The problem is that emails can be sent from a computer outside the US jurisdiction.
The jurisdiction of the computer won't be an issue. The jurisdiction of the spammer is what will count. And being a non-US company is not necessarily much of a defense either: if you do business in the US, then you're potentially at-risk (see, e.g. US v. Elcomsoft), and can have your assets seized or possibly worse; contrariwise, if you don't do business in the US, then there's little point in spamming people in the US.
Anyway, the US isn't the only country considering anti-spam laws. If enough countries take an anti-spam stance, the rest may have to fall in line or risk being blocked completely.
Looks more like grotesque ignorance than trolling, but slashdot doesn't have a "grotesquely ignorant" mod.:)
It would have helped a lot, I think, if people like Bruce Perens had worked as part of the Free Software movement instead of confusing the issues with all the talk about Open Source.
Since Bruce has been writing Free Software since before the label "Open Source" existed, and was involved with the Debian project back when they were strongly affiliated with the FSF, and is considered the primary author of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and is a former Debian Project Leader, and is currently on the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, the parent organization for the Debian Project, and since Bruce has resigned from the OSI (which was really ESR's baby) over philosophical differences, I think it's a little unreasonable to criticize him for the OSI's failings.
As with most attempts to use the BetaMax analogy in the computer world, this one fails: BetaMax was incompatible with VHS, period, end statement. If you had a Beta machine, VHS tapes were useless to you, and vice versa. IPv4 and IPv6 can happily co-exist, though. Totally different situation.
That said, I agree with the underlying premise that migration isn't going to happen until it's easy and cheap, and (moreover) there's some motivation out there. It's possible that this translates to "never"; it's also possible that it translates to "some time in the next 5-10 years". I'm reserving judgement for now, but I'll be amazed if I have to deal with IPv6 in less than five years.
For example, see this message on the Debian-Devel-Announce list, where it mentions that Lindows is providing 4.5kUSD to help support a Debian conference. (HP, Trolltech and O'Reilly are also mentioned.)
He'd be welcome in my house for a beer.
Mine too. Heck, I'd probably offer him snacks to go with it.:)
So, the DDoS is using 90% of their bandwidth? Just think, if only the article had included a link to SCO, maybe we could have taken out their remaining 10%.:)
Ok, the whole thing is childish and stupid and pointless -- I'm sure that IBM is more than capable of holding its own in court -- and two wrongs never make a right. Nevertheless, I find it hard to be too upset about this. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.:)
Libranet is possibly the oldest distro based off of Debian, predating Corel (RIP), Stormix (RIP), Progeny (RIP), LNX-BBC, Lindows, Lycorix, Knoppix and Morphix. (Not sure how it compares age-wise to LRP -- but then LRP is rather specialized.) If you haven't heard of it, it's probably because it's most popular in Europe.
This is not "another Linux Distribution", this is an old, well-established Linux Distribution; if you want to complain about something, go complain about "new-fangled" Distros like Mandrake!:)
The first solution was moderation, but this placed too much of a burden on a single volunteer
This was solved by the creators of the alt.hackers group. The group was marked as moderated, but there was no moderator, so only people who knew how to hack the system could post.:)
Anyway, Usenet moderation is done through a single email address per newsgroup. That does not mean a single person by any means. These days, most of the moderation for the larger groups is done by teams, often with the aid of bots. I don't read anywhere near as much netnews as I used to, but groups like comp.lang.{c,c++}.moderated seem to be doing fine.
What is in place to keep people from changing the apt-get sources from CnR to the Debian sources
Some Debianers investigated this, and the answer is: absolutely nothing. Nor (last we heard) were there any plans to implement anything to prevent this. Use of the Click-n-Run is entirely voluntary; the assumption seems to be that most (or at least, enough) people will be willing to pay for professional support, rather than take their chances with the often newbie-hostile volunteer army that is Debian. Speaking as a Debian developer myself, that seems like a reasonable bet.
I know a number of people that have bootstrapped themselves into running Debian by starting with Lindows. It is (or was) even easier than bootstrapping yourself into Debian from Knoppix. For those who want to try Debian, but are intimidated by the installer, Lindows seems to be a perfectly reasonable starting place.
I suspect much of it is written on company time, on the sneak,
I suspect that much more of it is written on company time quite openly, and with the full support of the company. I know that's how I got started, way back in the eighties. A small company, faced with the choice between licensing some expensive proprietary software that more or less did the job, and using some free software that almost did the job, turned to their in-house programmer (me) and said, "how much to add the features we need?" And lo and behold, my time cost a whole lot less.
Huh, what about, "needed a feature that wasn't there."
I think that's either "work functionality" or "non-work functionality", depending on whether you needed the feature to do your job or simply for personal reasons.
Its kinda hard for me to start reading some of the new masters, not because I wouldn't like them, but maybe because I'm too lazy to explore new books (yeah, I know that's bad).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. One of the best ways to discover new, good authors is to check out awards lists and award nominees. I've been reading SF since the late sixties, and most of my favorite new authors I've discovered in the last quarter century or so have come off of award nominee lists. Of course, I probably miss a few good ones this way, but I have discovered so many good authors that I really don't feel deprived.
A good place to start might be Locus Mag's Online list of SF Awards. If you can't find some interesting stuff to check out from browsing that, you're beyond lazy.:)
Just as a ferexample: if a book wins both the Hugo (award from fans) and the Nebula (award from writers), chances are pretty high that it's a pretty durn good book. Have you read everything on this list? (The only one on that list that didn't impress me is "Dreamsnake".)
The question is why tests find women are worse at spatial orientation. Is it a sex linked biological trait?
The spacial orientation thing has been known about and studied for a long time -- at least since I was a kid (late sixties/early seventies). The hypothesis that it is biological has held up pretty well, despite a lot of study (much of it from people who would prefer to find that it's not biological, so I think there's a good chance that it is. There are also some areas of cognition where women apparently consistently test better than men. Of course, these don't get as much publicity, and yes, that does say something about the flaws of our society.
Anyway, that's not the real question. The real question is, do bigger screens help counterbalance this trait (whatever the source of the trait might be)? Even if we were able to adjust our society so that a new generation of women didn't show this trait, that still wouldn't help the existing women who do have this trait. Bigger screens, OTOH, seem to help existing women. (And adjusting society is no small task in any case.)
Some of these things are known to be fundamentally biological. No amount of social pressure will cause men to be able to bear children.
There are other physical differences beside the oh-so-obvious ones. For example, the presence of an adam's apple is a strong indication of malehood (a handy thing to know if you visit nightclubs in certain areas of town), and if you stand up and let your arms dangle freely, if the knuckles face forward, you're almost certainly male; if they face outward, you're almost certainly female.
Too many people seem inclined to look at the human world as it exists today and declare, "this is the natural order of things."
Sure, but not really a relevant argument in this case. Whether or not this trait is nature or nurture, it seems to be a real trait, and if bigger screens help the women of our culture, then I say, bring on the bigger screens! It's not like it hurts anyone to have bigger screens, and if bigger screens become more popular, the price should fall, which benefits everyone.:)
Much of the most secure software around is written in C. Look at OpenBSD or qmail or djbdns. The problem is not the language, the problem is the skill of the programmer. C makes good programmers better, and bad programmers worse.
And yes, bounds-checking and GC are nice for a lot of things. And they do make it much easier for a mediocre or average (or even a good) programmer to write safe, reasonably secure code. The problem is the overhead. For a lot of things, that doesn't matter, and for a lot of things, I firmly advocate the use of higher level languages (don't care if it's lisp or python or whatever). But for some things, like basic kernel and networking features, where performance can be critical, it very much does matter. So our only hope is to get stuff from programmers who have proven themselves to be able to write solid, secure, fast code. That means, e.g. dump the damn sendmail and install postfix or qmail. And as for samba, well, just get rid of windows from your site, and it'll cease to be an issue. And in the mean time, remind yourself that it's still a lot more secure than anything you've seen from MS so far...:)
This is the obligatory SPAM thread plug for bayesian filtering.
That's missing the point. So I haven't seen any spam for a while -- so what, I'm still paying for it! I still have all the associated bandwidth costs, and my ISP still has those plus the associated storage costs (which, of course, they pass along to me and their other customers). Spam isn't a problem that can be solved by shutting your eyes and pretending its not there. It's time for a MILITARY solution! Bomb the suckers back to the stone age!:)
But...it won't work. It's just too easy to move (if its not already moved) these operations offshore to countries where pissed off AOL users aren't a concern.
No, it's not. First of all, the company would have to NOT DO BUSINESS IN THE US! If it does business in the US, then its open to penalties under US law. And second, it's really not that easy to move a business offshore. You'd need to make sure you have no assets left back in the states (or they could be seized), and even then, the banks could potentially block any transfer of money from US accounts to your accounts. It's just not that easy.
The US gummit seemed to have no problems suing Elcomsoft, even though it was a purely Russian company, and everything it did was legal in Russia. (Whatever you may think about the merits of that suit, it pretty clearly shows that being "offshore" is not necessarily a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
Furthermore, it only invites a lot of unwanted government regulation of email. If DMCA, the Patriot Act and others aren't enough for you, can you imagine having to license an SMTP server?
Straw man argument. The vast majority of laws are just fine - maybe not perfect, but good enough. There are a handful of ill-conceived, badly implemented laws out there. And these laws receive a disproprtionate amount of press (justifiably). But to jump from the fact that we talk about bad laws so much to the theory that most laws are bad laws just shows poor reasoning skills (not "insightfulness").
Frankly, I'm more worried about these laws being too weak than too strong. If you want to see where there are likely to be flaws in a law, look for the money. In this case, it's in the hands of the spammers. I strongly expect any anti-spam laws to be based on the existing junk-fax laws (just fine) or anti-telemarketing laws (too weak, but better than nothing). The idea that these laws will be too strong strikes me as implausible to the point of ridiculousness.
What we need (and I've started to see this gain more prominance in comments to these stories) is better enforcement of fraud and racketeering laws.
We need that too! The one doesn't preclude the other.
Sure, it gets bounced off of open relays in korea, or whatever, but if the originating company is either a US company, or does business in the US, then they are potentially liable. And that covers the vast majority of spam.
They keep saying this isn't DRM, but it's most of the building blocks you need for DRM.
Quite true. On the other hand, this system does make it easy to implement what they are talking about (allowing the user to verify what's installed), whereas implementing reliable DRM is still going to be extremely difficult (given the ability to combine an emulator with a proxy to the encryption chip, which will provide the ability to examine all data going into or coming out of the chip).
My guess (given the industry track record) is that the first few attempts to create DRM with this system will result in something that will fall pretty quickly to a determined and knowledgeable "attacker". And of course, none of this will plug the "analog hole". My guess is that we'll get a few rounds of attempted repression, which will fail, and eventually, they'll give up, rather than pouring more money into a "solution" that shows no signs of ever working. But I could be wrong - certainly I'm an optimist.
The other thing to note is that they keep stressing RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) licenses.
That's a bigger issue in my eyes, at least in the short term. Of course, while it means no open source, it doesn't necessarily mean no licensed add-ons to open-source systems. Which is not a solution I like, but is better than nothing.
You can still have bochs (or some equivalent) proxy the chip, forwarding requests to the actual chip, and intercepting all the data, including the clear data coming back from the chip. Turning this system into reliable DRM is orders of magnitude more difficult than most people seem to realize. Not necessarily impossible, but far more difficult than a cursory examination would suggest.
Of course, I have no doubt that there will be attempts to use the chip for naive DRM, which will limit the access for casual users, but probably not for determined "attackers" (if you can be referred to as an "attacker" when hacking your own machine).
[the Apple III] likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.
I strongly disagree. The Apple II family continued to be Apple's best-sellers (in both the home and business markets) for years after the III was retired and abandoned. In fact, the Apple II continued selling well into the early Mac days, and Apple pretty much had to put a stake through its heart to put it to rest. So I'd say -- as someone who was there -- that the negative effects of the Apple III were every bit as negligable as its positive effects.
Re:at this point why bother with a license?
on
Implementing VisiCalc
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Open the damn thing up and see where it goes. It may not go anywhere or it may turn into K-Visi or something.
Since it was probably written in pure assembly language (most microcomputer apps were at the time), it's unlikely to be of much use to modern development teams. And in any case, there are already a plethora of clones available; the oldest free one I know of is sc, which runs on dos and text-based unix systems. Originally by James Gosling of gosmacs and java fame. If you really want a tiny, underpowered spreadsheet, that's where I'd start. Otherwise, why not just stick with KSpread or Gnumeric or something similar.
(I feel like I should mention oreo too, the emacs to sc's vi, but I couldn't quite work it in.)
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Before the first IBM PC? Pretty much everywhere. Up till that point, most business microcomputers ran CP/M. VisiCalc was the original "killer app", and it put Apple on the map. Within a year of VisiCalc's release, Apple IIs had gone from just-another-home-computer (toy) to being the best-selling business microcomputers around.
Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that emails can be sent from a computer outside the US jurisdiction.
The jurisdiction of the computer won't be an issue. The jurisdiction of the spammer is what will count. And being a non-US company is not necessarily much of a defense either: if you do business in the US, then you're potentially at-risk (see, e.g. US v. Elcomsoft), and can have your assets seized or possibly worse; contrariwise, if you don't do business in the US, then there's little point in spamming people in the US.
Anyway, the US isn't the only country considering anti-spam laws. If enough countries take an anti-spam stance, the rest may have to fall in line or risk being blocked completely.
Someone tell me what is "trolling" in this post:
:)
Looks more like grotesque ignorance than trolling, but slashdot doesn't have a "grotesquely ignorant" mod.
It would have helped a lot, I think, if people like Bruce Perens had worked as part of the Free Software movement instead of confusing the issues with all the talk about Open Source.
Since Bruce has been writing Free Software since before the label "Open Source" existed, and was involved with the Debian project back when they were strongly affiliated with the FSF, and is considered the primary author of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and is a former Debian Project Leader, and is currently on the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, the parent organization for the Debian Project, and since Bruce has resigned from the OSI (which was really ESR's baby) over philosophical differences, I think it's a little unreasonable to criticize him for the OSI's failings.
IPv6 is like BetaMax tapes back in the 80's
As with most attempts to use the BetaMax analogy in the computer world, this one fails: BetaMax was incompatible with VHS, period, end statement. If you had a Beta machine, VHS tapes were useless to you, and vice versa. IPv4 and IPv6 can happily co-exist, though. Totally different situation.
That said, I agree with the underlying premise that migration isn't going to happen until it's easy and cheap, and (moreover) there's some motivation out there. It's possible that this translates to "never"; it's also possible that it translates to "some time in the next 5-10 years". I'm reserving judgement for now, but I'll be amazed if I have to deal with IPv6 in less than five years.
But of course, most people actually know what was meant, even if it wasn't spelled out in grotesque and painful detail... :)
For example, see this message on the Debian-Devel-Announce list, where it mentions that Lindows is providing 4.5kUSD to help support a Debian conference. (HP, Trolltech and O'Reilly are also mentioned.)
:)
He'd be welcome in my house for a beer.
Mine too. Heck, I'd probably offer him snacks to go with it.
By this time I was already having dreams ascii dungeons, monsters, and a 'd' following me around hoping for '%'
:)
And here I thought it was just me!
So, the DDoS is using 90% of their bandwidth? Just think, if only the article had included a link to SCO, maybe we could have taken out their remaining 10%. :)
:)
Ok, the whole thing is childish and stupid and pointless -- I'm sure that IBM is more than capable of holding its own in court -- and two wrongs never make a right. Nevertheless, I find it hard to be too upset about this. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
Libranet is possibly the oldest distro based off of Debian, predating Corel (RIP), Stormix (RIP), Progeny (RIP), LNX-BBC, Lindows, Lycorix, Knoppix and Morphix. (Not sure how it compares age-wise to LRP -- but then LRP is rather specialized.) If you haven't heard of it, it's probably because it's most popular in Europe.
:)
This is not "another Linux Distribution", this is an old, well-established Linux Distribution; if you want to complain about something, go complain about "new-fangled" Distros like Mandrake!
The first solution was moderation, but this placed too much of a burden on a single volunteer
:)
This was solved by the creators of the alt.hackers group. The group was marked as moderated, but there was no moderator, so only people who knew how to hack the system could post.
Anyway, Usenet moderation is done through a single email address per newsgroup. That does not mean a single person by any means. These days, most of the moderation for the larger groups is done by teams, often with the aid of bots. I don't read anywhere near as much netnews as I used to, but groups like comp.lang.{c,c++}.moderated seem to be doing fine.
What is in place to keep people from changing the apt-get sources from CnR to the Debian sources
Some Debianers investigated this, and the answer is: absolutely nothing. Nor (last we heard) were there any plans to implement anything to prevent this. Use of the Click-n-Run is entirely voluntary; the assumption seems to be that most (or at least, enough) people will be willing to pay for professional support, rather than take their chances with the often newbie-hostile volunteer army that is Debian. Speaking as a Debian developer myself, that seems like a reasonable bet.
I know a number of people that have bootstrapped themselves into running Debian by starting with Lindows. It is (or was) even easier than bootstrapping yourself into Debian from Knoppix. For those who want to try Debian, but are intimidated by the installer, Lindows seems to be a perfectly reasonable starting place.
I suspect much of it is written on company time, on the sneak,
I suspect that much more of it is written on company time quite openly, and with the full support of the company. I know that's how I got started, way back in the eighties. A small company, faced with the choice between licensing some expensive proprietary software that more or less did the job, and using some free software that almost did the job, turned to their in-house programmer (me) and said, "how much to add the features we need?" And lo and behold, my time cost a whole lot less.
Huh, what about, "needed a feature that wasn't there."
I think that's either "work functionality" or "non-work functionality", depending on whether you needed the feature to do your job or simply for personal reasons.
Its kinda hard for me to start reading some of the new masters, not because I wouldn't like them, but maybe because I'm too lazy to explore new books (yeah, I know that's bad).
:)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. One of the best ways to discover new, good authors is to check out awards lists and award nominees. I've been reading SF since the late sixties, and most of my favorite new authors I've discovered in the last quarter century or so have come off of award nominee lists. Of course, I probably miss a few good ones this way, but I have discovered so many good authors that I really don't feel deprived.
A good place to start might be Locus Mag's Online list of SF Awards. If you can't find some interesting stuff to check out from browsing that, you're beyond lazy.
Just as a ferexample: if a book wins both the Hugo (award from fans) and the Nebula (award from writers), chances are pretty high that it's a pretty durn good book. Have you read everything on this list? (The only one on that list that didn't impress me is "Dreamsnake".)
The question is why tests find women are worse at spatial orientation. Is it a sex linked biological trait?
:)
The spacial orientation thing has been known about and studied for a long time -- at least since I was a kid (late sixties/early seventies). The hypothesis that it is biological has held up pretty well, despite a lot of study (much of it from people who would prefer to find that it's not biological, so I think there's a good chance that it is. There are also some areas of cognition where women apparently consistently test better than men. Of course, these don't get as much publicity, and yes, that does say something about the flaws of our society.
Anyway, that's not the real question. The real question is, do bigger screens help counterbalance this trait (whatever the source of the trait might be)? Even if we were able to adjust our society so that a new generation of women didn't show this trait, that still wouldn't help the existing women who do have this trait. Bigger screens, OTOH, seem to help existing women. (And adjusting society is no small task in any case.)
Some of these things are known to be fundamentally biological. No amount of social pressure will cause men to be able to bear children.
There are other physical differences beside the oh-so-obvious ones. For example, the presence of an adam's apple is a strong indication of malehood (a handy thing to know if you visit nightclubs in certain areas of town), and if you stand up and let your arms dangle freely, if the knuckles face forward, you're almost certainly male; if they face outward, you're almost certainly female.
Too many people seem inclined to look at the human world as it exists today and declare, "this is the natural order of things."
Sure, but not really a relevant argument in this case. Whether or not this trait is nature or nurture, it seems to be a real trait, and if bigger screens help the women of our culture, then I say, bring on the bigger screens! It's not like it hurts anyone to have bigger screens, and if bigger screens become more popular, the price should fall, which benefits everyone.
"their Slashdot password!"
There ya go -- now, where's my pen!?
Much of the most secure software around is written in C. Look at OpenBSD or qmail or djbdns. The problem is not the language, the problem is the skill of the programmer. C makes good programmers better, and bad programmers worse.
:)
And yes, bounds-checking and GC are nice for a lot of things. And they do make it much easier for a mediocre or average (or even a good) programmer to write safe, reasonably secure code. The problem is the overhead. For a lot of things, that doesn't matter, and for a lot of things, I firmly advocate the use of higher level languages (don't care if it's lisp or python or whatever). But for some things, like basic kernel and networking features, where performance can be critical, it very much does matter. So our only hope is to get stuff from programmers who have proven themselves to be able to write solid, secure, fast code. That means, e.g. dump the damn sendmail and install postfix or qmail. And as for samba, well, just get rid of windows from your site, and it'll cease to be an issue. And in the mean time, remind yourself that it's still a lot more secure than anything you've seen from MS so far...
This is the obligatory SPAM thread plug for bayesian filtering.
:)
That's missing the point. So I haven't seen any spam for a while -- so what, I'm still paying for it! I still have all the associated bandwidth costs, and my ISP still has those plus the associated storage costs (which, of course, they pass along to me and their other customers). Spam isn't a problem that can be solved by shutting your eyes and pretending its not there. It's time for a MILITARY solution! Bomb the suckers back to the stone age!
But...it won't work. It's just too easy to move (if its not already moved) these operations offshore to countries where pissed off AOL users aren't a concern.
No, it's not. First of all, the company would have to NOT DO BUSINESS IN THE US! If it does business in the US, then its open to penalties under US law. And second, it's really not that easy to move a business offshore. You'd need to make sure you have no assets left back in the states (or they could be seized), and even then, the banks could potentially block any transfer of money from US accounts to your accounts. It's just not that easy.
The US gummit seemed to have no problems suing Elcomsoft, even though it was a purely Russian company, and everything it did was legal in Russia. (Whatever you may think about the merits of that suit, it pretty clearly shows that being "offshore" is not necessarily a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
Furthermore, it only invites a lot of unwanted government regulation of email. If DMCA, the Patriot Act and others aren't enough for you, can you imagine having to license an SMTP server?
Straw man argument. The vast majority of laws are just fine - maybe not perfect, but good enough. There are a handful of ill-conceived, badly implemented laws out there. And these laws receive a disproprtionate amount of press (justifiably). But to jump from the fact that we talk about bad laws so much to the theory that most laws are bad laws just shows poor reasoning skills (not "insightfulness").
Frankly, I'm more worried about these laws being too weak than too strong. If you want to see where there are likely to be flaws in a law, look for the money. In this case, it's in the hands of the spammers. I strongly expect any anti-spam laws to be based on the existing junk-fax laws (just fine) or anti-telemarketing laws (too weak, but better than nothing). The idea that these laws will be too strong strikes me as implausible to the point of ridiculousness.
What we need (and I've started to see this gain more prominance in comments to these stories) is better enforcement of fraud and racketeering laws.
We need that too! The one doesn't preclude the other.
Sure, it gets bounced off of open relays in korea, or whatever, but if the originating company is either a US company, or does business in the US, then they are potentially liable. And that covers the vast majority of spam.
They keep saying this isn't DRM, but it's most of the building blocks you need for DRM.
Quite true. On the other hand, this system does make it easy to implement what they are talking about (allowing the user to verify what's installed), whereas implementing reliable DRM is still going to be extremely difficult (given the ability to combine an emulator with a proxy to the encryption chip, which will provide the ability to examine all data going into or coming out of the chip).
My guess (given the industry track record) is that the first few attempts to create DRM with this system will result in something that will fall pretty quickly to a determined and knowledgeable "attacker". And of course, none of this will plug the "analog hole". My guess is that we'll get a few rounds of attempted repression, which will fail, and eventually, they'll give up, rather than pouring more money into a "solution" that shows no signs of ever working. But I could be wrong - certainly I'm an optimist.
The other thing to note is that they keep stressing RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) licenses.
That's a bigger issue in my eyes, at least in the short term. Of course, while it means no open source, it doesn't necessarily mean no licensed add-ons to open-source systems. Which is not a solution I like, but is better than nothing.
You can still have bochs (or some equivalent) proxy the chip, forwarding requests to the actual chip, and intercepting all the data, including the clear data coming back from the chip. Turning this system into reliable DRM is orders of magnitude more difficult than most people seem to realize. Not necessarily impossible, but far more difficult than a cursory examination would suggest.
Of course, I have no doubt that there will be attempts to use the chip for naive DRM, which will limit the access for casual users, but probably not for determined "attackers" (if you can be referred to as an "attacker" when hacking your own machine).
[the Apple III] likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.
I strongly disagree. The Apple II family continued to be Apple's best-sellers (in both the home and business markets) for years after the III was retired and abandoned. In fact, the Apple II continued selling well into the early Mac days, and Apple pretty much had to put a stake through its heart to put it to rest. So I'd say -- as someone who was there -- that the negative effects of the Apple III were every bit as negligable as its positive effects.
Open the damn thing up and see where it goes. It may not go anywhere or it may turn into K-Visi or something.
Since it was probably written in pure assembly language (most microcomputer apps were at the time), it's unlikely to be of much use to modern development teams. And in any case, there are already a plethora of clones available; the oldest free one I know of is sc, which runs on dos and text-based unix systems. Originally by James Gosling of gosmacs and java fame. If you really want a tiny, underpowered spreadsheet, that's where I'd start. Otherwise, why not just stick with KSpread or Gnumeric or something similar.
(I feel like I should mention oreo too, the emacs to sc's vi, but I couldn't quite work it in.)
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Before the first IBM PC? Pretty much everywhere. Up till that point, most business microcomputers ran CP/M. VisiCalc was the original "killer app", and it put Apple on the map. Within a year of VisiCalc's release, Apple IIs had gone from just-another-home-computer (toy) to being the best-selling business microcomputers around.
Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.
At my school, we get XP Pro and Office XP for $10 each. Not too shabby.
:)
Seems pretty shabby to me - they'd have to lower that by at least $20 more before I'd even think about it.