No form of broadband is any more secure than the other. Packets traversing the Internet can be captured at an uncountable number of levels.
Wireless security sucks, and it is damned stupid to run wireless in a corporate environment without placing the AP's on a segment that requires some form of ipsec or vpn. However, for Internet provision, it's just fine. Anything that is "important" should (and generally is) secured before being pushed across the 'net anyway.
Everyone here is talking about alternatives to DSL and cable. There ARE other alternatives! You'd be surprised how many rural areas have ISP's throwing wireless repeaters on the tops of grain silos or whatever else they can find. Latency will be WAYYYYYYYYYYY lower. On our wireless network, we have around 20-30ms to anywhere in our network. Max of 200 on bad days.
We've upgraded a few people from Starband, and from what I can gather, the equipment cost is about the same.
I'd shop around for a local ISP doing wireless (and doing it right, i.e. has an RF guy on staff and not a bunch of cat5 jockeys trying to crimp rp-tnc connectors on lmr-400) before I settled with Starband.
Adding new bells and whistles to a smaller, less populated theatre will attract more crowds. If a theatre is already filling most seats and remaining busy, adding digital projection obviously is not going to significantly increase the number of customers.
But, as soon as other theatres get digital projection and numbers start to suffer, I'm sure something will be done to match.
If you're looking at a $400 difference, perhaps you can recoup some of that by selling off the old systems at auction. I'm sure they're worth $200-$300. Then you have the benefits of new supported machines from the big guys, without the hassles of supporting your own systems, and the cost factor is minimalized.
Just be sure to erase those drives several times, and make sure you conform to whatever license transfer blah blah M$ wants.
Me and my old boss used to have lunch all of the time and brainstorm cool useless ideas. One wasn't that bad.
We had this idea for a footpedal that would fit between the monitor and the PC. When depressed, it would display a preset screencap. Everything would be built in, with some type of a button to set take a cap for use. Perfect for PC's that are locked down from installing software, drivers, etc.
The downside is that the cap would be obviously non-interactive. If the boss actually comes into your cube and asks to take a peek at your project, you're pretty screwed. Maybe you could "Oh shit, I accidentally bumped the power button. Lemme reboot real quick!"
Thought it would be a cool ThinkGeek product. Interested guys?:)
Since I've had my cellphonbe, I've been itching to get rid of my home phone, but I haven't wanted to do it completely for several reasons...
1) There are still occasions when I want to relax on the couch with a real phone and have a long conversation.
2) There are some people I do NOT want to have my cellphone number, but still want them to have a way to contact me. Think credit card companies et al.
3) My TiVo needs a phone line. Yes, I will eventually get the NIC hack, but for now, it needs a phone line.
4) I'd give anything to have the above and NOT have to send $$$ to SBC/Ameritech any longer.
I think their service would meet all of these requirements for me, and save me a good amount.
This is their final reply -- I choose not to respond any further. I basically informed them that the "Verisign prompt" as they put it is deceiving and almost forceful.
*snip*
I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way. Our own experience has actually been the opposite, that most users do understand what the Verisign prompts mean, and know that it is to give them an option, just as they might get for many other applications, or such things as Microsoft updates. That said, I would agree with you in that some users do not understand this, though this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. In those few cases, however, there still is seldom a problem, since our applications can be easily removed through Add/Remove Programs, regardless of the reason a user may wish to uninstall them. (Those few users may also believe that when they get a prompt offering an update to one of the Microsoft products, for instance, that they MUST get the update. Naturally, that is very seldom the case, and the users usually learn this fairly quickly, some more quickly than others.)
Surprisingly, just a few minutes after sending the above, they replied with the following:
*snip*
Actually, many of our partner sites may offer our software, and we welcome them to do so. What you may be referring to is the Verisign prompts that you might see on a partner site, which gives a user the option of installing if they wish, or not doing so if they don't want to. (We believe in giving a user the option, while at the same time making it as easy as possible to download and install our products.) We set a cookie to keep track of how many times the application is offered, so that after it has been offered and declined a few times, or installed and uninstalled, it not offered again - do you have your cookies turned off, or has the Gator cookie been removed? (You should be able to find it by searching for *gator*.txt in the cookie folder.)
Simple web comments form. I informed them that I work for an ISP, and I inform almost every user of Gator, their advertising practices, and provide assistance to uninstall the software.
Also, keep in mind this isn't entirely Gator's fault. If you see a site that does this, I think the site needs to know as well.
Re:The (Hopefully) Great April Fools Blackout
on
CPAN Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 1
Judging from the number of satirical comments these articles are getting, I think there are a few of us who enjoy it.
The world is already a dull and boring place -- it's nice to spend 1/365 of the year lightening up a bit.
Microsoft products have had this form of remote administration available in various forms for many years. I for one am glad that a Linux distribution is finally striving to achieve the same robust remote management facilities that have always been a major selling point for the NT platform.
I am the network admin for a wireless isp that does transparent cacheing. If a user asks us to turn it off, we can disable it for their IP.
For more than 99% of our users, they don't know what routing or cacheing is, much less that it's happening. For those that actually have issues with the proxy it's a quick modification to our ipchains rules. So far we've only had 2 such requests. Also, we disable the cacheing for business class users by default.
I would hope that you would ask them to disable their transparent cacheing for you before doing something as rash as dropping them. It's my bet that most of their other users do not have this issue, and they may not even be aware that it is causing problems for you.
You know, I'm a huge believer in open source, but I'm starting to loose faith.
We always cry that OS software is the way to go, and greedy bastards who charge for software are evil.
Well, look at the economy. Look at the number of out-of-work techies out there mowing lawns and flipping burgers to stay afloat. I wonder how many of them would have jobs if there was less open source software in existance. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?
I'm frankly VERY tired of seeing an ARTICLE on the main page of slashdot at least once a week about someone whining about their broadband prices going up. I still don't get why people think $80 per month is a ripoff for quality reliable bandwidth, or why people think they should get 100x the speed of their dialup modem for only $10-$20 more per month.
I think I said it best last time someone cried about their bandwidth bill, so I'll just quote it here...
"It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a/29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.
It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing."
It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a/29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.
It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing.
Use a quality 6db omnidirectional attached to a 1-watt 2.4 gig amp. This will give you max legal transmit power taking ERP into consideration. Make sure to get an amp with a high receive gain as well, as that is far more important. A 1 watt amp with ~10db receive gain can be had for around $500 at most places that sell serious wireless gear. winncom.com and hyperlink.com are two that come to mind.
Where I currently work, no software can be installed, and much existing software breaks. Windows media player causes a GPF, and many enhanced websites cause the machine to hang. The registry is locked down, and I don't have rights to "program files".
Every time in the past I've needed a piece of software, it generally takes days to be installed, and the entire chain of command has to OK it. If we directly submit a request be it for software or support, it gets deleted.
This completely and utterly lowers productivity. If I need something and I need it now, it takes days or weeks to make it happen. Problems or requirements that could easily be taken care of by the user are not possible, resulting in delays and wasted time.
Plus, IT stops by once a week to add software, odbc connectors, or make other changes. Those are things I could very easily do myself. Doesn't IT have better things to do?
I'm surprised they let me add bookmarks. Don't even get me started on firewall rules.
Ham radio operators generally love to do stuff to aid the community, and often have big pre-existing towers.
We run a decent sized wireless-only (sorry, for a profit) ISP as a father-son team. He's a ham radio operator whose very familiar with microwave frequencies, and I'm the network geek. With his experience and rf network design, we have an incredible coverage area, and have saves tens of thousands on antennas and cable by using his sources.
Unfortunately most of us networking geeks don't know the first thing about ERP, antenna design and poliarization, or any of the other RF principles that are crucial to wireless network design. Ham op's can be a wonderful resource in freenet projects.
No... You can block relaying by limiting based on IP address. If they were to prevent relaying simply by the from field, anyone in the world could spam through their servers simply by tacking @verizon.com or whatever to a bogus e-mail address.
Many people have third party web hosting companies for their domains and use their ISP's e-mail servers for outgoing. This is going to be a big problem, as most web hosts don't allow relaying either.
As the proprietor of a wireless ISP, I can say we have a difficult time keeping our own towers from interfering from each other. Even though 802.11 has 11 channels, only 3 of them can co-exist peacefully. Luckily we have an RF engineer on staff, who with the right antennas and network design can eliminate these problems, or work around them.
With lots of these "mom and pop" freenets, they will definitely interfere with each other. Also with a large number in an area, and all broadcasting the "world" SSID, you may roam to another access point with a different subnet and loose connectivity.
I stopped listening to radio years ago. The local hits station (clear channel) plays the same redundant crap by the same redundant artists.
Enter the world of online stations. They're independently owned, and usually have thousands of songs in their playlist by popular and not-so popular artists.
I now listen to radioparadise.com at work. They are very eclectic, and I've heard some great music by unheard artists. If I hear a song I don't like, I vote it down on their website. They index this, so the songs that get the higher votes get played more often. Very cool stuff, and no 10 minute commercial breaks. (note: I'm not affiliated with them)
And, of course, in the car I listen to CD's.
Boy when they attack, they attack. I don't think it's their place to
criticize other companies for following an open source model. They should
mind their own damn business and worry about their own 'proprietary business
model'.
How much intellectual property did THEY take from Apple, Xerox, etc etc...
It's only because Apple had a stupid lawyer back in the day that Microsoft
HAS a GUI. The lawyer basically ended up getting the judge to say that
Windows 1.0 could not mimic the GUI of MacOS. Unfortunately Windows 2.0 and
beyond were not covered. I can't recall exactly how the story goes, but it's along the lines of the ruling being limited to one version and not future ones.
Also, I haven't seen a single damn innovation come out of Microsoft in
years. I look at WinME, then back at Win95... They look the same, work the
same, and have pretty much the same featureset. And shit, I think ME is way
buggier IMHO than previous windows versions.
Apple MacOS and IBM's OS/2 Warp have had built in speech recognition and
voice synthesis for years now. I can have my Mac authenticate me with my
voice instead of user/pass. I can say "open file" and it actually brings up
the open file dialog. Oh, and I can leave my mac running for a week and
have just as much system resource open as the day I booted it up.
And I don't even need to argue that NT is a pile of shit and pretty much
worthless as an internet/intranet server. Sure, that little mom and pop
store with 4 computers sharing quickbooks files between them is going to
have no problems with NT. But the company I worked for previously had like
6 quad processor machines with gigs of ram each serving out their search
engine in load balancing, and at any given time at least one or two were out
of service, and I was called to reboot them at least once a week.
Microsoft can argue about innovation the day they have some innovative
product come out of there. Ooh, the X-Box. The "gaming console". What a
UNIQUE idea, no one has EVER released the new powerful console system. Wow,
Win95 has a RECYCLE BIN. I wonder how long it took them to rename it from
"Trash" to something not resembling what Mac has offered since the 80's.
Granted they're only attacking GPL products here, not MacOS or game
consoles, but they're arguing that the GPL stifles innovation. I haven't
seen innovation come out of Microsoft since well before open source
alternatives were widely used. Their "proprietary business model" seems to
me to be "buy the fuckers". They can't buy Linux, and that's what is
pissing them off.
Several years ago I was in Florida and went to Disney World. Many of the movies, parades, and even the nightly light show had lighting, all i'm sure synced with a 'lighting track'.
A few months ago I saw Pink Floyd's The Wall at a local theatre, and the DVD player played a separate data track into a light controller for their lighting.
In elementary school, I went to a planetarium. They showed a movie, and a laserdisc player controlled the lighting, some projectors, and a number of other things.
So where's the new idea? What's the new technology? Sticking it in homes? Making contracts with movie companies?
I tried various open source AND commercial products. The only way you're truely going to find what you want is to code your own.
Any other solution you find is most likely going to require you to have special directory structures, user/pass formats, use a specific mail server, etc.
Most users simply want to modify email accounts. QMail has a few great control panels available for it. This may be a great option if that's all you need.
I recently sold my hosting company and had developed about 1/2 of a control panel. The only fully functioning part was e-mail control. I can say that with PHP, MySQL, SSH, SuDo, and some very basic shell scripting, it is very easy to code your own.
Any commercial product you use is going to tie you down. Any open source project you use is going to tie you down to hacking at existing code if you want to make changes. But if you code your own, you have infinite flexibility. Code your own while you still can.
And, my opinions of the RaQ's is that they are unnecessarily expensive, don't perform well with more than about 100 sites on one, and the control panel is very very slow. I just left a company that exclusively used them for hosting, and everyone there who thought they were cool at first considered them worthless towards the end.
Slashdot Mirror
No form of broadband is any more secure than the other. Packets traversing the Internet can be captured at an uncountable number of levels.
Wireless security sucks, and it is damned stupid to run wireless in a corporate environment without placing the AP's on a segment that requires some form of ipsec or vpn. However, for Internet provision, it's just fine. Anything that is "important" should (and generally is) secured before being pushed across the 'net anyway.
My company and ISP both employ virus scanning on the smtp gateway. Haven't seen a single worm. This just seems like common sense to me.
Everyone here is talking about alternatives to DSL and cable. There ARE other alternatives! You'd be surprised how many rural areas have ISP's throwing wireless repeaters on the tops of grain silos or whatever else they can find. Latency will be WAYYYYYYYYYYY lower. On our wireless network, we have around 20-30ms to anywhere in our network. Max of 200 on bad days.
We've upgraded a few people from Starband, and from what I can gather, the equipment cost is about the same.
I'd shop around for a local ISP doing wireless (and doing it right, i.e. has an RF guy on staff and not a bunch of cat5 jockeys trying to crimp rp-tnc connectors on lmr-400) before I settled with Starband.
Adding new bells and whistles to a smaller, less populated theatre will attract more crowds. If a theatre is already filling most seats and remaining busy, adding digital projection obviously is not going to significantly increase the number of customers.
But, as soon as other theatres get digital projection and numbers start to suffer, I'm sure something will be done to match.
If you're looking at a $400 difference, perhaps you can recoup some of that by selling off the old systems at auction. I'm sure they're worth $200-$300. Then you have the benefits of new supported machines from the big guys, without the hassles of supporting your own systems, and the cost factor is minimalized.
Just be sure to erase those drives several times, and make sure you conform to whatever license transfer blah blah M$ wants.
Me and my old boss used to have lunch all of the time and brainstorm cool useless ideas. One wasn't that bad.
:)
We had this idea for a footpedal that would fit between the monitor and the PC. When depressed, it would display a preset screencap. Everything would be built in, with some type of a button to set take a cap for use. Perfect for PC's that are locked down from installing software, drivers, etc.
The downside is that the cap would be obviously non-interactive. If the boss actually comes into your cube and asks to take a peek at your project, you're pretty screwed. Maybe you could "Oh shit, I accidentally bumped the power button. Lemme reboot real quick!"
Thought it would be a cool ThinkGeek product. Interested guys?
Since I've had my cellphonbe, I've been itching to get rid of my home phone, but I haven't wanted to do it completely for several reasons...
1) There are still occasions when I want to relax on the couch with a real phone and have a long conversation.
2) There are some people I do NOT want to have my cellphone number, but still want them to have a way to contact me. Think credit card companies et al.
3) My TiVo needs a phone line. Yes, I will eventually get the NIC hack, but for now, it needs a phone line.
4) I'd give anything to have the above and NOT have to send $$$ to SBC/Ameritech any longer.
I think their service would meet all of these requirements for me, and save me a good amount.
This is their final reply -- I choose not to respond any further. I basically informed them that the "Verisign prompt" as they put it is deceiving and almost forceful.
*snip*
I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way. Our own experience has actually been the opposite, that most users do understand what the Verisign prompts mean, and know that it is to give them an option, just as they might get for many other applications, or such things as Microsoft updates. That said, I would agree with you in that some users do not understand this, though this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. In those few cases, however, there still is seldom a problem, since our applications can be easily removed through Add/Remove Programs, regardless of the reason a user may wish to uninstall them. (Those few users may also believe that when they get a prompt offering an update to one of the Microsoft products, for instance, that they MUST get the update. Naturally, that is very seldom the case, and the users usually learn this fairly quickly, some more quickly than others.)
Rex
Surprisingly, just a few minutes after sending the above, they replied with the following:
*snip*
Actually, many of our partner sites may offer our software, and we welcome them to do so. What you may be referring to is the Verisign prompts that you might see on a partner site, which gives a user the option of installing if they wish, or not doing so if they don't want to. (We believe in giving a user the option, while at the same time making it as easy as possible to download and install our products.) We set a cookie to keep track of how many times the application is offered, so that after it has been offered and declined a few times, or installed and uninstalled, it not offered again - do you have your cookies turned off, or has the Gator cookie been removed? (You should be able to find it by searching for *gator*.txt in the cookie folder.)
Rex
Gator Corp.
http://www.gator.com/contact/index.html
Simple web comments form. I informed them that I work for an ISP, and I inform almost every user of Gator, their advertising practices, and provide assistance to uninstall the software.
Also, keep in mind this isn't entirely Gator's fault. If you see a site that does this, I think the site needs to know as well.
Judging from the number of satirical comments these articles are getting, I think there are a few of us who enjoy it.
The world is already a dull and boring place -- it's nice to spend 1/365 of the year lightening up a bit.
Microsoft products have had this form of remote administration available in various forms for many years. I for one am glad that a Linux distribution is finally striving to achieve the same robust remote management facilities that have always been a major selling point for the NT platform.
I am the network admin for a wireless isp that does transparent cacheing. If a user asks us to turn it off, we can disable it for their IP.
For more than 99% of our users, they don't know what routing or cacheing is, much less that it's happening. For those that actually have issues with the proxy it's a quick modification to our ipchains rules. So far we've only had 2 such requests. Also, we disable the cacheing for business class users by default.
I would hope that you would ask them to disable their transparent cacheing for you before doing something as rash as dropping them. It's my bet that most of their other users do not have this issue, and they may not even be aware that it is causing problems for you.
You know, I'm a huge believer in open source, but I'm starting to loose faith.
We always cry that OS software is the way to go, and greedy bastards who charge for software are evil.
Well, look at the economy. Look at the number of out-of-work techies out there mowing lawns and flipping burgers to stay afloat. I wonder how many of them would have jobs if there was less open source software in existance. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?
I'm frankly VERY tired of seeing an ARTICLE on the main page of slashdot at least once a week about someone whining about their broadband prices going up. I still don't get why people think $80 per month is a ripoff for quality reliable bandwidth, or why people think they should get 100x the speed of their dialup modem for only $10-$20 more per month.
/29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.
I think I said it best last time someone cried about their bandwidth bill, so I'll just quote it here...
"It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a
It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing."
It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a /29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.
It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing.
Use a quality 6db omnidirectional attached to a 1-watt 2.4 gig amp. This will give you max legal transmit power taking ERP into consideration. Make sure to get an amp with a high receive gain as well, as that is far more important. A 1 watt amp with ~10db receive gain can be had for around $500 at most places that sell serious wireless gear. winncom.com and hyperlink.com are two that come to mind.
It's horrible!
Where I currently work, no software can be installed, and much existing software breaks. Windows media player causes a GPF, and many enhanced websites cause the machine to hang. The registry is locked down, and I don't have rights to "program files".
Every time in the past I've needed a piece of software, it generally takes days to be installed, and the entire chain of command has to OK it. If we directly submit a request be it for software or support, it gets deleted.
This completely and utterly lowers productivity. If I need something and I need it now, it takes days or weeks to make it happen. Problems or requirements that could easily be taken care of by the user are not possible, resulting in delays and wasted time.
Plus, IT stops by once a week to add software, odbc connectors, or make other changes. Those are things I could very easily do myself. Doesn't IT have better things to do?
I'm surprised they let me add bookmarks. Don't even get me started on firewall rules.
Ham radio operators generally love to do stuff to aid the community, and often have big pre-existing towers.
We run a decent sized wireless-only (sorry, for a profit) ISP as a father-son team. He's a ham radio operator whose very familiar with microwave frequencies, and I'm the network geek. With his experience and rf network design, we have an incredible coverage area, and have saves tens of thousands on antennas and cable by using his sources.
Unfortunately most of us networking geeks don't know the first thing about ERP, antenna design and poliarization, or any of the other RF principles that are crucial to wireless network design. Ham op's can be a wonderful resource in freenet projects.
No... You can block relaying by limiting based on IP address. If they were to prevent relaying simply by the from field, anyone in the world could spam through their servers simply by tacking @verizon.com or whatever to a bogus e-mail address. Many people have third party web hosting companies for their domains and use their ISP's e-mail servers for outgoing. This is going to be a big problem, as most web hosts don't allow relaying either.
As the proprietor of a wireless ISP, I can say we have a difficult time keeping our own towers from interfering from each other. Even though 802.11 has 11 channels, only 3 of them can co-exist peacefully. Luckily we have an RF engineer on staff, who with the right antennas and network design can eliminate these problems, or work around them. With lots of these "mom and pop" freenets, they will definitely interfere with each other. Also with a large number in an area, and all broadcasting the "world" SSID, you may roam to another access point with a different subnet and loose connectivity.
I stopped listening to radio years ago. The local hits station (clear channel) plays the same redundant crap by the same redundant artists. Enter the world of online stations. They're independently owned, and usually have thousands of songs in their playlist by popular and not-so popular artists. I now listen to radioparadise.com at work. They are very eclectic, and I've heard some great music by unheard artists. If I hear a song I don't like, I vote it down on their website. They index this, so the songs that get the higher votes get played more often. Very cool stuff, and no 10 minute commercial breaks. (note: I'm not affiliated with them) And, of course, in the car I listen to CD's.
Boy when they attack, they attack. I don't think it's their place to criticize other companies for following an open source model. They should mind their own damn business and worry about their own 'proprietary business model'. How much intellectual property did THEY take from Apple, Xerox, etc etc... It's only because Apple had a stupid lawyer back in the day that Microsoft HAS a GUI. The lawyer basically ended up getting the judge to say that Windows 1.0 could not mimic the GUI of MacOS. Unfortunately Windows 2.0 and beyond were not covered. I can't recall exactly how the story goes, but it's along the lines of the ruling being limited to one version and not future ones. Also, I haven't seen a single damn innovation come out of Microsoft in years. I look at WinME, then back at Win95... They look the same, work the same, and have pretty much the same featureset. And shit, I think ME is way buggier IMHO than previous windows versions. Apple MacOS and IBM's OS/2 Warp have had built in speech recognition and voice synthesis for years now. I can have my Mac authenticate me with my voice instead of user/pass. I can say "open file" and it actually brings up the open file dialog. Oh, and I can leave my mac running for a week and have just as much system resource open as the day I booted it up. And I don't even need to argue that NT is a pile of shit and pretty much worthless as an internet/intranet server. Sure, that little mom and pop store with 4 computers sharing quickbooks files between them is going to have no problems with NT. But the company I worked for previously had like 6 quad processor machines with gigs of ram each serving out their search engine in load balancing, and at any given time at least one or two were out of service, and I was called to reboot them at least once a week. Microsoft can argue about innovation the day they have some innovative product come out of there. Ooh, the X-Box. The "gaming console". What a UNIQUE idea, no one has EVER released the new powerful console system. Wow, Win95 has a RECYCLE BIN. I wonder how long it took them to rename it from "Trash" to something not resembling what Mac has offered since the 80's. Granted they're only attacking GPL products here, not MacOS or game consoles, but they're arguing that the GPL stifles innovation. I haven't seen innovation come out of Microsoft since well before open source alternatives were widely used. Their "proprietary business model" seems to me to be "buy the fuckers". They can't buy Linux, and that's what is pissing them off.
Several years ago I was in Florida and went to Disney World. Many of the movies, parades, and even the nightly light show had lighting, all i'm sure synced with a 'lighting track'. A few months ago I saw Pink Floyd's The Wall at a local theatre, and the DVD player played a separate data track into a light controller for their lighting. In elementary school, I went to a planetarium. They showed a movie, and a laserdisc player controlled the lighting, some projectors, and a number of other things. So where's the new idea? What's the new technology? Sticking it in homes? Making contracts with movie companies?
I tried various open source AND commercial products. The only way you're truely going to find what you want is to code your own. Any other solution you find is most likely going to require you to have special directory structures, user/pass formats, use a specific mail server, etc. Most users simply want to modify email accounts. QMail has a few great control panels available for it. This may be a great option if that's all you need. I recently sold my hosting company and had developed about 1/2 of a control panel. The only fully functioning part was e-mail control. I can say that with PHP, MySQL, SSH, SuDo, and some very basic shell scripting, it is very easy to code your own. Any commercial product you use is going to tie you down. Any open source project you use is going to tie you down to hacking at existing code if you want to make changes. But if you code your own, you have infinite flexibility. Code your own while you still can. And, my opinions of the RaQ's is that they are unnecessarily expensive, don't perform well with more than about 100 sites on one, and the control panel is very very slow. I just left a company that exclusively used them for hosting, and everyone there who thought they were cool at first considered them worthless towards the end.