Slashdot Mirror

And exactly which ls do you think you'll be using? To the best of my knowledge, and I may be wrong here, but the only freely available copies of most of the software that is considered "standard" is the GNU versions. The *BSDs use GNU tools, and all the proprietary vendors (Sun, Digital, HP-UX, IBM, SGI, BSDI, etc) have their own proprietary versions of the tools. So, which tools are these?

darren

Here is what I came up with...

• a copy of the GPL (printed on something water resistant);
• A copy of Windows 2000 -- might be the last piece of software Micro$oft puts out before the breakup;
• A copy of the US's stupid encryption/export laws so future generations can marvel at our stupidity and ass-backwardsness;
• A CD holding all of Paul McCartney's songs in MP3 format;
• deCSS source is a great idea (you have a cool wife);
• how about a 100-base hub and a big-ass fileserver? ;)

darren

You raise some good points, but miss something very important. This is not (or, at least, should not be) about being Anti-Micro$oft; it's about offering other operating systems. I also am a very firm believer in using the appropriate tool for the job; as well as being very much pro-*nix, I am a M$-Certified Professional, and spent a lot of time with NT, Win9x, NetWare, MacOS, and DOS. There are times when Windows 95 is the most approriate choice -- I would probably never recommend Linux to a non-technical person if they didn't have an interest in learning about it -- but there are many, many times when it is not. Too often people choose the default, rather than the best option. Kind of like when you build Perl -- many questions say, "If you don't understand this question, just hit ENTER." This is not always the best option (although it is correct much more often in the case of Perl than it is with OSes).

From our perspective (the users out there who care about what OS/tools/software we use), there are much better options that M$ windows/office/visual *++ -- but for many casual users, this may not be the case. But this is not the point. This whole thing is about decisions being made for you. Nothing more, nothing less.

This, by the way, is why I will never again use an Apple operating system without an 'X' in it.

darren

• Are you sure that's the only thing that's special? I suspect that if that script ran "passwd root", the effects would qualify as "special".

Nope, still nothing special about the name "root". It's a character string, nothing more, nothing less. The problem, though, is that Unix searched through the password file line by line and stops when it reaches the name it is looking for. So, "passwd root" will do what you think it will if the admin hasn't changed the name associated with UID 0. Many, if not most, good sysadmins change the superuser's name.

By the way, even Microsoft recommends, as part of the standard "NT hardening", changing the name of the Administrator and Guest accounts.

But, just as an aside, if you use a system with shadow passwords (good idea) and you want to change the name of the root user, be sure to do it in both /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (or run /usr/sbin/pwunconv first) before you log out as root, or you'll in a world of hurt (have your installation media close by if you do this!). Experience talking here...

darren

These are probably the same guys that did (do?) the Ultrix training... Teaching one BSDish Unix isn't all so difficult from teaching another, just bone up on the Sys V-isms of Linux, and you've got a whole fleet of Linux trainers in no time flat.

darren

I also have one... It's called a sippy bird.

darren

XML suffers from the same problems that a lot of "popular" technologies suffer from: overhype. XML has a lot of potential to change the way you move data around. You can share data between totally different applications. You can post an XML version of your headlines (such as sites like Slashdot, LWN, Freshmeat, et al do) and have other sites snarf them to list the headlines. It's a desert topping and a floor wax. You may not believe it, but it will cure your asthma, too.

OK, enough hype.

XML is a data description standard that relies on pairs of tags, which are enclosed by < and >. These tags can be nested, and this nesting represents a hierarchy. For example:

<foo>Hello!</foo>

Here, the foo tag has a value of "Hello!". I could just as easily written the same thing using attributes:

<foo value="Hello!" />

This tells us the same thing. Here is a nested tag:

So, bar lives inside foo, and has the value "Hello!". Who cares about all this stuff? Why does this matter? Glad you asked.

Basically what it means is that I can take my data, in whatever format I keep it in (whether it be text files, HTML files, PGP-scrambled MD5 hashes, or even something really stupid like an Access database), convert it to XML format, and it is easily usable by other programs.

How? you ask. In order for a document to be valid XML, it has to meet some pretty stringent requirements, such as all tags must be closed and properly nested. In addition, you can define you data types in advance (some standard XML document types (called a DTDsor Document Type Definition) are RSS (Rich Site Summary, a Netscape-induced standard that lets you describe a sites contents (this is what Slashdot uses)) and CDF (Microsoft's Channel Definition Format, used for their (failed) push technologies)).

Yeah, great. Contrary to what uyou may be reading and such, XML is not revolutionary; XML is not earth-shattering; XML is not new. XML is a good idea that just happens to have a lot of people, and therefore a lot of momentum, behind it.

How do I use it? Well, the first thing XML requires is a parser. A parser (usually) reads in the XML, turns it into some sort of a parse tree, and them outputs it into some format your target application finds useful. There are many parsers out there, many written in Java, but of course also in C, Perl, Python, Tcl, and others. Slashdot uses the XML::RSS module to slurp in headlines from the 8 zillions other sites that make up the slashboxed on the right of the page.

The story of XML is the story of potential. There is tons of it: Potential to share data among applications and among businesses. But you still have to do much of the work. Premade solutions (such as Perl's XML::RSS) tend to be specific purpose solutions, or very general purpose (like the expat parser, written in C, which you plug in to your application to parse XML). Most of the work still needs to be done by the programmer in question; XML provides a framework for data sharing.

This frameworks entirely developed by the developer who controls the data. While you can use predefined DTDs if you want, you are not at all obligated to do so. Recently /. ran a review of "Docbook: The Definitive Guide"; Docbook is an example of a premade DTD for technical writing and documentation. But of course everyone's data is different, so your DTD will reflect your data exactly, without you having to modify it to fit into someone else's schema.

XML is only a part of the story; it describes the data itself, with nothing about how the data should be presented or connected to other data sources. These other parts have their own markup languages, XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and XLL (eXtensible Linking Language). There are tons of X_L lanagues (eXtensible Query Language (XQL) anyone?) which are designed to fill in the various gaps.

Microsoft, for all their faults, have been doing a lot with XML lately. They are moving the native formats for their Office suite to be XML-based; there's CDF I mentioned earlier; they developed a business-to-business langauge called BizTalk (which is just a DTD and some assorted supporting programs/parsers/etc). IBM has also done a great deal with XML and Java, producing parsers and translators.

Hope I didn't ramble or jump around too much.

darren

mybox$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.0 built for i686-linux

Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.

Installation is identical to earlier versions, no differences. Didn't attempt to use the same Policy.sh, though.

Whatever you do, don't visit the site using Navigator with JavaScript off and CSS support off and images off. You'll be greeted with a screenful of image placeholders with the text at the very bottom of the page (it relies on CSS-positioned layers).

Yeah, I was working on that one. It's availble here.

darren

As an aside, mod_perl 1.22 has been updated to work with Perl 5.6 (it was released last Wednesday). From the changelog:

compile fixes for 5.6 + -Duse5005threads
[Lincoln Stein ]

darren

The change log is available here.

darren

the correct URL for the BSD Google search is http://www.google.com/bsd -- no trailing slash.

A quick search (the obligatory search for foo) brought back a bunch of BSD-specific stuff.

This is probably the way to go, for a few reasons:

• Many (most) services are, or can be, name-based rather than address based, so this shouldn't be an issue for most processes other than routing.
• With many of these services, you get to choose your own hostname, so you can choose something groovy. I believe some will also provide free TLD DNS service on one of these dynamic addresses, so you don't have to settle for groovyhost.sillydomain.com or something similar.
• If (when) ION goes to static IPs, you are already set up to handle the services, so there will be no rearranging of addresses and client configurations.

You can get/write scripts that will tell your daemons what their hostname/IP is (the ones that need to know -- sendmail probably, maybe Apache) as you change the address.

Plus, running your own servers is inherantly more satisfying. Knowing that you have control over (almost) all aspects of your services can be a pretty, albeit scary, proposition.

• Who was it that said, "99% of science fiction is crap, but 99% of everything is crap."

Theodore Sturgeon: "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." This has become know as Sturgeon's Law.

I'm a little leary of setting out specifically to build a "less popular" anything... :)

But seriously, this is one of the things I've been considering, but one of the appeals of slashdot is that it covers the "News For Nerds" topic pretty comprehensively. "Patent Issues for Nerds" or "Free Borland Compilers for Nerds" are probably a little too restrictive, and won't get much traffic.

darren

One of the early ideas I had was something along these lines, as well. A site where people would post their code, and it could be peer-reviewed in the same way that people post comments on Slashdot now, crossed with an LXR-type display with line numbering, named anchors, etc. It's a great idea, I think, but extremely difficult to implement well -- for example, how do you attach comments to particular lines without completely disrupting the flow of the code? There are (mostly non-portable) hacks, such as using DHTML to make the comments collapsible, but things like that might detract from the content of the site.

Of course, there's very little non-programmer appeal to this sort of a site, and even most programmers would probably only be interested in a few of the postings at any given time. How would you like to log in one day and see only LISP and Applescript stuff? I think I'd get pretty annoyed and stop visiting after a few days of that.... (no offense meant if you happen to use either of those languages; I like LISP myself).

darren

Good idea, although probably a real lot of work for the site -- for this to be truly useful, I think, it would also require cross referencing the results of the slashot histogram with the Freshmeat historgram, and the LWN histogram, and the Linux Today historgram, etc, etc, etc. Maybe this would be a good use for a Beowulf cluster...?

I think the best reason is for consistency. One of the things I like about Linux and the BSD's is that they run on a lot of hardware. If I get a PowerPC for my desk, and I happen to not like the MacOS (!!!), then I like the fact that there are other options (quite a few in this case). Running NetBSD, or Linux, or whatever on my Intel box, my Sparc, and my PPC means consistency from box to box. Yeah, the binaries are not compatible, but the source is -- I can actually utilize the PPC hardware to its fullest potential if I put NetBSD on it rather than the MacOS.

darren

For example, a site dedicated to a specific topic, such as Apache, or book reviews? Is there enough of a market, or interest, in any one of these categories? How many new stories are there every day about, e.g., Apache, that would interest readers without becoming ApacheWeek, an Apache mirror, or a site dedicated to programming Apache? (not that those are not all great ideas!) I'm definitely OK with being that technical, but the question is, would there be enough reader interest for it to be worthwhile? (i ran with the Apache topic here, but it could apply to a lot of other topics.)

darren

As a Perl programmer, I am very impressed by the POD (plain old documentation) system that is almost universal to Perl modules and scripts -- embedding documentation into the code, with a corresponding tool to extract it. I also think that Javadoc is pretty cool -- it actually pulls out function and variable declarations and creates hyperlinked documentation based on that. Given that software documentation tends to lag behind the software itself, do you that there is a future in software that generates documentation from source code, in a more general way? Something like a set of scripts written in Perl (for example, due to it's excellent pattern matching) that would read your C/Lisp/C++/Java/Perl/Python/Pascal/whatever and generate documentation (perhaps XML in a standard format that can then be run through a 2man or 2info or 2pod).

More importantly, perhaps, do you think there is any reason to develop a XML dialect specifically for documentation?

darren

Ah, yes, good, old-fashioned Capitalism.

Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.

I'm only half kidding, by the way.

darren

• "...is Joe Blow linux guy prepared for the intrusion of Windows application economics and is John Doe Windows developer prepared for the linux market?"

Linux users are more used to having tons of different software out there to do any particular task (seen all the CD players on Freshmeat, for example?), so I don't think that an influx of new software, even software ported from Delphi on Windows, is going to have a real impact on the average Linux user's life. Let me rephrase -- the applications themselves will most likely be welcomed and probably get used quite a bit, but the flood of ported apps will not, in itself, be a problem.

The same thing can be said from the Windows users point of view -- how many windows users need or want many of the tools that are available on Linux? Many of the tools already have Windows equivalents; I can't think of any major tools (or classes of tools) that do not already exist on the Windows platforms, so, once again, Windows users will mainly gain choice. Which is a good thing -- inevitably a windows user will find a great tool that has been ported from Linux to Windows, become curious about it, and learn about Linux that way.

darren

I haven't used Delphi in years, and never really used any of Borland's other products, so I read this article on a whim, just to keep up to date, and boy, am I glad I did. This is exactly the kind of article that we need more of -- no marketing hype, no pandering drivel, just straight-forward, honest-to-goodness details. I like it. Good work, Borland.

So is the source from WinCE available anywhere on the Net? Someone who reads /. has to be an MSDN member, right? get a free GeoCities homepage and post it!

This search engine appears to have just about everything I've been looking for in a search engine:

• It uses google
• the pages are small and load very quickly -- very few images at all
• Well-designed interface

They seem to be using the same database as Google -- I did a search for a few of my old email addresses (stuff that gets results from Google, pages that are no longer up any more), and I got the same results that I got with Google.

Plus, it's runing Apache/PHP:

(bfm4) $ HEAD
http://www.topclick.com/
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:42:35 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) PHP/3.0.7
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:30:03 GMT
Client-Peer: 204.71.176.40:80

All in all, it looks like I'll be switching. The Bookstore has a bunch of Security related articles and books as well, categorized into secitons like Encryption, Consumer Profiling, and Spam.

darren

Does anyone know which version of X is included? I couldn't find any references to it in the release notes.

Well... not so hard to imagine. Remeber Ken Thompson's CC hack? (slashdot rated it 3rd in the Top 10 Hacks Of All Time thread).

Microsoft has been saying for a while that Active Directory was going to be the focal point for Win2000, and to a certain extent, it is. It is the part of win2k that has changed the most from previous versions of NT (4.0 and earlier used the domain model, which is basically identical to the domain model used by NIS -- a collection of computers grouped into a flat (non-hierarchical) group, with one or more master servers (Primary Domain controllers) and zero or more slave servers (Backuck Domain Controllers)). Active Directory is a true hierarchical directory service, similar to Novell's NDS. Active Directory has an LDAP interface, proprietary interfaces for D?COM and the like, as well as a direct API that can be used by VB/C++ programmers.

Yeah, Microsoft is on the leading edge as far as Dynamic DNS is concerned, and LDAP support, and all those lovely wonderful things that no one is implementing for real. All this comes at a price, of course, even assuming that there won't be a huge amount of bugs in Active Directory (this is not a flame or a jibe at microsoft; AD is a 1.0 product, and a huge one at that). When you implement any of these things, you have to implement them all. Because of the radical differences between AD and the NT 4.0 domain model, all of your domains and workgroups need to be replanned and re-implemented (no small feat even for small companies). Are you using DHCP for your windows clients? Ooops, you have to use the AD version of DHCP; the older "outdated" (NT 4.0) version doesn't work with AD.

Another problem that has been plaging AD is the speed issue. AD is written as a part of the win2k OS, naturally; to access it via all these disparate methods (LDAP, the API, etc), which the OS doesn't support natively, there needs to be a compatibility layer. And this compatibility layer is way slow. So slow as to render AD unusable on anything but super boxen (Uber-Boxen?). So, merely upgrading your NT 4.0 servers, whose hardware requirements are modest compared to Win2k, is not a good option here.

Do I think Microsoft did a good thing here? In theory, yes. Having only worked with it a little, and that in passing on another person's box, I can't say authoritatively whether I think they did in actuality do it right. The approach has the outward appearance of being done right, but Microsoft's track record for playing by the rules is not spotless (to say the least). We'll have to wait and see, I guess...

darren

as many have pointed out, too often people see certification as a replacement for experience. without a doubt, i would hire someone with no certification and a few years experience than vice versa. certification means nothing to me, and if my employer hadn't paid for it for me, i would never in a million years be bothered with it. as it was, i didn't study for the win95 exam, and just a little for the win nt server exam, yet i still did ok (900+ out of 1000 on both).

but wait, there's more: i also have problems with the exams themselves. my main problem with them is that they do not test anything real, or even anything worth learning. the knowledge that you gain from working closely with windows boxen on a real, production network is not, for the most part, going to help you pass the certification exams. the win95 exam, for example, emphasized upgrading from dos/win3.1 to windows 95. who does that? nobody real.

i got my microso~1 certifications about two years ago (back when the win95 exam was still pretty current), after taking a few classes (not the official ms endorsed ones, but from a local university). my experience has been that the majority of the people in the classes, and therefore probably most people taking the exams, are in it for the money, not for the love of it. Ask anyone in the classes (and i did ask a bunch of them), and in the top 2 or 3 reasons for taking the class is 'more money.' wanting to make more money is not a bad thing in and of itself, of course; it's when more money is the primary motivation for taking the exams that you have to be wary.

of the people i saw week to week in my classes, there were almost none that i would have voluntarily worked with. they were all nice enough, but, almost without exception, were not really interested in what they were doing.

this is the crucial difference between microso~1 folks and the *nix folks, at least that i have found: the *nix folks tend to do it because they love it. yeah, you can make a decent (really decent in come cases) living out of it, but for many of us, that is secondary. no one that i know of administers nt networks for the love of it.

darren

I struggled with this for a while as well, and I realized that, all things considered, Samba is definitely the way to go. I ended up setting up a dedicated Linux box, running Samba and having it authenticate against the NT domain in which all the Windows boxen lived, and kept tons of data on the Linux box. The windows users never knew that they weren't talking to an NT box, and I got all the advantages of using Linux.

The advantages are (quickly):

• stability
• you can use any unix filesystem on the back end, since the Windows box communicates with it via SMB, and not through direct file access
• it doesn't have to run on Linux; you can use a Solaris box, for example (samba is developed on Solaris and Irix, not Linux) and this is also transparent to the Windows users
• because SMB is a network protocol, and not a kernel driver, you can share the same disk via several methods simultaneously: to Windows boxen via SMB, to *nix via NFS, to Macs using Netatalk, and, of course, you can ssh in to the box and access the files through the filesystem in the normal fashion.

Disadvantages:

• you need to have an extra box on the network (might be a problem if you have limited address space or physical space, like at your house)
• there are Windows boxen on your network (not a samba problem per se).

• It's nice to have a GUI and all that rather than using console-based tools with obscure command line parameters, but what does KDE offer than my Win2K box doesn't?

KDE offers the stability of *nix, rather than the uncertainty of running on an mostly untested platform with over 65,000 confirmed bugs released by a company with a spotty track record. Other than that, nothing.

That's enough for me.

Interestingly enough, right now Wired has an article about this topic running right now called "Open Source Opens Education", which mentions the Linux In Schools Project. The article gives several examples of high schools and middle schools that have made the move to Linux, and outlines several reasons for doing so (cost, stability, etc). There are also some good pointers to other sites.

There are probably many "established" professionals in your area who would be more than happy to come in and give a presentation on Open Source in general, or Linux in particular. Check for a local Linux users group, or even a local branch of a related user group (like Perl Mongers, for exaqple). Even if the presentation is just for the teachers, it would probably be well received. If you are in the Boston area, contact the FSF. See the Linux User Group HOWTO for more info.

This definitely is an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think it indicates that the new kernel might not be ready to see the light of day. If you think back to who was using Linux in 1994, and who's using it now, or, rather, who was aware of it then and now, there is significantly increased awareness now. I think the shortened development time is due to more eyeballs.

"On 22 November 1999 begin towards in Prague the turning work for a 6-stuendige TV filming of the novel " the desert planet " (" Dune ") of franc Herbert. The TV project budgetierte with 20 million US Dollar can offer thereby a hochkaraetigen occupation and crew.

Thus William Hurt (out " draws in space ", " Dark admits town center " among other things or also " to to the end of the world ") took over the role of the duke Leto Atreides, which will have to be seen Italian actors Giancarlo Giannini as Imperator Shaddam IV and to Ian McNeice as a bad baron Harkonnen.

Barbara Kodetova plays charismatischen Paul Atreides, the main figure of the film as Chani at the page of Alec Newman, that represents. With Uwe ox farmhand, who embodies the Fremenfuehrer very convincingly, is represented also a German actor in this internationally filled production.

The film script to " desert planet " wrote John Harrison, which leads also direction; executing producers are Richard P. Rubinstein and Mitchell Galin. The line of the camera work took over the three-way Oskar winner Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now). The marvelous kostuementwuerfe come from Theodor Pistek (won a Oskar for the costumes in Amadeus). Additionally the special effect conductor Ernest Farino and the production designer Miljen Kreka Kljakovic is involved in the project. The digital trick effects will come from three of studios, among them AREA 51 and nice one digital (Babylon 5).

" Dune " produced of new Amsterdam Entertainment Inc., the Scifi Channel and KirchMedia in co-operation with tandem Communications. The US Austrahlung is planned for the last quarter 2000, in Germany the television filming in the spring 2001 to see will be (thus only little later).

World-exclusively SF Film.de can show the first photos of the set and the turning work here now. Thank you for it at Torsten Dewi!

I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, so I'll throw it out there. Simson Garfinkle writes weekly column for the Boston Globe called Plugged In. If you like his writings, you should probably check it out.

you raise some good points:

• Create a consensus document that sets forth interface guidelines, like Apple has for Mac developers

Actually, this is exactly what Microsoft has done as well. In order to earn the "Windows 95 Compatible" logo for your software, it must meat specific interface requriements. Things such as what happens when you hit the tab button, and how custom dialog boxes should be laid out. One this about Windows programs is that, by and large, they are extremely consistent, even between vendors.

I don't feel that this is necessarily the way that the open source community needs to go. I don't want my KDE programs to act like my GNOME programs, and neither will act like emacs, no matter what we try to do (although many emacs movement keybindings work inside Netscape dialog boxes...).

• This problem is not one that is insurmountable. It simply needs to be recognized.

Yes! Exactly. But now that you and I have recognized that, what do we do...?

darren

A good, intuitive user interface is not only totally relative, it also depends on the past experiences of the user in general. I, for example, find a command line interface intuitive, but I've been using Unix for almost 10 years. My parents, who have been using PC's for a few years now, find the Windows95 model (start menu, folder icons for directories, etc) intuitive. Some former co-workers used Macs exclusively for a dozen years--guess what they liked best?

But everyone knows this already. This is not news. But does matter.

We can try to find the common themes here -- if there are, in fact, any common themes to be found when you compare bash to the Finder -- but that will probably not be very fruitful.

We need a huge focus group to discuss user interfaces. We need to get the opinions of people who live in different countries and who speak different languages. We need to get the opinions of people with backgrounds in multiple OSes. So why doesn't someone put together an open source "Research" project that attempts to do precisely this? A site like slashdot would be ideal -- it encourages interaction, posting your own comments and feedback is easy and convenient, and it is widely read.

How does this strike people? Is this a viable things to do? I know this is one of those areas, like documentation, where many open source developers and users are traditionally lax. This is unfortunate -- it is one of the more important aspects of any program, open or closed source.

darren

This statement caught my attention:

• Mozilla has chosen to use a well defined component system, Microsoft COM. They've actually created a cross platform implementation of COM called XPCOM.

This interests me, not because I give a shit about micros~1, but because D?COM is one of things standing in the way of full compatibility between IIS and the like and real webservers. If there was COM on other platforms, then all those IIS applications could be picked up and moved, whole hog, to other systems. This is interesting to me. Plus, I feel that a cross-platform version of almost anything is preferable to a single-platform stranglehold, even if I personally will never use it.

AlterNIC was trying to do exactly this for a long time. The problem is, you need existing root servers and DNS servers to use your server as a root server. How does my company's DNS server (ns.fooinc.com) know about foo.bar-nic.baz (the root server for the .baz TLD)? I have to tell it -- and every DNS admin needs to be told about foo.bar-nic.baz. That's the problem. It's a wonderful idea otherwise, and I'd be all for it.

anyone have the sourceforge or va linux url for this? I can't seem to locate it on either site.

• we've all heard about how the Post Office wants to make themselves relevant in the 21st century. why don't they become an offical key authenticator. they are already used to dealing with huge numbers of people and are recognized as a trusted authority with special legal rights. tampering with the mail is a federal offense. becoming a key signer is a much better way to stay relevant than by giving everyone an email address. and their trusted status would lend creedence to the internet way of doing business.

This is a really good idea, except for one small thing -- the US Post Office holds no international authority. Why should (for example) France treat the USPO any differently than any other random organization? In fact, other countries might trust the USPO less than another random organization because it is affiliated with the US government.

But I like where you're going with this -- it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps if there was some sort of an international group, of which the USPO was one member, this would work. I don't forsee this happening, however, with the differences in crypto laws throughout the world.

Cthulhu for President! Why settle for the lesser evil?

http://www.cthulhu.org/

• Cholula is apparently the site of the Temanapa Pyramid, a "major religious center before the Spanish arrived".
• Apparently this involves Chihuahuas somehow. "Drop the Chalupa-cabra! Don't be a fool!"
• Apparently Cholula was a holy city
• And there's a volcano there.
• And Chewbaca is a wookie
• Therefore, my client is an alien!

..by he who is not named, by YHVH, Ph'ngluimglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn!
i bind you to the ether that is cyberspace, to your lonely newsgroup. back to where you were spawned!


PS: to any cultest that read this i need you help! we must bind Shub before it gathers more power....
PSS: if you dont get it, read some, but say fairwell to your sanity.

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

So instead of starting religious wars...{I mean Linux and Windows are JUST OSes after all, there are many more serious things to war about)...

this is like saying that Cthulhu is just alittle hungery, ( or that shoggoths aren't the perfect lover)and Discorda is just another goddess...

anyway, domesticated primates have made war on anything, dont let it bother you. if you dont war about OSes what do you make (love) war on? well, my advice, is to just:

Practive Random Acts of Intelligence and Senseless Acts of Self-Control!!!


ps: now dont go looking at shoggoth smut, try primate smut...

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE