Re:not the answer - you got that right!
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
Then the smtp server needs to authenticate all the clients.
I like that.
Some reliable SMTP server has to claim ownership of the mail and to guarantee they'll take back unwanted UBE.
Anyone adminning a "trusted" SMTP server would lock it down and be very careful of which users they granted access because of the consequences.
The concept of distributing responsibility outward as much as possible is one I like. We just have to stop one layer back at trusted SMTP relays, because we can't trust unresponsible SMTP relays and we have insufficient means to enforce responsible behavior.
Difficult Problem
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree that something ought to be done to cut down on the huge volume of spam that clogs most SMTP traffic.
On the surface of it, a white-listing system, perhaps based on public-key cryptography and endorsements might work.
But, as someone who values freedom and anonymity, I'd hate to have a system that closes off completely the opportunity for more anonymous communication via email.
Whistleblowers in the government and in the corporate sector, dissidents under a repressive political regime are some of the use cases for email that I'm not really inclined to sacrifice merely to eliminate spam.
Yer just reminding me of how badly I miss a good solid HP calculator with RPN functionality!
My old HP-15C got flaky years ago.
For a short time, I ran xhpcalc, an X11 application that looked and functioned almost exactly like one of those nice classics but only ran on old versions of HP/UX.
Now, I have to put up with Gnome or KDE calculators that are no where near as nice!
I wouldn't have minded a T shirt with a filled in version of Timothy's Slashdot crossword puzzle on it.
Better than that, though, would be if the white and dark squares of the puzzle formed some kind of crude image.
Ah, the history. You'd get all kinds of puzzled looks from non-readers looking at answers like
"Natalie Portman", "karma whore", "goatse.cx", "Troll", "BSD is dead", etc..
Another shameful artifact of a distorted marketplace, unfortunately.
I remember when NDS came out to good technical reviews earlier than Active Directory.
Despite all the good press about a good product, most IT managers took the cautious approach, figuring, rightly, that Microsoft would make its directory services offering "integrated" with Windows.
Yep, "integrated', the same way that Brer Rabbit got "integrated" with the Tar Baby.
The same way that IE got "integrated" with Windows.
Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money.
You're correct. If I had to bet my life support machine on a single piece of hardware and software, I'd pick Solaris on SPARC over Linux on x86, mainly because of the extra hardware reliability from Sun.
But with the way that clustering technology is developing, it's getting to be a reasonable cost-effective alternative to pickup 2 or 3 Lintel boxes.
If your Lintel box has 99.99% uptime and your Solaris/SPARC box has 99.999% uptime, then 2 Lintel boxes will give you theoretically 8 nines of uptime (I know, I know, in real life, whatever power line glitch caused the downtime for the first machine is likely to increase the odds of the second machine to fail). Even so, 2 Lintel boxes is better.
I really still think Sun can offer value to the emerging and growing market of low-end Lintel boxes in two areas: services (like IBM does), and enterprise management (because they've already worried about it (NIS and follow ons) for Solaris systems).
It's too bad to see another great hardware platform fade. But UltraSPARC has been late in delivery because only real he-men can afford the fabs and development necessary and Intel shows it can afford to make mistakes (like Itanium) and still beat more worthy technology in chips such as Alpha, PA-RISC, MIPS and Power.
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc.
Careful, dude. Next thing, you'll start to question collegiate athletic programs!
If you look closely at the number of comments and the number of comments with high scores associated with the story.
I wouldn't mind if the Slash code showed some nice graphics so I could more quickly find the hot stories. Something like larger pies for more comments, with colored sectors for fractions of high comments, etc.
Clothing manufacturers will give away free clothing to hot-looking chicks and hunky guys.
Especially if they act "cool". That is, your models act in such a way that makes other people want to be like them and to wear the same clothing as they do.
Ugly, out-of-shape and uncool?
We'll be paying full price for our duds. Or else we'll be wearing clothing that is not "cool".
I doubt that it would be so "trivial" to install gcc or any other piece of GNU software in the old days unless there was a reasonable amount of standards compliance (i.e., POSIX). Even so, they had to jump through more than a few hoops to get portability.
The existence of autoconf and its friends are testimony to the niggly details of non-compliance to standards.
I'd like to see the greatest common factor for UNIX systems be increased periodically.
I recall recently reading a lengthy NY Times article about the Houston School District getting flack for underreporting the high school dropout rate.
It seems a lot of good political hay was generated about their success in having low dropout rates, when in fact the statistics keepers were logging dropouts as "transferred" to some other school.
Is that the government is deliberately foot-dragging on all kinds of BIA infrastructure, hoping to delay the time of reckoning, when it will be made clear that the BIA mismanaged the lands entrusted to them, particularly with regard to oil royalties.
IIRC, Gale Norton, the Secy of the Interior, had gotten subpoened, held in contempt, etc.
This IT snafu is just a small part of an overall larger mess that each Cabinet level Interior Secy is hoping to delay Until the Next Administration's Watch.
an archaeologist of tomorrow can figure out ascii.
To be sure.
And will they be able to figure out PowerPoint?
And how about Secure PointPoint 2005 with automatic DocuSafe technology that incorporates encryption with a public key that is automatically downloaded over the network from microsoft.com after your VISA card number has been authenticated with citibank.com?
No, tomorrow's archaeologists will miss out on the whole indecipherable morass that is today's data formats.
Documents and presentations will look indistinguishable from random noise.
And, honestly, a lot of what gets attached in those formats looks that way already to me in 2003.
"Now tell me again where you were until 2:30 last night! And don't think you can get away with lying - I've got my IR polygraph aimed right at your forehead!"
and take a "go-slow" approach to Linux in high-value or mission-critical production systems."
This seems to be common sense no matter what platform you're trying. I wish I could sell advice like that for as much as Gartner charges its clients.
Like, I can definitely see a CIO at a Fortune 500 company saying,
"Hmmmm, since I'm going with Unix or Windows instead of Linux on this high-value or mission-critical system, it's probably a good idea to take a go fast approach and
rush right in where angels fear to tread!"
Here's one for free: in order to succeed in the stock market, assess your personal tolerance for risk, invest for the long term, diversify, buy low, and sell high.
Good listing of how to figure costs! You have my virtual mod points:)
You allude to what is really the most insidious and difficult part: trying to place a value on each of the different services that your computer provides.
I recall people charging for CPU time, disk space and pages printed, but I've lately thought that other resources should be examined such as memory occupation time, network occupancy, or, possibly even bus occupancy. Some of these really depend on the contention with other users and ought to be less costly during off-peak usage times.
Figuring out what is the relative cost among these seems tricky, but perhaps it could be done using a similar analysis where you figure out the incremental cost of upgrading the equipment to include either another CPU, more memory, another network card, another high throughput connection to the internet, etc.
Windows boxes use the deeply rutted cowpaths that are the many flavors of Office, Outlook, Access and IE and the various binary formats with undocumented behaviors.
Of course it galls the purists that a fine racing machine should have to be re-engineered to be able to run through all these crufty paths, but that's the reality. It's the reality that is facing Linux.
However, it's getting really close to the tipping point, where Linux will be a cheaper backwardly-compatible solution for Windows legacy houses than the newer versions of Windows, mainly because MS wants to push people onto upgrade treadmills.
Periodic reviews of the viability of desktop Linux may keep coming back with "good, but not yet".
The fact is that desktop Linux is constantly improving, getting better all the time, and perfectly acceptable in more and more situations.
The desktop war won't be won in a single day when all of Gartner and every Fortune 500 company redeploys overnight.
It will be won gradually, as first the fringe elements (academic institutions, charities, small cost-conscious technology-heavy businesses) adopt first. Then, single app and POS applications, then more mainstream use will come.
It's exactly how the commodity PC was originally established back in the 1980s as it won out over the mainframes and minicomputers. It will be the same way that Linux is established.
It's amazing how much they can ask you to give up in the way of privacy these days.
If you want to rent a car, have a VISA card, you're going to have to part with as much privacy as they demand of you.
And if your employer wants you to pee in a cup, record your fingerprints in their database and undergo a complete physical to which they obtain all the information, then you have freedom of choice: tolerate the invasion of your privacy, or look for a new job. What a fine choice.
The founding fathers of the United States of America would have understood the need for privacy, even though it was less an issue in their day. If it were quick and easy for the colonial administration to find and squelch them as rapidly as it could be done today, be assured there would be no Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution.
The new bill sounds excellent to me, something that Americans could actually be proud of having on their books (rather than the knee-jerk abomination that is the Patriot Act).
Law and Order is great, too, but it shouldn't be Easy and Convenient for anyone to impose Law and Order.
Otherwise, the "Law" and the "Order" that is so effectively imposed might gradually become something different than what the labels say.
Slashdot Mirror
Then the smtp server needs to authenticate all the clients.
I like that.
Some reliable SMTP server has to claim ownership of the mail and to guarantee they'll take back unwanted UBE.
Anyone adminning a "trusted" SMTP server would lock it down and be very careful of which users they granted access because of the consequences.
The concept of distributing responsibility outward as much as possible is one I like. We just have to stop one layer back at trusted SMTP relays, because we can't trust unresponsible SMTP relays and we have insufficient means to enforce responsible behavior.
I agree that something ought to be done to cut down on the huge volume of spam that clogs most SMTP traffic.
On the surface of it, a white-listing system, perhaps based on public-key cryptography and endorsements might work.
But, as someone who values freedom and anonymity, I'd hate to have a system that closes off completely the opportunity for more anonymous communication via email.
Whistleblowers in the government and in the corporate sector, dissidents under a repressive political regime are some of the use cases for email that I'm not really inclined to sacrifice merely to eliminate spam.
Yer just reminding me of how badly I miss a good solid HP calculator with RPN functionality!
My old HP-15C got flaky years ago.
For a short time, I ran xhpcalc, an X11 application that looked and functioned almost exactly like one of those nice classics but only ran on old versions of HP/UX.
Now, I have to put up with Gnome or KDE calculators that are no where near as nice!
I wouldn't have minded a T shirt with a filled in version of Timothy's Slashdot crossword puzzle on it.
Better than that, though, would be if the white and dark squares of the puzzle formed some kind of crude image.
Ah, the history. You'd get all kinds of puzzled looks from non-readers looking at answers like "Natalie Portman", "karma whore", "goatse.cx", "Troll", "BSD is dead", etc..
Another shameful artifact of a distorted marketplace, unfortunately.
I remember when NDS came out to good technical reviews earlier than Active Directory.
Despite all the good press about a good product, most IT managers took the cautious approach, figuring, rightly, that Microsoft would make its directory services offering "integrated" with Windows.
Yep, "integrated', the same way that Brer Rabbit got "integrated" with the Tar Baby.
The same way that IE got "integrated" with Windows.
Latest And Greatest OS.
Yeah, I know.
I work for the same company that Dilbert does, regularly churning out stuff that is Stalest and Leastest.
Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money.
You're correct. If I had to bet my life support machine on a single piece of hardware and software, I'd pick Solaris on SPARC over Linux on x86, mainly because of the extra hardware reliability from Sun.
But with the way that clustering technology is developing, it's getting to be a reasonable cost-effective alternative to pickup 2 or 3 Lintel boxes.
If your Lintel box has 99.99% uptime and your Solaris/SPARC box has 99.999% uptime, then 2 Lintel boxes will give you theoretically 8 nines of uptime (I know, I know, in real life, whatever power line glitch caused the downtime for the first machine is likely to increase the odds of the second machine to fail). Even so, 2 Lintel boxes is better.
I really still think Sun can offer value to the emerging and growing market of low-end Lintel boxes in two areas: services (like IBM does), and enterprise management (because they've already worried about it (NIS and follow ons) for Solaris systems).
It's too bad to see another great hardware platform fade. But UltraSPARC has been late in delivery because only real he-men can afford the fabs and development necessary and Intel shows it can afford to make mistakes (like Itanium) and still beat more worthy technology in chips such as Alpha, PA-RISC, MIPS and Power.
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc.
Careful, dude. Next thing, you'll start to question collegiate athletic programs!
Already gets done.
If you look closely at the number of comments and the number of comments with high scores associated with the story.
I wouldn't mind if the Slash code showed some nice graphics so I could more quickly find the hot stories. Something like larger pies for more comments, with colored sectors for fractions of high comments, etc.
Nice collection.
You might want to consider the translation these folks have done, too.
Good list.
Properly implemented, I think e-voting could do much of what you want.
In fact, I'd trust a correctly implemented e-voting system more than a paper ballot system.
But e-voting won't be correctly implemented.
Any more than the improper influence of money has been eliminated from our current electoral system.
Yeah, like I always store my bash history in below my DocumentRoot directory.
Anybody that does this is Running with Scissors.
Clothing manufacturers will give away free clothing to hot-looking chicks and hunky guys.
Especially if they act "cool". That is, your models act in such a way that makes other people want to be like them and to wear the same clothing as they do.
Ugly, out-of-shape and uncool?
We'll be paying full price for our duds. Or else we'll be wearing clothing that is not "cool".
because "it's trivial to simply install GCC."
I guess so.
But it's cheating in my book.
I doubt that it would be so "trivial" to install gcc or any other piece of GNU software in the old days unless there was a reasonable amount of standards compliance (i.e., POSIX). Even so, they had to jump through more than a few hoops to get portability.
The existence of autoconf and its friends are testimony to the niggly details of non-compliance to standards.
I'd like to see the greatest common factor for UNIX systems be increased periodically.
What are plug-ins for a filesystem?
Why are they such a great thing?
medium sized tourist town
Basics, of course (clicking the mouse, dragging and dropping, word, email, web browsing).
Advanced: Creating a web page, running a spreadsheet, maybe even setting up a simple database for logging hotel guests, etc.
I recall recently reading a lengthy NY Times article about the Houston School District getting flack for underreporting the high school dropout rate.
It seems a lot of good political hay was generated about their success in having low dropout rates, when in fact the statistics keepers were logging dropouts as "transferred" to some other school.
Is that the government is deliberately foot-dragging on all kinds of BIA infrastructure, hoping to delay the time of reckoning, when it will be made clear that the BIA mismanaged the lands entrusted to them, particularly with regard to oil royalties.
IIRC, Gale Norton, the Secy of the Interior, had gotten subpoened, held in contempt, etc.
This IT snafu is just a small part of an overall larger mess that each Cabinet level Interior Secy is hoping to delay Until the Next Administration's Watch.
an archaeologist of tomorrow can figure out ascii.
To be sure.
And will they be able to figure out PowerPoint?
And how about Secure PointPoint 2005 with automatic DocuSafe technology that incorporates encryption with a public key that is automatically downloaded over the network from microsoft.com after your VISA card number has been authenticated with citibank.com?
No, tomorrow's archaeologists will miss out on the whole indecipherable morass that is today's data formats.
Documents and presentations will look indistinguishable from random noise.
And, honestly, a lot of what gets attached in those formats looks that way already to me in 2003.
Infrared laser pulses
(Wife points TV remote at hubby.)
"Now tell me again where you were until 2:30 last night! And don't think you can get away with lying - I've got my IR polygraph aimed right at your forehead!"
and take a "go-slow" approach to Linux in high-value or mission-critical production systems."
This seems to be common sense no matter what platform you're trying. I wish I could sell advice like that for as much as Gartner charges its clients.
Like, I can definitely see a CIO at a Fortune 500 company saying,
Here's one for free: in order to succeed in the stock market, assess your personal tolerance for risk, invest for the long term, diversify, buy low, and sell high.
Good listing of how to figure costs! You have my virtual mod points:)
You allude to what is really the most insidious and difficult part: trying to place a value on each of the different services that your computer provides.
I recall people charging for CPU time, disk space and pages printed, but I've lately thought that other resources should be examined such as memory occupation time, network occupancy, or, possibly even bus occupancy. Some of these really depend on the contention with other users and ought to be less costly during off-peak usage times.
Figuring out what is the relative cost among these seems tricky, but perhaps it could be done using a similar analysis where you figure out the incremental cost of upgrading the equipment to include either another CPU, more memory, another network card, another high throughput connection to the internet, etc.
nice example of humans taking an active role
People in L.A. have been doing their part, drivign their cars in the sunshine, to help create more ozone!
Now if we could only get it off the ground and up high we'd have it made.
As a side note, the high flying SSTs, such as the Concorde, have stopped in the last few years.
Windows and Linux both use the same roads.
No, they don't.
Windows boxes use the deeply rutted cowpaths that are the many flavors of Office, Outlook, Access and IE and the various binary formats with undocumented behaviors.
Of course it galls the purists that a fine racing machine should have to be re-engineered to be able to run through all these crufty paths, but that's the reality. It's the reality that is facing Linux.
However, it's getting really close to the tipping point, where Linux will be a cheaper backwardly-compatible solution for Windows legacy houses than the newer versions of Windows, mainly because MS wants to push people onto upgrade treadmills.
Periodic reviews of the viability of desktop Linux may keep coming back with "good, but not yet".
The fact is that desktop Linux is constantly improving, getting better all the time, and perfectly acceptable in more and more situations.
The desktop war won't be won in a single day when all of Gartner and every Fortune 500 company redeploys overnight.
It will be won gradually, as first the fringe elements (academic institutions, charities, small cost-conscious technology-heavy businesses) adopt first. Then, single app and POS applications, then more mainstream use will come.
It's exactly how the commodity PC was originally established back in the 1980s as it won out over the mainframes and minicomputers. It will be the same way that Linux is established.
It's amazing how much they can ask you to give up in the way of privacy these days.
If you want to rent a car, have a VISA card, you're going to have to part with as much privacy as they demand of you.
And if your employer wants you to pee in a cup, record your fingerprints in their database and undergo a complete physical to which they obtain all the information, then you have freedom of choice: tolerate the invasion of your privacy, or look for a new job. What a fine choice.
The founding fathers of the United States of America would have understood the need for privacy, even though it was less an issue in their day. If it were quick and easy for the colonial administration to find and squelch them as rapidly as it could be done today, be assured there would be no Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution.
The new bill sounds excellent to me, something that Americans could actually be proud of having on their books (rather than the knee-jerk abomination that is the Patriot Act).
Law and Order is great, too, but it shouldn't be Easy and Convenient for anyone to impose Law and Order.
Otherwise, the "Law" and the "Order" that is so effectively imposed might gradually become something different than what the labels say.