I'd say that it's mostly disillusionment. You're right: it's not that hard in essence, but in the modern age of spam the effort required to stay clean is (IMO) non-trivial, and things can get very ugly very quickly. (Ugly in terms of bounce loops and bounce spam and various spools filling up.)
I gave up, but haven't switched to gmail (yet). I just turned off my external SMTP service, and now configure all of my MUAs to SMTP directly to the upstream server of the account I'm responding as. Most can handle that, and it still lets me run a unified IMAP server, which I love, but avoids all of the pain of black-lists and most of the pain of spam. Still run a local spool, because my ISP's mail is only POP, so I fetchmail from there.
So: the OP can probably get most of what he wants with an IMAP server (dovecot) and a web-mail front-end (maybe roundcube? I just read about it here.) Let the big ISP's mail spool handle MX and most of the spam filtering...
The old Slashdot used to format the centre column nicely across the width of the iPhone screen. The new one does that by making the font size unreadable, keeping the same number of lines per paragraph. Please support "vertical" reading on handheld devices again, by allowing the paragraphs to re-format, as HTML intended.
Re:Asynchronous and self modifying code.
on
Programming Clojure
·
· Score: 1
"creating and composing anonymous lambda functions on the fly" is usually referred to as closing over lexically-scoped variables. It is certainly something that happens as a common idiom in functional languages, but it is *not* self-modifying code. It's more like creating an ad-hoc object that holds some data, and has an over-ridden "operator-()" (to use a C++ idiom). Yes, many lisps can and do generate code at run-time. So do several object-oriented languages, like Smalltalk. There are many dialects of lisp (including common lisp and scheme) that compile to pure executable code, either directly or through C, and have no compiler in the result. No compiler or self-modifcation, but they still operate with closures.
> So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with filtering it.
Totally wrong: there is *no* other "media" that is actively filtered, based either on content or source. That is what is different about this proposal. All other media comply with the legislation (mostly) because they'll get into trouble with the law if they don't. That is *good enough*.
> I mean hell, it's already illegal to *host* this sort of content in Australia.
Exactly. It's illegal essentially everywhere. Let the police get on with their job. Encourage them. Fund them with the proceeds of this policy, if you like. The police don't care what protocols you're using to break the law, and are therefore future-proof and much harder to circumvent.
Java the language may or may not be cool, but Java the platform has exactly the problem Jobs is talking about: a closed API set that doesn't offer *any* access to the underlying Cocoa framework, because to do so would prevent "compiling once and running anywhere". This inability to use platform-native APIs is why Java is the programming ghetto that it is, and why Android's use of Java is not allowed to call itself Java: they like the language, but want to offer platform-appropriate (their own) APIs, rather than J2ME or whatever.
Since when does DTD or CSS file creation involve "a map of metacodes found in the document" such that "the map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document". I doubt that is what Microsoft have done, because, well, who would? It means that this map needs to be regenerated after every edit of the document, which means that this isn't terribly useful or document-independent meta-information...
That summary makes it sound as though the company invented DTDs, after seeing HTML (which had them, sort-of), and in ignorance of all of the processing that was already being done in SGML in the years before. This is clearly rubbish. The pre-existence of document formatting with SGML must make the patent's claims very narrow. (not that I've read them.)
Read the report: it's not accurate in any useful or unexpected sense: it blocks the URLs that are on the block list. Neat, huh? They just get to make a claim with a pretty, round number.
What on earth do you need multiple inheritance, virtual functions and templates for if you're writing a memory management system or interrupt handler?
The problem with C++ is that it keeps C++ programmers from moving on to more productive languages with more support for real abstractions, by having them believe that they should use it to write the tiny amount of code that would be better written in C.
Get over it: you've got a perfectly useful set of interrupt handlers and memory management in your favourite OS and runtime. Write the useful code in something that will *leverage* that, rather than re-inventing it over and over again.
The lined FSF news item names GCC and binutils as licenced items that Cisco is not doing the right thing with. GNU libc I can understand (but thought that most of those sorts of gizmos used newlib), but gcc itself? How are GCC and Binutils being brought into the complaint?
I always thought that since we have to do without an hour all summer, and then get it back as winter comes on, it would be fairer if we got it back with interest. You don't want to actually make any of the hours longer or shorter, but some hours are more valuable than others:
Take the hour at 2AM on a Sunday morning, same as now, but return the hour at, say, 4PM on a Friday afternoon, so that we get into the weekend a bit sooner than expected...
> and (b) difficulty for anyone in politics. This could be the end of functional democracy.
Maybe, just like your optimistic view of discrimination laws and behavior, people will just get a grip and stop expecting their politicians to be anything other than real people.
By way of example: the current Australian Prime Minister's popularity rating increased significantly, during the election campaign, when it was leaked that he had been inebriated at a strip club in the company of some journalists, while on an overseas trip.
It can be argued that democracy is already not particularly functional, but knowing more about our politicians, or what their Facebook pages say about them probably isn't going to have much of an impact, IMO.
enjoy reading my encrypted traffic and voip phone calls. Don't forget that in the UK, you must hand over encryption keys on demand or face jail time. This has been the law for some time over there. And how does that work out for them for https or other common SSL connections like smtp+tls, or imaps, where the keys are generated per-session and then thrown away?
The Portege and Vaio are nice machines, but they don't run OS-X, which makes them a non-starter for me. Does Linux know how to talk to all of the curly hardware in yours? No, I reckon this new thing could very well be the replacement for my 12" PowerBook G4: the 15" Pro is just too big and heavy for what I want in a laptop. Guess I'm the target market...
It's got (almost) nothing to do with network-facing servers. There's no point running IPv6 if noone's going to route IPv6 packets to you. I've seen no indication of IPv6 activity or routability or interest from my local ISPs.
Hey, I did vacation work on a Mac (Plus!) interface to an experimental ATM network in about 1988. Sure, ATM doesn't seem to have made it into the home, but voice+video+data over one protocol was the goal. Worked, too. Just wasn't TCP/IP based... If there's anything interesting in this patent (which I haven't read), it'll be something clever to do with priority and QoS associated with IP routing, which is probably fair enough. The three "modes" typically have considerably different bandwidth/latency profiles and requirements.
Well, it doesn't sound too terribly different from the sorts of things that SE Linux (in Fedora Core), or TrustedBSD on FreeBSD, or systrace on OpenBSD: wrap particular applications up with a bunch of rules ("policy") about what they're actually allowed to do. Certainly not as desirable as bug-free software, but perhaps a reasonable approach if the desired network-facing software is sufficiently complex by design that rendering it bug free is troublesome.
Of course, browsers have no business running raw downloaded code under any circumstances. That's just daft.
Hunting for the widget the FIRST time was annoying enough. Why would I want to hunt for it a SECOND time? I have already learned where it is the first time.
It's worse than that. As an infrequent user of MS Office, I've noticed that the time it takes me to correlate the label on a menu item that my mouse is hovering over with what I want to do is just fractionally longer than the time that Office decides is the right time to expand the menu into full glory mode. Bang! The menu item that I then click on is *not* the one that I was hovering over, and something inexplicable happens to my document. (Of course, the menu goes away as soon as you release the mouse button, so you can't even see what option it was that was clicked.)
No, supply chains hate double inventory, let alone tripple. That's one of the reasons that DVD-A and SACD floundered: most retailers wouldn't stock even the pitiful range of titles that *were* available, because they percieved no demand, and the extra range took up shelf, display and warehouse space (all costs to the distribution chain). There has to be consumer demand. That was easy with both CD and DVD. There's nothing in HD/Blu DVD to induce that.
I can't be bothered to track down the patent, but if your description is accurate, then a number of solutions seem obvious:
* Pre-load the appropriate plug-ins (that have already been installed as appropriate), so that the browser+plugin just has the necessary functionaity at boot time, or
* Run the dynamically started "plug-in" as a separate executable, with an appropriate display/comms protocol between it and the browser, just the way X-windows and MS's own OLE has done for years.
I'm sure that others can come up with other work-arounds, if necessary. Personlally, I think that a separate installation process in which I pre-approve of particular sorts of plug-in functionality (java, flash, PDF would probably do me) would be vastly better than the whole Active-X miazma.
No-one ever did that before, on a remote X-terminal/session? Pretty sure I was doing content creation over the internet in '95 or so, that way. Or does the patent explicitly require HTTP connections? No, I wasn't using those, back then.
Yes it's true that human angular resolution of sound arrival is higher than the angular positioning that can be achieved by time displacements of whole samples. However the sampling process is linear and shift-invariant, and the time of arrival of a sampled (band-limited) signal is completely unrelated to the timing of individual samples. Sub-sample time shifts are possible with sampled signals, it just takes more effort than whole-sample shifts (if you're doing it in the sampled domain). If you do the shift in the physical domain, say by moving a microphone less than the 7mm occupied by one 48kHz sample, then you can still sample and record the signal digitally, and the sub-sample shift will be faithfully recorded. So this isn't an argument for sampling higher than 44.1kHz (although that's not to say that there may be some others).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that it's mostly disillusionment. You're right: it's not that hard in essence, but in the modern age of spam the effort required to stay clean is (IMO) non-trivial, and things can get very ugly very quickly. (Ugly in terms of bounce loops and bounce spam and various spools filling up.)
I gave up, but haven't switched to gmail (yet). I just turned off my external SMTP service, and now configure all of my MUAs to SMTP directly to the upstream server of the account I'm responding as. Most can handle that, and it still lets me run a unified IMAP server, which I love, but avoids all of the pain of black-lists and most of the pain of spam. Still run a local spool, because my ISP's mail is only POP, so I fetchmail from there.
So: the OP can probably get most of what he wants with an IMAP server (dovecot) and a web-mail front-end (maybe roundcube? I just read about it here.) Let the big ISP's mail spool handle MX and most of the spam filtering...
Why not? Works for Ubuntu. You want Amazon or WalMart or the guy down the road managing your software updates?
The old Slashdot used to format the centre column nicely across the width of the iPhone screen. The new one does that by making the font size unreadable, keeping the same number of lines per paragraph. Please support "vertical" reading on handheld devices again, by allowing the paragraphs to re-format, as HTML intended.
"creating and composing anonymous lambda functions on the fly" is usually referred to as closing over lexically-scoped variables. It is certainly something that happens as a common idiom in functional languages, but it is *not* self-modifying code. It's more like creating an ad-hoc object that holds some data, and has an over-ridden "operator-()" (to use a C++ idiom).
Yes, many lisps can and do generate code at run-time. So do several object-oriented languages, like Smalltalk. There are many dialects of lisp (including common lisp and scheme) that compile to pure executable code, either directly or through C, and have no compiler in the result. No compiler or self-modifcation, but they still operate with closures.
You mean like gnash? Clearly it's not quite as simple as that, because gnash's primary function appears to be to crash, taking the browser with it...
The Australian is the local NEWS Corp. paper. Rupert essentially on record as saying that the internet is a bad idea...
> So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with filtering it.
Totally wrong: there is *no* other "media" that is actively filtered, based either on content or source. That is what is different about this proposal. All other media comply with the legislation (mostly) because they'll get into trouble with the law if they don't. That is *good enough*.
> I mean hell, it's already illegal to *host* this sort of content in Australia.
Exactly. It's illegal essentially everywhere. Let the police get on with their job. Encourage them. Fund them with the proceeds of this policy, if you like. The police don't care what protocols you're using to break the law, and are therefore future-proof and much harder to circumvent.
Java the language may or may not be cool, but Java the platform has exactly the problem Jobs is talking about: a closed API set that doesn't offer *any* access to the underlying Cocoa framework, because to do so would prevent "compiling once and running anywhere". This inability to use platform-native APIs is why Java is the programming ghetto that it is, and why Android's use of Java is not allowed to call itself Java: they like the language, but want to offer platform-appropriate (their own) APIs, rather than J2ME or whatever.
Since when does DTD or CSS file creation involve "a map of metacodes found in the document" such that "the map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document". I doubt that is what Microsoft have done, because, well, who would? It means that this map needs to be regenerated after every edit of the document, which means that this isn't terribly useful or document-independent meta-information...
That summary makes it sound as though the company invented DTDs, after seeing HTML (which had them, sort-of), and in ignorance of all of the processing that was already being done in SGML in the years before. This is clearly rubbish. The pre-existence of document formatting with SGML must make the patent's claims very narrow. (not that I've read them.)
Read the report: it's not accurate in any useful or unexpected sense: it blocks the URLs that are on the block list. Neat, huh? They just get to make a claim with a pretty, round number.
What on earth do you need multiple inheritance, virtual functions and templates for if you're writing a memory management system or interrupt handler?
The problem with C++ is that it keeps C++ programmers from moving on to more productive languages with more support for real abstractions, by having them believe that they should use it to write the tiny amount of code that would be better written in C.
Get over it: you've got a perfectly useful set of interrupt handlers and memory management in your favourite OS and runtime. Write the useful code in something that will *leverage* that, rather than re-inventing it over and over again.
The lined FSF news item names GCC and binutils as licenced items that Cisco is not doing the right thing with. GNU libc I can understand (but thought that most of those sorts of gizmos used newlib), but gcc itself? How are GCC and Binutils being brought into the complaint?
I always thought that since we have to do without an hour all summer, and then get it back as winter comes on, it would be fairer if we got it back with interest. You don't want to actually make any of the hours longer or shorter, but some hours are more valuable than others:
Take the hour at 2AM on a Sunday morning, same as now, but return the hour at, say, 4PM on a Friday afternoon, so that we get into the weekend a bit sooner than expected...
> and (b) difficulty for anyone in politics. This could be the end of functional democracy.
Maybe, just like your optimistic view of discrimination laws and behavior, people will just get a grip and stop expecting their politicians to be anything other than real people.
By way of example: the current Australian Prime Minister's popularity rating increased significantly, during the election campaign, when it was leaked that he had been inebriated at a strip club in the company of some journalists, while on an overseas trip.
It can be argued that democracy is already not particularly functional, but knowing more about our politicians, or what their Facebook pages say about them probably isn't going to have much of an impact, IMO.
The Portege and Vaio are nice machines, but they don't run OS-X, which makes them a non-starter for me.
Does Linux know how to talk to all of the curly hardware in yours?
No, I reckon this new thing could very well be the replacement for my 12" PowerBook G4: the 15" Pro is just too big and heavy for what I want in a laptop. Guess I'm the target market...
It's got (almost) nothing to do with network-facing servers. There's no point running IPv6 if noone's going to route IPv6 packets to you. I've seen no indication of IPv6 activity or routability or interest from my local ISPs.
Hey, I did vacation work on a Mac (Plus!) interface to an experimental ATM network in about 1988. Sure, ATM doesn't seem to have made it into the home, but voice+video+data over one protocol was the goal. Worked, too. Just wasn't TCP/IP based... If there's anything interesting in this patent (which I haven't read), it'll be something clever to do with priority and QoS associated with IP routing, which is probably fair enough. The three "modes" typically have considerably different bandwidth/latency profiles and requirements.
Well, it doesn't sound too terribly different from the sorts of things that SE Linux (in Fedora Core), or TrustedBSD on FreeBSD, or systrace on OpenBSD: wrap particular applications up with a bunch of rules ("policy") about what they're actually allowed to do. Certainly not as desirable as bug-free software, but perhaps a reasonable approach if the desired network-facing software is sufficiently complex by design that rendering it bug free is troublesome.
Of course, browsers have no business running raw downloaded code under any circumstances. That's just daft.
It's worse than that. As an infrequent user of MS Office, I've noticed that the time it takes me to correlate the label on a menu item that my mouse is hovering over with what I want to do is just fractionally longer than the time that Office decides is the right time to expand the menu into full glory mode. Bang! The menu item that I then click on is *not* the one that I was hovering over, and something inexplicable happens to my document. (Of course, the menu goes away as soon as you release the mouse button, so you can't even see what option it was that was clicked.)
Bah, humbug. Gimme VIM any day.
No, supply chains hate double inventory, let alone tripple. That's one of the reasons that DVD-A and SACD floundered: most retailers wouldn't stock even the pitiful range of titles that *were* available, because they percieved no demand, and the extra range took up shelf, display and warehouse space (all costs to the distribution chain). There has to be consumer demand. That was easy with both CD and DVD. There's nothing in HD/Blu DVD to induce that.
I can't be bothered to track down the patent, but if your description is accurate, then a number of solutions seem obvious:
* Pre-load the appropriate plug-ins (that have already been installed as appropriate), so that the browser+plugin just has the necessary functionaity at boot time, or
* Run the dynamically started "plug-in" as a separate executable, with an appropriate display/comms protocol between it and the browser, just the way X-windows and MS's own OLE has done for years.
I'm sure that others can come up with other work-arounds, if necessary. Personlally, I think that a separate installation process in which I pre-approve of particular sorts of plug-in functionality (java, flash, PDF would probably do me) would be vastly better than the whole Active-X miazma.
No-one ever did that before, on a remote X-terminal/session? Pretty sure I was doing content creation over the internet in '95 or so, that way. Or does the patent explicitly require HTTP connections? No, I wasn't using those, back then.
Yes it's true that human angular resolution of sound arrival is higher than the angular positioning that can be achieved by time displacements of whole samples. However the sampling process is linear and shift-invariant, and the time of arrival of a sampled (band-limited) signal is completely unrelated to the timing of individual samples. Sub-sample time shifts are possible with sampled signals, it just takes more effort than whole-sample shifts (if you're doing it in the sampled domain). If you do the shift in the physical domain, say by moving a microphone less than the 7mm occupied by one 48kHz sample, then you can still sample and record the signal digitally, and the sub-sample shift will be faithfully recorded.
So this isn't an argument for sampling higher than 44.1kHz (although that's not to say that there may be some others).