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I have had a Wave Sandbox account for a few weeks. I don't know why. Something to do with going along to two Google developer events in London.

I don't buy that it's going to replace e-mail. The great thing about e-mail is that it is already massively distributed and established. There are e-mail clients already existing for every platform. Pretty much the first application that gets written for any operating system these days is an e-mail client or a web browser. E-mails are sent in an extremely easy-to-understand, widely implemented format - plain text. There are already hundreds of e-mail servers, and if you are using a mature Linux distro like Debian or whatever, e-mail isn't that complex to set up.

Wave requires much more technology: you've got to host XMPP, you've got to host whatever interface magic you are doing to serve up the Wave experience to the end user (which means another HTTP service, at least until Wave clients start being available for Windows, Mac and $YOUR_PLATFORM), you've got to host all the media that gets dumped into the Wave. Beneath all of that, you've got to understand a fair bit about XMPP, and you've got to understand a fair amount of the complexities of XML, HTML, JS and so on. And, well, is the extra complexity and extra cost (in resources) of Wave really worth it? I'm not sure it is.

As a technology, Wave is awesome. Drag and drop files into your browser and watch them appear magically on another computer. The tech demo is really impressive. I'm impressed by Wave as a demo of just what is possible using the browser and a stack of open standards and open source technologies. I'm just not convinced that it's really been thought through. It won't replace e-mail or IM: it's too complex compared to them. As for collaboration, compare it with wikis or EtherPad - both are also a lot simpler. The Wave UI is mind-bogglingly complicated. There's no way my parents are going to be riding the Wave.

Wave seems to be predicated on there being something wrong with e-mail. I don't think there is. The only problems with e-mail are social, not technological. The primary problem with e-mail is that people don't follow RFC 1855 - people sending stupid rumours and chain letters, spam and spammy notifications, HTML crapola, and not being able to figure out how to quote correctly. Oh, and paranoid corporations who feel the need to shove 20K of legal crap at the bottom of the e-mail telling me that it's confidential (I never signed anything), that if I got it in error I should delete it (no, fuck off), not to print it out (I'll do what I want with my e-mail and my laser printer) and that it's been through their virus scanner (okay, how does that affect me?).

Summary: Wave is a cool tech demo, but I don't buy that it's a replacement for e-mail.

You are correct, although you're too much of a coward to receive affirmation. I was wrong in stating "from the previous year", when I should have said "in the following decade".

In 1981, the TOTAL federal revenue was approximately $1 trillion. As you noted, the tax cuts occured in 1982. By the time the 1980s were gone, the tax cuts raised approximately $1.2 trillion dollars in revenue in the 1980s. (You can go Here (specifically look at the chart). This was a direct result of the tax cuts.

You may also want to check out this page which is labeled 'economics 101'. Some interesting facts:

1) These additional federal tax revenues contributed to the reduction of the federal deficit from 6.3% of GDP in l983 to 2.9% in l989
2) From l982 to l989, l9 million net new jobs were created in the United States (more than the number of jobs created in Europe and Japan combined), two-thirds of them high or middle paying, resulting in the lowest unemployment rate in l6 years.
3) Real family income increased every year from l983 through l990 in every income group (from the poorest fifth of households to the richest fifth).
4) 86% of the tax filers in the poorest fifth of families in l980 moved out of that bottom quintile by l988 (l6% moved all the way to the top fifth of income earners).

Also of interest is this site which talks about the Reagan cuts. Interesting enough is the chart which shows that the tax burdon increased for the highest wage earners while decreasing for the lowest wage earners. And a quote, " The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988."

Those supply-side economics... wow, such a terrible thing. Worked twice before and yet you refuse to learn from history.

here

Now if you have a fiver that looks like this you might have to take it to a bank to get it swapped, but you'd be much better off taking it to a collector and getting more than face value for it! :)

Wow, now that's progress! What next? An unattended installation process that actually works, like kickstart, where you can specify everything needed to install via a simple text file, including partition table layout, and then use a simple XML file to determine what packages get loaded?

And before you claim Windows can do this, be careful. You might get me started on one of my typical rants.

Wow, now that's progress! What next? An unattended installation process that actually works, like kickstart, where you can specify everything needed to install via a simple text file, including partition table layout, and then use a simple XML file to determine what packages get loaded?

And before you claim Windows can do this, be careful. You might get me started on one of my typical rants.

Wow, now that's progress! What next? An unattended installation process that actually works, like kickstart, where you can specify everything needed to install via a simple text file, including partition table layout, and then use a simple XML file to determine what packages get loaded?

And before you claim Windows can do this, be careful. You might get me started on one of my typical rants.

Wow, now that's progress! What next? An unattended installation process that actually works, like kickstart, where you can specify everything needed to install via a simple text file, including partition table layout, and then use a simple XML file to determine what packages get loaded?

And before you claim Windows can do this, be careful. You might get me started on one of my typical rants.

Try here.

Before there was Israel, there was the British Mandate.

That would be the British Mandate of Palestine. Have a look at their coins and ooh look at the name on them. Could it be "Palestine"? Just because somewhere is occupied, it doesn't mean that it does exist. Get a clue.

i'm sorry to inform you your pulp fiction fan club membership has been revoked.

Oh no, you're right of course. It's been so long. And to think I saw it like 14 times in the theater. My friends and I would see it every Friday night. I even have an ancient (circa 1994) web page about it...

Posted ac due to it being off topic.

-- weave

As for fireman, I certainly don't think that they will hire an idiot just because they weigh 200 pounds. Or are you saying that fire departments are full of big bruiser idiots and that it doesn't take any intelligence to be a fireman? I don't know what planet you're from, but believe it or not, there are college degrees offered in fire protection. It takes a lot more than muscle to be a fireman...

Due to the root CA crap, it's not easy. I thought maybe we could become our own internal CA and get one of the root CAs to sign our CA so it chained up and was recognized by browsers, but you wouldn't BELIEVE how much that costs. Even Thawte charged a fortune. $20,000 plus a dollar for each cert we'd sign.

So I set up our own CA. I could embed our own root CA into all browsers we distribute. I also put the root CA on our web server so people could chose to import it into their own browsers, but for whatever reason, IE 4.5 on a Mac does not have this ability. Plus you wouldn't believe how many people bitch about installing the root CA due to the dire messages some browsers put out about it, but these same people think nothing of granting a java applet permissions to "read/write files/settings" from some unknown site.

It's a mess, and sometimes I think it's all a scam to make encryption for the masses to be too much of a pain in the ass to bother.

Yes, verifying a server's identity is important for e-commerce situations, but if given the choice between encrypted traffic between two unverified points or unencrypted traffic between two unverified points (which is what almost all net traffic is anyway), marginal safety is better than no safety (as long as it doesn't lull you into a false sense of security).

One goal of mine was to prevent a boss of mine from saying "get this slackers e-mail from his account or else be fired" in the future. Then I could say "it's all encrypted, sorry." (Thank *GOD* I've never been asked this in my 10 years as a net administrator here...yet)

Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP3 was certified in March 1999 at assurance level E3 and functionality class F-C2 under the UK ITSEC scheme - see the UK ITSEC scheme site for details. This is essentially C2 functionality, but with a higher assurance level (ITSEC E2/F-C2 is approximately TCSEC C2).

These security classifications are useless in real world situations. I am an IS manager in charge of a thousand computers in student labs at a college. What I want is a desktop computer that I can deploy that stops students from flock()ing with it which requires expensive tech time to rebuild.

Windows NT Workstation should have been the answer, but it wasn't. Everything is marketing and everything is never as good as Microsoft promises.

Some examples:

• Desktop security. Impossible to implement as soon as you load any type of application. They all want write access to various system files and directories. If you ACL %systemroot% down, everything fails. Microsoft Office is the worse offender. It even wants the ROOT of C: to be writable by all. Can you imagine / and /bin in UNIX being 1777 perms? Did the security evaluations evaluate the box doing anything useful? Or just sitting there?
• ZAK: Zero Administration Kit. I bought into this hype and it's been hell trying to implement it ever since. Allegedly you're supposed to be able to lock down policies and roll out workstations and applications using unattended installations. It's not easy. Even many of Microsoft's own products don't support Unattended Installations. I've been beating my head against the wall this week trying to get Visual Basic 6 to install unattended. (See my notes on ZAK and efforts to get it all working at www.dtcc.edu/cs/admin/nt/)
• IEAK: Internet Explorer Administration Kit. I had a problem. I needed to deploy a hundred browsing stations in public-access libraries around our various campuses. IEAK seemed to be a dream come true and when I first started with it, I was greatly impressed. I could lock down every setting, remove menu entries, even disable right-click context menus. Everything seemed cherry -- until -- I typed C:\ into the browser location bar. Bingo, all restrictions disappear and I'm now browsing C: with context menus on, other menus on, etc. I can still ACL most of the config down, but not it all (See first bitch point above). Absolutely useless. (I had convinced the library staff to let me install Linux desktops in the library and all was about to go well until I was told that they also had to run Ameritech's Horizon library catalog program -- which does not work under Linux...)
• Sysprep: Saw some video about deploying Windows 2000 in the enterprise and the video went on and on about imaging hard drives (Ghost basically, which sucks if you have dozens of different hardware configs and software configs). The video made it sound like sysprep was going to make my administrative duties a snap (more promises). We grabbed a copy and it turned out all it did was make a random string to define as your Netbios station name (yack) and requires DHCP to obtain the IP address -- and it sets the SID to be unique. Why am I not surprised.

So please, stop the hype. Real people are trying to implement real world solutions using NT and actually want it to live up to the hype.

I'm tired of Microsoft hype. If I kept lying, exaggerating, and making excuses to my wife, she'd throw my ass out and trade me in for a better model. I guess IT people are just masochists or something... :(

7 years ago, we got 20 dial-in analog lines for our userbase of 255 CIS students. Now we have 16,000 students (all students get e-mail now of course, not just CIS), but still have 20 lines.

Why? The college doesn't want to get into the ISP business. It's expensive and most students have ISP accounts of their own anyway. It's a decision I supported 100%.

But there's always the poorer students who gets screwed by policies like this. So we maintain shell access for those students to get their e-mail and -- if they can figure it out -- allow them to use SLiRP to get something approaching a PPP line.

We put up a web page explaining the steps in getting it to work, but specify that we don't support it. This way, the student who isn't burdened with a lot of cash but has half a brain can get equal access to the net at no cost.

So far, policy works fine. Most students use their own ISP, and our 20 lines don't get maxed out, but most of those that DO use it, are running slirp.

It'd be nice to see it maintained. I've seen cases where it drops the last byte of an FTP transfer and haven't been able to figure out why, for example. (We run DG/UX boxes here, might be an OS compatability issue... Also, DG/UX doesn't have a pppd that will work on a non-serial connection, ruling out that...)

Now the next slirp question I'm sure to hear is -- can it be hacked to work with Dreamcast? Beings I just bought one this morning and my first analysis of it -- answer is no. Doesn't seem to support a connection script... just PAP or CHAP I suppose... :-(