Yes, it is very cool, but you'll find that the Sender: tag in the email header still has the originating GMail address, even if the From: tag doesn't.
In other words, don't rely on this feature to hide the real source of email you send, anyone smart enough to look at the headers will know the truth:
X-Gmail-Received: 92ffbb318a086f769eb85c1ef1d3b1787fb82e02 Delivere d-To: XXXXXX@XXXXXX.net Received: by 10.54.28.52 with SMTP id b52cs8926wrb; Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:59:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.54.56.47 with SMTP id e47mr1688682wra; Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:59:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.54.124.10 with HTTP; Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:59:41 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <49aa23805082507594a42249e@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 10:59:41 -0400 From: Matt Storer <XXXXXX@XXXXXX.net> Sender: REALADDRESS@gmail.com To: RECIPIENT@gmail.com Subject: test Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline
The benefits of Morse Code are that it will work with the least amount of power, and over the longest and the noisiest channels out there. It is digital communication in its most basic form. Because Amateur Radio is used as an emergency service, it makes sense to me to ensure that operators of that service can communicate over such channels - it doesn't seem like a good idea to trust that in an emergency situation, that you'll have all the supplies you need (e.g., electricity), or that you'll be anywhere close to assistance.
Amateur Radio operators need to be able to understand Morse, even if they don't intend to use it themselves. Why? Suppose that someone is in a situation (perhaps in emergency or distress) and Morse is the only method they can use to communicate. Go on, use your imagination, I'm sure you can think of situations where this might be the case - not in the first world, but perhaps the second or third. Now imagine that Morse isn't required for obtaining a license so nobody needs to knows Morse anymore. How many people are going to understand, much less respond, to that distress signal? Exactly.
If you're going to get an Amateur Radio license, it makes sense to learn some Morse. It's important, really, it is. Saying you can't, or that you don't want to bother, is sheer laziness - go use the Childrens - er, sorry, Citizens - Band instead, if you don't want to put in the effort. There are computer programs out there you can use to learn Morse, it's not really that hard. I mean, when I got my General's license, I had to copy at 13 WPM, outside, with distractions. 5 WPM, indoors, without distractions is cake compared to that.
that morse code beats T9, even though the T9 system for SMS on cell phones is much faster than the standard hit-2-three-times-for-C style of messaging.
Why?
Because of two reasons:
Morse Code was developed so that the most frequently used characters are the quickest to transmit. For example, E and T, the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet, each take one keypress to send (see http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwo rds/frequency for details). With T9, on the other hand, each character has the same "cost" - even Q and Z.
You can keep one thumb on the key for short tones, and your other thumb on the key for long tones. Because you now don't need to look or feel for the letter you want to send, seek time drops to zero; you are limited in your speed only by how fast you can map letters to their Morse equivalents in you head, and how fast your mobile device can process inputs. Given technological improvements in cell phones over the years, that make competitive multimedia systems and are almost certainly not going to be the bottleneck.
So yeah, Morse Code is superior. It may take more skill to learn to use, but that should only scare away teh lUsers.
unless you're referring to established, well-defined physical principles about the world around us, you're going to be wrong. McVoy may hate it when I say this, but it's true.
most of the time, speaking in absolutes is a dead give-away that someone doesn't know what the hell they're talking about, or that they're just trying to spread FUD, and likely both.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero.
see, this just doesn't make sense, although I think there's a degree of truth to it. Innovation will not stop, that's for damn sure, even if the world goes 100% open source, Microsoft crumbles like Rome, and we all join hands and sing Kumbayah. It may, however, slow down - the fact is (generally speaking), people like money, and if exchanging money for inventions is going to spur on innovation, so be it. if money or corporate profits are no longer a motivational factor, then you're left with the people who'll innovate for the sake of innovation itself.
...which isn't necessarily a bad thing. when you really put your heart and soul into something, you tend to do a much better job at it than if you're doing it for some alterior motive.
(disclaimer: I did not RTFA, although I think what I'm talking about here is general enough that I'll be okay)
yeah, for sure. I grew up during the BBS era, and was a SysOp on my high school's BBS (ran TBBS), with 8 lines internally connected to dumb terminals, and another 8 external lines through the phone system.
made a point every day to hop online to my local boards to play BRE and SRE. man, those were a lot of fun.
and then muds sorta took over for gaming, and the web took over for file and info hosting.
... but I'm not sure I could sit through such a long documentary, I mean, how much is there, really, to say about it? and how much would you really care to hear about it?
Because 100% of murders committed with firearms were committed by gun owners
...nooooooo, you're wrong. 100% of murders committed with firearms were committed by people with guns, which does not necessarily mean they were gun owners. AFAIK, gun control affects primarily legitimate owners of guns; those breaking the law to possess them don't seem to have any qualms about it and probably ignore / work around a lot of the legal processes that make up "gun control."
Let's get back to the square-rectangle / logical subset argument. Yes. Gun Owners tend to possess guns. BUT, it would be fallacy to think that just because someone has a gun it means that they went to a legitimate store, went through the background checks, and purchased a gun.
gotta remember all the guns with filed serial numbers and all that jazz.
A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square (that's the example I always use). A square is one possible representation (i.e., a subset) of the larger set of all things rectangular.
it's all about logical subsets, and in particular, the one-way nature of "x belongs to y, but y does NOT belong to x."
MS has departments, many of them. There is probably an IE department and it's sole purpose is IE. It may not have any conversations with any other departments with the exception of "Will IE still work with the rest of Windows? It does? Great, going back to my cave."
you raise a good point. MS does certainly have many more employees than the Mozilla Foundation. However, something else you said, namely the part about separate departments not communicating with each other (much), that is more salient. And also a good point, btw.
Because MS ties into Windows via ActiveX, etc., the IE team needs to be aware of what the ActiveX team is doing, and what every other team that IE touches is doing, and vice versa. There HAS to be that kind of communication, really really good communication, for things to work the way they should (e.g., without opening security holes).
so, while MS may be bigger and have many more employees to deal with issues, they have that many more employees to create the issues in the first place (too many cooks in the kitchen?), and a much larger world in which those bugs can reside and hide.
simplicity is beautiful. if I want a hammer, I'll buy one that pounds nails into wood better than any other hammer I can find. I don't need it to julienne fries and wake me up at 6:00 in the morning as well.
There is nothing in FireFox's architecture which makes it a more secure alternative to IE
except that IE is tied very tightly (I was going to say "securely," but really, it's not that secure) into Windows, whereas Firefox is not. The more levels of separation you can have between the app and the OS, the better.
the benefit of using Firefox also has to do with response times - the Moz. Foundation has been extremely quick to patch holes once detected, while critical holes in IE, if history is our guide, stay open way longer than they should.
IMHO, much of this has to do with Mozilla being far more invested in the well-being of Firefox than Microsoft is in the well-being of IE. Think about it - how many products does Microsoft have to maintain, versus the Mozilla Foundation? To Mozilla, the well-being of Firefox is not just a minor detail to contend with; it's much much bigger, so gets all the swifter attention.
from the GMail help docs, available online here, which states:
Studies have shown that short usernames at popular domains receive significantly more spam due to the generation of automatic addresses. Gmail's requirement that all usernames be at least six characters in length is meant to keep spam out of your inbox.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trade a 6 character username for a 4 character one if it meant receiving bucketloads of spam for the privilege, and I sure as hell wouldn't pay for one.
Every programmer worth his/her salt knows that source code is self documenting
... actually, there's a degree of truth to this. I've had to work on code that's passed through many hands before, and there's nothing worse than having comments that are written poorly, are ambiguous, or don't get updated along with the code they relate to.
While having comments can be a great thing, they can also be a terrible thing if they misinform. Comments are, IMHO, best when you have a short blurb at the top of a larger block of code, where the higher-level purpose of the code block won't change, even if its implementation does.
On modern systems, worrying about microseconds is a waste of time unless you're dealing with systems that really need that kind of precision. Most user apps don't, period. Having clean, understandable code is far more important, again IMHO, than saving a few cycles through a cryptic coding style.
Perhaps it isn't the job of the cashier to check the back of a credit card and ask for ID if that's what's written there, BUT let me ask you this: if you had just stolen a credit card, and you saw "Ask for ID" on the back, how likely would you be to use that card, knowing that someone might ask you for ID?
to stick with Windows 2000 SP4 if you've got to use any Windows OS at all. I had a copy of XP on my system once when it first came out, and the degree to which I was forced to jump through hoops to register and get anything to work was rediculous.
(I could tangent into how this is similar to the DRM being enforced on music downloads, CD copy protection, and everything else companies are doing in the name of protecting their interests, which I understand and can't really argue with on a philosophical level, except that such protections in practice usually cripple the product to an unusable degree... but I won't;)
Win2k has never given me any problems, has provided the stability and multimedia capabilities I need (including gaming, not that game all that much), and contains far less "fluff" that I see consuming resources on XP systems, all registration / validation issues aside.
In addition, anything extra that XP provides that 2k doesn't, I've been able to find 3rd party, usually free and often open-source solutions from companies with better track records than M$.
okay, on a theoretical level, I understand why you might want to bother with a keyboard layout that optimizes input speed. BUT, even on a QWERTY layout board, all 26 letters are easily in reach of the home row, and hitting any one letter with the appropriate finger really doesn't seem to be particularly problematic. Draw from that the ability to hit any number of keys rapidly in series with different fingers also is not particularly problematic. Funny that.
I concede that there may be a few exceptions to the rule where one finger, or one hand, is used more often for a particular word or phrase, and that may cause a temporary decrease in efficiency, but I'll argue that for almost all of the time such circumstances are not the norm. And I don't think that such efficiency bottlenecks are unique to QWERTY.
so, what I guess I'm getting at is, is there really any realistic benefit to switching to any of these new layouts? Is 80 or 90 WPM on a QWERTY layout board not fast enough for you? What are you typing so voraciously that you require WPMs into the hundreds? Personally, I like to stop and think about what I'm writing periodically, so there's plenty of "buffer" time in which I could be typing, but I'm not.
QWERTY is fine as is, IMHO. It's become the standard, and it's important to stick with some standards if they do the job well. The inefficiencies that'll be caused by having multiple standards for something as ubiquitous as the computer keyboard will, again IMHO, outweigh any perceived benefits.
nope. I don't really want to say which school I went to, don't really want to badmouth them publically you see... but it was in the northeast United States. New England.
Limiting the numbers that have access is paramount.
very true. but security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain, and if schools are publicizing SSNs as student IDs, then I would argue that there really is no chain to speak of - they're undermining their own security systems in the name of convenience.
Yeah, I did pretty much the same thing at my school. I was, unfortunately, blessed (?) with a remarkably easy-to-remember SSN; almost anyone who hears it could probably remember it without difficulty after the first time.
So anyway, I went to get my student ID changed after the proberbial straw broke the camel's back: I had received a letter in the mail from the university, addressed to me, with my student ID (SSN) printed on the outside of the envelope. Boy was I pissed. So, I went down to the registrar's office to get my ID changed, which they were happy to do.
A few thoughts:
first, at my old school, if you lived on campus you could order pizza from local pizza shops and pay for it using your student meal plan. you just had to provide to the 16-year-old on the other end of the phone your name, address, and SSN. Now, if this isn't one of the biggest loopholes for identity theft, I don't know what is. I mean, how the hell do I know the kid taking my order isn't going to misuse my information? What checks and balances are in place to ensure my information stays private in the pizza joint?
second, and not quite so bad, is that everyone in the school knows damn well student IDs are SSNs. even after I got my ID changed from my SSN to an internal ID, if I ever went to the health center, or had to sign forms of any sort, or order pizza, or whatever, I would be asked for my SSN. I'd ask them, "you mean my student ID?" and they'd reply, "your SSN." early on, if the questioner was a school official, I'd give them my SSN trusting they know what they're talking about, but found that they in fact didn't, they really meant my student ID. grrr...
but here's the weird part. about 6 months after I changed my ID from my SSN to an internal ID, I got a notice in the mail that I had to start paying my student loans, as I'd left school. I thought, "WTF? I haven't left!" so I looked into it. Turns out, there's a whole network of linkages between your student loans and your student ID - at least, at my alma mater - so when I changed my ID, I had a fair amount of extra work to do to continue to receive my loans. Just FYI, you'll probably want to inquire about this at your school's financial aid office if you decide to switch your ID - which I strongly encourage you to do, even if it is a pain.
... which moments later he followed up with: "That I'm really not the biggest lying scumsucking progress-thwarting joke-of-the-day toolbox in the software community!"
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, don't rely on this feature to hide the real source of email you send, anyone smart enough to look at the headers will know the truth:
-Matt
The benefits of Morse Code are that it will work with the least amount of power, and over the longest and the noisiest channels out there. It is digital communication in its most basic form. Because Amateur Radio is used as an emergency service, it makes sense to me to ensure that operators of that service can communicate over such channels - it doesn't seem like a good idea to trust that in an emergency situation, that you'll have all the supplies you need (e.g., electricity), or that you'll be anywhere close to assistance.
Amateur Radio operators need to be able to understand Morse, even if they don't intend to use it themselves. Why? Suppose that someone is in a situation (perhaps in emergency or distress) and Morse is the only method they can use to communicate. Go on, use your imagination, I'm sure you can think of situations where this might be the case - not in the first world, but perhaps the second or third. Now imagine that Morse isn't required for obtaining a license so nobody needs to knows Morse anymore. How many people are going to understand, much less respond, to that distress signal? Exactly.
If you're going to get an Amateur Radio license, it makes sense to learn some Morse. It's important, really, it is. Saying you can't, or that you don't want to bother, is sheer laziness - go use the Childrens - er, sorry, Citizens - Band instead, if you don't want to put in the effort. There are computer programs out there you can use to learn Morse, it's not really that hard. I mean, when I got my General's license, I had to copy at 13 WPM, outside, with distractions. 5 WPM, indoors, without distractions is cake compared to that.
Matt (N1VSB)
Why?
Because of two reasons:
- Morse Code was developed so that the most frequently used characters are the quickest to transmit. For example, E and T, the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet, each take one keypress to send (see http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutw
o rds/frequency for details). With T9, on the other hand, each character has the same "cost" - even Q and Z.
- You can keep one thumb on the key for short tones, and your other thumb on the key for long tones. Because you now don't need to look or feel for the letter you want to send, seek time drops to zero; you are limited in your speed only by how fast you can map letters to their Morse equivalents in you head, and how fast your mobile device can process inputs. Given technological improvements in cell phones over the years, that make competitive multimedia systems and are almost certainly not going to be the bottleneck.
So yeah, Morse Code is superior. It may take more skill to learn to use, but that should only scare away teh lUsers.Matt
unless you're referring to established, well-defined physical principles about the world around us, you're going to be wrong. McVoy may hate it when I say this, but it's true.
...which isn't necessarily a bad thing. when you really put your heart and soul into something, you tend to do a much better job at it than if you're doing it for some alterior motive.
most of the time, speaking in absolutes is a dead give-away that someone doesn't know what the hell they're talking about, or that they're just trying to spread FUD, and likely both.
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero.
see, this just doesn't make sense, although I think there's a degree of truth to it. Innovation will not stop, that's for damn sure, even if the world goes 100% open source, Microsoft crumbles like Rome, and we all join hands and sing Kumbayah. It may, however, slow down - the fact is (generally speaking), people like money, and if exchanging money for inventions is going to spur on innovation, so be it. if money or corporate profits are no longer a motivational factor, then you're left with the people who'll innovate for the sake of innovation itself.
(disclaimer: I did not RTFA, although I think what I'm talking about here is general enough that I'll be okay)
yeah, for sure. I grew up during the BBS era, and was a SysOp on my high school's BBS (ran TBBS), with 8 lines internally connected to dumb terminals, and another 8 external lines through the phone system.
... but I'm not sure I could sit through such a long documentary, I mean, how much is there, really, to say about it? and how much would you really care to hear about it?
;)
made a point every day to hop online to my local boards to play BRE and SRE. man, those were a lot of fun.
and then muds sorta took over for gaming, and the web took over for file and info hosting.
that's what the FF button is for I guess
Because 100% of murders committed with firearms were committed by gun owners
...nooooooo, you're wrong. 100% of murders committed with firearms were committed by people with guns, which does not necessarily mean they were gun owners. AFAIK, gun control affects primarily legitimate owners of guns; those breaking the law to possess them don't seem to have any qualms about it and probably ignore / work around a lot of the legal processes that make up "gun control."
Let's get back to the square-rectangle / logical subset argument. Yes. Gun Owners tend to possess guns. BUT, it would be fallacy to think that just because someone has a gun it means that they went to a legitimate store, went through the background checks, and purchased a gun.
gotta remember all the guns with filed serial numbers and all that jazz.
matt
A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square (that's the example I always use). A square is one possible representation (i.e., a subset) of the larger set of all things rectangular.
it's all about logical subsets, and in particular, the one-way nature of "x belongs to y, but y does NOT belong to x."
MS has departments, many of them. There is probably an IE department and it's sole purpose is IE. It may not have any conversations with any other departments with the exception of "Will IE still work with the rest of Windows? It does? Great, going back to my cave."
you raise a good point. MS does certainly have many more employees than the Mozilla Foundation. However, something else you said, namely the part about separate departments not communicating with each other (much), that is more salient. And also a good point, btw.
Because MS ties into Windows via ActiveX, etc., the IE team needs to be aware of what the ActiveX team is doing, and what every other team that IE touches is doing, and vice versa. There HAS to be that kind of communication, really really good communication, for things to work the way they should (e.g., without opening security holes).
so, while MS may be bigger and have many more employees to deal with issues, they have that many more employees to create the issues in the first place (too many cooks in the kitchen?), and a much larger world in which those bugs can reside and hide.
simplicity is beautiful. if I want a hammer, I'll buy one that pounds nails into wood better than any other hammer I can find. I don't need it to julienne fries and wake me up at 6:00 in the morning as well.
-matt
There is nothing in FireFox's architecture which makes it a more secure alternative to IE
except that IE is tied very tightly (I was going to say "securely," but really, it's not that secure) into Windows, whereas Firefox is not. The more levels of separation you can have between the app and the OS, the better.
the benefit of using Firefox also has to do with response times - the Moz. Foundation has been extremely quick to patch holes once detected, while critical holes in IE, if history is our guide, stay open way longer than they should.
IMHO, much of this has to do with Mozilla being far more invested in the well-being of Firefox than Microsoft is in the well-being of IE. Think about it - how many products does Microsoft have to maintain, versus the Mozilla Foundation? To Mozilla, the well-being of Firefox is not just a minor detail to contend with; it's much much bigger, so gets all the swifter attention.
-matt
Matt
Every programmer worth his/her salt knows that source code is self documenting
... actually, there's a degree of truth to this. I've had to work on code that's passed through many hands before, and there's nothing worse than having comments that are written poorly, are ambiguous, or don't get updated along with the code they relate to.
While having comments can be a great thing, they can also be a terrible thing if they misinform. Comments are, IMHO, best when you have a short blurb at the top of a larger block of code, where the higher-level purpose of the code block won't change, even if its implementation does.
On modern systems, worrying about microseconds is a waste of time unless you're dealing with systems that really need that kind of precision. Most user apps don't, period. Having clean, understandable code is far more important, again IMHO, than saving a few cycles through a cryptic coding style.
-Matt
Perhaps it isn't the job of the cashier to check the back of a credit card and ask for ID if that's what's written there, BUT let me ask you this: if you had just stolen a credit card, and you saw "Ask for ID" on the back, how likely would you be to use that card, knowing that someone might ask you for ID?
to stick with Windows 2000 SP4 if you've got to use any Windows OS at all. I had a copy of XP on my system once when it first came out, and the degree to which I was forced to jump through hoops to register and get anything to work was rediculous.
;)
(I could tangent into how this is similar to the DRM being enforced on music downloads, CD copy protection, and everything else companies are doing in the name of protecting their interests, which I understand and can't really argue with on a philosophical level, except that such protections in practice usually cripple the product to an unusable degree... but I won't
Win2k has never given me any problems, has provided the stability and multimedia capabilities I need (including gaming, not that game all that much), and contains far less "fluff" that I see consuming resources on XP systems, all registration / validation issues aside.
In addition, anything extra that XP provides that 2k doesn't, I've been able to find 3rd party, usually free and often open-source solutions from companies with better track records than M$.
So yeah, stick with 2k if you can help it.
-matt
okay, on a theoretical level, I understand why you might want to bother with a keyboard layout that optimizes input speed. BUT, even on a QWERTY layout board, all 26 letters are easily in reach of the home row, and hitting any one letter with the appropriate finger really doesn't seem to be particularly problematic. Draw from that the ability to hit any number of keys rapidly in series with different fingers also is not particularly problematic. Funny that.
I concede that there may be a few exceptions to the rule where one finger, or one hand, is used more often for a particular word or phrase, and that may cause a temporary decrease in efficiency, but I'll argue that for almost all of the time such circumstances are not the norm. And I don't think that such efficiency bottlenecks are unique to QWERTY.
so, what I guess I'm getting at is, is there really any realistic benefit to switching to any of these new layouts? Is 80 or 90 WPM on a QWERTY layout board not fast enough for you? What are you typing so voraciously that you require WPMs into the hundreds? Personally, I like to stop and think about what I'm writing periodically, so there's plenty of "buffer" time in which I could be typing, but I'm not.
QWERTY is fine as is, IMHO. It's become the standard, and it's important to stick with some standards if they do the job well. The inefficiencies that'll be caused by having multiple standards for something as ubiquitous as the computer keyboard will, again IMHO, outweigh any perceived benefits.
-matt
nope. I don't really want to say which school I went to, don't really want to badmouth them publically you see... but it was in the northeast United States. New England.
Limiting the numbers that have access is paramount.
very true. but security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain, and if schools are publicizing SSNs as student IDs, then I would argue that there really is no chain to speak of - they're undermining their own security systems in the name of convenience.
matt
So anyway, I went to get my student ID changed after the proberbial straw broke the camel's back: I had received a letter in the mail from the university, addressed to me, with my student ID (SSN) printed on the outside of the envelope. Boy was I pissed. So, I went down to the registrar's office to get my ID changed, which they were happy to do.
A few thoughts:
- first, at my old school, if you lived on campus you could order pizza from local pizza shops and pay for it using your student meal plan. you just had to provide to the 16-year-old on the other end of the phone your name, address, and SSN. Now, if this isn't one of the biggest loopholes for identity theft, I don't know what is. I mean, how the hell do I know the kid taking my order isn't going to misuse my information? What checks and balances are in place to ensure my information stays private in the pizza joint?
- second, and not quite so bad, is that everyone in the school knows damn well student IDs are SSNs. even after I got my ID changed from my SSN to an internal ID, if I ever went to the health center, or had to sign forms of any sort, or order pizza, or whatever, I would be asked for my SSN. I'd ask them, "you mean my student ID?" and they'd reply, "your SSN." early on, if the questioner was a school official, I'd give them my SSN trusting they know what they're talking about, but found that they in fact didn't, they really meant my student ID. grrr...
- but here's the weird part. about 6 months after I changed my ID from my SSN to an internal ID, I got a notice in the mail that I had to start paying my student loans, as I'd left school. I thought, "WTF? I haven't left!" so I looked into it. Turns out, there's a whole network of linkages between your student loans and your student ID - at least, at my alma mater - so when I changed my ID, I had a fair amount of extra work to do to continue to receive my loans. Just FYI, you'll probably want to inquire about this at your school's financial aid office if you decide to switch your ID - which I strongly encourage you to do, even if it is a pain.
-mattDarl says: "That Linux stole our code!"
... which moments later he followed up with: "That I'm really not the biggest lying scumsucking progress-thwarting joke-of-the-day toolbox in the software community!"
(sorry, had to throw that in there)