I'm sure that the post this answers was intended as irony, but for just in case some newcomer is reading this: when the 2.4.0 kernel was released, there had been people running it for many months, sometimes for many months without rebooting. One of the wonders of opensource is that you don't have to wait for the release, and so the release can happen when the product is ready, not when the business plan calls for it.
For the other side of this, consider Redhat 7.x. Their business plan called for a release when the compiler they wanted wasn't ready. In the closed-source paradigm, they would have called it ready and shipped bugs. Since the compiler is GPL'd they had to explicitly ship a beta compiler, and we got some fair warning about those bugs which we wouldn't have gotten from Microsoft or Sun. By the way, Redhat has done a wonderful job of making that work far better than it should, to judge by the reports of people who have been using it. In the usual closed-source, proprietary course of events, a closed source vendor such as Sun or MS would have denied the bugs, threatened customers to try to hush things up, and the folks who laid out big bucks for the bugs would have had to pay for an upgrade.
How is Linux ever to become a commercial success/serious platform if development takes years? Same way it's been getting there all along, I guess, by being so much better than the stuff that's rushed out the door to keep the marketing department happy.
I'm replying because I wanted to agree and amplify your other point: we have to actively raise our children, and make sure that they have a set of beliefs which they understand well enough that the beliefs can't be overturned by the first fast-talking con man the kids meet. We must also make sure that those beliefs leave no room for self rightousness and hatred.
I'm from a good deal further West (and North) than Montana. Fortunately, Alaska has a reputation for cold that keeps some of the nuts out, but we have some of both sorts up there too... obnoxious crazies from back east looking for a place to fester, and quiet folk who are left alone because they never trouble others. Not many plain folk up there, but there is a colony of old believers down on the Kenai, as I recall.
You should of course put whatever license you like upon your efforts. I would like to point out that to someone somewhere, your suggestion will smack of the sort of twisted hatred that should be banned from the earth. My point is that such a license would boil down to "... you can only use this for stuff (author's name here) approves of...", which is not likely to attract any significant use.
I would certainly not trust any accreditation boards; they are as susceptible to political correctness as any other group, and thus teaching Shakespear might wind up verboten, and teaching that ALL consentual sex is rape might not. One of those should seem innocous, and the other should not, to pretty much everyone.
This problem has been around for as long as there has been communication: someone might lead someone else astray. It's old enough that the ancient Greeks had a word for it: someone who led a lot of folks astray was a demagog.
I'm glad to hear that your windmills have low kill rates for bees; I'm a beekeeper, and would hate to see my apairy devastated. How are they on birds (that is, what's the avian kill rate)?
More seriously, I've lived near old, dirty coal plants, and near wind generators, and I'll take the coal anyday. It makes a better neighbor. Wind plants are loud and unsightly, while coal plants are quiet and the new ones are surprisingly clean.
You say 4.5cents/kWh to build? What's the capital cost per kWh? What's the lifespan that you amortize that over? What's it going to cost to produce power on the days that the wind doesn't blow? I hadn't heard that wind power was competitive with a modern coal plant set up close to a mine. The cost of the wind generators per nameplate MW may be low, but the cost per reliable MW has to include the wind generators and either very expensive storage, or fossil generators which can take over on a calm day. I'm not saying there is no place for wind, but it can't replace fossil/nuclear, it isn't suitable. Windpower next to a hydro site might make sense; it could run all night to pump water uphill over the dam, and provide some lowcost peaking power during the day, weather permitting. But for general use, as a primary source of juice? probably not.
Who's talking about the environmentalists? Those laws come from the State's elected officials and beaurocrats, who found it expedient to work with the demagogs who make up the "leadership" of the environmental movement.
The ordinary folks who make up the rank and file of the environmental movements are mostly useful fools, to quote Lenin. They know a whole lot that just ain't so, and they are willing to listen to any fast-talking liar who promises utopia. These grass-roots environmentalists aren't to blame, except in the sense that they are, like all citizens, responsible for their government.
The solution to this problem of political decisionmaking isn't to "join a group" but to reduce the power of government, so that there is less scope for demagogs and useful fools to do harm in the political arena. To get some idea about why the "dive head-first into the manure pile" approach won't actually clean things up, you might want to read a little book by Frederick Bastiat, titled The Law. It's almost as short as the title, and well worth the time it takes to read it. Whatever you may believe about the state of the environment, the environment is far to important to leave to political whimsy.
Yes, PJM seems to be working out rather well. New Zealand is another example of a market which seems to be working well, and it is truely deregulated! No tariff filings and so on. England and Wales is a second, and Scandanavia is a third. I think that NZ's market is about 5 years old now? E&W is older than that.
As I said, they seem to have screwed up pretty much everything in CA, but the original sin was not allowing capacity to keep up to demand. The second factor was not giving demand incentives to drop down to equal supply.
If you interfere with a market, you eventually will go the way of the USSR and California. Even if you find a way to interfere without causing an immediate disaster, you cause some distortion which requires more interference, and on and on until you have rolling blackouts, a state of emergency, and the taxpayers on the hook to pay for the billions of dollars of mistakes made by their "Public Servants".
As someone pointed out in an earlier reply to my post, it wasn't really deregulation that CA tried, it was an attempt to set up a command-economy market, al la the USSR. So you're right, we certainly can't look at CA and say that deregulation doesn't work.
I hadn't noticed that part about negative spot prices... I was taking my prelims about then. But I'm not surprised, in retrospect. All it takes is a loop to make that possible. That means, of course, that folks somewhere are willing to pay to keep power off the lines, to relieve congestion. I've seen examples in the ops research literature, but haven't seen any references to that happening in reality. I don't suppose that you remember what markets?
The short answer is: "if Marxism-Leninism was a good idea, the USSR would be the richest nation on the planet, at least in the sense of the standard of living for the average guy."
The long answer to "could a utility be held in the public domain?" is no. If utilities are publically owned, the decisions about how much to produce, how, and who gets it are made politically. Trust me, that's bad. (Trust me, I'm an economist...)
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market. Thus, consumers had no incentive to conserve when supplies got tight, while the utilities had to keep buying power to meet demand, however high the prices got. That was only the second mistake. They didn't understand the economics of these markets yet, and did some rather stupid things with zonal pricing which aggravated the problem. William Hogan has an interesting paper on his website, in particular this one.
Those links don't seem to be working in the preview, so here they are in cut-and-paste form:
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/
and
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/zonal_ Feb11.pdf
What was the first mistake? Their stupid, infeasible environmental laws, which are really about social and technological ignorance and NIMBY rather than any realistic concern for the human environment. It would be irresponsible to invest any money in power generation or transmission facilities in the People's Republic of California, and the fact that there hasn't been much such investment in recent decades shows that most gereration company CEO's have good sense.
You mention that it's silly to assume that the multinationals would act in the best interests of the Californians. That's sort of right, except that what they are doing is really in the long term best interests of the Californians. By driving up the prices of power, they give incentives to build more generation and transmission facilities in California. The State Government is of course trying to counteract these incentives, with talk of "nationalization" and price caps.
The stuff in your home, and even the bits on your hard drive are yours, and if I take the physical stuff, you don't have it any more. That's why every society has some version of property rights. It's never ok to take peoples stuff, in general, because for all you or I know, their livelihood or lives might depend on it.
Here's how IP differs: if I copy a program / book / whatever which you have sold me, you still have your copy. This is why the very idea of IP is a very recent innovation; it came into being with the printing press, as I understand it. The reasons advanced for copyrights and patents are always to provide monetary incentives for creative endeavors. Patents and copyrights are monopolies granted to the employer of the creator. Economists generally consider that monopolies are very bad things (I can talk with some authority about what economists think, I am one). I don't think that anyone has ever investigated whether this practice of granting monopolies is optimal, or what terms would be optimal for what industries.
Ownership of physical property is vital to the American dream, and basic human dignity. Ownership of IP, in my opinion, is nowhere nearly so fundamental. I believe that it is optional, and should be abandoned as a bad idea, if that is what it is.
Human progress has depended on humans building on the work of others. Encouraging disclosure (as patents have done in the U.S.) is a step in the right direction. Encouraging inventors to invent new algorithms because current ones are patented does not seem an optimal use of scarce resources (and if inventions are not a scarce resource, then what do we need to encourage them for anyway!). The recent problems with patented compression algorithms (such as GIF's) and patented encryption algorithms (such as RSA) should show that IP does not unambiguously increase social welfare in all cases.
After all this, I agree: if you don't own it, it's not yours. Period. We should work to get more sensible copyright and patent laws, but we shouldn't harm the owners of "rights" under the current laws. These shouldn't be called rights, since they cannot predate the existence of governments. They are priviliges, granted by the governments, and unimaginable without government. Rights (in the U.S. at least) are a pre-existing condition, which might be enforced or violated by government, but can never be created or destroyed by it. If I were a lawyer, I could quote you a case or two in which the supreme court said exactly that. But I don't remember the citation. If there is a lawyer reading this, please fill in the blank.
we could paraphrase the answer with another question: where is the deregulation? The telco's are still regulated, and they have been using that regulation to choke out the would-be competition.
I think that if we want to have some competition and some approximation to universal access, we're going to have to do what has been done in the power company deregulation efforts around the world: separate the distribution network from the generation network. The telephone analog of this would be to split the local telco's into a distribution company, which owns the copper, and a service provider, which pays a fee for (NON-exclusive) use of the lines to provide dialtone. Then anyone could pay the same fee and get the same access.
The distribution company could be a regulated semi-monopoly; I say semi-monopoly, since we should allow cable and wireless companies to compete for the business of delivering a dialtone. The distribution companies would be able to ensure universal access in the same way we currently achieve it, by cross-subsidies.
The service companies should be quite unregulated. Anyone should be able to set up some switchgear in their garage and be a service provider. The service company which was split off from the distribution company would have the advantage of an existing customer base, plentiful capital, and a corporate culture of dedication to customer service which would ensure that startups could make headway. Cherry-picking here shouldn't be a problem, I think, since the marginal cost should be about the same for providing a dial tone to any customer.
that you MUST keep the secret, right? So when Microsoft carelessly allowed spies to copy their secrets, they lost the trade secret protection, didn't they? The spies have broken the law, and should be punished, but if they publish the "secrets", it's none of my doing that that's not a secret any more. There may be a copyright to keep me from cutting and pasting, but other than that, it seems that I should be in the clear.
In a nutshell,(TM) I thought that once a trade secret slipped out, it was no longer protected by law. Can someone who IS a lawyer comment on this? Is it true that it doesn't matter HOW a trade secret is divulged?
So, in Russia, artists play music because they love to play, not because it makes them rich... bands have to tour to make money... this is bad? I don't really see anything wrong with it. I think that the current winner-take-all situation in the US is worse in many ways. We see bands like millie-vanillie (spelling?) which can't even sing; they lip-sync for marketing purposes. They made their makers rich, no doubt, but were they art? I do think that copyrights can be good for our society, but certainly not as they are envisioned by the RIAA and MPAA.
Here's another use for those old 486's and pentium 75's other than Yet Another Firewall: send them to a charity which can get them to a third-world country! Install Linux, and include the install media, since bandwidth for downloads can be expensive. Africa is one place where this kind of thing could make a big difference, but there are also some big chunks of Asia, South America and the Carribean where some old hardware and some help could go a very long way.
Why Linux, by the way (other than advocacy)? After all, so many posters have already pointed out that Windows is free there too. Everyone already knows how to run Windows, so there would be less training required. There are two very practical reasons: First,the charity would need to keep on the right side of the law back here, where it gets its goods. Second, there is little training required (or even possible) with Windows. CTRL-ALT-DELETE, then reinstall, is most of the technical know-how you need to M$ successfully. Not exactly a great learning system for folks whom you want to go on and build infrastructure.
So: does anyone know of such a charity? One that could get the hardware into the hands of folks who could use it, and give some training, and would absolutely insist on the use of libre software to avoid lisensing issues?
For IBM, this is no problem; IBM can say: "we'll make it work or give you back your money." That's credible. For Joe's Garage Software, this statement may not have the same level of credibility. If Joe has some past history in business, he may well be able to get a performance bond to stand behind his work, and ensure that funds will be there to fix problems.
It seems to me that this problem really bites the folks who have a really new package, and no past history. I'd guess that for sendmail or apache, there aren't any difficulties here; lots of places will provide support for them. You don't even need the developers anymore for that. Third-party support has been the answer to this question so far in free software. But linuxcare isn't going to offer support for some thing they've never even heard of.
Maybe the beginning of an answer lies in that last paragraph: software with a good reputation WILL be supported by third parties, and you (or your client) will be able to hire some outfit like linuxcare to ensure that your application runs for a client, IF you have earned a good reputation. So, to provide quality assurance in free software: First, build it and make it good. Second, keep developing it, make it better, and get users to adopt it. By now, you should have a good reputation and lots of firms standing ready to stand behind your work. I'm not sure how we fit a quick IPO and early retirement in here, but maybe you shouldn't expect that out of the free software model.
How far exactly would you like to carry this argument? As long as the library's resources are limited, they will have to purchase some books, and exclude others. CENSORSHIP!
Should the librarians choose the books randomly, to avoid making value judgements? Librarians don't limit access (much) to books and such. But they should certainly remember who pays the bills. The folks of that town are ponying up lots of pounds to provide that library. I think that it is entirely proper for the townsfolk to have a BIG say about what their money gets spent on. If you don't like their taste, spend your own money to make whatever they don't approve of available to the public. Don't try to force others to pay for your opinions. The burning desire to implement your opinions at the expense of others is what this censorship argument always boils down to.
There is, here in the US, a national organization for librarians. They buy into your argument hook, line and sinker. It makes them feel brave and daring to "fight censorship", I suspect, and is always a good argument for a bigger budget: "we need more money to buy reference books... the porn is so expensive, and so popular we can't cut back on it...". I'm sure that's true in GB too, so you can rest easy: the public's right to be robbed to fund utopias isn't in any real danger.
The library laid down the gold for those computers, so they make the rules about using them. Don't like it? Don't use them.
The folks of that little town (?) presumably think that their tax pounds sterling are being used in a suitable way. Here is the US, at least, that would have probability >>0. If you don't like the outcome of the public debate there, either stay home, or move there and get involved.
It is the nature of these socially funded goods that the rules controlling them WILL be set socially, by the political process, and thus in general suboptimally. What can you do about this? Well, try to keep your society from providing things which are not strictly speaking public goods! These computer terminals are rivalrous in consumption, and pretty darn excludeable. Certainly not public goods. My point is not that there should be no "public" access points for the web, but rather that it's not appropriate for the government to fund them. Why not set up a charity to provide open-access terminals, subject to sane conditions of use? Then anyone who doesn't like YOUR idea of sane can go found his own charity. Don't think it's worth while? You're probably right, so stop complaining.
The point here is not censorship, exactly, but rather the more fundamental question of "what should the government be doing?". Today we would all be far better off if the government did just a bit less. Not nothing, mind you; just a bit less. Then we wouldn't have to decide so many fundamentally private questions in the public arena, where the folks who sniff a handout always have more incentive to yell 'till they get their way than the rest of us. Think how much more restful life would be if we didn't have to continually lobby for this bill that will line our pockets at the expense of others, and against that bill which will line someone else's pockets at our expense!
An Indian speaker of English is likely to be quite well educated. An American speaker of English is not likely to be educated, except perhaps in the trade-school sense: trained for a particular task. Today, that trade-school education can include quite a bit of technical stuff, thought up by well-educated people. Education isn't about learning a trade, or learning to run, (or write) circuit simulators. It's about getting a grasp on history, and nuances, and learning to see new situations and languages in the light of that history and those nuances. Most Americans don't get that sort of education. Neither do most Indians. Imagine that in this country English was taught only to children bound for Ivy-league schools. That's roughly how it is in India.
Back around the turn of the last century, about 5% of the US population got a University education. Today, close to half of the US population goes to something called a University, and still about 5% gets a University education. The rest get a trade-school education.
If a company tries this kind of thing, it has two choices: a contract, signed by both parties and enforceable in court, or to simply accept that some of the items it gives away won't produce any revenue.
I think that the reason we're seeing so much angst over these business models is that these "giveaways" are presented as free; they aren't, as you have so eloquently argued. The actual intent is to trick the unwary into giving away something of greater value for something of lesser value. The old "new lamps for old" scam. If some one wants to make such a deal, knowing what he's getting into, fine. If CluelessCat wants to trick the gullible, I don't think that is fine at all.
Every time one of these companies sets their "rules", and finds that people who never knowingly agreed to them don't follow them, we can only laugh. If new technology comes out with restrictive legislation, it'll be because you didn't contact your congress-critters early and often.
We know that telling people what the rules are will get them to change their behavior. Game theory tells us that the set of possible equilibria may change. In short, it is not necessarily better to tell everyone what the rules are, and try to iterate to some new steady state, in which we all try to exploit, and "it all balances out".
This really is not related to the security-by-obsecurity issue, I think. It involves security in the sense of "keep your passwords secret", not in the sense of "build a system with no bugs", which seems to be where security-by-obscurity fails. The issue here is that rules which people could know about and not be able to exploit might well be significantly inferior to rules which are exploitable.
I suppose that someone who wanted to find out an answer to this could try to get a grant to set up a search engine with a public rating system, and see what came of it. If we can come up with a reasonable metric for the signal-to-noise ratio which resulted from searches, we could find out what really works. By the way, I suspect that one problem with such a proposal would be that no one will bother gaming the system unless it is REALLY popular, and delivers loads of hits. That is, I don't think that this could be done on a small scale: go Google-size, or you won't get any data that applies to the big engines. But you could find out how alternative rules work, with a site that was below the radar screens of the home shopping network and the porn queens.
I have a question for you CS grad students: is there any academic literature on this issue, looking at how people react to this sort of structure, and how the structure must be designed to get them to react in a way which doesn't screw things up? This seems to relate to the information theory field of economics.
There is easy-to-use, and then there is easy-to-learn. They are often orthogonal. That seems to be especially true in computer UI's.
It seems to me that the MacOS is easy-to-learn, judging by the things the Mac-o-philes tell me. That is, you can easily get things done, without any need for any understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. That isn't really a bad thing, either, until you NEED to know what's going on.
That's where the author's example came in: the kiddies would use ftp, and not have a clue where the file wound up, or even that they had downloaded a file. They hadn't learned that you start an application, and then open a file... they had learned that you click on something, and it opens...
If you save a file somewhere on a Unix box, but don't know where, or exactly what the name was, you can use grep with regular expressions, or any one of a number of methods to search the directories where you have write permissions and find it. If you have that problem under Windows, there aren't any reg-exps, just ? and *. Reg-exps are hard to learn, but so powerful and easy to use. They just don't seem to fit the Windows/Mac way of doing things. This is the difference between easy-to-use and easy-to-learn In a Nutshell (hey, that's a catchy phrase, I should trademark it!).
I read that fellow's article,and I'm still scratching my head. I know that you have to salt a scholarly paper with some big words, and some obfuscation, lest people realize that you really aren't adding anything to the field, but this was ridiculous. What field is this guy in? The standards for content are very different than in Econometrica, or even American Statistician.
I'm really not sure what his point was, but I have the uneasy feeling that he had one.
Yes, they chose to give it away (actually, to provide it to Radio Shack for a price, it's Radio Shack who gave me mine). If they don't like what I choose to do with my new toy, they shouldn't give me any more. Other than that, they're out of luck. If I want to take it apart, use a driver some has written, and generally take advantage of the gift they gave me, they're out of luck. Let'em whine, "unhappy" doesn't equal "wronged".
I just checked out cell phones again. They still seem to cost about twice as much per month as the landlines. I won't be getting one until they get a bit more competitive. Also there is the nuisance factor. If you have a phone, people can call you. When you need to get some work done, you get out of the office so you won't be disturbed. With a cell phone in your pocket that won't work so well. I think that nuisance factor outweights the added convenience of being able to call out from anywhere, like sitting in the park, or sitting in the toilet, or the toilet in the park, or...
Another problem is that most service plans require you to pay for incoming calls! Not only are people bothering you, but you're paying for it. That really adds insult to injury. The rates I saw seemed to run around 30 to 50 cents a minute for local calls, with 15 cents a minute extra for long-distance. This was digital service in the MidWest.
I don't think that cellphones will get too far beyond the gadget-freak crowd until service gets quite a bit cheaper. I'm just not willing, right now, to pay more than double for phone service, just to make it easier for others to bother me. I rarely have to make a call when I'm not near a land line, so the added convenience is just isn't worth much extra money for me.
The gas prices in Europe are artificially high! Their gas taxes are far higher than ours. This is probably a legacy of their socialist past, when only the very prosperous had cars (true into the 1950's). Also, the tiny size of their countries pretty well ruled out long-distance driving before the EU. After all, if an Austian or Italian goes on what would be a pleasant, all-day jaunt into the next state over here, he winds up in the next country.
The same situation of artificially inflated gas prices holds true in Canada and Taiwan. Probably other countries as well, but these two I know about first hand. Gas taxes are an easy source of revenue in Europe and Taiwan, because gas is really a luxury for most people. Those countries have also fairly comprehensive public transportation systems, not because the people want it, but because it is subsidied by their socialist governments. The public transport is well-used, since the people can't afford anthing better, after the government has robbed them blind and jacked up the price of gas. Their environment is certainly no cleaner than ours, to boot.
Windows 2000 is a bit better, but the fact is that installing windows requires AT LEAST as much knowlege as does installing Linux. My father, now a grandpa, couldn't install either. He was an electronics technician for many years, a ham radio operator, and took several programming classes over the last 10 years. His first experiences with computers were back before magnetic core memory. I spent over an hour on the phone long distance getting him through installing windows. GUI's are terribly unintuitive at first use. The hundreds of little conventions about which window is active, how you move about, how you change things, the fact that dialog boxs pop up and CHANGE which window is active, are all confusing. That is actually one of the great things about the linux text-based installers: they don't require that you have the years of experience with the GUI.
The fact is that a new user is unlikely to be able to install any useful operating system on his own. Or windows, or BEOS. Would you expect a new auto user to be able to fix a car? Even a model T? New users have to be told how to find a gas tank! Remember the first time you tried to cook? Followong a receipe is easy when you know how: divide two eggs, cook some spagetti, reserve some of the water, and so on... if you aren't familiar with the jargon and the basics, it's gibberish. Same with computers. Nothing is easy until you understand it.
I posted a comment above, RE:windows is (NOT) easy to use, which details some other of my experiences with windows. I am convinced that windows is actually NOT easy to use, nor easy to install, when compared with old-style, command line unix. At the Purdue stat department the secretarys, who have windows pcs on their desks, use pine and vi on AIX for most of their work. They find it easier, and they teach it to temps because even for temps, the learning curve is short enough. They use those windows pcs for xterms, and for netsurfing.
When you start using a computer, you learn, through trial and error, how to accomplish the things you can imagine to do. Once you've learned it, and forgotten how you struggled, it's easy. By this standard, windows would be easy. So was VMS.
I disagree with this idea that "windows is easy to install". Here is a little rant that I sent off a couple days ago on the subject which explains why.
\begin{rant}
I've installed Linux on several machinces in the last year, including a
bleeding-edge laptop, an older laptop, and a couple of desktops, one
overclocked. I've installed windows (mostly 98, once 2000) on all of
them at least once, as well.
Windows WILL find the hardware, every time, and doesn't have the right
drivers for it, and will drive your 21 inch monitor hooked to a big,
fast 3d card at 640x480x8bit until you take it by the hand, after many
reboots, and lead it to a driver for your card, and another for your
monitor, which YOU must dig up. Then you must reboot AGAIN!
Contrast this to Linux: it correctly detects the card, just as does
windows, and then loads a good driver for it. It offers you a sensible
default resolution, and you're off. All the other hardware is handled
similarly by Linux: it finds it, gives you a decent driver, and things
just work. The windows example is also standard: it finds some kind of
hardware, loads a lowest common denominator driver, and then expects YOU
to do the work of making it work right.
Don't try to install Win98 to replace NT, by the way... fdisk gets
baffled, scandisk crashes, setup.exe craps out... the problem is that
they don't know that NTFS isn't FAT, and die in an uninformative
manner. I had to use Linux's fdisk to repartition as ef2s, then MSfdisk
thought that the partition was "unformatted", or some such, and could
work with it.
In short, it seems to me that Windows is MUCH harder to install than is
Linux. Windows does have a fancy graphical installation tool, not quite
so nice as Corel's, perhaps, but it really doesn't DO anything for you!
Linux, with or without the eye-candy, gives you far fewer hassles, far
fewer reboots than even win2000, and seems to me to require a bit less
knowlege of the hardware, as well. Linux only requires that you guess
which interrupt your soundcard wants. That you can get by trial and
error (some day I'll write down which one works, so I don't have to try
the guessing game at each install on a given machine).
Windows requires that you have the manufacturer's driver on hand for
EVERY part in your machine! For a frankenstein box, assembled out of
old parts, that can be a big problem. You have to know what you have,
and go find the drivers, and on and on. First stop, the FCC website, to
try to find out who made each board, and then go find out that the
manufacturer is out of business and no more drivers. For a Compaq (don't
buy Compaq if you want to run windows), knowing your hardware is still a
big problem. Finding the drivers on the Compaq disk is painfull. For
Linux, all the drivers are on one CD, and the installer finds the right
one for you. THAT'S easy.
Yes, Linux app's do seem to be lagging a bit yet, but Staroffice 5.2 is
getting pretty close to MSOffice. You will soon be able to do
Microsofty things as well as MS, and serious work is already much easier
on Unix. By the way, administering NT on a home system doesn't seem any
easier to me than the same chores on Linux. Maybe even harder, since at
least with Linux, I know what's behind the GUI. You never really know
that with MS.
It always bugs me to hear this "Linux is hard to install" line, since
that exactly contradicts my experience.
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For the other side of this, consider Redhat 7.x. Their business plan called for a release when the compiler they wanted wasn't ready. In the closed-source paradigm, they would have called it ready and shipped bugs. Since the compiler is GPL'd they had to explicitly ship a beta compiler, and we got some fair warning about those bugs which we wouldn't have gotten from Microsoft or Sun. By the way, Redhat has done a wonderful job of making that work far better than it should, to judge by the reports of people who have been using it. In the usual closed-source, proprietary course of events, a closed source vendor such as Sun or MS would have denied the bugs, threatened customers to try to hush things up, and the folks who laid out big bucks for the bugs would have had to pay for an upgrade.
How is Linux ever to become a commercial success/serious platform if development takes years? Same way it's been getting there all along, I guess, by being so much better than the stuff that's rushed out the door to keep the marketing department happy.
I'm from a good deal further West (and North) than Montana. Fortunately, Alaska has a reputation for cold that keeps some of the nuts out, but we have some of both sorts up there too... obnoxious crazies from back east looking for a place to fester, and quiet folk who are left alone because they never trouble others. Not many plain folk up there, but there is a colony of old believers down on the Kenai, as I recall.
I would certainly not trust any accreditation boards; they are as susceptible to political correctness as any other group, and thus teaching Shakespear might wind up verboten, and teaching that ALL consentual sex is rape might not. One of those should seem innocous, and the other should not, to pretty much everyone.
This problem has been around for as long as there has been communication: someone might lead someone else astray. It's old enough that the ancient Greeks had a word for it: someone who led a lot of folks astray was a demagog.
More seriously, I've lived near old, dirty coal plants, and near wind generators, and I'll take the coal anyday. It makes a better neighbor. Wind plants are loud and unsightly, while coal plants are quiet and the new ones are surprisingly clean.
You say 4.5cents /kWh to build? What's the capital cost per kWh? What's the lifespan that you amortize that over? What's it going to cost to produce power on the days that the wind doesn't blow? I hadn't heard that wind power was competitive with a modern coal plant set up close to a mine. The cost of the wind generators per nameplate MW may be low, but the cost per reliable MW has to include the wind generators and either very expensive storage, or fossil generators which can take over on a calm day. I'm not saying there is no place for wind, but it can't replace fossil/nuclear, it isn't suitable. Windpower next to a hydro site might make sense; it could run all night to pump water uphill over the dam, and provide some lowcost peaking power during the day, weather permitting. But for general use, as a primary source of juice? probably not.
The ordinary folks who make up the rank and file of the environmental movements are mostly useful fools, to quote Lenin. They know a whole lot that just ain't so, and they are willing to listen to any fast-talking liar who promises utopia. These grass-roots environmentalists aren't to blame, except in the sense that they are, like all citizens, responsible for their government.
The solution to this problem of political decisionmaking isn't to "join a group" but to reduce the power of government, so that there is less scope for demagogs and useful fools to do harm in the political arena. To get some idea about why the "dive head-first into the manure pile" approach won't actually clean things up, you might want to read a little book by Frederick Bastiat, titled The Law. It's almost as short as the title, and well worth the time it takes to read it. Whatever you may believe about the state of the environment, the environment is far to important to leave to political whimsy.
As I said, they seem to have screwed up pretty much everything in CA, but the original sin was not allowing capacity to keep up to demand. The second factor was not giving demand incentives to drop down to equal supply.
If you interfere with a market, you eventually will go the way of the USSR and California. Even if you find a way to interfere without causing an immediate disaster, you cause some distortion which requires more interference, and on and on until you have rolling blackouts, a state of emergency, and the taxpayers on the hook to pay for the billions of dollars of mistakes made by their "Public Servants".
As someone pointed out in an earlier reply to my post, it wasn't really deregulation that CA tried, it was an attempt to set up a command-economy market, al la the USSR. So you're right, we certainly can't look at CA and say that deregulation doesn't work.
I hadn't noticed that part about negative spot prices... I was taking my prelims about then. But I'm not surprised, in retrospect. All it takes is a loop to make that possible. That means, of course, that folks somewhere are willing to pay to keep power off the lines, to relieve congestion. I've seen examples in the ops research literature, but haven't seen any references to that happening in reality. I don't suppose that you remember what markets?
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market. Thus, consumers had no incentive to conserve when supplies got tight, while the utilities had to keep buying power to meet demand, however high the prices got. That was only the second mistake. They didn't understand the economics of these markets yet, and did some rather stupid things with zonal pricing which aggravated the problem. William Hogan has an interesting paper on his website, in particular this one.
Those links don't seem to be working in the preview, so here they are in cut-and-paste form:_ Feb11.pdf
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/
and
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/zonal
What was the first mistake? Their stupid, infeasible environmental laws, which are really about social and technological ignorance and NIMBY rather than any realistic concern for the human environment. It would be irresponsible to invest any money in power generation or transmission facilities in the People's Republic of California, and the fact that there hasn't been much such investment in recent decades shows that most gereration company CEO's have good sense.
You mention that it's silly to assume that the multinationals would act in the best interests of the Californians. That's sort of right, except that what they are doing is really in the long term best interests of the Californians. By driving up the prices of power, they give incentives to build more generation and transmission facilities in California. The State Government is of course trying to counteract these incentives, with talk of "nationalization" and price caps.
The stuff in your home, and even the bits on your hard drive are yours, and if I take the physical stuff, you don't have it any more. That's why every society has some version of property rights. It's never ok to take peoples stuff, in general, because for all you or I know, their livelihood or lives might depend on it.
Here's how IP differs: if I copy a program / book / whatever which you have sold me, you still have your copy. This is why the very idea of IP is a very recent innovation; it came into being with the printing press, as I understand it. The reasons advanced for copyrights and patents are always to provide monetary incentives for creative endeavors. Patents and copyrights are monopolies granted to the employer of the creator. Economists generally consider that monopolies are very bad things (I can talk with some authority about what economists think, I am one). I don't think that anyone has ever investigated whether this practice of granting monopolies is optimal, or what terms would be optimal for what industries.
Ownership of physical property is vital to the American dream, and basic human dignity. Ownership of IP, in my opinion, is nowhere nearly so fundamental. I believe that it is optional, and should be abandoned as a bad idea, if that is what it is.
Human progress has depended on humans building on the work of others. Encouraging disclosure (as patents have done in the U.S.) is a step in the right direction. Encouraging inventors to invent new algorithms because current ones are patented does not seem an optimal use of scarce resources (and if inventions are not a scarce resource, then what do we need to encourage them for anyway!). The recent problems with patented compression algorithms (such as GIF's) and patented encryption algorithms (such as RSA) should show that IP does not unambiguously increase social welfare in all cases.
After all this, I agree: if you don't own it, it's not yours. Period. We should work to get more sensible copyright and patent laws, but we shouldn't harm the owners of "rights" under the current laws. These shouldn't be called rights, since they cannot predate the existence of governments. They are priviliges, granted by the governments, and unimaginable without government. Rights (in the U.S. at least) are a pre-existing condition, which might be enforced or violated by government, but can never be created or destroyed by it. If I were a lawyer, I could quote you a case or two in which the supreme court said exactly that. But I don't remember the citation. If there is a lawyer reading this, please fill in the blank.
we could paraphrase the answer with another question: where is the deregulation? The telco's are still regulated, and they have been using that regulation to choke out the would-be competition.
I think that if we want to have some competition and some approximation to universal access, we're going to have to do what has been done in the power company deregulation efforts around the world: separate the distribution network from the generation network. The telephone analog of this would be to split the local telco's into a distribution company, which owns the copper, and a service provider, which pays a fee for (NON-exclusive) use of the lines to provide dialtone. Then anyone could pay the same fee and get the same access.
The distribution company could be a regulated semi-monopoly; I say semi-monopoly, since we should allow cable and wireless companies to compete for the business of delivering a dialtone. The distribution companies would be able to ensure universal access in the same way we currently achieve it, by cross-subsidies.
The service companies should be quite unregulated. Anyone should be able to set up some switchgear in their garage and be a service provider. The service company which was split off from the distribution company would have the advantage of an existing customer base, plentiful capital, and a corporate culture of dedication to customer service which would ensure that startups could make headway. Cherry-picking here shouldn't be a problem, I think, since the marginal cost should be about the same for providing a dial tone to any customer.
that you MUST keep the secret, right? So when Microsoft carelessly allowed spies to copy their secrets, they lost the trade secret protection, didn't they? The spies have broken the law, and should be punished, but if they publish the "secrets", it's none of my doing that that's not a secret any more. There may be a copyright to keep me from cutting and pasting, but other than that, it seems that I should be in the clear.
In a nutshell,(TM) I thought that once a trade secret slipped out, it was no longer protected by law. Can someone who IS a lawyer comment on this? Is it true that it doesn't matter HOW a trade secret is divulged?
So, in Russia, artists play music because they love to play, not because it makes them rich... bands have to tour to make money... this is bad? I don't really see anything wrong with it. I think that the current winner-take-all situation in the US is worse in many ways. We see bands like millie-vanillie (spelling?) which can't even sing; they lip-sync for marketing purposes. They made their makers rich, no doubt, but were they art? I do think that copyrights can be good for our society, but certainly not as they are envisioned by the RIAA and MPAA.
Nels
Here's another use for those old 486's and pentium 75's other than Yet Another Firewall: send them to a charity which can get them to a third-world country! Install Linux, and include the install media, since bandwidth for downloads can be expensive. Africa is one place where this kind of thing could make a big difference, but there are also some big chunks of Asia, South America and the Carribean where some old hardware and some help could go a very long way.
Why Linux, by the way (other than advocacy)? After all, so many posters have already pointed out that Windows is free there too. Everyone already knows how to run Windows, so there would be less training required. There are two very practical reasons:
First,the charity would need to keep on the right side of the law back here, where it gets its goods.
Second, there is little training required (or even possible) with Windows. CTRL-ALT-DELETE, then reinstall, is most of the technical know-how you need to M$ successfully. Not exactly a great learning system for folks whom you want to go on and build infrastructure.
So: does anyone know of such a charity? One that could get the hardware into the hands of folks who could use it, and give some training, and would absolutely insist on the use of libre software to avoid lisensing issues?
For IBM, this is no problem; IBM can say: "we'll make it work or give you back your money." That's credible. For Joe's Garage Software, this statement may not have the same level of credibility. If Joe has some past history in business, he may well be able to get a performance bond to stand behind his work, and ensure that funds will be there to fix problems.
It seems to me that this problem really bites the folks who have a really new package, and no past history. I'd guess that for sendmail or apache, there aren't any difficulties here; lots of places will provide support for them. You don't even need the developers anymore for that. Third-party support has been the answer to this question so far in free software. But linuxcare isn't going to offer support for some thing they've never even heard of.
Maybe the beginning of an answer lies in that last paragraph: software with a good reputation WILL be supported by third parties, and you (or your client) will be able to hire some outfit like linuxcare to ensure that your application runs for a client, IF you have earned a good reputation. So, to provide quality assurance in free software:
First, build it and make it good.
Second, keep developing it, make it better, and get users to adopt it.
By now, you should have a good reputation and lots of firms standing ready to stand behind your work.
I'm not sure how we fit a quick IPO and early retirement in here, but maybe you shouldn't expect that out of the free software model.
Nels
So, if I choose not to buy a book, am I a censor?
How far exactly would you like to carry this argument? As long as the library's resources are limited, they will have to purchase some books, and exclude others. CENSORSHIP!
Should the librarians choose the books randomly, to avoid making value judgements? Librarians don't limit access (much) to books and such. But they should certainly remember who pays the bills. The folks of that town are ponying up lots of pounds to provide that library. I think that it is entirely proper for the townsfolk to have a BIG say about what their money gets spent on. If you don't like their taste, spend your own money to make whatever they don't approve of available to the public. Don't try to force others to pay for your opinions. The burning desire to implement your opinions at the expense of others is what this censorship argument always boils down to.
There is, here in the US, a national organization for librarians. They buy into your argument hook, line and sinker. It makes them feel brave and daring to "fight censorship", I suspect, and is always a good argument for a bigger budget: "we need more money to buy reference books... the porn is so expensive, and so popular we can't cut back on it...". I'm sure that's true in GB too, so you can rest easy: the public's right to be robbed to fund utopias isn't in any real danger.
The library laid down the gold for those computers, so they make the rules about using them. Don't like it? Don't use them.
The folks of that little town (?) presumably think that their tax pounds sterling are being used in a suitable way. Here is the US, at least, that would have probability >>0. If you don't like the outcome of the public debate there, either stay home, or move there and get involved.
It is the nature of these socially funded goods that the rules controlling them WILL be set socially, by the political process, and thus in general suboptimally. What can you do about this? Well, try to keep your society from providing things which are not strictly speaking public goods! These computer terminals are rivalrous in consumption, and pretty darn excludeable. Certainly not public goods. My point is not that there should be no "public" access points for the web, but rather that it's not appropriate for the government to fund them. Why not set up a charity to provide open-access terminals, subject to sane conditions of use? Then anyone who doesn't like YOUR idea of sane can go found his own charity. Don't think it's worth while? You're probably right, so stop complaining.
The point here is not censorship, exactly, but rather the more fundamental question of "what should the government be doing?". Today we would all be far better off if the government did just a bit less. Not nothing, mind you; just a bit less. Then we wouldn't have to decide so many fundamentally private questions in the public arena, where the folks who sniff a handout always have more incentive to yell 'till they get their way than the rest of us. Think how much more restful life would be if we didn't have to continually lobby for this bill that will line our pockets at the expense of others, and against that bill which will line someone else's pockets at our expense!
Nels Tomlinson
Education isn't about learning a trade, or learning to run, (or write) circuit simulators. It's about getting a grasp on history, and nuances, and learning to see new situations and languages in the light of that history and those nuances. Most Americans don't get that sort of education. Neither do most Indians. Imagine that in this country English was taught only to children bound for Ivy-league schools. That's roughly how it is in India.
Back around the turn of the last century, about 5% of the US population got a University education. Today, close to half of the US population goes to something called a University, and still about 5% gets a University education. The rest get a trade-school education.
Nels
I think that the reason we're seeing so much angst over these business models is that these "giveaways" are presented as free; they aren't, as you have so eloquently argued. The actual intent is to trick the unwary into giving away something of greater value for something of lesser value. The old "new lamps for old" scam.
If some one wants to make such a deal, knowing what he's getting into, fine. If CluelessCat wants to trick the gullible, I don't think that is fine at all.
Every time one of these companies sets their "rules", and finds that people who never knowingly agreed to them don't follow them, we can only laugh. If new technology comes out with restrictive legislation, it'll be because you didn't contact your congress-critters early and often.
Nels
We know that telling people what the rules are will get them to change their behavior. Game theory tells us that the set of possible equilibria may change. In short, it is not necessarily better to tell everyone what the rules are, and try to iterate to some new steady state, in which we all try to exploit, and "it all balances out".
This really is not related to the security-by-obsecurity issue, I think. It involves security in the sense of "keep your passwords secret", not in the sense of "build a system with no bugs", which seems to be where security-by-obscurity fails. The issue here is that rules which people could know about and not be able to exploit might well be significantly inferior to rules which are exploitable.
I suppose that someone who wanted to find out an answer to this could try to get a grant to set up a search engine with a public rating system, and see what came of it. If we can come up with a reasonable metric for the signal-to-noise ratio which resulted from searches, we could find out what really works. By the way, I suspect that one problem with such a proposal would be that no one will bother gaming the system unless it is REALLY popular, and delivers loads of hits. That is, I don't think that this could be done on a small scale: go Google-size, or you won't get any data that applies to the big engines. But you could find out how alternative rules work, with a site that was below the radar screens of the home shopping network and the porn queens.
I have a question for you CS grad students: is there any academic literature on this issue, looking at how people react to this sort of structure, and how the structure must be designed to get them to react in a way which doesn't screw things up? This seems to relate to the information theory field of economics.
There is easy-to-use, and then there is easy-to-learn. They are often orthogonal. That seems to be especially true in computer UI's.
It seems to me that the MacOS is easy-to-learn, judging by the things the Mac-o-philes tell me. That is, you can easily get things done, without any need for any understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. That isn't really a bad thing, either, until you NEED to know what's going on.
That's where the author's example came in: the kiddies would use ftp, and not have a clue where the file wound up, or even that they had downloaded a file. They hadn't learned that you start an application, and then open a file... they had learned that you click on something, and it opens...
If you save a file somewhere on a Unix box, but don't know where, or exactly what the name was, you can use grep with regular expressions, or any one of a number of methods to search the directories where you have write permissions and find it. If you have that problem under Windows, there aren't any reg-exps, just ? and *. Reg-exps are hard to learn, but so powerful and easy to use. They just don't seem to fit the Windows/Mac way of doing things. This is the difference between easy-to-use and easy-to-learn In a Nutshell (hey, that's a catchy phrase, I should trademark it!).
I read that fellow's article,and I'm still scratching my head. I know that you have to salt a scholarly paper with some big words, and some obfuscation, lest people realize that you really aren't adding anything to the field, but this was ridiculous. What field is this guy in? The standards for content are very different than in Econometrica, or even American Statistician.
I'm really not sure what his point was, but I have the uneasy feeling that he had one.
Nels
Yes, they chose to give it away (actually, to provide it to Radio Shack for a price, it's Radio Shack who gave me mine). If they don't like what I choose to do with my new toy, they shouldn't give me any more. Other than that, they're out of luck. If I want to take it apart, use a driver some has written, and generally take advantage of the gift they gave me, they're out of luck. Let'em whine, "unhappy" doesn't equal "wronged".
Tough.
Nels
I just checked out cell phones again. They still seem to cost about twice as much per month as the landlines. I won't be getting one until they get a bit more competitive. Also there is the nuisance factor. If you have a phone, people can call you. When you need to get some work done, you get out of the office so you won't be disturbed. With a cell phone in your pocket that won't work so well. I think that nuisance factor outweights the added convenience of being able to call out from anywhere, like sitting in the park, or sitting in the toilet, or the toilet in the park, or...
Another problem is that most service plans require you to pay for incoming calls! Not only are people bothering you, but you're paying for it. That really adds insult to injury. The rates I saw seemed to run around 30 to 50 cents a minute for local calls, with 15 cents a minute extra for long-distance. This was digital service in the MidWest.
I don't think that cellphones will get too far beyond the gadget-freak crowd until service gets quite a bit cheaper. I'm just not willing, right now, to pay more than double for phone service, just to make it easier for others to bother me. I rarely have to make a call when I'm not near a land line, so the added convenience is just isn't worth much extra money for me.
Nels
The gas prices in Europe are artificially high! Their gas taxes are far higher than ours. This is probably a legacy of their socialist past, when only the very prosperous had cars (true into the 1950's). Also, the tiny size of their countries pretty well ruled out long-distance driving before the EU. After all, if an Austian or Italian goes on what would be a pleasant, all-day jaunt into the next state over here, he winds up in the next country.
The same situation of artificially inflated gas prices holds true in Canada and Taiwan. Probably other countries as well, but these two I know about first hand. Gas taxes are an easy source of revenue in Europe and Taiwan, because gas is really a luxury for most people. Those countries have also fairly comprehensive public transportation systems, not because the people want it, but because it is subsidied by their socialist governments. The public transport is well-used, since the people can't afford anthing better, after the government has robbed them blind and jacked up the price of gas. Their environment is certainly no cleaner than ours, to boot.
Windows 2000 is a bit better, but the fact is that installing windows requires AT LEAST as much knowlege as does installing Linux. My father, now a grandpa, couldn't install either. He was an electronics technician for many years, a ham radio operator, and took several programming classes over the last 10 years. His first experiences with computers were back before magnetic core memory. I spent over an hour on the phone long distance getting him through installing windows. GUI's are terribly unintuitive at first use. The hundreds of little conventions about which window is active, how you move about, how you change things, the fact that dialog boxs pop up and CHANGE which window is active, are all confusing. That is actually one of the great things about the linux text-based installers: they don't require that you have the years of experience with the GUI.
The fact is that a new user is unlikely to be able to install any useful operating system on his own. Or windows, or BEOS. Would you expect a new auto user to be able to fix a car? Even a model T? New users have to be told how to find a gas tank! Remember the first time you tried to cook? Followong a receipe is easy when you know how: divide two eggs, cook some spagetti, reserve some of the water, and so on... if you aren't familiar with the jargon and the basics, it's gibberish. Same with computers. Nothing is easy until you understand it.
I posted a comment above, RE:windows is (NOT) easy to use, which details some other of my experiences with windows. I am convinced that windows is actually NOT easy to use, nor easy to install, when compared with old-style, command line unix. At the Purdue stat department the secretarys, who have windows pcs on their desks, use pine and vi on AIX for most of their work. They find it easier, and they teach it to temps because even for temps, the learning curve is short enough. They use those windows pcs for xterms, and for netsurfing.
When you start using a computer, you learn, through trial and error, how to accomplish the things you can imagine to do. Once you've learned it, and forgotten how you struggled, it's easy. By this standard, windows would be easy. So was VMS.
I disagree with this idea that "windows is easy to install". Here is a little rant that I sent off a couple days ago on the subject which explains why.
... fdisk gets
... the problem is that
\begin{rant}
I've installed Linux on several machinces in the last year, including a
bleeding-edge laptop, an older laptop, and a couple of desktops, one
overclocked. I've installed windows (mostly 98, once 2000) on all of
them at least once, as well.
Windows WILL find the hardware, every time, and doesn't have the right
drivers for it, and will drive your 21 inch monitor hooked to a big,
fast 3d card at 640x480x8bit until you take it by the hand, after many
reboots, and lead it to a driver for your card, and another for your
monitor, which YOU must dig up. Then you must reboot AGAIN!
Contrast this to Linux: it correctly detects the card, just as does
windows, and then loads a good driver for it. It offers you a sensible
default resolution, and you're off. All the other hardware is handled
similarly by Linux: it finds it, gives you a decent driver, and things
just work. The windows example is also standard: it finds some kind of
hardware, loads a lowest common denominator driver, and then expects YOU
to do the work of making it work right.
Don't try to install Win98 to replace NT, by the way
baffled, scandisk crashes, setup.exe craps out
they don't know that NTFS isn't FAT, and die in an uninformative
manner. I had to use Linux's fdisk to repartition as ef2s, then MSfdisk
thought that the partition was "unformatted", or some such, and could
work with it.
In short, it seems to me that Windows is MUCH harder to install than is
Linux. Windows does have a fancy graphical installation tool, not quite
so nice as Corel's, perhaps, but it really doesn't DO anything for you!
Linux, with or without the eye-candy, gives you far fewer hassles, far
fewer reboots than even win2000, and seems to me to require a bit less
knowlege of the hardware, as well. Linux only requires that you guess
which interrupt your soundcard wants. That you can get by trial and
error (some day I'll write down which one works, so I don't have to try
the guessing game at each install on a given machine).
Windows requires that you have the manufacturer's driver on hand for
EVERY part in your machine! For a frankenstein box, assembled out of
old parts, that can be a big problem. You have to know what you have,
and go find the drivers, and on and on. First stop, the FCC website, to
try to find out who made each board, and then go find out that the
manufacturer is out of business and no more drivers. For a Compaq (don't
buy Compaq if you want to run windows), knowing your hardware is still a
big problem. Finding the drivers on the Compaq disk is painfull. For
Linux, all the drivers are on one CD, and the installer finds the right
one for you. THAT'S easy.
Yes, Linux app's do seem to be lagging a bit yet, but Staroffice 5.2 is
getting pretty close to MSOffice. You will soon be able to do
Microsofty things as well as MS, and serious work is already much easier
on Unix. By the way, administering NT on a home system doesn't seem any
easier to me than the same chores on Linux. Maybe even harder, since at
least with Linux, I know what's behind the GUI. You never really know
that with MS.
It always bugs me to hear this "Linux is hard to install" line, since
that exactly contradicts my experience.
\end{rant}
Nels Tomlinson