You are mistaken. Look at the page that you linked to. Read the page carefully.
Search the page for the text "Select your printer from the list." Look at the screen capture just below that text.
This is the screen where you are required to select the driver for the network printer. The list of printers presented in that dialog is the Gutenprint (aka gimpprint) drivers, not the drivers that you get from the printer manufacturer.
Heck, read the text from that page below that screen capture:
You will notice that I am using the Gimp-Print driver as the supplied HP driver does not work when the printer is shared from another computer.
As I said in my grandfather post, if gimp-print doesn't have a driver for that printer, you're in trouble.
One problem we ran into was network printer drivers.
For network printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS[1]. And the printer drivers that you download from the manufacturers which are labeled "for Mac" are not CUPS drivers. They're local drivers only (ie. for printers physically connected to the computer with a USB cable). These local drivers can't be used for network printers.
Apple supplies the Gutenprint (nee gimp-print) CUPS drivers but the selection of printers covered is limited. (Check the list on their page before you buy a printer if you're planning to use a Mac.)
This isn't a huge deal. It just meant that our Mac users could only use a subset of the printers at our site. But it is something that really surprised us because it isn't well publicized (we initially naively thought that if the manufacturer's website had a Mac driver, we would be set for all printing).
[1] Note: this rant doesn't apply to postscript printers.
I did specifically say in my previous post that there would be mechanisms to wave the registration fees for non-profit organizations. And whether a "determined purveyor of child porn" would have the money or not is a red herring. If you read the whole post that you replied to you would see that there would be mechanisms both before registration and after, beyond just the money aspect. (But, of course, attacking just one point out of a long post and ignoring the rest of the post is time honored internet tradition. So I guess I shouldn't expect a comprehensive analysis of my entire post.)
I agree in general with your disdain for companies that say they are "for kids" for purely financial reasons. If I were god of the internet, companies like Hasbro and even Disney would actually not be allowed into the.kids TLD. But I figured that, pragmatically, we'd have to allow any company into.kids if they abide by the content restrictions.
And finally, if you'd read the entirety of the post you replied to you would see that in the last paragraph I also express my disagreement with the general principle of using network infrastructure to categorize content. I was simply suggesting that, if one were foolish enough to try, then.kids made more sense than.xxx.
I was deliberately avoiding the question of who, exactly, should be the.kids registrar because I was just trying to get the basic idea across without getting bogged down in details.
Obviously, it can't be done in the same fashion as.com is currently done (basically a free-for-all). But there are lots of other ways it could be done. Just look at how all the other TLDs are managed to see some examples. Country-code TLDs alone provide dozens of different models for domain management. Then there is.museum,.post, etc, etc.
If you're asking, how would I do it... I would set up a non-profit corporation that would have exclusive rights to create domains in.kids and would not be allowed to subcontract or otherwise pass on responsibility to other organizations. It would be funded mostly by high domain registration fees (more on that below) with probably some money coming from governments and charitable foundations.
I would make the barrier to entry much higher than.com. Prospective.kids domain owners would have so submit paperwork describing their site (which would be reviewed by.kids domain staff) and would have to pay a fairly hefty annual charge (partly to discourage people who aren't serious about policing their content and partly to pay for salaries for the staff that will have to administer the.kids TLD). I haven't decided exactly how much but it would be enough to prevent people who aren't running legal businesses from creating domains. There would be provisions for waving the charges for non-profit organizations, of course.
I'm not sure if individuals would be allowed to create.kids domains. It is harder to tie responsibility to individuals than it is to organizations. I haven't decided on this point yet.
So that covers initial creation. As to policing, I think that we could rely on the users to police the.kids domains. We'll set up a form where users can submit reports of questionable content. Staff will review the reports and we'll have a very draconian policy of one-strike and you're out. If the report is accurate, the domain in question is immediately shut down (that is, DNS settings are changed to point the whole domain to an error page saying that the domain has been taken down for hosting questionable content) and the domain owner is notified.
The domain owner can then modify their site and submit the changes for review (possibly having the pay a fine to cover the costs) or they can appeal the "questionable content" judgment. If the review or appeal is successful, the domain would be reinstated. The terms and conditions that the domain owner agreed to will clearly and legally state that the.kids domain registrar is not responsible for lost revenue due to this process.
There would be some procedure to completely shut down repeat offenders. I haven't worked out all the details of that yet.
I think that this policing structure will work because there would be huge financial incentive for companies to keep their.kids domain operating. And if we are being devious, there are even financial incentives for companies to rat on other companies. Remember, some very large companies (e.g. Disney) would have significant incentives to make.kids work.
Anyways, that's my thinking on the matter (since you asked). But again, let's not get bogged down in details and instead focus on the basic idea. But when it comes to domain registration, there are many more ways to do it than the way that.com is handled.
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it.kids.
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
But a.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but.kids. So you set up.kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
Of course, the companies pushing.xxx want to run.xxx and not.kids because running.kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
And the moral crusaders prefer.xxx to.kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about.kids will admittedly be challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But it won't be that challenging because companies would have a very strong incentive to follow the rules. So isn't.kids a much better idea?
(If you're really going to pursue porn filtering at the network infrastructure level, that is. Personally I think the whole idea is stupid. I'm just saying that if you're going to do it, isn't.kids better.)
I heard an interview in a podcast with one of the upstart designers (sorry, I can't remember which podcast). He said that at the time they were just starting upstart, they licensing terms on launchd were not suitable for inclusion in ubuntu (it was under the Apple Public Source License initially).
During upstart development, Apple changed the licensing terms and released launchd under the Apache license (Aug 2006, I think). However, by that time upstart was far enough along that the upstart developers (and the ubuntu leadership), rightly or wrongly, decided to continue with upstart rather than switch to launchd.
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it.kids.
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
But a.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but.kids. So you set up.kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
Of course, a company like ICM Registry wants to run.xxx and not.kids because running.kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
And the moral crusaders prefer.xxx to.kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about.kids will admittedly be quite challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But aside from that, isn't.kids a much better idea?
Putting any energy savings (or lack of) aside for the moment, I think that fuel cells for transportation are good idea simply because they let us move the pollution away from where we live. Internal combustion engines used for transportation put their pollution right in our residential and commercial areas. But with hydrogen and fuel cells we can move the pollution to areas where no-one lives (that is, we can place the hydrogen and electricity generating plants in out of the way places).
Now, environmentalists might be aghast at the idea of pursuing something just in order to hide pollution under the rug, so to speak. But as a dweller in an urban area, it sounds like a damn good idea to me.
Again (and Hi there!), don't nit-pick, keep to the broad strokes. Every organization that has been around for decades will have some (several) occasions where they dropped the ball; sometimes quite seriously. Even private organizations like the Gates Foundation. And, relevant to this particular discussion, ICANN.
And don't put words into my mouth, I didn't say anything like "pure as the driven snow". My exact words were "reasonably well run".
You have to evaluate the big picture. And I argue that the big picture is that there are UN organizations that are, on the whole, reasonably well run.
Oh come on. You know what I mean; don't nit-pick. Do you think that I couldn't cite an example of a reasonably well run UN system organization that was founded after the UN (UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF,...)? I just picked the ITU because telecommunications is a related field to the internet.
I'm just trying to fight the general problem of people condemning everything the UN does or tries to do because of problems in the headline parts of the UN like the Security Council and the Secretariat.
Don't forget, there are many, many organizations in the UN System. So don't judge them all by the serious flaws in the Security Council and the Secretariat. For example, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the UN body that governs interaction between national telephone networks. And they're pretty well run.
I'm not saying that they're not computers. Just that the manufacturer and the owners (the government) controls (or should be able to control) what runs on the e-voting machine; and what is running will generally only be one program.
Whereas a average desktop computer in an office will generally be running multiple different programs with difficult to predict interations (eg. is there a dll conflict between Word v10 and Acrobat v4?). Not to mention a ton of crapware that the user installed (knowingly or not).
Now, I hate Diebold as much as the next person (or at much as the/. groupthink), but I think that the reporter is making an unfair comparision .
He's comparing general purpose computers to single purpose computer based devices. He's basically saying "because desktop computers crash, we should never have electronic voting". Which is just silly. E-voting machines are specialized computers with known, controlled hardware and limited, controlled software. Comparing them to the average office worker's Dell is apples and oranges.
There is no technical reason why Diebold cannot make electronic voting machines just as reliable (both in runtime and security) as automatic teller machines (which they also make). And ATMs, in my experience, are pretty damn reliable.
Now, the fact the Diebold can't seem to make an e-voting machine as reliable as an ATM suggests, of course, that there is something more than technical reasons going on here.
I don't understand your argument. Here's the conversation I could see happening at google:
Google Bean-counter: People aren't clicking on ads in gmail. So advertisers don't want to advertise there. So we're not making any money with gmail.
Google Visionary: But gmail is wildly popular and the halo effect to the company is worth millions!
BC: It's all very well to talk intangibles, but the bottom line for gmail is in the red. We're a public company and we can't pursue "feel-good" money-losing projects forever.
GV: Don't be evil!
Now, I don't know which side would win that arguement. At today's google, the visionary would probably win out. But google five years from now... who can say. That's why I want both the visionary and the bean-counter on my side.
Of course, it's nice to get all the free stuff, but there are times that I wish that I could pay Google directly for some of their products. Why? Because I want to clearly signal to them that I want them to keep the product around and keep working on it. When the means for the consumer to signal the producer is absent (for example, in Picasa) or indirect (for example, in gmail), there's a larger risk that the producer will discontinue the product (or stop active development of it).
For example, I use gmail all the time. But I have never, not once ever, clicked on an ad in gmail. So from my input, a bean-counter at gmail could conclude that I don't care about gmail.
Sure, I could click on ads from time to time even though I have no interest in the products in the ads, but there are times that I wish I could just give Google a few bucks a year to give them a direct incentive to keep gmail going.
What worries me a bit in all these wonderful things coming out of Google is that there is never any way for users to pay Google for them.
Why would I want to pay, if I can get it for free? Because money changing hands is a very good way for consumers to signal their interest to producers. As long as we simply can't pay Google for things like Gmail, Earth, Picasa, etc. we have very little influence over whether Google continues with these products and over which products Google focuses their efforts on. You could argue that the advertising is a way; but I use Gmail all the time, but I've never clicked on an ad in Gmail. So as far as Google is concerned, maybe this means I don't like Gmail.
I mean, the whole situation calls into question whether these things can even be considered products. In fact, Google's primary product is actually you and me and the customer is advertisers. And, as TV has shown us, this model where the "products" are incidental produces very mixed results for the users.
I think that the hard truth of the 21st century is that most people will have to change professions at least once in their life.
In the 20th century, we had to give up on the idea of having one employer for life, and now we have to give up on the idea of having one profession for life.
Granted, it really sucks having to change professions. So I'm not happy about this change. But my grand-children will probably be as used to the idea of changing professions as we are to the idea of changing employers several times.
Well, I'll be damned, that works. Thank you Chris Kaminski.
I was unaware of the "lfs" option. But in my defense, it's not listed as an option on the smbmount man page in either SLES9 or on the Samba website.
In the end, however, I would still not recommend purchasing the Terastation because of Buffalo's blanket refusal to support their product when they learned I was trying to connect to it using Linux.
No, as of firmware 1.12, the Terastation does not support NFS.
But yes, if they ever did add NFS support then that would address my problems. (Buffalo has, in the past, vaguely suggested that they might be adding NFS support. But they've never committed to a timeframe.)
I purchased a Terastation and ran into a (small?) problem with it. I couldn't mount it successfully from Linux. When I mounted it with "smbfs" it was fine, but smbfs has a 2gb file size transfer limit. But when I mounted it with the preferred "cifs" the mount said it was successful, but the mount point was empty. (SLES9, samba 3.something, Terastation firmware 1.12).
Buffalo tech support outright refused to offer any help once I told them I was running linux and the online support forums yielded no assistance. (My best guess is that the problem was the version of samba in the Terastation firmware.)
The Terastation worked just fine when accessed from windows or when using ftp or even smbclient. But I would recommend against purchasing a Terastation if you have linux systems on your network.
Except that the UN already has dozens of affiliated agencies that handle interconnecting systems between nations. For example: International Maritime Organization, Universal Postal Union (a bit presumptuous, claiming the whole univere), International Telecommunications Union, etc, etc. Here is a chart of the whole UN organization: United Nations System
In fact, that last one, the Internation Telecommunications Union (ITU), might provide a good parallel to what a proposed UN internet agency might be like. The ITU basically provides the standards and arbitration for how the worldwide telephone network work. For example, they hand out the country dialing prefixes. What the ITU does sounds a lot like what ICANN does, in their respecive realms.
Anyway, my point is that the UN is a lot more than just the Security Council/General Assembly/Secretary General parts that most frequently make the news. UN agencies are already impacting your life every time you make an overseas call, or buy a t-shirt made in China.
I read this article, LCD Guide, that goes into great detail on the different types of LCD monitor (apparently there are three different types of underlying LCD technology). The article makes the point that each type of LCD technology has differing strengths and weaknesses (eg. response time vs. color fidelity vs. viewing angle, etc) and that there is no best technology.
However, I've never really seen this information anywhere else in other LCD reviews. So I'm not clear if the points that the X-bit labs article makes are really important or whether the writer is just a specialist making a mountain out of a molehill.
Slashdot Mirror
Search the page for the text "Select your printer from the list." Look at the screen capture just below that text.
This is the screen where you are required to select the driver for the network printer. The list of printers presented in that dialog is the Gutenprint (aka gimpprint) drivers, not the drivers that you get from the printer manufacturer.
Heck, read the text from that page below that screen capture:
As I said in my grandfather post, if gimp-print doesn't have a driver for that printer, you're in trouble.
One problem we ran into was network printer drivers.
For network printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS[1]. And the printer drivers that you download from the manufacturers which are labeled "for Mac" are not CUPS drivers. They're local drivers only (ie. for printers physically connected to the computer with a USB cable). These local drivers can't be used for network printers.
Apple supplies the Gutenprint (nee gimp-print) CUPS drivers but the selection of printers covered is limited. (Check the list on their page before you buy a printer if you're planning to use a Mac.)
This isn't a huge deal. It just meant that our Mac users could only use a subset of the printers at our site. But it is something that really surprised us because it isn't well publicized (we initially naively thought that if the manufacturer's website had a Mac driver, we would be set for all printing).
[1] Note: this rant doesn't apply to postscript printers.
I did specifically say in my previous post that there would be mechanisms to wave the registration fees for non-profit organizations. And whether a "determined purveyor of child porn" would have the money or not is a red herring. If you read the whole post that you replied to you would see that there would be mechanisms both before registration and after, beyond just the money aspect. (But, of course, attacking just one point out of a long post and ignoring the rest of the post is time honored internet tradition. So I guess I shouldn't expect a comprehensive analysis of my entire post.)
.kids TLD. But I figured that, pragmatically, we'd have to allow any company into .kids if they abide by the content restrictions.
.kids made more sense than .xxx.
I agree in general with your disdain for companies that say they are "for kids" for purely financial reasons. If I were god of the internet, companies like Hasbro and even Disney would actually not be allowed into the
And finally, if you'd read the entirety of the post you replied to you would see that in the last paragraph I also express my disagreement with the general principle of using network infrastructure to categorize content. I was simply suggesting that, if one were foolish enough to try, then
I was deliberately avoiding the question of who, exactly, should be the .kids registrar because I was just trying to get the basic idea across without getting bogged down in details.
.com is currently done (basically a free-for-all). But there are lots of other ways it could be done. Just look at how all the other TLDs are managed to see some examples. Country-code TLDs alone provide dozens of different models for domain management. Then there is .museum, .post, etc, etc.
.kids and would not be allowed to subcontract or otherwise pass on responsibility to other organizations. It would be funded mostly by high domain registration fees (more on that below) with probably some money coming from governments and charitable foundations.
.com. Prospective .kids domain owners would have so submit paperwork describing their site (which would be reviewed by .kids domain staff) and would have to pay a fairly hefty annual charge (partly to discourage people who aren't serious about policing their content and partly to pay for salaries for the staff that will have to administer the .kids TLD). I haven't decided exactly how much but it would be enough to prevent people who aren't running legal businesses from creating domains. There would be provisions for waving the charges for non-profit organizations, of course.
.kids domains. It is harder to tie responsibility to individuals than it is to organizations. I haven't decided on this point yet.
.kids domains. We'll set up a form where users can submit reports of questionable content. Staff will review the reports and we'll have a very draconian policy of one-strike and you're out. If the report is accurate, the domain in question is immediately shut down (that is, DNS settings are changed to point the whole domain to an error page saying that the domain has been taken down for hosting questionable content) and the domain owner is notified.
.kids domain registrar is not responsible for lost revenue due to this process.
.kids domain operating. And if we are being devious, there are even financial incentives for companies to rat on other companies. Remember, some very large companies (e.g. Disney) would have significant incentives to make .kids work.
.com is handled.
Obviously, it can't be done in the same fashion as
If you're asking, how would I do it... I would set up a non-profit corporation that would have exclusive rights to create domains in
I would make the barrier to entry much higher than
I'm not sure if individuals would be allowed to create
So that covers initial creation. As to policing, I think that we could rely on the users to police the
The domain owner can then modify their site and submit the changes for review (possibly having the pay a fine to cover the costs) or they can appeal the "questionable content" judgment. If the review or appeal is successful, the domain would be reinstated. The terms and conditions that the domain owner agreed to will clearly and legally state that the
There would be some procedure to completely shut down repeat offenders. I haven't worked out all the details of that yet.
I think that this policing structure will work because there would be huge financial incentive for companies to keep their
Anyways, that's my thinking on the matter (since you asked). But again, let's not get bogged down in details and instead focus on the basic idea. But when it comes to domain registration, there are many more ways to do it than the way that
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it .kids.
.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but .kids. So you set up .kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
.xxx want to run .xxx and not .kids because running .kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
.xxx to .kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
.kids will admittedly be challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But it won't be that challenging because companies would have a very strong incentive to follow the rules. So isn't .kids a much better idea?
.kids better.)
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,
But a
Of course, the companies pushing
And the moral crusaders prefer
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about
(If you're really going to pursue porn filtering at the network infrastructure level, that is. Personally I think the whole idea is stupid. I'm just saying that if you're going to do it, isn't
No, upstart is not related to launchd.
I heard an interview in a podcast with one of the upstart designers (sorry, I can't remember which podcast). He said that at the time they were just starting upstart, they licensing terms on launchd were not suitable for inclusion in ubuntu (it was under the Apple Public Source License initially).
During upstart development, Apple changed the licensing terms and released launchd under the Apache license (Aug 2006, I think). However, by that time upstart was far enough along that the upstart developers (and the ubuntu leadership), rightly or wrongly, decided to continue with upstart rather than switch to launchd.
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it .kids.
.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but .kids. So you set up .kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
.xxx and not .kids because running .kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
.xxx to .kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
.kids will admittedly be quite challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But aside from that, isn't .kids a much better idea?
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,
But a
Of course, a company like ICM Registry wants to run
And the moral crusaders prefer
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about
Putting any energy savings (or lack of) aside for the moment, I think that fuel cells for transportation are good idea simply because they let us move the pollution away from where we live. Internal combustion engines used for transportation put their pollution right in our residential and commercial areas. But with hydrogen and fuel cells we can move the pollution to areas where no-one lives (that is, we can place the hydrogen and electricity generating plants in out of the way places).
Now, environmentalists might be aghast at the idea of pursuing something just in order to hide pollution under the rug, so to speak. But as a dweller in an urban area, it sounds like a damn good idea to me.
Again (and Hi there!), don't nit-pick, keep to the broad strokes. Every organization that has been around for decades will have some (several) occasions where they dropped the ball; sometimes quite seriously. Even private organizations like the Gates Foundation. And, relevant to this particular discussion, ICANN.
And don't put words into my mouth, I didn't say anything like "pure as the driven snow". My exact words were "reasonably well run".
You have to evaluate the big picture. And I argue that the big picture is that there are UN organizations that are, on the whole, reasonably well run.
Oh come on. You know what I mean; don't nit-pick. Do you think that I couldn't cite an example of a reasonably well run UN system organization that was founded after the UN (UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF,...)? I just picked the ITU because telecommunications is a related field to the internet.
I'm just trying to fight the general problem of people condemning everything the UN does or tries to do because of problems in the headline parts of the UN like the Security Council and the Secretariat.
Don't forget, there are many, many organizations in the UN System. So don't judge them all by the serious flaws in the Security Council and the Secretariat. For example, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the UN body that governs interaction between national telephone networks. And they're pretty well run.
I'm not saying that they're not computers. Just that the manufacturer and the owners (the government) controls (or should be able to control) what runs on the e-voting machine; and what is running will generally only be one program.
Whereas a average desktop computer in an office will generally be running multiple different programs with difficult to predict interations (eg. is there a dll conflict between Word v10 and Acrobat v4?). Not to mention a ton of crapware that the user installed (knowingly or not).
Now, I hate Diebold as much as the next person (or at much as the /. groupthink), but I think that the reporter is making an unfair comparision .
He's comparing general purpose computers to single purpose computer based devices. He's basically saying "because desktop computers crash, we should never have electronic voting". Which is just silly. E-voting machines are specialized computers with known, controlled hardware and limited, controlled software. Comparing them to the average office worker's Dell is apples and oranges.
There is no technical reason why Diebold cannot make electronic voting machines just as reliable (both in runtime and security) as automatic teller machines (which they also make). And ATMs, in my experience, are pretty damn reliable.
Now, the fact the Diebold can't seem to make an e-voting machine as reliable as an ATM suggests, of course, that there is something more than technical reasons going on here.
I don't understand your argument. Here's the conversation I could see happening at google:
Google Bean-counter: People aren't clicking on ads in gmail. So advertisers don't want to advertise there. So we're not making any money with gmail.
Google Visionary: But gmail is wildly popular and the halo effect to the company is worth millions!
BC: It's all very well to talk intangibles, but the bottom line for gmail is in the red. We're a public company and we can't pursue "feel-good" money-losing projects forever.
GV: Don't be evil!
Now, I don't know which side would win that arguement. At today's google, the visionary would probably win out. But google five years from now... who can say. That's why I want both the visionary and the bean-counter on my side.
Of course, it's nice to get all the free stuff, but there are times that I wish that I could pay Google directly for some of their products. Why? Because I want to clearly signal to them that I want them to keep the product around and keep working on it. When the means for the consumer to signal the producer is absent (for example, in Picasa) or indirect (for example, in gmail), there's a larger risk that the producer will discontinue the product (or stop active development of it).
For example, I use gmail all the time. But I have never, not once ever, clicked on an ad in gmail. So from my input, a bean-counter at gmail could conclude that I don't care about gmail.
Sure, I could click on ads from time to time even though I have no interest in the products in the ads, but there are times that I wish I could just give Google a few bucks a year to give them a direct incentive to keep gmail going.
What worries me a bit in all these wonderful things coming out of Google is that there is never any way for users to pay Google for them.
Why would I want to pay, if I can get it for free? Because money changing hands is a very good way for consumers to signal their interest to producers. As long as we simply can't pay Google for things like Gmail, Earth, Picasa, etc. we have very little influence over whether Google continues with these products and over which products Google focuses their efforts on. You could argue that the advertising is a way; but I use Gmail all the time, but I've never clicked on an ad in Gmail. So as far as Google is concerned, maybe this means I don't like Gmail.
I mean, the whole situation calls into question whether these things can even be considered products. In fact, Google's primary product is actually you and me and the customer is advertisers. And, as TV has shown us, this model where the "products" are incidental produces very mixed results for the users.
No, it was written by Nigel Russell. Stan Rogers recorded a version of it (on the album "Between the Breaks").
I think that the hard truth of the 21st century is that most people will have to change professions at least once in their life.
In the 20th century, we had to give up on the idea of having one employer for life, and now we have to give up on the idea of having one profession for life.
Granted, it really sucks having to change professions. So I'm not happy about this change. But my grand-children will probably be as used to the idea of changing professions as we are to the idea of changing employers several times.
Could "-o lfs" work
Well, I'll be damned, that works. Thank you Chris Kaminski.
I was unaware of the "lfs" option. But in my defense, it's not listed as an option on the smbmount man page in either SLES9 or on the Samba website.
In the end, however, I would still not recommend purchasing the Terastation because of Buffalo's blanket refusal to support their product when they learned I was trying to connect to it using Linux.
No, as of firmware 1.12, the Terastation does not support NFS.
But yes, if they ever did add NFS support then that would address my problems. (Buffalo has, in the past, vaguely suggested that they might be adding NFS support. But they've never committed to a timeframe.)
I purchased a Terastation and ran into a (small?) problem with it. I couldn't mount it successfully from Linux. When I mounted it with "smbfs" it was fine, but smbfs has a 2gb file size transfer limit. But when I mounted it with the preferred "cifs" the mount said it was successful, but the mount point was empty. (SLES9, samba 3.something, Terastation firmware 1.12).
Buffalo tech support outright refused to offer any help once I told them I was running linux and the online support forums yielded no assistance. (My best guess is that the problem was the version of samba in the Terastation firmware.)
The Terastation worked just fine when accessed from windows or when using ftp or even smbclient. But I would recommend against purchasing a Terastation if you have linux systems on your network.
Except that the UN already has dozens of affiliated agencies that handle interconnecting systems between nations. For example: International Maritime Organization, Universal Postal Union (a bit presumptuous, claiming the whole univere), International Telecommunications Union, etc, etc. Here is a chart of the whole UN organization:
United Nations System
In fact, that last one, the Internation Telecommunications Union (ITU), might provide a good parallel to what a proposed UN internet agency might be like. The ITU basically provides the standards and arbitration for how the worldwide telephone network work. For example, they hand out the country dialing prefixes. What the ITU does sounds a lot like what ICANN does, in their respecive realms.
Anyway, my point is that the UN is a lot more than just the Security Council/General Assembly/Secretary General parts that most frequently make the news. UN agencies are already impacting your life every time you make an overseas call, or buy a t-shirt made in China.
D'oh! Didn't preview. Yeah, MaxiVista.
I read this article, LCD Guide, that goes into great detail on the different types of LCD monitor (apparently there are three different types of underlying LCD technology). The article makes the point that each type of LCD technology has differing strengths and weaknesses (eg. response time vs. color fidelity vs. viewing angle, etc) and that there is no best technology.
However, I've never really seen this information anywhere else in other LCD reviews. So I'm not clear if the points that the X-bit labs article makes are really important or whether the writer is just a specialist making a mountain out of a molehill.
Anyone know?
I've never used it myself, but I've heard good things about this:
It's software that you run that lets any computer (usually extra laptops) act as secondary displays for a system, operating over a network.
It's $35.