Once upon a time (late last year, actually), I read an article about an electric car. It's a very expensive and impractical one in many ways, mind you, but they got one part really, really right: the range on a single charge was approximately 300 miles.
Now, you can read that two ways. Since I'm familiar with electric car technology, I know that you're lucky to get 45 miles out of a single charge in most electric cars, and the best ones can stretch to about 90. I also know that my little Nissan Sentra has a range of approximately 360 miles. So I looked at that 300 mile range number, and thought, "Holy Crap! They just leaped from 1/4 the range of my Sentra to 5/6 the range -- that's phenomenal!"
The person who wrote the article, however, presumably wasn't familiar with the technology. Or perhaps he drives a car that gets 40+mpg and carries 16 gallons. I'm not sure why, but they looked at that 300 mile range and called the range "extremely limited".
This is how I see these "is Linux ready for the desktop?" discussions.
If you've been playing with Linux and Windows for a few years, and then you try something like Xandros, you're likely to say "Holy Crap! They have made a huge leap forward in hardware compatibility, integration, ease of installation and use, functionality and compatibility, akin to the functionality of Windows 98!"
If you've been playing with Windows exclusively, and you don't see or understand the progress that has been made in the last few years, you're likely to say "Well, I clicked something and got an error message I didn't understand, and it didn't set up exactly like my Windows box did, so I don't think it's ready for the desktop."
I can play 3D shooter games. I can run 95% of the programs I want for work and play. I can listen to streaming radio stations, download account information from my bank, and SSH into my email server at home to bypass the company firewall. It's not parity with Windows XP, but it's getting mighty close.
And it's a heck of a lot more ready for the desktop than Windows 95 was -- and we all used that once upon a time.
One more thing that's missing for Linux to work on the desktop: easy software installation. But it's getting closer.
For instance, to install the Flash plugin on IE, I just surf to a site and click a few buttons. Done. On Mozilla, I have to download a file and know how to install it. However, macromedia now pops up a screen that says "Save it here, use the console to type this command, then do this and you're finished." Those instructions help bring it closer.
LindowsOS, Xandros, and other distros are giving people a repository to download free (or not free) software automatically -- apt-get with a pretty package, basically, but that makes it easy. It's getting closer.
The day I can go to a website, download a file to my desktop, double-click it and have it install -- consistently and every time -- is the day I say it's ready.
No matter how many times I've tried to get it working, Suse (my formerly favorite distro) could never play videos smoothly on my machine.
Xandros Deluxe 2.0 plays them smoothly out of the box. For me, that, plus the crossover office and crossover plugin proprietary packages included in the price, were enough to make it worthwhile.
But that's just me...and I bought Suse, so it isn't a free vs. paid decision for me.
A revised kernel with a fix for that serious bug is already available; you can download and install it from their apt-get front end the moment you finish installing the OS.:)
Funny, yes, but untrue
on
Xandros version 2
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· Score: 3, Interesting
(Full disclosure: I was part of the beta test, but am not an employee or developer associated with Xandros)
The installer is actually quite comprehensive, but the complexity is optional -- you either do the four click install, or you divert into optional choices should you dare, like partitioning and whatnot.
As far as only supporting industry-leading hardware, I have a small pile of old HP 4150a Omnibooks laying around, and they couldn't boot the Xandros installer due to a BIOS bug (LindowsOS has the same problem, by the way.) Whereas the LindowsOS people took no interest in helping me solve the problem with my PAID copy, the Xandros folks solved the problem in time for this release. My relatively ancient laptops are now supported*.
*except for sound, which no Linux distribution supports without the Open Sound System proprietary drivers.
I carry around an object that broadcasts what is functionally equivalent to my credit card info to any reader within close proximity?
And so the guys that usually pull credit card numbers out of the garbage, or from lost/stolen card, or from bank records, and make dummy cards that they use in stores* will now be able to set up a portable reader, put it in a pocket, and wander through a crowded subway car picking up credit card numbers without anyone noticing?
Why would anyone want this?
Oh, yeah. Because they want it to be more convenient to make purchases.
Sigh.
*this has happened to me THREE TIMES, including once by a ring of thieves that successfully used the dummy cards in three different airports in three different countries simultaneously, even as my bank's fraud department watched via computer with me on the other end)
I pay $49.95 a month for 1500/256, I get a static IP, I can run all the servers I want, I get great customer service, and the tech folks there know what the heck they're doing.
Case in point: I run a mail server. Several months in advance, they sent out a notice (paraphrased): "If you run a mail server please send an email to this address, because we're going to block commonly-exploited mail server ports for everyone who is NOT knowingly running one of these servers, and we don't want to block you by accident."
They followed this with an explanation of why: #1, people who unknowingly (or willingly) run open relays get owned by spammers, and they don't want to contribute to that problem, and #2, if you are intentionally running a mail server, and you can keep it from being an open relay (they check once and a while) who are we to say you can't do it?
My wife and I were dissatisfied with the management of a public (for-profit) discussion forum, so we decided to start our own.
We set it up in a weekend on our personal DSL server, assuming that we could transfer it later if it got popular.
Well, it got popular FAST, because over 150 people from the for-profit board wanted an alternative, and they flocked to our board. In a two week period, we had more than 5gb of traffic. We were flabbergasted at the sheer volume.
Needless to say, we've moved the board to a hosting provider that allocates us a specific (and very high) amount of bandwidth.
It should be noted that our ISP, DSLExtreme, was exceptionally supportive and patient with us during this time. The for-profit board attempted to get us shut down, and the legal folks at DSLExtreme would have none of it. They also allowed us to rack up that temporary 5gb traffic burst with no warnings, no stoppage and no extra charge (I only know how much we used from my own logs.) I can't thank them enough.:)
I have a Pentax K-1000 from college. I'm 32 now, and the camera has survived bad packing from apartment to apartment to apartment and across the country, has survived being thrown in the bottom of a backpack, etc., and works beautifully to this day.
This is, I believe, a direct result of the metal body. I do not believe a plastic-bodied camera would have stood up to my abuse to this degree. My digital Canon A60 certainly wouldn't (I keep it in a nice padded case.)
So, yeah, don't throw good money at useless body upgrades from a functionality perspective (all manual is a great way to learn) but spending a little extra for a metal-body camera is something I highly recommend.
I hope that it didn't appear I was suggesting donation or purchase was required, as that wasn't my intention at all. The project is, indeed, open source, with all that it implies.
As to Richard Morrell's leaving the project, thanks for that piece of information. I personally find that extremely useful, and will be reevaluating smoothwall shortly.:)
Congratulations to all those who made Smoothwall's latest release possible.
Based on personal experience, I highly recommend that anyone planning to use, donate to or purchase support for the Smoothwall product first research the company and primary members of the development team, such as founder Richard Morrell, before making a committment. Of course, that's a good idea under any circumstances, with any software product.:)
Personally, I use the Mitel SME Server distribution (formerly e-smith) for my needs, but the feature set is somewhat different and it may not be a good fit for you. The community of users supporting users, however, is a great assett to the SME server project.
A friend of mine is in a local band that gigs regularly. His band recently recorded an EP. It cost them approximately $400 at a professional CD pressing shop to generate the limited run, plus a couple of hundred dollars in production costs -- they're talented guys, so they ran into a studio, recorded for a few hours (a couple of live takes for each song) and the album was complete. Approximately $600 in real expenses, plus several hours of their time.
Now, they've given the vast majority of these CDs away to record company flacks, because they still think that being signed is a good option to have. The rest of the CDs, they sold at a couple of their shows. Total revenue from the CD sales covered the production and pressing costs for the entire run of EPs.
Are they happy? You bet, because they viewed the EP as a promotional tool rather than a revenue stream, and were happy to sell enough CDs to break even on the costs, and still have enough CDs to distribute to the critics and record companies on their list. They know that getting people to their shows in the first place is the primary way they'll make nice, no-strings-attached money.
It's interesting that they have such an attitude, but the lead singer (a reasonably famous person I shall not name) was once the lead singer of a well-known and reasonably "successful" band distributed by a major label -- and he still owes money to the label, years later, and doesn't own the copyrights on his songs.
Interesting, eh? They make more money at a single concert than the lead singer made in his entire stint as frontman from a successful major-label band due to the contract BS that goes on in such places, which would be true even if they played for free.
The day after this number portability thing went into effect, my wife called our carrier (T-Mobile) to cancel our hotspot service*. When she let them know she wanted to "cancel service", they apparently assumed she meant our entire service plan, rather than just the hotspot part of it, and immediately offered a really good deal: almost double the minutes we had previously, plus the addition of free nights, all for the same price we were already paying.
Needless to say, we stuck with 'em -- just like we were going to anyway.;)
*Hotspot is T-Mobile's wifi service. We had tried the hotspot service for a month, but it turned out to be unnecessary, as every Starbucks we went to had free service available from somewhere nearby, usually at a strength equal (or almost equal) to the for-pay service.
I respectfully disagree with the basic premise of your statements above.
Specifically, the idea that "The quality of jobs necessarily means the type of work that the population is willing to do...The country then looks to exporting those jobs, so that it's population can work on something better...maybe higher level jobs."
At risk of seeming glib, close your eyes, reach out your arms and spin in a circle. You'll probably smack an unemployed IT professional in the back of the head. That individual, and a lot more like her/him, very much want to do the type of work that is being outsourced. The fact that most of them are not being hired is not due to their lack of desire, or (in most, not all) cases their greed, but to the fact that living in the US is a lot more expensive than living in Delhi, so the minimum that a US citizen will accept for the work is higher than the minimum that someone living in Delhi will accept.
Similarly, when auto plants were closing in Michigan, et al, it wasn't because people didn't want to work, but because they couldn't afford to live on the salaries that Mexican workers would accept.
In short, "the country" didn't look to export those jobs to allow the population to do something better -- the corporations exported the jobs so that they could get more labor for the same amount of money, or the same amount of labor for less money.
Think of it as time travel. If you could send your money back to the 1920s, think of the amount of labor you could afford for a fraction of the price! Now, the health care, safety standards, environmental controls, and general quality of life sucked compared to current US conditions, but hey, you don't have to go back there -- only your money does. The goods and services produced by this labor come back into the year 2003 and are sold at today's marketplace rates. That's fundamentally what we're talking about here, and I suppose that's good capitalism.
Just don't pretend it's for the good of the unemployed, i.e., they don't want to do this kind of work. If you were asked to do your job at a salary that wouldn't pay for your share of rent on a one bedroom apartment shared with three other people, you wouldn't do the work either, no matter how "higher level" they might be.
Sorry if this seems like a rant.:)
PS: in my original draft, I wrote "If you could send your monkey back to the 1920s..." which is, on it's own, something interesting to think about.;)
I ask, because back in 1997 I was the lighting/sound designer for "Jedi! A Musical Tour De Force", performed at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago.
It was the trilogy, performed in about an hour and a half (if memory serves) with heavy use of models and such to represent space battles and things -- it contained select dialogue from all three movies, and each installment of the trilogy began with the piano player singing an overture featuring the words that scrolled across the screen to open each movie.
Oh, wait. Did I mention it was a MUSICAL? Seriously. Princess Leia's "It's hard to be hard" was a particularly good Disco tune performed by the guy in drag playing Leia (there were women in the show, but not for Leia.)
My particular favorite was Obi Wan's climactic ode to the Force, "Feel The Flow". Feel the flow/feel it from above and below/feel it in every mountain stream/everywhere you go/feel the force/it will never lead you off course...and so on and so on. I actually have the cast recording on a CD-R at home.
So anyway -- the point of all this is, Lucas shut us down with a cease and desist. Hopefully this guy won't suffer the same fate.
I hope you're right about the encrypted data. Certainly, given the recent Diebold voting machine debacle, I am not reassured that for-profit companies have the children's safety as a concern above and beyond their own profit margins.
And yes, it's a colorful little story designed to emphasize the risk potential to make a point. Nonetheless, it IS possible (a possibility you minimize, but do not deny), and thanks to script kiddie-style attacks and insecure software running rampant, it would be ignorant to assume that all people who might want to harm your kids are unintelligent, risk-craving technophobes.
Bottom line: you can have a teacher standing at the door taking attendance as kids walk in, or you can have a teacher standing at the door watching the kids enter their own attendance into a machine. It would take the same amount of time, one would be significantly less costly and more reliable, and the other introduces a risk, albeit small, to the children. Which one do you want?
A step forward in technology is the same as taking today's technology back in time.
The first few people do it, and they get amazing results. Other people figure out what they're doing, and jump on the bandwagon. Before long, everybody is on equal footing again.
Trouble is, it isn't a natural progress over time that allows us to see and avert trouble spots. Nope, it's a mad rush to use the futuristic technology, and damn the consequences.
The automobile is the perfect example of this.
Once upon a time, everyone lived close to their jobs, because they couldn't travel very far very quickly. Everyone shared this problem.
Then the car came along, and people realized they could buy cheaper land further away, and still make it to work on time.
Over time, they completely abandoned the residential centers near their workplaces in favor of outlying homesteads, and the abandoned residential centers fell into disrepair.
Suddenly, everyone looks around at the traffic and realizes they wish they lived closer to work -- and the huge demand makes housing prices near people's workplaces even MORE expensive than before, even though the housing stock is in disrepair. Everyone shares this new problem.
Applying the time travel idea, if you were to take today's SUV back to the late 1800s, you could purchase a huge pile of land in an outlying area and still make it to work on time.
People would see you driving, though. And they'd figure out how to do what you were doing. And they'd eventually be able to move out to the cheaper land. And so on, until they were looking around and wishing they could live closer to work, just like we are now.
As an aside, this is something that SUV drivers should think about. When there are only a few SUV drivers, they get a huge benefit -- but when everyone drives SUVs, the benefits are lost. Gas becomes more scarce, so prices go up. Accidents are between SUVs rather than one SUV and one car, so no SUV driver is any safer than car drivers were when accidents were between cars. SUVs can handle roads in bad condition (and actually contribute to faster road deterioration) so there's less need to keep the roads up, and eventually you NEED an SUV to drive on the crappy roads. And so on.
Sorry, slipped into a rant there. But seriously, if all you need to do is be trendy, buy a Mini -- and if all you need to do is carry seven kids, buy a minivan.
Re:Misleading story (both wired and slashdot)
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Reading, Writing, RFID
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· Score: 2, Insightful
(Note -- I posted this elsewhere in the replies to this article, but forgot to login, so I thought I'd do it again with my ID and in a relevant spot...sorry about the double-post.)
In the article:
"Intuitek President David M. Straitiff said his company built privacy protections into the school's RFID system, including limiting the reading range of the kiosks to less than 20 inches and making students touch the kiosk screen instead of passively being scanned by it. He pooh-poohed the notion that the system would be abused.
"(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said."
(then, later in the article)
""It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said."
- - -
So okay, it's no worse than mag-strip cards or photo ID cards AT THE POINT OF ENTRY TO THE CLASSROOM.
But suppose, just suppose, your server gets compromised. Happens every day, as we all know, to banks and other supposedly high-security establishments, so it's safe to say that school databases can and will be compromised.
Now, the person who compromises the server gets names, addresses and faces from the database, prints them out in a handy reference*, then sets up a little scanner at a nearby arcade to read the tags of kids as they come in. Certainly conceivable.
The person then hangs out at the arcade during school hours and, when one of these kids shows up while ditching school, the abductor walks up to the child and loudly announces in a voice of authority "Jimmie Johnson, you should be in 3rd period right now! Come with me." The child assumes the person is a school authority (after all, they recognized them and knew their name, right?) and goes with the adult.
The child is taken into a car (people don't stop them; after all, this person recognized the kid, and the kid isn't fighting it, right?) and is driven somewhere secluded where they are molested and killed.
The whole point of this isn't that you get tracked -- it's that you get tracked WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE, and that RFIDs allow anyone who comes within reading range of the tags to read information from it.
At least having a photo ID in a pocket or a mag-strip card in your pocket means nobody can track you without getting it out of your pocket first -- so if some adult starts claiming they know you, but don't know your name, you can start screaming bloody murder in hopes than an adult will intervene and prevent your abduction.
Sigh.
*Arguably, this could be done without the use of RFIDs, since a person could break into the server and print this data out and this would be sufficient. However, without RFIDs the abductor would need to stand near the entryway holding the printout and checking out faces, which would be highly suspicious behavior. With RFIDs, the perp could sit in a car nearby and wait for the scanner to pick up one of the kids. They cross-reference it with their printout, then go into the arcade without holding any reference material -- and march straight towards the child in question. It's a lot more commanding and authoritative, and much more likely to be believed by witnesses in the vicinity.
Yes, according to Tony Lawrence, owner of A.P. Lawrence, a consulting firm that is probably ALSO a small or medium-sized business.
From the article, referring to small and medium-sized business owners:
"They don't necessarily know whether they have SCO or Linux. The only time they care about their computer is when it crashes."
Show of hands: who believes that CEOs of fortune 500 companies know the details of their hardware and software infrastructure better than small and medium-sized business owners?
Okay, Tony, put your hand down.
Show of hands: who believes that CEOs of fortune 500 companies only give a rat's ass when their computer crashes, that small business owners are highly aware of their hardware and software infrastructure because they have a smaller staff and a higher sensitivity to the cost and maintenance to such infrastructure, and that medium-sized business owners fall into both groups?
Okay, everyone else put your hands down. One more.
Show of hands: who believes that Tony's business probably runs on pirated Microsoft products?
ONLY? My 2001 Sentra goes about 300 miles before I need to refill it. My sunny LA commute is 28 miles a day, so I only need to fill up every two weeks -- and that's for a daily driver. This car is a niche performance vehicle...after all, who drives their Ferrari to work and back every day (unless they have a serious ego problem)? Let's face it, an electric car with this kind of range is the holy grail of electric cars, assuming the cost can be brought down. The Ford Ranger electric pickup the article mentions as being discontinued barely had enough range to get me to work and back ONCE. I know this, because I did the research before deciding not to buy one.
#2: "Its Spartan interior looks like a science project, in which most of the controls apart from the CD player are gadgets to monitor the battery and tiny 110-lb. motor. Drivers get an analog current meter, voltmeter, altimeter, and battery-voltage display with LED lights that measures temperature and charging limits."
As opposed to those high-end exotic production cars which have "gadgets" to monitor the oil pressure, oil temperature, coolant temperature and fuel level. They're called gauges. You read them to figure out how the unseen mechanicals are doing. Just like every other car.
Honestly, I'm never reading a forbes article again. Their bias against alternative (read disruptive) technologies is just too evident to waste my time on.
"Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square, and realize that their protests and complaints would not only be a pathetic waste of time but, also a waste of the tax payers money?"
It might be a waste of time, but not for the reason you might assume. I'll tell you what would NOT be a waste of time, though: spending money and attention to ensure that electronic voting cannot be tampered with. That means a paper trail. That means independent review of machines. That means source code that anyone can read, review and comment on before and after the election.
In short, assuring that there are no reasons for anyone to doubt the effectiveness of the voting mechanism, so that issues like the potential Diebold fraud(s) never come up in the first place. That would be a great use of taxpayer money.
And hey, here's a thought: how about purchasing voting machines from non-profits?
"I'll bet that you think it is because the opposing party is somehow controlling them and making it impossible for them to complain."
It is equally conceivable that the writer you responded to knows that it would be political suicide to complain unless there were concrete proof.
I mention this, because your stated assumption that the poster believed something that is essentially irrational (that "the opposting party is somehow controlling...") struck me as whiny and biased, something you lambasted the person you responded to for. So, you lost credibility in my eyes.
By the way, this doesn't mean I agree with either of you.;)
I respectfully request a clarification of your statement, thus:
"He knew that is impossible to claim morality while excluding religious principle."
I am a secular humanist, which is a fancy name for "God may or may not exist, but I neither know nor care." Are you suggesting that it is impossible for me to claim that my actions are moral strictly because I don't use someone's religion as the yardstick for judging said morality?
I ask, because I occasionally do nice things for strangers, like help them push their broken-down car to the side of the road or give them a ride to work when their car catches on fire or tackle a thief to recover a snatched purse. Are these acts rendered immoral, simply because I didn't do them in the name of someone else's God? Am I, as a human being, incapable of determining the boundaries of morality without guidance from an organized religious doctrine?
I realize it is possible to read hostility into the above questions, but I'm quite sincere -- can you please clarify the intent of your statement?
Oh, and this:
"Without God in our society the worst will happen."
Some of the greatest moments of kindness and generosity took place and continue to take place in the world under the auspices of God -- and some of the worst atrocities, as well. This suggests that the success or failure of a society likely does not rest solely on whether or not the society believes in, or is governed by, God. It will take more than quotes from famous people to convince me otherwise, as those quotes were made by people, and people are imperfect. In other words, saying it doesn't make it so.:)
I, too, recited the "under God" part throughout grade school, even though I didn't believe in God*. It was one of many things that made me feel like I didn't belong, like I was some kind of freak or outcast.
Once I got to high school, I realized that there wasn't anything wrong with me or my (non-religious) beliefs -- but up until that time I had assumed, based in part on the pledge, that everyone else (outside of some immediate family members) believed in God, and that I must be really messed up.
So personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the "under God" part go away, although inserting a pause for other people to say "under God" if they want to seems like a reasonable thing to do.
- - -
*My mother raised me Lutheran, church every Sunday and Bible school and whatnot, until one day I said "I don't want to go to Bible school." She asked, "Why not?" and I replied, "All they talk about is God, and I don't believe in God." I was ten years old at the time. My mother told me that she felt it was her obligation to raise me as she was raised until I was old enough to make up my own mind, at which point my beliefs were my own business. Go Mom! Ultimately, my mother still goes to church, my father doesn't, one of my sisters doesn't, one of my sisters does, and I occasionally consider joining a Unitarian church for the snacks.
It's aggravating because the power supply is a lot cheaper, presumably, than the CPU. When troubleshooting comes down to replacing suspect parts, and you must incur the cost of each part you replace, it makes sense for the consumer to determine the most likely suspects, then replace the cheapest suspect part first.
On the other hand, Apple suggests that you replace a significantly more expensive part BEFORE replacing a relatively less expensive part. That's not a cost-effective way of fixing the problem, although it makes sense if you have a huge bin of CPUs and power supplies sitting around as spare parts.
So: if it IS the CPU that's the problem, then replacing it first will save you the cost of the power supply. If it is the power supply that's the problem, however, you will have paid for a really, really expensive CPU that didn't need replacing anyway, and probably can't be returned. That certainly qualifies as aggravating.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time (late last year, actually), I read an article about an electric car. It's a very expensive and impractical one in many ways, mind you, but they got one part really, really right: the range on a single charge was approximately 300 miles.
Now, you can read that two ways. Since I'm familiar with electric car technology, I know that you're lucky to get 45 miles out of a single charge in most electric cars, and the best ones can stretch to about 90. I also know that my little Nissan Sentra has a range of approximately 360 miles. So I looked at that 300 mile range number, and thought, "Holy Crap! They just leaped from 1/4 the range of my Sentra to 5/6 the range -- that's phenomenal!"
The person who wrote the article, however, presumably wasn't familiar with the technology. Or perhaps he drives a car that gets 40+mpg and carries 16 gallons. I'm not sure why, but they looked at that 300 mile range and called the range "extremely limited".
This is how I see these "is Linux ready for the desktop?" discussions.
If you've been playing with Linux and Windows for a few years, and then you try something like Xandros, you're likely to say "Holy Crap! They have made a huge leap forward in hardware compatibility, integration, ease of installation and use, functionality and compatibility, akin to the functionality of Windows 98!"
If you've been playing with Windows exclusively, and you don't see or understand the progress that has been made in the last few years, you're likely to say "Well, I clicked something and got an error message I didn't understand, and it didn't set up exactly like my Windows box did, so I don't think it's ready for the desktop."
I can play 3D shooter games. I can run 95% of the programs I want for work and play. I can listen to streaming radio stations, download account information from my bank, and SSH into my email server at home to bypass the company firewall. It's not parity with Windows XP, but it's getting mighty close.
And it's a heck of a lot more ready for the desktop than Windows 95 was -- and we all used that once upon a time.
One more thing that's missing for Linux to work on the desktop: easy software installation. But it's getting closer.
For instance, to install the Flash plugin on IE, I just surf to a site and click a few buttons. Done. On Mozilla, I have to download a file and know how to install it. However, macromedia now pops up a screen that says "Save it here, use the console to type this command, then do this and you're finished." Those instructions help bring it closer.
LindowsOS, Xandros, and other distros are giving people a repository to download free (or not free) software automatically -- apt-get with a pretty package, basically, but that makes it easy. It's getting closer.
The day I can go to a website, download a file to my desktop, double-click it and have it install -- consistently and every time -- is the day I say it's ready.
And it gets closer every month. Whee!
No matter how many times I've tried to get it working, Suse (my formerly favorite distro) could never play videos smoothly on my machine.
Xandros Deluxe 2.0 plays them smoothly out of the box. For me, that, plus the crossover office and crossover plugin proprietary packages included in the price, were enough to make it worthwhile.
But that's just me...and I bought Suse, so it isn't a free vs. paid decision for me.
A revised kernel with a fix for that serious bug is already available; you can download and install it from their apt-get front end the moment you finish installing the OS. :)
(Full disclosure: I was part of the beta test, but am not an employee or developer associated with Xandros)
The installer is actually quite comprehensive, but the complexity is optional -- you either do the four click install, or you divert into optional choices should you dare, like partitioning and whatnot.
As far as only supporting industry-leading hardware, I have a small pile of old HP 4150a Omnibooks laying around, and they couldn't boot the Xandros installer due to a BIOS bug (LindowsOS has the same problem, by the way.) Whereas the LindowsOS people took no interest in helping me solve the problem with my PAID copy, the Xandros folks solved the problem in time for this release. My relatively ancient laptops are now supported*.
*except for sound, which no Linux distribution supports without the Open Sound System proprietary drivers.
So let me get this straight:
I carry around an object that broadcasts what is functionally equivalent to my credit card info to any reader within close proximity?
And so the guys that usually pull credit card numbers out of the garbage, or from lost/stolen card, or from bank records, and make dummy cards that they use in stores* will now be able to set up a portable reader, put it in a pocket, and wander through a crowded subway car picking up credit card numbers without anyone noticing?
Why would anyone want this?
Oh, yeah. Because they want it to be more convenient to make purchases.
Sigh.
*this has happened to me THREE TIMES, including once by a ring of thieves that successfully used the dummy cards in three different airports in three different countries simultaneously, even as my bank's fraud department watched via computer with me on the other end)
Here's a plug for DSLExtreme, while you're at it:
;)
I pay $49.95 a month for 1500/256, I get a static IP, I can run all the servers I want, I get great customer service, and the tech folks there know what the heck they're doing.
Case in point: I run a mail server. Several months in advance, they sent out a notice (paraphrased): "If you run a mail server please send an email to this address, because we're going to block commonly-exploited mail server ports for everyone who is NOT knowingly running one of these servers, and we don't want to block you by accident."
They followed this with an explanation of why: #1, people who unknowingly (or willingly) run open relays get owned by spammers, and they don't want to contribute to that problem, and #2, if you are intentionally running a mail server, and you can keep it from being an open relay (they check once and a while) who are we to say you can't do it?
Love 'em, will never leave 'em.
My wife and I were dissatisfied with the management of a public (for-profit) discussion forum, so we decided to start our own.
:)
We set it up in a weekend on our personal DSL server, assuming that we could transfer it later if it got popular.
Well, it got popular FAST, because over 150 people from the for-profit board wanted an alternative, and they flocked to our board. In a two week period, we had more than 5gb of traffic. We were flabbergasted at the sheer volume.
Needless to say, we've moved the board to a hosting provider that allocates us a specific (and very high) amount of bandwidth.
It should be noted that our ISP, DSLExtreme, was exceptionally supportive and patient with us during this time. The for-profit board attempted to get us shut down, and the legal folks at DSLExtreme would have none of it. They also allowed us to rack up that temporary 5gb traffic burst with no warnings, no stoppage and no extra charge (I only know how much we used from my own logs.) I can't thank them enough.
I have a Pentax K-1000 from college. I'm 32 now, and the camera has survived bad packing from apartment to apartment to apartment and across the country, has survived being thrown in the bottom of a backpack, etc., and works beautifully to this day.
This is, I believe, a direct result of the metal body. I do not believe a plastic-bodied camera would have stood up to my abuse to this degree. My digital Canon A60 certainly wouldn't (I keep it in a nice padded case.)
So, yeah, don't throw good money at useless body upgrades from a functionality perspective (all manual is a great way to learn) but spending a little extra for a metal-body camera is something I highly recommend.
I hope that it didn't appear I was suggesting donation or purchase was required, as that wasn't my intention at all. The project is, indeed, open source, with all that it implies.
:)
As to Richard Morrell's leaving the project, thanks for that piece of information. I personally find that extremely useful, and will be reevaluating smoothwall shortly.
Congratulations to all those who made Smoothwall's latest release possible.
:)
Based on personal experience, I highly recommend that anyone planning to use, donate to or purchase support for the Smoothwall product first research the company and primary members of the development team, such as founder Richard Morrell, before making a committment. Of course, that's a good idea under any circumstances, with any software product.
Personally, I use the Mitel SME Server distribution (formerly e-smith) for my needs, but the feature set is somewhat different and it may not be a good fit for you. The community of users supporting users, however, is a great assett to the SME server project.
A friend of mine is in a local band that gigs regularly. His band recently recorded an EP. It cost them approximately $400 at a professional CD pressing shop to generate the limited run, plus a couple of hundred dollars in production costs -- they're talented guys, so they ran into a studio, recorded for a few hours (a couple of live takes for each song) and the album was complete. Approximately $600 in real expenses, plus several hours of their time.
Now, they've given the vast majority of these CDs away to record company flacks, because they still think that being signed is a good option to have. The rest of the CDs, they sold at a couple of their shows. Total revenue from the CD sales covered the production and pressing costs for the entire run of EPs.
Are they happy? You bet, because they viewed the EP as a promotional tool rather than a revenue stream, and were happy to sell enough CDs to break even on the costs, and still have enough CDs to distribute to the critics and record companies on their list. They know that getting people to their shows in the first place is the primary way they'll make nice, no-strings-attached money.
It's interesting that they have such an attitude, but the lead singer (a reasonably famous person I shall not name) was once the lead singer of a well-known and reasonably "successful" band distributed by a major label -- and he still owes money to the label, years later, and doesn't own the copyrights on his songs.
Interesting, eh? They make more money at a single concert than the lead singer made in his entire stint as frontman from a successful major-label band due to the contract BS that goes on in such places, which would be true even if they played for free.
The day after this number portability thing went into effect, my wife called our carrier (T-Mobile) to cancel our hotspot service*. When she let them know she wanted to "cancel service", they apparently assumed she meant our entire service plan, rather than just the hotspot part of it, and immediately offered a really good deal: almost double the minutes we had previously, plus the addition of free nights, all for the same price we were already paying.
;)
Needless to say, we stuck with 'em -- just like we were going to anyway.
*Hotspot is T-Mobile's wifi service. We had tried the hotspot service for a month, but it turned out to be unnecessary, as every Starbucks we went to had free service available from somewhere nearby, usually at a strength equal (or almost equal) to the for-pay service.
I respectfully disagree with the basic premise of your statements above.
:)
;)
Specifically, the idea that "The quality of jobs necessarily means the type of work that the population is willing to do...The country then looks to exporting those jobs, so that it's population can work on something better...maybe higher level jobs."
At risk of seeming glib, close your eyes, reach out your arms and spin in a circle. You'll probably smack an unemployed IT professional in the back of the head. That individual, and a lot more like her/him, very much want to do the type of work that is being outsourced. The fact that most of them are not being hired is not due to their lack of desire, or (in most, not all) cases their greed, but to the fact that living in the US is a lot more expensive than living in Delhi, so the minimum that a US citizen will accept for the work is higher than the minimum that someone living in Delhi will accept.
Similarly, when auto plants were closing in Michigan, et al, it wasn't because people didn't want to work, but because they couldn't afford to live on the salaries that Mexican workers would accept.
In short, "the country" didn't look to export those jobs to allow the population to do something better -- the corporations exported the jobs so that they could get more labor for the same amount of money, or the same amount of labor for less money.
Think of it as time travel. If you could send your money back to the 1920s, think of the amount of labor you could afford for a fraction of the price! Now, the health care, safety standards, environmental controls, and general quality of life sucked compared to current US conditions, but hey, you don't have to go back there -- only your money does. The goods and services produced by this labor come back into the year 2003 and are sold at today's marketplace rates. That's fundamentally what we're talking about here, and I suppose that's good capitalism.
Just don't pretend it's for the good of the unemployed, i.e., they don't want to do this kind of work. If you were asked to do your job at a salary that wouldn't pay for your share of rent on a one bedroom apartment shared with three other people, you wouldn't do the work either, no matter how "higher level" they might be.
Sorry if this seems like a rant.
PS: in my original draft, I wrote "If you could send your monkey back to the 1920s..." which is, on it's own, something interesting to think about.
I ask, because back in 1997 I was the lighting/sound designer for "Jedi! A Musical Tour De Force", performed at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago.
It was the trilogy, performed in about an hour and a half (if memory serves) with heavy use of models and such to represent space battles and things -- it contained select dialogue from all three movies, and each installment of the trilogy began with the piano player singing an overture featuring the words that scrolled across the screen to open each movie.
Oh, wait. Did I mention it was a MUSICAL? Seriously. Princess Leia's "It's hard to be hard" was a particularly good Disco tune performed by the guy in drag playing Leia (there were women in the show, but not for Leia.)
My particular favorite was Obi Wan's climactic ode to the Force, "Feel The Flow". Feel the flow/feel it from above and below/feel it in every mountain stream/everywhere you go/feel the force/it will never lead you off course...and so on and so on. I actually have the cast recording on a CD-R at home.
So anyway -- the point of all this is, Lucas shut us down with a cease and desist. Hopefully this guy won't suffer the same fate.
I hope you're right about the encrypted data. Certainly, given the recent Diebold voting machine debacle, I am not reassured that for-profit companies have the children's safety as a concern above and beyond their own profit margins.
And yes, it's a colorful little story designed to emphasize the risk potential to make a point. Nonetheless, it IS possible (a possibility you minimize, but do not deny), and thanks to script kiddie-style attacks and insecure software running rampant, it would be ignorant to assume that all people who might want to harm your kids are unintelligent, risk-craving technophobes.
Bottom line: you can have a teacher standing at the door taking attendance as kids walk in, or you can have a teacher standing at the door watching the kids enter their own attendance into a machine. It would take the same amount of time, one would be significantly less costly and more reliable, and the other introduces a risk, albeit small, to the children. Which one do you want?
My apologies to Tony Lawrence for the glib remark about pirated office products, although the rest of what I said still stands. :)
A step forward in technology is the same as taking today's technology back in time.
The first few people do it, and they get amazing results. Other people figure out what they're doing, and jump on the bandwagon. Before long, everybody is on equal footing again.
Trouble is, it isn't a natural progress over time that allows us to see and avert trouble spots. Nope, it's a mad rush to use the futuristic technology, and damn the consequences.
The automobile is the perfect example of this.
Once upon a time, everyone lived close to their jobs, because they couldn't travel very far very quickly. Everyone shared this problem.
Then the car came along, and people realized they could buy cheaper land further away, and still make it to work on time.
Over time, they completely abandoned the residential centers near their workplaces in favor of outlying homesteads, and the abandoned residential centers fell into disrepair.
Suddenly, everyone looks around at the traffic and realizes they wish they lived closer to work -- and the huge demand makes housing prices near people's workplaces even MORE expensive than before, even though the housing stock is in disrepair. Everyone shares this new problem.
Applying the time travel idea, if you were to take today's SUV back to the late 1800s, you could purchase a huge pile of land in an outlying area and still make it to work on time.
People would see you driving, though. And they'd figure out how to do what you were doing. And they'd eventually be able to move out to the cheaper land. And so on, until they were looking around and wishing they could live closer to work, just like we are now.
As an aside, this is something that SUV drivers should think about. When there are only a few SUV drivers, they get a huge benefit -- but when everyone drives SUVs, the benefits are lost. Gas becomes more scarce, so prices go up. Accidents are between SUVs rather than one SUV and one car, so no SUV driver is any safer than car drivers were when accidents were between cars. SUVs can handle roads in bad condition (and actually contribute to faster road deterioration) so there's less need to keep the roads up, and eventually you NEED an SUV to drive on the crappy roads. And so on.
Sorry, slipped into a rant there. But seriously, if all you need to do is be trendy, buy a Mini -- and if all you need to do is carry seven kids, buy a minivan.
(Note -- I posted this elsewhere in the replies to this article, but forgot to login, so I thought I'd do it again with my ID and in a relevant spot...sorry about the double-post.)
In the article:
"Intuitek President David M. Straitiff said his company built privacy protections into the school's RFID system, including limiting the reading range of the kiosks to less than 20 inches and making students touch the kiosk screen instead of passively being scanned by it. He pooh-poohed the notion that the system would be abused.
"(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said."
(then, later in the article)
""It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said."
- - -
So okay, it's no worse than mag-strip cards or photo ID cards AT THE POINT OF ENTRY TO THE CLASSROOM.
But suppose, just suppose, your server gets compromised. Happens every day, as we all know, to banks and other supposedly high-security establishments, so it's safe to say that school databases can and will be compromised.
Now, the person who compromises the server gets names, addresses and faces from the database, prints them out in a handy reference*, then sets up a little scanner at a nearby arcade to read the tags of kids as they come in. Certainly conceivable.
The person then hangs out at the arcade during school hours and, when one of these kids shows up while ditching school, the abductor walks up to the child and loudly announces in a voice of authority "Jimmie Johnson, you should be in 3rd period right now! Come with me." The child assumes the person is a school authority (after all, they recognized them and knew their name, right?) and goes with the adult.
The child is taken into a car (people don't stop them; after all, this person recognized the kid, and the kid isn't fighting it, right?) and is driven somewhere secluded where they are molested and killed.
The whole point of this isn't that you get tracked -- it's that you get tracked WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE, and that RFIDs allow anyone who comes within reading range of the tags to read information from it.
At least having a photo ID in a pocket or a mag-strip card in your pocket means nobody can track you without getting it out of your pocket first -- so if some adult starts claiming they know you, but don't know your name, you can start screaming bloody murder in hopes than an adult will intervene and prevent your abduction.
Sigh.
*Arguably, this could be done without the use of RFIDs, since a person could break into the server and print this data out and this would be sufficient. However, without RFIDs the abductor would need to stand near the entryway holding the printout and checking out faces, which would be highly suspicious behavior. With RFIDs, the perp could sit in a car nearby and wait for the scanner to pick up one of the kids. They cross-reference it with their printout, then go into the arcade without holding any reference material -- and march straight towards the child in question. It's a lot more commanding and authoritative, and much more likely to be believed by witnesses in the vicinity.
Yes, according to Tony Lawrence, owner of A.P. Lawrence, a consulting firm that is probably ALSO a small or medium-sized business.
From the article, referring to small and medium-sized business owners:
"They don't necessarily know whether they have SCO or Linux. The only time they care about their computer is when it crashes."
Show of hands: who believes that CEOs of fortune 500 companies know the details of their hardware and software infrastructure better than small and medium-sized business owners?
Okay, Tony, put your hand down.
Show of hands: who believes that CEOs of fortune 500 companies only give a rat's ass when their computer crashes, that small business owners are highly aware of their hardware and software infrastructure because they have a smaller staff and a higher sensitivity to the cost and maintenance to such infrastructure, and that medium-sized business owners fall into both groups?
Okay, everyone else put your hands down. One more.
Show of hands: who believes that Tony's business probably runs on pirated Microsoft products?
#1: "Only go 280 to 300 miles"
ONLY? My 2001 Sentra goes about 300 miles before I need to refill it. My sunny LA commute is 28 miles a day, so I only need to fill up every two weeks -- and that's for a daily driver. This car is a niche performance vehicle...after all, who drives their Ferrari to work and back every day (unless they have a serious ego problem)? Let's face it, an electric car with this kind of range is the holy grail of electric cars, assuming the cost can be brought down. The Ford Ranger electric pickup the article mentions as being discontinued barely had enough range to get me to work and back ONCE. I know this, because I did the research before deciding not to buy one.
#2: "Its Spartan interior looks like a science project, in which most of the controls apart from the CD player are gadgets to monitor the battery and tiny 110-lb. motor. Drivers get an analog current meter, voltmeter, altimeter, and battery-voltage display with LED lights that measures temperature and charging limits."
As opposed to those high-end exotic production cars which have "gadgets" to monitor the oil pressure, oil temperature, coolant temperature and fuel level. They're called gauges. You read them to figure out how the unseen mechanicals are doing. Just like every other car.
Honestly, I'm never reading a forbes article again. Their bias against alternative (read disruptive) technologies is just too evident to waste my time on.
"Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square, and realize that their protests and complaints would not only be a pathetic waste of time but, also a waste of the tax payers money?"
;)
It might be a waste of time, but not for the reason you might assume. I'll tell you what would NOT be a waste of time, though: spending money and attention to ensure that electronic voting cannot be tampered with. That means a paper trail. That means independent review of machines. That means source code that anyone can read, review and comment on before and after the election.
In short, assuring that there are no reasons for anyone to doubt the effectiveness of the voting mechanism, so that issues like the potential Diebold fraud(s) never come up in the first place. That would be a great use of taxpayer money.
And hey, here's a thought: how about purchasing voting machines from non-profits?
"I'll bet that you think it is because the opposing party is somehow controlling them and making it impossible for them to complain."
It is equally conceivable that the writer you responded to knows that it would be political suicide to complain unless there were concrete proof.
I mention this, because your stated assumption that the poster believed something that is essentially irrational (that "the opposting party is somehow controlling...") struck me as whiny and biased, something you lambasted the person you responded to for. So, you lost credibility in my eyes.
By the way, this doesn't mean I agree with either of you.
I respectfully request a clarification of your statement, thus:
:)
"He knew that is impossible to claim morality while excluding religious principle."
I am a secular humanist, which is a fancy name for "God may or may not exist, but I neither know nor care." Are you suggesting that it is impossible for me to claim that my actions are moral strictly because I don't use someone's religion as the yardstick for judging said morality?
I ask, because I occasionally do nice things for strangers, like help them push their broken-down car to the side of the road or give them a ride to work when their car catches on fire or tackle a thief to recover a snatched purse. Are these acts rendered immoral, simply because I didn't do them in the name of someone else's God? Am I, as a human being, incapable of determining the boundaries of morality without guidance from an organized religious doctrine?
I realize it is possible to read hostility into the above questions, but I'm quite sincere -- can you please clarify the intent of your statement?
Oh, and this:
"Without God in our society the worst will happen."
Some of the greatest moments of kindness and generosity took place and continue to take place in the world under the auspices of God -- and some of the worst atrocities, as well. This suggests that the success or failure of a society likely does not rest solely on whether or not the society believes in, or is governed by, God. It will take more than quotes from famous people to convince me otherwise, as those quotes were made by people, and people are imperfect. In other words, saying it doesn't make it so.
I, too, recited the "under God" part throughout grade school, even though I didn't believe in God*. It was one of many things that made me feel like I didn't belong, like I was some kind of freak or outcast.
Once I got to high school, I realized that there wasn't anything wrong with me or my (non-religious) beliefs -- but up until that time I had assumed, based in part on the pledge, that everyone else (outside of some immediate family members) believed in God, and that I must be really messed up.
So personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the "under God" part go away, although inserting a pause for other people to say "under God" if they want to seems like a reasonable thing to do.
- - -
*My mother raised me Lutheran, church every Sunday and Bible school and whatnot, until one day I said "I don't want to go to Bible school." She asked, "Why not?" and I replied, "All they talk about is God, and I don't believe in God." I was ten years old at the time. My mother told me that she felt it was her obligation to raise me as she was raised until I was old enough to make up my own mind, at which point my beliefs were my own business. Go Mom! Ultimately, my mother still goes to church, my father doesn't, one of my sisters doesn't, one of my sisters does, and I occasionally consider joining a Unitarian church for the snacks.
It's aggravating because the power supply is a lot cheaper, presumably, than the CPU. When troubleshooting comes down to replacing suspect parts, and you must incur the cost of each part you replace, it makes sense for the consumer to determine the most likely suspects, then replace the cheapest suspect part first.
On the other hand, Apple suggests that you replace a significantly more expensive part BEFORE replacing a relatively less expensive part. That's not a cost-effective way of fixing the problem, although it makes sense if you have a huge bin of CPUs and power supplies sitting around as spare parts.
So: if it IS the CPU that's the problem, then replacing it first will save you the cost of the power supply. If it is the power supply that's the problem, however, you will have paid for a really, really expensive CPU that didn't need replacing anyway, and probably can't be returned. That certainly qualifies as aggravating.