Sending email and receiving email are done by completely different protocols. IMAP lets you access your email folders on the mail server and edit/move/delete emails you have received, but if you're sending email you use SMTP.
That's why when you're configuring your email client, there's different settings for incoming and outgoing mail.
Now, you _could_ spam someone with IMAP, but you'd have to break their password and then save an email in their inbox for them to read. This would get around almost any server-side spam filter, but considering you'd have to break the password for every account you want to spam, it's not very feasible.
Besides, you'd make more money selling the passwords for the accounts than you would spamming them:)
If there weren't people out there pushing the cause in its purest sense, we wouldn't have half the progress we do. Stallman has a role, and it's a vital one. If it wasn't him (or at least his push for a total free software world) the GNU system wouldn't have started up, and we wouldn't have Linux at all.
That doesn't mean you have to buy into it. Everyone pretty much knows there's lots of room for closed software. Stallman just represents the extreme, which you need to balance the other extreme. After all, how many times have we heard large companies tell us open source is inferior/unsecure/communist/etc? It's all gotta balance out.
I've heard this before, although generally about cancer. The problem is, that idea only works if the drug companies are a cartel.
Let's say you're an executive for EvilCo, and your company develops that one month treatment for AIDS. You've got two choices:
1) Patent it, sell it for major short term profits 2) Sweep it under the rug, continue selling treatments for long term profits
Option two sounds the best, right? But you don't exist in a vacuum. If your researchers found the cure, then how long until SatanDrugs, LLC or BeelzePharm makes that same discovery, and will they do the same thing you are? Maybe they already have. Maybe they're on their way to the patent office now...
It's kind of like the old prisoner's dilemma scenario. You can't trust every other company to act for the collective good for the industry, and since any one of you could sell out for short term profits, why not you?
There's also another problem, which is that it's a cold hearted bastard thing to do. If your R&D department actually discovered a cure, you think the people who know about it are going to sit quietly while you sweep it under the rug? What kind of PR are you going to get when they go public? The only way to guarantee they'd keep quiet would be to have them killed. Otherwise, your company would have the worst PR incident since the holocaust.
H stands for hentai, which means (more or less) perverted in japanese. When a fanboy says, "I just downloaded twelve gigs of H" he's talking japanese porn of some sort, usually drawn/animated but not necessarily so. Hence the schoolgirl and tentacle monster.
IdleAire is pretty much everywhere at the big truckstops (TAs, Petros, maybe some Flying Js) these days. There's also the advantage that trucks aren't allowed to idle or run their APUs next to you, which keeps some people awake (can't do anything about reefer units though).
There's also attendants on duty, which I imagine keeps the hookers and panhandlers away. I'm not sure on that one though - they're pretty persistant.
It's a neat deal, and some companies will pay for it rather than have you idle your truck. I know Arrow has a deal with them where their drivers don't pay anything for it. Dunno who else does though.
You now have systems where you have one truck with a driver is followed by several driverless trucks. You also can have automatic parking / reversing. Driverless trucks? That won't make production, at least on the American interstate system. It would work fine if it wasn't for all the cars on the road. My bet is that an automated driving system wouldn't make a thousand mile trip before it ran someone off the road.
Automatic backing sounds interesting though. There's a lot of places that are difficult at best to back up to (grocery and department stores are in general really bad about that - blind side backing with no space) and it'd be interesting to see if a computer could do a better job. It'd probably require equipment mounted on the trailer itself though, and I doubt that would be adopted very quickly.
Re:Freight prices have not gone up in years
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Big Rigs Go High Tech
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Fuel is the largest expense in trucking. Wages is #2, and tires are #3. After that, I don't know for sure, but my guess would be maintenance and truck purchases.
Wages used to be the #1 expense. Diesel also used to be $1.30 a gallon three or four years ago.
The grandparent poster is right - it's all a bidding game, and if you try to raise your rates, someone else will do it cheaper. Rates will increase, but probably not until a lot of the little guys are out of business. I know my company is struggling.
Re:I'm a believer in the railroads.
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Big Rigs Go High Tech
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· Score: 4, Informative
Regarding the article you linked to: this is extremely rare. You can't make any money operating equipment like that, except for certain short haul dedicated stuff like construction haulers. Trucks require constant maintenance or they break down in extremely expensive ways.
Regrooved tires are dangerous in general, and there's no benefit to using them. It costs a lot more to have a tire truck come out than to just buy a retread (not regroove) tire and have it done at a shop. You can't use retreads on the steering axle, and many trucking companies don't use them on the drive axles. Trailers are a different thing - you can go cheap on trailer tires because if one blows out, you can still go down the road for a bit. The other seven are adequate for getting you to the nearest tire shop.
Now as far as the "dirty and unsafe" part - that doesn't describe the modern trucking industry. Most trucks on the road are less than five years old, with hardly any older than ten. Emissions have been lowered dramatically compared to the old days, and the new fuels are almost sulphur-free. The black stuff you see coming from the stacks? That's soot - unburned carbon. It's not particularly dangerous, although it can contribute to smog. You only see that when the engine is doing something dramatic, like changing gears or taking off. Most of the time a truck is in motion, the engine is working as efficiently as possible and minimizing unburned fuels.
Most trucks are moving towards having small "lawnmower" engines called APUs (axillary power units) that power the heat/AC system and provide electricity when the truck would normally be idling. I don't have one, but hopefully I will when the lease runs out on my truck. (You have to idle or have one of these APUs in inclement weather - a trucker needs to be fully rested to drive, and that's hard when you're in a truck in the middle of the desert during the summer with no A/C. Not that California cares.)
Drivers have strict rules they have to follow regarding hours of service and inspections, and while every driver breaks the rules from time to time, you develop a sense of when you need to get off the road. A wreck can destroy your career, and equipment failure can delay your load (and your paycheck). DOT inspects trucks randomly, and they're pretty thorough. Safety is a huge concern for truckers as well as trucking companies, since accidents translate to lost money. It's not worth pushing your drivers past the rules, since DOT can audit you at any time and any accident can turn into a million dollar lawsuit.
Bear in mind this article is talking about the port of Los Angeles, which just recently banned owner-operators and trucks more than a few years old. California is a very truck-unfriendly state in general and I wouldn't be surprised if this article you pointed out was just propaganda pointing out the worst case.
Neither do I understand an arbitrary speed limit of 55 mph which exists pretty much across the whole USA. Yes, it might have made sense in the 50s when cars could often go not much more than 55, and more often than not 55 was already a rather unsafe speed in said cars.
Actually, the 55 mph national speed limit was put in place in 1974, and for fuel efficiency reasons, not safety.
The speed limits in the 50s (in many places) were still determined by the old 80% average method, IIRC. Let a bunch of people drive on the road with no speed limit, cut out the top 10% and bottom 10%, and average the speed of the remaining, and there's your speed limit. It makes sense, because that's the speed most people feel comfortable at.
Nowadays, most of the states I've seen just make a state version of the old national speed limit. Here in Oklahoma it's 65 on two lane highways, 70 on some four lane highways, and 75 on turnpikes. The speed limit on some of the county roads have gone up in response, which helps matters (some small towns are only accessible via county roads), but I still feel the old 80% system made more sense.
Bear in mind though, many cars manufactured between 1974 and 1995 were made for 55 and 65 mph speed limits. Going faster than that is exceeding the design limits of the vehicle. Sure, they'll do it, but engineers didn't have to take into account states like Montana where you could go as fast as you like and still be legal. So while those cars may have had better safety features, in theory they weren't designed for today's speed limits. There's still a lot of those cars on the road today.
Bummer the ol' Multia 166 isn't up on auction. IIRC, they used it to host slashdot way back in the very early days.
I know that if I wasn't currently out of work, I would certainly bid on it. I've got a developer's board 166 and it's a neat box - too bad Compaq killed the Alpha.
Magical ability? Only if you're talking in terms of AI picture recognition. Just about everyone can tell that a five year old isn't eighteen yet. I'm not talking about the fake lolita pictures, although those would have been bad enough if I was dragged in front of my commander.
The newsgroups used to have a real problem with child porn. I'm talkin' _real_ child porn - little kids and stuff.
I remember when I was in the military, I decided to stop bulk downloading porn because of it. I didn't want to land in Leavenworth because my news client downloaded some picture of a naked little girl.
Not to mention it's a turnoff to be lookin' through a bunch of pictures of naked women and then see some four year old boy giving a blow job to a fat man.
I don't know if it's a problem anymore, but for a while it was pretty bad. No idea how it is nowdays.
It's the same in Oklahoma, USA. My ex-wife was 16 when we started dating and she moved in with me. That's perfectly legal in Oklahoma (although in most states in the U.S. the age of consent is 18, and there's a couple that are 14). Taking a picture of her naked, even though I got to see her nude every day, would have landed my ass in jail.
Personally I consider it a reflection of reality. Teenagers have sex, whether it's legal or not. Teenagers can't handle professional porn, however - it's not a pretty business. I think the law is there more to keep kids from being exploited by professional porn makers, rather than stop them from having their boyfriends snap a few pictures.
I'll tell you who's using the majority of the Win98 boxes: the parents and grandparents of the world.
Throw in small busnesses as well.
I support a few businesses, and a good half of them run 98 or ME. We're talking junk shops, cafe-style restaurants, etc. - places with practically no automation. They use a computer for email, web browsing, printing out signs, and maybe an ancient version of quickbooks or something. I did a format/reinstall for a new client on ME just recently and the only backup she wanted was a few text files that she used for inventory.
These storeowners are older folks who do things the old way and resist changing their methods. They might use email and do ordering online, but they'll have a paper ledger and a notebook they keep inventory information in. They don't care about official support, as long as they can ask around and find someone who can fix their machine when their dialup goes down. I picked up most of my clients at a cafe via word of mouth.
I think there's more people out there like that than most people realize. They don't care about being current, as long as they can do the three or four things they use their computers for, so XP is a waste. You can't talk them into changing their business methods.
Linux for these people would be unacceptable. They don't want change - they want exactly what they have so they don't have to learn anything new. I have snuck firefox onto a few of their machines, replacing the desktop shortcut to IE, which cuts down on my spyware related calls, but otherwise talking them into changing would be talking myself out of a job.
There isn't an FVWM 3 - it's version 3 of this theme that runs on top of FVWM 2.5.
I made the switch to FVWM 2 through a lot of other window managers. I held on to the 1.x series 'til enlightenment DR13 ( I think), then gnome/sawmill was working enough to use, then after a few years went back to FVWM. I like 2.x much better - my current config doesn't do a whole lot 1.x doesn't do, but there's a trick or two I pull that I'm pretty sure 1.x wouldn't let me get away with.
One question though - if you're running the same binary, is it still linked with libc5, or were you an early glibc convert?
I looked into this once. A T-1 equivalent (frame relay) would have cost me about $500/month. At my location, a T-1 from SBC would have cost about $1800/month.
You'll have last mile issues, which are always expensive. Maybe if there's a phone exchange near you, you can get a DSLAM in, if the phone company doesn't laugh you out of their office. Cable would involve a lot of equipment, know-how, and rights to use the poles (no idea there, but I'm certain they don't just let you staple your own lines on the poles). Most likely you're talking roll-your-own wireless WAN, which you really need some know-how for. When I priced it out (this was about three years ago), you're lookin' at about $200 US for customer equipment at every site, assuming you do your own assembly and some custom wiring and tweaking.
It's doable, yes, but not for someone who doesn't have enough money to move out on their own, and you just have to hope that someone doesn't roll out competing wired broadband before you can make up all your initial investment. Wireless is pretty much the worst option for most people, due to weather and line-of-sight issues.
One thing though - there might be wireless available in his area that he doesn't know about. I didn't go through my plan because someone was already doing it in my area of the state. It's usually not cheap, but for gaming it's much better than dealing with satellite latencies.
Bringing in a ton of money is the point. Paramount and CBS are corporations, after all.
Spending all the development effort on something that'll bring the same amount of money would be a waste to them. They only care about impact as far as how much money they can make off of it. Besides, there's nothing stopping them from developing new ideas at the same time they've got other people working on this.
Someone once claimed that if copyright holders don't enforce their copyrights, they'll lose them.
That's trademarks. Copyright doesn't require enforcement - everyone could use your works and then you could sue Joe Bob 'cause you think he's ugly. As long as he doesn't have explicit permission to your works, you're in the right.
I put it down to lawyers being lawyers, and businesses being myopic in general. I'm sure they have their reasons, and I'm sure they're silly, but they take it seriously.
Sorry about that, I misphrased. MIT and BSD licenses can be linked to by GPL software with no issues. The artistic and apache licenses are well understood as far as their interaction with the GPL, and pretty much no one argues about the legal points on them. I didn't mean to say they could be linked, but I'll agree that's certainly what I typed. Chalk that up to sloppy proofreading.
The BSD license change has been gone over as well. Some code still uses the old, non GPL-compatible license, but anything that belongs to berkely can use the new license, so it's perfectly within debian's rights to change the license in the code. Stuff still using the old license with "regents of berkely" changed to something else of course isn't GPL compatible and debian would have to have the copyright holder's permission to change it.
Anyway, debian does try to do the right thing. It doesn't always happen, but no group of people is perfect. Without having been involved during these discussions you're talking about, I can't really say one way or the other about it, but I would imagine removing all BSD code from debian would have rendered the system inoperable for a while. Not as bad as 4.4BSD, but there's a _lot_ of BSD code in there... The only real solution is to make the current debian leadership aware and have them correct it, or get the copyright owners to start up a fuss.
You can use it in emulators and use it for an operating system if you're selling a bare PC.
It's nice for legacy stuff - I had a client once that ran a QBASIC application and we had to set up a couple more machines for him. FreeDOS was nice and legal, since I had no idea how to buy a license for MS-DOS. It's not like you can walk down to the store and buy DOS these days.
I have an unopened copy of DOS 6.22 around here somewhere, but it's buried in a box, most likely. Probably next to my 70 NT4 Workstation licenses.
I don't see that. Their biggest competitor for file/print services was Novell, which works pretty much the same. They might have used DCE for implementation details, but I'm willing to bet it was Novell they copied the basic ideas from.
Now Novell might have copied DCE... I have no idea. I'm just saying that Microsoft had their mind on copying the directory features of NDS, not an obscure UNIX setup.
The interaction of the GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses is well understood and works well.
There's no problem at all linking GPL software with libraries of either. Same goes with the apache license and perl's artistic license.
Sun's license isn't GPL-friendly, and even if there's a question about it, debian needs to find a way around it. This is the way debian works - it's all in the social contract. It's a pain sometimes, but there's distros out there who don't worry so much about licensing issues you can use if you're concerned.
Account management is boring and detracts from "real" work.
Back when I worked in a network shop in the air force, all the people that really didn't know anything and weren't willing to put in the effort to learn were given the task of user account management, since it's easy (at least it was easy on NT4 with Enterprise Administrator). Some of them would get fed up doing the same old boring thing and find out what the more knowledgable people were doing, some wouldn't.
I liked the way it was set up 'cause I could worry about other things than user support and train people who were actually interested in learning.
recently even Novell and lots of companies use it for different purposes in one or another way
Novell's been using it longer than pretty much anyone. Check out NDS for more info. Microsoft was more or less copying Novell, not any of the UNIX vendors (who were mostly still using NIS and friends when active directory came out).
Why not ask the people who code for NetBSD? They'll tell you why they do it.
The scheduler was just an example, but using that example, what if NetBSD is a particularly good testbed for it? Maybe you like the way the kernel internals are sorted out, so you want to work on it there. Maybe there's thirty people doing scheduler work on FreeBSD and you can't get your ideas in. Maybe you don't have the knowledge of other kernel areas to write your own mini-unix, or maybe you want to work in a collaborative environment where you get feedback. Everyone has their reasons.
Either way, if you don't run NetBSD, it shouldn't matter to you. There's been enough code lifted from it to prove its worth many times over, and if the developers want to keep going, then they'll keep going. Like I said, let them have their fun, they aren't hurting anything.
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Sending email and receiving email are done by completely different protocols. IMAP lets you access your email folders on the mail server and edit/move/delete emails you have received, but if you're sending email you use SMTP.
That's why when you're configuring your email client, there's different settings for incoming and outgoing mail.
Now, you _could_ spam someone with IMAP, but you'd have to break their password and then save an email in their inbox for them to read. This would get around almost any server-side spam filter, but considering you'd have to break the password for every account you want to spam, it's not very feasible.
Besides, you'd make more money selling the passwords for the accounts than you would spamming them :)
They're pushing for it because someone has to.
If there weren't people out there pushing the cause in its purest sense, we wouldn't have half the progress we do. Stallman has a role, and it's a vital one. If it wasn't him (or at least his push for a total free software world) the GNU system wouldn't have started up, and we wouldn't have Linux at all.
That doesn't mean you have to buy into it. Everyone pretty much knows there's lots of room for closed software. Stallman just represents the extreme, which you need to balance the other extreme. After all, how many times have we heard large companies tell us open source is inferior/unsecure/communist/etc? It's all gotta balance out.
I've heard this before, although generally about cancer. The problem is, that idea only works if the drug companies are a cartel.
Let's say you're an executive for EvilCo, and your company develops that one month treatment for AIDS. You've got two choices:
1) Patent it, sell it for major short term profits
2) Sweep it under the rug, continue selling treatments for long term profits
Option two sounds the best, right? But you don't exist in a vacuum. If your researchers found the cure, then how long until SatanDrugs, LLC or BeelzePharm makes that same discovery, and will they do the same thing you are? Maybe they already have. Maybe they're on their way to the patent office now...
It's kind of like the old prisoner's dilemma scenario. You can't trust every other company to act for the collective good for the industry, and since any one of you could sell out for short term profits, why not you?
There's also another problem, which is that it's a cold hearted bastard thing to do. If your R&D department actually discovered a cure, you think the people who know about it are going to sit quietly while you sweep it under the rug? What kind of PR are you going to get when they go public? The only way to guarantee they'd keep quiet would be to have them killed. Otherwise, your company would have the worst PR incident since the holocaust.
H stands for hentai, which means (more or less) perverted in japanese. When a fanboy says, "I just downloaded twelve gigs of H" he's talking japanese porn of some sort, usually drawn/animated but not necessarily so. Hence the schoolgirl and tentacle monster.
IdleAire is pretty much everywhere at the big truckstops (TAs, Petros, maybe some Flying Js) these days. There's also the advantage that trucks aren't allowed to idle or run their APUs next to you, which keeps some people awake (can't do anything about reefer units though).
There's also attendants on duty, which I imagine keeps the hookers and panhandlers away. I'm not sure on that one though - they're pretty persistant.
It's a neat deal, and some companies will pay for it rather than have you idle your truck. I know Arrow has a deal with them where their drivers don't pay anything for it. Dunno who else does though.
Automatic backing sounds interesting though. There's a lot of places that are difficult at best to back up to (grocery and department stores are in general really bad about that - blind side backing with no space) and it'd be interesting to see if a computer could do a better job. It'd probably require equipment mounted on the trailer itself though, and I doubt that would be adopted very quickly.
Fuel is the largest expense in trucking. Wages is #2, and tires are #3. After that, I don't know for sure, but my guess would be maintenance and truck purchases.
Wages used to be the #1 expense. Diesel also used to be $1.30 a gallon three or four years ago.
The grandparent poster is right - it's all a bidding game, and if you try to raise your rates, someone else will do it cheaper. Rates will increase, but probably not until a lot of the little guys are out of business. I know my company is struggling.
Regarding the article you linked to: this is extremely rare. You can't make any money operating equipment like that, except for certain short haul dedicated stuff like construction haulers. Trucks require constant maintenance or they break down in extremely expensive ways.
Regrooved tires are dangerous in general, and there's no benefit to using them. It costs a lot more to have a tire truck come out than to just buy a retread (not regroove) tire and have it done at a shop. You can't use retreads on the steering axle, and many trucking companies don't use them on the drive axles. Trailers are a different thing - you can go cheap on trailer tires because if one blows out, you can still go down the road for a bit. The other seven are adequate for getting you to the nearest tire shop.
Now as far as the "dirty and unsafe" part - that doesn't describe the modern trucking industry. Most trucks on the road are less than five years old, with hardly any older than ten. Emissions have been lowered dramatically compared to the old days, and the new fuels are almost sulphur-free. The black stuff you see coming from the stacks? That's soot - unburned carbon. It's not particularly dangerous, although it can contribute to smog. You only see that when the engine is doing something dramatic, like changing gears or taking off. Most of the time a truck is in motion, the engine is working as efficiently as possible and minimizing unburned fuels.
Most trucks are moving towards having small "lawnmower" engines called APUs (axillary power units) that power the heat/AC system and provide electricity when the truck would normally be idling. I don't have one, but hopefully I will when the lease runs out on my truck. (You have to idle or have one of these APUs in inclement weather - a trucker needs to be fully rested to drive, and that's hard when you're in a truck in the middle of the desert during the summer with no A/C. Not that California cares.)
Drivers have strict rules they have to follow regarding hours of service and inspections, and while every driver breaks the rules from time to time, you develop a sense of when you need to get off the road. A wreck can destroy your career, and equipment failure can delay your load (and your paycheck). DOT inspects trucks randomly, and they're pretty thorough. Safety is a huge concern for truckers as well as trucking companies, since accidents translate to lost money. It's not worth pushing your drivers past the rules, since DOT can audit you at any time and any accident can turn into a million dollar lawsuit.
Bear in mind this article is talking about the port of Los Angeles, which just recently banned owner-operators and trucks more than a few years old. California is a very truck-unfriendly state in general and I wouldn't be surprised if this article you pointed out was just propaganda pointing out the worst case.
Neither do I understand an arbitrary speed limit of 55 mph which exists pretty much across the whole USA. Yes, it might have made sense in the 50s when cars could often go not much more than 55, and more often than not 55 was already a rather unsafe speed in said cars.
Actually, the 55 mph national speed limit was put in place in 1974, and for fuel efficiency reasons, not safety.
The speed limits in the 50s (in many places) were still determined by the old 80% average method, IIRC. Let a bunch of people drive on the road with no speed limit, cut out the top 10% and bottom 10%, and average the speed of the remaining, and there's your speed limit. It makes sense, because that's the speed most people feel comfortable at.
Nowadays, most of the states I've seen just make a state version of the old national speed limit. Here in Oklahoma it's 65 on two lane highways, 70 on some four lane highways, and 75 on turnpikes. The speed limit on some of the county roads have gone up in response, which helps matters (some small towns are only accessible via county roads), but I still feel the old 80% system made more sense.
Bear in mind though, many cars manufactured between 1974 and 1995 were made for 55 and 65 mph speed limits. Going faster than that is exceeding the design limits of the vehicle. Sure, they'll do it, but engineers didn't have to take into account states like Montana where you could go as fast as you like and still be legal. So while those cars may have had better safety features, in theory they weren't designed for today's speed limits. There's still a lot of those cars on the road today.
Bummer the ol' Multia 166 isn't up on auction. IIRC, they used it to host slashdot way back in the very early days.
I know that if I wasn't currently out of work, I would certainly bid on it. I've got a developer's board 166 and it's a neat box - too bad Compaq killed the Alpha.
Magical ability? Only if you're talking in terms of AI picture recognition. Just about everyone can tell that a five year old isn't eighteen yet. I'm not talking about the fake lolita pictures, although those would have been bad enough if I was dragged in front of my commander.
The newsgroups used to have a real problem with child porn. I'm talkin' _real_ child porn - little kids and stuff.
I remember when I was in the military, I decided to stop bulk downloading porn because of it. I didn't want to land in Leavenworth because my news client downloaded some picture of a naked little girl.
Not to mention it's a turnoff to be lookin' through a bunch of pictures of naked women and then see some four year old boy giving a blow job to a fat man.
I don't know if it's a problem anymore, but for a while it was pretty bad. No idea how it is nowdays.
It's the same in Oklahoma, USA. My ex-wife was 16 when we started dating and she moved in with me. That's perfectly legal in Oklahoma (although in most states in the U.S. the age of consent is 18, and there's a couple that are 14). Taking a picture of her naked, even though I got to see her nude every day, would have landed my ass in jail.
Personally I consider it a reflection of reality. Teenagers have sex, whether it's legal or not. Teenagers can't handle professional porn, however - it's not a pretty business. I think the law is there more to keep kids from being exploited by professional porn makers, rather than stop them from having their boyfriends snap a few pictures.
I'll tell you who's using the majority of the Win98 boxes: the parents and grandparents of the world.
Throw in small busnesses as well.
I support a few businesses, and a good half of them run 98 or ME. We're talking junk shops, cafe-style restaurants, etc. - places with practically no automation. They use a computer for email, web browsing, printing out signs, and maybe an ancient version of quickbooks or something. I did a format/reinstall for a new client on ME just recently and the only backup she wanted was a few text files that she used for inventory.
These storeowners are older folks who do things the old way and resist changing their methods. They might use email and do ordering online, but they'll have a paper ledger and a notebook they keep inventory information in. They don't care about official support, as long as they can ask around and find someone who can fix their machine when their dialup goes down. I picked up most of my clients at a cafe via word of mouth.
I think there's more people out there like that than most people realize. They don't care about being current, as long as they can do the three or four things they use their computers for, so XP is a waste. You can't talk them into changing their business methods.
Linux for these people would be unacceptable. They don't want change - they want exactly what they have so they don't have to learn anything new. I have snuck firefox onto a few of their machines, replacing the desktop shortcut to IE, which cuts down on my spyware related calls, but otherwise talking them into changing would be talking myself out of a job.
There isn't an FVWM 3 - it's version 3 of this theme that runs on top of FVWM 2.5.
I made the switch to FVWM 2 through a lot of other window managers. I held on to the 1.x series 'til enlightenment DR13 ( I think), then gnome/sawmill was working enough to use, then after a few years went back to FVWM. I like 2.x much better - my current config doesn't do a whole lot 1.x doesn't do, but there's a trick or two I pull that I'm pretty sure 1.x wouldn't let me get away with.
One question though - if you're running the same binary, is it still linked with libc5, or were you an early glibc convert?
I looked into this once. A T-1 equivalent (frame relay) would have cost me about $500/month. At my location, a T-1 from SBC would have cost about $1800/month.
You'll have last mile issues, which are always expensive. Maybe if there's a phone exchange near you, you can get a DSLAM in, if the phone company doesn't laugh you out of their office. Cable would involve a lot of equipment, know-how, and rights to use the poles (no idea there, but I'm certain they don't just let you staple your own lines on the poles). Most likely you're talking roll-your-own wireless WAN, which you really need some know-how for. When I priced it out (this was about three years ago), you're lookin' at about $200 US for customer equipment at every site, assuming you do your own assembly and some custom wiring and tweaking.
It's doable, yes, but not for someone who doesn't have enough money to move out on their own, and you just have to hope that someone doesn't roll out competing wired broadband before you can make up all your initial investment. Wireless is pretty much the worst option for most people, due to weather and line-of-sight issues.
One thing though - there might be wireless available in his area that he doesn't know about. I didn't go through my plan because someone was already doing it in my area of the state. It's usually not cheap, but for gaming it's much better than dealing with satellite latencies.
Bringing in a ton of money is the point. Paramount and CBS are corporations, after all.
Spending all the development effort on something that'll bring the same amount of money would be a waste to them. They only care about impact as far as how much money they can make off of it. Besides, there's nothing stopping them from developing new ideas at the same time they've got other people working on this.
Someone once claimed that if copyright holders don't enforce their copyrights, they'll lose them.
That's trademarks. Copyright doesn't require enforcement - everyone could use your works and then you could sue Joe Bob 'cause you think he's ugly. As long as he doesn't have explicit permission to your works, you're in the right.
I put it down to lawyers being lawyers, and businesses being myopic in general. I'm sure they have their reasons, and I'm sure they're silly, but they take it seriously.
Sorry about that, I misphrased. MIT and BSD licenses can be linked to by GPL software with no issues. The artistic and apache licenses are well understood as far as their interaction with the GPL, and pretty much no one argues about the legal points on them. I didn't mean to say they could be linked, but I'll agree that's certainly what I typed. Chalk that up to sloppy proofreading.
The BSD license change has been gone over as well. Some code still uses the old, non GPL-compatible license, but anything that belongs to berkely can use the new license, so it's perfectly within debian's rights to change the license in the code. Stuff still using the old license with "regents of berkely" changed to something else of course isn't GPL compatible and debian would have to have the copyright holder's permission to change it.
Anyway, debian does try to do the right thing. It doesn't always happen, but no group of people is perfect. Without having been involved during these discussions you're talking about, I can't really say one way or the other about it, but I would imagine removing all BSD code from debian would have rendered the system inoperable for a while. Not as bad as 4.4BSD, but there's a _lot_ of BSD code in there... The only real solution is to make the current debian leadership aware and have them correct it, or get the copyright owners to start up a fuss.
You can use it in emulators and use it for an operating system if you're selling a bare PC.
It's nice for legacy stuff - I had a client once that ran a QBASIC application and we had to set up a couple more machines for him. FreeDOS was nice and legal, since I had no idea how to buy a license for MS-DOS. It's not like you can walk down to the store and buy DOS these days.
I have an unopened copy of DOS 6.22 around here somewhere, but it's buried in a box, most likely. Probably next to my 70 NT4 Workstation licenses.
I don't see that. Their biggest competitor for file/print services was Novell, which works pretty much the same. They might have used DCE for implementation details, but I'm willing to bet it was Novell they copied the basic ideas from.
Now Novell might have copied DCE... I have no idea. I'm just saying that Microsoft had their mind on copying the directory features of NDS, not an obscure UNIX setup.
The interaction of the GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses is well understood and works well.
There's no problem at all linking GPL software with libraries of either. Same goes with the apache license and perl's artistic license.
Sun's license isn't GPL-friendly, and even if there's a question about it, debian needs to find a way around it. This is the way debian works - it's all in the social contract. It's a pain sometimes, but there's distros out there who don't worry so much about licensing issues you can use if you're concerned.
Account management is boring and detracts from "real" work.
Back when I worked in a network shop in the air force, all the people that really didn't know anything and weren't willing to put in the effort to learn were given the task of user account management, since it's easy (at least it was easy on NT4 with Enterprise Administrator). Some of them would get fed up doing the same old boring thing and find out what the more knowledgable people were doing, some wouldn't.
I liked the way it was set up 'cause I could worry about other things than user support and train people who were actually interested in learning.
recently even Novell and lots of companies use it for different purposes in one or another way
Novell's been using it longer than pretty much anyone. Check out NDS for more info. Microsoft was more or less copying Novell, not any of the UNIX vendors (who were mostly still using NIS and friends when active directory came out).
Why not ask the people who code for NetBSD? They'll tell you why they do it.
The scheduler was just an example, but using that example, what if NetBSD is a particularly good testbed for it? Maybe you like the way the kernel internals are sorted out, so you want to work on it there. Maybe there's thirty people doing scheduler work on FreeBSD and you can't get your ideas in. Maybe you don't have the knowledge of other kernel areas to write your own mini-unix, or maybe you want to work in a collaborative environment where you get feedback. Everyone has their reasons.
Either way, if you don't run NetBSD, it shouldn't matter to you. There's been enough code lifted from it to prove its worth many times over, and if the developers want to keep going, then they'll keep going. Like I said, let them have their fun, they aren't hurting anything.