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Hint is designed to fulfill the following goals.

• Scalability. Runs on a calculator, even on your brain. No need to upgrade benchmarks every year.
• Compiler independent. No easy "cheating" possible.
• Speed dependent on problem size is calculated. Different processors have different cache sizes and perform by a factor of 10 or more differently on different problem sizes.
• You can check every result, Hint is Open Source and free.

As most other benchmarks fulfill none of the design goals above, almost all benchmarks are nearly useless.

HINT or Hierarchical INTegration is a computer benchmarking tool developed at the Scalable Computing Laboratory (SCL) of Ames Laboratory, and is funded by the Office of Scientific Computing, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Unlike traditional benchmarks, HINT neither fixes the size of the problem nor the calculation time and instead uses a measure called QUIPS (QUality Improvement Per Second).

This enables HINT to display the speed for a given machine specification and problem size. Computers typically start up fast and slow down as they run out of fast memory and start using the main memory, or slow down even more if they have to access the disk. Such changes are easily visible with HINT generated data.

HINT is scalable and easily portable for a variety of architectures. It can be run on anything from a programmable calculator to a supercomputer.

Oh, well. If SCO says the GPL is invalid, then obviously it's time to pay up!!!

I am interested in getting a copy of your paper. I am doing some research in this area and would like to see how you propose to do it.

If you wouldn't mind sending it to my email address. Just go to our lab's web page and click on the People link. My name is Evan, and my email is on the page.

Thanks

Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace.

It's certainly true that they've been orphaned, but WP8 for Linux Download Personal Edition remains available at a large number of sites, listed in my WordPerfect for Linux FAQ. You can also find PhotoPaint9 (Winelib) tarballs, here and there, if so interested.

The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.

Substantially all of the former linux.corel.com Web site remains mirrored on http://corellinux.com/. The Corelwine fork remains maintained, for now, by Michael Torrie at http://students.cs.byu.edu/~torriem/.

And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!

Torrie's third-party updates to Corelwine, the Fontastic server, and other support code are said to make WP9 for Linux almost acceptable, although I find WP8 generally superior in fundamental ways. Valentijn Sessink has contributed a third-party fix to the Filtrix date-rollover problem, and there are numerous Corel-issued fixes to little bugs at http://corellinux.com/.

Your point generally is well taken: The corellinux.com site even enshrines Corel's lastingly broken promise to post an "Update coming soon for Corel WordPerfect 8 for Linux/UNIX import/export filter issue", which failure Sessink eventually worked around for the user community's benefit without Corel's help. However, I just wanted to point out that many problems can be fixed to a significant degree, despite Corel having cast the entire thing to the winds.

Library-support problems for WP8.x on modern Linux distributions can be fixed, given varying amounts of determination. In extreme cases, you can install all needed libs from a tarball available for that purpose. My FAQ has details.

I suspect you'd find WP8.x much less frustrating than the lamentable WP9, especially if you acquire a copy of the WP8.1 Personal Edition -- the best release by far of WP for Linux -- still sometimes available (on eBay and other places) bundled as part of Corel Linux OS Standard or Deluxe Editions.

But the long term answer is to realise that proprietary codebases are prone to being here today, gone tomorrow, and to realise that AbiWord 1.9.1 is starting to look awfully good and cannot suffer that same fate. (OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1 beta 2 is useful, too.)

Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com

Arrow's Theorem states that systems such as you described can't be made perfect however.

::Buzz:: Wrong again.

Forks are actually quite old.

All 1000+ workstations (HPUX, Windows, and Linux) at BYU's College of Engineering use Mozilla. The Windows boxes still have IE on them, but we had it turned off for a while (gotta love Active Directory profiles that let you cripple IE) to encourage users to switch over. A vocal few complained, but it was mostly because they had been brainwashed with MS FUD and hadn't even tried Mozilla.

Maybe those governments, the EU, US, and South Korea are wrong. Tariffs and other protectionist policies make products more expensive to consumers without passing the increase in price onto the workers in that industry, because it is lost in innefficiency. The US loses $50 Billion/year in inefficiency cause by trade barriers, and the third world loses $150 Billion/year. Link. Eye-for-any-eye policies in the end make everyone blind.

Sorry did you say *little* more cost? Try $50 Billion/year for us and $150 Billion a year for the third world. link. Steel tariffs alone are essentially paying US steel workers each something like $80,000 in inefficient prices. Yet they don't really make that much, even though we pay it. Poverty is not a measure of how much you make, but of how much you can buy. Tariffs *invariably* make consumers poorer.

Or how about the illegal [as the WTO ruled] tarrif on Softwood lumber?

Same problem as above--Canada's socialist, anti-market subsidies propped up softwood lumber producers so they could dump their products in the US. Just like in the case being discussed, the US applied a corrective measure. If the Canadian industry can't handle a little competition, that's not our problem.

The point here is that the WTO has ruled that the Canadian government does not unfairly subsidize the softwood lumber industry. The Canadian softwood producers are not 'propped up' by 'socialist, anti-market subsidies'. Canada does use a different system (from the U.S.) for the sale of logging rights, but it is not intrinsically unfair. Unless, of course, you wish to make the assertion that the WTO is a bastion of 'leftist' and 'socialist' thinking.

Until recently, the Canadian dollar was at all-time historic lows against the U.S. dollar--consequently, Canadian products became cheaper (relatively) in the American market. Now, the Canadian dollar has jumped in value about fifteen percent in the last year or two--Canadian goods will become more expensive. We should also consider the possibility that the American softwood lumber industry is inefficient and uncompetitive, and should be subjected to market forces instead of hiding behind protectionist tariffs.

Yep. Leftists and socialists such as yourself think it's peachy for every country but the US to prop up uncompetitive industries, using far more nationalist propaganda than anything you'll ever see in US markets. But if the big, bad US of A, which probably sent soldiers to fight for your freedom to bitch at some point, tries to defend its own markets, oh, what a monster.

Hypocrite.

They were also fighting for their own 'freedom to bitch'. In case you're wondering, Canada too has paid in blood for the right of its citizens to bitch. Battles like Vimy Ridge and Ypres in WWI, and the Juno Beach landing in WWII are as well known to Canadians as events like Leyte Gulf or Pearl Harbor are to Americans. Feel free to discuss differences of opinion about international trade policy, but don't insult the millions of men and women in other countries who have also died for our freedom.

The United States is one of the world's largest markets. If it engages in unfair trade practices, it distorts commerce for the rest of the world. If it chooses to employ protectionist tariffs while purportedly supporting free trade...'hypocrite' indeed.

Ours is bigger.

They cost Americans $50B/year and the third world $150B/year. See here.

Your comment defeats itself. If a country can undersell India, it is likely that the income from GlobalCorp, Inc. will have a greater impact for good there than it had in India.

I *personally* saw a group of Romanian engineers designing car parts for an American company. They were getting paid $400-$500 per month. You might say it's deplorable to do that. What if I told you that the average Romanian income was $100-$150 per month at the time? All of a sudden it's not so bad.

The point is that they are not getting paid as well as an American, but they are better off than the alternative, namely leaving them to struggle out of their bad economy on their own. In fact, barriers on trade actually *cost* third-world countries $150 Billion/year.

Free trade proponents *don't* claim that GlobalCorp, Inc. is doing it out of the good of their heart, as you imply. The point, in fact, is that they are *not* doing it out of the good of their heart, i.e. they are being rationally motivated to produce more efficiently. I agree with the sister post here that said that moral considerations sometimes play a part (i.e. products of true slave labor). However, we will not get rid of poverty until we reduce scarcity. Encouraging efficient production is part of that process. Where would we be now if machines didn't replace many factory workers? We would probably be working in old factories, with much lower standards of living. (Efficiency has made life better for those who still work in factories today.) In the end, how else are these countries supposed to escape poverty?

When a coalition of engineering corporations donated ``$313,884,754'' worth of CAD software to my school last year, I smelt a rat. Well, I'm not exactly complaining, because now we have a bunch of expensive proprietary software that the school would not have ever purchased anyway, but it turns out to be a nice tax writeoff for the donating coalition. It is quite literally like printing money!

Just pick the highest market price you can get away with for your software, make and give away copies of your software, and then claim the donation on your tax forms for that year (which might explain why the donation was conveniently made in December). Interestingly enough, our school is only paying the ``cost of shipping'' for the software - $3,000 to $4,000 a year. I find it amusing that we are essentially paying the printing costs for the money they're printing up for us, analogically speaking.

This coalition gave away a grand total of $1.5 billion dollars worth of copies of their software to various schools. In the end, everyone wins out, except the IRS, which gets shorted whatever they feel was owed to them. It looks like this whole proprietary software tax loophole is very good news for some software companies.

To supplant a standard, a new design must be significantly superior (e.g., Dvorak keyboards aren't [superior enough]).

But as a left handed person, my reasons for not switching to Dvorak are pretty specific: one of the supposed benefits of Dvorak is that it puts the most frequently used letters on the right, under the "dominant" hand. But that ain't my dominant hand :-)

So if the Dvorak proponents are correct, the layout would actually be an impediment to me, and if they're wrong, then what's the point? As it is, I can touch type pretty rapidly on any (American) keyboard I'm likely to come across -- any PC, Mac, or Unix workstation I find is going to have essentially the same standard layout. I have nothing to gain by switching to a new layout at this point, and much to lose by trying, whether or not I succeed.

Just to give one example, I'll be damned if I'm going to learn vi all over again, or a new arrangement for my emacs / bash / pine / readline keybindings. I don't know where the "jump to line start" keychord is, I just know that my left pinky holds down the control key and my ring finger twitches just above it, and magically the cursor jumps where I wanted it. Isn't that magical? Isn't it foolish to rewire that beauty after all the work went in to learn it once?

Aren't there more interesting things to be learning than a whole new keyboard arrangement?

The real potential for electronic voting is the opportunity to improve the voting system itself.

There are many voting systems possible besides simple "one man, one vote". In fact, "one man, one vote" is probably the worst of all (of course, Arrow proved no perfect voting system is possible).

There are some alternative systems here.

That's not BYU there is it ?

Nope.

mirror

BYU is using N2H2, and I have been repeatedly blocked from Google's news site over the last two days. The block notification states that it is ``Inappropriate Content Blocked by Override List.''

One of my biggest gripes with the system is the way it is implemented; we, as college students, are told ``Ah, ah, ahhhh! This page is a big no-no,'' and we are not even given the option to override the decision of the censoring software if we know for a fact that the page does not have any ``inappropriate content.'' There is no link given, nor is there any contact information, about how to appeal a blocked site. How about letting the students decide for themselves which content is or is not ``appropriate?''

Well, since tariffs result in directly higher prices for consumers, you are asking me to pay more for software so you can get a job they could pay someone else less to do. Tell you what, make your case, keeping these things in mind:

1) You are no more entitled to a paid job than the foriegn programmer doing the job you want to do.
2) You could learn a skill that *is* in higher demand in the US so paying you is actually the efficient thing to do.
3) Tariffs to preserve jobs are the equivalent of welfare in that they raise costs for everyone else (not that welfare is inherently bad, but that is what you are asking).

Now you know how American steel workers feel. Should they learn another skill? I think that they absolutely should. Here is an article for your consideration: link.

We most certainly do have a constitution. It is a pretty good one. You can read up on it
here.

I figure your comment was going for "funny". If not than I am all the more glad that Mr. Rumsfeld does not want to redeploys US troops back to Germany once this war is over. We very much enjoy living in peace and we have an army capable of defending ourselves. We really do not want to get involved in America's post-colonial adventures. Having US troops here make terror attacks on German soil much likelier. I do not think we should tolerate this risk any longer. That is why fully support Mr. Rumsfeld in his initiative to pull American troops out of Germany to station them in Eastern European countries. But than again I always like to support my American friends if they are not completely unreasonable.

I have two brothers and two sisters who are BYU students. My one brother might be one of the people in that picture, the other certainly isn't (he smiles too much...). I have an ex-roommate who went to U of U; he's a lawyer; figures.

BTW, the BYU computer accaptable use policy is here; note that everything is framed in terms of the Honor Code, not just what might be legally convienient for the University administration.

BYU has an information security research group; they even have at least one paper about Internet privacy.

I have two brothers and two sisters who are BYU students. My one brother might be one of the people in that picture, the other certainly isn't (he smiles too much...). I have an ex-roommate who went to U of U; he's a lawyer; figures.

BTW, the BYU computer accaptable use policy is here; note that everything is framed in terms of the Honor Code, not just what might be legally convienient for the University administration.

BYU has an information security research group; they even have at least one paper about Internet privacy.

I have two brothers and two sisters who are BYU students. My one brother might be one of the people in that picture, the other certainly isn't (he smiles too much...). I have an ex-roommate who went to U of U; he's a lawyer; figures.

BTW, the BYU computer accaptable use policy is here; note that everything is framed in terms of the Honor Code, not just what might be legally convienient for the University administration.

BYU has an information security research group; they even have at least one paper about Internet privacy.

Most linux desktop, or as I would say, home or laptop users who use linux are already somewhat proficient with computers. (i.e. CS, comp/electric engineers) Truly, old hats are less likely to change. The up and coming generation is the most likely to use linux. At BYU's installfest this year,
" We installed Linux for 57 people, some on multiple computers. This was by far our most successful InstallFest. Because of the huge turnout, we blew three breakers. We even had to move all the laptop users out into the hall to be on a different power circuit. " club site
I'm fairly certain we at least doubled installations since the last installfest.

Look at the droids on Brigham Young University's homepage. Man they're creepy.

These scrolls are not lost to us!

They're lost to me. I haven't seen any of them yet, nor am I sure where to look if they've been published. Will they be published? I found an old article which seems to indicate so, but nothing more. I didn't search very hard though.

...and how long until Hollywood tries to declare copyright on them, and the only way you will "see" them is through the eyes of a low brow movie. ;-)

And why, in the case of the Library of Alexandria?

Religious ferver. It was burned to the ground by followers of Christ.

Don't worry, I'm sure the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft will help the modern world overcome such heresy, but with DRM rejection certificates instead of book burning. ;-)

I tried a Google search, but didn't find anything very interesting. A little more info at an article titled "Ancient maths revealed". Some possibly interesting links (at bottom of page). An article at BYU which goes into slightly more detail about the multi-spectral imaging technology. Though your "religious ferver" comment may apply here. If BYU does create a digital archive, will they really release lesbian poetry?

These scrolls are not lost to us!

They're lost to me. I haven't seen any of them yet, nor am I sure where to look if they've been published. Will they be published? I found an old article which seems to indicate so, but nothing more. I didn't search very hard though.

...and how long until Hollywood tries to declare copyright on them, and the only way you will "see" them is through the eyes of a low brow movie. ;-)

And why, in the case of the Library of Alexandria?

Religious ferver. It was burned to the ground by followers of Christ.

Don't worry, I'm sure the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft will help the modern world overcome such heresy, but with DRM rejection certificates instead of book burning. ;-)

I tried a Google search, but didn't find anything very interesting. A little more info at an article titled "Ancient maths revealed". Some possibly interesting links (at bottom of page). An article at BYU which goes into slightly more detail about the multi-spectral imaging technology. Though your "religious ferver" comment may apply here. If BYU does create a digital archive, will they really release lesbian poetry?

If he is a student at the university whose server he posted it on, he may want to read up on this.

Sorry while I rant, but you just stomped on one of my nerves. (Unless your comment about neededing that much RAM was a complaint about Adobe or their direct *cough* compeitors -- sucks to be you.)

<Old Geezer Mode> In one case, not long ago, a fellow lab-rat Eric Mortenson had sold his research and tools to Adobe, but part of the poorly-written agreement said that he couldn't upgrade his work station. So he finished his Ph.D on a 386 with 32-MB of RAM, while the rest of us in the lab were using Pentium 3's, DEC Alpha's, and various SGI boxs. Eric's algorithms ran great on the newer PC's even though he couldn't develop them on the new boxes. Other with Adobe (NOT on that web site interestingly enough) needed the DEC Alphas (64-bit machines) with scads of memory and much more running time to do a similar implementation of Eric's algorithms. </Old Geezer Mode>

3D rendering doesn't take that much RAM. As a 3D graphics researcher and developer, I have worked with models where individual objects were multi-gigabytes (meshes+textures and volumes) but even then, having 1GB of RAM was more than enough for us to reach 20-30 FPS realtime on a box with NT4 and first- and second-generation 3D cards. Software rendering with very realistic detail was a little slower (3-5 fps) but was fine for writing movies. Progressive geometry & texture transmission, continuously calculated view-dependant detail levels, and other current and not-so-current research would solve the memory problems in 3D. Don't believe me? Go to Visualization 2003 and see if the leading researchers are finding RAM as their primary bottleneck. It is a bottleneck of course, but processing speed, caches, and the system BUS limitations are far more troubling.

As for video editing, you only need enough memory for the tools, a few frames, and whatever operations you are performing. In every case that I've had to do video editing, I've seen two classes of tools -- those that take gobs of memory and try to copy the entire video clip into RAM and end up thrashing for memory -- and those that intellegently figure out what is needed and use only the memory needed for the app.

An example of the first, an Adobe AfterEffects rendering a simple math function over time was only able to render 30-seconds because it wanted to buffer the AVI file in memory and ran out of RAM (2GB) after a several-hour rendering. An example of the second, a simple home-brew compositor that used the Windows multimedia API to write the AVI to disk -- the same machine and the same set of images required about 45 minutes to render the entire clip.

So instead of saying:

I need more than 4GB RAM (3.5 if I want it stable) for video editing and 3D rendering.

I would suggest you say " I need to buy tools that are properly designed and implemented for my class of computer. "

Frob.

You have not done much to indicate to me that you really understand what you believe to be true.

If somebody educated said this, I'd be upset. Fortunately the only people who tell me this are the same people who believe Columbus was alone in his conviction that the Earth was round, that thermodynamics disproves evolution, and that Dr Gould was an uneducated fool who didn't know anything about evolution! The barbs don't sting because the venom is so impotent.

It is a problem when you hold the writings of anyone in such high regard that you are not willing to analyze them with a critical mind.

But you are not critical. You are merely ignorant. You have raised silly arguments that show an obvious lack of understanding.

And it's not that I hold the writings in high regard. I hold the work in high regard. Why? Because scientists have invested a huge amount of effort into critically examining the evidence and the theory. 1000s of scientists have reviewed evolution, spanning 100 years of work, across at least 4 major disciplines of science (paleontology, cosmology, geology, and biology), and there has been NOT A SINGLE piece of evidence to refute the theory! Let's make this point very clear. NOT A SINGLE speck of evidence.

Oh, I know you don't believe that. You think there is plenty of dispute. You've already used a couple of the bigger chestnuts yourself. What you don't seem to understand is these "disputes" you have are merely ignorance. Claims like "evolution defies thermodynamics" aren't valid points of contention: they merely demonstrate the claimant has no understanding of either evolution or thermodynamics. They are "arguments" that only impress other ignorant people.

Also keep this in mind. There is NOT A SINGLE published paper on creationism in any respectable scientific journal. NOT A SINGLE ONE. Why is this? Is it because the journals are biassed? It's a conspiracy to hide the truth? Hardly. All scientists would take great delight in tearing down evolution. It's like a badge of honour to be the guy who destroyed a theory. Think of Einstein who managed to falsify a 400 year old theory of physics.

If you think all the answers have been found then you don't understand the science.

I don't. Strawman argument.

I do believe in God though, so I hope you see how impossible it is for me to hold to any theory that undermines this belief.

And I've made a serious blunder in trying to reason with you. I know from experience this will achieve nothing. You're a creationist. You refuse to accept evidence. You simply deny everything that disagrees with your desired belief: Gould is wrong, science is wrong, scientists are wrong, evidence is wrong. I know you won't bother to read these links just like you didn't read the links before. Not critically. At best you'll load it in a browser, scan for words that support your own beliefs, and ignore the rest. You're such a textbook case of the creationist that it's almost worth taking a photo and using you as a poster-child.

The only positive benefit I see is that even the creationists, such as yourself, are starting to realise that "creationist" is a label they don't want to be associated with.

Here is a script I hacked up a while back to automatically download trailers from Apple's website. Just pass the resulting filename to the player of your choice. It is written in Ruby, and I use MPlayer. You can use it by doing a copy-and-paste of the URL in the story as a parameter on the command line (watch out for the lameness filter putting a space in the filename near the end after an underscore character; they really need to fix the problem in a real way, like using CSS right :-):

"Christensen obselescence" refers to Clayton Christensen's book: "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail". Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business school. He is a renowned expert on disruptive technologies, which is really what the Innovator's dilemma is all about, and thus, the reference to the Internet and Open Source.

But, getting the two confused is understandable, they are both BYU grads. :)

Brigham Young University is doing similar work on MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems. Here's a link to the lab working on it.

They're not what you think, or what I thought. It is a forcefully (ballistic) deployed parachute attached to the helicopter. See here in relation to the GEN H-4.

Current computer security research is motivated by the realization that some cyber-attacks will succeed and that systems therefore must be designed for survivability. Two critical enabling technologies for building survivable systems are autonomic response and orchestration. SARA, the Survivable Autonomic Response Architecture, is an architecture developed as part of Lincoln Laboratory's participation in the DARPA SWWIM program. SARA facilitates orchestrated autonomic response by allowing components developed by independent information assurance developers to collaborate to defend computer networks and systems. SARA is well suited to defend against fast, distributed information attacks that require rapid, coordinated, network-wide responses. The core components of the architecture are a run-time infrastructure (RTI), a communication language, a system model, and defensive components. The RTI incorporates a number of innovative design concepts and provides fast, reliable, exploitation-resistant communication and coordination services to the components defending the network, even when challenged by a distributed attack. The architecture can be tailored to provide scalable information assurance defenses for large, geographically distributed, heterogeneous networks with multiple domains, each of which uses different technologies and requires different policies. The architecture can form the basis of a field-deployable system. Prototype versions of SARA have been used in a number of experiments and environments; most notably, SARA was a core technology in an experiment in which distributed defenses neutralized a self-propagating polymorphic email virus.

There's technology you can get today that uses morphing algorithms to expand 24fps all the way up to 60 fairly convincingly.

So, that's what I do at work.

It's pretty cool. There are some really large unsolved problems with it though - the biggest is that it's really tough to detect when objects go in front of each other (occlusions). If you don't detect them correctly, then you get really bad results. Of course, you can do things with a little human intervention, which lets you get almost perfect results, but the time that that takes is proportional to the number of source frames.

That's why you see those kind of effects for slow-motion (in Lost in Space or the Matrix) which has relatively few source frames, but I doubt we'll see it any time soon to increase framerate in movies, because 24fps for a whole movie is a whole lot of frames to manually tweak.

First of all, perhaps for USians to improve, they need to look at the superior systems present in Europe. The systems of the 1930's represent the height of European thoughtfulness and ingenuity in election systems. Never since has such decisive, positive action been taken through the true will of the people. Just look at what they accomplished! They were able to work together to nearly bring down the rest of the world! You never see this kind of coalition building with USia today, and if you just take a look at their system of elections, you'll see why.

Now of course, this isn't to say that they're not improving and working towards the ideal of their European betters; the 2000 election and subsequent events have proven that there has been remarkable progress in their system. But they just aren't there yet. And frankly, Europes isn't there any more either.

So, best of luck to all of you. You're almost there!

A proof, I believe, is located here. Interesting reading, considering that it says that a fair election is mathematically impossible.

People think that just because gnutella doesn't scale very well that any peer-to-peer will have the same flaws.

If you can have hosts that don't go up and down all the time, and you don't care about anonymity (which you really shouldn't if you're looking up addresses in other people's contact lists) then peer to peer can scale in a way which is competitive with client-server. Plus, nobody needs to invest in a massive server (or server farm).

The guy I heard talk about this has a paper up (sorry, it's postscript).

I consider myself to be a seasoned Linux user. I have been using various distributions of Linux exclusively on my desktop for two years now.

My school's Unix Users Group runs a periodic Install Fest, where people bring in their desktops, and UUG members load Linux onto them.

Having settled in Debian myself, I figured I would be able to easily install it for someone else. While all my buddies were zipping through the RedHat 8.0 installation for others, I tenatiously stuck with Debian 3.0 for the guy who came to my station.

Things were complicated by the fact that his network card would not play nice with our switch, so I had to use the CD installation (I always prefer the net install with Debian). It took me about twice as long as the RedHat guys just to get a basic system installed and a command prompt. Then his USB mouse wasn't being recognized by the kernel at all.

Well, the guy went home, and then installed Mandrake over the Debian installation I had worked so hard to start up, because he couldn't figure out how to configure his network or his USB mouse, and he didn't want to go through the time or trouble to get it working. Mandrake just did it for him, and he was on his way with his classwork.

It wasn't until I replaced my own motherboard that I realized that you have to use UHCI for some USB chipsets and OHCI for other USB chipsets (he probably had a chipset that was different than that which came with the Debian kernel image). Mandrake and RedHat just figure all that out for you. I wish Debian would do the same.

Some of the guys on the UUG mailing list are claiming that since RedHat now has apt-get, there is no longer any good reason to keep using Debian. I argue that some of Debian's strongest points are that its developers are not blown about by every whim of the market, and when they say "stable," they mean it. Also, the unstable branch provides ample opportunity to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest packages, if that's what floats your boat.

Well, to make a long story short, for now, I tend to encourage newbies to just use RedHat or Mandrake ... but to keep their /home directories on a separate partition for the day that they will wipe their root partition and install Debian ;-)

The last web shop I worked in made extensive use of dreamweaver, and had little problem with accessibility. Macromdia actually provides a suite of excellent tools for checking ADA compliance of the code it writes. This feature is well advertised, and was one of the features that led us to choose it for use by our artists.

As an aside, our HTML programmers used a different program, HoT MetaL Pro, which checks HTML validity every time you save. Mostly it was just the artists causing accessibility problems (flash animations and the like), so by the time they handed their code over to the HTML jockeys it was ADA compliant and just needed to be dropped in place. Not a perfect solution, but we've never had any complaints.

Back to the point, if the editor you're using doesn't support validation features, get another one, or use a couple that give you the features you need. For anyone who is selling things on the web, the cost of Dreamweaver and HoTMetaL Pro licenses is negligible compared to the rest of your operating costs. Suck it up, and do the job right the first time.

All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.

Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.

It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)

In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.

All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.

Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.

It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)

In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.

All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.

Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.

It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)

In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.

All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.

Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.

It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)

In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.

All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth.

Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.

It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter from yours truly. :-)

In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.

Well, honesty is the best policy. If a business is violating copyright on proprietary software, it seems entirely appropriate to anonymously turn them in to the BSA. Four good reasons why:
It's the right thing to do (TM).
It helps publicise MS's license terms.
It helps the Libre software evangelists.
There might even be a reward?

I think that if an individual asks you to help violate MS's copyright, you should use it as an opportunity to explain that that is immoral, and illegal, and you can't do it. Of course, you continue to explain, you can help him to install this Libre alternative.

As I said in an earlier post, even if this doesn't convert the would-be copier, it can at least get you out of having to install Windows.

During the summer, I suggested to my local Unix Users Group that we put together a campaign on campus dubbed "Software for Starving Students." The idea is that we would advocate the use of Free Software among the student body at BYU.

The ball got rolling, and we put together a CD image that we burned and handed out to students from a booth in the student center. We selected OpenOffice, Mozilla, The Gimp, BZFlag, and AbiWord in the most recent incarnation.

Last week, we gave out 400 copies of the CD from the booth. I mentioned to the group that if we did the math the way Microsoft does math, with each disc, we saved a student around $1,300. The 400 copies from last week combined with the 180 copies we gave out during the summer comes to around 3/4 of a million dollars with of savings to the student body! :-)

I, of course, took every opportunity to explain to passerby who accepted the disc about the multiple meanings of the word "free." The club president was making people promise to copy the software and give it to their friends in exchange for receiving the disc. Our Linux Install Fest last Saturday kept the classroom packed with students who heard about Linux and wanted us to install it on their computers for them.

I'm happy to say that we're doing our part to keep Linux from getting "stomped."