbox" folder?
That would be a fine substitute for their POP3 interface.
DVD-R shouldn't need anything special, cdrecord claims to support DVD-R drives
I see a lot of people saying ``it should work'' or ``I read in this README that it should work'' but I haven't seen anyone standing up and saying, ``YES, by God, I have successfully burned a DVD-R on Linux.''
Because I've been searching for someone saying that for a few years now, I still believe that it has not been done, and is not possible.
Prove me wrong, please.
ah, the noble apostrophe
on
Emigrating DVD's?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
What property or posession of the "Emigrating DVD" are we discussing again?
Contrary to the opinion of a bunch of know-nothing high school teachers and linguists, the apostrophe does, in fact, mean "Look out! Here comes an S!"
I use SmartList, which comes with
Procmail.
It's kind of a hassle to initially install (there's no smurfy GUI) but it's basic, poweful, and works without any stupidity getting in the way. User subscriptions and unsubscriptions are handled via the time-honored mechanism of mailing to list-request addresses.
The last time this came up, lots of
people recommended MailMan. As a user, I hate Mailman. So as a mailing list admin, I won't inflict it on people. Here's why:
Compare and contrast this sequence of actions:
With sane mailing list software:
Mail "unsubscribe" to "foo-request".
Get "please confirm" mail back.
Reply.
Done.
With Mailman:
Mail "unsubscribe" to "foo-request".
Get "I don't understand that" mail back.
Find the admin URL in that web page.
Load the web page.
Try to log in.
Realize you don't remember the password
it generated for you, because you haven't
ever used it even once.
Find the "mail me my password" button.
Wait for the password to arrive.
Go back to the web page.
Try to log in.
Waste some more time trying before you
realize it doesn't work without cookies.
Turn cookies back on.
Log in.
Find the unsubscribe link.
Done.
Now which was easier?
So I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists.
Though it is a pain in the ass to configure,
it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick
completely painlessly from the end user's point
of view, and not having that is a deal breaker
for me.
I understand that Mailman is trying to provide some measure of security by mailing passwords around, but mailed passwords don't work. By which I mean, they provide no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism does. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading
mail sent to the address they are subscribing.
It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the
password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.
So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.
I did this better in
webcollage years ago. But of course I
didn't call myself an Artist Collective, and
I didn't put out a press release, so no
article in the Times for me, darn. I guess
that's why webcollage is a ``hack'' rather
than an ``art project.''
I swear, one of these days I'm gonna apply
for a federal grant to hack on
xscreensaver. I've seen people get
money for
worse things. All you have to do is
swallow your sanity and gag up an
artist statement of some kind, and the
literati will take you seriously: if you cloak it in pretentiousness, the most trivial piece of eye candy can become a Serious Work, full of Insight And Meaning!
The problem with art is artists. My goal has long been to eliminate the artist from the creative process.
Could it be possible that yet-another-window-manager, just isn't a particularly
interesting project to work on any more?
We've had the pre-cambrian explosion, time for the mass extinction.
Absolutely! Now if only we could get people to stop writing IRC clients and curses-based MP3 playlist editors, we might be getting somewhere...
I haven't seen anything in a window manager that interested me since 1993. All I pray for these days is that whatever window manager that gets installed on my systems by default have the decency to put the "close" box in the same place as the last location I got used to, and that it not make me jump through too many hoops to turn off all of the keyboard equivalents that get in the way of Emacs usage.
Re:A bit of thought on the evolution of the GNOME.
on
Gnome 2.0 Alpha 1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Eazel and Ximian are the most productive GNOME companies,
By "most productive", did you mean "only"?
Is it because
the GNOMErs only know how to code in C, and not in C++. There are
several good books and web sites on C++ programming, you know.
I promise you that those of us who refuse to use C++ do not do so out of ignorance. Quite the opposite, in fact: I don't use C++ precisely because I know more about it than you.
I imagine that the password feature is an attempt to cut down on unsolicited/unintended
subscriptions and unsubscriptions. I've never been the victim of a prank unsubscription
myself, though.:)
But that's exactly my point: it doesn't work for that. By which I mean, it provides no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading mail sent to the address they are subscribing.
It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.
So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.
Realize you don't remember the password
it generated for you, because you haven't
ever used it even once.
Find the "mail me my password" button.
Wait for the password to arrive.
Go back to the web page.
Try to log in.
Waste some more time trying before you
realize it doesn't work without cookies.
Turn cookies back on.
Log in.
Find the unsubscribe link.
Done.
Now which was easier?
I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists.
It's a huge pain in the ass to configure, but
it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick
completely painlessly from the end user's point
of view, and not having that is a deal breaker
for me.
Take stuff from work.
It's the best way to feel better about your job.
Never buy pens or pencils or paper.
Take 'em from work.
Rubber bands, paper clips, memo pads, folders -- take 'em from work.
It's the best way to feel better about your low pay and appalling working conditions.
Take an ashtray -- they got plenty.
Take coat hangers.
Take a, take a trash can.
Why buy a file cabinet?
Why buy a phone?
Why buy a personal computer or word processor?
Take 'em from work.
I took a whole desk from the last place I worked.
They never noticed, and it looks great in my apartment.
Take an electric pencil sharpener.
Take a case of white-out; you might need it one day.
Take some from work.
It's your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your exploiters.
It's gonna be an outstanding day.
Take stuff from work.
And goof off on the company time.
I wrote this at work.
They're paying me to write about stuff I steal from them.
Life is good.
bars that take cash only are a relic of days
gone by
Since I own a bar that only takes cash, I think I'm qualified to tell you that you're wrong.
The reason most bars only take cash is because we make more money that way. Credit cards slow down the bartender a lot: not only do they have to ring it in, but they have to get a signature. Good bartenders will parallel-process to get around this, but it still takes time. The faster our bartenders, the more drinks we serve, and the more money we make. Plus, the credit card company charges a fee for using credit cards. If you run a tab, where you hold on to the customer's card until the end of the night, the situation is somewhat better, but still not as good as cash: there's a lot more to keep track of, and a lot more potential for fraud. Plus, people tip less when they are paying by credit card, so both the bar and the bartenders make less money.
We take cash only, and have an ATM inside, right next to the bar. People are welcome to get cash advances on their credit cards before giving us cash for the drinks.
I'm pretty sure there aren't laws against possessing drugs on a federal level. That would be
unconstitutional. As for state laws on possessing drugs, some states have very light
non-criminal penalties, [...]
The trick is that they treat posession of any non-trivial amount of a drug as evidence that you were planning on selling it: so even though you're only guilty of posession, they charge you with dealing.
We really need crypto to be easier to use, if we want to combat routine, unnecessary, unaccountable, and and secret privacy violations.
Today, I briefly considered how I could make
so that when two of my machines happened to be exchanging mail with each other, they would do so through a crypto tunnel (at the transport level, not the message-body level), but after looking at the
documentation, I realized that it would take me at least a week or two to get it working, if I'm lucky. And I just don't have the time.
The only way crypto is going to get used is if it's on by default.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to name a piece of software with a smiley should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch sitcoms for the rest of their life.
"The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it
doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley
teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is
punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better
judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent."
-- Jim Showalter
"...the hateful:) which means 'just kidding' and is used by people who
would dot their i's with little circles and should have their eyes
dotted with Drano."
-- Penn Jillette
"I cringe when I see them. On the other hand, smileys might be a
real help for today's students, raised on TV and unskilled at spotting
irony without a laugh track."
-- Roger Ebert
What if everyone had access to those
cameras? For example, what if they were
broadcast on extra channels on the cable TV
system inside the building (this is trivially
easy to do, it's a $10 part.)
The thing that people find disturbing about surveilance is not that they are being watched, but that they are being watched by some authority who is not accountable.
It's about disparity of power.
If everybody can see, then nobody cares. You can easily observe this by the care-free way people walk down the street, and eat in public restaurants. When you are all on equal footing, lack of privacy is not a big deal. It's just called ``being out in public.''
David Brin wrote an interesting book about
this called The Transparent Society, which was based on an article he wrote in
Wired a few years ago.
But collision of domains would be disastrous. It amounts to taking control of
the internet from ICANN and giving it to AOL. AOL could easily decide to
point microsoft.com somewhere else. Stink.
I frequently see TV commercials that say at the end something like, ``visit us on the web at www.foobar.com. AOL keyword: foobar.''
I note that the world has not ended.
Disclaimer: I've never used AOL, so I don't really know what these ``keywords'' are, but I can guess.
How these licenses actually work
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 3
I wrote up a document about how the laws apply to webcasting that should shed some light on what's going on here:
As I understand it, the basis of RIAA's suit is that even though Launch is paying for "statutory" (or "manditory") licenses, those licenses don't allow them to offer any level of "interactivity". "Interactivity" is legalese for
"customization". That is, listeners aren't allowed to request songs, or hit "fast forward" or "rewind".
So what this suit means is that RIAA is now claiming that any kind of rating system constitutes interactivity, and is thus not permitted under statutory/manditory licenses.
The way LaunchCast works, their rating system really amounts to picking a genre of music: it's absolutely not the kind of thing you could use to tell the system to play a song on demand, which is the boogyman that is the basis for the statutory license rules.
So they're saying now that Launch needs "negotiated" licenses to do what they do. But this means that they won't be able to do it at all, because RIAA is under no obligation to give anyone a "negotiated" license at all.
President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible
trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations have
been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow
and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on
the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few
hands . . . and the republic is destroyed." [...]
Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades
(and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the
course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific
Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed
that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US
Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of
Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty
previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free
speech.
This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as
private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources,
corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private
citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more
vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a
single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution --
that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public
debates -- had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it
"could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great
legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of
democratic government.
So by virtue of this VC being Bush's advisor, all the corporate ``persons'' his company funded get to have lunch with the president every day.
But non-billionaire ``persons'' made of flesh and blood will never be heard.
These problems are not really new to the web -- they are present just as
much in print media too. For example, you only know how many magazines
you've sold, not how many people have read them. In print media we have
learnt to live with these issues, using the data which are available, and it
would be better if we did on the web too, rather than making up spurious
numbers."
But I'm told by people in the magazine business that the industry standard there is to assume that the number of readers is 5x the number of issues sold. Of course that will vary widely by magazine: but that's the ratio they all use when making readership claims in their rate cards.
This is exactly the question the original poster was asking, but for the web: everybody knows that getting an exact answer is impossible, he's just looking for a rule of thumb.
Sadly, that nightclub ended up going with an NT-based solution becaus the Linux POS
market was so barren.
Hell no: the DNA Lounge is a No Microsoft Zone, and will stay that way.
Because the Linux POS market is so barren, we ended up going with plain-old cash registers, no network, no OS to speak of: just buttons and LEDs.
Perhaps we'll upgrade someday when something better comes along that isn't prohibitively expensive.
Finally, someone appearing on a "streamed" event has had clue enough to say, "Um, can
the people interested in me actually see this?"
If he was interested in whether the people interested in seeing it actually could, then it would be a no-brainer: he would use RealVideo.
Because almost all people using GNU software are running Linux (and most of the rest are running Solaris) and those people have free-as-in-beer RealPlayers easily available to them.
But he's not interested in whether his target audience can see him.
He's interested in using this as an opportunity to make a political statement.
Which is fine.
But call it what it is. It's certainly not the pragmatic decision that you characterized it as.
There is no reason to use proprietary software to send out an audio-only stream.
Icecast is all you need.
Video is a different matter: for Video, you get to choose between: RealVideo (cross-platform, but very, very expensive); Microsoft (Windows-only, but "free"); and QuickTime (Windows and Mac only, but "free".)
Slashdot Mirror
There are a whole bunch of webmail implementations on Freshmeat; do any of them fail to suck?
My friends who use Yahoo all also have other ISPs, including web pages, and only use Yahoo so that they can check their mail from anywhere. (They then download their Yahoo mail into a "real" mail reader via the formerly-free POP3 service, in order to archive it at home.)
It seems to me that if these folks were to install a webmail CGI on their own web pages for their private use only, they wouldn't need to use Yahoo at all to get location-independence. That's something most people would be able to do without needing root access on the HTTP server machine, assuming the ISP allows the running of CGIs at all. But there are so many packages, it's hard to guess whether any of them work, or whether any are of similar levels of usability to Yahoo's CGIs.
Any opinions?
Failing that, are there any decent "screen scrapers" that can log in to Yahoo's CGI interface and extract the HTML presentation of the messages into a Eudora/Netscape-compatible "mbox" folder? That would be a fine substitute for their POP3 interface.
I see a lot of people saying ``it should work'' or ``I read in this README that it should work'' but I haven't seen anyone standing up and saying, ``YES, by God, I have successfully burned a DVD-R on Linux.''
Because I've been searching for someone saying that for a few years now, I still believe that it has not been done, and is not possible.
Prove me wrong, please.
What property or posession of the "Emigrating DVD" are we discussing again?
Contrary to the opinion of a bunch of know-nothing high school teachers and linguists, the apostrophe does, in fact, mean "Look out! Here comes an S!"
I use SmartList, which comes with Procmail. It's kind of a hassle to initially install (there's no smurfy GUI) but it's basic, poweful, and works without any stupidity getting in the way. User subscriptions and unsubscriptions are handled via the time-honored mechanism of mailing to list-request addresses.
The last time this came up, lots of people recommended MailMan. As a user, I hate Mailman. So as a mailing list admin, I won't inflict it on people. Here's why:
Compare and contrast this sequence of actions:
With sane mailing list software:
With Mailman:
Now which was easier?
So I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists. Though it is a pain in the ass to configure, it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick completely painlessly from the end user's point of view, and not having that is a deal breaker for me.
I understand that Mailman is trying to provide some measure of security by mailing passwords around, but mailed passwords don't work. By which I mean, they provide no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism does. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading mail sent to the address they are subscribing.
It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.
So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.
I did this better in webcollage years ago. But of course I didn't call myself an Artist Collective, and I didn't put out a press release, so no article in the Times for me, darn. I guess that's why webcollage is a ``hack'' rather than an ``art project.''
I swear, one of these days I'm gonna apply for a federal grant to hack on xscreensaver . I've seen people get money for worse things . All you have to do is swallow your sanity and gag up an artist statement of some kind, and the literati will take you seriously: if you cloak it in pretentiousness, the most trivial piece of eye candy can become a Serious Work, full of Insight And Meaning!
The problem with art is artists. My goal has long been to eliminate the artist from the creative process.
Absolutely! Now if only we could get people to stop writing IRC clients and curses-based MP3 playlist editors, we might be getting somewhere...
I haven't seen anything in a window manager that interested me since 1993. All I pray for these days is that whatever window manager that gets installed on my systems by default have the decency to put the "close" box in the same place as the last location I got used to, and that it not make me jump through too many hoops to turn off all of the keyboard equivalents that get in the way of Emacs usage.
By "most productive", did you mean "only"?
I promise you that those of us who refuse to use C++ do not do so out of ignorance. Quite the opposite, in fact: I don't use C++ precisely because I know more about it than you.
But that's exactly my point: it doesn't work for that. By which I mean, it provides no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading mail sent to the address they are subscribing.
It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.
So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.
As a user, I hate Mailman.
Compare and contrast this sequence of actions:
With sane mailing list software:
With Mailman:
Now which was easier?
I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists. It's a huge pain in the ass to configure, but it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick completely painlessly from the end user's point of view, and not having that is a deal breaker for me.
In the immortal words of King Missle:
Since I own a bar that only takes cash, I think I'm qualified to tell you that you're wrong.
The reason most bars only take cash is because we make more money that way. Credit cards slow down the bartender a lot: not only do they have to ring it in, but they have to get a signature. Good bartenders will parallel-process to get around this, but it still takes time. The faster our bartenders, the more drinks we serve, and the more money we make. Plus, the credit card company charges a fee for using credit cards. If you run a tab, where you hold on to the customer's card until the end of the night, the situation is somewhat better, but still not as good as cash: there's a lot more to keep track of, and a lot more potential for fraud. Plus, people tip less when they are paying by credit card, so both the bar and the bartenders make less money.
We take cash only, and have an ATM inside, right next to the bar. People are welcome to get cash advances on their credit cards before giving us cash for the drinks.
The trick is that they treat posession of any non-trivial amount of a drug as evidence that you were planning on selling it: so even though you're only guilty of posession, they charge you with dealing.
Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school.
We really need crypto to be easier to use, if we want to combat routine, unnecessary, unaccountable, and and secret privacy violations.
Today, I briefly considered how I could make so that when two of my machines happened to be exchanging mail with each other, they would do so through a crypto tunnel (at the transport level, not the message-body level), but after looking at the documentation, I realized that it would take me at least a week or two to get it working, if I'm lucky. And I just don't have the time.
The only way crypto is going to get used is if it's on by default.
We are so not there yet.
The solution to that is straightforward: before writing -- learn how.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to name a piece of software with a smiley should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch sitcoms for the rest of their life.
What if everyone had access to those cameras? For example, what if they were broadcast on extra channels on the cable TV system inside the building (this is trivially easy to do, it's a $10 part.)
The thing that people find disturbing about surveilance is not that they are being watched, but that they are being watched by some authority who is not accountable.
It's about disparity of power.
If everybody can see, then nobody cares. You can easily observe this by the care-free way people walk down the street, and eat in public restaurants. When you are all on equal footing, lack of privacy is not a big deal. It's just called ``being out in public.''
David Brin wrote an interesting book about this called The Transparent Society, which was based on an article he wrote in Wired a few years ago.
Well now that we know where it is, we can consult Map-a-Blast!
I frequently see TV commercials that say at the end something like, ``visit us on the web at www.foobar.com. AOL keyword: foobar.''
I note that the world has not ended.
Disclaimer: I've never used AOL, so I don't really know what these ``keywords'' are, but I can guess.
I wrote up a document about how the laws apply to webcasting that should shed some light on what's going on here:
As I understand it, the basis of RIAA's suit is that even though Launch is paying for "statutory" (or "manditory") licenses, those licenses don't allow them to offer any level of "interactivity". "Interactivity" is legalese for "customization". That is, listeners aren't allowed to request songs, or hit "fast forward" or "rewind".
So what this suit means is that RIAA is now claiming that any kind of rating system constitutes interactivity, and is thus not permitted under statutory/manditory licenses.
The way LaunchCast works, their rating system really amounts to picking a genre of music: it's absolutely not the kind of thing you could use to tell the system to play a song on demand, which is the boogyman that is the basis for the statutory license rules.
So they're saying now that Launch needs "negotiated" licenses to do what they do. But this means that they won't be able to do it at all, because RIAA is under no obligation to give anyone a "negotiated" license at all.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn.
Yes, corporations are people, just like you and me! From Adbusters' history of the corporation :
So by virtue of this VC being Bush's advisor, all the corporate ``persons'' his company funded get to have lunch with the president every day. But non-billionaire ``persons'' made of flesh and blood will never be heard.
"`I have great access,' said Kvamme."
But I'm told by people in the magazine business that the industry standard there is to assume that the number of readers is 5x the number of issues sold. Of course that will vary widely by magazine: but that's the ratio they all use when making readership claims in their rate cards.
This is exactly the question the original poster was asking, but for the web: everybody knows that getting an exact answer is impossible, he's just looking for a rule of thumb.
Hell no: the DNA Lounge is a No Microsoft Zone, and will stay that way. Because the Linux POS market is so barren, we ended up going with plain-old cash registers, no network, no OS to speak of: just buttons and LEDs. Perhaps we'll upgrade someday when something better comes along that isn't prohibitively expensive.
Actually, we found the lighting controller. It wasn't stolen, just misplaced...
If he was interested in whether the people interested in seeing it actually could, then it would be a no-brainer: he would use RealVideo. Because almost all people using GNU software are running Linux (and most of the rest are running Solaris) and those people have free-as-in-beer RealPlayers easily available to them.
But he's not interested in whether his target audience can see him.
He's interested in using this as an opportunity to make a political statement.
Which is fine.
But call it what it is. It's certainly not the pragmatic decision that you characterized it as.
There is no reason to use proprietary software to send out an audio-only stream. Icecast is all you need.
Video is a different matter: for Video, you get to choose between: RealVideo (cross-platform, but very, very expensive); Microsoft (Windows-only, but "free"); and QuickTime (Windows and Mac only, but "free".)