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Try giving them this article. If they have a bit longer, give them Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots.

If you want to explain DRM to people outside Slashdot, let them read something like this article or Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots.

DRM, by definition, causes vendor lock-in. If DRM schemes were licensed under a fair and non-discriminatory policy then they would not work, because anyone who wanted to get around them would be able to get the specification. You could even legally create an open source application which did all of the rights checking inside #ifdefs so if someone defined the IGNORE_DRM symbol then they could compile a version that decrypted the DRM'd content but didn't apply any restrictions. This wouldn't even be illegal, since they would be distributing the version that respected the DRM and end users would be applying the modification.

The correct solution, then, is not for lawmakers to go after Apple, but for them to go after DRM in general. Except on books, where it makes perfect sense.

They introduced something new for corporate customers in the UK; a new repair policy that violates their own AppleCare agreement. Now they require you to take defective Macs to an authorised repair centre, rather than having them collected and shipped back to you. Since AppleStores are still very rare in the UK, and there aren't many resellers left since Apple started direct selling over the Internet, this means a drive of at least an hour (each way) for most people to drop it off, and the same later to collect it. For home users this is bad enough, but how many companies can spare a technician for a day for every faulty machine?

The FreeBSD equivalent of NDISwrapper is "Project Evil" if anyone's wondering...

For a slightly larger form factor, I can recommend the PC Engines WRAP boards. They are 6"x6", but come with up to 3 100Mbit network connectors, 266MHz AMD Geode CPUs, 64 or 128MB of RAM and boot from a compact flash card. Mine has two miniPCI slots; one contains an Atheros 802.11a/b/g card (supports two antennae for each wavelength; four in total) and the other will probably gain a hardware crypto card at some point, when I start bothering with VPN things. It runs OpenBSD very happily (instructions for installing OpenBSD on a flash card).

Indeed. I wouldn't expect it to be such a draw now, but it is just a concrete example of the attention to detail of the BSD teams.

I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system

For the most part, it's little things. A good example is network configuration. On OpenBSD, everything to do with configuring network interfaces is done through ifconfig. On Linux (and, sadly, FreeBSD) you have a separate utility to control WiFi settings. One Linux user recently told me that ifconfig was now deprecated in favour of something else (I can't remember what) on Linux systems, although the man page makes no mention of this.

I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.

If you're running in a VM, I would suggest OpenBSD. I find the userland cleaner, and the lack of 3D support isn't going to be an issue in a VM. The install process can be a bit daunting; it's not actually that hard, but it doesn't do much by way of hand-holding so make sure you have the manual open.

Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install?

Not really. The concept isn't so important in the BSD world. A BSD is an operating system; a kernel and a basic userland (including compiler tool chain). Once you have installed *BSD, you have what is known as the base system. This is everything that is maintained by the BSD team (including a few third party utilities that have patch branches maintained by the team). This might include X, but won't include something like GNOME.

Once you have the base system installed, you then add ports or packages. On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, a port is a framework for building a third party application (including dependency resolution and applying OS-specific patches), while a package is the binary version of a port. You can create a package by running 'make package' in the port's directory. On FreeBSD, ports are the usual way of installing applications, and binary packages sometimes lag behind the ports (you can use them interchangeably, since a package is just a precompiled port; the portupgrade utility has an option to try installing the package if it exists, or to build the port if it doesn't). On OpenBSD, the pre-built packages are much more heavily tested than the ports (although they are only released every six months with a release of the base system and so are often slightly out-of-date) and are the recommended way of installing software.

If you really want to do something a bit more manually, there is a tutorial on Ping Wales about installing OpenBSD without using the OpenBSD installer. It's focussed on using an existing system to create a bootable flash image, but you can probably adapt it to a real system. I wouldn't recommend actually doing this, but you might find it informative.

The BSD community has a reputation for being slightly newbie-hostile. For the most part, this comes from two things:

1. People posting newbie questions on development lists. There are lists for newbie questions, and if you post to the wrong list you might well get flamed.
2. People asking questions that are answered in the documentation. People put a lot of effort into writing BSD documentation - I wrote a small section of the FreeBSD Handbook - and it is very irritating to have people asking questions that you have already answered.

Linux is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. The trademark is used to describe the kernel whose development is lead by Linus Torvalds. Nothing else can accurately (or legally) be described as Linux.. See this article for more information.

Ping Wales is carrying Alan Cox's views on GPLv3 and DRM.

Ping Wales have an interview with Alan Cox on the subject. I know of two people who have tried submitting this, but it's been rejected both times.

A lot of people use the word Linux to refer to a lot of things that are not Linux. Sadly, this kind of thing is behaviour seems to be common on even on a supposedly technically competent site like Slashdot.

See here. Apple are, and always have been a consumer electronics company - it's just that some of their consumer electronics devices look like general purpose computers.

The cheapest and simplest way of doing this is using an old line printer - that way you get a paper log, which can only be tampered with by someone with physical access.

I wrote some hints for people securing an OpenBSD install - if the default install isn't paranoid enough for you already...

Many things.

I wrote an article about my set-up for Ping Wales

For anyone interested, there is a tutorial for setting up Sendmail for authenticated relaying here, including a sendmail configuration file that can be used. While it is targetted at OpenBSD, most of it can easily be translated to other *NIX flavours (file locations are about the only things that need changing). The next article in the series (spam filtering) is a bit more OpenBSD specific, since it uses OpenBSD's spamd tar pit, although this could probably be persuaded to work with NetBSD and FreeBSD, since they both have working pf ports.

Sure, there are problems with the G5, but FreeScale is about to release a dual-core, 64-bit CPU with clock speeds starting at around 2GHz, integrated memory controller and 3 integrated GigE controllers (and a few other things I've forgotten), with a power consumption in line with current G5s. Abandoning IBM (at least in the short term) makes sense, but abandoning PowerPC does not. More speculation here.

Before anyone points out the laptop hard drive, I have 512MB of RAM in the machine, and most of that is used as disk cache - the disk itself spends a lot of its time spun down.

In the press release, they lump sales from Mac Mini and iMac together. Since the last quarter, iMac + Mac Mini sales have increased by 2%. This seems to indicate that the Mac Mini is not responsible for Apple's profits to any great degree. See Ping Wales for more coverage.

Unless you're recording HDTV direct from the FireWire input (in which case you have enough disk space for around 2 hours of video) then the speed of the drive is not going to be an issue. Compressed video is relatively low bandwidth - DVDs are roughly 1.5MB/s, which is well within the sustained transfer rate of a 4200RPM drive. If you plug in an external FireWire MPEG-2/4 encoder then it will store quite a lot of video - and don't forget that a 4200 RPM drive is very quiet. There's an article on PingWales discussing the use of this as a living room box.

If you've been stuck on the ISS or asleep for a few days, you can get a decent summary of all the announcements made at the Apple Keynote here

You can read a good summary of all the announcements made at the Apple Keynote here