In fact, a much more reasonable way to reward him would be to make his salary commensurate with the homeless guy shaking a cup in the street outside his shops.
It must sadden you that moving to Moscow will no longer satisfy your communist dreams.
Whatever. Come to the Bay Area and I'll introduce you to 80, 280, 680, and 880. 580 isn't so bad.
Yeah, but the point is you guys have BART, and we have a big pile of shit. And I've driven your freeways, I'll take them any day over LA. The 580 is better than "not bad," it's a dream compared to anything we have.
My experience has been the same. I don't recall getting any calls other than from non-profit organizations in quite some time now. And 429,000 complaints in 62,000,000 registered numbers is a mere 0.69%.... I'd say that's a pretty low noise ratio for the first run of this thing.
I'm on the list, and I get just as many calls as ever. But they're not selling things now, they're just doing surveys, which are allowed by the damned law. Why they are exempted I have no idea - all they're doing is using people for free labor.
Maybe we need a better / more effective / less easily confused way to talk about the "freedom" aspect. I'd be interested in constructive discussion of this. But there is a logical flaw in ESR's argument here. It's wrong to conclude that using the term "free software" is a bad idea just because MS tries to muddy the waters. MS may or may not succeed in making our current way of communicating the freedom aspect of Free Software less effective, but this is certainly not a reason to stop talking about "Free Foftware". Quite on the contrary, if after all their studying Microsoft is now trying to discredit the "freedom thing", isn't that an indication that emphasis on the freedom aspect is important, and should be increased rather than diminished!
I don't think so.
1) 99% of corporate linux users could care less if they can ever see the code, and fewer still care if they could release changes. In other words, hardly anyone outside the community cares about the freedom. And how many of these people aren't *already* using linux, BSD, or something similar?
2) If MS can make linux advocates defend what they say and spend time clarifying what should have been clear originally, that's time they spend NOT answering questions about Sasser. That's a victory for them. So yes, if MS successfully muddies the waters, it's a reason to use another term, though not for abandoning the topic.
3) ESR didn't suggest we not talk about the freedom aspect, just that we use a clearer term. He's right.
4) MS isn't trying to discredit the "freedom thing." Hell, their "Shared Source" crap admits that some people will find "freedom" useful. Rather, they're using the ambiguity to suggest that Linux advocates are deceptive, by intentionally presuming that when we say free(libre) we're actually saying free(gratis).
5) Freedom arguments should be largely abandoned toward typical corporate and government targets, and reserved for those who would actually want to change the code anyway - and I suspect these people would know the difference between "libre" and "gratis" forms of free already.
Ultimately, would we rather spend time on the defensive, re-educating people who were confused by a poorly-chosen term, or would we rather spend that time nailing MS on TCO from stuff like worms and the myriad security holes in IE and WMP that yield root access? Not to mention critical holes that go unpatched for months.
'A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers,'
And quite frankly they're right. Additionally, it's not in the FTC's jusrisdiction, I don't believe, to change the SMTP protocol. As such, they do not have the ability to actually solve the problem.
Given the degree to which the FTC fought for the Do-not-call registry, I think they deserve more credit than Michael's snide editorial remarks. They also deserve credit for having the courage to admit that they can't solve the problem under the current situation and providing a damned good reason why, as well as leaving bad enough alone and not doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Sometimes, inaction is the best course, and it takes maturity to realize it.
Right now, setting up a do-not-email registry would be as smart as responding to the "Please remove me" addresses. In short, it would be absolutely stupid.
Again, that's not a problem. If you mail yourself a page from an encyclopedia with no spam then it shouldn't be flagged as spam.
Then your filter isn't so attuned to your ham as you think. You claimed that your filter knows your email so well that an incoming email doesn't just have to be neutral, but downright good. If you can email yourself an encyclopedia entry from a new, neutral account, that's not the case. At that point, you're not recognizing ham, because you can't. You're recognizing spam, and will be hampered somewhat by dilution.
The use of random words may prolong your training period somewhat, but it's going to have almost no effect on a more typical user of email. Certainly, the use of random words cannot achieve the spammers' ultimate goal of defeating Bayesian or making it worthless.
If I'm having 80% failure on encyclopedia attacks after 2 months, that's getting cose to worthless.
An unknown ham will look like noise, and pure noise shouldn't be filtered by Bayesian--only spam.
That's contrary to what you stated earlier, and is precisely what I originally claimed. But if you start down that road, then dilution does become a problem - spams don't have to look like your ham, simply like noise, as your filter has to let noise through since it can't tell ham from noise.
Just because you have lots of different types of ham doesn't mean it's any harder for Bayesian to identify it. In the end, it's a simple game of statistics. And it's a game that works very well. One ham doesn't have to look like all the other ham, it just has to look different than spam.
Au contraire, given the way Bayes' rule works, a posteriori probabilities are intimately related to the statical variance.
P(spam|X) = P(X|spam)P(spam)/(P(X|spam)P(spam) + P(X|ham)P(ham)) is the adapted Bayes rule as it works with spam, where P refers to conditional or overall probabilities, and X is a given mail signature. For high-variance ham, the problematic term is P(X|ham), which will result in little difference between noise and ham. Put it this way - if you can email yourself a page from an encyclopedia (without spam) and it isn't flagged as spam, then your filter can't tell ham from noise.
For the math above, particularly for highly dimensional spaces (like the many descriptors adapted to email signatures using filters) with few samples, Bayes can have issues. Basically, the fewer samples and more dimensions and greater variance per dimension, the coarser the space must inherently be to derive useful statistics. Look at it this way - to get a description of the probability of getting spam signature X from either ham or spam, we have to map the total space spanned by the mails. If we have 10 descriptors, and each is even binary, and we need at least 10 datapoints per cell to get statistics, that means we need at least 10,000 messages. That should give some idea of the problem. Less variance makes the space more dense and inherently more manageable. Duda and Hart's book "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis" gives a better description than I can, particularly the treatment on Parzen windows and other methods of dealing with the so-called "curse of dimensionality" with Bayesian models.
I agree with you, you probably just don't have a finely-tuned Bayesian filter yet. But that's not an inherent flaw in Bayesian, it's just a matter of being patient. If you keep with it Bayesian is going to work great for you--the dilution tactics might just mean that you have to be patient in training your Bayesian filter longer than was necessary a year ago. The end result will be the same, though.
I agree - the only thing is, at this point last time - before the "encyclopedia" crap started - I had much more success. My old database was about the size of yours, and worked well. But the thing is, on the type of spam I got with that one, my current one works fine, so who knows. Time will tell.
Also, while you are training the Bayesian filter, alternative filters are definitely a plus. In the filter I developed and use (see sig line), the user has the option of enabling common keyword filters that has an updated list of known spam phrases, domains, etc. This helps detect spam while the Bayesian filter is still getting up to speed. Such standard filters are a very important part of helping tune the Bayesian filter initially without having to depend entirely on the user. Once the Bayesian filter is trained, the archaeic keyword filters can be disabled. At this point I don't use the keyword filters at all--I depend entirely on Bayesian.
That's the winning strategy. Personally, since I'm curious, I like to see the dropoff as it learns, but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for common practice.;)
The challenge for spammers is exactly what Graham said: They need to make their messages look like what your "good" messages look like.
The question is, is your filter identifying ham or spam? Also, what does a "good" message look like? If one has a diversity of "ham" relative to its population size, then it's hard to characterize them. At that point, the task of identifying spam is almost solely based on the characteristics of the spam, as ham can look like anything. If it's a reasonable assumption that ham is ill-defined, then masking can go a long way to getting spam through.
On an emprical level, we have two observations: 1) your Bayesian filter is working fine with "encyclopedia" spams, and 2) mine isn't. I've been training mine for 2 months, and it catches 100% of word salads, and maybe 20% of "encyclopedia" spams. That's a real problem.
I think 2 months training should certainly be enough. The question is, why is it not working, because it's clear that it's not. We'll probably agree that the root cause is that your database is older, broader, and better characterized. I would guess that this allows your ham to be better characterized, while mine is more fuzzy. In other words, my filter may be partially handicapped compared to yours.
From a mathematical standpoint, my ham database is likely a sparse space, which causes myriad problems with such calculations. Even then, it's only the new techniques that are causing problems.
In short, it shouldn't take so long to effectively train a filter. And for young filters that inherently have to separate the spam from the noise rather than the ham, this is a significant problem indeed as dilution really is a problem in such instances. I do agree that, if your filter is working with such well-defined ham, that dilution won't work, because it can separate ham from neutral, meaning that having neutral looking spam won't work. Since my filter can't, it does work.
I've seen excerpts from books, the Constitution, etc. I haven't had a message like that get past my filter ever, as far as I know.
Perhaps my Thbird filter is just too new - my old Mozilla database was huge, but I started over a few months ago.
It doesn't matter if the encyclopedia entry "dominates" the spam text. If the spam is spammy and the encyclopedia text is "neutral" (which it will be unless the spammer gets lucky and picks a topic you often discuss) then all the neutral words in the world aren't going to compensate for a few good spammy words.
Not so sure about that. If a spam consisted of the words "Buy my viagra," that would be a spam. If those three words were interspersed through an article, I highly doubt it would be tagged as spam. So dilution should be a factor. I don't know exactly how Thbird implements it, but in standard Bayes theory, this is a problem.
It's not enough to be "neutral" you have to be downright good.
Only if you have the threshold on your filter cranked down pretty far.
Unless they can send a messager with headers that are close to what my friends' mails' have, unless they know my friends' names, unless they know the topics I often discuss, they're just not going to be able to break through my Bayesian filter by "swamping" it with neutral text. It just doesn't make a difference.
Then you've implemented your filter to approximate a whitelist, while most people implement theirs to be more like a blacklist. Particularly for those of us who need to be reachable by people who have never emailed us before, cranking down the level that far isn't an option. As such, neutral things have to be classified more as ham than spam.
Except that won't work, as anyone that understands Bayesian filtering will tell you. In the case of every message with "random words" I've checked recently, the random words actually increased the spam score of that message. Why? Because it seems the random words aren't so random and either the same spammer is using the same "random words" over and over or various spammers are using sets of the same words. Over time most of the "random words" they use actually become great indicators of spam since my real email doesn't typically contain the random words they use.
Right, and my Thunderbird Bayesian filter catches all of those word salad approaches. But they've come up with a new one - what I call the "encyclopedia attack."
What they do is copy an encyclopedia entry and put it at the bottom of their spam. The thing is usually a few paragraphs long, so that textually it dominates the message. The subjects are fairly random, and are occasionally educational;)
The problem is that the text of this doesn't trip the "too many strange words" flag that's used for word salads. My Thunderbird filter is really having trouble with these. Anyone else having trouble with these spams?
because it had just one Vacuum Tube. That's why Asimov had to develop Multivac.
Yessir, the mods are extra stupid today. One vacuum tube? Christ, you fucking cretins.
Is it time yet for/. to admit the metamod system DOESN'T WORK and that mod points only go to people with fairly new accounts? And morons like the those who modded this guy's joke insightful?
Well, those who have been paying attention know that Linux has had quite a few (read: way too many) critical bugs in the past year.
First off, I'll go ahead and agree with that statement! This could be nothing more than a greater amount of attention being paid Linux every year - or it could be that the increasing commercialization of linux is taking it away from its more stable roots. Either way, it's disconcerting.
Windows kernel had in the last 12 months? I am afraid that this comparison might fall out to the advantage of Windows.
It's hard to compare - studies I've seen (can't remember where, or I'd link) suggests that the overall bug rate in the two codebases is similar, but that linux generally tends to pay more attention to critical areas (this exploit notwithstanding).
Until you take into account time to fix, maybe
Now that's part of the critical bit. Not to mention which the Windows platform has a number of bugs that can be inflicted 1) remotely, and 2) without user access. Because windows does such a poor job protecting resources at the port level, it means that no human intervention is in any way required to propagate an exploit. Thus, while kiddies may attack individual linux machines, they can release exploits that can ultimately affect an unlimited number of windows machines. That's the real problem, the exponential nature of windows exploits.
It's not easy to change, because it's only supposed to be changed once, maybe twice. Either you like spatial, or you don't. Set it up right, and forget about the setting.
I doubt that - as has been pointed out ad nauseum, it's good for shallow directory structures and hell for deep ones. But that means that there is a large camp that will want it sometimes but not all times. That's why Mac has both (plus an excellent frame-based version), and it's trivial to switch back and forth.
Also, since the way to change is extremely poorly documented (I expect intentionally), many new users - including (but not limited to!) the noobs that gnome is supposedly cultivating - won't know how to change it.
I think it should be prominently displayed, as even people who like spatial will need the tree version sometimes. Failing that, it should be in a preferences tab somewhere, even if it's not on the main tab.
For a modern desktop environment, if someone needs to use an external utility to change the features of a program, you as a developer have FAILED.
I just want to know why anyone even cares what the default on Nautilus is.
The point isn't so much what the default is, but rather that it's damned near impossible to change. You have one camp who says "I hate this new feature, and lots of other people do to - it should be easy to change back." You have another camp who thinks that they know best, and that it should be damned near impossible to do things other than the way they believe they should be done. Thanks guys.
And just as the article states, your clutter argument is crack. Middle click or shift-click will close the parent window while opening the new, so there is absolutely no reason for your desktop to be cluttered other than you being unaware of the feature. Now that you are, that argument is invalid.;-)
And you just lost most users, because we don't want to use modified click commands for something that should be default behavior.
I bet most of the people on slashdot are aware of the constant problems with IE/Windows. Maybe if Microsloth got smart, they would include a popup with minesweeper and Solitaire that would check their systems for vulnerabilities while they were playing the game. If it automatically patched their systems, GREAT.
I'm assuming having your vulnerabilities fixed would be the prize for winning the game?;)
It has been pointed out a couple of times on Groklaw that it is not in the interests of either IBM or the Linux community to snow The SCO Group under with paperwork.
Thank you, I'm getting sick of people who don't see that for legitimizing the stall tactics SCO is already attempting (trial date of 9/2005? Even they know they won't be around then).
Does anyone know the status of IBM's motion from late May (it was either a motion to dismiss or something similar)? Any idea when that's expected for a ruling?
I am sure that Windows is no harder to administer than Unix. But I have fifteen years of Unix adminning experience, and zero Windows experience. To people who grew up on PC-DOS and Wintel, it is as intuitive for them as dd is to me.
I applaud you giving them the benefit of the doubt...but no. Setting up LANs, firewalls and such - as a client - is harder for me on Win XP than for *nix, and I have 12 years Windows experience and 3 years *nix experience.
As has been pointed out by others, windows now ends up scattering all the important utilities needed to modify, say, a network client all over the place. Some are under subscreens of the administrator tools, some are under subscreens of network neighborhood, some are God knows where. And that's just an example.
Slashdot Mirror
It must sadden you that moving to Moscow will no longer satisfy your communist dreams.
Then the CEO of McDonalds would make less than his lawyers. Let's think this through.
Yeah, but the point is you guys have BART, and we have a big pile of shit. And I've driven your freeways, I'll take them any day over LA. The 580 is better than "not bad," it's a dream compared to anything we have.
Psssh. Come out here, I'll introduce you to the 405. If the gangbangers don't kill you, the soccer moms surely will.
I'm on the list, and I get just as many calls as ever. But they're not selling things now, they're just doing surveys, which are allowed by the damned law. Why they are exempted I have no idea - all they're doing is using people for free labor.
I don't think so.
1) 99% of corporate linux users could care less if they can ever see the code, and fewer still care if they could release changes. In other words, hardly anyone outside the community cares about the freedom. And how many of these people aren't *already* using linux, BSD, or something similar?
2) If MS can make linux advocates defend what they say and spend time clarifying what should have been clear originally, that's time they spend NOT answering questions about Sasser. That's a victory for them. So yes, if MS successfully muddies the waters, it's a reason to use another term, though not for abandoning the topic.
3) ESR didn't suggest we not talk about the freedom aspect, just that we use a clearer term. He's right.
4) MS isn't trying to discredit the "freedom thing." Hell, their "Shared Source" crap admits that some people will find "freedom" useful. Rather, they're using the ambiguity to suggest that Linux advocates are deceptive, by intentionally presuming that when we say free(libre) we're actually saying free(gratis).
5) Freedom arguments should be largely abandoned toward typical corporate and government targets, and reserved for those who would actually want to change the code anyway - and I suspect these people would know the difference between "libre" and "gratis" forms of free already.
Ultimately, would we rather spend time on the defensive, re-educating people who were confused by a poorly-chosen term, or would we rather spend that time nailing MS on TCO from stuff like worms and the myriad security holes in IE and WMP that yield root access? Not to mention critical holes that go unpatched for months.
No, that's what we Americans call "French Software"
Are we talking invites or emails? I sent a plain email from my gmail account to yahoo, and it got there fine.
No, Michael, it's not. What they said was
And quite frankly they're right. Additionally, it's not in the FTC's jusrisdiction, I don't believe, to change the SMTP protocol. As such, they do not have the ability to actually solve the problem.
Given the degree to which the FTC fought for the Do-not-call registry, I think they deserve more credit than Michael's snide editorial remarks. They also deserve credit for having the courage to admit that they can't solve the problem under the current situation and providing a damned good reason why, as well as leaving bad enough alone and not doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Sometimes, inaction is the best course, and it takes maturity to realize it.
Right now, setting up a do-not-email registry would be as smart as responding to the "Please remove me" addresses. In short, it would be absolutely stupid.
So let's leave the FTC alone, shall we?
Then your filter isn't so attuned to your ham as you think. You claimed that your filter knows your email so well that an incoming email doesn't just have to be neutral, but downright good. If you can email yourself an encyclopedia entry from a new, neutral account, that's not the case. At that point, you're not recognizing ham, because you can't. You're recognizing spam, and will be hampered somewhat by dilution.
The use of random words may prolong your training period somewhat, but it's going to have almost no effect on a more typical user of email. Certainly, the use of random words cannot achieve the spammers' ultimate goal of defeating Bayesian or making it worthless.
If I'm having 80% failure on encyclopedia attacks after 2 months, that's getting cose to worthless.
An unknown ham will look like noise, and pure noise shouldn't be filtered by Bayesian--only spam.
That's contrary to what you stated earlier, and is precisely what I originally claimed. But if you start down that road, then dilution does become a problem - spams don't have to look like your ham, simply like noise, as your filter has to let noise through since it can't tell ham from noise.
Au contraire, given the way Bayes' rule works, a posteriori probabilities are intimately related to the statical variance.
P(spam|X) = P(X|spam)P(spam)/(P(X|spam)P(spam) + P(X|ham)P(ham)) is the adapted Bayes rule as it works with spam, where P refers to conditional or overall probabilities, and X is a given mail signature. For high-variance ham, the problematic term is P(X|ham), which will result in little difference between noise and ham. Put it this way - if you can email yourself a page from an encyclopedia (without spam) and it isn't flagged as spam, then your filter can't tell ham from noise.
For the math above, particularly for highly dimensional spaces (like the many descriptors adapted to email signatures using filters) with few samples, Bayes can have issues. Basically, the fewer samples and more dimensions and greater variance per dimension, the coarser the space must inherently be to derive useful statistics. Look at it this way - to get a description of the probability of getting spam signature X from either ham or spam, we have to map the total space spanned by the mails. If we have 10 descriptors, and each is even binary, and we need at least 10 datapoints per cell to get statistics, that means we need at least 10,000 messages. That should give some idea of the problem. Less variance makes the space more dense and inherently more manageable. Duda and Hart's book "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis" gives a better description than I can, particularly the treatment on Parzen windows and other methods of dealing with the so-called "curse of dimensionality" with Bayesian models.
I agree with you, you probably just don't have a finely-tuned Bayesian filter yet. But that's not an inherent flaw in Bayesian, it's just a matter of being patient. If you keep with it Bayesian is going to work great for you--the dilution tactics might just mean that you have to be patient in training your Bayesian filter longer than was necessary a year ago. The end result will be the same, though.
I agree - the only thing is, at this point last time - before the "encyclopedia" crap started - I had much more success. My old database was about the size of yours, and worked well. But the thing is, on the type of spam I got with that one, my current one works fine, so who knows. Time will tell.
Also, while you are training the Bayesian filter, alternative filters are definitely a plus. In the filter I developed and use (see sig line), the user has the option of enabling common keyword filters that has an updated list of known spam phrases, domains, etc. This helps detect spam while the Bayesian filter is still getting up to speed. Such standard filters are a very important part of helping tune the Bayesian filter initially without having to depend entirely on the user. Once the Bayesian filter is trained, the archaeic keyword filters can be disabled. At this point I don't use the keyword filters at all--I depend entirely on Bayesian.
That's the winning strategy. Personally, since I'm curious, I like to see the dropoff as it learns, but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for common practice. ;)
The question is, is your filter identifying ham or spam? Also, what does a "good" message look like? If one has a diversity of "ham" relative to its population size, then it's hard to characterize them. At that point, the task of identifying spam is almost solely based on the characteristics of the spam, as ham can look like anything. If it's a reasonable assumption that ham is ill-defined, then masking can go a long way to getting spam through.
On an emprical level, we have two observations: 1) your Bayesian filter is working fine with "encyclopedia" spams, and 2) mine isn't. I've been training mine for 2 months, and it catches 100% of word salads, and maybe 20% of "encyclopedia" spams. That's a real problem.
I think 2 months training should certainly be enough. The question is, why is it not working, because it's clear that it's not. We'll probably agree that the root cause is that your database is older, broader, and better characterized. I would guess that this allows your ham to be better characterized, while mine is more fuzzy. In other words, my filter may be partially handicapped compared to yours.
From a mathematical standpoint, my ham database is likely a sparse space, which causes myriad problems with such calculations. Even then, it's only the new techniques that are causing problems.
In short, it shouldn't take so long to effectively train a filter. And for young filters that inherently have to separate the spam from the noise rather than the ham, this is a significant problem indeed as dilution really is a problem in such instances. I do agree that, if your filter is working with such well-defined ham, that dilution won't work, because it can separate ham from neutral, meaning that having neutral looking spam won't work. Since my filter can't, it does work.
Perhaps my Thbird filter is just too new - my old Mozilla database was huge, but I started over a few months ago.
It doesn't matter if the encyclopedia entry "dominates" the spam text. If the spam is spammy and the encyclopedia text is "neutral" (which it will be unless the spammer gets lucky and picks a topic you often discuss) then all the neutral words in the world aren't going to compensate for a few good spammy words.
Not so sure about that. If a spam consisted of the words "Buy my viagra," that would be a spam. If those three words were interspersed through an article, I highly doubt it would be tagged as spam. So dilution should be a factor. I don't know exactly how Thbird implements it, but in standard Bayes theory, this is a problem.
It's not enough to be "neutral" you have to be downright good.
Only if you have the threshold on your filter cranked down pretty far.
Unless they can send a messager with headers that are close to what my friends' mails' have, unless they know my friends' names, unless they know the topics I often discuss, they're just not going to be able to break through my Bayesian filter by "swamping" it with neutral text. It just doesn't make a difference.
Then you've implemented your filter to approximate a whitelist, while most people implement theirs to be more like a blacklist. Particularly for those of us who need to be reachable by people who have never emailed us before, cranking down the level that far isn't an option. As such, neutral things have to be classified more as ham than spam.
Right, and my Thunderbird Bayesian filter catches all of those word salad approaches. But they've come up with a new one - what I call the "encyclopedia attack."
What they do is copy an encyclopedia entry and put it at the bottom of their spam. The thing is usually a few paragraphs long, so that textually it dominates the message. The subjects are fairly random, and are occasionally educational ;)
The problem is that the text of this doesn't trip the "too many strange words" flag that's used for word salads. My Thunderbird filter is really having trouble with these. Anyone else having trouble with these spams?
Like this is my only account. Sheesh.
Yessir, the mods are extra stupid today. One vacuum tube? Christ, you fucking cretins.
Is it time yet for /. to admit the metamod system DOESN'T WORK and that mod points only go to people with fairly new accounts? And morons like the those who modded this guy's joke insightful?
First off, I'll go ahead and agree with that statement! This could be nothing more than a greater amount of attention being paid Linux every year - or it could be that the increasing commercialization of linux is taking it away from its more stable roots. Either way, it's disconcerting.
Windows kernel had in the last 12 months? I am afraid that this comparison might fall out to the advantage of Windows.
It's hard to compare - studies I've seen (can't remember where, or I'd link) suggests that the overall bug rate in the two codebases is similar, but that linux generally tends to pay more attention to critical areas (this exploit notwithstanding).
Until you take into account time to fix, maybe
Now that's part of the critical bit. Not to mention which the Windows platform has a number of bugs that can be inflicted 1) remotely, and 2) without user access. Because windows does such a poor job protecting resources at the port level, it means that no human intervention is in any way required to propagate an exploit. Thus, while kiddies may attack individual linux machines, they can release exploits that can ultimately affect an unlimited number of windows machines. That's the real problem, the exponential nature of windows exploits.
I doubt that - as has been pointed out ad nauseum, it's good for shallow directory structures and hell for deep ones. But that means that there is a large camp that will want it sometimes but not all times. That's why Mac has both (plus an excellent frame-based version), and it's trivial to switch back and forth.
Also, since the way to change is extremely poorly documented (I expect intentionally), many new users - including (but not limited to!) the noobs that gnome is supposedly cultivating - won't know how to change it.
I think it should be prominently displayed, as even people who like spatial will need the tree version sometimes. Failing that, it should be in a preferences tab somewhere, even if it's not on the main tab.
For a modern desktop environment, if someone needs to use an external utility to change the features of a program, you as a developer have FAILED.
The point isn't so much what the default is, but rather that it's damned near impossible to change. You have one camp who says "I hate this new feature, and lots of other people do to - it should be easy to change back." You have another camp who thinks that they know best, and that it should be damned near impossible to do things other than the way they believe they should be done. Thanks guys.
And you just lost most users, because we don't want to use modified click commands for something that should be default behavior.
I'm assuming having your vulnerabilities fixed would be the prize for winning the game? ;)
Mudflaps. With the nekkid ladies on 'em.
What, am I the only redneck who owns a mac?
Thank you, I'm getting sick of people who don't see that for legitimizing the stall tactics SCO is already attempting (trial date of 9/2005? Even they know they won't be around then).
Does anyone know the status of IBM's motion from late May (it was either a motion to dismiss or something similar)? Any idea when that's expected for a ruling?
I applaud you giving them the benefit of the doubt...but no. Setting up LANs, firewalls and such - as a client - is harder for me on Win XP than for *nix, and I have 12 years Windows experience and 3 years *nix experience.
As has been pointed out by others, windows now ends up scattering all the important utilities needed to modify, say, a network client all over the place. Some are under subscreens of the administrator tools, some are under subscreens of network neighborhood, some are God knows where. And that's just an example.
Go beavers!