If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.
There is no requirement in the GPL for modifiers to give modifications back to the original author.
All it requires is that recipients of the modified version get the modified source (or an offer to provide the source) used to produce it.
So if someone modifies your GPL'ed program and no-one ever gives you a modified copy, you'll never see those changes. IBM, Apple, Netscape and Sun have tried "give us all your changes" licenses, and they were lambasted for doing so.
I'm sitting on a number of modifications for CVS and GNU Make, which I'll never send back into the maintainers. But everyone with access to the modified binaries can also get at the corresponding source.
These changes don't make much sense outside of my particular company--changes that are "good for the world" I send back upstream, but that's because I want to help others, not because the GPL requires that I do.
And the regulations in many countries require that speedos never read "low", so the manufacturers have to set them to read high. You can't make a +10%/-0% device, so you make a +/-5% device to a 5% higher target.
That's due to losses in a conductive medium, known as the "skin depth effect". Longer waves have a deeper skin depth, so are carried deeper into a conductor. (Salt water is approximately a conductor.)
In the opposite direction, very high frequencies use only the surface of a conductor. Consequently, microwaves aren't run on wires, but are actually sent down hollow "wave guides". If you need any sort of power, you'd need a massively thick wire, but the energy will just be on the outer surface. So we use a tube, the waves don't care.
Tesla coils use this effect for rather dramatic results.
A landscape photographer friend was outgraded when I mentioned that I could get 600-800 shots on my Digital Rebel XT/350D, when using the battery grip and both batteries. (The camera is so light, I just leave the grip on so it balances on the strap better.)
He said he gets 5-7 years out of a single battery on his T90 film body.
What he didn't take into account was:
The Digital Rebel XT is the hobbyist camera, the 20D has a much larger capacity battery.
His battery doesn't get to run any autofocus motors--not a big deal for landscapes.
His doesn't run the flash either--also not a big deal for landscapes.
Most importantly, his doesn't have a computer that's trying to digest 3 x 8 millon dots, and write it out to a flash card.
So, like you hinted, you have to compare battery + card use on a digital camera to battery + film use on a film camera.
All Canon chargers are multivoltage and multifrequency, all you need are adapter plugs, not voltage converters. I would expect most others are also, these days, especially those from camera companies.
I think this is a very weak argument. No one with more than a few days of computer experience has the slightest trouble with multi-button mice.
This is patently wrong.
People who "are into" computers quickly grasp hold of select/execute on left and menu on right (Windows, OS/2, Amiga, OS X), or select, paste, and extend (X11), or select, execute, menu (Xerox Star, IIRC), or a polybuton chording system, or whatever else floats their UI boat. USB Overdrive and other multi-button interfaces (especially from Kensington) have been around for Macs for ages. People who know what they do love them, and people who have no idea what you're talking about with all these context menus can live without them just fine.
People who don't "get" computers are always asking me, "Left or right click?" They haven't noticed the pattern in the chaos of clicks. Many of them still don't understand the difference between double-click and single-click... and it doesn't help that some things execute on a single click (like hyperlinks), and some select (text regions, icons in the Finder)... and even then they haven't noticed that "double click" means "do the most common or default action on the thing".
Apple's breakthrough wasn't in getting rid of the menu button, that's easy--just remove context-sensitive menus and put them on a fixed place on the screen. Merging "select" and "execute" is what took the brainstorm of using double-clicking.
And we've had to be telling people, "No, just click once!" ever since.
Finally, keep in mind that intermediate and expert users are probably less than 25% of the computer-using population. So a default appropriate for 75% is just fine, Apple has allowed people to plug in other vendor's mice with more buttons ever since the ADB Macs came out.
... mount a firewire drive with a file system other than the one your current version of the Mac OS expects.
Uhmmm.
OK, Mac OS X is quite happy with FAT16, FAT32, HFS and HFS+, and maybe that UFS thing I've never used but can choose in the formatter.
I've never tried NTFS on it; but trying to work NTFS on non-NT-based systems is awkward at best--though it is definately better in the newer Linuxes.
So what filesystem do you have on an external FireWire drive that Windows is perfectly happy to mount, but Mac OS X won't touch?
And can you explain why I can take the internal IDE drive out of a Mac, plop it in a FireWire box, and use it on any other Mac I want... but if I take the internal IDE drive out of an Intel PC (Linux or Windows), plop it in a FireWire or USB box, the very same system does not recognize the partition table?
Let's face it, we're still pretty much stuck with FAT32 for cross-platform filesystem interoperation, even if you aren't using Windows.
And every camera is using it, or at least FAT16, for the flash cards--it may suck, but it's a known system, and everything can deal with it.
Make Macs look more like Windows, and I'll never upgrade again. I don't like how Windows works, regardless of all the security issues (both design and bug). Windows could be 100% flawless and I still won't like it, or anything else that works the same way.
Or, perhaps, someone can tell me how to get XP SP 2 to do any of the following:
Sort directories with all other file types
Show all files in a directory, rather than just the ones that match some magic pattern
Separate file name from file type
Use an menu accelerator key that's close to the space bar, rather than near the edge of the keyboard
OK, on that last one, tweaking the keymap would do it. (And that would solve the article's author's problem with Command vs. Control--swap Windows and CTRL on his Winbox keymap, or Control and Command on his Mac.)
And I don't want stuff that only works for the current load/save dialog, like switching to list view. Yeesh.
At least most Windows apps finally stopped defaulting to saving in the directory the program is in, that was really dumb.
Not that Macs are perfect, either, but they're closer to how I want to use a machine than Windows is.
Those would be where we can predict the existence of an element, but haven't found or synthesized one yet.
For example, if you have a set elements with nucleuses containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 protons, you can guess that there should probably be one with 6 in the bunch.
Electron shells are related to these predictions, too; we know how many electrons can be at particular "distances" from the nucleus, so if we have elements with incomplete shells (== room for more electrons), we can predict that there are elements which have complete shells.
Since the periodic table is ordered by protons-in-nucleus-count, and grouped by electron shell number, drawing out the periodic table inherently makes those predictions.
Saw one of those overhead signs in eastern Pennsylvania. I admit, I spent far too much time trying to read the sign than I should have, but there wasn't a lot of traffic and I didn't get into a crash.
When I got closer, I found out my problem. I was trying to make sense of:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789.:;!
My brain just wouldn't figure out what the sign said at a glance, I needed to actually take the time to read it. *sigh* The word "TESTING" would have helped a lot.
Sure, they have to keep registering new random-gibberish domains... but aren't they going to be continuously pointing at the same blocks of IP addresses?
I'm not sure what Microsoft is shipping in its Windows XP boxes anymore, not having ever purchased a retail version of it.
I got pissed-off-at-98-enough to get the XP retail upgrade box. And this was back in the winter.
Both upgrade and full install, Home and Professional, had SP2 built right in. The store might have had some old pre-SP2 copies left lying around, but they were advising SP2 for anything connected to the 'net.
And it wasn't install and patch, when the system completed base install, it was already at SP2.
He and kibo were just spool-greppers, not spammers. Annoying, but easy enough to filter.
Most of my "stupid posting" filtering used to be done by rejecting any message which did not have a lowercase letter in Subject:. Worked great until I got a job at IBM with all those old mono-case mainframe programmers. (You can decide if I'm talking about the mainframes or the programmers being old.)
You want to remember spam, how about Green Card Lottery from Canter & Siegel?
Heck, that was back when people talked about "EMP" (excessive multi-posting) or "ECP" (excessive cross-posting) on USENET, and "UCE" (unsolicited commercial e-mail) for, uh... e-mail I suppose.
Spam originally referred to USENET postings, in honor of those Monty Python vikings who just won't shut up about it--the C&S postings were like that, everywhere you went, there was another damn green card lottery posting....
But that was after the start of Eternal September. (Now that AOL has dropped USENET, is it finally October?) And those of us who complained when Prodigy got 'net access sure looked back fondly when AOL hooked up.
Remember when the worst thing about USENET was a few kooks and badly-configured FIDO BBS doors?
Yeah, me neither, my memory's not what it used to be.
I do remember being shown this neat thing on one of those fancy Sun SPARCStations with the built-in ISDN connection where you could look at a page of text from an information service, and it would be able to have pictures and full-motion video integrated into it! Even over ISDN it took a while to load up, and the video (MPEG 1) got all blurry if there was a lot of movement, and it pretty much swamped the SPARCStation....
It was summer of 1992 and they didn't really have a name for it yet. It was like gopher, but with graphics, too.
They (Northern Telecom's research division) also had a prototype of a new wireless phone from Motorola--it would work with their wireless set-up for private branch exchanges (Meridians). But the cool thing was, it had a flip-down thing like a Star Trek communicator.
Intel is not detecting the supported instruction set, they are detecting the actual CPU.
The way a responsible compiler developer generates code in this situation is to say, "I need feature X, Y and Z for this code path--it will be used if all are present."
The only thing the latest Pentium IVs have on the Athlons is the SSE3 extensions, and that is pretty much irrelevant to most code. "It must be true, Intel told us."
If you switch the Intel compiler so that it does NOT generate multiple-CPU-supporting code, you can generate code that runs on Pentium III, IV, and Athlon just fine. (My overly-cheap ECS Duron board burned out, and who cares about Duron anymore anyway?)
(The magic switches are -xK or -xW, BTW.)
But there is no reason for code targetting a Pentium IV restricted to SSE2 at the highest to NOT run on an Athlon. You can "not support" it, sure, but to DELIBERATELY disable the code when you detect a competitor's chip is... well, anti-competitive.
And this isn't a free compiler. You pay for ICC. (There's a for-free-software download, sure, but most people who really care about this stuff are more than willing to pay, and pay well, for the best compiler optimizations they can get.)
The problem is not that they can't guarantee that the AMD chips work. The problem is they are generating instruction streams that run JUST FINE on AMD chips and their runtime code DISABLES that code path (if you use the recommended or default compiler settings).
It's AMD's job to make sure their implementation of IA32 + whatever extensions is good, not Intel's job to disable code on their chips--except based on the processor capability word. (Whatever "flags" from/proc/cpuinfo is properly called.)
Firefox and Mozilla, and probably any other Gecko-based browsers, have a way of disabling the disabling of various UI elements when JavaScript opens a window. I found this in another Slashdot thread last year, but forgot which one.
Open about:config. You'll probably have to type that, Mozilla won't follow it from an http: URL.
Key in dom.disable_window_open_feature as a filter.
Change the value for location to true. In Firefox, just double-click the false and it will toggle. Mozilla you need to edit it and actually type in all four letters of true. (But I'm happier with the Mozilla suite at the office, so I live with it.)
Change any other values to true that you feel like; I'd be inclined to do status, resizable, close and menubar at a minimum.
Now the location will be visible in any pop-up window.
So the very first thing the Moz group should do is default some of this stuff to true instead of pander to controlling webmasters who want to take over the user's computer. I mean false.
I'm not sure if this is going to be sarcasm or flamebait... but I'm saying it anyway. It's rhetorical, I'm not really asking the OP to answer.
Tell us again how that set-up lowers your TCO? Is it because you can't actually provide certain services to your users, and consequently you don't have any costs associated with them?
I have this rule: You want my money, you've got to do better than the free stuff. Pine can do SSL and SMTP Auth, I believe. My Palm can do SSL and SMTP auth. What makes Office so special? In a similar vein, how about Oracle providing an SQL interface with commandline editing like PostgreSQL does? And I don't mean in some sort of add-on, I mean it should be right there from the start. sqlplus is awful.
Well, it did sound like they'd be using the EMT64 chips, so that's more like x86-64 if we're going to be generic. IA32 code runs on those chips, and IA64 doesn't. At least the prototypes had EMT64; and who'd use plain-old IA32 on anything but the cheapest system these days? We know Apple isn't the cheapest, anyway.
I'd be happy to see the AMD chips, but hey, anything to get out from under Big Blue. We all worried about that alliance back when the 68040 was still a pretty neat idea.
Of course, were Big Blue to have actually kept up the pace with the PowerPCs, I'd prefer them to keep on the PPC family....
I'll be looking forward to that--if Garmin's MapSource program runs under it. (It isn't currently listed.)
While I'd much prefer a native application, I'd far rather run MapSource in an emulator or API port than have to have a second machine around. It runs well enough under VirtualPC (I hear), but that would have cost more than buying a low-end barebones PC and an OEM copy of Windows.
But something portable would be best; so being able to run a few needed Windows-only apps on an iBook will be a big selling feature for me.
Don't forget, we also use firewalls to prevent unintentional access.
You don't want someone to access your restricted files just because they made a keying error in a URL, hostname, filename, or whatever. Or your DNS provider did something stupid and crossed your A records with another site. Or your servers got set up with the wrong address for a bit.
There are many reasons to have a decent firewall, and only one is to prevent malicious access.
Heck, outbound proxy firewalls are usually used to control what employees do with their time--almost as if it is to protect the 'Net from your company's PCs.
There's more than one kind of Yale lock; the kind described in that forum post I refer to as a "credit card" lock--you can open it with a credit card stuck between the jamb and the door. Using a water bottle is better, 'cause you're not going to wreck a credit card. (The real name is a "Keyed Entry Lockset", at least for the guys doing the orders for the hardware store.)
It is quite possible to get a Yale lock on a deadbolt. These days, Schlage and Kwikset are much more common, but the lock mechanisms themselves use the same pin-and-cylinder arrangement from the Yale invention.
For those door locks, those ones which have a keylock in the doorknob, you've got next to no security. Anything less than a deadbolt is useless. (To be fair, there are in-knob locks which provide better security, but they're more expensive than a regular deadbolt.) You wouldn't leave the encrypted password file around for just anyone to read, either--right? Well, unless you're still using NIS or something.
And back on topic, why do we need usernames and passwords on our computers anyway? That's sure a big inconvenience. And remember when they let you bill a long distance call to any phone number? That was much more convenient than using a calling card. And putting my seatbelt on in the car, using my turn signals, checking my blind spot, and all that--that's very inconvenient. (And a lot of people don't do it all, of course--I just figure having a crash is more inconvenient than not having one.)
my only course of action to recover the stolen money would have been a private civil lawsuit against AOL - which, I'm sad to say, I didn't feel wealthy enough to bring.
You don't have Small Claims Court, where you can represent yourself, for disputes over low-value amounts? IIRC, it's amounts under $1000CDN, though things may be higher now.
It's set up so that big guys can't squash the little people by having court costs outweigh the value of the dispute.
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There is no requirement in the GPL for modifiers to give modifications back to the original author.
All it requires is that recipients of the modified version get the modified source (or an offer to provide the source) used to produce it.
So if someone modifies your GPL'ed program and no-one ever gives you a modified copy, you'll never see those changes. IBM, Apple, Netscape and Sun have tried "give us all your changes" licenses, and they were lambasted for doing so.
I'm sitting on a number of modifications for CVS and GNU Make, which I'll never send back into the maintainers. But everyone with access to the modified binaries can also get at the corresponding source.
These changes don't make much sense outside of my particular company--changes that are "good for the world" I send back upstream, but that's because I want to help others, not because the GPL requires that I do.
And the regulations in many countries require that speedos never read "low", so the manufacturers have to set them to read high. You can't make a +10%/-0% device, so you make a +/-5% device to a 5% higher target.
In the opposite direction, very high frequencies use only the surface of a conductor. Consequently, microwaves aren't run on wires, but are actually sent down hollow "wave guides". If you need any sort of power, you'd need a massively thick wire, but the energy will just be on the outer surface. So we use a tube, the waves don't care.
Tesla coils use this effect for rather dramatic results.
He said he gets 5-7 years out of a single battery on his T90 film body.
What he didn't take into account was:
So, like you hinted, you have to compare battery + card use on a digital camera to battery + film use on a film camera.
All Canon chargers are multivoltage and multifrequency, all you need are adapter plugs, not voltage converters. I would expect most others are also, these days, especially those from camera companies.
This is patently wrong.
People who "are into" computers quickly grasp hold of select/execute on left and menu on right (Windows, OS/2, Amiga, OS X), or select, paste, and extend (X11), or select, execute, menu (Xerox Star, IIRC), or a polybuton chording system, or whatever else floats their UI boat. USB Overdrive and other multi-button interfaces (especially from Kensington) have been around for Macs for ages. People who know what they do love them, and people who have no idea what you're talking about with all these context menus can live without them just fine.
People who don't "get" computers are always asking me, "Left or right click?" They haven't noticed the pattern in the chaos of clicks. Many of them still don't understand the difference between double-click and single-click... and it doesn't help that some things execute on a single click (like hyperlinks), and some select (text regions, icons in the Finder)... and even then they haven't noticed that "double click" means "do the most common or default action on the thing".
Apple's breakthrough wasn't in getting rid of the menu button, that's easy--just remove context-sensitive menus and put them on a fixed place on the screen. Merging "select" and "execute" is what took the brainstorm of using double-clicking.
And we've had to be telling people, "No, just click once!" ever since.
Finally, keep in mind that intermediate and expert users are probably less than 25% of the computer-using population. So a default appropriate for 75% is just fine, Apple has allowed people to plug in other vendor's mice with more buttons ever since the ADB Macs came out.
Kids.
/. lameness filter.
#CP SMSG SOMEFRIEND AT SOMENODE Wanna catch a movie?
All this UNIX stuff is so... modern. No virtual card punch, spooler or printer.
And VM/CMS commands trigger the
Uhmmm.
OK, Mac OS X is quite happy with FAT16, FAT32, HFS and HFS+, and maybe that UFS thing I've never used but can choose in the formatter.
I've never tried NTFS on it; but trying to work NTFS on non-NT-based systems is awkward at best--though it is definately better in the newer Linuxes.
So what filesystem do you have on an external FireWire drive that Windows is perfectly happy to mount, but Mac OS X won't touch?
And can you explain why I can take the internal IDE drive out of a Mac, plop it in a FireWire box, and use it on any other Mac I want... but if I take the internal IDE drive out of an Intel PC (Linux or Windows), plop it in a FireWire or USB box, the very same system does not recognize the partition table?
Let's face it, we're still pretty much stuck with FAT32 for cross-platform filesystem interoperation, even if you aren't using Windows. And every camera is using it, or at least FAT16, for the flash cards--it may suck, but it's a known system, and everything can deal with it.
Or, perhaps, someone can tell me how to get XP SP 2 to do any of the following:
OK, on that last one, tweaking the keymap would do it. (And that would solve the article's author's problem with Command vs. Control--swap Windows and CTRL on his Winbox keymap, or Control and Command on his Mac.)
And I don't want stuff that only works for the current load/save dialog, like switching to list view. Yeesh.
At least most Windows apps finally stopped defaulting to saving in the directory the program is in, that was really dumb.
Not that Macs are perfect, either, but they're closer to how I want to use a machine than Windows is.
Those would be where we can predict the existence of an element, but haven't found or synthesized one yet.
For example, if you have a set elements with nucleuses containing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 protons, you can guess that there should probably be one with 6 in the bunch.
Electron shells are related to these predictions, too; we know how many electrons can be at particular "distances" from the nucleus, so if we have elements with incomplete shells (== room for more electrons), we can predict that there are elements which have complete shells.
Since the periodic table is ordered by protons-in-nucleus-count, and grouped by electron shell number, drawing out the periodic table inherently makes those predictions.
Well, since it's not in any particular order, it's probably going to be just as useful as it was when he first introduced it.
When I got closer, I found out my problem. I was trying to make sense of:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789.:;!
My brain just wouldn't figure out what the sign said at a glance, I needed to actually take the time to read it. *sigh* The word "TESTING" would have helped a lot.
My TV is set for realistic colour, and my speakers are set for realistic sound.
And none are Realistic--is that Radio Shack brand name even still around these days?
So IP-block blacklists will still take 'em out.
I got pissed-off-at-98-enough to get the XP retail upgrade box. And this was back in the winter.
Both upgrade and full install, Home and Professional, had SP2 built right in. The store might have had some old pre-SP2 copies left lying around, but they were advising SP2 for anything connected to the 'net.
And it wasn't install and patch, when the system completed base install, it was already at SP2.
He and kibo were just spool-greppers, not spammers. Annoying, but easy enough to filter.
Most of my "stupid posting" filtering used to be done by rejecting any message which did not have a lowercase letter in Subject:. Worked great until I got a job at IBM with all those old mono-case mainframe programmers. (You can decide if I'm talking about the mainframes or the programmers being old.)
You want to remember spam, how about Green Card Lottery from Canter & Siegel?
Heck, that was back when people talked about "EMP" (excessive multi-posting) or "ECP" (excessive cross-posting) on USENET, and "UCE" (unsolicited commercial e-mail) for, uh... e-mail I suppose.
Spam originally referred to USENET postings, in honor of those Monty Python vikings who just won't shut up about it--the C&S postings were like that, everywhere you went, there was another damn green card lottery posting....
But that was after the start of Eternal September. (Now that AOL has dropped USENET, is it finally October?) And those of us who complained when Prodigy got 'net access sure looked back fondly when AOL hooked up.
Remember when the worst thing about USENET was a few kooks and badly-configured FIDO BBS doors?
Yeah, me neither, my memory's not what it used to be.
I do remember being shown this neat thing on one of those fancy Sun SPARCStations with the built-in ISDN connection where you could look at a page of text from an information service, and it would be able to have pictures and full-motion video integrated into it! Even over ISDN it took a while to load up, and the video (MPEG 1) got all blurry if there was a lot of movement, and it pretty much swamped the SPARCStation....
It was summer of 1992 and they didn't really have a name for it yet. It was like gopher, but with graphics, too.
They (Northern Telecom's research division) also had a prototype of a new wireless phone from Motorola--it would work with their wireless set-up for private branch exchanges (Meridians). But the cool thing was, it had a flip-down thing like a Star Trek communicator.
The way a responsible compiler developer generates code in this situation is to say, "I need feature X, Y and Z for this code path--it will be used if all are present."
The only thing the latest Pentium IVs have on the Athlons is the SSE3 extensions, and that is pretty much irrelevant to most code. "It must be true, Intel told us."
If you switch the Intel compiler so that it does NOT generate multiple-CPU-supporting code, you can generate code that runs on Pentium III, IV, and Athlon just fine. (My overly-cheap ECS Duron board burned out, and who cares about Duron anymore anyway?)
(The magic switches are -xK or -xW, BTW.)
But there is no reason for code targetting a Pentium IV restricted to SSE2 at the highest to NOT run on an Athlon. You can "not support" it, sure, but to DELIBERATELY disable the code when you detect a competitor's chip is... well, anti-competitive.
And this isn't a free compiler. You pay for ICC. (There's a for-free-software download, sure, but most people who really care about this stuff are more than willing to pay, and pay well, for the best compiler optimizations they can get.)
The problem is not that they can't guarantee that the AMD chips work. The problem is they are generating instruction streams that run JUST FINE on AMD chips and their runtime code DISABLES that code path (if you use the recommended or default compiler settings).
It's AMD's job to make sure their implementation of IA32 + whatever extensions is good, not Intel's job to disable code on their chips--except based on the processor capability word. (Whatever "flags" from /proc/cpuinfo is properly called.)
Clear all your cookies from .slashdot.org that have a number sign in the value.
Basically, all you need is "user" to stay logged in.
Hmmm, these guys seem to have found a card shark for their game's icon. He's also around to give you advice during the game.
Open about:config . You'll probably have to type that, Mozilla won't follow it from an http: URL.
Key in dom.disable_window_open_feature as a filter.
Change the value for location to true. In Firefox, just double-click the false and it will toggle. Mozilla you need to edit it and actually type in all four letters of true. (But I'm happier with the Mozilla suite at the office, so I live with it.)
Change any other values to true that you feel like; I'd be inclined to do status, resizable, close and menubar at a minimum.
Now the location will be visible in any pop-up window.
So the very first thing the Moz group should do is default some of this stuff to true instead of pander to controlling webmasters who want to take over the user's computer. I mean false.
I'm not sure if this is going to be sarcasm or flamebait... but I'm saying it anyway. It's rhetorical, I'm not really asking the OP to answer.
Tell us again how that set-up lowers your TCO? Is it because you can't actually provide certain services to your users, and consequently you don't have any costs associated with them?
I have this rule: You want my money, you've got to do better than the free stuff. Pine can do SSL and SMTP Auth, I believe. My Palm can do SSL and SMTP auth. What makes Office so special? In a similar vein, how about Oracle providing an SQL interface with commandline editing like PostgreSQL does? And I don't mean in some sort of add-on, I mean it should be right there from the start. sqlplus is awful.
I'd be happy to see the AMD chips, but hey, anything to get out from under Big Blue. We all worried about that alliance back when the 68040 was still a pretty neat idea.
Of course, were Big Blue to have actually kept up the pace with the PowerPCs, I'd prefer them to keep on the PPC family....
I'll be looking forward to that--if Garmin's MapSource program runs under it. (It isn't currently listed.)
While I'd much prefer a native application, I'd far rather run MapSource in an emulator or API port than have to have a second machine around. It runs well enough under VirtualPC (I hear), but that would have cost more than buying a low-end barebones PC and an OEM copy of Windows.
But something portable would be best; so being able to run a few needed Windows-only apps on an iBook will be a big selling feature for me.
You don't want someone to access your restricted files just because they made a keying error in a URL, hostname, filename, or whatever. Or your DNS provider did something stupid and crossed your A records with another site. Or your servers got set up with the wrong address for a bit.
There are many reasons to have a decent firewall, and only one is to prevent malicious access.
Heck, outbound proxy firewalls are usually used to control what employees do with their time--almost as if it is to protect the 'Net from your company's PCs.
There's more than one kind of Yale lock; the kind described in that forum post I refer to as a "credit card" lock--you can open it with a credit card stuck between the jamb and the door. Using a water bottle is better, 'cause you're not going to wreck a credit card. (The real name is a "Keyed Entry Lockset", at least for the guys doing the orders for the hardware store.)
It is quite possible to get a Yale lock on a deadbolt. These days, Schlage and Kwikset are much more common, but the lock mechanisms themselves use the same pin-and-cylinder arrangement from the Yale invention.
For those door locks, those ones which have a keylock in the doorknob, you've got next to no security. Anything less than a deadbolt is useless. (To be fair, there are in-knob locks which provide better security, but they're more expensive than a regular deadbolt.) You wouldn't leave the encrypted password file around for just anyone to read, either--right? Well, unless you're still using NIS or something.
And back on topic, why do we need usernames and passwords on our computers anyway? That's sure a big inconvenience. And remember when they let you bill a long distance call to any phone number? That was much more convenient than using a calling card. And putting my seatbelt on in the car, using my turn signals, checking my blind spot, and all that--that's very inconvenient. (And a lot of people don't do it all, of course--I just figure having a crash is more inconvenient than not having one.)
You don't have Small Claims Court, where you can represent yourself, for disputes over low-value amounts? IIRC, it's amounts under $1000CDN, though things may be higher now.
It's set up so that big guys can't squash the little people by having court costs outweigh the value of the dispute.