University network administrators accept limited public funds to provide a particular subset of functionality to meet particular goals of the university. They have a great many technical and legal constraints (both internal and external) on their solutions. Many of these constraints are legitimately addressed by privacy intrusive policies.
When publicly available dial up and broadband access is cheap and universal, why should a taxpayer funded institution have any obligation to incur extra expense to achieve "freedom"? Why not let the individuals who value freedom buy and use the services that meet their goals, and let the taxpayer funded institutions buy the services that meet the goals of the funding (taxpayer / university) community?
As I look at the history of communist nations, they seem to eliminate the economic gaps between rich and poor by making everyone poor. An elegant, but hardly optimal solution.
Plus, they seem only marginally effective at elimnating the gap... in most cases they just move it from an industrial elite to a government elite.
With the current shambolic state of education in many places and the huge lack of opportunities for many people, every little bit we can do helps. Otherwise we'll end up losing out to countries which have social programs to try and help the poor, rather than ignoring them as an inevitable consequence of a small part of the population having vast resources
This (and the main slashdot story) seems to assume that the main obstacle to deliverance from low income is simply access to a computer. This is silly, perfectly adequate computers for becoming extremely employable can be already had for just about free (think 486-66 with 16MB ram, 500MB drive, and 14" tube) here in the U.S. Notice we still have poor people.
It has not been my experience that this is the obstacle. Rather, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, chronic bad decision making, illness, immaturity, family of origins, and the like set up high obstacles to overcome. Some people don't, won't, or can't put in the time, blood, sweat and tears to overcome the issues they face.
Design a government program to solve these problems and you will overcome poverty. I suspect the solution to this problem is slightly harder then finding the highest prime number, and slightly easier then the grand unification theory. Not to say we should not try, but don't hold your breath and don't expect a simple solution. And good luck.
In the meantime, the most effective change agent I have seen (other then a person deciding for themselves to do what they have to do come hell or high water) is in the context of committed and genuine relationship between individuals, not by large government programs. I don't contribute to charities that have more then 15% overhead... I wish I could direct the fortune I am paying in taxes that are supposed "help people" to channels that have a less abysmal success rate and a more reasonable overhead.
Another data point... I agree. I have pounded on every Red Hat release since 4.2, and it was my experience that 7.0 was the best yet. My only problem was with the PCMCIA installer boot disk and a PCMCIA cdrom, but a network install is probably a better approach for me anyway.
OH! That just made me think... you still listening Bero? How about a SSH (scp) network install option? Easier to set up and get running (on the machine serving up the files) then FTP, HTTP, NFS, or rlogin... Probably thinner and easier on the client as well.
Anyway, 7.0 was better then 6.2 (which I was very dissapointed in) in every regard.
Of course you won't see this on the slashdot front page, as just about everyone with editorial control has some kind of irrational fear of republicians in general and Bush in particular.
I think it all comes down to whether Republicans want to be more friendly to the big business of entertainment or the big business of consumer electronics. Which group gave more money to the party?
I work for money. I choose to use some of that money to contribute to organizations that share my goals and philosophies, and expect them to lobby on my behalf. I don't begrudge companies that do the same, so long as they are not a monopoly (in the legal sense, in which case they have some pretty tight limits on what they are allowed to do).
Isn't this the exact same sort of thing that Apple tried to use to crush microsoft back in the days when they were actually a competitor? I believe they tried to claim that a GUI was their IP. At the time, it more or less was as far as commercial systems went, and windows 1.0 (anyone else besides me have to support that monstrosity?) was more or less an attempt to bring a mac style interface to windows hardware, that much was clear.
Apple lost the suit, but there is one remaining artifact from the whole legal battle... look on your windows desktop and notice that you have no "trash can". It's a recycle bin instead. I recall the presence or absence of a trash can being a big deal during the trial.
I know you meant this to be a joke... but there are some great tools and they are quite usefull.
First, get the cygnus (now owned by RedHat) toolkit . This gives you a great many unix type commands (tar, ls, cp, dd, less, cat, pwd, ftp, cut, sort, etc), and a real bash shell, and a decent terminal window. Just having the bash autocompletion and command line history is worth the price of download, not to mention your directory slashes now go the right way:)
Next, get yourself the activestate perl port for windows. This gives you perl, which combined with the cygnus toolset makes easy and highly portable scripts very easy to throw together.
Next, get the putty secure shell tools . This gives you pscp (like rcp, but better in every regard) and a pssh (a secure telnet replacement). These will both connect right up with a RedHat 7 system running the openSSH stuff right out of the box.
Finally, just for good measure, throw on Apache so you can serve up files in a pinch. This is handy in case you need to move files around with a system that lacks secure shell for whatever reason. Just throw together a quickie page and use browsers to do all the transfers.
I keep all these tools on a single burned CD (with room to spare). They are the first things I put on any system I use. With this toolset, windows goes from a useless development platform to a slightly annoying development platform, which is better then nothing when your clients require windows on your desktop box.
Hmmm... has anyone tried putting the genuine suspend partition in a place where the bios will find it first?
If the bios uses short circuit evaluation of their internal search loop, then maybe it will find this one first, see it in the expected state, and either restore it or boot normally as necessary without getting confused by the later overly large FreeBSD partitions with the same ID. The Bios is bound to searche either first to last, or last to first. Heck, put two suspend partition in, one first, one last, and tuck the freeBSD partition in between. Worth a try anyway.
I know nothing about FreeBSD, but I suspect it is like linux systems in that while it would think the suspend partition is a FreeBSD partition, it will only mount it or mess with it if you tell it to (manually or by/etc/fstab), so there should be no problem. The bios does all the suspend to disk stuff, so as long as they always discover the correct partition in the right order and always use short circuit evaluation, then it may work.
Just a thought. If IBM wants to send me a brand new Thinkpad, I will be most happy to try it out:). My Sharp Actius laptop uses partition type a0 for hibernation, and the Linux fdisk tool calls it a "IBM Thinkpad hibernation" partition.
Perl and Linux have a pretty good synergy... Perl makes a fantastic little scripting language for Linux use. It gives you some fantastic opportunities to show off the real muscle of *nix based systems (like "find", "dd", "cut", "tar", and many others). Further, you could probably even get a "never ever" to be writing simple programs in only an hour or so of teaching. Having taught Perl on both Linux and Windows, I can think of no better way to demonstrate the strengths of Linux.
If you get into some depth, you could then teach some simple Perl based CGI. You have to struggle through references, objects, and regular expressions to do it right, but students will totally "light up" when they see a dynamic page they wrote come to life on a web server, and Linux is a great platform for a Perl CGI dynamic setup.
Feel free to use notes that I prepared for a similiar class for both Perl, and Perl CGI. There are a few typos in them that I need to clean up over the holiday break, but they are 99% fine.
The Perl notes links are about ten lines down the page. They are GPL'd. I made a point of following the "Learning Perl" (O'Rielly book) order of topic presentation, so that students that want a deeper resource can follow a parallel presentation of topics.
Freesco is by far easiest and most flexible out of the box router I could find... it supports just about every type of bridge you may need (ethernet dialup, ethernet ethernet, dial in server). It has a built in DHCP server, print server, dns server, web server, and web based control panel. Further, it all fits on a floppy.
I can set one of these things up on site in less then half an hour. I threw a couple of web based security audit tools at it, including running a version of Saint against it, and it scored as near to perfect as possible in every case (I left a trivial web server running and open to the outside so it could not get a perfect score).
The only drawback is the fact that they insist on trying to keep everything on a floppy, so they miss a couple of nice tools that would help me. This is a bad idea (IMHO), as I have stacks of 100 - 500 MB hard drives (that no one can use) laying around, but extra floppy drives are harder to come by (as people still use them in current systems). 100 MB hard drives are arguably cheaper (i.e. free) then 1.44M floppy drives ($19 or so)!
Anyway, I have two subnets behind my firewall, one traditional 10/t ethernet, and one wireless ethernet (based around webgear aviator 2.4 Ghz PCMCIA cards with ISA adapters if necessary).
Because they want it on a floppy, there is no room for the PCMCIA support, which means I have to have my other server do a little more complicated routing, and DHCP serving (a non-routable protocol) gets messy. It would be easier if all my subnets were anchored directly into the firewall... but I digress.
Anyway, if you want a very secure and easy to set up firewall, then take a good look at freesco. Run a setup script and answer 20 or so questions (all with reasonable defaults) and you have a great little full featured server on your old 486 (with 16 MB ram). The documentation is very good as well.
Personally, I think a dedicated firewall product like this is much more secure then trying to lock down a full distribution and using that... there are just fewer doors and windows for people to poke at and pry open, and much fewer tools to exploit if they do get in... not to mention that the entire OS partition gets mounted read only...
I realize you are kidding... but I program in both Perl and C++ and both can get as bad as you want them to be.
For example, a Perl regular expression for matching can be plenty painfull to read... but it replaces 3 pages of nested and snarled looping in C++. Hardly an easy read either, and lots more opportunity for defect. You can use the regular expressions in C++, but they might not work (at least not the ones I tried) and will be even uglier...
Also, while Perl is weakly typed and does not declare types (or even necessarily variables), you still can know the difference when you need to. Consider the two examples below.
# Perl Compare
if ( $foo == $bar )
# C++ Compare
if ( foo == bar )
What does the perl do? Compare the number in $foo to the number in $bar. If it were comparing strings, it would have used the "eq" operator instead of the "==" operator.
In C++, who knows what is being compared unless you can track down the class declaration for foo and bar. Further, this class definition probably inherited from about 3 other levels of classes, each of which must be checked to see who (if anyone) overloaded the "==" operator. The base class probably used a template, which you have to find. Then, if you can even find the headers for all the clases and the template, you get to parse the actual overload for the "==" operator to see what on earth it is doing.
Granted, the C++ example has considerably more complexity... but either language can be completely and equally illegible.
The more I use C++, the more I like Java, but that's a different topic...
This is a very nice little quiz to see what candidates agree with you. Make sure you read the clarifying text with each question (each question has a little link)... your answers will probably change when you see how they interpret what you select.
I took it and liked it... No suprise to find out I am the complete and total anti-Nader...
I tend to agree that their laptops are not the fastest things in the world, but the agony I get from carrying around a Compaq brick makes me long for a light machine, not a fast one. SuSE doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether it can surf the net at 300MHz or 700MHz!
Amen to that! I currently use a Sharp Actius A150 (same form factor as the litle Viao's) with 64 MB of Ram and a pentium 266. No built in CDRom or floppy.
Size matters, at least for a laptop, and I would much rather have my existing small form factor then double the performance. Red Hat 7.0 does not care either, and running Gnome, sawfish, a couple of netscape windows, an MP3 player, and 5 or so emacs windows feels just as fast as my sun workstation.
As for battery life, I get an hour from my old mostly fried internal NiMh... which has never been a problem for me. It's just not that hard to find a plug when I need the laptop. Places without plugs lend themselves more to the use of my palm pilot.
This (to meander back on topic) is where the curusoe can really shine... "good enough" performance at a great price and outstanding form factor.
Picture a Sony Viao form factor laptop with a decent 13" diagonal 800x600 LCD, a [Celeron 300 | K6-2 450] level CPU, built in 10/t ethernet, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 USB port, 64 MB of ram, and a 10 gig hard drive.
Heck, you could even drop the battery and charging stuff (but keep the suspend features) to make it smaller and cheaper... outlets are pretty easy to find.
Now picture it at your local Best Buy for $650. Maybe with a $10 per month for 1 year optional payment plan.
It would be unremarkable in every catagory, but INCREDIBLY usefull. They would fly off the shelves... kind of the VW Beetle (the old one, not the new one) of computers...
This has undoubtedly been covered before, but there should be some moderation applied to the slashdot story posters.
For example, many of Taco's posts about the upcoming presidential election, particularly ones where he goes out of his way to stereotype and vilify Bush, would have been moderated away as trolls, offtopic, or flamebait had they been subject to the same moderation that any other slashdotter faces.
The Nader supporters should be even more offended by the slashdot biases... how many Nader headlines do you think we would see if Nader threatened Bush's base as opposed to Gore's base? Probably three or four a day...
It is slashdots site, and they can and should do what they want, but it should never claim to be balanced (which it cannot be) or terribly accurate (which it has never been).
It's main claim should be that it is interesting and entertaining (which it often is).
It would be nice if some of the editors who seem filled with such irrational hate for Bush would take a deep breath and be less driven by emotions though... and stop for a second and think "maybe my motives for this article are not very pure, perhaps I should allow other more subjective individuals to judge if it should be published".
Censorship (or to put it another way, limiting use of taxpayer funded internet terminals in public areas) is another laughably unbalanced topic... There is a valid argument on either side if the issue, but you would never know it from the sensationalistic reactionary headlines.
But again, it's their site and they can do what they want, and I can vote with my feet whenever I want.
That is a good point, but I don't believe the filtering is applied mainly for funding reasons. I am sure the publisher of penthouse would be more then happy to give free copies to every library in the US.
I suspect the "mechanical filtering" is applied, especially regarding minors, to keep firestorms such as this one from interfering with the more important mission of libraries. They also likely do it to avoid breaking local, state, and federal laws regarding minors.
I was not trying to make a statement that is either for or against filtering (though I do have opinions on the matter that inevitibly creep out in my posts).
I just wanted to point out that there are really several different questions being asked when considering filtering, with different answers, and that most of the questions are not new, and that many (but not all) of the questions have already been answered (though right or wrong is still up for debate).
You add another good question that I had not included... is filtering cost prohibitive?
Amazing how you can divine how well read I am by my above post.
Anyway, my point was that mechanical filtering already exists and has already been implemented. Your counter examples only demonstrate that the filtering is lightly applied, not that it does not exist.
It is also curious how you can speak for "any who hold liberty dear". Perhaps there are one or two of us who believe that government involvement at any level inheritly erodes liberty, and should only be applied as a necessary evil when no other alternatives exist.
In fact these very people, devoted to liberty, may go so far as to form their own political party on that platform. Hmmm... a party devoted to liberty based on a minimally empowered government... wonder what they would call themselves... How about liberocrats... or libercians... or...
Libertarians... that one's kinda catchy:)
Bill "who reads calvin and hobbes every day thank you very much" Kilgallon
While it is fun for slashdotters to get all up in arms about hot button issues... lets keep a few things clear.
1) Both candidates support filtering. When Bush mentioned it, he explicitly stated that it was only appropriate for PUBLICLY FUNDED institutions. He went on to state his support for the first ammendment EXPLICITLY. Gore suggested much more expensive and invasive requirements to be levied on ALL ISP's, and was more interested in showing how much "smarter" he was then bush to bother bringing up the first ammendment.
2) Content filtering is not a new problem. Go down to your public library and ask for the latest copy of Penthouse. See what happens. There is already all sorts of mechanical filtering for the mechanical media in place, the question has been asked and answered. The question is how to implement the electronic filtering for the electronic media.
3) There are two seperate issues...
a) Should we filter at all?
b) Is current filtering software effective?
These are two seperate problem domains with two seperate soultion spaces.
4) The first ammendment protects "free as in speech" speech, not "free as in beer" speech. That is, you are free to say what you want, and seek what you want, but the government is not obligated to fund you for either.
5) The question "should parents have legislative supports to help them control the actions of their minor children" is also a different question. Saying minors should not be allowed unfiltered access without supervision is no different then saying minors can't buy ciggarettes and beer without parental supervision. Again, this is a question US society has asked and answered.
6) Free speech advocates are free to use their own money and their own resources to set up their own information kiosks (not unlike the Christian Science Reading Rooms, but with different content and motivations) and let people have all the free, non-filtered and unrestricted access they want. In this case, for non-minors, the second ammendment DOES protect them, as it is clearly a form of free speech.
7) Just becuase current filtering approaches suck, does not mean that all future filtering approaches will suck.
Hopefully that helps clarify the debate a little... we aren't helping anyone on either side with confusion.
Just as another datapoint, I have been running the webgear aviator 2.4 cards under linux for a year now, and they work like a champ.
I got both PCMCIA cards, complete with 2 ISA adapters, for $150 or so from buy.com.
Not the fastet throughput (around 75k bytes (not bits!) per second), but more then adequate for most applications... it is still 10 to 20 times faster then your cable modem / dsl connection.
On what are you basing your claim that Bush has no idea what peer to peer file sharing is? I watched the debates... both people sounded like politicians, neither sounded stupid.
Gore touts technology as some miracle savior... I loved the part about the fact that the oil crises is not a crises because technology will "magically" create cars that get 140 MPG.
Classic pointy haired boss stuff... You and Bill may not be held accountable to the laws of the state, but the laws of physics take more then a good spin machine to work around.
Can we create cars that get 140 mpg? Probably, but not soon enough that we can continue to ignore petroleum issues. When we make them they will be pretty darn expensive, and they are not going to have any of the features YOU want in a car right now (unless you like your Ford Festiva).
The Honda Insight hybrid is the perfect example. Cool? Yes. Innovative? Yup. Practical? Errr... I don't think so...
The insight is really just a updated CRX, which back in 89 was already pushing 50 MPG (the insight gets 70 MPG). The difference is that you could get the CRX for close to $10,000, and it would run with little maintenance for 200,000 miles easy. The insight costs $20,000, and will likely need an expensive battery replacement every 3 years or so.
Continue to push for new technology, but if you look at it as your sole savior you are going to be cold and hungry sitting there in the dark.
(IMHO:)
(note to the secret service... the killbill nick has nothing to do with anybody in politics, it is a combination of my first and last name and was given to me in 1984)
I have no illusions about the balance of slashdot editors political views, nor do I feel they should have any obligation to be whatever they want... I did find it humorous however that the same story managed to promote Gore and slam Bush... as if just promoting Gore was not good enough:)
Anyway, go back and listen to the first debate, where Gore made it clear that he thought the Constitution was a living document that must be constantly re-interpreted, and if current justice department activities are any indication, aggressivly re-interpreted. Gore went on to indicate that he would choose supreme court justices based on how he believed they would rule on a particular issue (in that case, abortion).
Bush indicated he would choose justices based on qualifications, and that he favors constructivist justices (justices that give the constitution as broad a power as possible).
Take a read of the constitution, and consider all our pet issues it protects... Then take another look at it through the eyes of somebody like Al Gore and do some lawerly "reinterpretation". Remember this is the guy that called the fund raiser at the Buddist temple a "community outreach" event.
He may be with you on this issue... but once the door is opened to manipulate the constitution, then the US is in REAL danger... what is your recourse if he, or his successor, or his sucessors sucessor, is on the other side?
The constitution may have been written by a bunch of dead rich white guys... but they were also a group that had been oppressed by a tyrannical government and were prepared to give life, limb, and fortune to overthrow it. They did not set up the new government lightly, and they were not fools.
Al Gore has been on just about every side of just about every major issue whenever it works to his advantage (gun control, censorship, abortion, etc)... remember this election is not just about issues, but is about individuals, and that the Al Gore you elect may not be the Al Gore that governs.... Bush, for better or worse, has at least been consistent on the issues and is honest about where he stands.
Taco can post his political rants, and I can post mine. I would also prefer this stays a "news for nerds site", but will respond in kind.
"Anyone who is young and conservative has no heart... Anyone who is old and liberal has no brain..." (Winston Churchil)
Errr... maybe they are discussed, but they are not "news", because they are so far from realizable technology?
If there was a currently workable solution in reach that could solve the fuel problems, you can bet every money grubbing international would be all over it like flies on... errr... anyway, they would be all over it.
So far, the best we have is the honda hybrid, which is a good idea, but hardly a breakthrough. It is not THAT much better then the '86 Honda CRX I used to own, and amounts to basically a $20,000 two seater economy car, which is pretty painfull. The battery technology continues to be expensive and problematic.
Continously variable transmissions and regenerative braking can help somewhat (probably 20% to 30% improvements), but it will take a technological breakthrough to get a real revolution, and that will likely come from esoteric science (or perhaps space or military programs), not the pop media.
So in other words, you won't hear about the solution in the media until the problem is more or less solved. And sorry to break it to you Mr. Gore, but the the laws of thermodynamics DO have a controlling legal authority, and are not up for repeal.
Counting on "new technology" as some sort of miracle savior for future problems is roughly akin to putting you head in the sand. Work towards them, hope for them, but dont plan that they will magically appear at the perfect instant...
(kinda on a rant today... gotta get rid of all that Karma somehow)...
Bill
I do this now. I have an older sharp Actius (looks like a sony VAIO, less than an inch thick) that sports 64MB of ram and a 266 mmx CPU. Street price for a device like this is probably around $800.
I added a set of wireless ethernet cards (webgear aviator 2.4Ghz) for another $150, and dropped the second card in my basement Red Hat 6.2 server (a 233 AMD system with 64MB ram and 20 gigs or so of hard drive).
Because both run X, I can export whatever graphical apps (including the whole display) across the wireless link whenever I want. It is (as you describe) very usefull.
Here's the rub. Even though my laptop is reasonably modest in capabilities (you could not buy a machine today with this small a CPU), it still runs for $800 used, and still only displays 800x600 pixels. OK for a laptop, but embarrassing for a desktop. For an XGA laptop, we are talking some serious money. Even assuming you could drop some non-essentials (floppy drive, hard drive, etc), you are still looking at $300 or more just for LCD screen, not to mention keyboard, glidepad, cpu, memory, etc.
That's why all these cheap internet appliances have a custom dedicated UI, to keep them cheap. Any kind of usable generalized access device for a desktop system is either going to be more expensive then your desktop (because of the more expensive portable components), or so inferior in capability as to be useless.
The displays are really the rub right now... it is pretty darn cheap to produce a big glass tube, and pretty darn expensive to produce a small LCD. Maybe once the lighte emitting polymers hit the real world this will change, but don't expect it inside of the next two years.
Slashdot Mirror
University network administrators accept limited public funds to provide a particular subset of functionality to meet particular goals of the university. They have a great many technical and legal constraints (both internal and external) on their solutions. Many of these constraints are legitimately addressed by privacy intrusive policies.
When publicly available dial up and broadband access is cheap and universal, why should a taxpayer funded institution have any obligation to incur extra expense to achieve "freedom"? Why not let the individuals who value freedom buy and use the services that meet their goals, and let the taxpayer funded institutions buy the services that meet the goals of the funding (taxpayer / university) community?
As I look at the history of communist nations, they seem to eliminate the economic gaps between rich and poor by making everyone poor. An elegant, but hardly optimal solution.
Plus, they seem only marginally effective at elimnating the gap... in most cases they just move it from an industrial elite to a government elite.
Bill
With the current shambolic state of education in many places and the huge lack of opportunities for many people, every little bit we can do helps. Otherwise we'll end up losing out to countries which have social programs to try and help the poor, rather than ignoring them as an inevitable consequence of a small part of the population having vast resources
;)
This (and the main slashdot story) seems to assume that the main obstacle to deliverance from low income is simply access to a computer. This is silly, perfectly adequate computers for becoming extremely employable can be already had for just about free (think 486-66 with 16MB ram, 500MB drive, and 14" tube) here in the U.S. Notice we still have poor people.
It has not been my experience that this is the obstacle. Rather, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, chronic bad decision making, illness, immaturity, family of origins, and the like set up high obstacles to overcome. Some people don't, won't, or can't put in the time, blood, sweat and tears to overcome the issues they face.
Design a government program to solve these problems and you will overcome poverty. I suspect the solution to this problem is slightly harder then finding the highest prime number, and slightly easier then the grand unification theory. Not to say we should not try, but don't hold your breath and don't expect a simple solution. And good luck.
In the meantime, the most effective change agent I have seen (other then a person deciding for themselves to do what they have to do come hell or high water) is in the context of committed and genuine relationship between individuals, not by large government programs. I don't contribute to charities that have more then 15% overhead... I wish I could direct the fortune I am paying in taxes that are supposed "help people" to channels that have a less abysmal success rate and a more reasonable overhead.
IMHO of course
Bill
Another data point... I agree. I have pounded on every Red Hat release since 4.2, and it was my experience that 7.0 was the best yet. My only problem was with the PCMCIA installer boot disk and a PCMCIA cdrom, but a network install is probably a better approach for me anyway.
OH! That just made me think... you still listening Bero? How about a SSH (scp) network install option? Easier to set up and get running (on the machine serving up the files) then FTP, HTTP, NFS, or rlogin... Probably thinner and easier on the client as well.
Anyway, 7.0 was better then 6.2 (which I was very dissapointed in) in every regard.
Bill
His nominee as replacement for Janet Reno was one of the few people fighting FOR the rights of individuals to be able to encrypt data without being forced to turn over keys to government agencies.
Of course you won't see this on the slashdot front page, as just about everyone with editorial control has some kind of irrational fear of republicians in general and Bush in particular.
I think it all comes down to whether Republicans want to be more friendly to the big business of entertainment or the big business of consumer electronics. Which group gave more money to the party?
I work for money. I choose to use some of that money to contribute to organizations that share my goals and philosophies, and expect them to lobby on my behalf. I don't begrudge companies that do the same, so long as they are not a monopoly (in the legal sense, in which case they have some pretty tight limits on what they are allowed to do).
IMHO... Bill
Isn't this the exact same sort of thing that Apple tried to use to crush microsoft back in the days when they were actually a competitor? I believe they tried to claim that a GUI was their IP. At the time, it more or less was as far as commercial systems went, and windows 1.0 (anyone else besides me have to support that monstrosity?) was more or less an attempt to bring a mac style interface to windows hardware, that much was clear.
Apple lost the suit, but there is one remaining artifact from the whole legal battle... look on your windows desktop and notice that you have no "trash can". It's a recycle bin instead. I recall the presence or absence of a trash can being a big deal during the trial.
Bill
First, get the cygnus (now owned by RedHat) toolkit . This gives you a great many unix type commands (tar, ls, cp, dd, less, cat, pwd, ftp, cut, sort, etc), and a real bash shell, and a decent terminal window. Just having the bash autocompletion and command line history is worth the price of download, not to mention your directory slashes now go the right way
Next, get yourself the activestate perl port for windows. This gives you perl, which combined with the cygnus toolset makes easy and highly portable scripts very easy to throw together.
Next, get the putty secure shell tools . This gives you pscp (like rcp, but better in every regard) and a pssh (a secure telnet replacement). These will both connect right up with a RedHat 7 system running the openSSH stuff right out of the box.
Of course, get the latest version of emacs for windows.
Finally, just for good measure, throw on Apache so you can serve up files in a pinch. This is handy in case you need to move files around with a system that lacks secure shell for whatever reason. Just throw together a quickie page and use browsers to do all the transfers.
I keep all these tools on a single burned CD (with room to spare). They are the first things I put on any system I use. With this toolset, windows goes from a useless development platform to a slightly annoying development platform, which is better then nothing when your clients require windows on your desktop box.
Hmmm... has anyone tried putting the genuine suspend partition in a place where the bios will find it first?
/etc/fstab), so there should be no problem. The bios does all the suspend to disk stuff, so as long as they always discover the correct partition in the right order and always use short circuit evaluation, then it may work.
:). My Sharp Actius laptop uses partition type a0 for hibernation, and the Linux fdisk tool calls it a "IBM Thinkpad hibernation" partition.
If the bios uses short circuit evaluation of their internal search loop, then maybe it will find this one first, see it in the expected state, and either restore it or boot normally as necessary without getting confused by the later overly large FreeBSD partitions with the same ID. The Bios is bound to searche either first to last, or last to first. Heck, put two suspend partition in, one first, one last, and tuck the freeBSD partition in between. Worth a try anyway.
I know nothing about FreeBSD, but I suspect it is like linux systems in that while it would think the suspend partition is a FreeBSD partition, it will only mount it or mess with it if you tell it to (manually or by
Just a thought. If IBM wants to send me a brand new Thinkpad, I will be most happy to try it out
Bill
Perl and Linux have a pretty good synergy... Perl makes a fantastic little scripting language for Linux use. It gives you some fantastic opportunities to show off the real muscle of *nix based systems (like "find", "dd", "cut", "tar", and many others). Further, you could probably even get a "never ever" to be writing simple programs in only an hour or so of teaching. Having taught Perl on both Linux and Windows, I can think of no better way to demonstrate the strengths of Linux.
If you get into some depth, you could then teach some simple Perl based CGI. You have to struggle through references, objects, and regular expressions to do it right, but students will totally "light up" when they see a dynamic page they wrote come to life on a web server, and Linux is a great platform for a Perl CGI dynamic setup.
Feel free to use notes that I prepared for a similiar class for both Perl, and Perl CGI. There are a few typos in them that I need to clean up over the holiday break, but they are 99% fine.
The Perl notes links are about ten lines down the page. They are GPL'd. I made a point of following the "Learning Perl" (O'Rielly book) order of topic presentation, so that students that want a deeper resource can follow a parallel presentation of topics.
Bill
I second the motion.
Freesco is by far easiest and most flexible out of the box router I could find... it supports just about every type of bridge you may need (ethernet dialup, ethernet ethernet, dial in server). It has a built in DHCP server, print server, dns server, web server, and web based control panel. Further, it all fits on a floppy.
I can set one of these things up on site in less then half an hour. I threw a couple of web based security audit tools at it, including running a version of Saint against it, and it scored as near to perfect as possible in every case (I left a trivial web server running and open to the outside so it could not get a perfect score).
The only drawback is the fact that they insist on trying to keep everything on a floppy, so they miss a couple of nice tools that would help me. This is a bad idea (IMHO), as I have stacks of 100 - 500 MB hard drives (that no one can use) laying around, but extra floppy drives are harder to come by (as people still use them in current systems). 100 MB hard drives are arguably cheaper (i.e. free) then 1.44M floppy drives ($19 or so)!
Anyway, I have two subnets behind my firewall, one traditional 10/t ethernet, and one wireless ethernet (based around webgear aviator 2.4 Ghz PCMCIA cards with ISA adapters if necessary).
Because they want it on a floppy, there is no room for the PCMCIA support, which means I have to have my other server do a little more complicated routing, and DHCP serving (a non-routable protocol) gets messy. It would be easier if all my subnets were anchored directly into the firewall... but I digress.
Anyway, if you want a very secure and easy to set up firewall, then take a good look at freesco. Run a setup script and answer 20 or so questions (all with reasonable defaults) and you have a great little full featured server on your old 486 (with 16 MB ram). The documentation is very good as well.
Personally, I think a dedicated firewall product like this is much more secure then trying to lock down a full distribution and using that... there are just fewer doors and windows for people to poke at and pry open, and much fewer tools to exploit if they do get in... not to mention that the entire OS partition gets mounted read only...
Bill
For example, a Perl regular expression for matching can be plenty painfull to read... but it replaces 3 pages of nested and snarled looping in C++. Hardly an easy read either, and lots more opportunity for defect. You can use the regular expressions in C++, but they might not work (at least not the ones I tried) and will be even uglier...
Also, while Perl is weakly typed and does not declare types (or even necessarily variables), you still can know the difference when you need to. Consider the two examples below.
What does the perl do? Compare the number in $foo to the number in $bar. If it were comparing strings, it would have used the "eq" operator instead of the "==" operator.
In C++, who knows what is being compared unless you can track down the class declaration for foo and bar. Further, this class definition probably inherited from about 3 other levels of classes, each of which must be checked to see who (if anyone) overloaded the "==" operator. The base class probably used a template, which you have to find. Then, if you can even find the headers for all the clases and the template, you get to parse the actual overload for the "==" operator to see what on earth it is doing.
Granted, the C++ example has considerably more complexity... but either language can be completely and equally illegible.
The more I use C++, the more I like Java, but that's a different topic...
Bill
Try http://www.speakout.com/votematch/index2.asp . This is one of the redirects from the site referenced above.
This is a very nice little quiz to see what candidates agree with you. Make sure you read the clarifying text with each question (each question has a little link)... your answers will probably change when you see how they interpret what you select.
I took it and liked it... No suprise to find out I am the complete and total anti-Nader...
Bill
As a side note... there is an emulator for several of these that will run on a Palm Pilot (zork and hitchhikers at least).
It has been a couple of years since I tried it, but it worked fine then. Should be easy to track down on www.pilotgear.com or similiar site.
Basically, you get the emulator, and just move the data onto the palm is a slightly modified format.
Bill
I tend to agree that their laptops are not the fastest things in the world, but the agony I get from carrying around a Compaq brick makes me long for a light machine, not a fast one. SuSE doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether it can surf the net at 300MHz or 700MHz!
Amen to that! I currently use a Sharp Actius A150 (same form factor as the litle Viao's) with 64 MB of Ram and a pentium 266. No built in CDRom or floppy.
Size matters, at least for a laptop, and I would much rather have my existing small form factor then double the performance. Red Hat 7.0 does not care either, and running Gnome, sawfish, a couple of netscape windows, an MP3 player, and 5 or so emacs windows feels just as fast as my sun workstation.
As for battery life, I get an hour from my old mostly fried internal NiMh... which has never been a problem for me. It's just not that hard to find a plug when I need the laptop. Places without plugs lend themselves more to the use of my palm pilot.
This (to meander back on topic) is where the curusoe can really shine... "good enough" performance at a great price and outstanding form factor.
Picture a Sony Viao form factor laptop with a decent 13" diagonal 800x600 LCD, a [Celeron 300 | K6-2 450] level CPU, built in 10/t ethernet, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 USB port, 64 MB of ram, and a 10 gig hard drive.
Heck, you could even drop the battery and charging stuff (but keep the suspend features) to make it smaller and cheaper... outlets are pretty easy to find.
Now picture it at your local Best Buy for $650. Maybe with a $10 per month for 1 year optional payment plan.
It would be unremarkable in every catagory, but INCREDIBLY usefull. They would fly off the shelves... kind of the VW Beetle (the old one, not the new one) of computers...
Bill
This has undoubtedly been covered before, but there should be some moderation applied to the slashdot story posters.
:)
For example, many of Taco's posts about the upcoming presidential election, particularly ones where he goes out of his way to stereotype and vilify Bush, would have been moderated away as trolls, offtopic, or flamebait had they been subject to the same moderation that any other slashdotter faces.
The Nader supporters should be even more offended by the slashdot biases... how many Nader headlines do you think we would see if Nader threatened Bush's base as opposed to Gore's base? Probably three or four a day...
It is slashdots site, and they can and should do what they want, but it should never claim to be balanced (which it cannot be) or terribly accurate (which it has never been).
It's main claim should be that it is interesting and entertaining (which it often is).
It would be nice if some of the editors who seem filled with such irrational hate for Bush would take a deep breath and be less driven by emotions though... and stop for a second and think "maybe my motives for this article are not very pure, perhaps I should allow other more subjective individuals to judge if it should be published".
Censorship (or to put it another way, limiting use of taxpayer funded internet terminals in public areas) is another laughably unbalanced topic... There is a valid argument on either side if the issue, but you would never know it from the sensationalistic reactionary headlines.
But again, it's their site and they can do what they want, and I can vote with my feet whenever I want.
But you did ask, so there's my opinion
Bill (slashdot old timer)...
That is a good point, but I don't believe the filtering is applied mainly for funding reasons. I am sure the publisher of penthouse would be more then happy to give free copies to every library in the US.
I suspect the "mechanical filtering" is applied, especially regarding minors, to keep firestorms such as this one from interfering with the more important mission of libraries. They also likely do it to avoid breaking local, state, and federal laws regarding minors.
I was not trying to make a statement that is either for or against filtering (though I do have opinions on the matter that inevitibly creep out in my posts).
I just wanted to point out that there are really several different questions being asked when considering filtering, with different answers, and that most of the questions are not new, and that many (but not all) of the questions have already been answered (though right or wrong is still up for debate).
You add another good question that I had not included... is filtering cost prohibitive?
Bill
Amazing how you can divine how well read I am by my above post.
:)
Anyway, my point was that mechanical filtering already exists and has already been implemented. Your counter examples only demonstrate that the filtering is lightly applied, not that it does not exist.
It is also curious how you can speak for "any who hold liberty dear". Perhaps there are one or two of us who believe that government involvement at any level inheritly erodes liberty, and should only be applied as a necessary evil when no other alternatives exist.
In fact these very people, devoted to liberty, may go so far as to form their own political party on that platform. Hmmm... a party devoted to liberty based on a minimally empowered government... wonder what they would call themselves... How about liberocrats... or libercians... or...
Libertarians... that one's kinda catchy
Bill "who reads calvin and hobbes every day thank you very much" Kilgallon
While it is fun for slashdotters to get all up in arms about hot button issues... lets keep a few things clear.
1) Both candidates support filtering. When Bush mentioned it, he explicitly stated that it was only appropriate for PUBLICLY FUNDED institutions. He went on to state his support for the first ammendment EXPLICITLY. Gore suggested much more expensive and invasive requirements to be levied on ALL ISP's, and was more interested in showing how much "smarter" he was then bush to bother bringing up the first ammendment.
2) Content filtering is not a new problem. Go down to your public library and ask for the latest copy of Penthouse. See what happens. There is already all sorts of mechanical filtering for the mechanical media in place, the question has been asked and answered. The question is how to implement the electronic filtering for the electronic media.
3) There are two seperate issues...
a) Should we filter at all?
b) Is current filtering software effective?
These are two seperate problem domains with two seperate soultion spaces.
4) The first ammendment protects "free as in speech" speech, not "free as in beer" speech. That is, you are free to say what you want, and seek what you want, but the government is not obligated to fund you for either.
5) The question "should parents have legislative supports to help them control the actions of their minor children" is also a different question. Saying minors should not be allowed unfiltered access without supervision is no different then saying minors can't buy ciggarettes and beer without parental supervision. Again, this is a question US society has asked and answered.
6) Free speech advocates are free to use their own money and their own resources to set up their own information kiosks (not unlike the Christian Science Reading Rooms, but with different content and motivations) and let people have all the free, non-filtered and unrestricted access they want. In this case, for non-minors, the second ammendment DOES protect them, as it is clearly a form of free speech.
7) Just becuase current filtering approaches suck, does not mean that all future filtering approaches will suck.
Hopefully that helps clarify the debate a little... we aren't helping anyone on either side with confusion.
Bill
Just as another datapoint, I have been running the webgear aviator 2.4 cards under linux for a year now, and they work like a champ.
I got both PCMCIA cards, complete with 2 ISA adapters, for $150 or so from buy.com.
Not the fastet throughput (around 75k bytes (not bits!) per second), but more then adequate for most applications... it is still 10 to 20 times faster then your cable modem / dsl connection.
Bill
On what are you basing your claim that Bush has no idea what peer to peer file sharing is? I watched the debates... both people sounded like politicians, neither sounded stupid.
:)
Gore touts technology as some miracle savior... I loved the part about the fact that the oil crises is not a crises because technology will "magically" create cars that get 140 MPG.
Classic pointy haired boss stuff... You and Bill may not be held accountable to the laws of the state, but the laws of physics take more then a good spin machine to work around.
Can we create cars that get 140 mpg? Probably, but not soon enough that we can continue to ignore petroleum issues. When we make them they will be pretty darn expensive, and they are not going to have any of the features YOU want in a car right now (unless you like your Ford Festiva).
The Honda Insight hybrid is the perfect example. Cool? Yes. Innovative? Yup. Practical? Errr... I don't think so...
The insight is really just a updated CRX, which back in 89 was already pushing 50 MPG (the insight gets 70 MPG). The difference is that you could get the CRX for close to $10,000, and it would run with little maintenance for 200,000 miles easy. The insight costs $20,000, and will likely need an expensive battery replacement every 3 years or so.
Continue to push for new technology, but if you look at it as your sole savior you are going to be cold and hungry sitting there in the dark.
(IMHO
(note to the secret service... the killbill nick has nothing to do with anybody in politics, it is a combination of my first and last name and was given to me in 1984)
Bill
I have no illusions about the balance of slashdot editors political views, nor do I feel they should have any obligation to be whatever they want... I did find it humorous however that the same story managed to promote Gore and slam Bush... as if just promoting Gore was not good enough :)
Anyway, go back and listen to the first debate, where Gore made it clear that he thought the Constitution was a living document that must be constantly re-interpreted, and if current justice department activities are any indication, aggressivly re-interpreted. Gore went on to indicate that he would choose supreme court justices based on how he believed they would rule on a particular issue (in that case, abortion).
Bush indicated he would choose justices based on qualifications, and that he favors constructivist justices (justices that give the constitution as broad a power as possible).
Take a read of the constitution, and consider all our pet issues it protects... Then take another look at it through the eyes of somebody like Al Gore and do some lawerly "reinterpretation". Remember this is the guy that called the fund raiser at the Buddist temple a "community outreach" event.
He may be with you on this issue... but once the door is opened to manipulate the constitution, then the US is in REAL danger... what is your recourse if he, or his successor, or his sucessors sucessor, is on the other side?
The constitution may have been written by a bunch of dead rich white guys... but they were also a group that had been oppressed by a tyrannical government and were prepared to give life, limb, and fortune to overthrow it. They did not set up the new government lightly, and they were not fools.
Al Gore has been on just about every side of just about every major issue whenever it works to his advantage (gun control, censorship, abortion, etc)... remember this election is not just about issues, but is about individuals, and that the Al Gore you elect may not be the Al Gore that governs.... Bush, for better or worse, has at least been consistent on the issues and is honest about where he stands.
Taco can post his political rants, and I can post mine. I would also prefer this stays a "news for nerds site", but will respond in kind.
"Anyone who is young and conservative has no heart... Anyone who is old and liberal has no brain..." (Winston Churchil)
Bill
You are thinking of depth of field, which expresses the range in distance where correct focus is maintained.
This is different then maximum resolution, though of course if your eye can't focus, then your maximum resolution will be severly limited.
Errr... maybe they are discussed, but they are not "news", because they are so far from realizable technology?
If there was a currently workable solution in reach that could solve the fuel problems, you can bet every money grubbing international would be all over it like flies on... errr... anyway, they would be all over it.
So far, the best we have is the honda hybrid, which is a good idea, but hardly a breakthrough. It is not THAT much better then the '86 Honda CRX I used to own, and amounts to basically a $20,000 two seater economy car, which is pretty painfull. The battery technology continues to be expensive and problematic.
Continously variable transmissions and regenerative braking can help somewhat (probably 20% to 30% improvements), but it will take a technological breakthrough to get a real revolution, and that will likely come from esoteric science (or perhaps space or military programs), not the pop media.
So in other words, you won't hear about the solution in the media until the problem is more or less solved. And sorry to break it to you Mr. Gore, but the the laws of thermodynamics DO have a controlling legal authority, and are not up for repeal.
Counting on "new technology" as some sort of miracle savior for future problems is roughly akin to putting you head in the sand. Work towards them, hope for them, but dont plan that they will magically appear at the perfect instant...
(kinda on a rant today... gotta get rid of all that Karma somehow)...
Bill
I do this now. I have an older sharp Actius (looks like a sony VAIO, less than an inch thick) that sports 64MB of ram and a 266 mmx CPU. Street price for a device like this is probably around $800.
:)
I added a set of wireless ethernet cards (webgear aviator 2.4Ghz) for another $150, and dropped the second card in my basement Red Hat 6.2 server (a 233 AMD system with 64MB ram and 20 gigs or so of hard drive).
Because both run X, I can export whatever graphical apps (including the whole display) across the wireless link whenever I want. It is (as you describe) very usefull.
Here's the rub. Even though my laptop is reasonably modest in capabilities (you could not buy a machine today with this small a CPU), it still runs for $800 used, and still only displays 800x600 pixels. OK for a laptop, but embarrassing for a desktop. For an XGA laptop, we are talking some serious money. Even assuming you could drop some non-essentials (floppy drive, hard drive, etc), you are still looking at $300 or more just for LCD screen, not to mention keyboard, glidepad, cpu, memory, etc.
That's why all these cheap internet appliances have a custom dedicated UI, to keep them cheap. Any kind of usable generalized access device for a desktop system is either going to be more expensive then your desktop (because of the more expensive portable components), or so inferior in capability as to be useless.
The displays are really the rub right now... it is pretty darn cheap to produce a big glass tube, and pretty darn expensive to produce a small LCD. Maybe once the lighte emitting polymers hit the real world this will change, but don't expect it inside of the next two years.
IMHO
You can go to palmstation ( http://www.palmstation.com ) for more information, including more links to complete pages.
There has been discussion there about these links all week.