This article illustrates an important point--that overeager advoactes do more harm than good. Regardless of some people's ideas of the strengthening nature of flames, well-reasoned, well-presented arguments go farther in winning someone to your side of an argument than brimstone-laden insults. The author of the article noted that he already uses Linux. If he wasn't already familiar with the OS, I doubt that he would have bothered to try it after the torrent of flames he got.
I've seen a couple of comments pointing out that Slashdot does not represent the Linux community as a whole. Slashdot does, however, have a huge readership that is markedly pro-Linux. Even a small percentage of that readership flaming an author can generate enough vitriol to turn someone off to Linux, thinking that it's an OS used by people of an immature bent. (Yes, I'm struggling to avoid "pimply-faced 13-year-old" stereotypes.)
Please, people, try to avoid knee-jerk reactions, and work on refraining from flaming people just because you don't agree with them. If toey're wrong, there ought to be solid facts that can be quoted in your defense, and, if you are not in posession of those facts, go look for them before posting.
--Phil (Paraphrasing a little: "If you don't have anything constructive to say, don't say it.")
I thought the game was quite well done. It kept the good features of the game and added additional ones that I think work very well. Cities can have building queues where you specify a list of items for them to build. You can save queues and use them on multiple cities (I love this feature--especially later in the game, I have a standard set of improvements that my cities build). You can build underwater, and have underwater tunnels. (My units can walk anywhere in my empire.) You can build in space, and there are many spacefaring units. In addition to the good concepts in the game, it looks good, too. The tiles and units are all well-rendered and the overall appearance is a large improvement over Civ II. (It also takes up more CPU power than Civ II.) Not "gripping"? The first all-nighter I ever did was while playing Civ II. I've already spent several on CTP.
--Phil (Sleep? Isn't that a totally inadequate substitute for caffine?)
Actually, the game was useable on my 90Mhz Pentium. I had all frivolous turned off and the were noticeable pauses as the game thought about things, but it was still enjoyable. That was on the first beta, which was loaded with debugging code. Beta 3 has much of the debugging stuff pulled out and is much faster. I don't know how it runs on a slower processor, though. For unrelated reasons I finally got around to upgrading to a 400Mhz K6-2. I would expect the game to be quite playable on a 100Mhz pentium. You just won't get all the neat animations.
--Phil (It's a good game. I'm definitely going to buy it when it comes out.)
The rationale behind the ant is that Debian has similarities to an ant colony--hundreds of developers, each maintaing his or her own packages, and the sum is the finished product. Bees were also suggested for the same reason.
--Phil (But I really like option 2. Clean, elegant, recognizable, good connotations.)
I don't know. From what Rob has said, I think he's moving toward the goal of making moderation like jury duty and picking different people from the Slashdot readership on different days. If he's doing that, then the posting/moderation exclusion is a good balance. It prevents people from moderating others when they may have a stake in the results, it forces people to think carefully about whether posting or moderating is more important to the for that story, and it only affects the person when they've been chosen as a moderator.
--Phil (I'd just like some sort of selt-moderation option, for when I want to be off-topic.)
"IMAFAKE wrote in with this tidbit about Microsoft announcing that it has dumped it's entire line of Windows products and will immediately begin freely distributing Linux on it's Microsoft.com web site. All Microsoft technical support staff will be retrained to offer free technical support for all distro's of Linux downloaded at the site, and Bill Gates is selling off his holdings in the empire so that he can spend more time on his true passion, Buddhism."
Oh, good. At least someone else has heard of the new MS Linux.
--Phil (What a fun day. I'm waiting to see what RFCs get posted.)
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, there's a book entitles The Physics of Star Trek which discusses much of this stuff. The site even mentions it in several places. There's also a mailing list for people interested in discussing this stuff: The Star Trek Technologists. The discussions generally run more along the lines of "How does this work?" or "They did this; how does that relate to modern physics?" than creating Star Trek equipment today, but it's a very interesting list.
--Phil (No, I'm not a dedicated Star Trek Geek at all...)
The Freecddb people might want to look at coordinating with the CDIndex people. For one matter, both projects look like they're aiming to accomplish the same goal. For another, CDIndex has as a stated goal, "Create GPL like license to cover the data that is inside of the CD Index. (If the GPL can't cover the data.)" I like that setup much better, as it would insure that no one could buy up the database and claim that they owned the freely submitted data and could do whatever they wanted with it.
--Phil (Besides, I think CDIndex is going with a better protocol than CDDB.)
The current problem is that the company that currently owns the CDDB database (yes, I know that's redundant) has declared that the contents of that database are their intellectual property and have put together a license with various terms for using their database. Access may not cost anything, but it's not _FREE_. For more details, check out a previous Slashdot story on the subject.
--Phil (#define _FREE_ free(as in speech)/*Thanks to the poster I saw do that. */)
Well, I read through both articles. The first one had some rather annoying things in it. It could probably be termed "FUD", but in a rather subtle way. It has the usual confusion of free beer and free speech, but had some other clever things, too. Mentioning that Linux lets you partition your drive "because it knows you're going to want to keep running Windows too" made me shudder inside. (For the new, Linux is happiest with a separate partition for swap, so (re)partitioning is generally necessary.)
I felt that the second article was a more honest one. Mostly, it described the problems the person has installing Linux. She happened to be unlucky enough to have problems with her CD drive, and had to ask several people for help. As others have pointed out, she would likely have problems installing Windows, also. That's why LUGs offer to do installations. She might have liked Linux if someone else had installed it for her.
--Phil (No "formal engaged testing"? Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"!)
I'd just like to address a couple of points you mention.
1. I am not a programmer, so having the source code does absolutely nothing for me. While I took programming courses in college, and I can hold my own READING code, I probably couldn't even write a "Hello World" in any language except BASIC anymore. (At one point, I could code in BASIC, Pascal, and FORTRAN. I've been meaning to learn C for awhile, but I'm too lazy) So if I download a piece of Linux software, and it doesn't compile on the first try, I give up on it. I don't know enough to dig through and find the error. And if I get more errors than on an equivalent Windows program, I'm not going to use it.
You make some good points here. If a program doesn't compile and you can't program, it's pretty worthless to you. However, just because you can't program doesn't mean that having the source does nothing for you. Because the source is available, anyone can play with it, even if you don't. And when someone else finds that bug keeping the program from compiling and submits it back to the author, you benefit from it. Just because you can't program doesn't mean that having source available does nothing for you.
Of course, it does help if you try to contribute to the program. If you can't program, you can usually at least give bug reports. I often don't have time to fix errors in the programs I use, but I generally submit bug reports, which can range from "The program segfaults. I tried to do this, and here's the output leading up to the problem," to "The program seems to be choking on my input in fuction derf(). It's being called from asdf() on initialization of the main widget.
2. I do actually use Linux. I'm not just a Linux-bashing Microsoftie. My main computer may run Win98, but I have 2 other computers that both run Linux. An old 486, and a Mac Powerbook running MkLinux. I think it's great, but not for my main computer.
Keep going. I started with Linux on a 386 I picked up cheaply. I played with it and learned Linux there. Now, I use Linux exclusively on my main computer, and the 386 serves as an internet gateway for our home LAN.
Basically, complain all you want, but for non-programmers, any *nix isn't quite ready for the desktop. Yes, if you write code for a living, it makes perfect sense, but for Joe User (me) being able to open the computer for the first time, hit the power button, and be ready to go is good. Your average user should never have to go through any manual process to recompile the kernel.
Linux isn't ready for everyone's desktop yet, but it's getting there. I use Linux primarily for writing papers and analyzing data from my labs. (I'm a physics student.) Web browsing, too. I think that Linux is rapidly approaching the point where the average person can easily use it. Compiling the kernel isn't really even necessary any more. Debian and Red Hat both compile stock kernels with modules for everything. Just tell it what hardware you have (and people are working on autodetection), and it'll install the necessary modules.
--Phil (Keep working at Linux--we'll make you a convert yet.)
Hmm. I always thought that the "learning curve" was had amount of work you could do on the x-axis and amount of stuff you had to learn on the y-axis. (Come to think of it, that's bad--the knowledge is the independent variable.) With that setup, things like UNIX have a steep learning curve for many people, i.e. there is a lot that they must learn before they can use it well. The point I often make is that Linux often has a longer learning curve than other OSes, like NT. IOW, if you're willing to put the time into learning it, you can do more with Linux, even to the point of rewriting portions of the kernel (or the GUI, or your editor, or your favorite game,...). Thus a graph for NT might look like this:
Each OS has its own features. NT is easy to pick up (point, click), then you have to learn about networking and such to use it well, and there are a lot of things you can't do with it. Linux, being more unfamiliar to more people, takes more effort to learn, but the usefuless extends far past that of NT.
--Phil (Graphs not necessarily to scale.)
The Correct Link To The Apple Job & My Humble Op..
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That link almost works. Slashdot seems to be inserting a space so the "_pagesNEW" turns into "_pa gesNEW".
That means that anyone who doesn't want to go with RedHat doesn't have to. Given the freeness of Linux, I see no way for RedHat to somehow deprive you of your choice among the distributions. If you don't like any of them, you can even roll your own. (I'd love to do that someday, but I don't have the time.)
How could RedHat make.rpms incompatible? rpm is GPLed. We'd all be able to see what the format changes were and they'd gain nothing but ill will.
Remember, RedHat is a company. Their primary goal is to earn enough money to allow their employees to make a living working for them. If they ever did anything along the lines of the paranoid ravings being spouted here, they would lose all community trust. With that trust would go their profits. I doubt they plan anything so insidious.
--Phil (Over there! It's a conspiracy! Made you look...)
I think we should give them a chance. IBM was long known as a "bad" company. In recent times, we've seen them change their course and begin embracing free software. I see Apple as a company who's heard about this 'open source' thing and wants to get in on it. Rather than flaming them, I think it's more productive to point out to them, in a reasonable manner, things that are not in the spirit of free softare. If they're really intent on joining us, they'll change. If not, we wait and try again later.
Companies, especially companies steeped in proprietariness, will only change slowly. We need to be patient and show them the way to go.
Give the guy a break! Immediately after mentioning the resistors, he notes "I'm no technician excuse my translation!" I thought that he got the idea across, and the images showed the process, too.
--Phil (Not that I'll be trying this--I don't have a Palm pilot.)
Your best bet is to use either a BSD-style license of the GPL. Most of the other licenses that abound have been custom tailored for a specific company and product. With BSD licensing and the GPL, you also have the advantage that more people will tent to know the basic tenets of the license.
The differences between the GPL and a BSD-style license generally relate to reuse of your code. GPLed code must always remain GPLed. BSDed code may be made proprietary or included into other codebases with different licenses.
--Phil (Personally, I prefer the GPL. Once free, always free.)
Well, as I understand it the TIFF spec is very nice. The only problem is that it's too big, and not everyone implements the same parts of it. If you're using compatible implementations, everything's fine, but incompatible implementations can render the image unusable. JPEGs aren't good formats for image editing because some information gets lost every time a jpeg is saved. Multiple edit-save iterations can leave a jpeg looking very bad.
I don't do a great deal of image editing, but for what I do, I use XCF as my "master" image, TIFF for transporting images, and JPEG or GIF for the final image to be displayed. As soon as the GIMP gets good support for aplha channels in PNGs, I'm probably going to start using PNG in place of TIFFs and GIFs.
--Phil (Hmm.. I could have gotten more TLAs and ETLAs in my post--I'll have to try harder next time.)
I stopped reading when...
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A number of people seem to think that the article wasn't very good. I didn't think that it was too bad. The "red hat" line was the worst one. The bit about Papa Smurf and the village smurfberry supply was a bit fluffy, but I thought it drew a nice analogy. It doesn't make any denigrating comments about KDE (notable for a GNOME article). It mentions that GNOME is, in part, commercially funded yet is a free project.
The biggest complaints about the article seem to be about the remark about the "application-rich" Windows NT. That comment is, in many ways, true. Windows in general has been around longer than any major Linux push for the desktop and more people write programs for the Windows platform. The next quote, from IDC, "If they give Linux a complete look and feel, but if the applications aren't there, it still won't grow," is true but misleading. The application base is small when compared to Windows' base, but GNOME's is growing. I think that was the worst of the article, and it wasn't that bad. The article as a whole was pretty good.
--Phil (If only they'd waited a little longer for 1.0...)
It's definitely a nice format. (And I know a lot more about it now that I did when i work up this morning.) I plan to move my web pages to PNG as soon as the GIMP supports PNG's alpha stuff.
--Phil (And I try to make good use of the alt= parameter, too. No one should be left out.)
That was a much better piece than ESR's. Point by point refutation, no insults, a little bit of humor. People should read things like this and use them as guides for their own advocacy.
--Phil (I quite enjoyed the comment, "This is the quote that wins the Ken Olsen Award.")
About a year ago, I got a BIOS update for my three-year-old Packard Bell, and booting from CD was one of the things added. (They use AMI as their BIOS base.) If a Packard Bell can do it, any couputer ought to be able to.
--Phil (And no complaints about the computer. If I knew then what I know now...)
Slashdot Mirror
As usual, we need the obligatory link to the Linux Advocacy HOWTO.
This article illustrates an important point--that overeager advoactes do more harm than good. Regardless of some people's ideas of the strengthening nature of flames, well-reasoned, well-presented arguments go farther in winning someone to your side of an argument than brimstone-laden insults. The author of the article noted that he already uses Linux. If he wasn't already familiar with the OS, I doubt that he would have bothered to try it after the torrent of flames he got.
I've seen a couple of comments pointing out that Slashdot does not represent the Linux community as a whole. Slashdot does, however, have a huge readership that is markedly pro-Linux. Even a small percentage of that readership flaming an author can generate enough vitriol to turn someone off to Linux, thinking that it's an OS used by people of an immature bent. (Yes, I'm struggling to avoid "pimply-faced 13-year-old" stereotypes.)
Please, people, try to avoid knee-jerk reactions, and work on refraining from flaming people just because you don't agree with them. If toey're wrong, there ought to be solid facts that can be quoted in your defense, and, if you are not in posession of those facts, go look for them before posting.
--Phil (Paraphrasing a little: "If you don't have anything constructive to say, don't say it.")
I thought the game was quite well done. It kept the good features of the game and added additional ones that I think work very well. Cities can have building queues where you specify a list of items for them to build. You can save queues and use them on multiple cities (I love this feature--especially later in the game, I have a standard set of improvements that my cities build). You can build underwater, and have underwater tunnels. (My units can walk anywhere in my empire.) You can build in space, and there are many spacefaring units. In addition to the good concepts in the game, it looks good, too. The tiles and units are all well-rendered and the overall appearance is a large improvement over Civ II. (It also takes up more CPU power than Civ II.) Not "gripping"? The first all-nighter I ever did was while playing Civ II. I've already spent several on CTP.
--Phil (Sleep? Isn't that a totally inadequate substitute for caffine?)
Actually, the game was useable on my 90Mhz Pentium. I had all frivolous turned off and the were noticeable pauses as the game thought about things, but it was still enjoyable. That was on the first beta, which was loaded with debugging code. Beta 3 has much of the debugging stuff pulled out and is much faster. I don't know how it runs on a slower processor, though. For unrelated reasons I finally got around to upgrading to a 400Mhz K6-2. I would expect the game to be quite playable on a 100Mhz pentium. You just won't get all the neat animations.
--Phil (It's a good game. I'm definitely going to buy it when it comes out.)
The rationale behind the ant is that Debian has similarities to an ant colony--hundreds of developers, each maintaing his or her own packages, and the sum is the finished product. Bees were also suggested for the same reason.
--Phil (But I really like option 2. Clean, elegant, recognizable, good connotations.)
I don't know. From what Rob has said, I think he's moving toward the goal of making moderation like jury duty and picking different people from the Slashdot readership on different days. If he's doing that, then the posting/moderation exclusion is a good balance. It prevents people from moderating others when they may have a stake in the results, it forces people to think carefully about whether posting or moderating is more important to the for that story, and it only affects the person when they've been chosen as a moderator.
--Phil (I'd just like some sort of selt-moderation option, for when I want to be off-topic.)
--Phil (What a fun day. I'm waiting to see what RFCs get posted.)
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, there's a book entitles The Physics of Star Trek which discusses much of this stuff. The site even mentions it in several places. There's also a mailing list for people interested in discussing this stuff: The Star Trek Technologists. The discussions generally run more along the lines of "How does this work?" or "They did this; how does that relate to modern physics?" than creating Star Trek equipment today, but it's a very interesting list.
--Phil (No, I'm not a dedicated Star Trek Geek at all...)
The Freecddb people might want to look at coordinating with the CDIndex people. For one matter, both projects look like they're aiming to accomplish the same goal. For another, CDIndex has as a stated goal, "Create GPL like license to cover the data that is inside of the CD Index. (If the GPL can't cover the data.)" I like that setup much better, as it would insure that no one could buy up the database and claim that they owned the freely submitted data and could do whatever they wanted with it.
--Phil (Besides, I think CDIndex is going with a better protocol than CDDB.)
The current problem is that the company that currently owns the CDDB database (yes, I know that's redundant) has declared that the contents of that database are their intellectual property and have put together a license with various terms for using their database. Access may not cost anything, but it's not _FREE_. For more details, check out a previous Slashdot story on the subject.
--Phil (#define _FREE_ free(as in speech)
Well, I read through both articles. The first one had some rather annoying things in it. It could probably be termed "FUD", but in a rather subtle way. It has the usual confusion of free beer and free speech, but had some other clever things, too. Mentioning that Linux lets you partition your drive "because it knows you're going to want to keep running Windows too" made me shudder inside. (For the new, Linux is happiest with a separate partition for swap, so (re)partitioning is generally necessary.)
I felt that the second article was a more honest one. Mostly, it described the problems the person has installing Linux. She happened to be unlucky enough to have problems with her CD drive, and had to ask several people for help. As others have pointed out, she would likely have problems installing Windows, also. That's why LUGs offer to do installations. She might have liked Linux if someone else had installed it for her.
--Phil (No "formal engaged testing"? Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"!)
I'd just like to address a couple of points you mention.
You make some good points here. If a program doesn't compile and you can't program, it's pretty worthless to you. However, just because you can't program doesn't mean that having the source does nothing for you. Because the source is available, anyone can play with it, even if you don't. And when someone else finds that bug keeping the program from compiling and submits it back to the author, you benefit from it. Just because you can't program doesn't mean that having source available does nothing for you.Of course, it does help if you try to contribute to the program. If you can't program, you can usually at least give bug reports. I often don't have time to fix errors in the programs I use, but I generally submit bug reports, which can range from "The program segfaults. I tried to do this, and here's the output leading up to the problem," to "The program seems to be choking on my input in fuction derf(). It's being called from asdf() on initialization of the main widget.
Keep going. I started with Linux on a 386 I picked up cheaply. I played with it and learned Linux there. Now, I use Linux exclusively on my main computer, and the 386 serves as an internet gateway for our home LAN.
Linux isn't ready for everyone's desktop yet, but it's getting there. I use Linux primarily for writing papers and analyzing data from my labs. (I'm a physics student.) Web browsing, too. I think that Linux is rapidly approaching the point where the average person can easily use it. Compiling the kernel isn't really even necessary any more. Debian and Red Hat both compile stock kernels with modules for everything. Just tell it what hardware you have (and people are working on autodetection), and it'll install the necessary modules.--Phil (Keep working at Linux--we'll make you a convert yet.)
Hmm. I always thought that the "learning curve" was had amount of work you could do on the x-axis and amount of stuff you had to learn on the y-axis. (Come to think of it, that's bad--the knowledge is the independent variable.) With that setup, things like UNIX have a steep learning curve for many people, i.e. there is a lot that they must learn before they can use it well. The point I often make is that Linux often has a longer learning curve than other OSes, like NT. IOW, if you're willing to put the time into learning it, you can do more with Linux, even to the point of rewriting portions of the kernel (or the GUI, or your editor, or your favorite game, ...). Thus a graph for NT might look like this:
- ---------------------
| *
K| *
n| *
o| *
w| ****
l|****
e|*
d|*
g|**
e|****
|***
+---------------------
Usefulness
Whereas Linux might be:
| ****************
| ********
| ***
| *
| *
| **
| **********
| ****
| *
| *
K| ***
n| *****
o| **
w|****
l|***
e|**
d|*
g|*
e|*
|*
|*
|**
+------------------------------------------------
Usefulness
(Pardon my lack of artistry)
Each OS has its own features. NT is easy to pick up (point, click), then you have to learn about networking and such to use it well, and there are a lot of things you can't do with it. Linux, being more unfamiliar to more people, takes more effort to learn, but the usefuless extends far past that of NT.
--Phil (Graphs not necessarily to scale.)
That link almost works. Slashdot seems to be inserting a space so the "_pagesNEW" turns into "_pa gesNEW".
--Phil (Rob, you reading this?)
What? No slashdot.themes.org? :)
--Phil (I just discover "Nested" and Rob yanks it... Please fix it soon!)
Linux is free.
That means that anyone who doesn't want to go with RedHat doesn't have to. Given the freeness of Linux, I see no way for RedHat to somehow deprive you of your choice among the distributions. If you don't like any of them, you can even roll your own. (I'd love to do that someday, but I don't have the time.)
How could RedHat make .rpms incompatible? rpm is GPLed. We'd all be able to see what the format changes were and they'd gain nothing but ill will.
Remember, RedHat is a company. Their primary goal is to earn enough money to allow their employees to make a living working for them. If they ever did anything along the lines of the paranoid ravings being spouted here, they would lose all community trust. With that trust would go their profits. I doubt they plan anything so insidious.
--Phil (Over there! It's a conspiracy! Made you look...)
I think we should give them a chance. IBM was long known as a "bad" company. In recent times, we've seen them change their course and begin embracing free software. I see Apple as a company who's heard about this 'open source' thing and wants to get in on it. Rather than flaming them, I think it's more productive to point out to them, in a reasonable manner, things that are not in the spirit of free softare. If they're really intent on joining us, they'll change. If not, we wait and try again later.
Companies, especially companies steeped in proprietariness, will only change slowly. We need to be patient and show them the way to go.
--Phil (Optimist extraordinare)
Give the guy a break! Immediately after mentioning the resistors, he notes "I'm no technician excuse my translation!" I thought that he got the idea across, and the images showed the process, too.
--Phil (Not that I'll be trying this--I don't have a Palm pilot.)
Your best bet is to use either a BSD-style license of the GPL. Most of the other licenses that abound have been custom tailored for a specific company and product. With BSD licensing and the GPL, you also have the advantage that more people will tent to know the basic tenets of the license.
The differences between the GPL and a BSD-style license generally relate to reuse of your code. GPLed code must always remain GPLed. BSDed code may be made proprietary or included into other codebases with different licenses.
--Phil (Personally, I prefer the GPL. Once free, always free.)
Well, as I understand it the TIFF spec is very nice. The only problem is that it's too big, and not everyone implements the same parts of it. If you're using compatible implementations, everything's fine, but incompatible implementations can render the image unusable. JPEGs aren't good formats for image editing because some information gets lost every time a jpeg is saved. Multiple edit-save iterations can leave a jpeg looking very bad.
I don't do a great deal of image editing, but for what I do, I use XCF as my "master" image, TIFF for transporting images, and JPEG or GIF for the final image to be displayed. As soon as the GIMP gets good support for aplha channels in PNGs, I'm probably going to start using PNG in place of TIFFs and GIFs.
--Phil (Hmm.. I could have gotten more TLAs and ETLAs in my post--I'll have to try harder next time.)
A number of people seem to think that the article wasn't very good. I didn't think that it was too bad. The "red hat" line was the worst one. The bit about Papa Smurf and the village smurfberry supply was a bit fluffy, but I thought it drew a nice analogy. It doesn't make any denigrating comments about KDE (notable for a GNOME article). It mentions that GNOME is, in part, commercially funded yet is a free project.
The biggest complaints about the article seem to be about the remark about the "application-rich" Windows NT. That comment is, in many ways, true. Windows in general has been around longer than any major Linux push for the desktop and more people write programs for the Windows platform. The next quote, from IDC, "If they give Linux a complete look and feel, but if the applications aren't there, it still won't grow," is true but misleading. The application base is small when compared to Windows' base, but GNOME's is growing. I think that was the worst of the article, and it wasn't that bad. The article as a whole was pretty good.
--Phil (If only they'd waited a little longer for 1.0...)
It's definitely a nice format. (And I know a lot more about it now that I did when i work up this morning.) I plan to move my web pages to PNG as soon as the GIMP supports PNG's alpha stuff.
--Phil (And I try to make good use of the alt= parameter, too. No one should be left out.)
That was a much better piece than ESR's. Point by point refutation, no insults, a little bit of humor. People should read things like this and use them as guides for their own advocacy.
--Phil (I quite enjoyed the comment, "This is the quote that wins the Ken Olsen Award.")
Does anyone have a link to the text of the bill? This would be useful material for a research paper I'm doing on exporting encryption.
--Phil (My English teacher is probably going to regret letting us pick our own subjects...:)
About a year ago, I got a BIOS update for my three-year-old Packard Bell, and booting from CD was one of the things added. (They use AMI as their BIOS base.) If a Packard Bell can do it, any couputer ought to be able to.
--Phil (And no complaints about the computer. If I knew then what I know now...)
Right... That'll be an accurate determination of who's intelligent and who's not.
Not to mention that, if slashdot did this, it would tell you that I'm using Netscape Navigator Gold 7.32 in AIX running on an Apple ][.
--Phil (The Internet Junkbuster can be such fun.)