Yep. Buffy definitely has plots. Plot arcs, even. The fate of Willow becomming a possible Vengence daemon spanned just over a whole season. Usually, in any given episode, there are actually two parallel plots -- One dramatic, and one comedic. (e.g. in one episode where Spike, being non-human, is the only one to realize that two characters (one good and one evil) are actually alter-egos of each other.)
When I originally heard about buffy, I decided to pass on it. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, I considered it 'bubble-gum'. I figured that, as a TV series, it would be pretty vacuous. When I finally got around to watching it, I found that it was hilarious. It is now one of only two TV series that I watch regularly (the other being Enterprise*).
In any case, I wrote up a defence of Buffy some time ago (which was printed in a local SF mag).
I also have Slashdot Journal entry about how Buffy's biggest problem in running for Emmys is that they're going for the drama prizes when they should competing in the comedy category.
*(for those of you just waiting for me to comit blasphemy, I've come to like the theme to Enterprise, and have gone to the trouble of transcribing and memorizing it... If you pay attention, it's basically a musical version of the 'where no-one has gone before' monologue.
Back in the early '90s, a PC (Windows) magazine (PC Mag, I think), acknowled that
MacOS has a 5 year software lead on Windows, and this lead is likely to continue for the forseeable future
(or something pretty close to that).
Engineers rule at Apple, so the OS was well designed, but badly marketed.
System 7 was stable, consistent, extensible, and -- unlike any version of Windows -- very well thought-out and designed.
Marketers ruled at Microsoft, so the OS was badly designed, but well marketed.
Yes, the marketing people won this war -- but as a childhood saying went:
Nobody said anything about emulation. A port is a native compilation, and therefore no performance hit is taken.
When Mac went from the 68K to the PPC, they included emulation software, do that the PPC could still run the 'legacy' 68K code. Because the PPC was enough faster than the 68K, the emulated code still ran with 'reasonably acceptable' speed.
Intel isn't much (if at all) faster than similarly timed PPCs, so trying to do a PPC emulation on an Intel CPU would probably be a horror story.
(the '386 architecture is also not quite as elegant as the PPC architecture. Most of the registers would have to be stored in RAM, and that would hurt you BIGTIME).
You're addicted to the long hours. You've actually acknowledged that the long hours are making you work worse. The math doesn't work. Why work 4 hours doing what you could accomplish in 1 if you had the 3 hours sleep and relaxation?
Talk to your boss. Find a coach. Find someone you can talk to and who can tell yo when you've hit the point of diminishing returns.
See what you can farm off to other programmers
In any case, the bonus isn't going to do you any good if you end up (literally) dead from exhaustion.
Besides: If the customer diddled the dog for 4 months when you should have been programming, you should be charging for your overtime, and getting it out of the customer. If it's really that important that it get done in time, they'll pay. If not, then forget them.
Apple, CIsco, Palm, etc, worked their employees long hours, but it was long pampered hours. -- and most of those employees had stock options which meant that they shared in the profits that came from those long hours.
This guy looks like he's walking into a sweatshop environment.. Long hours, little recognition, bad project planning.....
It's the bad project planning that really gets to me. It's the expecting the employees to be slaves and happy about it. It's the sinking ship, and you better find a raft now feeling to this whole scenario that has me wanting to scream.
Get you resume out there NOW!
Either everybody burns out before the project's finished, or they get fired after it's finished, or they're going to expect you to do it again with the next project.
In either case, you'll be short a job, a life, or both.
Some executives really don't care about reality. What they care about is the numbers. As long as the numbers add up to a nice big bonus cheque at the end of the quarter/year/whatever, they're happy.
We'll handle reality tomorrow.
Yes, it leads to Enronitis, and the like but -- hey! The ex prez of MCI got his $400M loan before the bottom fell out of the company.
And in answer to the original question, some famous executive had a saying:
I can do a year's worth of work in 11 months, but I can't do it in 12
First things first: Don't bother slamming the AS/400. They probably know the system far better than you do. This includes all of it's bumps and SMOOWTs (System Malfunctions Or Other Wierd Things). You'll only be doing one of two things:
1) wasting time covering things they already know, or
2) hitting an open wound and pissing someone off.(... or both)
What they called you in for is to know what Linux can do for them. If you really want to impress them, I'd say try and be candid. Say both what it can do, and what you should not (currently) be used for (I'm sure there's a few of those).
If it was me, I'd start with a quick history of Unix/Linux.. how Unix was Pseudo-Open Source in it's early days and how the closing down of Unix led to the founding of the GNU foundation which opened up the way for Linus to write a kernel with the promise of all those GNU utilities to populate the hard disk.
I'd probably cover off a couple of the popular OS licenses (GNU & BSD at the least).. Let them know the downfall of the GNU license (Don't canibalize the source unless you want to free your own), and the advantages (everybody is a potential support person).
At that point, you could probably go through a quick Hall of OS fame (Sendmail, GCC, SSH, Apache, MySql/Postgres, Perl, The Web.... [Remember that Microsoft is Still using BSD code in NT's TCP stack, and IE started out as the Mosaic web browser]).
Some other things you might go through are stability, ease of use/installation (network installs are the way to go, and faster than CDs) and, of course, the ability to fix almost anything that you really want to fix -- or farm it out to someone else (distributer) if you've got more money than time.
The next thing I can think of is to do a quick overview of some of the various Linux distributions available -- big ones, little ones; general ones, specific ones.. If nothing else, it shows off how you you can customize Linux for anything from word processing to firewalls.
After that, you might mention a couple of areas where you see Linux as a possible boon directly within the company (probably underlaying why they really want to hear from you).
To add to that, I'd ask why go with AS/400 when for similar cost and much better interface/usability, you could do a Linux or Sun cluster?
The easy answer is: the software was originally written for AS400 -- and moving it off would take time and money and risk having an unstable system -- at least until you get all of the bugs out.
In time, moving to a comoditized system might be a good idea. but in the meantime, "you gotta dance with the one that brung 'ya".
I may hate the X-10 popup adds, but at least they're paying for them -- which supports the web sites that I'm going to. I'd rather support X-10 and the sites that they give money to than somebody who spammed me.. You'd have to tie me to a pole and treaten to burn me at the stake to get me to buy from a spammer.
Unless they're blocking everything under the sun, chances are that they won't get around to blocking you. -- Besides: if they're blocking hotmail because all the nubes are downloading and running viruses, then the fact that you know enough to set up your own webmail would be an indicator that you (hopefully) know better than that.
(Just don't go selling access to your home box to all the nubes that download and run viruses).
Actually, that's not too far off the mark. The easiest way to test for bandwidth independent of remote traffic hickups is to start up a handfull of transfers to a bunch of different sites. If you can consistently max out the bandwidth of your T1, then chances are that your ISP has a reasonably provisioned network.
testing your outbound traffic is going to be a bit harder (mostly a problem with finding people who will take great gobs of your data).
P2P networks with a juicy set of files to transfer are a pretty good way of doing that.
If you can watch the raw traffic as it goes to your DSU, then you should even be able to factor in the bandwidth that your building-mates are using, too.
getting 300-900Kbps isn't bad. It can be hard to tell if the 300's are because the machine at the other end is slow or your ISP is oversubscribed.
If you can do a series of transfers in rapid succession to different places, and you can get consistently high bandwidth to some of them, then that's proabaly closer to the real bandwith of your own line.
If no site can get consistently good bandwidth, then I'd be more likely to blame it on my ISP oversubscribing.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
on
How to Test Your T1?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It all depends on where you want your T1 bandwith to go TO. Unless your local guy is guaranteeing you a specific bandwidth to the local backbone, there's nothing wrong with him (slightly) over-subscribing a DS-3. That sort of stuff is being done all over the net.. Mostly based on the fact that hardly anybody comes close to running their pipe full out 24/7.
This even applies to phone lines.. That's why It's sometimes hard to get a call through on Mothers' day. The phone companies provision to handle 99%+ of the volume spikes, and mothers' day can consistently make it into that last percentile. Even so... handling 99% of the traffic spikes still comes to far less than one circuit for every two subscribers.
To test if your T1 is really a T1, you can try setting up for an FTP (or whatever) session with your buddies... Change things to make sure that you've each got the route to the other going through the first hop on your T1. As long as that router doesn't icmp-redirect the traffic, (in which case your measured bandwidth will be more in line with local ethernet traffic) you should be able to get a good estimate as to the raw bandwidth of your 'last mile'.
(it'll actually be the lesser of your uplink speed and your downlink speed minus a little bit)
The next hop would be to set up a transfer with something inside of your ISP's primary network.
(did they give you a web site on one of their systems, etc??). That'll allow you to test for local bandwidh bottlenecks and give you a theoretical maximum to the outside world.
The last link check would be to find a machine on a fast network that's not on your local ISP's but is (topologically) close. Try doing traceroutes to nearby universities.. See if you can find one that doesn't put you through 3 different ISPs. Then try and transfer data from/to them and see how fast it goes.
You'd be best to try connections to a few semi-local sites. Otherwise it'll be hard to
tell if a low bandwidth reading is the fault of your ISP, or the server's ISP.
It's pretty much useless to check bandwidth to random (distant) sites.
Once you get a site that's a reasonable ways away (topologically or geographically), then you run into the vagraties of internet traffic (see the article earlier this week about 'net quakes)..
BTW:
When I speak of being topologically close, this is different from geographically close. I remember one case where getting a packet to a machine not more than 100 feet away (but on another ISP) sent traffic from Vancouver, down the coast to Silicon Valley and back. Needless to say, ping times stank. In that case we were geographically close, but topographically distant.
THere would be two times to test these transfer speeds: Low time (e.g. 4am) and prime time (Last time I peeled apart ISP traffic stats, traffic peaks were around 8-9pm for home traffic and about 4PM and 9AM for commercial traffic)
I don't buy cars based on what brand I like, or how their business practices are.
Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?
To follow on the oft-repeated analogy: would you buy a car with the hood welded shut and an EULA that required you to only have it serviced at the manufacturer's shop, threatened you with jail for fixing problems yourself, and comitted you to paying a premium if you replaced the car with a competetor's model?
Vehicles are, essentially open-source.
the hood's not welded shut
We can move from make to another at will.
We can change whatever parts of them we want -- or go to the manufacturer for 'proper' repairs.
If we can figure out how to put a GM engine into a Ford chassis, we won't have to worry about either company suing us.
we don't have to drive in different lanes depending on what model car we have
A city car won't maliciously 'seize up' if we take it 'off road' on a flat piece of desert.
We often quietly put up with these sorts of things from software vendors. They call it 'standard industry practice'. We (customers) are the ones who pay through the nose. If the automobile (or most other) industries did the same things, we'd have lynch mobs out.
You could just type your e-mail in word and then encrpyt and then paste into hotmail. They keylogger probably won't log Word-created documents as e-mail.
I would expect that, for sites like hotmail, the program is going to record your 'post' requests.
. The setup here doen't bother me too much because I use an obscure free webmail provider (20MB, IMAP4!!) One day I'll drag the name of that webmail provider out of you!
Why do you need it?
Become your own webmail provider.
I use fetchmail to grab mail from remote sites. I also point the primary MX for my own domain to my home box. This consolidates most everything into one email address.
At that point, you can use imap(s) and horde/IMP to create your own webmail service... or just SSH in and start up your favorite mail program remotely.
(I've even done it with Netscape/mozilla.. It's slow, but it works).
20MB max?? HA! how big is your/var partition?
The biggest problem I currently have is that, with Mozilla, the SSL Certs for my web server and imaps server collide. If I save the cert for one, the other claims that it's invalid.
The problems with making 'wardialing' illegal is that it's often done by accident. Consider the case of the guy who had a public access site up, and got overrun by StarBucks. Some of these people didn't want StarBucks. Are we going to throw people in jail because someone put up a conflicting access point?
polyopoly " - or perhaps "poliopoly", but that sounds a bit too much like someone who is infected by multiple polio viruses.
But -- as was pointed out: Jonas Salk placed his vaxine into the public domain -- and thus saved millions of lives and made polio almost extinct (with the exception of 'defensive' bioweapons stores).
The success of the vaccination effort won Jonas Salk unsought fame. The March of Dimes, hoping to boost publicity and donations to fund vaccination programs, lionized Salk to the point of offending his colleagues. He had applied the findings of others in a successful bid to prevent disease. Other researchers and doctors grumbled that he hadn't found anything new; he had just applied what was there. But the timing of his successful vaccine at the peak of polio's devastation made the public blind to that.
Had todays IP laws been in place back then, much of the work that Salk depended on would have probably been patented. He might not have been able to create the Smallpox vaccine, and many of us here today would have thus been dead.
Is Mozilla more innovative than Internet Explorer or Opera?
Is TCP/IP and the Internet more innovative than xns?
or netbios (which came much later)?
Is Sendmail / SMTP more innovative than DEC's messaging system from the early '80s, or IBM's? (damned If I can remember their names).
Is NFS more innovative than RFS?? (actually, I'd say that they were about even -- but NFS won out.. possibly because it was more open than RFS).
______
When you think about it: VHS beat out Beta -- not because it was better but because it was more 'open' (just about anybody could produce a VHS machine, but only Sony could produce Beta).
Similarly, many people ascribed DOS's ascendency over the obviously superior MAC to openness -- the fact that anybody could (and did) build a DOS box, and put whatever they wanted into it.
Openness does drive innovation.
With two products of equivalent inovativeness, the one that is more open tends to drive more collateral innovation -- and is thus most likely to thrive.
Part of the reason for patents and Copyrights was the fear that, without them, big-money own-it-alls would usurp the works of truly innovative (usually small) authors and scientists -- make all of the money off of their work and, this remove any incentive for them to make their work known.
Copyright and Patents have now swung to the other end of the pendulum. They've become and end in, and of, themselves. They've been 'strengthened' to the point where we'll soon be 'celebrating' a Century of Intellectual wilderness -- A century during which substantially nothing has been put into copyright that has subsequently flowed into the public domain -- as envisioned by the writers of the first amendment.
Much of what was created in the early 1900s will be lost into this wilderness. Only the most famous (and, in some cases, the most mundane) works will survive. Much of the rest is caught in a legal limbo. Nobody knows who 'owns' it -- thus, nobody can obtain the right to copy it. By the time it's legal to redistribute it, the originals will be incapable of being duplicated.
Consider that recordings of the technical conversations with the Apollo astronauts were only barely recoverable -- and this after less than 30 years in storage. Imagine what another 100+ years of languishing would do to less famous works -- Those who would like to preserve them risk criminalizing themselves in the process.
Had the original works been protected under current Copyright rules, Disny's Snow White would never have been made. Similarly, most of Shakespeares works are known to have had their stories lifted from other authors.
We build on the works of others. Copyright and Patent laws are useful to the extent to which they lubricate the path from creation to public availability. The moment that these laws block that path, they become repugnant to their moral and constitutional underpinning.
Is Mozilla more innovative than Internet Explorer or Opera?
Internet Explorer and Opera are based on the original NCSA Mosaic browsers -- which was an open source project. NT's TCP/IP Stack is mostly 'embraced and extended(corrupted)' BSD (open source) code.
Without open source, Bill gates wouldn't have ben able to program his way out of a router.
Patents and copyrights are about protection of an individual's ownership and reproduction rights of a produced work.
Bzzzt!
That's close to what they do, but it's not what they're about. Patents and Copyrights are supposed to give inventors/authors a temporary monopoly on their inventions so that they have an incentive to create and distribute them.
The temporary 'ownership' of the ideas and the profits that should go with that are simply supposed to be the vehicle for promoting innovation. It's pretty clear when you give a good read to the text of the first amendment.
"The people own it. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" (although granted, the likes of Jack Valenti [slashdot.org] probably would love to have IP ownership of everything and anything).
Or, as my (very right wing) sister once said (after a tornado hit Edmonton),
Criminal liability requires intent. If I got a virus accidently, and I am doing my best to get rid of it, then the intent does not exist, and probably couldn't be proved. On the other hand, being complacent about the existence of an active virus/worm on my system could lead to charges because I did nothing to get rid of it once I knew it was there. (along the lines of criminal negligence).
I've got nothing against encouraging the use of Open Source solutions. I have some quams about forcing it.
Open source is about freedom. Enforced freedom is an oxymoron.
Slashdot Mirror
When I originally heard about buffy, I decided to pass on it. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, I considered it 'bubble-gum'. I figured that, as a TV series, it would be pretty vacuous. When I finally got around to watching it, I found that it was hilarious. It is now one of only two TV series that I watch regularly (the other being Enterprise*).
In any case, I wrote up a defence of Buffy some time ago (which was printed in a local SF mag).
I also have Slashdot Journal entry about how Buffy's biggest problem in running for Emmys is that they're going for the drama prizes when they should competing in the comedy category.
*(for those of you just waiting for me to comit blasphemy, I've come to like the theme to Enterprise, and have gone to the trouble of transcribing and memorizing it... If you pay attention, it's basically a musical version of the 'where no-one has gone before' monologue.
Engineers rule at Apple, so the OS was well designed, but badly marketed. System 7 was stable, consistent, extensible, and -- unlike any version of Windows -- very well thought-out and designed.
Marketers ruled at Microsoft, so the OS was badly designed, but well marketed.
Yes, the marketing people won this war -- but as a childhood saying went:
When Mac went from the 68K to the PPC, they included emulation software, do that the PPC could still run the 'legacy' 68K code. Because the PPC was enough faster than the 68K, the emulated code still ran with 'reasonably acceptable' speed.
Intel isn't much (if at all) faster than similarly timed PPCs, so trying to do a PPC emulation on an Intel CPU would probably be a horror story.
(the '386 architecture is also not quite as elegant as the PPC architecture. Most of the registers would have to be stored in RAM, and that would hurt you BIGTIME).
Now
You're addicted to the long hours. You've actually acknowledged that the long hours are making you work worse. The math doesn't work. Why work 4 hours doing what you could accomplish in 1 if you had the 3 hours sleep and relaxation?
Talk to your boss. Find a coach. Find someone you can talk to and who can tell yo when you've hit the point of diminishing returns.
See what you can farm off to other programmers
In any case, the bonus isn't going to do you any good if you end up (literally) dead from exhaustion.
Besides: If the customer diddled the dog for 4 months when you should have been programming, you should be charging for your overtime, and getting it out of the customer. If it's really that important that it get done in time, they'll pay. If not, then forget them.
This guy looks like he's walking into a sweatshop environment.. Long hours, little recognition, bad project planning.....
It's the bad project planning that really gets to me. It's the expecting the employees to be slaves and happy about it. It's the sinking ship, and you better find a raft now feeling to this whole scenario that has me wanting to scream.
- Get you resume out there NOW!
Either everybody burns out before the project's finished, or they get fired after it's finished, or they're going to expect you to do it again with the next project.In either case, you'll be short a job, a life, or both.
We'll handle reality tomorrow.
Yes, it leads to Enronitis, and the like but -- hey! The ex prez of MCI got his $400M loan before the bottom fell out of the company.
And in answer to the original question, some famous executive had a saying:
1) wasting time covering things they already know, or
2) hitting an open wound and pissing someone off.(... or both)
What they called you in for is to know what Linux can do for them. If you really want to impress them, I'd say try and be candid. Say both what it can do, and what you should not (currently) be used for (I'm sure there's a few of those).
If it was me, I'd start with a quick history of Unix/Linux.. how Unix was Pseudo-Open Source in it's early days and how the closing down of Unix led to the founding of the GNU foundation which opened up the way for Linus to write a kernel with the promise of all those GNU utilities to populate the hard disk.
I'd probably cover off a couple of the popular OS licenses (GNU & BSD at the least).. Let them know the downfall of the GNU license (Don't canibalize the source unless you want to free your own), and the advantages (everybody is a potential support person).
At that point, you could probably go through a quick Hall of OS fame (Sendmail, GCC, SSH, Apache, MySql/Postgres, Perl, The Web.... [Remember that Microsoft is Still using BSD code in NT's TCP stack, and IE started out as the Mosaic web browser]).
Some other things you might go through are stability, ease of use/installation (network installs are the way to go, and faster than CDs) and, of course, the ability to fix almost anything that you really want to fix -- or farm it out to someone else (distributer) if you've got more money than time.
The next thing I can think of is to do a quick overview of some of the various Linux distributions available -- big ones, little ones; general ones, specific ones.. If nothing else, it shows off how you you can customize Linux for anything from word processing to firewalls.
After that, you might mention a couple of areas where you see Linux as a possible boon directly within the company (probably underlaying why they really want to hear from you).
The easy answer is: the software was originally written for AS400 -- and moving it off would take time and money and risk having an unstable system -- at least until you get all of the bugs out.
In time, moving to a comoditized system might be a good idea. but in the meantime, "you gotta dance with the one that brung 'ya".
'Nuff said.
I may hate the X-10 popup adds, but at least they're paying for them -- which supports the web sites that I'm going to. I'd rather support X-10 and the sites that they give money to than somebody who spammed me..
You'd have to tie me to a pole and treaten to burn me at the stake to get me to buy from a spammer.
(Just don't go selling access to your home box to all the nubes that download and run viruses).
testing your outbound traffic is going to be a bit harder (mostly a problem with finding people who will take great gobs of your data).
P2P networks with a juicy set of files to transfer are a pretty good way of doing that.
If you can watch the raw traffic as it goes to your DSU, then you should even be able to factor in the bandwidth that your building-mates are using, too.
If no site can get consistently good bandwidth, then I'd be more likely to blame it on my ISP oversubscribing.
This even applies to phone lines.. That's why It's sometimes hard to get a call through on Mothers' day. The phone companies provision to handle 99%+ of the volume spikes, and mothers' day can consistently make it into that last percentile. Even so... handling 99% of the traffic spikes still comes to far less than one circuit for every two subscribers.
To test if your T1 is really a T1, you can try setting up for an FTP (or whatever) session with your buddies... Change things to make sure that you've each got the route to the other going through the first hop on your T1. As long as that router doesn't icmp-redirect the traffic, (in which case your measured bandwidth will be more in line with local ethernet traffic) you should be able to get a good estimate as to the raw bandwidth of your 'last mile'. (it'll actually be the lesser of your uplink speed and your downlink speed minus a little bit)
The next hop would be to set up a transfer with something inside of your ISP's primary network. (did they give you a web site on one of their systems, etc??). That'll allow you to test for local bandwidh bottlenecks and give you a theoretical maximum to the outside world.
The last link check would be to find a machine on a fast network that's not on your local ISP's but is (topologically) close. Try doing traceroutes to nearby universities.. See if you can find one that doesn't put you through 3 different ISPs. Then try and transfer data from/to them and see how fast it goes.
You'd be best to try connections to a few semi-local sites. Otherwise it'll be hard to tell if a low bandwidth reading is the fault of your ISP, or the server's ISP.
It's pretty much useless to check bandwidth to random (distant) sites. Once you get a site that's a reasonable ways away (topologically or geographically), then you run into the vagraties of internet traffic (see the article earlier this week about 'net quakes)..
BTW: When I speak of being topologically close, this is different from geographically close. I remember one case where getting a packet to a machine not more than 100 feet away (but on another ISP) sent traffic from Vancouver, down the coast to Silicon Valley and back. Needless to say, ping times stank. In that case we were geographically close, but topographically distant.
THere would be two times to test these transfer speeds: Low time (e.g. 4am) and prime time (Last time I peeled apart ISP traffic stats, traffic peaks were around 8-9pm for home traffic and about 4PM and 9AM for commercial traffic)
I don't buy cars based on what brand I like, or how their business practices are.
- Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?
To follow on the oft-repeated analogy: would you buy a car with the hood welded shut and an EULA that required you to only have it serviced at the manufacturer's shop, threatened you with jail for fixing problems yourself, and comitted you to paying a premium if you replaced the car with a competetor's model?- Vehicles are, essentially open-source.
- the hood's not welded shut
- We can move from make to another at will.
- We can change whatever parts of them we want -- or go to the manufacturer for 'proper' repairs.
- If we can figure out how to put a GM engine into a Ford chassis, we won't have to worry about either company suing us.
- we don't have to drive in different lanes depending on what model car we have
- A city car won't maliciously 'seize up' if we take it 'off road' on a flat piece of desert.
We often quietly put up with these sorts of things from software vendors. They call it 'standard industry practice'. We (customers) are the ones who pay through the nose. If the automobile (or most other) industries did the same things, we'd have lynch mobs out.I would expect that, for sites like hotmail, the program is going to record your 'post' requests.
One day I'll drag the name of that webmail provider out of you!
Why do you need it?
Become your own webmail provider.
I use fetchmail to grab mail from remote sites. I also point the primary MX for my own domain to my home box. This consolidates most everything into one email address.
At that point, you can use imap(s) and horde/IMP to create your own webmail service... or just SSH in and start up your favorite mail program remotely. (I've even done it with Netscape/mozilla .. It's slow, but it works).
20MB max?? HA! how big is your /var partition?
The biggest problem I currently have is that, with Mozilla, the SSL Certs for my web server and imaps server collide. If I save the cert for one, the other claims that it's invalid.
The problems with making 'wardialing' illegal is that it's often done by accident. Consider the case of the guy who had a public access site up, and got overrun by StarBucks. Some of these people didn't want StarBucks. Are we going to throw people in jail because someone put up a conflicting access point?
But -- as was pointed out: Jonas Salk placed his vaxine into the public domain -- and thus saved millions of lives and made polio almost extinct (with the exception of 'defensive' bioweapons stores).
From one story about Salk:
Had todays IP laws been in place back then, much of the work that Salk depended on would have probably been patented. He might not have been able to create the Smallpox vaccine, and many of us here today would have thus been dead.Is TCP/IP and the Internet more innovative than xns? or netbios (which came much later)?
Is Sendmail / SMTP more innovative than DEC's messaging system from the early '80s, or IBM's? (damned If I can remember their names).
Is NFS more innovative than RFS?? (actually, I'd say that they were about even -- but NFS won out .. possibly because it was more open than RFS).
______
When you think about it: VHS beat out Beta -- not because it was better but because it was more 'open' (just about anybody could produce a VHS machine, but only Sony could produce Beta).
Similarly, many people ascribed DOS's ascendency over the obviously superior MAC to openness -- the fact that anybody could (and did) build a DOS box, and put whatever they wanted into it.
Openness does drive innovation.
With two products of equivalent inovativeness, the one that is more open tends to drive more collateral innovation -- and is thus most likely to thrive.
Part of the reason for patents and Copyrights was the fear that, without them, big-money own-it-alls would usurp the works of truly innovative (usually small) authors and scientists -- make all of the money off of their work and, this remove any incentive for them to make their work known.
Copyright and Patents have now swung to the other end of the pendulum. They've become and end in, and of, themselves. They've been 'strengthened' to the point where we'll soon be 'celebrating' a Century of Intellectual wilderness -- A century during which substantially nothing has been put into copyright that has subsequently flowed into the public domain -- as envisioned by the writers of the first amendment.
Much of what was created in the early 1900s will be lost into this wilderness. Only the most famous (and, in some cases, the most mundane) works will survive. Much of the rest is caught in a legal limbo. Nobody knows who 'owns' it -- thus, nobody can obtain the right to copy it. By the time it's legal to redistribute it, the originals will be incapable of being duplicated.
Consider that recordings of the technical conversations with the Apollo astronauts were only barely recoverable -- and this after less than 30 years in storage. Imagine what another 100+ years of languishing would do to less famous works -- Those who would like to preserve them risk criminalizing themselves in the process.
Had the original works been protected under current Copyright rules, Disny's Snow White would never have been made. Similarly, most of Shakespeares works are known to have had their stories lifted from other authors.
We build on the works of others. Copyright and Patent laws are useful to the extent to which they lubricate the path from creation to public availability. The moment that these laws block that path, they become repugnant to their moral and constitutional underpinning.
Internet Explorer and Opera are based on the original NCSA Mosaic browsers -- which was an open source project. NT's TCP/IP Stack is mostly 'embraced and extended(corrupted)' BSD (open source) code.
Without open source, Bill gates wouldn't have ben able to program his way out of a router.
Bzzzt!
That's close to what they do, but it's not what they're about. Patents and Copyrights are supposed to give inventors/authors a temporary monopoly on their inventions so that they have an incentive to create and distribute them.
The temporary 'ownership' of the ideas and the profits that should go with that are simply supposed to be the vehicle for promoting innovation. It's pretty clear when you give a good read to the text of the first amendment.
Or, as my (very right wing) sister once said (after a tornado hit Edmonton),
She was in law school at the time.
Long live Big Brother???
I've got nothing against encouraging the use of Open Source solutions. I have some quams about forcing it.
Open source is about freedom. Enforced freedom is an oxymoron.