When only 65% of you even bother to register to vote, and of those only 62% actually vote (totallying about 35% of America)... It's really sad that it only takes ~18% of the population to elect a President.
I missed the urls and citations in your post. Maybe one of my browser extensions was hiding it, but what reputable sources did you capture these figures from?
Fuck it, I think I'm going to make a hundred random phone calls right now.
I've recently been pondering answering every phone call to the house with the pre-declaration of the obvious keywords:
Ring, ring... "Hi.. [Bomb, Iraq, Saddam, Osama, Nuclear, Iran, Anthrax, Kill, CIA, NSA, wiretap, oil, regime, republican] how are you? Sure, I..." and so on.
Or the even more succinct...
Ring, ring.. "Hi, how [bomb] are you [Iraq] today? Sure, I [Saddam] was going to [Osama] head down to [Nuclear] the mall [Iran] to pick up [Anthrax] some new [Kill] shirts for [CIA] my trip [NSA] to the [wiretap] islands in a few weeks. I might [oil] need to stop [regime] at GNC to [republican] get some new vitamins too."
"I wonder what definition they will use to describe the people who are going to remove this administration from power through WORDS. Maybe they will make their own dictionary up, just like they publish their own medical papers, their own research reports, their own "findings" about the attacks."
As has been predicted nearly 1/2 century ago, this is not unheard of...
Some days I wonder if they're not taking that FICTIONAL work and instead of using it as a warning, using it as a script to run this country... scary how many parallels there are in there. Watching the movie recently was as eerie as watching the nightly news.
"It should be only terrorists and terrorist suspects who are on the no-fly and special scrutiny list"
True, and it should only be international calls, specifically those who are being made to or from existing suspects which are being tapped and monitored.
But we all know that ALL calls are now being monitored, as well as 100% of Internet traffic.
You can bet "The List" includes a lot of people who are not on the no-fly and special scrutiny lists.
"Somehow, I doubt the administration bothered with technicalities like "warrants"."
You mean like this statement of lies straight from Bush's mouth? I love the statement "Constitutional guarantees are in place.." and "...we value the Constitution...", and then you look at this article where Bush says (and I quote):
""Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
"Read the fucking constitution and look up some judicial records before you open your big, dumb mouth please. The law is very specific about protecting journalistic sources, there is supposed to be no way around it."
Didn't you get the memo? The Constitution was put on hold, in the name of national security. Besides, the NSA is already rewriting the 4th Amendment to suit their own needs now.
Pretty soon whistleblowing will be the norm and Thoughtcrime will be the next wave of neighborly telling-do.
"Plain and simple, this is a way for the powers-that-be to clamp down on news that makes them look bad."
Ironic how close this situation is to modeling Al Jazeera, now isn't it?
With all of this "Sorry, we suspended the Constitution in the name of national security", and "We can't tell you what illegal activities we're using, because that would be a violation of national security" rhetoric, we're getting closer and closer to exactly where they are with their extreme regime.
"It amazes me that people aren't yelling and screaming about this and marching in front of the White House. People in this country have become too complacent and they're going to lose the freedoms that so many people have died to protect over the years. And when it comes to that, we'll have nobody to blame but ourselves."
More than 11 million people protested in cities throughout the world to oppose an invasion of Iraq. Bush dismissed the protests, saying that he doesn't "decide policy based upon a focus group."
I don't think yelling and screaming will do much now, other than get yourself fast-tracked to the front of "Some List" that you probably don't want to be on at all.
"Patent and Trademark EVERYTHING, Including the wheel. It will get accepted, and unless you fight it out in court, and LOSE, people should pay you money for using it."
Frivility is a non-issue at this point.
You cannot trademark a copyrighted thing, especially if you did not create that thing in the first place.
If the smiley is found to be in the public domain, they can trademark their interpretation of it (beveled button look, white gloves, larger eyes), but they most-certainly cannot copyright or trademark it if it is NOT in the public domain.
"And I give them homework. Measure your blood sugar twice daily..."
I seriously hope you're not giving this kind of advice to diabetic patients. If so, you're doing a lot of harm to them as their medical mentor. At the BARE MINIMUM, if they're diabetic, they should be measuring their blood sugars at least 5 times a day:
When they wake up
When they eat breakfast
When they eat lunch
When they eat dinner
Before they go to bed
My wife is a diabetic and a celiac, and she checks herself no less than 7-8 times a day. Granted, she's also a very athletic woman, and that means she's brittle, and sugars can vary wildly between meals and before/after exercise, but a stoic person with diabetes should be checking at LEAST 5 times a day.
I've had conversations with people who say: "I check twice a day, and I'm 120 both times", and they think they're fine, but when I ask them to check more often for a few days in a row, they find out that they're spending the entire day over 400, and then dropping at the end of the day before bedtime. This all-day 400 is doing PERMANENT DAMAGE to their liver, eyes and feet (neuropathy).
Checking more often can give them a better baseline to work from, and extend their lives.
I'm not diabetic, but I'm married to one, and she's opened my eyes to an entirely different world of treatment and medical practice.
Looks like someone repackaged up HotSaNIC and rebranded it as their own. Graphs are IDENTICAL. I knew something looked mighty familiar when I saw them, because I've been running HotSaNIC on our servers for awhile now. Great stuff.
We were previously running SpamAssassin for about 4 years with 13 RBLs and blackholes.us, and we were at 90% accuracy or so, and still seeing 10-20 spams slip through per-day.
I gave dspam a test, and after 3 days, we were already up to 95% accuracy, with ZERO spams slipping through.
Today, about 3 years later, we're now at 99.726% overall accuracy, again, with ZERO spams slipping through to any user's mailbox. For false-positives, the users can go to the web interface, check the "legit" emails getting incorrectly marked as spam, and have those sent to their mailbox, retrained as HAM. After a user receives 'n' number of messages from a specific address, they're auto-whitelisted.
dspam blows away anything I've ever used, ever. We're not seeing a single spam in any user's mailbox in 3 years, and we're at about 85% incoming spam per-day with 1 RBL.
Ironically, I'm running Ubuntu Dapper here and it worked great for me, and I'm running their fglrx drivers as I type this, which is giving me 2800fps with glxgears -printfps.
I'm sorry, but you don't get it. It's not that people *can't* do these things, it's that they don't *want* to, and therefore they won't.
Then for them, Linux progresses at MY speed (or the aggregate speed of everyone actively working on it), not at THEIR speed. If they don't want to help, then they wait.
If you really want more people to use Linux (and it seems like you do) then you have to get into the mind of the average user.
Now now, don't put words in my mouth that I never actually said...
But actually, I don't care if more people use Linux or not. That's not my goal, and its not the goal of 99% or more of the people working on the core internals of Linux. Its not about "market penetration" or "adoption", its about making something useful to THEM (the developers), not to YOU (the users). It just so happens that what the developers find useful, you too find useful. Some developers DO write software "for others", but its not how this all was started.
Someone had an itch, they scratched it and shared their method with someone else who had a similar itch.. in a different place. They changed how they scratched a bit, and passed it on. And so on, and so on.
Telling them they're stupid (which may actually be the case!) doesn't help. If you TRULY want more widespread adoption - on the desktop - of Linux, then focus on developing tools and systems that make it easier for vendors to more easily support it.
Who said anything about more widespread adoption? That just increases the number of whining, complaining, inept users who don't understand how MY community works. This isn't some sort of big, free conundrum where you just ask for things and get them. You have to wait your turn, earn your stripes, or appeal to the developers by using other means (help out, pay for their time, yadda yadda).
Frankly, the LESS users we have, the better, as it cuts down on the things distracting us from producing better code, better programs. Time.
It really is that simple. The ability for Linux to support ONE set of binary only drivers for each MAJOR kernel version would be a HUGE benefit. The ATI thing is a hack that probably took a huge amount of effort (money) to make. I mean, the thing automatically makes install packages for various distributions! Why not just make ONE way of distributing Linux drivers so you don't need such time-consuming hacks.
Because there is no ONE way of doing things with Linux. There are different flavors, paths, kernels, file structures, filesystems, package management formats, tools, compilers, etc. We call this choice, and its what makes Linux as flexible as it is.
Yes, users want one simple way to do things. If it was all in 1 click, they'd flock to it in crowds, but that's not reality. As you state, it took ATI time to create that GUI installer (and its not a hack at all, its quite slick), and that time cost them money. Now you're saying that WE should do it instead of them, and not only should WE do it, we should strive to make it work across ALL distributions? Its just not going to happen, ever. There's no way everyone is going to agree on one package format for these things which transparently installs on every distribution without complaint or dependency problems. Even if there was, another distro would come out just to be different (its how Red Hat was started, in fact, and now they're the most non-Linux of all Linux distributions because of it).
Also, check of the installation instructions for the Linux driver and compare that to the (non-existent) instructions for the Windows driver. Yes, we're talking about Windows now, since you brought up the topic.
You mean launch GUI, click through the wizard, and install the package it creates? How is that any different? Because the "Next" buttons do
You simply cannot deny that drivers for Linux are more hassle. Just take a look at the installation procedure for the NVidia driver. For you and me, it's simple. For a regular user (try to step out of geekdom for a second) it's just insane. Type this, read this, what the fuck?
Yes, typing and reading are hard skills to master, I understand. However, it can be simpler (again, talk to the vendor, they can provide single-click installations for their binary driver packages).
Binary drivers that are simple to install are in packages, right. For what distribution? Do I have that distribution?
For EVERY distribution. Every single package you installed when you installed Linux was a binary package (unless you went with Gentoo's Stage 1 installer, which bootstraps from some basic binaries and rebuilds the whole thing from source further on).
Answer this question: If a vendor (not the community) wanted to support Linux using binary-only packages, how many packages would they need to compile/test and support? Just add it up and come back with the answer.
Answer: Zero. They don't need to do any of that, because these are KERNEL drivers, not userland or system tools and utilities. Now, if they wanted some Qt-based GUI configurator for their video driver's knobs and switches, that's a different story, but for kernel binary drivers, its as simple as making sure you're using those mated to the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel series. ATI has no problems with this, you should take a look at their installer sometime. You click through a GUI, tell it which distro you have, which version of that distro, and they generate the proper, versioned, rpm/deb/tgz for you, automagically. You can then "click" that if you choose, and install it.
Other vendors should follow their lead in this department.
Classic denial. "This isn't Windows". Whatever.. I said NOTHING about Windows in my post, *you* did, and you appear to have a prett ybig chip on your shoulder.
Not denial, reality. Sorry, when someone says it should be "easier", they're comparing it to something which IS easier in some way or another (less clicks, less reading, whatever). Unfortunately, that paradigm includes Microsoft Windows, whether or not YOU stated it in your post, the article did, and that's what I'm referring to.
No denial at all, MY systems work great, MY drivers function perfectly (in most cases, better than the proprietary drivers, in a highly optimized fashion (more fps in 3D than vendor drivers, etc.). I'm not in denial at all, Linux works flawlessly in every place I've put it, and I've been doing this for over a decade.
You don't like it when your baby (Linux) is criticized and when someone suggests that it could be better. You say there is no "magic bullet", which is true. But come on, the QUEST for the magic bullet is what makes things better! Shouldn't Linux have a BETTER driver model, however you define "better". Shouldn't it strive to be easier to use? Easier to write drivers for?
Absolutely, and I didn't deny that, but step off of your soapbox and come down here with the rest of us plebes for 10 minutes and realize what we're up against. 1.) Thousands of existing bug reports and issues with existing packages, unrelated to uncooperative vendors, 2.) Features of our own that need to be added, 3.) Making, testing and updating releases, 4.) Maintaining project webistes, revision control, mailing lists, etc. which includes responding to hundreds of messages from thousands of users. 5.) A day job, unrelated to the Linux/OSS development work (yes, a majority of us don't get paid by companies to work on our own hobby projects, even if we're paid to work on Linux), 6.) Families, sleep, eating, hygene
Well, maybe if it was easy/possible to distribute BINARY drivers for Linux, this wouldn't be so much of a problem. And yes, most companies want to release binary drivers because increasingly the value of their product is in the driver and not the hardware.
It is possible to distribute binary drivers, hundreds of vendors do this for Linux every single day. What makes you think this isn't possible? ATI, NVidia, Oracle, hundreds of vendors do this. The Linux kernel allows and encourages it, in fact.
Also, there is simply no way that a user should have to compile a damn driver - it's just silly to even consider saying that. All the diversity of distributions and kernel versions does not help this problem as it pretty much guarantees you have to compile the driver because some Linux kernel geek decided to tweak one thing to make it "better".
First you say we should allow binary drivers (which we do), then you say the user shouldn't have to compile anything. Well, which is it? If they have binary drivers, they're not compiling anything. If they're not using binary drivers, they're using packages from their distribution. That's what package management is for... delivering pre-compiled (i.e. binary) data to the end-user. If they still refuse to use those two options, they can compile the drivers from source (assuming source is available), but that requires skill, knowledge, compilers, kernel headers, libraries... so most users don't go this route. This is why packages exist.
Coming from a USER's perspective (and not giving a shit about "kernels" or "distributions") I would want to be able to know that I have version 2.6 of Linux and therefore I need to click on the "Download Version 2.6 driver" link on the website. The distribution shouldn't matter and the particular version (e.g. 2.6.9.3.2.4rc1-ac3-beta2) shouldn't matter either.
Sorry, this isn't Windows, and that's not how it works in Linux. Which driver do you want? What capabilities do you want? What kind of hardware do you have? There is no "magic bullet" and there shouldn't be. I'm glad that we're getting away from the "Click, click, click" braindead mentality that has propagated the Windows mess in the first place. Good riddance to that mess.
In summary, I think that the complexity of the driver model and the complexity of the required install discourages hardware manufacturers from wanting to support Linux. It doesn't stop it entirely, but it does discourage them.
Again, not a Linux problem at all. If the vendors wanted proper drivers, they can help us write them by providing documentation, APIs, whatever. Do they have to provide source code? Of course not, we don't need that, but we DO need to know that flipping bit 23 under packet X will cause a hardware lockup, so avoid doing that, yadda yadda.
The problem lies solely in the vendor's lap. There's more then enough time, talent, code and developers in the community (growing every day) to write HIGHLY optimized drivers for Linux for every single device in existance today that connects to anything that can run Linux.
They don't want to cooperate, and instead threaten to sue us, so we spend our time focusing on things that are fun.
When you take the "fun" part out of the equation, you make pleasing you much less favorable. I get to make the choices of what I spend my time on, you do not, until you start paying me to re-prioritize my workload to solve your problems for you.
Remember, this is a FREE (as in cost, liberty) operating system. If it doesn't suit your needs, and Windows does, then please continue to run Windows. If you want to affect change, use your time, dollars or skills to do it.
We earn our keep in this community through our actions and accomplishments, and complaining doesn't count. It falls on deaf ears.
What vendor's hardware dongle are you using to make this work? I presume you're not using the onboard machine's/laptop's encryption chipset, so which one ARE you using? I'm curious to see how you're auto-generating the keys from an algo, without storing the nature of that algo on the system proper, prior to mounting your home directory... do tell.
Don't worry, in 50 years, the location of those 35mm cannisters will be plowed under to make way for a parking lot or a building or some other item to further corporate interests. So much for your inheritence;)
Slashdot Mirror
I missed the urls and citations in your post. Maybe one of my browser extensions was hiding it, but what reputable sources did you capture these figures from?
I've recently been pondering answering every phone call to the house with the pre-declaration of the obvious keywords:
Ring, ring... "Hi.. [Bomb, Iraq, Saddam, Osama, Nuclear, Iran, Anthrax, Kill, CIA, NSA, wiretap, oil, regime, republican] how are you? Sure, I..." and so on.
Or the even more succinct...
Ring, ring.. "Hi, how [bomb] are you [Iraq] today? Sure, I [Saddam] was going to [Osama] head down to [Nuclear] the mall [Iran] to pick up [Anthrax] some new [Kill] shirts for [CIA] my trip [NSA] to the [wiretap] islands in a few weeks. I might [oil] need to stop [regime] at GNC to [republican] get some new vitamins too."
As has been predicted nearly 1/2 century ago, this is not unheard of...
Some days I wonder if they're not taking that FICTIONAL work and instead of using it as a warning, using it as a script to run this country... scary how many parallels there are in there. Watching the movie recently was as eerie as watching the nightly news.
True, and it should only be international calls, specifically those who are being made to or from existing suspects which are being tapped and monitored.
But we all know that ALL calls are now being monitored, as well as 100% of Internet traffic.
You can bet "The List" includes a lot of people who are not on the no-fly and special scrutiny lists.
You mean like this statement of lies straight from Bush's mouth? I love the statement "Constitutional guarantees are in place.." and "...we value the Constitution...", and then you look at this article where Bush says (and I quote):
Didn't you get the memo? The Constitution was put on hold, in the name of national security. Besides, the NSA is already rewriting the 4th Amendment to suit their own needs now.
Pretty soon whistleblowing will be the norm and Thoughtcrime will be the next wave of neighborly telling-do.
Ironic how close this situation is to modeling Al Jazeera, now isn't it?
With all of this "Sorry, we suspended the Constitution in the name of national security", and "We can't tell you what illegal activities we're using, because that would be a violation of national security" rhetoric, we're getting closer and closer to exactly where they are with their extreme regime.
Nice.
More than 11 million people protested in cities throughout the world to oppose an invasion of Iraq. Bush dismissed the protests, saying that he doesn't "decide policy based upon a focus group."
I don't think yelling and screaming will do much now, other than get yourself fast-tracked to the front of "Some List" that you probably don't want to be on at all.
Didn't you get the memo?
The new mantra for 2006 and beyond is as follows:
If you cannot innovate, litigate!
Or the lighter version:
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
You cannot trademark a copyrighted thing, especially if you did not create that thing in the first place.
If the smiley is found to be in the public domain, they can trademark their interpretation of it (beveled button look, white gloves, larger eyes), but they most-certainly cannot copyright or trademark it if it is NOT in the public domain.
I seriously hope you're not giving this kind of advice to diabetic patients. If so, you're doing a lot of harm to them as their medical mentor. At the BARE MINIMUM, if they're diabetic, they should be measuring their blood sugars at least 5 times a day:
My wife is a diabetic and a celiac, and she checks herself no less than 7-8 times a day. Granted, she's also a very athletic woman, and that means she's brittle, and sugars can vary wildly between meals and before/after exercise, but a stoic person with diabetes should be checking at LEAST 5 times a day.
I've had conversations with people who say: "I check twice a day, and I'm 120 both times", and they think they're fine, but when I ask them to check more often for a few days in a row, they find out that they're spending the entire day over 400, and then dropping at the end of the day before bedtime. This all-day 400 is doing PERMANENT DAMAGE to their liver, eyes and feet (neuropathy).
Checking more often can give them a better baseline to work from, and extend their lives.
I'm not diabetic, but I'm married to one, and she's opened my eyes to an entirely different world of treatment and medical practice.
Looks like someone repackaged up HotSaNIC and rebranded it as their own. Graphs are IDENTICAL. I knew something looked mighty familiar when I saw them, because I've been running HotSaNIC on our servers for awhile now. Great stuff.
The solution to all of this, is dspam, of course.
We were previously running SpamAssassin for about 4 years with 13 RBLs and blackholes.us, and we were at 90% accuracy or so, and still seeing 10-20 spams slip through per-day.
I gave dspam a test, and after 3 days, we were already up to 95% accuracy, with ZERO spams slipping through.
Today, about 3 years later, we're now at 99.726% overall accuracy, again, with ZERO spams slipping through to any user's mailbox. For false-positives, the users can go to the web interface, check the "legit" emails getting incorrectly marked as spam, and have those sent to their mailbox, retrained as HAM. After a user receives 'n' number of messages from a specific address, they're auto-whitelisted.
dspam blows away anything I've ever used, ever. We're not seeing a single spam in any user's mailbox in 3 years, and we're at about 85% incoming spam per-day with 1 RBL.
Ironically, I'm running Ubuntu Dapper here and it worked great for me, and I'm running their fglrx drivers as I type this, which is giving me 2800fps with glxgears -printfps.
Perhaps you've done something wrong?
Then for them, Linux progresses at MY speed (or the aggregate speed of everyone actively working on it), not at THEIR speed. If they don't want to help, then they wait.
Now now, don't put words in my mouth that I never actually said...
But actually, I don't care if more people use Linux or not. That's not my goal, and its not the goal of 99% or more of the people working on the core internals of Linux. Its not about "market penetration" or "adoption", its about making something useful to THEM (the developers), not to YOU (the users). It just so happens that what the developers find useful, you too find useful. Some developers DO write software "for others", but its not how this all was started.
Someone had an itch, they scratched it and shared their method with someone else who had a similar itch.. in a different place. They changed how they scratched a bit, and passed it on. And so on, and so on.
Who said anything about more widespread adoption? That just increases the number of whining, complaining, inept users who don't understand how MY community works. This isn't some sort of big, free conundrum where you just ask for things and get them. You have to wait your turn, earn your stripes, or appeal to the developers by using other means (help out, pay for their time, yadda yadda).
Frankly, the LESS users we have, the better, as it cuts down on the things distracting us from producing better code, better programs. Time.
Because there is no ONE way of doing things with Linux. There are different flavors, paths, kernels, file structures, filesystems, package management formats, tools, compilers, etc. We call this choice, and its what makes Linux as flexible as it is.
Yes, users want one simple way to do things. If it was all in 1 click, they'd flock to it in crowds, but that's not reality. As you state, it took ATI time to create that GUI installer (and its not a hack at all, its quite slick), and that time cost them money. Now you're saying that WE should do it instead of them, and not only should WE do it, we should strive to make it work across ALL distributions? Its just not going to happen, ever. There's no way everyone is going to agree on one package format for these things which transparently installs on every distribution without complaint or dependency problems. Even if there was, another distro would come out just to be different (its how Red Hat was started, in fact, and now they're the most non-Linux of all Linux distributions because of it).
You mean launch GUI, click through the wizard, and install the package it creates? How is that any different? Because the "Next" buttons do
Yes, typing and reading are hard skills to master, I understand. However, it can be simpler (again, talk to the vendor, they can provide single-click installations for their binary driver packages).
For EVERY distribution. Every single package you installed when you installed Linux was a binary package (unless you went with Gentoo's Stage 1 installer, which bootstraps from some basic binaries and rebuilds the whole thing from source further on).
Answer: Zero. They don't need to do any of that, because these are KERNEL drivers, not userland or system tools and utilities. Now, if they wanted some Qt-based GUI configurator for their video driver's knobs and switches, that's a different story, but for kernel binary drivers, its as simple as making sure you're using those mated to the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel series. ATI has no problems with this, you should take a look at their installer sometime. You click through a GUI, tell it which distro you have, which version of that distro, and they generate the proper, versioned, rpm/deb/tgz for you, automagically. You can then "click" that if you choose, and install it.
Other vendors should follow their lead in this department.
Not denial, reality. Sorry, when someone says it should be "easier", they're comparing it to something which IS easier in some way or another (less clicks, less reading, whatever). Unfortunately, that paradigm includes Microsoft Windows, whether or not YOU stated it in your post, the article did, and that's what I'm referring to.
No denial at all, MY systems work great, MY drivers function perfectly (in most cases, better than the proprietary drivers, in a highly optimized fashion (more fps in 3D than vendor drivers, etc.). I'm not in denial at all, Linux works flawlessly in every place I've put it, and I've been doing this for over a decade.
Absolutely, and I didn't deny that, but step off of your soapbox and come down here with the rest of us plebes for 10 minutes and realize what we're up against. 1.) Thousands of existing bug reports and issues with existing packages, unrelated to uncooperative vendors, 2.) Features of our own that need to be added, 3.) Making, testing and updating releases, 4.) Maintaining project webistes, revision control, mailing lists, etc. which includes responding to hundreds of messages from thousands of users. 5.) A day job, unrelated to the Linux/OSS development work (yes, a majority of us don't get paid by companies to work on our own hobby projects, even if we're paid to work on Linux), 6.) Families, sleep, eating, hygene
It is possible to distribute binary drivers, hundreds of vendors do this for Linux every single day. What makes you think this isn't possible? ATI, NVidia, Oracle, hundreds of vendors do this. The Linux kernel allows and encourages it, in fact.
First you say we should allow binary drivers (which we do), then you say the user shouldn't have to compile anything. Well, which is it? If they have binary drivers, they're not compiling anything. If they're not using binary drivers, they're using packages from their distribution. That's what package management is for... delivering pre-compiled (i.e. binary) data to the end-user. If they still refuse to use those two options, they can compile the drivers from source (assuming source is available), but that requires skill, knowledge, compilers, kernel headers, libraries... so most users don't go this route. This is why packages exist.
Sorry, this isn't Windows, and that's not how it works in Linux. Which driver do you want? What capabilities do you want? What kind of hardware do you have? There is no "magic bullet" and there shouldn't be. I'm glad that we're getting away from the "Click, click, click" braindead mentality that has propagated the Windows mess in the first place. Good riddance to that mess.
Again, not a Linux problem at all. If the vendors wanted proper drivers, they can help us write them by providing documentation, APIs, whatever. Do they have to provide source code? Of course not, we don't need that, but we DO need to know that flipping bit 23 under packet X will cause a hardware lockup, so avoid doing that, yadda yadda.
The problem lies solely in the vendor's lap. There's more then enough time, talent, code and developers in the community (growing every day) to write HIGHLY optimized drivers for Linux for every single device in existance today that connects to anything that can run Linux.
They don't want to cooperate, and instead threaten to sue us, so we spend our time focusing on things that are fun.
When you take the "fun" part out of the equation, you make pleasing you much less favorable. I get to make the choices of what I spend my time on, you do not, until you start paying me to re-prioritize my workload to solve your problems for you.
Remember, this is a FREE (as in cost, liberty) operating system. If it doesn't suit your needs, and Windows does, then please continue to run Windows. If you want to affect change, use your time, dollars or skills to do it.
We earn our keep in this community through our actions and accomplishments, and complaining doesn't count. It falls on deaf ears.
Write Once, Debug Everywhere.
This is not a Linux problem. Please talk to your hardware vendor and ask where their Linux drivers are on their website.
And how do you do that? I'm interested, even though we run sendmail + dspam here and are at 99.667% accuracy...
Why don't they support Mozilla and Firefox yet? That should be their top-level priority, and MSIE second. Sigh.
What vendor's hardware dongle are you using to make this work? I presume you're not using the onboard machine's/laptop's encryption chipset, so which one ARE you using? I'm curious to see how you're auto-generating the keys from an algo, without storing the nature of that algo on the system proper, prior to mounting your home directory... do tell.
Don't worry, in 50 years, the location of those 35mm cannisters will be plowed under to make way for a parking lot or a building or some other item to further corporate interests. So much for your inheritence ;)
Black helicopters, anyone?