The Kindle 2 and newspapers

Thinking about the Kindle 2, it may be the salvation of newspapers. A lot of the cost of newspapers is in the printing: the paper, the ink, the presses, the cost of distributing the sheer physical mass of paper. The Kindle 2 provides a secure subscription-based channel for delivering black-and-white printed content that doesn't require moving physical material around. Amazon already has a content distribution network set up. A newspaper could mark up their edition electronically and distribute it to Kindles. As long as nobody involved gets greedy, I think it could be profitable once the costs of physical printing and distribution are shed.

Verizon using mail submission port 587

Verizon is moving to using port 587 for mail submission, requiring encryption and authentication to send mail. That alone won't stop the spam originating from their networks, but it's a start. My thought is that there should be 3 ports for 3 different purposes:

• Port 25, no encryption or authentication required, is for server-to-server mail transfer. Relaying shouldn't be allowed, all e-mail arriving should be addressed to an in-network domain. Anything else should be rejected. This means no relaying. Messages should not be modified except for adding an appropriate Received header.
  
• Port 587, encryption and authentication required, is for end-user mail submission only. Mail submitted to it should have the Sender header stripped and replaced with one based on the authenticated username.
• Port 465, encryption required and authentication allowed, is a hybrid. If the session isn't authenticated, it should act per the rules for port 25. Authenticated sessions should be allowed to relay. If relaying, authentication information should be added to the Received header and if no Sender header is present one should be added based on the authentication information. Messages should not be otherwise altered.

One thing many ISPs ignore (often, I suspect, willfully) is customers who do not use their ISP as their mail provider. I'm an example. I get my Internet connection from Cox, but XMission in Utah host my domain and handle my e-mail.

The Pirate Bay trial

Apparently half the charges against The Pirate Bay have been dropped by the prosecution. This isn't based on a technicality, as I read it, but on such basic things as the screenshots the prosecution was using as evidence the client was connected to the TPB tracker clearly saying it was not connected to the tracker. It's no wonder the prosecution dropped those charges rather than continue. If they'd've continued, the defense would've introduced the prosecution's own screenshots and the prosecutor wouldn't've been able to rebut them.

I don't particularly agree with piracy, but when the prosecutors screw up this badly they deserve to lose.

Code comments

Motivated by a Daily WTF entry on code comments. I know exactly what creates this: Comp Sci instructors. You know them, the ones who insist that every line of code be commented, no matter how trivial. After a couple of years of this, students get in the habit of including comments just to have a comment for that line of code. Of course the easy way to do this is to just restate what the line of code does.

Now, as a professional programmer doing maintenance on code I don't need to know what the code does. I can read that line of code and see exactly what it does. I need something a bit higher-level. I need to know what the code's intended to do, and I need to know why it's doing it and why that way of doing it was selected. I know it's interating down a list looking for an entry, I need to know what that list is for and why the code's looking for that particular entry. Instead of comments describing how to iterate through a list, I need a block comment saying something like "We've got our list of orders entered this week, we know they're ordered by vendor, and we're trying to find the first order for a particular vendor so we can extract all his orders quickly.". Probably followed by something like "Now that we have this vendor's first order, we'll grab everything until we see the vendor number change. When we see that, we've got all his orders.". Much shorter, wouldn't satisfy that instructor at all since most of the code won't be commented, but much much more useful when I have to change things. It tells me what the code's trying to do, and what assumptions it's making that I have to avoid invalidating.

Too many Comp Sci teachers need some real-life experience maintaining the kind of code they exhort their students to produce.

Powerful and easy to use

"You'll find this system to be incredibly flexible and powerful. You'll also find it to be incredibly simple and easy to use with minimal training. However, don't ask it to be both at the same time."