QC is a topic I'd like to see addressed, but I disagree with one of your points. You say that, "you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior."
The "unexpected behavior" test generally prevents inadvertent goofs. But for malicious (advertent?) bad code, the controller is accountability; one person, or at least a small group (the maintainer(s)), has CVS access (or other control over the "official" codebase). So there is a level of QC (them) before stuff gets put into the code. If they themselves are intentionally putting in bad code, then people will notice, and leave or spread the word when they don't fix it - or they'll fork it. In theory, of course. I haven't actually seen this happen, probably because it'd be hard to get away with.
If code was written wiki-style, you'd have noobs writing bad or buggy code and including it without testing or getting feedback, or you'd have GNAA/goatse trolls putting in their own easter eggs and (shudder) splash screens. This doesn't mean wikis are bad; just that the analogy to FOSS isn't perfect. I would like to second your question, though.
Don't forget the other nice thing about RPMs - if you do want to compile it yourself, you can then make an RPM, and either roll it out to tons of boxes at once, or reinstall the same (customized, optimized) RPM every time you reinstall your distro (yes, I've done this a few times... don't ask why).
Just about every Linux distro except Fedora has a standard graphical installer... if you decide to use Fedora anyway, you should be using yum
Um... yum has a GUI frontend. There's up2date which is installed by default (doesn't let you install, but takes care of updates), which I admit sucks, but if you want something non-sucky that does install/remove stuff too, check out Cobind Yum GUI, Red Carpet by Ximian (FC1 only, but probably works on FC2), or Synaptic (you have to compile yourself if you want RPM, but it's only one compile).
This is a bunch of FUD. Besides which, what does a GUI actually add to the package management experience?
RPMs don't do dependences? Neither do deb files. apt-get is more directly comparable to yum. No, I'm not going to say up2date, as that sucks.
I don't have a response to the amount of packages available, except to say that I created a mini yum-repo on my own box - just a directory that yum knows to access - of everything I couldn't find in a standard repo.
The rest of your post is just Distro Wars, and largely irrelevant. The grandparent didn't say anything about Debian, and you can get apt-get for Fedora.
First, I didn't mean the.foo part. I meant the foo.com part. And yes, I was wrong. Shouldn't assume NetSol is right when it says a 3 letter domain is invalid. My bad.
Use a domain less than 3 chars - can't exist, according to standards, so you won't be abusing anyone. If that's not allowed, use example.com (or.org, or.net), which was set up as a dummy domain to be used in examples.
The best way I've found, though, is mailinator.com. Every @mailinator.com account "exists" (is created as needed), and other than (perhaps) root, abuse, etc., they aren't passworded. So you don't even have to set up a junk account, just make up the address on the fly. Be sure to delete any emails with passwords in 'em ASAP, of course.
If you go to example.com (or.org,.net) it'll tell you that it was set up as a dummy domain in some RFC for the express purpose of being used as an example: "so then you point your browser to example.com" that wouldn't be abusable. So go right ahead and use example.[com|org|net].
For starters, he things Internet is short for "INTERnational NETwork" as opposed to a NETwork between entities (vs. network within an entity: intranet).
Then, his criteria: Is the format of the e-mail HTML?
This is not a bad criterion.
Is the e-mail formatted in valid HTML?
Have you ever seen a commercial program (esp. word, used by Outlook) generate good, 100% valid HTML?
Is the e-mail encoding base64?
No argument here. Unless base64 could be confused with Unicode - don't think so, but not sure.
Does the e-mail contain image links?
Does the e-mail contain "hidden" text that the user cannot see?
Heck, yeah, block it.
Does this e-mail have a large number of recipients?
Most of the spam I get has less than 5 recipients, and a lot of my mail is from a listserv with more than 5 recips.
What's the ratio of links to words in this e-mail?
I generally see only one or two links in my spam. Although I do see zero links in most of my ham.
What's the ratio of misspelled words to words in this e-mail?
Dear lord, no. This is a worthless criterion. Maybe if you looked for a ratio of non-letters (@, |, etc) to letters, but not spelling.
What's the Bayesian spam probability of this e-mail?
WTF does this have to do with AI?
Basically, he's stated the obvious, then made some really idiotic assumptions. Plus a shitload of spelling and grammar errors.
Why not skip the patent all together? Let people arbitrarily say, "I will take this to court" - maybe make a label for it - and then the validity of it's protected IP-ness will be determined in court. Just like with copyrights.
True, the original intent was partially to get this stuff documented, so it could be used when the patent ran out, but that might not be so important in these days of easy data storage.
Um... Leibniz and Newton would've ignored 'em. Just like they'll be ignored today. OTOH, look at "high school science" - not all that simple, mostly because we haven't come up with a good way of simplifying it all - just like with patents.
Safari isn't bad. I like Firefox better for a variety of reasons, some "real", some just "why isn't the damn button where I left it - oh yeah, wrong browser".
However, the "real" reasons aren't enough to blow Safari out of the water. Especially since many of them are personal preferences. I'd expect the same to be true of Opera, given what I've heard about it.
And prefetching needs to be 'smarter'. So you don't get to a page with umpteen zillion links, and it loads the ads first. Or begins loading, then doesn't stop when you go to another page. (Thus slowing the arrival of the new, user-chosen, page).
It does have the advantage that it uses the roman alphabet... but have you ever heard an American butcher an umlaut? Or say, "where is the bench" rather than "where is the bank" because the gender changed the sentence?
I spent a year in Germany when I was 5, and became fluent. I have spent several years in H.S. classes picking it up again since then, and Americans suck at it. German is not an easy language, despite the fact that English is a Germanic language.
I'm still in school, and I had to read it for history. We read a few of Thoreau's essays in English, too, as well as Fahrenheight 451. Good stuff, even if the teacher did a crappy job presenting it, and tried to portray censorship as something that only happens in rural towns and East Europe/Asia/Middle East.
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QC is a topic I'd like to see addressed, but I disagree with one of your points. You say that, "you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior."
The "unexpected behavior" test generally prevents inadvertent goofs. But for malicious (advertent?) bad code, the controller is accountability; one person, or at least a small group (the maintainer(s)), has CVS access (or other control over the "official" codebase). So there is a level of QC (them) before stuff gets put into the code. If they themselves are intentionally putting in bad code, then people will notice, and leave or spread the word when they don't fix it - or they'll fork it. In theory, of course. I haven't actually seen this happen, probably because it'd be hard to get away with.
If code was written wiki-style, you'd have noobs writing bad or buggy code and including it without testing or getting feedback, or you'd have GNAA/goatse trolls putting in their own easter eggs and (shudder) splash screens. This doesn't mean wikis are bad; just that the analogy to FOSS isn't perfect. I would like to second your question, though.
Y'mean, he's two-timing on DOS with 'nix? Shut uuup!
Dammit, you stole my post.
Don't forget the other nice thing about RPMs - if you do want to compile it yourself, you can then make an RPM, and either roll it out to tons of boxes at once, or reinstall the same (customized, optimized) RPM every time you reinstall your distro (yes, I've done this a few times ... don't ask why).
According to the first page of Synaptic's website, it can be recompiled to support RPMs.
Just about every Linux distro except Fedora has a standard graphical installer ... if you decide to use Fedora anyway, you should be using yum
... yum has a GUI frontend. There's up2date which is installed by default (doesn't let you install, but takes care of updates), which I admit sucks, but if you want something non-sucky that does install/remove stuff too, check out Cobind Yum GUI, Red Carpet by Ximian (FC1 only, but probably works on FC2), or Synaptic (you have to compile yourself if you want RPM, but it's only one compile).
Um
This is a bunch of FUD. Besides which, what does a GUI actually add to the package management experience?
RPMs don't do dependences? Neither do deb files. apt-get is more directly comparable to yum. No, I'm not going to say up2date, as that sucks.
I don't have a response to the amount of packages available, except to say that I created a mini yum-repo on my own box - just a directory that yum knows to access - of everything I couldn't find in a standard repo.
The rest of your post is just Distro Wars, and largely irrelevant. The grandparent didn't say anything about Debian, and you can get apt-get for Fedora.
Good $DEITY, two tax attorneys in one thread? Wait, did I just violate some corollary to Godwin's law?
First, I didn't mean the .foo part. I meant the foo.com part. And yes, I was wrong. Shouldn't assume NetSol is right when it says a 3 letter domain is invalid. My bad.
Use a domain less than 3 chars - can't exist, according to standards, so you won't be abusing anyone. If that's not allowed, use example.com (or .org, or .net), which was set up as a dummy domain to be used in examples.
The best way I've found, though, is mailinator.com. Every @mailinator.com account "exists" (is created as needed), and other than (perhaps) root, abuse, etc., they aren't passworded. So you don't even have to set up a junk account, just make up the address on the fly. Be sure to delete any emails with passwords in 'em ASAP, of course.
If you go to example.com (or .org, .net) it'll tell you that it was set up as a dummy domain in some RFC for the express purpose of being used as an example: "so then you point your browser to example.com" that wouldn't be abusable. So go right ahead and use example.[com|org|net].
For starters, he things Internet is short for "INTERnational NETwork" as opposed to a NETwork between entities (vs. network within an entity: intranet).
Then, his criteria:
Is the format of the e-mail HTML?
This is not a bad criterion.
Is the e-mail formatted in valid HTML?
Have you ever seen a commercial program (esp. word, used by Outlook) generate good, 100% valid HTML?
Is the e-mail encoding base64?
No argument here. Unless base64 could be confused with Unicode - don't think so, but not sure.
Does the e-mail contain image links?
Does the e-mail contain "hidden" text that the user cannot see?
Heck, yeah, block it.
Does this e-mail have a large number of recipients?
Most of the spam I get has less than 5 recipients, and a lot of my mail is from a listserv with more than 5 recips.
What's the ratio of links to words in this e-mail?
I generally see only one or two links in my spam. Although I do see zero links in most of my ham.
What's the ratio of misspelled words to words in this e-mail?
Dear lord, no. This is a worthless criterion. Maybe if you looked for a ratio of non-letters (@, |, etc) to letters, but not spelling.
What's the Bayesian spam probability of this e-mail?
WTF does this have to do with AI?
Basically, he's stated the obvious, then made some really idiotic assumptions. Plus a shitload of spelling and grammar errors.
That's how it is (in theory, at least), now. You can't patent HVAC, but way back when, you might've been able to patent the use of Freon.
Why not skip the patent all together? Let people arbitrarily say, "I will take this to court" - maybe make a label for it - and then the validity of it's protected IP-ness will be determined in court. Just like with copyrights.
True, the original intent was partially to get this stuff documented, so it could be used when the patent ran out, but that might not be so important in these days of easy data storage.
Short is an antonym of long, as well as tall. Where's the "-1, idiot" mod?
Um ... Leibniz and Newton would've ignored 'em. Just like they'll be ignored today. OTOH, look at "high school science" - not all that simple, mostly because we haven't come up with a good way of simplifying it all - just like with patents.
I figured. Just didn't want someone like me (i.e.: untrained guy who lucked into a sysadmin) to screw things up badly :-)
Bad idea to run anything from a given directory on the local machine ... too many potential escalation attacks.
Try, say, an AT program that contacts a secure, internal server, which then tells the local machine what to download and execute.
Same idea, just a bit more secure.
Safari isn't bad. I like Firefox better for a variety of reasons, some "real", some just "why isn't the damn button where I left it - oh yeah, wrong browser".
However, the "real" reasons aren't enough to blow Safari out of the water. Especially since many of them are personal preferences. I'd expect the same to be true of Opera, given what I've heard about it.
And prefetching needs to be 'smarter'. So you don't get to a page with umpteen zillion links, and it loads the ads first. Or begins loading, then doesn't stop when you go to another page. (Thus slowing the arrival of the new, user-chosen, page).
Arab culture is not broken - try reading about the Ottoman empire, or about modern Turkey.
It does have the advantage that it uses the roman alphabet ... but have you ever heard an American butcher an umlaut? Or say, "where is the bench" rather than "where is the bank" because the gender changed the sentence?
I spent a year in Germany when I was 5, and became fluent. I have spent several years in H.S. classes picking it up again since then, and Americans suck at it. German is not an easy language, despite the fact that English is a Germanic language.
I'm still in school, and I had to read it for history. We read a few of Thoreau's essays in English, too, as well as Fahrenheight 451. Good stuff, even if the teacher did a crappy job presenting it, and tried to portray censorship as something that only happens in rural towns and East Europe/Asia/Middle East.
They can't strip your head!
Hey, boss, whatcha doin' with that icepick?
I think he misspelled "on the cheap".