In a case like this where BIG money has vested interests, you have to wonder if the defending lawyers are being put under any pressure to lose the case.
BTW, isn't this something the ACLU should do instead of the EFF?
Not to be stupid, but why can't they use the operating system's TCP/IP stack like EVERYTHING ELSE? Come on- this seems like a case of proprietary protocols undermining well established, perfectly functional standards to the detriment of the user, but I might be misunderstanding how it works.
From my experience over the past 5 years, AOL *is* an unethical company at best, and you could even say "evil".
I've used both KDE and Gnome with various combinations of window managers and distributions recently, and while both are perfectly good solutions, there's a couple simple things that gnome does that I personally find endearing:
1. The high quality of the icon artwork.
2. The graphical virtual window manager. For some reason I like the little grid a whole lot better than the "one,two,three,four" buttons.
In addition to these "hard" first impressions I find I'm also drawn to gnome for some purely subjective feelings that GTK is more in the open source spirit than qt, and that gnome pushes the destop manager envelope a little further than KDE. I like the "try" button better than "apply" for example. It seems to make more sense. I dislike the "explorer" windows being cluttered with buttons, however.
Keep in mind that these are just feelings, and I can't really make a logical arguement for them. I continue to use my KDE desktops alongside my gnome ones. Both desktops are very useful to me and I haven't had serious stability or performance problems with either one.
I appologize if this has already been addressed. Alas, my connection to slashdot is poor and it took forever to bring up the reply page.
I see that this processor comes in two versions with different Mhz, but what does that actually mean in real world performance? What is a 700Mhz or 400Mhz Crusoe chip equivalent to? As we all know, the Mhz rating does not mean everything.
I have used the MS optical mouse by plugging into the USB port of my Mac G3 Laptop (Lombard) running LinuxPPC. It worked perfectly in both X and the console, and it sure was nice to have those three buttons back:)
From what I've seen, it's not so much that Microsoft's products are inferior. Most of the time they work fine, or at least par for the industry.
The problem that a lot of people have with Microsoft is their monopolistic business practices. Even leaving aside the ethical and legal questions some of these practices raise, these practices hurt competion and create a climate were even competitors with superior technology have severe difficulties making inroads into the market. The end result is that we are forced (or at least heavily influenced) to use, and pay for, software that may not be the best or even wanted in the first place.
The other problem people (esp. geeks) have with Microsoft is that their software is not designed primarily for power users, so that programmers, hackers, and all other kinds of computer-knowledgeable people run into artificial constraints on what they can do with Microsoft's software, and that is frustrating:)
You are allowed by law to make copies of your personal music and software for personal use and backup purposes.
You might want to listen to the music on a Rio or some other device, or you might want to make a backup copy in case your physical media becomes damaged. You might also want to keep a few copies in different places so you don't have to lug your music collection around with you. It's also fun to manipulate your music on a PC to see what it sounds like backwards and stuff like that.
There's nothing inherently wrong with "ripping" a CD, and the music industry shouldn't be so caught up in trying to control distribution to the point where their efforts are at odds with technological progress.
Copying music and then distributing it without permission is against the law, except in very limited circumstances where you can claim fair use (a la Negativland). But there is no reason that simply copying it, without distributing it, is wrong.
Don't let coporations control more of your life than they already do.
-OT (who is not a lawyer and knows these statements are not 100% accurate:)
Do you have an AMD K6-2 350 by any chance? There is a known windows 95 patch to prevent intermittent lockups when booting with this processor.
In the errata Microsoft does say the problem is a bug in windows, and not due to an AMD compatibility problem. I had one of these, and after installing the patch everything was fine.
Of course, Linux just worked right from the start:)
Yes, that's what it was. I couldn't remember exactly what part of the M releases I was having a hard time with, but knew there was something.
I've been following the M's since 5 regularly but stopped when I found one that included the "Smart browsing" keywords that send all the addresses you type in back to netscape for massaging. I always disable this in the regular netscape releases, but was hoping that the open source version would come with more privacy-friendly defaults.
I haven't checked the latest release. I'll take your word for it that it's been taken out, or at least disabled as the default. Thanks for that info.
I too was very much turned off by the marketing "features" creeping into both netscape and mozilla releases. Is there any way to get rid of them? I hope they can be customized away in Mozilla.
It's just wrong that you can't choose to not install AOL IM. Even if you go and delete the AIM directory inside netscape communicator folders, you are still left with the annoying button on your browser window. The "shop" buttons are similar garbage. Am I the only one who is offended by this? At work I received a compaq laptop and it came with a shopping button.. blech. I traded up for a toshiba instead.
Listen here corporate america, I don't want any shopping button. I don't want any push-content channels on my desktop. I don't want instant messaging software controlled by a third party server- all I want is a fast, powerful computer with applications that do no more than they need to. My computer is a tool, not my personal temple to consumerism.
While I'm in rant mode... Ever notice how even if you choose custom install on windows98 and deselect the "online services" junk, they are still installed on your hard drive and show up on the desktop. Blech.
I'm very glad to see such a visible, open retraction. Every publisher (especially news publishers) make mistakes. What seperates a site with integrity from a site like, say, anything ziff-davis is the ability to admit mistakes.
I want my news to be simply informative- retractions don't take away from that. The kind of places that don't care about retractions are usually trying to use their position as a news provider for more self-serving ends. They don't care so much if the news is true, so long as you get it from them.
Why is this marked as "Funny"? (And where are those moderator points when you need them?) If you do even the smallest bit of research into scientology you will find that these accusations are true, and only scratch the surface of criticism one can give against the Scientologists.
Some of their beliefs would in fact be funny if they were not destroying people's lives and abusing our (US) public institutions.
I use Vandyke's SecureCRT software, which is a win32 SSH v1, v2, telnet, and general terminal emulation client. Version 3.0 lets you connect to either SSHv1 or SSHv2 servers with lots of encryption/compression/port forwarding options. If you're using a client like this a v1 to v2 server upgrade "flag" day isn't as annoying as it could be.
I don't have any affiliation with Vandyke, but I would like to say that they make beta releases readily available, return email promptly with a personal reply, and emailed me the the upgrade license from version 2 to version 3 without any "upgrade" charge. Yes, it's closed, non-free software, but much better than most I've dealt with.
I haven't seen anyone post on the monitor mentioned in the subject, which happens to be the one that I own, so I'll add in my 2cents.
To avoid the problem of finding a sync-on-green video card with decent X drivers, you can remove the plastic casing of the monitor and unscrew the back metal plate. You will find a switch there that toggles the monitor between sync-on-green and v/h sync. Move it to v/h sync. Now you can either make a VGA to 5 BNC cable, or just buy one. They are about 50$ new, but you can usually find these things attached to junk that no one wants either in your company's basement or at a show. If you have to make one, someone here has already posted the specs.
You might want to attach the monitor to your PC at this point without putting it back together. I had to adjust the plastic dial on top of the flyback (the thing that attached to the suction-cup going into the tube) in order to achieve decent brightness at 1152x900, but don't adjust it too much.
Make sure you have some kind of console into your PC, because text mode will not work and you'll just see gibberish. Add a modeline entry in the XF86Config file for this monitor. The one I use is:
Now start up X, and you should be good to go. The monitor is file, although it does use up a lot of electricity and focus is inevitably bad. Still, it's much nicer than a 14" of 15" monitor.
I know that I'm ignorant about what is going on over there right now, as I've only read the Reuters wire and a CNN report.
However, from this information it appears that Japan:
1. Is not prepared for this kind of disaster 2. Is not reacting to it in an aggressive fashion.
It is strange to me that given the repeated nuclear safety problems they have had over there that they do not have a plan in place to deal with a nuclear emergency. Why are they asking the US Military for aid? What kind of aid are they looking for? It seems like they don't even know what kind of help they need.
Also, the action that appears to be taken so far seems to contrast starkly with the Russian firefighters who gave their lives to try and stop the Chernobyl disaster. Some officials are saying that they don't know whether or not the reaction will become self sustaining or not. It seems to me that if there is a chance this emergency could turn into something similar to a reactor meltdown people should go in there and do everything they can to smother the reaction before it becomes any worse. Taking a "wait and see" attitude with something like has the possibility of frigthening consequences.
Some people have questioned the value of telling people to remain indoors. This was probably done to avoid a widespread panic that would clog all the roads and hamper efforts to bring the situation under control.
Perhaps we'll get more useful information in the days ahead.
"Nobody" may need to be concerned about security if your computer is never plugged into a network such as the internet.
However, as soon as you dial up your ISP, not to mention connect a cablemodem, you would be well advised to be concerned with security.
Even if you have nothing but valueless games on your personal computer, a malicious cracker can still make use of it as a depot for warez and pornography, and they can also use your computer as a launching pad for attacks on other systems. Some people will try and damage your computer simply because you live in (insert your country here).
How would you like it if your computer was seized by the feds for evidence because a malicious person used it for illegal purposes?
Everyone who is part of an worldwide electronic community should be aware of security (and privacy) issues. You don't have to be a security expert, but you should at least go in with a cautious attitude. In the end, you are responsible for yourself.
I just "aquired" a new Apple 333Mhz G3 512K l2 cache, with a 14" active matrix screen, 64MB RAM, and 4G HD. It comes with an IrDA port, 10/100 ethernet BUILT IN (not via a fragile card clip-thing or cable), 2 usb ports, a built in modem (which I believe is a REAL v.90 modem, and not a software modem, but I might be wrong.) a CDROM drive that can be replaced with a DVD drive without any other special upgrades, and ATI video chip with 8MB SDRAM, VGA-out, S-video output, sound in/out jacks, builtin mic and speakers,a cardbus slot, and a SCSI connector.
This cost 2300$ retail and for the hardware it appears to be an absolutely great deal. I have a few other new PC laptops here from compaq and toshiba. In the same price range they don't have built-in ethernet, they don't have SCSI, and they don't have as much video RAM. They are also Celeron or AMD K6-x chips, not P2-3's. In my subjective opinion the G3 laptop is cooler looking as well.
So.. before you go and bash apple powerbooks, check out the specs, pricing, and use one for a week. All my other computers here are PCs but you have to give credit where credit is due. Apple's G3 powerbooks are real contenders, even leaving out the OS.
PS: Compaq prices their consumer laptops very low, but who would want a "retail" button with a shopping cart icon right next to the trackpad, even if the rest of the specs rock? GRRR.
When you have that many users you have to have a nice structure for the usernames, which isn't the/etc/passwd file. And, you need a mailbox format that isn't linear, like the normal mbox. The rest of the problems can usually be solved with hardware (think about using a raid).
I know of three potential semi-free solutions.
Carnegie Mellon Cyrus (go to the FTP site and download the latest version. Don't rely on the way out of date web page to link to it.) IMAP server.
University of Washington's imapd. This seems to be under more active development, and supports a nice range of features, mailbox formats, and security mechanisms. However, it uses the passwd file (although you might be able to get around this using PAM) and it doesn't natively support quotas. (although you can do this at the OS level.
Darthmouth's Blitzmail Server: This has been ported to linux, and is *wonderfully* scalable across multiple machines. It inlcudes its own directory services too. The only problem is that it doesn't support Imap (although some work has started on that front), and the only database it supports as a backend is oracle. I would love it if someone hacked it to use mysql of postgresql with IMAP support, but that's a tall order. The client is also under-featured.
All of these have their drawbacks though. You might wish to go with a commercial IMAP/POP server on linux. There are a few good ones that exist. You definitely don't want to go with exchange. A lot of people go that route because they are forced to. My experience with exchange 5.5 was so bad that I would not recommend it to anyone.
Roblimo's style doesn't really fit well with the other posters (except perhaps John Katz). This may be because he's more of a professional, but it can come off as too polished and too editorial.
I like the way most content is presented on slashdot: There's a submitter's intro, a link, and a few lines from the poster. The submitter and the poster usually include personal opinions, but they are easily recognized as such and everyone can make up their own mind about the content of the link.
This post from Roblimo does not present his take on the article as a personal opinion, and, ironicly, he's probably the poster on slashdot least qualified to make the statements he does.
I'm not saying I don't like the article, but this new presentation is a turnoff. It seems too much like "Here's the way it is" instead of "Check this out and come to your own conclusions."
-OT (who has complained too much recently, I know)
The title says it all. A third party company has decided to block your ISP. The ISP is not responsible for making this information known. If I hate your ISP, and write them a message, "Your site is dumb, I'm going to block it from my server." They don't have to fire off a message to their customers informing them that Outland Traveller is now blocking their site. I hope you can understand how obvious this is.
Your problem (and your head hunter's problem) is with Cyber Patrol. Your ISP is not doing anything wrong. In fact, I tend to believe they are doing the right thing by not changing their business to fit the broken design of a random third party blocking service.
It's not your ISP's responsibility to please CyberPatrol, and it's not their responsibility to track who is blocking them and let everyone know. You shouldn't get any money back with your reasoning.
I noticed one of the options on the developer survery asked whether there was any preference for using existing open source tools.
IMHO it would be very nice if Borland/Inprise used GCC and the other GNU tools as a backend (and submitted improvements to their code bases as needed!) while using their IDE and RAD tools on top. I think people would pay for this, the community would benefit from some source improvements, and there would not be the overhead of supporting another compiler. Metrowerks seems to be doing this with their Codewarrior "GNU edition." Does anyone know how well this works?
Borland would have to be careful not to violate the open source tool's licensing, but this shouldn't be impossible.
This article and the "Hellmouth" articles resonate well with me, probably because they have real personal content and not so much glossy buzzword-rich pontifications.
It's important to show people how silly/stupid my country's implementation of censorship is. Whether or not you believe that some content is not suitable for minors (I do), legislation and lawsuits are truly poor instruments for regulating content.
Movie rating policies and other kinds of institutionalized content filtering can be a useful tool for parents to use, but that is all that they are. The final responsibility for a child should rest with parents, not with an instituation. It's a mistake (and an ironic one, in the case of the South Park movie which satires censorism) to force government and/or business to take this responsibility from parents.
This seems to be a growing trend in the US. Public schools, for example, are taking on more and more responsibilities formerly handled by parents. A teacher told me last month that if all he had to do was teach the curriculum his job would be a piece of cake.
My personal opinion is that our lawsuit-happy culture has saturated our consciousness with the idea that problems in the world are someone else's responsibility, and this idea has even begun to affect previously inviolate ideas about responsibility for minors. People act like it's the government's responsibility to take care of students who aren't in school to learn, or that it's the movie industry's responsibility to keep kids out of R movies, but in fact it is (and should always be) the parent's responsibility.
These problems are probably exacerbated by the fact that so many people's parents work full time. I'm not sure our current economic organization encourages good parenting. I hope that the proverbial pendulum will start swinging the other way soon. The state should not be taking care of our kids.
I will probably catch some flames for this, but I'm not happy with the number of stock-related posts over the last few weeks. So-and-so is IPOing, so-and-so might be IPOing, so-and-so's shares went way up and levelled off, etc. As an anymous poster said earlier, this is getting to be "news for daytraders, stocks that matter."
I don't really care about any of this. I'm not so egotistical as to think that my opinions should change slashdot, but I would greatly appreciate it if a new "market" catagory could be created so I could have an easier time filtering this stuff out.
Slashdot Mirror
In a case like this where BIG money has vested interests, you have to wonder if the defending lawyers are being put under any pressure to lose the case.
BTW, isn't this something the ACLU should do instead of the EFF?
-Just my conspiracy theory.
Not to be stupid, but why can't they use the operating system's TCP/IP stack like EVERYTHING ELSE? Come on- this seems like a case of proprietary protocols undermining well established, perfectly functional standards to the detriment of the user, but I might be misunderstanding how it works.
From my experience over the past 5 years, AOL *is* an unethical company at best, and you could even say "evil".
-OT
I've used both KDE and Gnome with various combinations of window managers and distributions recently, and while both are perfectly good solutions, there's a couple simple things that gnome does that I personally find endearing:
1. The high quality of the icon artwork.
2. The graphical virtual window manager. For some reason I like the little grid a whole lot better than the "one,two,three,four" buttons.
In addition to these "hard" first impressions I find I'm also drawn to gnome for some purely subjective feelings that GTK is more in the open source spirit than qt, and that gnome pushes the destop manager envelope a little further than KDE. I like the "try" button better than "apply"
for example. It seems to make more sense. I dislike the "explorer" windows being cluttered with buttons, however.
Keep in mind that these are just feelings, and I can't really make a logical arguement for them. I continue to use my KDE desktops alongside my gnome ones. Both desktops are very useful to me and I haven't had serious stability or performance problems with either one.
Cheers,
-OT
I appologize if this has already been addressed. Alas, my connection to slashdot is poor and it took forever to bring up the reply page.
I see that this processor comes in two versions with different Mhz, but what does that actually mean in real world performance? What is a 700Mhz or 400Mhz Crusoe chip equivalent to? As we all
know, the Mhz rating does not mean everything.
-OT (bogomips for everyone!)
I have used the MS optical mouse by plugging into the USB port of my Mac G3 Laptop (Lombard) running LinuxPPC. It worked perfectly in both X and the console, and it sure was nice to have those three buttons back :)
-Outland Traveller
From what I've seen, it's not so much that Microsoft's products are inferior. Most of the time they work fine, or at least par for the industry.
:)
The problem that a lot of people have with Microsoft is their monopolistic business practices. Even leaving aside the ethical and legal questions some of these practices raise, these practices hurt competion and create a climate were even competitors with superior technology have severe difficulties making inroads into the market. The end result is that we are forced (or at least heavily influenced) to use, and pay for, software that may not be the best or even wanted in the first place.
The other problem people (esp. geeks) have with Microsoft is that their software is not designed primarily for power users, so that programmers, hackers, and all other kinds of computer-knowledgeable people run into artificial constraints on what they can do with Microsoft's software, and that is frustrating
You are allowed by law to make copies of your personal music and software for personal use and backup purposes.
:)
You might want to listen to the music on a Rio or some other device, or you might want to make a backup copy in case your physical media becomes damaged. You might also want to keep a few copies in different places so you don't have to lug your music collection around with you. It's also fun to manipulate your music on a PC to see what it sounds like backwards and stuff like that.
There's nothing inherently wrong with "ripping" a CD, and the music industry shouldn't be so caught up in trying to control distribution to the point where their efforts are at odds with technological progress.
Copying music and then distributing it without permission is against the law, except in very limited circumstances where you can claim fair use (a la Negativland). But there is no reason that simply copying it, without distributing it, is wrong.
Don't let coporations control more of your life than they already do.
-OT (who is not a lawyer and knows these statements are not 100% accurate
Do you have an AMD K6-2 350 by any chance? There is a known windows 95 patch to prevent intermittent lockups when booting with this processor.
:)
In the errata Microsoft does say the problem is a bug in windows, and not due to an AMD compatibility problem. I had one of these, and after installing the patch everything was fine.
Of course, Linux just worked right from the start
-OT
Yes, that's what it was. I couldn't remember exactly what part of the M releases I was having a hard time with, but knew there was something.
I've been following the M's since 5 regularly but stopped when I found one that included the "Smart browsing" keywords that send all the addresses you type in back to netscape for massaging. I always disable this in the regular netscape releases, but was hoping that the open source version would come with more privacy-friendly defaults.
I haven't checked the latest release. I'll take your word for it that it's been taken out, or at least disabled as the default. Thanks for that info.
I too was very much turned off by the marketing "features" creeping into both netscape and mozilla releases. Is there any way to get rid of them? I hope they can be customized away in Mozilla.
It's just wrong that you can't choose to not install AOL IM. Even if you go and delete the AIM directory inside netscape communicator folders, you are still left with the annoying button on your browser window. The "shop" buttons are similar garbage. Am I the only one who is offended by this? At work I received a compaq laptop and it came with a shopping button.. blech. I traded up for a toshiba instead.
Listen here corporate america, I don't want any shopping button. I don't want any push-content channels on my desktop. I don't want instant messaging software controlled by a third party server- all I want is a fast, powerful computer with applications that do no more than they need to. My computer is a tool, not my personal temple to consumerism.
While I'm in rant mode... Ever notice how even if you choose custom install on windows98 and deselect the "online services" junk, they are still installed on your hard drive and show up on the desktop. Blech.
I'm very glad to see such a visible, open retraction. Every publisher (especially news publishers) make mistakes. What seperates a site with integrity from a site like, say, anything ziff-davis is the ability to admit mistakes.
I want my news to be simply informative- retractions don't take away from that. The kind of places that don't care about retractions are usually trying to use their position as a news provider for more self-serving ends. They don't care so much if the news is true, so long as you get it from them.
Why is this marked as "Funny"? (And where are those moderator points when you need them?) If you do even the smallest bit of research into scientology you will find that these accusations are true, and only scratch the surface of criticism one can give against the Scientologists.
Some of their beliefs would in fact be funny if they were not destroying people's lives and abusing our (US) public institutions.
-OT
I use Vandyke's SecureCRT software, which is a win32 SSH v1, v2, telnet, and general terminal emulation client. Version 3.0 lets you connect to either SSHv1 or SSHv2 servers with lots of encryption/compression/port forwarding options. If you're using a client like this a v1 to v2 server upgrade "flag" day isn't as annoying as it could be.
I don't have any affiliation with Vandyke, but I would like to say that they make beta releases readily available, return email promptly with a personal reply, and emailed me the the upgrade license from version 2 to version 3 without any "upgrade" charge. Yes, it's closed, non-free software, but much better than most I've dealt with.
-OT
Hi there,
I haven't seen anyone post on the monitor mentioned in the subject, which happens to be the one that I own, so I'll add in my 2cents.
To avoid the problem of finding a sync-on-green video card with decent X drivers, you can remove the plastic casing of the monitor and unscrew the back metal plate. You will find a switch there that toggles the monitor between sync-on-green and v/h sync. Move it to v/h sync. Now you can either make a VGA to 5 BNC cable, or just buy one. They are about 50$ new, but you can usually find these things attached to junk that no one wants either in your company's basement or at a show. If you have to make one, someone here has already posted the specs.
You might want to attach the monitor to your PC at this point without putting it back together. I had to adjust the plastic dial on top of the flyback (the thing that attached to the suction-cup going into the tube) in order to achieve decent brightness at 1152x900, but don't adjust it too much.
Make sure you have some kind of console into your PC, because text mode will not work and you'll just see gibberish. Add a modeline entry in the XF86Config file for this monitor. The one I use is:
Modeline "1152x900" 92 1152 1216 1360 1456 900 901 909 945 -hsync -vsync
Now start up X, and you should be good to go. The monitor is file, although it does use up a lot of electricity and focus is inevitably bad. Still, it's much nicer than a 14" of 15" monitor.
I know that I'm ignorant about what is going on over there right now, as I've only read the Reuters wire and a CNN report.
However, from this information it appears that Japan:
1. Is not prepared for this kind of disaster
2. Is not reacting to it in an aggressive fashion.
It is strange to me that given the repeated nuclear safety problems they have had over there that they do not have a plan in place to deal with a nuclear emergency. Why are they asking the US Military for aid? What kind of aid are they looking for? It seems like they don't even know what kind of help they need.
Also, the action that appears to be taken so far seems to contrast starkly with the Russian firefighters who gave their lives to try and stop the Chernobyl disaster. Some officials are saying that they don't know whether or not the reaction will become self sustaining or not. It seems to me that if there is a chance this emergency could turn into something similar to a reactor meltdown people should go in there and do everything they can to smother the reaction before it becomes any worse. Taking a "wait and see" attitude with something like has the possibility of frigthening consequences.
Some people have questioned the value of telling people to remain indoors. This was probably done to avoid a widespread panic that would clog all the roads and hamper efforts to bring the situation under control.
Perhaps we'll get more useful information in the days ahead.
"Nobody" may need to be concerned about security if your computer is never plugged into a network such as the internet.
However, as soon as you dial up your ISP, not to mention connect a cablemodem, you would be well advised to be concerned with security.
Even if you have nothing but valueless games on your personal computer, a malicious cracker can still make use of it as a depot for warez and pornography, and they can also use your computer as a launching pad for attacks on other systems. Some people will try and damage your computer simply because you live in (insert your country here).
How would you like it if your computer was seized by the feds for evidence because a malicious person used it for illegal purposes?
Everyone who is part of an worldwide electronic community should be aware of security (and privacy) issues. You don't have to be a security expert, but you should at least go in with a cautious attitude. In the end, you are responsible for yourself.
I just "aquired" a new Apple 333Mhz G3 512K l2 cache, with a 14" active matrix screen, 64MB RAM, and 4G HD. It comes with an IrDA port, 10/100 ethernet BUILT IN (not via a fragile card clip-thing or cable), 2 usb ports, a built in modem (which I believe is a REAL v.90 modem, and not a software modem, but I might be wrong.) a CDROM drive that can be replaced with a DVD drive without any other special upgrades, and ATI video chip with 8MB SDRAM, VGA-out, S-video output, sound in/out jacks, builtin mic and speakers,a cardbus slot, and a SCSI connector.
This cost 2300$ retail and for the hardware it appears to be an absolutely great deal. I have a few other new PC laptops here from compaq and toshiba. In the same price range they don't have built-in ethernet, they don't have SCSI, and they don't have as much video RAM. They are also Celeron or AMD K6-x chips, not P2-3's. In my subjective opinion the G3 laptop is cooler looking as well.
So.. before you go and bash apple powerbooks, check out the specs, pricing, and use one for a week. All my other computers here are PCs but you have to give credit where credit is due. Apple's G3 powerbooks are real contenders, even leaving out the OS.
PS: Compaq prices their consumer laptops very low, but who would want a "retail" button with a shopping cart icon right next to the trackpad, even if the rest of the specs rock? GRRR.
Outland Traveller - new and laptop enabled!
When you have that many users you have to have a nice structure for the usernames, which isn't the /etc/passwd file. And, you need a mailbox format that isn't linear, like the normal mbox. The rest of the problems can usually be solved with hardware (think about using a raid).
I know of three potential semi-free solutions.
Carnegie Mellon Cyrus (go to the FTP site and download the latest version. Don't rely on the way out of date web page to link to it.) IMAP server.
University of Washington's imapd. This seems to be under more active development, and supports a nice range of features, mailbox formats, and security mechanisms. However, it uses the passwd file (although you might be able to get around this using PAM) and it doesn't natively support quotas. (although you can do this at the OS level.
Darthmouth's Blitzmail Server: This has been ported to linux, and is *wonderfully* scalable across multiple machines. It inlcudes its own directory services too. The only problem is that it doesn't support Imap (although some work has started on that front), and the only database it supports as a backend is oracle. I would love it if someone hacked it to use mysql of postgresql with IMAP support, but that's a tall order. The client is also under-featured.
All of these have their drawbacks though. You might wish to go with a commercial IMAP/POP server on linux. There are a few good ones that exist. You definitely don't want to go with exchange. A lot of people go that route because they are forced to. My experience with exchange 5.5 was so bad that I would not recommend it to anyone.
-OT
Roblimo's style doesn't really fit well with the other posters (except perhaps John Katz). This may be because he's more of a professional, but it can come off as too polished and too editorial.
I like the way most content is presented on slashdot: There's a submitter's intro, a link, and a few lines from the poster. The submitter and the poster usually include personal opinions, but they are easily recognized as such and everyone can make up their own mind about the content of the link.
This post from Roblimo does not present his take on the article as a personal opinion, and, ironicly, he's probably the poster on slashdot least qualified to make the statements he does.
I'm not saying I don't like the article, but this new presentation is a turnoff. It seems too much like "Here's the way it is" instead of "Check this out and come to your own conclusions."
-OT (who has complained too much recently, I know)
The title says it all. A third party company has decided to block your ISP. The ISP is not responsible for making this information known. If I hate your ISP, and write them a message, "Your site is dumb, I'm going to block it from my server." They don't have to fire off a message to their customers informing them that Outland Traveller is now blocking their site. I hope you can understand how obvious this is.
Your problem (and your head hunter's problem) is with Cyber Patrol. Your ISP is not doing anything wrong. In fact, I tend to believe they are doing the right thing by not changing their business to fit the broken design of a random third party blocking service.
It's not your ISP's responsibility to please CyberPatrol, and it's not their responsibility to track who is blocking them and let everyone know. You shouldn't get any money back with your reasoning.
It is not the ISP's responsibility to tell you that random private company 'A' is blocking them.
The ISP's site is perfectly open-- if someone else chooses to block it, your problem is with the blocker, not the ISP.
-OT
I noticed one of the options on the developer survery asked whether there was any preference for using existing open source tools.
IMHO it would be very nice if Borland/Inprise used GCC and the other GNU tools as a backend (and submitted improvements to their code bases as needed!) while using their IDE and RAD tools on top. I think people would pay for this, the community would benefit from some source improvements, and there would not be the overhead of supporting another compiler. Metrowerks seems to be doing this with their Codewarrior "GNU edition." Does anyone know how well this works?
Borland would have to be careful not to violate the open source tool's licensing, but this shouldn't be impossible.
-OT
*grin*
I couldn't help but notice the reference to the RUSH album, which also deals with censorship.
Cheers,
-OT
This article and the "Hellmouth" articles resonate well with me, probably because they have real personal content and not so much glossy buzzword-rich pontifications.
It's important to show people how silly/stupid my country's implementation of censorship is. Whether or not you believe that some content is not suitable for minors (I do), legislation and lawsuits are truly poor instruments for regulating content.
Movie rating policies and other kinds of institutionalized content filtering can be a useful tool for parents to use, but that is all that they are. The final responsibility for a child should rest with parents, not with an instituation. It's a mistake (and an ironic one, in the case of the South Park movie which satires censorism) to force government and/or business to take this responsibility from parents.
This seems to be a growing trend in the US. Public schools, for example, are taking on more and more responsibilities formerly handled by parents. A teacher told me last month that if all he had to do was teach the curriculum his job would be a piece of cake.
My personal opinion is that our lawsuit-happy culture has saturated our consciousness with the idea that problems in the world are someone else's responsibility, and this idea has even begun to affect previously inviolate ideas about responsibility for minors. People act like it's the government's responsibility to take care of students who aren't in school to learn, or that it's the movie industry's responsibility to keep kids out of R movies, but in fact it is (and should always be) the parent's responsibility.
These problems are probably exacerbated by the fact that so many people's parents work full time. I'm not sure our current economic organization encourages good parenting. I hope that the proverbial pendulum will start swinging the other way soon. The state should not be taking care of our kids.
-OT
I will probably catch some flames for this, but I'm not happy with the number of stock-related posts over the last few weeks. So-and-so is IPOing, so-and-so might be IPOing, so-and-so's shares went way up and levelled off, etc. As an anymous poster said earlier, this is getting to be "news for daytraders, stocks that matter."
I don't really care about any of this. I'm not so egotistical as to think that my opinions should change slashdot, but I would greatly appreciate it if a new "market" catagory could be created so I could have an easier time filtering this stuff out.
Thanks,
-OT