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... He wants his science fiction book title back. Bruce Sterling has been talking about this idea of years. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/03/20 /distributing-the-future.html http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-385773935 9956666768

I wonder if they seized any of his computers. I was thinking it'd be awful ironic if they recover some sort of damning data from his computer -- data that was only recoverable because ReiserFS is resist to things like shred(1).

It is not hypothetical. Here is a testimony of one such person.

As long as the people are paid to improve the quality per Wikipedia standards, rather than to promote a particular POV, I consider such "hired editors" for a contribution.

Jason Hoffman's talk at RailsConf also looked at scaling Rails apps. The slides are available in PDF format.

Getting a LITTLE off topic, but thanks to both of the posts clarifying the relationship of Carbon and Cocoa! As I said, I'm the new guy! But a little more quick research finds that a significant enough part of the community has a hard time with the differences as well. A few informative bits here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/05/23/coc oa_vs_carbon.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/ 10/70789.aspx
http://daringfireball.net/2006/10/some_assembly_re quired
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/10/pimp-my-code-pa rt-12-frozen-in.html

I have much to learn!

you do not provide functions which can execute arbitrary programs.... This is the source of most of the vulnerabilities involving web browsing. Now we have Google competing to offer similar security holes.

Firefox offers the exact same mechanism. Firefox extensions can contain (and run) executable code. (See below.)

As the Greasemokey security vulnerability demonstrated, web pages can "script" Firefox extensions.

ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.

Take for instance FoxyTunes, which is listed on the Recommended Add-ons page. Download the XPI file, rename it to ZIP. Open it in WinZip or whatever. You'll notice several files:

• FoxyTunes.dll
• FoxyTunes.dll.linux
• FoxyTunes.dll.mac
• FoxyTunesBonobo.so.file

DLL files are executable code on Windows. I'm assuming the *.linux and *.mac are similar. SO files are executable code under Linux, not sure why it has .file after it. I'm sure there are more extensions with executable code, that was just the first I looked at. Look for any extension that integrates with external software - almost always there will be a DLL or EXE.

Firefox is not so closely tied to the OS that they could take this breach, elevate privileges and take over a system, like ActiveX vulnerabilities.

Uh... not true at all. Firefox extensions can contain (and run) executable code.

As the Greasemokey security vulnerability demonstrated, web pages can "script" Firefox extensions.

ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.

(addons.mozilla.org is having problems right now, otherwise I'd point out some extensions that have .EXEs in them. I looked into it before and one extension that had them added support for 3rd party download managers - don't recall the name...)

Similarly, PETA should hold real-meat barbecues to attract more potential members.

Walt Disney hasn't created anything new in over 40 years. I'm not sure why continuing his incentive to create is useful for society.

I'm not going to directly disagree with you because I'm unsure how you'd define the above. What 3D tasks do you want the card to do? Because if all you want is basic 3D acceleration good enough for e.g. TuxRacer or Open Arenaand the fun desktop effects with Compiz/Beryl then Intel has very nicely provided complete Free/OpenSource drivers for most of their integrated components (*) including the GMA X3000 integrated graphics chips. The latter chips apparently do T&L shaders and other good stuff which is actually better supported under GNU/Linux than Windows Vista.

Of course, if what you're talking about is CAD or something really GPU intensive then you may be more out of luck, but I'm interested to know exactly what that is?

You know, some of us have known for a while that Steve replies to his email, or at least a small subset of the torrents he probably receives every day (a couple of public examples). He's answered a few of the questions I've emailed him over the years, too, and I'm just a regular Slashdotter Joe.

But the more publicity he gets for doing it, and the more people actually try to email him, the less likely he'll be to read and respond, and the less personal it's actually going to get. It's obvious from the numbers. Part of me hates myself for saying this, and I acknowledge that it's elitist as all hell, but I sort of wish these guys (the ones "in the know" about Steve's responsiveness over email) would keep it to themselves. Because if Steve stops answering his email, that's another piece gone of the old Apple spirit.

Of course, I suppose we must all eventually succumb to inevitability—but there's no harm delaying that end, while possible. So please. Enough. Let me suggest we simply appreciate Steve for keeping it real, and not trumpet it all over the blog-o-spierre.

You may find OSCON interesting.

I cannot believe "KickTam" didn't make the list. He/she was so lame, Apple dropped by it after a very short time.

Chris Adamson mentions him at the end of this article and links to this Apple dev page for a picture.

The name "KickTam" came from a developer's young child who couldn't say "QuickTime" properly.

While these other mascots may score between 3 and 7 on the lameness meter, KickTam was an 11.

There was a great presentation at ETech about this. For more information on this kind of thing check out the RepRap Project.

There was a great presentation at ETech about this. For more information on this kind of thing check out the RepRap Project.

“Web 2.0” is not AJAX and “AJAX” is not Web 2.0. These terms are not synonyms nor does one necessarily imply the other. Yes, AJAX is an important participant, but Web 2.0 is really about service architecture that is equally consumable by machines and people—a notion that somewhat embodies the original vision of the Web. The article title “Web 2.0 Under Siege” is misleading nonsense. It is analogous to stating that programming is “under siege” because a library exists that contains a vulnerability.

Europe virtually ignored the tech industry for decades

Yes, Tim Berners-Lee completely ignored technology when inventing the Web (whilst working at CERN) preferring to use homing pigeons instead of a packet-switching network.

Just because the EC is taking a known monopolist to task--and going the right way about it--doesn't mean there is some sort of European conspiracy going on. Microsoft have got a massive percentage (a bit out of date, can't seem to find anything current) of desktop market share and are using that to unfairly hamper competition. They use bundling and their API to stop people from developing for other platforms. They put the brakes on IE for as long as possible because they realised their API was (and still is) threatened by web based applications.

Unfortunately the US government failed to prosecute Microsoft fully so the EC are being forced to do it. It's sad but quite simple.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I think the whole patent system is a mess at the moment. There are too many companies grabbing technologies that have been around for ages.

Anyone remember when microsoft patented a whitespace remover!?

I propose we coin this "Pat-Squatting", although some people might hear something nasty in that.

I was impressed by the author's attention to detail and clear specification of the tested systems and the steps involved in using them.

One useful correction would be that programs are just as easy to install on .rpm-based systems as they are on .deb-based systems. The default tool on Fedora Core 6 is called YUM and it does all the dependency resolving necessary. There are even simpler front ends to it such as Pup and Pirut. Package installation, deinstallation, upgrade and update are just as easy as they are with Aptitude.

The problems that the author experiences with 64-bit Flash are unfortunately a result of there being insufficient pressure from GNU/Linux consumers on vendors to supply Free software. A similar problem is experience by many Ubuntu users that rely on the non-Free drivers produced by Nvidia for their graphics cards, or the various non-free binary blobs used for some dodgy wireless hardware. This will continue to be a problem as long as distributions like Ubuntu facilitate the manufacturers of this hardware in evading one of the central principles of Free Software. The manufacturers can't do a good enough job of staying current with the kernel and so GNU/Linux will always be a second class citizen as long as we accept this. Fortunately there are manufacturers, such as Intel that provide Free software for their 3D graphics cards and their wireless chipsets and so it's worth choosing their components when building a new system. (I used to buy ATI stuff because the Free 3d drivers were better than the Free Nvidia ones, but apparently the nouveau project is opening up the list of working Free Nvidia cards. I'll probably be giving Nvidia and ATI both a miss in favour of Intel though).

Unfortunately Mark Shuttleworth is a short-term thinker who is pushing many of the Ubuntu developers into including binary, closed blobs that work until you update your system. This is the tired old "I'm a pragmatist" line which has been releiving the pressure on manufacturers to open their drivers and on users to choose non-closed hardware while purchasing new systems. It's anything but pragmatic and leads to the sort of frustrations seen in the article.

Whether they give cash to the RIAA oe head to Hilary Rosen, they ARE affiliated with the RIAA. They directly contribute to its power base. They enjoy benefits from being a "reporting affiliate" or whater stupid wordgame you'd like to play as you delude yourself that you are not supporting the very people you claim to revile just so you don't have to go without your debbie gibson fix.

I could have listed 100 examples fo you but its oibvious even that wouldn't be enough, because you CHOOSE TO BELIEVE. Ah well, then I guess those old press releases won't make any differnce either... you know, the ones where emusic openly admit they are RIAA affiliated by way of the labels they represent.

Oh yeah... and they're OWNED by fucking Vivendi... er, they were. Until they were bought up by some obscure LLC partnership (an old trick for hiding parent company ties) that also owns "The Orchard" - a company that, itself, has a very bad reputation for screwing artists. So it goes from being owned outright by one of the largest RIAA partners to being owned by a secret partnership with a reputation for being pretty much as bad to artists as the "majors."

Now, repeat after me: Bahhh... Bahhh.

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2003/0 8/emusic_is_a_freedomproof_busin.html
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/29/151021 1&mode=thread

But, buried under the "game" talk is a considerable legal issue--one which I'm surprised has gone silent. Can Blizzard claim to "own" all character data? Yes, yes, we sign away our lives when we "sign" user agreements; but doesn't the shift into a "web2.0" (and here I'm using this term to signify: distributed, information-based, user-oriented economy, pulling my definition from Tim O'Reilly's article) economy place a tremendous value on user information? This is the argument made by Alex Iskold in his recent article "The Attention Economy" and is the kind of argument at the heart of Lessig's work. And this is why, in my opinion (as someone who has never played WoW but played Socom rather religiously for a couple years), this is a "rights" issue. Or at least it should be.

You were joking; but that's exactly the same kind of non-indemnification that Microsoft sells its customers:

It's very likely that now Microsoft has a license to use MP3 internally; but no right to sublicense it to end users who may still be liable.

If you think I'm kidding, they've done it before:
    http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/4306 7

There is basically no new market to gain by increasing the speed of the internet connection

Also, the nature of the industry makes it almost impossible for a startup to come in, up the ante and increase the speed of the internet.

if you were any sort of DECENT consultant, you would have stated this on a blog, with link-whoring to scoble (no link because WE DONT LINK!!!), adaptive path, wikpedia, patented the term "1's and 0's" (in the process starting a flamewar with any site using them), and started a range of high priced conferences in exotic locations.

if you were any sort of DECENT consultant, you would have stated this on a blog, with link-whoring to scoble (no link because WE DONT LINK!!!), adaptive path, wikpedia, patented the term "1's and 0's" (in the process starting a flamewar with any site using them), and started a range of high priced conferences in exotic locations.

So, free software is geeky, useless, childish and no one cares? What an ignorant flame disguised as a thoughtful and informed reflection.

Your response is not exactly the epitome of reasoned debate. Where did you get childish and useless from? He never said either of those things. He merely said that the general public does not care about Linux, which is true. He also said that people who are mature about this, rather than spouting ridiculous OS zealotry without taking note of the actual point (true of EVERY OS, not just Linux, though you are a prime example), realise that people will gravitate to using what they find most useful, regardless of how 'free' it is. No-one is asking you to choose between what is 'free' and what is useful. They are asking you to choose whatever you find does what you want to do properly.

That isn't always Linux, and you know that - which is why you're having a hissy fit. If you were trying to prove that Linux users aren't childish, a point that was never made or even hinted at, you defeated yourself rather rapidly. I find it of some small amusement that you inadvertantly proved a point that no-one made.

How about this - true freedom is being free to choose the OS and software I want to use, when I like. Oh, and Firefox leaks like a sieve and crashes too, even on Linux, to the point where someone had to release a leak monitoring plug-in. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's not a Windows-only issue. Anyway, some people want some performance out of their browser rather than the "anything but IE" choice, which is why I use Opera. The Opera browsing experience is far superior, in my extensive experience, to both IE and Firefox and is (shock) closed source.

Proprietary, closed source solutions are sometimes better than open source solutions and vice versa.

before we seen anything web 2.0 widely yet,

Bwahahaaa! Don't make me laugh! Windows security superior to Mac OS X or UNIX? Ok....all of those exploits are NOT on Windows they are on UNIX....ok...sure....

Yes it's trivial to elevate a local user to root, but it's not as easy as it seems. First, on the Mac, you'd have to be flagged as a Administrative user. EVEN THEN it prompts you to type your password in when you you have to install software. Sure, you an sudo su to get a real root prompt, but, again, you'd have to type in a password.

Password's are not always secure that's one thing that we should all know by now, but if you pick a good password, unless there's a exploit or unless it's easy to guess, it would take a long time to figure out the password via brute force.

Mac OS X stores all of it's security information in the Netinfo database. Netinfo started out on the old NextOS as did most of OS X. While traditional UNIX files like /etc/passwd exist, you still need a entry into the NetInfo database in order to log in to the desktop in multiuser mode. The only time the standard UNIX security is used is when in single user mode. Check out: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/22/mac forunix.html

Root logins being disabled IS safer, but no where did I say it made you perfectly safe. Not only do you have to be flagged as a Admin user (as on Windows), you also get prompted for your password every time (not a default behavior on Windows XP) you need to do a Administrative feature like installing software.

Ironically, relational fans (such as I) tend to think that polymorphism and inheritance are usually poor modeling techniques and way over used. Many OO fans have agreed even, recommending composition instead of inheritance. IS-A is out out out of style in OO circles.

You can keep using the phrase 'many OO fans', but that does not stop these features being of real use. Inheritance and polymorphism are fundamentally different ideas. Inheritance is overused, polymorphism underused.

The best GUI system would be mostly declarative because that would allow *multiple* languages to use the same GUI engine.

Multiple languages can already use the same GUI engine on the JVM.

OOP has not figured out a way to do that because each OO language is too different from each other.

No, see below.

If you can prove otherwise, you will be an OO hero instead of wrong. Declarative is more cross-sharable. Declarative == Sharable.

Then I am an OO hero, as I can easily prove you wrong. Here are some examples of multiple languages using the same GUI engine (Swing on the JVM):

Java (well, no examples needed there).
Groovy: http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2004/10/gdgr oovy_basic_swingbuilder.html
JRuby:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library /j-alj09084/
Jython:
http://www.uselesspython.com/Jython_Swing_Basics.h tml
Scala:
http://scala.sygneca.com/code/scalagui

I can provide many more if you wish.

Research? Where?

All the work of Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and so on.

Again, that is a query language syntax issue, not an OOP issue. (Some dialects support "natural joins" that do just that.) I would like to rework SQL myself, but that is another issue. If you are using a special magic query language that is better than SQL, fine, but that is not an OO victory even if true.

Yes, it is, because it is a query language that allows for inheritance, polymorphism and re-use. I can query for, say, a Contact, and I will automatically get subclasses. This allows for transparent extensibility.

Also, as I said, but you keep ignoring, what you retrieve are instances of classes that have been proxied and advised with additional code to allow transparent persistence. That is an OOP matter.

That is outright bad biz modeling.

Sorry, but I can't take you seriously. You are doing nothing more that claiming that anyone who takes a different approach from you is wrong!

You don't subclass Contact, you reference it. A customer, client, etc, may have multiple contacts. For example, a given company may have a billing contact, a sales contact, and a general (front desk) contact. Even Amazon has multiple contact options per customer. This is what happens when you think in trees instead of sets. I rest my case.

You haven't made any case. You can certainly model by referencing, but it depends on the complexity. In a situation where you don't have multiple contacts, inheritance is far simpler.

Dr. Codd and Charles Bachman faught navigational-versus-relational battles in the 70's and relational is generally considered to have won. That is until OO fans tried to resurrect navigational concepts. Navigational is modern-day GOTO's.

You had better tell CERN that - they use navigational models for the vast majority of their data collection, as relational systems are neither fast enough or flexible enough.

Again, a good many OO fans have lots of complaints and grumbles about OO/relational mappers.

That is true, but I am talking about modern mappers, not the way they were years

See Pragmatic Questions about Binary-Only Drivers.

Here's my shot at it. 3d in a webpage probably isn't neccessary and to me, it represents tech for tech's sake. But if you insist (CAD, very specialized use, experiemental interfaces) then maybe flash and some XML model (X3D) VRML replacement would suit you. Of course, replacement standards don't really address your question.

What I think the GP is saying is exactly what I think of VRML as bad design. For example, let's say I was going to design Online Phonebook Town. Sigh with me, this should all look familiar to a lot of you, it's been tried so many times. Ok so I might have these key design elements:

- You can run through rivers and streams to interact with a huge phonebook in the middle of a town square.
- When you are looking for a plumber, you go into the plumber building in the town square.
- The plumber building has a huge wrench sign hanging out front (of course).
- You can play MP3s from your computer in your "home" with a huge 3d control panel.

Sounds shiny and exciting, but the actual result is a 3d version of what is already usable in 2d. When people want to call a plumber they aren't really looking for a 3d experience, they want information transparently. When they need a phonebook, they don't want to run over a grassy hill with WASD and see a sky texture. When people want to play music, they probably already have a music player. Who in the world has a collection of MP3s and are just waiting for a VRML virtual town client to come along and play it for them? This feature bloat is an indication of poor direction.

Instead of navigating a horrible 3d metaphor, I'd rather just search in 2d with yahoo. Instead of having a 3d cd player in my "town", I'd rather have Windows integrate with Winamp/iTunes/Whatever. Instead of giving me a 3d desk with WASD controls, models of my "recycle bin", some rehashing of folders as drawers or files as pieces of paper in an 3d application; how about putting more work into the lower level components like the OS or display interfaces? The background music player might work better with a side display on the keyboard or a second monitor. Anyway, nevermind the audio player example ... it's just something I've seen attempted in a 3d environment.

I hesitantly like mature and modern attempts at this 3d metaphor like Project Looking Glass and Compiz/Beryl but so far the best use I see is a flashy demo movie. I'd rather watch the demo movie rather than depend on it. The usability isn't there, VRML was just the start of this continuing effort to get something usable. Beryl is great for making a 2d desktop slightly 3d. And even then, sometimes goes overboard with window wobbling (wtf). The effect is neat but it's kind of like an ice sculpture (pretty and useless).

To sum up my opinions:
1. VRML has a history of creating bad interface metaphors.
2. The 3d metaphor for navigating large amounts of data has mostly been replaced by 2d visualization.
3. Online data interactivity has largely been replaced by AJAX and Flash.
4. Any attempt to organize interfaces together seamlessly should be done with a smart OS not with a bad 3d metaphor for how I work.
5. A full 3d metaphor is useless. 3d icing on a 2d cake is ok, just don't add too much.

Heh, Why bother "happening" to be in the city at all? Point your Pringle yagi antenna - powered wireless connection west across the bay and be a proud San Franciscan from the comfort of your own home. If I needed to, I know I would. But seriously, I'm wondering 2 things:

How tamper proof are they actually going to make this thing? If the policy is libral/versatile/friendly enough, they probably won't face *too* much circumvention attempts. But there will inevitably be a few bad apples intent upon being a pain in the ass for the service providers and ruin it to varying degrees for the rest of us.

What does this mean for the community run free wireless groups already operating in SF? With the uniqueness and value of their efforts decreased, will they fold and cease to exist? Would that loss of diversity and choice be harmful? Have the leaders/organizers of the project(s) come out with public statements regarding the deployment?

• Home of Intel
• Home of Hewlett-Packard
• Home of Tektronix, FLIR, Mentor Graphics
• Linus Trovalds moved to Portland from the SF Bay Area
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention
• Government Open Source Conference
• Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)
• Large free Wireless project Personal Telco
• New PSU Open Source lab
• 5th largest Craigslist community (2004)
• Corporate HQ of Lattice Semiconductor, RadiSys, Planar Systems
• Home of Sun Microsystems High-End Operations
• Yahoo!, FEI, Credence Systems, and TriQuint Semiconductor located here

Google seems to be interested in collecting tons of data to secure a position in the data world of tomorrow. From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2 005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=3 "The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces." In 2007 I expect to see increased jockying in data related powerhouse players like Google, Oracle, etc... If I were to speculate beyond 2007 I would say that as far as security goes, data management & protection/privacy are top priority. Forget the bots, worms, crackers and spammers. If data is properly protected and managed then bots, worms, spam, etc.. are powerless because they will have no ability to exploit data as they do today. This raises another point, do you feel comfortable with only a few powerhouses like Google & Yahoo hording all the data they can? (email, websites, maps, etc..). I don't. I don't like the idea of only a few controlling the data. Thus, as a result, we may even begin to see a seperation between public and PRIVATE internet. Yup, you got it. I speculate that private internets will begin to develop. Much like we have social seperation, we will soon have Internet seperation. This seperation may occur on a tangible community/city level of even a 'like-interest' level. And, no, we don't have anything like it today so I'm not talking about Myspace, newsgroups, clubs, communities, etc.. I am talking about private internet sections, totally closed circuit.

Here's a good article that explains Web 2.0
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2 005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Coral Cache Link:
http://www.oreillynet.com.nyud.net:8090/pub/a/orei lly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

http://calendar.google.com/
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://del.icio.us/
http://docs.google.com/

You might try Tim O'Reilly's explanation, since he coined the bloody term in the first place.

Oh, and of course you heard of and used web 2.0 sites before anyone called them web 2.0. Think about it. Tim O'Reilly didn't sit around and think, hmm, let's come up with something we could call web 2.0. What would it be? And then went and made a bunch of people start implementing his ideas. It is descriptive, and the term to describe something (as happens pretty much always with history) came after that which is described. There had to be a web 2.0 before anyone could recognize it as something different from what came before and name it.

I do this stuff (among other things) for a living. ...
Passive tags (like the one in the passport) can only be read a few inches away and someone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows that the power requirement to maintain an adequate magnetic field increases exponentially with distance.

While you may "do" it for a living, it sounds like you don't hack it for a living. It takes a whole different mindset to look for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Even the State Department admits the RFIDs used in the passports can be read from at least 10 feet away. NIST says they've been able to do 30 feet and are working on clever ways to get beyond even that. These numbers are for ISO 14443 RFIDs which seem to be the type used in US passports.

one has to remember that tags operating on the same frequency will tend to interfere with each other, reducing the chance of getting a good read.

There are plenty of situations in which just knowing that the RFID and associated passport are present are trouble enough. The classic example being the bomb with an "american detector" - left out in a public area it only needs to get enough of a signal fingerprint to differentiate american passports from others in order to make that passport's owner very unhappy. Put one of those into the doorframe of a mcdonalds somewhere and you don't even need to worry about long-range fancy-smancy stuff.

A high-gain antenna doesn't have to look like a high-gain antenna, as illustrated by this set of instructions for building a high-gain 802.11b WIFI antenna out of a Pringles can

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the best kind of antenna for the job, but it's something that you could get through an x-ray partially disassembled, and nobody would question it.

PLUS You don't have to go waving the antenna around in the open for it to be useful. Radio frequencies will pass through the soft cloth sides of most carry-on luggage with absolutely zero loss in signal strength.

PS3 already has full-JAVA support via Blu-ray (also you can install Linux)

Blu-ray spec requires that all Blu-ray players have Java(J2ME, JavaTV API, etc.) due to future interactive menus, bonus material, etc will be done entirely in JAVA.

This is the core reason of Microsoft's opposition to Blu-ray and support of HD-DVD(which uses MS's iHD instead of JAVA) being that having a machine that runs JAVA by default and in every home can be very scary to MS.

So you shoiuld be able to make BD-J games on Blu-ray and have it play perfectly fine on the PS3 or any other Blu-ray player.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/10/we_love _bluray_java_its_perfec.html

You can still do this.

Gus Mueller, who was asked to participate but did not, was offered a flat fee of 5000 US$ (see comments). FotoMagico dev Oliver Breidenbach implies that his deal was similar in this oreilly thread. In this interview, Will Shipley of Delicious Monster clearly says that he's getting a very low amount of money, but does it for upgrades and publicity.

Other developers came out and were more explicit about how much they were getting or were offered, but I'm not going to search for those right now. I think it's quite obvious what the deal MacHeist offered was.

> I don't know what to do to solve this, any suggestions?

1) Address the ignorance factor first. Make sure people are aware of the issue of data security and the seriousness of it. Don't assume they automatically know. Explain it to them in a way that is informative and not condescending.

2) Use a platform designed to keep users in userland.

3) Setup laptops with encrypted filesystems [0] and encrypted connections [1]. Do not give users administrative access. Re-image [2] system partitions for extra freshness. Stop using WEP.

[0] http://rubyforge.org/projects/fusefs/
[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/02/2 3/wep.html
[2] http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
      http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l

suggest you also look at http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/11/learn_l isp_from_mitfor_free.html (LISP) and (from the same article) http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.h tml (Structure and Interpretation of computer programs) - read the introduction and preface. There are also a bunch of supplemental videos that you could use. Hope this helps.

You might want to read a dissenting opinion on Steve Yegge's hatchet job on agile development. Having been on both agile and non-agile development projects, my experience is that it's very easy to criticize agile development if you don't know anything about it.

Who the fuck came up with Web 2.0?

Dale Dougherty. Cofounder of O'Reilly, founder of Make Magazine and . . .founder of the first web site to be supported by advertising.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2 005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

KFG

The point is that without patents, big companies like Microsoft can easily out muscle and out market little guys with good ideas. With patents, the little guys can win more.

Though I can understand why people get paid to say or write that, I find it difficult to accept that anyone actually believes that. It doesn't work that way even in theory:

Maybe just maybe Bricklin could have gotten the concept of electronic spreadsheet accepted by the USPTO. But getting there to the initial product, he would have tread on dozens of patents utilized countless algorithms and concepts from Computer Science curricula and industry best practices which are owned by portfolio companies. They would have eaten his lunch even with cross licensing.

Here's a quote from your leader around 1994:

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. "
-- Chairman Gates (1994) then CEO of MS

There are numerous guides online that describe how to do this and the low cost of wireless networking equipment means that most HDB or condominium blocks have unprotected networks users can log on to.

A particularly interesting guide that, if accurate, makes me wonder why people still bother with wireless security at all. Note that it is in excess of 3 years old--the info. may not apply today.

Said Mr Cheo: 'People assume, wrongly, that since it is there, it is okay to use it.'

So, when I go to an airport to sit for 8 hours--even though there is no sign noting "FREE WIRELESS"--I should probably beg the proprietor for written consent? Fortunately, I don't go to Singapore, I could be in a lot of trouble. :)

You must have read about it here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/02/your _it_companys_biggest_enemy.html

Other people tried it and got different results. Of course, some people found mixed results. I guess you could, I don't know, try it and see if it helps?

Haven't read a single report where replacing the thermal paste didn't lower the temperature - only some (including your link) where the temperature didn't drop by much.