There are a few OSS firewall distros out now that give you all the firewall features w/o all the by hand set up. I've been looking at IP Cop lately although I am still using a home grown Linux firewall.
http://www.ipcop.org/
You can find more firewall distros on distrowatch's web site.
http://distrowatch.com/
I worked at Lawson during the time frame this book covers, hired '97 laid off '02. I haven't read the book yet though.
To quote you:
"Advanced Technology department (as if to imply that the other one is some kind of non-advanced, backward, technology)."
You are making a joke here, but you are actually correct. Back when R&D and AT were seperate entities AT was considered Lawson's future. AT focussed on Java, HTML, javascript, XML. R&D focussed on maintance and continued development of the Legacy product which was written in C.
I'll have to read this book. I'm an ex-Lawson employee. Laid off in 2002.
I need to defend something here. Although Bill might have been fed another story. The K&R code base did not lack comments for compilation speed. Back in 1997 I was told that it was because the code was meant to be "self documenting", that is, it was meant to be plain enough that you didn't need comments to understand it and comments got in the way and made the code more difficult to read. Also unless you are talking Universe 2.x or earlier it wasn't K&R any more, it was a mix of ANSI and K&R. We adjusted the compiler flags on the Unix platforms to allow for the mixture of syntaxes.
Bill might have been fed a different story though. I always added comments above functions that I went in to maintain. I was never told that I could not comment my code, just that I shouldn't litter the code with comments.
I liked working for Lawson up until the end. Lawson started going down hill when they started focussing on their IPO. Once Lawson focussed their goals on market cap rather than producing a quality product, the company started to spiral, IMHO.
I also feel the company lacked vision. Since '98 we had a Linux product that Lawson refused to market or offer to interested customers. I doubt it exists any more as I was the only one maintaining it when I was laid off in 2002. The last official line I got for The Godfather (if it is who I think it was) was that offering the product would offend MS and Lawson would never risk offending MS. Lawson's Web product used to be browser agnostic until some MS zelot got in control of the project and decreed that it would only work on IE. There was no real technical reason for that limitation.
Sadly Lawson was the best employer I ever had. I came from a worse environment and the one I'm in now makes Lawson look really good. Sigh.
With all the news I've read about SCO, one question keeps on comming to mind. Where is Ransom Love? If I'm not mistaken, Ransom got the idea behind Open Source and Linux. He was the orriginal CEO of Caldera, or at least was CEO from 1999 to some time in 2002.
When he ran the company I held stock in SCO/Caldera. I ditched it after he stepped down and the company started becoming evil.
Sigh. I'd sure like to here Ransom's take on all this.
How much of IDC's numbers are based on new users versus page bloat?
Just from the increase in graphics, flash, and java in web pages alone could acount for a doubling in bandwidth per year. Back in the Mosaic days Web pages were so light compared to what they are today.
Let me get this strait. You're blaming the state's tax revenue loss on the Federal regime? Hugh?
Just admit it. You are so liberal that you just hate anything to come out of a Republican administration.
The federal tax cut does NOT affect state tax revenues. At least this tax cut has a chance of helping the economy. States are experiencing lower tax revenues because the nation's economy as a whole is suffering. The federal tax cut if anything should help the state economy by giving more money back to the people who can then spend it on taxable goods and services.
You know I never liked the SNOW idea. I jumped onto the Agenda VR3 wagon back when we were using the ELF compiler and sure it created slower, larger, more memory intensive binaries, but it did have one significant advantage over SNOW. While the SNOW compiler made the Agenda VR3 apear faster, it became nearly impossible for developers to distribute binary versions of thier apps.
My project (shameless plug) The Religious Agenda was offered as a binary only for the alpha release because everyone was using ELF at that time and I didn't have to worry too much about dynamic run time linker choaking on it. Once people started using SNOW and several incompatible SNOW ABI's came out, in order to offer binaries to the public I needed to offer for each SNOW ABI people had chosen to use.
One of the ways SNOW works is by making shared libraries appear as if they were static libraries. The entry points into the library became staticly encoded into the compiled binary. You make a slight change to your library and all of a sudden everything that links against it needs to be recompiled as the offsets to these libraries change. ELF uses symbols instead of static entry points and allows backward compatibilty for minor changes and fixes.
So I had to simply resort to distributing source only. This excluded all MS Windows users since there was no cross compiler available for them. This made a lot of the available open source apps unavailable to anyone but hard core geeks who were into customizing their Agenda with their own cross compiler environments.
Now I believe you are suggesting that the SNOW idea can be used transparently without loosing the ELF flexibility. If so I'm all for it. And I'm not blaiming SNOW on the death of the VR3, however it was my biggest gripe. Also keep in mind without symbols, debugging becomes a nightmare. I wouldn't want to see symbol less core dumps on desktop or server machines. The SNOW ideas are only applicable to PDA's IMHO.
Actually if you have ever tried selling the idea of using objects to abstract out the functionality of a real primative datatype in a bussiness setting, you will find it's a hard sell. I know I've never been able to pull it off.
COBOL was designed for bussiness needs and it is still a fairly good fit. On the other hand Java was designed to be multi-platform Swiss army knife.
There is such a thing as the right tool for the right job you know. I would be quite happy to see Java become the right tool some day, but its not yet.
Oh sure. There are other languages out there. How many bussinesses will be willing to migrate from COBOL to Haskell or Smalltalk though. Not many I'm afraid.
Replace HP3000 with HP9000, Cobol with C++, and EDI with XML.
You know I'm not a big fan of COBOL either, but it still has its place in this world. One of the things that keeps COBOL alive is the Decimal data type. How many other languages can do arbitrary decimal precision? The decimal feature is percieved as being needed in the bussiness world and newer languages such as Java ignore this need.
Until we start making languages that are more suitable for bussiness needs than for computer science needs, COBOL will hang around.
Don't misunderstand me. If Sun added a decimal data type to Java I'd love to see COBOL die. But computer science types aren't interested in decimal types because they are ineffiecent. But the need still remains.
There could be a lucritive bussiness opertunity here.
I would love to see 3D printers begin to show up in places like Kinkos. These things would be a modellers dream! Imagine being able to fabricate your own model parts! If you can model it in virtual space, getting a real space equivalent is a matter of hitting print!
Does anyone know of someplace which is offering access to these printers to paying customers? I would be perfectly happy to email CAD plans to a fabricator if I could get a quick, cheap kit of parts back in the mail.
From the article:
If it -- or any other third-party OS -- becomes widely used, Lego would have trouble vouching for the reliability of its product and providing tech support. More worrisome, another company could use Noga's LegOS to create a competing product.
One of the things that saddens me is the way Lego has gone into reverse with their robotics system toy line. The orriginal Mindstorm kit had supperior hardware to the present kits. The orriginal RCX 1.0 brick had a 9V power jack which allowed you to power the brick w/o batteries. Starting with 1.5 and now 2.0 the bricks have no external power source.
The newer kits comming out of Lego are really dissapointing. The Scout, toughted as the future of RCX on some Lego pages, has only two inputs, two outputs and the light input is hardwired into the brick so it is less usefull. The Scout is a representation of the first labotomized RCX.
The newer micro-Scout is less usefull as it has one output and input and they are both internalized. It is also not programmable the way the Scout and RCX are.
If someone competes with Lego maybe we will see an improvement in the technology rather than the cheapening we have been witnessing. I would love to purchase an RCX brick with 6 or more inputs and outputs. Especially if it can run LegOS.
It is a shame that the Handy Boards are so darn expensive.
Why haven't we seen any of these chips appear in a line of PDAs?
I believe Transmeta had a TM3x00 line of chips that were altra low power consumption and a slower clock speed than the TM5x00 line. I was hoping to see it in a line of PDAs.
Looking at the specs for a StrongArm 1110 and a Cursoe TM5400, I'd say they are similair enough in energy consumption that a TM3x00 at a 200 Mhz clock speed would have been a supperior PDA chip. Unfortunately I cannot confirm this as the TM3x00 has seemed to have vanished.
Is any one working on a DirectX/3D to SDL/OpenGL translation layer?
If we took DirectX/3D and made it an open standard that both Microsoft and the rest of the world could develope against, then it wouldn't really matter that game developement companies are using DirectX/3D.
I'm a sad owner of an Inspiron 7500 laptop which was ordered with Red Hat 6.2 installed. It would be a great lap top if all of the hardware worked properly. The PCMCIA devices only like to work at certain low room temperatures or with the right amount of jiggling. And even then their continued function is not guerrentied.
The paradox lies in Dell not standing behind their 3 year parts and labor warranty when your product was purchased with Linux installed. First of all when you call them and they hear you are running Linux they forward you to Linuxcare. Linuxcare is a great company, but they do not get paid by Dell and as such will not help you unless you have bought a support contract from them. It's Dell's policy to not even consider the possibility of hardware failure until all software posibilities have been eliminated and with Linux they won't consider the software directly. As a final result, that hardware warranty Dell forced you to pay for is worthless without a second support contract through Red Hat or Linuxcare.
To get around my problem I simply bought a $30 USB ethernet adapter from Best Buy. It took less time to purchase and install than the time I spent on the phone with Dell and cheaper than buying a second support contract from Linuxcare.
In short Linux users do not need the Dell agrivation. I for one am for ever through with the company and with every chance I get recommend people find an alternative to this company's products. I personally wish Dell had never become involved with Linux so I would never have had to deal with the company's abuse.
I see a lot of people saying ignore the Yopy and iPaq and go for a Palm or compatible. But really it comes down to what you want.
If you want an out of the box PDA to do truly PDA like things, get a Palm. Palm's are simple machines with simple OS's that have long battery life and are hard to beat for that task.
If you want to carry Windows around in your pocket get a WinCE machine. You won't get the battery life but you get Windows!
If you want to have a Linux PDA, or in my case want a POSIX compatible PDA to run your own programs on, then either go with the Agenda VR3 or check out Handhelds.org on how to build your own on an iPaq. I don't like Yopy either because of the choice of W over X. Keep in mind that you are not going to get the battery life, but you can run far more complicated programs than you can on a Palm.
Is there a reason why you are not considering Java?
If you are looking for a cross platform language, why not go with one of the Java IDEs? Cross platform supposedly is the primary goal of Java. Although vi is my IDE, you might like something like JBuilder.
Linux is not dead on the desktop, but it has never led the life many Linux zelots have hoped. This article forgets that there is a subset of society who want their workstation to be running a Unix (or Unix like) OS in the first place. For them Linux is the ideal.
For those who want to run MS Apps, face it, they are unlikely to ever be available for Linux. For those who want to run Quicken, it's not going to happen.
I personally have been Windows free for over a year now at home and work and have no regrets. As a programmer I can do this, how many others can live without Big Bill's omnipotent embrace? Not likely to happen in my life time.
Yeah. Minnesota is the same way. By law you are required at tax time to pay sales tax on all items you have purchased through out the year over the internet and through the mail.
I have yet to see how they expect to enforce this tax law. I have seen some internet companies charge sales tax though. Some "well behaved" companies may already be keeping track of tax laws in states and sending in the state sales tax on your behalf (example: Loki Games, Va Linux Systems).
The one thing that irritates me about the above article is these legislators don't seem to understand what taxes are for. Taxes are to raise revenue for a government entity. To say that you want to create a new tax to be fair is an abuse of the very purpose of taxes. If you don't need the money, what's the point of even talking about new taxes.
It's like your neighbor complaining to the government you have a cow and he doesn't so they come in and shoot your cow rather than give your neighbor one as well.
This does at least explain why it is so hard to purchase a laptop from IBM running Linux. When I tried to do so they only offered one model with Linux installed and it was there most expensive model costing over $4000. I said no thanks and called up DELL.
Note this is not a plug for DELL.
I wonder if IBM has retracted their claim of supporting Linux on all their platforms then?
Color calibration is important if you are doing any type of graphic you want others to be able to work with on their machine. I've had no end of problems with POVRAY and SDL for Dalek Chess. When I think I have something that will look good for everyone I come to work and find that half of the PC's that pull up my web page either are too dim to see the detail or washed out. It even varies from Linux box to Linux box.
No answers here, but I would love to see a solution.
I'm not trying to plug Wells Fargo, even though that is exactly what I am doing 8-), but I had a similiar problem with them in the past and called them up. They were quite civil and pointed out that the reason I couldn't connect was because I had switched to weak encryption, a side effect of upgrading to a newer version of SuSE.
The technician had offered to give me a URL to download the latest Linux version of Netscape, but I declined. I was a little embarassed once I realized the failure was my fault, but none the less the service was admirable.
I personally dump any company that does not want to support my needs on my OS of choice. I recommend you consider doing the same. Vote with your check book or in this case the whole account.
Are you sure about your states?
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
If the polls are to be believed, Minnesota is actually a swing state this year. Last poll published by the Minneapolis Star Tribune showed Bush in the lead with a 44% vote compaired to Gore's 41%. The poll supposedly had a 3% margin of error.
I agree however that people should vote their conscience. And if you don't know who to vote for then maybe you shouldn't vote. It is better to not vote than risk putting someone in office who does not agree with your ideals.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few OSS firewall distros out now that give you all the firewall features w/o all the by hand set up. I've been looking at IP Cop lately although I am still using a home grown Linux firewall.
http://www.ipcop.org/
You can find more firewall distros on distrowatch's web site.
http://distrowatch.com/
I worked at Lawson during the time frame this book covers, hired '97 laid off '02. I haven't read the book yet though.
To quote you:
"Advanced Technology department (as if to imply that the other one is some kind of non-advanced, backward, technology)."
You are making a joke here, but you are actually correct. Back when R&D and AT were seperate entities AT was considered Lawson's future. AT focussed on Java, HTML, javascript, XML. R&D focussed on maintance and continued development of the Legacy product which was written in C.
I'll have to read this book. I'm an ex-Lawson employee. Laid off in 2002.
I need to defend something here. Although Bill might have been fed another story. The K&R code base did not lack comments for compilation speed. Back in 1997 I was told that it was because the code was meant to be "self documenting", that is, it was meant to be plain enough that you didn't need comments to understand it and comments got in the way and made the code more difficult to read. Also unless you are talking Universe 2.x or earlier it wasn't K&R any more, it was a mix of ANSI and K&R. We adjusted the compiler flags on the Unix platforms to allow for the mixture of syntaxes.
Bill might have been fed a different story though. I always added comments above functions that I went in to maintain. I was never told that I could not comment my code, just that I shouldn't litter the code with comments.
I liked working for Lawson up until the end. Lawson started going down hill when they started focussing on their IPO. Once Lawson focussed their goals on market cap rather than producing a quality product, the company started to spiral, IMHO.
I also feel the company lacked vision. Since '98 we had a Linux product that Lawson refused to market or offer to interested customers. I doubt it exists any more as I was the only one maintaining it when I was laid off in 2002. The last official line I got for The Godfather (if it is who I think it was) was that offering the product would offend MS and Lawson would never risk offending MS. Lawson's Web product used to be browser agnostic until some MS zelot got in control of the project and decreed that it would only work on IE. There was no real technical reason for that limitation.
Sadly Lawson was the best employer I ever had. I came from a worse environment and the one I'm in now makes Lawson look really good. Sigh.
With all the news I've read about SCO, one question keeps on comming to mind. Where is Ransom Love? If I'm not mistaken, Ransom got the idea behind Open Source and Linux. He was the orriginal CEO of Caldera, or at least was CEO from 1999 to some time in 2002.
When he ran the company I held stock in SCO/Caldera. I ditched it after he stepped down and the company started becoming evil.
Sigh. I'd sure like to here Ransom's take on all this.
How much of IDC's numbers are based on new users versus page bloat?
Just from the increase in graphics, flash, and java in web pages alone could acount for a doubling in bandwidth per year. Back in the Mosaic days Web pages were so light compared to what they are today.
When will Sharp start selling the A300 in the US? Really the A300 is the SL model I am interested in, but I see no plans on making it available.
IMHO the A300 is the sweetest Linux based PDA Sharp has produced. Here's a URL describing it from linuxdevices.com: http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5915008901. html
Let me get this strait. You're blaming the state's tax revenue loss on the Federal regime? Hugh?
Just admit it. You are so liberal that you just hate anything to come out of a Republican administration.
The federal tax cut does NOT affect state tax revenues. At least this tax cut has a chance of helping the economy. States are experiencing lower tax revenues because the nation's economy as a whole is suffering. The federal tax cut if anything should help the state economy by giving more money back to the people who can then spend it on taxable goods and services.
My project (shameless plug) The Religious Agenda was offered as a binary only for the alpha release because everyone was using ELF at that time and I didn't have to worry too much about dynamic run time linker choaking on it. Once people started using SNOW and several incompatible SNOW ABI's came out, in order to offer binaries to the public I needed to offer for each SNOW ABI people had chosen to use.
One of the ways SNOW works is by making shared libraries appear as if they were static libraries. The entry points into the library became staticly encoded into the compiled binary. You make a slight change to your library and all of a sudden everything that links against it needs to be recompiled as the offsets to these libraries change. ELF uses symbols instead of static entry points and allows backward compatibilty for minor changes and fixes.
So I had to simply resort to distributing source only. This excluded all MS Windows users since there was no cross compiler available for them. This made a lot of the available open source apps unavailable to anyone but hard core geeks who were into customizing their Agenda with their own cross compiler environments.
Now I believe you are suggesting that the SNOW idea can be used transparently without loosing the ELF flexibility. If so I'm all for it. And I'm not blaiming SNOW on the death of the VR3, however it was my biggest gripe. Also keep in mind without symbols, debugging becomes a nightmare. I wouldn't want to see symbol less core dumps on desktop or server machines. The SNOW ideas are only applicable to PDA's IMHO.
Actually if you have ever tried selling the idea of using objects to abstract out the functionality of a real primative datatype in a bussiness setting, you will find it's a hard sell. I know I've never been able to pull it off.
COBOL was designed for bussiness needs and it is still a fairly good fit. On the other hand Java was designed to be multi-platform Swiss army knife.
There is such a thing as the right tool for the right job you know. I would be quite happy to see Java become the right tool some day, but its not yet.
I still have hope for the future though.
Oh sure. There are other languages out there. How many bussinesses will be willing to migrate from COBOL to Haskell or Smalltalk though. Not many I'm afraid.
At least most suits have heard of Java.
You know I'm not a big fan of COBOL either, but it still has its place in this world. One of the things that keeps COBOL alive is the Decimal data type. How many other languages can do arbitrary decimal precision? The decimal feature is percieved as being needed in the bussiness world and newer languages such as Java ignore this need.
Until we start making languages that are more suitable for bussiness needs than for computer science needs, COBOL will hang around.
Don't misunderstand me. If Sun added a decimal data type to Java I'd love to see COBOL die. But computer science types aren't interested in decimal types because they are ineffiecent. But the need still remains.
Just another sad fact of life I'm afraid.
There could be a lucritive bussiness opertunity here.
I would love to see 3D printers begin to show up in places like Kinkos. These things would be a modellers dream! Imagine being able to fabricate your own model parts! If you can model it in virtual space, getting a real space equivalent is a matter of hitting print!
Does anyone know of someplace which is offering access to these printers to paying customers? I would be perfectly happy to email CAD plans to a fabricator if I could get a quick, cheap kit of parts back in the mail.
If it -- or any other third-party OS -- becomes widely used, Lego would have trouble vouching for the reliability of its product and providing tech support. More worrisome, another company could use Noga's LegOS to create a competing product.
One of the things that saddens me is the way Lego has gone into reverse with their robotics system toy line. The orriginal Mindstorm kit had supperior hardware to the present kits. The orriginal RCX 1.0 brick had a 9V power jack which allowed you to power the brick w/o batteries. Starting with 1.5 and now 2.0 the bricks have no external power source.
The newer kits comming out of Lego are really dissapointing. The Scout, toughted as the future of RCX on some Lego pages, has only two inputs, two outputs and the light input is hardwired into the brick so it is less usefull. The Scout is a representation of the first labotomized RCX.
The newer micro-Scout is less usefull as it has one output and input and they are both internalized. It is also not programmable the way the Scout and RCX are.
If someone competes with Lego maybe we will see an improvement in the technology rather than the cheapening we have been witnessing. I would love to purchase an RCX brick with 6 or more inputs and outputs. Especially if it can run LegOS.
It is a shame that the Handy Boards are so darn expensive.
Why haven't we seen any of these chips appear in a line of PDAs?
I believe Transmeta had a TM3x00 line of chips that were altra low power consumption and a slower clock speed than the TM5x00 line. I was hoping to see it in a line of PDAs.
Looking at the specs for a StrongArm 1110 and a Cursoe TM5400, I'd say they are similair enough in energy consumption that a TM3x00 at a 200 Mhz clock speed would have been a supperior PDA chip. Unfortunately I cannot confirm this as the TM3x00 has seemed to have vanished.
Maybe some day.
Is any one working on a DirectX/3D to SDL/OpenGL translation layer?
If we took DirectX/3D and made it an open standard that both Microsoft and the rest of the world could develope against, then it wouldn't really matter that game developement companies are using DirectX/3D.
Mind you I'm not talking about WINE here.
I'm a sad owner of an Inspiron 7500 laptop which was ordered with Red Hat 6.2 installed. It would be a great lap top if all of the hardware worked properly. The PCMCIA devices only like to work at certain low room temperatures or with the right amount of jiggling. And even then their continued function is not guerrentied.
The paradox lies in Dell not standing behind their 3 year parts and labor warranty when your product was purchased with Linux installed. First of all when you call them and they hear you are running Linux they forward you to Linuxcare. Linuxcare is a great company, but they do not get paid by Dell and as such will not help you unless you have bought a support contract from them. It's Dell's policy to not even consider the possibility of hardware failure until all software posibilities have been eliminated and with Linux they won't consider the software directly. As a final result, that hardware warranty Dell forced you to pay for is worthless without a second support contract through Red Hat or Linuxcare.
To get around my problem I simply bought a $30 USB ethernet adapter from Best Buy. It took less time to purchase and install than the time I spent on the phone with Dell and cheaper than buying a second support contract from Linuxcare.
In short Linux users do not need the Dell agrivation. I for one am for ever through with the company and with every chance I get recommend people find an alternative to this company's products. I personally wish Dell had never become involved with Linux so I would never have had to deal with the company's abuse.
Just my $0.02.
Look here at their FAQ:
http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/FAQ.html#2-5
I can't figure out if Linux DA has the same or similiar problems though.
Does any one have the skinny on this?
If you want an out of the box PDA to do truly PDA like things, get a Palm. Palm's are simple machines with simple OS's that have long battery life and are hard to beat for that task.
If you want to carry Windows around in your pocket get a WinCE machine. You won't get the battery life but you get Windows!
If you want to have a Linux PDA, or in my case want a POSIX compatible PDA to run your own programs on, then either go with the Agenda VR3 or check out Handhelds.org on how to build your own on an iPaq. I don't like Yopy either because of the choice of W over X. Keep in mind that you are not going to get the battery life, but you can run far more complicated programs than you can on a Palm.
Just choose the right tool for your needs.
Is there a reason why you are not considering Java?
If you are looking for a cross platform language, why not go with one of the Java IDEs? Cross platform supposedly is the primary goal of Java. Although vi is my IDE, you might like something like JBuilder.
Linux is not dead on the desktop, but it has never led the life many Linux zelots have hoped. This article forgets that there is a subset of society who want their workstation to be running a Unix (or Unix like) OS in the first place. For them Linux is the ideal.
For those who want to run MS Apps, face it, they are unlikely to ever be available for Linux. For those who want to run Quicken, it's not going to happen.
I personally have been Windows free for over a year now at home and work and have no regrets. As a programmer I can do this, how many others can live without Big Bill's omnipotent embrace? Not likely to happen in my life time.
Yeah. Minnesota is the same way. By law you are required at tax time to pay sales tax on all items you have purchased through out the year over the internet and through the mail.
I have yet to see how they expect to enforce this tax law. I have seen some internet companies charge sales tax though. Some "well behaved" companies may already be keeping track of tax laws in states and sending in the state sales tax on your behalf (example: Loki Games, Va Linux Systems).
The one thing that irritates me about the above article is these legislators don't seem to understand what taxes are for. Taxes are to raise revenue for a government entity. To say that you want to create a new tax to be fair is an abuse of the very purpose of taxes. If you don't need the money, what's the point of even talking about new taxes.
It's like your neighbor complaining to the government you have a cow and he doesn't so they come in and shoot your cow rather than give your neighbor one as well.
Just fed up with legistors.
This does at least explain why it is so hard to purchase a laptop from IBM running Linux. When I tried to do so they only offered one model with Linux installed and it was there most expensive model costing over $4000. I said no thanks and called up DELL.
Note this is not a plug for DELL.
I wonder if IBM has retracted their claim of supporting Linux on all their platforms then?
Color calibration is important if you are doing any type of graphic you want others to be able to work with on their machine. I've had no end of problems with POVRAY and SDL for Dalek Chess. When I think I have something that will look good for everyone I come to work and find that half of the PC's that pull up my web page either are too dim to see the detail or washed out. It even varies from Linux box to Linux box.
No answers here, but I would love to see a solution.
I'm not trying to plug Wells Fargo, even though that is exactly what I am doing 8-), but I had a similiar problem with them in the past and called them up. They were quite civil and pointed out that the reason I couldn't connect was because I had switched to weak encryption, a side effect of upgrading to a newer version of SuSE.
The technician had offered to give me a URL to download the latest Linux version of Netscape, but I declined. I was a little embarassed once I realized the failure was my fault, but none the less the service was admirable.
I personally dump any company that does not want to support my needs on my OS of choice. I recommend you consider doing the same. Vote with your check book or in this case the whole account.
If the polls are to be believed, Minnesota is actually a swing state this year. Last poll published by the Minneapolis Star Tribune showed Bush in the lead with a 44% vote compaired to Gore's 41%. The poll supposedly had a 3% margin of error.
I agree however that people should vote their conscience. And if you don't know who to vote for then maybe you shouldn't vote. It is better to not vote than risk putting someone in office who does not agree with your ideals.