chrisd notes that his company is making SCO employees unhireable.
That's okay. Most companies who might consider doing business with this fellow have probably just made his petty little company unhireable as well. Why apply to another sinking ship?
> I've always wondered if my information is secure between my keyboard and the monitor
Considering it takes a trip through the potentially keystroke-logger-ridden virus-infested operating system in order to do so, perhaps you should wonder...
> Does AOL really intend on being Mozilla's major financer for much longer, especially since they recently solidified a deal keeping the IE renderer a core part of their client software, all but making Mozilla irrelevant?
AOL for MacOSX runs on Gecko. Ironic, since that's probably Mozilla's worst platform. Bet your ass they're keeping their options open as far as supporting linux goes, e.g. if they decide to distribute some sort of AOL appliance.
I see AOL as moving gradually toward becoming a vanilla ISP ala Earthlink, actually, but you never know.
You realize they can simply pick up the phone? Or make a physical photocopy of the paper doc they do receive? (They're secretaries, they handle docs, that's a big reason they're there) Or take a screenshot?
Get a bit in the way maybe. Carte blanche, complete rubbish.
... Know who can afford to get "Level 1" certs by the dozens? Spammers. Know who can't afford to get a cert of any kind? The homeless guy at the library computer emailing to his buddies from hotmail about how the cops beat him up (yeah I'm pulling out emotional rhetoric, bad me).
How about those background checks for certs? I bet the aforementioned homeless guy would have alittle problem with that. Not to mention anyone with an interest in privacy. I'm *sure* the chinese government and the ashcroft regime would love a scheme that required that level of certification and registration in order to communicate online...
Re:business vs tech presss
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Oddly enough, your list leaves out SCO. I'm not talking about just OS choice here, but the applications it's used for, or some niche of professional services. There's reasons some people run SCO after all, even if it's lock-in.
Then again, their grand total of two new licensees last year suggests that maybe everyone's already found alternatives.
Also, it would be informative to know how much holding that Canopy has in any of these companies. Don't they own some small percentage of Redhat after all?
It's odd... almost every one of your points was the reason I preferred FreeBSD, from the console (graphical cursor), to the responsiveness of X (Linux has probably leapfrogged BSD by now, this was a couple years ago), to kernel configuration (kernel configuration in a text file, fully separate builds, dependencies always worked, modules could be built independently afterward with a 'make', etc).
Nowadays I'd probably go with Linux for my desktop and home server, but if I want some kind of appliance that I can make a dozen one-off configuration changes to with a simple script, FreeBSD's still on top. From the POV of the junior admin, there's no difference, both Linux and FreeBSD run webmin just dandy.
Re:Cairo? Bill Gates will be contacting them.
on
Xr Renamed to Cairo
·
· Score: 1
> This is the code name for Windows NT
You're thinking of Windows 95. NT's code name was, get ready for it, NT. It never escaped its codename except for adding a "Windows" in front of it when they added the Win32 layer.
> It may take a little more work, but the only solution to spam is the whitelist.
Insightful, eh? The only solution, eh? Let's consider for a moment that was mere hyperbole, and you didn't actually mean "only" (I've decided to start giving people the benefit of the doubt, goodness knows my own rhetoric doesn't shine with rigor.. insofar as rigor can shine. It's too early in the morning).
Let's come up with some problems with whitelists in terms of user population:
* The blind. Most whitelists make you read off some challenge text that's been mutated in some fairly surrealist/cubist style. * The just plain impatient. I refuse to jump through 20 different hoops to say hi to 20 people who left their email on a guestbook at a wedding. * Helpdesks, and other public points of contact. They still need an antispam solution though. * Old guard types who still believe in having an open email box (I should practice what I preach, but I so rarely read my "public" inbox). They may still want to block based on content and blacklists of known bad operators.
Whitelisting on a simple "from" is insufficient, spammers will simply begin harvesting address pairs... though that may make enough people mad to get more laws passed (hey it's grandma. enlarge my WHAT?) The prospect of more laws does not reassure me; the government would probably lock up anyone who sent an unpopular political newsletter to a typo'ed address.
Usually they're used when mastering a recording, and in the hands of a good recording engineer, you don't even know they were used. It's not about perfect pitch, it's about hitting a note perfectly (difference between 20/20 vision and batting 1.000).
More recently, Cher used the autopitch as an effect, keeping it on and letting it lock the notes as her voice slid up and down. Now every damn artist uses it, and it's as damn annoying as the robot voice in 80's electronika, but it's still as an effect. If you can't sing, it's still not going to make you sound good, and even if you can, it's still hard to sing like cher did into the autopitch without sounding more like Bette "Dyipthong" Midler instead. Try it, you'll see.
I won't play an MMORPG again until I can have an effect on the world around me.... I want the potential to not just rally and lead a clan, but to storm the castle or incite a coup!
I won't play a MMORPG until the rallying cry sounds something different than "SCHLONGMASTERS GUILD RALLY NOW, PHAT L00T @ SPAWN 153.62. NO ONE < LEV20, FUKN NEWBS"
You misspelled a word: "wild uninformed speculation" doesn't begin with a "C". Large stock transactions of publicly traded companies require disclosure. You would know.
"We" (Americans) work more hours than the Japanese did in the 80's.
> How would our society function if people didn't WANT to sit in school until they are 25, so they can work hard for 40 years then retire for 60 years.
If the average person lived til 125, that would indeed cause society to function a bit differently.
A "better filter" will only help you to avoid the problem, it doesn't make the problem go away.
At some point, as filters become ubiquitous, spammers are going to realize they could get more exposure by going back to junk faxing. Maybe SMS, but doubtful, since so much of that infrastructure is centralized. Some suckers buy from spam. Few buy stuff out of emails in their spam folder -- go fig.
Fuck if I want one of the most abusive, oppressive, and invasive governments in america's history getting access to more federal laws to whack us with. They'd probably use it to shut down a political campaign that has the bad judgement to pick a spammer to run a regional mail list (see Howard Dean)
> Since CAML is a functional language, it's probably more productive to compare it with other functional languages than with more familiar procedural languages.
Actually no, it's worth comparing against imperative languages, because caml has those features as well, like fully mutable variables (believe it or not, it's not something you take for granted in the FP world -- erlang's variables are set-once, and haskell has only bindings aside from monad 'do' blocks).
Ocaml does have several annoying features though:
* No machine types. You cannot express an unsigned 32 bit int in ocaml. This would make writing an IP4 stack in ocaml somewhat onerous. Similarly, there's no "raw" struct types you can finely pack.
* No overloading at all. To implement the actual nuts and bolts of polymorphism, where the types diverge, you either have to use separate classes or pass along type information explicitly, something like a C++ traits object. Somewhat more palatable with closures, but the monomorphism restriction will then bite you in the ass. Modules are suggested as another mechanism, but I've yet to see actual code that makes them look anything like ad hoc polymorphism.
* Supremely stupid compiler feedback. My favorite is "the expression is of type foo but is used here with type foo". Perhaps a warning about redefined types would have been handy?
* Syntax gets uuuuuuugly when using polymorphic types and labels. Objective Labl has been in ocaml for years, but still feels bolted on.
Personally, I want haskell and ocaml to get together and have a baby, but that's probably asking too much...
... that disables sobig.f and all its incarnations? Wondering how small one can make a personal firewall and spread it as a worm. At least a program that monitors for new ports being opened, tests them for being SMTP or SOCKS or whatever else sobig is opening, then pops up a warning saying "your system may be compromised, learn more by clicking here, clean it up by clicking here".
Network transparency is the single best thing about X
On that, no argument. X's implementation of network transparency is quite possibly the worst part of X, however. The X server is dumb and cannot be helped without some grotesque hacks. I'd really like to not cause a zillion expose events to happen every time I resize or move windows. I'd like to be able to program events locally and not have every single damn keystroke roundtripped. Wouldn't it be nice to have a terminal window that actually knew the difference between a canvas and a text widget on the server side and acted appropriately?
But you say there's local transports for local clients so we don't notice that. Then why the transparency in the first place?
I know about things like LBX. I also know that they're still not worth a damn on VPN tunnels which still impose big overhead on short packets. The fact is, a session on citrix is usable over a dialup, and X is not.
Heck, in the nice neighborhoods of San Francisco, the bus shelters have ads for Good Vibrations. And they're tasteful. There's the difference between that and spam.
True, and they have features that POSIX ACL's don't, such as more granular access rights and categories like OWNER/CREATOR.
It also has this other charming feature: when you use the GUI, it sorts the ACL by name. And when you have global allow or deny privs on particular credentials, but specific other credentials that override them, they may work when you set them, then mysteriously not once you simply view them in the GUI, because the list has been reordered, and the first one wins. This sort of thing drives NT admins nuts. And there's no sign of it being fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
chrisd notes that his company is making SCO employees unhireable.
That's okay. Most companies who might consider doing business with this fellow have probably just made his petty little company unhireable as well. Why apply to another sinking ship?
> I've always wondered if my information is secure between my keyboard and the monitor
Considering it takes a trip through the potentially keystroke-logger-ridden virus-infested operating system in order to do so, perhaps you should wonder...
> Does AOL really intend on being Mozilla's major financer for much longer, especially since they recently solidified a deal keeping the IE renderer a core part of their client software, all but making Mozilla irrelevant?
AOL for MacOSX runs on Gecko. Ironic, since that's probably Mozilla's worst platform. Bet your ass they're keeping their options open as far as supporting linux goes, e.g. if they decide to distribute some sort of AOL appliance.
I see AOL as moving gradually toward becoming a vanilla ISP ala Earthlink, actually, but you never know.
You realize they can simply pick up the phone? Or make a physical photocopy of the paper doc they do receive? (They're secretaries, they handle docs, that's a big reason they're there) Or take a screenshot?
Get a bit in the way maybe. Carte blanche, complete rubbish.
> My dictionary says that "schadenfreude" is also an english word.
Maybe the germans don't use it. "Zeitgeist" is another word that's more popular in english as well. To say nothing of "blitzkrieg".
... Know who can afford to get "Level 1" certs by the dozens? Spammers. Know who can't afford to get a cert of any kind? The homeless guy at the library computer emailing to his buddies from hotmail about how the cops beat him up (yeah I'm pulling out emotional rhetoric, bad me).
How about those background checks for certs? I bet the aforementioned homeless guy would have alittle problem with that. Not to mention anyone with an interest in privacy. I'm *sure* the chinese government and the ashcroft regime would love a scheme that required that level of certification and registration in order to communicate online...
Oddly enough, your list leaves out SCO. I'm not talking about just OS choice here, but the applications it's used for, or some niche of professional services. There's reasons some people run SCO after all, even if it's lock-in.
Then again, their grand total of two new licensees last year suggests that maybe everyone's already found alternatives.
Also, it would be informative to know how much holding that Canopy has in any of these companies. Don't they own some small percentage of Redhat after all?
It's odd ... almost every one of your points was the reason I preferred FreeBSD, from the console (graphical cursor), to the responsiveness of X (Linux has probably leapfrogged BSD by now, this was a couple years ago), to kernel configuration (kernel configuration in a text file, fully separate builds, dependencies always worked, modules could be built independently afterward with a 'make', etc).
Nowadays I'd probably go with Linux for my desktop and home server, but if I want some kind of appliance that I can make a dozen one-off configuration changes to with a simple script, FreeBSD's still on top. From the POV of the junior admin, there's no difference, both Linux and FreeBSD run webmin just dandy.
Yeah, and a capital rho looks like a P.
XP
Goody.
> This is the code name for Windows NT
You're thinking of Windows 95. NT's code name was, get ready for it, NT. It never escaped its codename except for adding a "Windows" in front of it when they added the Win32 layer.
One of my favorites:
$ tar c
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
> SPEWS starts out with a listing of JUST the IP address that is spamming. It gets wider only if abuse reports are repeatedly ignored
/24 to the /16, and now to his entire /0 ;)
Yeah, and now they've "widened" the block from the
> It may take a little more work, but the only solution to spam is the whitelist.
.. insofar as rigor can shine. It's too early in the morning).
Insightful, eh? The only solution, eh? Let's consider for a moment that was mere hyperbole, and you didn't actually mean "only" (I've decided to start giving people the benefit of the doubt, goodness knows my own rhetoric doesn't shine with rigor
Let's come up with some problems with whitelists in terms of user population:
* The blind. Most whitelists make you read off some challenge text that's been mutated in some fairly surrealist/cubist style.
* The just plain impatient. I refuse to jump through 20 different hoops to say hi to 20 people who left their email on a guestbook at a wedding.
* Helpdesks, and other public points of contact. They still need an antispam solution though.
* Old guard types who still believe in having an open email box (I should practice what I preach, but I so rarely read my "public" inbox). They may still want to block based on content and blacklists of known bad operators.
Whitelisting on a simple "from" is insufficient, spammers will simply begin harvesting address pairs... though that may make enough people mad to get more laws passed (hey it's grandma. enlarge my WHAT?) The prospect of more laws does not reassure me; the government would probably lock up anyone who sent an unpopular political newsletter to a typo'ed address.
If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.
Usually they're used when mastering a recording, and in the hands of a good recording engineer, you don't even know they were used. It's not about perfect pitch, it's about hitting a note perfectly (difference between 20/20 vision and batting 1.000).
More recently, Cher used the autopitch as an effect, keeping it on and letting it lock the notes as her voice slid up and down. Now every damn artist uses it, and it's as damn annoying as the robot voice in 80's electronika, but it's still as an effect. If you can't sing, it's still not going to make you sound good, and even if you can, it's still hard to sing like cher did into the autopitch without sounding more like Bette "Dyipthong" Midler instead. Try it, you'll see.
I won't play an MMORPG again until I can have an effect on the world around me. ... I want the potential to not just rally and lead a clan, but to storm the castle or incite a coup!
I won't play a MMORPG until the rallying cry sounds something different than "SCHLONGMASTERS GUILD RALLY NOW, PHAT L00T @ SPAWN 153.62. NO ONE < LEV20, FUKN NEWBS"
> Consensus, most likely MS' investment arm.
You misspelled a word: "wild uninformed speculation" doesn't begin with a "C". Large stock transactions of publicly traded companies require disclosure. You would know.
> We have been raised to DISDAIN work forever
"We" (Americans) work more hours than the Japanese did in the 80's.
> How would our society function if people didn't WANT to sit in school until they are 25, so they can work hard for 40 years then retire for 60 years.
If the average person lived til 125, that would indeed cause society to function a bit differently.
Then get a better Bayesian filter.
A "better filter" will only help you to avoid the problem, it doesn't make the problem go away.
At some point, as filters become ubiquitous, spammers are going to realize they could get more exposure by going back to junk faxing. Maybe SMS, but doubtful, since so much of that infrastructure is centralized. Some suckers buy from spam. Few buy stuff out of emails in their spam folder -- go fig.
Fuck if I want one of the most abusive, oppressive, and invasive governments in america's history getting access to more federal laws to whack us with. They'd probably use it to shut down a political campaign that has the bad judgement to pick a spammer to run a regional mail list (see Howard Dean)
> Since CAML is a functional language, it's probably more productive to compare it with other functional languages than with more familiar procedural languages.
Actually no, it's worth comparing against imperative languages, because caml has those features as well, like fully mutable variables (believe it or not, it's not something you take for granted in the FP world -- erlang's variables are set-once, and haskell has only bindings aside from monad 'do' blocks).
Ocaml does have several annoying features though:
* No machine types. You cannot express an unsigned 32 bit int in ocaml. This would make writing an IP4 stack in ocaml somewhat onerous. Similarly, there's no "raw" struct types you can finely pack.
* No overloading at all. To implement the actual nuts and bolts of polymorphism, where the types diverge, you either have to use separate classes or pass along type information explicitly, something like a C++ traits object. Somewhat more palatable with closures, but the monomorphism restriction will then bite you in the ass. Modules are suggested as another mechanism, but I've yet to see actual code that makes them look anything like ad hoc polymorphism.
* Supremely stupid compiler feedback. My favorite is "the expression is of type foo but is used here with type foo". Perhaps a warning about redefined types would have been handy?
* Syntax gets uuuuuuugly when using polymorphic types and labels. Objective Labl has been in ocaml for years, but still feels bolted on.
Personally, I want haskell and ocaml to get together and have a baby, but that's probably asking too much...
... that disables sobig.f and all its incarnations? Wondering how small one can make a personal firewall and spread it as a worm. At least a program that monitors for new ports being opened, tests them for being SMTP or SOCKS or whatever else sobig is opening, then pops up a warning saying "your system may be compromised, learn more by clicking here, clean it up by clicking here".
> I'm not sure that the X source can legally BE forked (I know nothing about licenses)
It's the MIT License. It says "we own this, you can do whatever you want as long as you don't sue us. If it breaks you keep both pieces".
Network transparency is the single best thing about X
On that, no argument. X's implementation of network transparency is quite possibly the worst part of X, however. The X server is dumb and cannot be helped without some grotesque hacks. I'd really like to not cause a zillion expose events to happen every time I resize or move windows. I'd like to be able to program events locally and not have every single damn keystroke roundtripped. Wouldn't it be nice to have a terminal window that actually knew the difference between a canvas and a text widget on the server side and acted appropriately?
But you say there's local transports for local clients so we don't notice that. Then why the transparency in the first place?
I know about things like LBX. I also know that they're still not worth a damn on VPN tunnels which still impose big overhead on short packets. The fact is, a session on citrix is usable over a dialup, and X is not.
Why is
"Great offer at Wal-Mart, 2 for 1 Washing powder"
more acceptable than
"Great offer at Sex-Mart, 2 for 1 Vibrators"
Heck, in the nice neighborhoods of San Francisco, the bus shelters have ads for Good Vibrations. And they're tasteful. There's the difference between that and spam.
Incidentally, Wal-Mart doesn't spam me either.
> But Windows NT has had ACLs for some time now.
True, and they have features that POSIX ACL's don't, such as more granular access rights and categories like OWNER/CREATOR.
It also has this other charming feature: when you use the GUI, it sorts the ACL by name. And when you have global allow or deny privs on particular credentials, but specific other credentials that override them, they may work when you set them, then mysteriously not once you simply view them in the GUI, because the list has been reordered, and the first one wins. This sort of thing drives NT admins nuts. And there's no sign of it being fixed.