Jargons of Info Tech industry

[John Bokma]

Denis Kasak <denis.kasak at gmail.com> wrote:

> John Bokma wrote:
>> 
>> You can't be sure: errors in the handling of threads can cause a
>> buffer overflow, same for spelling checking :-D
> 
> Yes, they can, provided they are not properly coded. However, those 
> things only interact locally with the user and have none or very
> limited interaction with the user on the other side of the line. As
> such, they can hardly be exploitable.

Uhm... one post can affect a number of clients, hence quite exploitable.

>> Some people never use them, and hence they use memory and add risks.
> 
> On a good newsreader the memory use difference should be irrelevantly 
> small, even if one does not use the features. I would call that a 
> nitpicky argument.

Xnews - 10 M
Thunderbird - 20 M

There was a time I had only 128M in this computer :-D. And there was a time 
I read news on a RISC OS machine. I guess the client was about 300 K (!).

> Also, the risk in question is not comparable
> because of the reasons stated above. The kind of risk you are talking
> about happens with /any/ software.

True. The more code, the more possibilities on holes.

> To stay away from that we shouldn't
> have newsreaders (or any other software, for that matter) in the first
> place.

telnet :-P.

>> Of course can HTML be useful on Usenet. The problem is that it will
>> be much more often abused instead of used.
> 
> No, you missed the point. I am arguing that HTML is completely and 
> utterly /useless/ on Usenet.

But I beg to differ :-). I can think of several *good* uses of HTML on 
Usenet. But like I said, it will be abused. And you can't enforce a subset 
of HTML.

> Time spent for writing HTML in Usenet

But you are not going to *write* HTML, you let your client hide that. I 
mean, it's not that hard to have a client turn *bold* into <strong>bold
</strong> :-).

> posts is comparable to that spent on arguing about coding style or

Agreed, I have learned things from arguing on coding style, even adjusted 
my style based on it.

> writing followups to Xah Lee.

Ok, now there is something one shouldn't spent time on :-)

> It adds no further insight on a
> particular subject,

Yes, it does. That's why for example figures, tables, and now and then 
colours are used in scientific publications. ASCII art, now that's a huge 
waste of time.

> but _does_ add further delays, spam, bandwidth
> consumation, exploits, and is generally a pain in the arse. It's
> redundant. 

I have to disagree. Mind, I am not saying that HTML *should* be used on 
Usenet, I am happy with Usenet as it is, but I wouldn't call it useless nor 
redundant.

-- 
John                   Small Perl scripts: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
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