This is why I hate the language used in patents & other legel documents - they are purposly obfuscated so that the patent is granted, when if it clearly stated "email addresses and URLs", it wouldn't get a second glance. And then we get more stupid litigation.
Except that honest patents (there are a few) are describing something that didn't exist before. Kind of a conundrum then, ain't it?
You owe me royalties on my patent on fruglastulatory prodipsis. C'mon, you already know what those are.
Vixie has also made a number of antispam statements that I tend to disagree with, including advocating mass blocking of mail servers on home email connections by netblock.
Why not? You got a dynamic IP, I don't have any way of knowing whose it is from one moment to the next. Get a static IP or use the mail relay host you pay your ISP for. You really need to send mail direct to your home office from the road, use port 587, that's what it's there for.
And if this is all too oppressive and regimented for you, go chat on freenet or tunnel your own VPN, have your own private internet. Communicate over Jabber. At this point, nothing can possibly stop you nor is anyone but the RIAA interested in doing so. Just know that your freedom ends at my router.
> Maybe I just have never been exposed to "enterprise" programming, but could you elaborate on why J2EE and JSP would be better for the enterprise? What do they do that php doesn't? I've heard this before, but I have not seen any solid examples.
Get a session to migrate across a cluster in PHP, without roundtripping to a DBMS like mysql. Non-trivial problem, even J2EE containers often don't get it right (far as I know ASP.NET doesn't even try, but that's another story).
Got an app that causes a fatal library error in PHP because of a syntax error in an include? It'll die. Silently. At runtime, i.e. when your customer is using it.
I'm actually NOT a J2EE or even an "enterprise architecture" booster, but a great strength of J2EE is that you can do a lot of stuff "declaratively", i.e. write your app logic, then have it run in a "context" that fits your needs, so you can take your application that writes persistent data and plug it into your data persister using mechanisms like container managed persistence, and you can switch backends effortlessly. If you want to say that "using these objects means that you're in a transaction, and if anything dies, roll back any changes in the db", you can do that without any code. That means you won't make any mistakes in the code, leave something out that leaves stale data, because you're not worrying about it in your code in the first place. Same goes for security -- though I'll be the first to say that the default security model in J2EE is downright anemic, and form-based auth is a hack, and if they looked at FastCGI, they would have seen a reasonable way to do it.
I'm sure others will come out with other reasons, but those are mine. Using J2EE is like driving a peterbilt, you don't really want to drive it to the store to pick up groceries (tho using resin+jikes+xdoclet makes it almost like scripting just with yucky syntax), but if you want to move the store's whole inventory, you're going to be glad for the backup power on the industrial refrigeration unit you got installed in that there trailer.
> I have a feeling that Python would perform a lot better if it was running in a proper POSIX environment
If she used cygwin python, then she's dealing with gcc's performance, being that it's compiled with gcc, as well as cygwin's less than stellar performance. Python would certainly do a lot better if it were the native version -- just the overhead of calling "print" has to go through synthetic "syscalls" and cygwin's hack of a DLL-based-kernel.
Actually, it doesn't look as if Eugenia even specified which build of python was used. I've come to expect this sort of thing from OSNews however.. what is it with the topdesk-ish links on that site incidentally? Did I get an adware virus or are those really there?
However, I'm mostly just glad to see psyco get a mention. Psyco, stackless, and pypy are making me really excited about python, and it's nice to see a mention of one of those.
Lets face it the Civil war was fought not to free the slaves, but in fact because the South was so rich because it legally could force people to work with no pay
Of all the interpretations of American History, that one definitely stands out as being the most... unique... that I've heard yet. Congratulations.
> The primary GUI is the classic NeXT look, which de-emphasized the system widgets in favor of the content
Is that then why the, ah, content of checkboxes is hardly visible in *step? Or why every widget looks like it came out of a soviet submarine: thick, metallic, and harsh? I've never seen a widget set that tried to look so "bumpy" as *step.
Then there's the horizontal scrolled layout of buttons and vertical menus. There's a reason the rest of the world repudiated this design, and Apple's HCI folks will go into great painful detail telling you about it.
> garbage collection stops system response while it's cleaning up
And malloc is of course free, right? ("well no wally, they're opposites"... yeah yeah you get my drift)
Good gc's operate incrementally. Good gc's let you turn gc on and off at will and disable it altogether for designated arenas. Good gc's can run in a separate thread on another CPU, whereas malloc/free cannot.
The reason java's gc goes wiggy is not because the gc is bad (it's just not very tunable except on solaris), it's because it allocates new objects all over the place (and is happily helped at it by the standard libraries). If you go hog wild with resource consumption, yes you're going to pay for it later.
For the 99.99% of programs that do NOT need hard realtime, you're better off with gc. Cripes, it's like saying homes shouldn't have thermostats because a home thermostat isn't suitable for a reactor sensor.
There's a neat trick KDE file selectors have: they're resizeable. In my cluttered download directory, I stretch the thing waaaaay open to see what I'm working on. On windows, I have to get some low-level hack to make this happen.
Why does every dialog designer think their dialogs are "big enough" and forbid anyone from altering their sacred proportions?
Thankfully, no company has yet exercised option 3: prosecute you for computer crime. It doesn't matter if they don't have a case or what laws are on your side -- they have the money, power, and desire to utterly ruin your life regardless.
These people market and sell a product they probably know is shoddy. What makes you think they'd have the moral fibre or restraint to refrain from shooting the messenger? You can't trust their software, what makes you think you can trust them?
It doesn't actually sit opposite any methodology, it simply extends the basic principles of skeptical inquiry into software engineering. It's anti-hype more than anything else.
> The best go playing software is rated about 12kuy.
Manyfaces is 6 kyu according to Nihon Kiin, and Handtalk is 3 kyu. Yet Handtalk gets handily beaten by amateurs with a 25 stone handicap. I suspect it's that the programs are a good deal more rigid than any decent human player and their idiosyncracies are well known. Kasparov would almost certainly beat the pants off any of the Deep * series if he played against them over and over (yes, Deep Fritz plays at grandmaster, but chess _is_ an easier problem)
Google's more than just a search engine as well, though it's stuck to its core model of using its search technology throughout. The only place I go for news these days is Google News. I look at Google News, and think "now this is what they were thinking of when they said how the web would be an information nexus". Yahoo has the nigh unsearchable and unnavigible Yahoo Groups with interstitial ads every other message, Google has Google Groups with no interruptions.
Google has search "types" like addresses, phone numbers, UPS and FedEx tracking numbers, patent numbers... There's a reason Google is a verb now, they're aiming to become not just a synonym for "search", but for "lookup". Yes, when they go public, they'll eventually extend too far, get too heavy and ossified, and someone else will come along and knock them off. I certainly hope so. Until then, they're really what makes the web exciting. Yahoo is simply giving my ad filter a workout by plastering flash ads all over the same old services I've seen for the last 10 years.
> Now I have to sort through page upon page of sites wanting to sell me said item, most of which aren't even actual store-fronts but instead just referral pages which have manipulated the Google ranking system to get on top
What'd be nice is to be able to drop any sites from your search results that also appear on Froogle. Barring that, try appending "-sale" and "-buy", which granted will knock out a number of non-commercial sites as well, but will take out most of the commercial ones.
It's not like any other search engine is going to be any better. These ones just target Google's algorithm. Yahoo owns Overture, which has paid placement as a business model -- you think your results are drowned out now?
> Really? My impression is that usually the opposite is true, since screens are wider than they are tall
Irrelevant, it just means I can stick more sidebars on. The reason horizontal real-estate is more valuable is because I read left to right, top to bottom. If something scrolls off the right, I have to continuously scrub back and forth. Off the bottom, I have a number of interface elements in the scrollbar, mousewheel, and keyboard that let me scroll down, and I generally don't have to scroll back up.
I can see both methods being useful, with tab groups on the left (a group of one if you feel like it) and individual tabs along the top. With opera that's pretty easy to do as a sidebar, though perhaps not so easily to do it dynamically, let alone with thumbnails.
It also doesn't take much brainpower to Just Hit Delete when you see a message with lots of \W in the subject.
Whoah nellie, I'm not actually suggesting JHD is a solution or that spam is any kind of non-problem. What I'm saying is that spammers are having to degrade the visual quality of their pitch so much that the munged subjects (sometimes bodies, though it's usually not visible) are instantly recognizeable as spam. Spammers are getting chased into smaller and smaller corners -- the r.an$do*m-l&y m#un^g!ed subjects are a sign that filters are working
Best long term solution is still to remove the incentive, but second only to that is to remove the spammers.
Re:I think you overrate this SCO thing.
on
The Voice of Groklaw
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I worked nearly sixty years in industry with owning my own business for 45 years. I encountered such strange lawsuits every 3 years or so. If I got agitated every time about this like you do then, well, I wouldn't posting this message. (Unless someone writes an astral interconnect module for Perl.)
Delusional IP lawsuits are certainly nothing new, even ones surrounded with press releases. SCO may even have some kind of case against IBM. It's Darl's grandiloquent pronouncements (to use a genteel term) about IP, Linux Hippies, and the unconstitutional GPL making the baby jesus cry that's what's generated so much "buzz" in this community.
Apple's "look and feel" lawsuits spring to mind... those created a lot of buzz, and that was before online communities were nearly what they are now. So while it's nothing new, I don't really think that automatically means the community it affects will or should be jaded about it.
Check CPAN, there might be a Tie::Plane::Astral in there somewhere
Our mail server has somehow erroneously been blacklisted.
So go email the antispam guy on AOL (not from YOUR email address naturally), his name's Carl, and he's a nice and reasonable guy who will tell you precisely why your server was blocked. AOL can make mistakes, but they don't sustain blocks without evidence.
You'll have to subscribe to SPAM-L (http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l) to find his full name and email address since I won't share it here, but that shouldn't take too long.
Imagine there's no spamblock It's easy if you try AOHell below us Above us only sky(list)... someone want to finish it? sorry, the title just got to me;)
> It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
<allahuakbar> We require passcodes for your "zombie" network. We will pay generously. <bonglord> alla msg me CC#/exp <allahuakbar> I can arrange money transfers through fronts, the funds cannot be traced. <0wnzj00> hes playin <bonglord> STFU, alla no, we need CC, we dont ask whose it is LOL <allahuakbar> Excuse me I must conference. <0wnsj00> oh jeez/kill ok? *** 0wnsj00 is now known as yomamabinladen <bonglord> LOL
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I hate the language used in patents & other legel documents - they are purposly obfuscated so that the patent is granted, when if it clearly stated "email addresses and URLs", it wouldn't get a second glance. And then we get more stupid litigation.
Except that honest patents (there are a few) are describing something that didn't exist before. Kind of a conundrum then, ain't it?
You owe me royalties on my patent on fruglastulatory prodipsis. C'mon, you already know what those are.
> Beastie, although he is really a BSD thing in general, is most associated with FreeBSD.
His name is Chuck.
Vixie has also made a number of antispam statements that I tend to disagree with, including advocating mass blocking of mail servers on home email connections by netblock.
Why not? You got a dynamic IP, I don't have any way of knowing whose it is from one moment to the next. Get a static IP or use the mail relay host you pay your ISP for. You really need to send mail direct to your home office from the road, use port 587, that's what it's there for.
And if this is all too oppressive and regimented for you, go chat on freenet or tunnel your own VPN, have your own private internet. Communicate over Jabber. At this point, nothing can possibly stop you nor is anyone but the RIAA interested in doing so. Just know that your freedom ends at my router.
> Maybe I just have never been exposed to "enterprise" programming, but could you elaborate on why J2EE and JSP would be better for the enterprise? What do they do that php doesn't? I've heard this before, but I have not seen any solid examples.
Get a session to migrate across a cluster in PHP, without roundtripping to a DBMS like mysql. Non-trivial problem, even J2EE containers often don't get it right (far as I know ASP.NET doesn't even try, but that's another story).
Got an app that causes a fatal library error in PHP because of a syntax error in an include? It'll die. Silently. At runtime, i.e. when your customer is using it.
I'm actually NOT a J2EE or even an "enterprise architecture" booster, but a great strength of J2EE is that you can do a lot of stuff "declaratively", i.e. write your app logic, then have it run in a "context" that fits your needs, so you can take your application that writes persistent data and plug it into your data persister using mechanisms like container managed persistence, and you can switch backends effortlessly. If you want to say that "using these objects means that you're in a transaction, and if anything dies, roll back any changes in the db", you can do that without any code. That means you won't make any mistakes in the code, leave something out that leaves stale data, because you're not worrying about it in your code in the first place. Same goes for security -- though I'll be the first to say that the default security model in J2EE is downright anemic, and form-based auth is a hack, and if they looked at FastCGI, they would have seen a reasonable way to do it.
I'm sure others will come out with other reasons, but those are mine. Using J2EE is like driving a peterbilt, you don't really want to drive it to the store to pick up groceries (tho using resin+jikes+xdoclet makes it almost like scripting just with yucky syntax), but if you want to move the store's whole inventory, you're going to be glad for the backup power on the industrial refrigeration unit you got installed in that there trailer.
> I have a feeling that Python would perform a lot better if it was running in a proper POSIX environment
.. what is it with the topdesk-ish links on that site incidentally? Did I get an adware virus or are those really there?
If she used cygwin python, then she's dealing with gcc's performance, being that it's compiled with gcc, as well as cygwin's less than stellar performance. Python would certainly do a lot better if it were the native version -- just the overhead of calling "print" has to go through synthetic "syscalls" and cygwin's hack of a DLL-based-kernel.
Actually, it doesn't look as if Eugenia even specified which build of python was used. I've come to expect this sort of thing from OSNews however
However, I'm mostly just glad to see psyco get a mention. Psyco, stackless, and pypy are making me really excited about python, and it's nice to see a mention of one of those.
Jesus jumping christ, will someone edit the article already to create a paragraph break so we stop seeing these misattributed quotes?
You'd think that when slashdot cashed out for two mil they could afford to take journalism writing classes...
Lets face it the Civil war was fought not to free the slaves, but in fact because the South was so rich because it legally could force people to work with no pay
... unique ... that I've heard yet. Congratulations.
Of all the interpretations of American History, that one definitely stands out as being the most
> The primary GUI is the classic NeXT look, which de-emphasized the system widgets in favor of the content
Is that then why the, ah, content of checkboxes is hardly visible in *step? Or why every widget looks like it came out of a soviet submarine: thick, metallic, and harsh? I've never seen a widget set that tried to look so "bumpy" as *step.
Then there's the horizontal scrolled layout of buttons and vertical menus. There's a reason the rest of the world repudiated this design, and Apple's HCI folks will go into great painful detail telling you about it.
> garbage collection stops system response while it's cleaning up
... yeah yeah you get my drift)
And malloc is of course free, right? ("well no wally, they're opposites"
Good gc's operate incrementally. Good gc's let you turn gc on and off at will and disable it altogether for designated arenas. Good gc's can run in a separate thread on another CPU, whereas malloc/free cannot.
The reason java's gc goes wiggy is not because the gc is bad (it's just not very tunable except on solaris), it's because it allocates new objects all over the place (and is happily helped at it by the standard libraries). If you go hog wild with resource consumption, yes you're going to pay for it later.
For the 99.99% of programs that do NOT need hard realtime, you're better off with gc. Cripes, it's like saying homes shouldn't have thermostats because a home thermostat isn't suitable for a reactor sensor.
There's a neat trick KDE file selectors have: they're resizeable. In my cluttered download directory, I stretch the thing waaaaay open to see what I'm working on. On windows, I have to get some low-level hack to make this happen.
Why does every dialog designer think their dialogs are "big enough" and forbid anyone from altering their sacred proportions?
Thankfully, no company has yet exercised option 3: prosecute you for computer crime. It doesn't matter if they don't have a case or what laws are on your side -- they have the money, power, and desire to utterly ruin your life regardless.
These people market and sell a product they probably know is shoddy. What makes you think they'd have the moral fibre or restraint to refrain from shooting the messenger? You can't trust their software, what makes you think you can trust them?
Obligatory linkwhoring: The Skeptical Software Development Manifesto
It doesn't actually sit opposite any methodology, it simply extends the basic principles of skeptical inquiry into software engineering. It's anti-hype more than anything else.
Mysterious Tartrate Conquers All At Go
I nominate this article title for "Most Surreal Slashdot Title Ever".
> The best go playing software is rated about 12kuy.
Manyfaces is 6 kyu according to Nihon Kiin, and Handtalk is 3 kyu. Yet Handtalk gets handily beaten by amateurs with a 25 stone handicap. I suspect it's that the programs are a good deal more rigid than any decent human player and their idiosyncracies are well known. Kasparov would almost certainly beat the pants off any of the Deep * series if he played against them over and over (yes, Deep Fritz plays at grandmaster, but chess _is_ an easier problem)
Google's more than just a search engine as well, though it's stuck to its core model of using its search technology throughout. The only place I go for news these days is Google News. I look at Google News, and think "now this is what they were thinking of when they said how the web would be an information nexus". Yahoo has the nigh unsearchable and unnavigible Yahoo Groups with interstitial ads every other message, Google has Google Groups with no interruptions.
Google has search "types" like addresses, phone numbers, UPS and FedEx tracking numbers, patent numbers... There's a reason Google is a verb now, they're aiming to become not just a synonym for "search", but for "lookup". Yes, when they go public, they'll eventually extend too far, get too heavy and ossified, and someone else will come along and knock them off. I certainly hope so. Until then, they're really what makes the web exciting. Yahoo is simply giving my ad filter a workout by plastering flash ads all over the same old services I've seen for the last 10 years.
> Now I have to sort through page upon page of sites wanting to sell me said item, most of which aren't even actual store-fronts but instead just referral pages which have manipulated the Google ranking system to get on top
What'd be nice is to be able to drop any sites from your search results that also appear on Froogle. Barring that, try appending "-sale" and "-buy", which granted will knock out a number of non-commercial sites as well, but will take out most of the commercial ones.
It's not like any other search engine is going to be any better. These ones just target Google's algorithm. Yahoo owns Overture, which has paid placement as a business model -- you think your results are drowned out now?
> he's running whatever server this article is on off of one of those machines sitting on the store shelf, based on it responsiveness.
I hope you're happy... You just made my natural language parser cry.
> Really? My impression is that usually the opposite is true, since screens are wider than they are tall
Irrelevant, it just means I can stick more sidebars on. The reason horizontal real-estate is more valuable is because I read left to right, top to bottom. If something scrolls off the right, I have to continuously scrub back and forth. Off the bottom, I have a number of interface elements in the scrollbar, mousewheel, and keyboard that let me scroll down, and I generally don't have to scroll back up.
I can see both methods being useful, with tab groups on the left (a group of one if you feel like it) and individual tabs along the top. With opera that's pretty easy to do as a sidebar, though perhaps not so easily to do it dynamically, let alone with thumbnails.
> It doesn't take very much CPU to s/\W//g
It also doesn't take much brainpower to Just Hit Delete when you see a message with lots of \W in the subject.
Whoah nellie, I'm not actually suggesting JHD is a solution or that spam is any kind of non-problem. What I'm saying is that spammers are having to degrade the visual quality of their pitch so much that the munged subjects (sometimes bodies, though it's usually not visible) are instantly recognizeable as spam. Spammers are getting chased into smaller and smaller corners -- the r.an$do*m-l&y m#un^g!ed subjects are a sign that filters are working
Best long term solution is still to remove the incentive, but second only to that is to remove the spammers.
I worked nearly sixty years in industry with owning my own business for 45 years. I encountered such strange lawsuits every 3 years or so. If I got agitated every time about this like you do then, well, I wouldn't posting this message. (Unless someone writes an astral interconnect module for Perl.)
... those created a lot of buzz, and that was before online communities were nearly what they are now. So while it's nothing new, I don't really think that automatically means the community it affects will or should be jaded about it.
Delusional IP lawsuits are certainly nothing new, even ones surrounded with press releases. SCO may even have some kind of case against IBM. It's Darl's grandiloquent pronouncements (to use a genteel term) about IP, Linux Hippies, and the unconstitutional GPL making the baby jesus cry that's what's generated so much "buzz" in this community.
Apple's "look and feel" lawsuits spring to mind
Check CPAN, there might be a Tie::Plane::Astral in there somewhere
> If anybody gets a lot of spam, it is usually their fault.
For posting their email address in a public forum (where's yours?). Welcome to the new internet, here's your burqa.
So, what technology is there right now that deals with certifying legitimacy?
Digital Certificates!
Sigh. Please read this and come back when you have.
Our mail server has somehow erroneously been blacklisted.
So go email the antispam guy on AOL (not from YOUR email address naturally), his name's Carl, and he's a nice and reasonable guy who will tell you precisely why your server was blocked. AOL can make mistakes, but they don't sustain blocks without evidence.
You'll have to subscribe to SPAM-L (http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l) to find his full name and email address since I won't share it here, but that shouldn't take too long.
Imagine there's no spamblock ... someone want to finish it? sorry, the title just got to me ;)
It's easy if you try
AOHell below us
Above us only sky(list)