Misunderstanding "single signon"
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's a common misunderstanding what "single signon" actually means. Even in this article that doesn't cover Passport in detail, when indicating the passport authentication process, look at step 3:
#3 Which redirects it back to its authorized Passport server
Notice that it's not "the" passport server, it's "its authorized...". The passport server may or may not be at Microsoft!
I'm busy setting up an LDAP server to allow a rapidly growing (and I do mean RAPIDLY growing, 4x growth in the last year) ISP to scale. We need to allow for future virtual servers, FTP, email, etc. and do so with a single authentication scheme.
LDAP does all this, and more, in a distributed, secure and encrypted fashion. Why are we bothering with HTTP "web services", when LDAP will do all this and lots more?
(Scratches head)
"Single Signon" doesn't mean there's some Microsoft server someplace the whole world logs in to, it means there's ONE server provided by somebody you trust, that authenticates you as YOU and which manages information on your behalf to determine what you should be granted/denied access to. You sign in once, and have immediate access to all the services you have set up.
There can be any number of authentication servers!
Passport, Plan 9, Kerberos, LDAP, and to a lesser extent, NIS and a few others give that ability!
So, if I get this right, you are asserting that there are two "English" languages... The spoken, and the written.
Is that true? The alphabet's inception is phonetic. As time has gone by, we've gotten further and further from our native, relatively simple, phonetic roots.
Thus, it seems, we are devolving to a arcane and complex chinese-like heiroglyphic system based on "spelling" with largely arbitrary rules, such as "i before e except... and excepting words x, y, and z".
This is forward progress?
This article is exactly about the assertion that language is a method of communicating, written or oral. They intertwine, and in the case of chat-room english invading the classroom, we see that "r"=="are" to these kids.
Interestingly enough, somebody made a point in this thread that in England, "thought" doesn't sound like "hot".
If we used purely phonetic spelling, that would be clear when we communicate, and would lend a greater degree of "culture" to our conversation, wouldn't it?
Otherwise, how would I know or care if you are English, US, or Pakistani?
With pure phonics, dialect follows spelling, and the language becomes one straightforward language, rather than the far more complex dual system the parent poster seems to prefer.
A pure phonics system would allow us to focus on the concept being communicated rather than the mechanics of communicating!
If you look at our website you'll find a web-based Contact Manager software accessable from (virtually) all the devices you mentioned above.
It's tested with Konqueror, IE, and Mozilla, and is known to work with a number of Palm-based devices, including the Handspring Treo cellular phone./Shameless Plug
English spelling is a travesty, a point made particularly clear to me as a home-schooling parent.
In our initial studies, we determined that teaching our kids to read using a phonetic approach was probably the best. In actual practice, we did see some pretty immediate gains, the oldest two learning to read simple books in just a few short weeks.
There, however, is where progress stopped. We figured that since it was obviously working, we pounded through weeks and months of more lessons, all based on phonics. The number of exceptions, duplicate cases, and whatnot grew, and the lessons became arduous, boring, confusing, and ultimately, fruitless.
Our children lost the desire to read, and it's taken several YEARS of hard work to recover from that. (they now have, thankfully!)
Why would "thought" be spelled so differently from "hot"?
I cood slip into pyoorly fonetic spelling, but most of us will fined that hard too reed, as we're too used to the "spelling power elite's" way of doing it.
Our students spend years learning "phonetic heiroglyphics" when they could be spending this time learning stuff of value - mathematics, sociology, science and history.
Every hour you spend working on memorizing the exceptions to basic phonetic rules is an hour you could have spent playing quake, romancing your girlfriend, reading a book, or studying something useful.
But that's not what's happening, and I feel it is wrong. Millions of man-hours are wasted annually on non-phonetic reading, all to maintain the illusion for those who can spell that they are somehow "brighter".
If a purely phonic (and I do mean PURELY phonic, with no exceptions) spelling/language system were adopted, we'd have 1st grade students routinely able to read virtually any text, and always capable of writing their messages clearly and distinctly.
I feel this goal is a noble one, and this issue is one I'd happily vote for somebody to lobby.
It's just a shame, a real shame, that we waste so much on something so meaningless.
When you click on a broken link and get an "oops!" page, remember that HTTP_REFERER tells the site where you came from, so that the broken link can be fixed.
It's standard on many of my sites to do this - it's a very good thing IMHO - improving customer experience is good, and we certainly don't CARE who you are!
So now, the little upstart "toy" operating system fully supports POSIX, full VM capabilities, and happily runs with some serious equipment and yet it also runs smoothly on small, dedicated devices.
With each day that goes by, it seems that the folks in Redmond have a deeper hole to dig their way out of...
Although it's ostensibly about "self healing", it seems the largest portion of the page was about databases that self-optimize their queries. They make a big deal about Microsoft having stuff like that out, and that IBM has some big thing coming soon (LEO).
AFAIK, the free and open-source PostgreSQL also has similar technology built in.
I tried the Moz 1.1 RPM on my RH 7.2 system, and suddently, the textarea tag screwed up constantly. Text did not wrap, and an "A" tag would cause not only the text in the textarea to become a link, but also submit buttons, and just about everything in the form!
1) PHP 4.2.x is stable, with libpspell, imap, pg and mysql support.
2) Apache supports the "per child" user definition. The inability to run as any user other than "nobody" is a real limitation. But, if I could define the user/group of a file and have the script run as that user/group, security for web applications would simply skyrocket! (I'd except "root" from that list, tho)
There's an interesting detail that's commonly misunderstood about OSS projects. They don't have to be #1 in market share to "win".
All it takes for OSS projects (such as ogg) to succeed is that somebody continues to develop the project, and some people use it.
Linux is just now really starting to "take the enterprise"... I read about it every week in my CRN weekly trade rag, but Linux has been around over 10 YEARS before this!
Was Linux "losing" 4 years ago just because it wasn't well known yet?
OSS slowly wins because it is:
Good enough. Come on, let's face it: Apache isn't as easy to set up as IIS, and there are other alternatives out there that have some clear advantages over, say, Apache. But Apache is "good enough" and seems to have the most mindshare, so Apache it is.
Cheap/Free: Traditionally, the low-price leader is the one that wins. EG: WalMart, Microsoft. Linux is free, Apache is free, and OGG is free.
NT is cheaper than Unix (and so was slowly taking it over) until Linux came along, which is cheaper than NT. Now, Linux has arrested NT's progress into the enterprise & Unix spaces, and is slowly taking the market, piece by piece. Not overnight. Slowly. Linux will be here tomorrow, too.
Market share changes happen more rapidly when circumstances change to provide a clear financial incentive to switch.
Thus, Microsoft's license changes provide a financial incentive to switch. The active persuit of royalties for MP3 players provides a new financial incentive to switch.
And the price doesn't have to be high, it just has to be higher than before.
How many times have you driven by a gas station because the other one a mile down the road is $0.03 cheaper? Never mind that it adds up to $0.60 cents for a 20-gallon SUV, and you spend ~$0.50 of that savings driving the extra mile and a half, you do it. Be honest...
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why.ogg will win - eventually. So, re-rip your CDs, and with every single song,.ogg moves forward that much more.
The biggest pain in the ass with "universal" remotes is that you have to spend at least a whole afternoon programming the !@# thing. Very !@# convenient...
So, what if you had a setup where you could call the company, their support staff'd ask for your model numbers, and they'd program it remotely!
Oh, and can you imagine, on this remote control, a big, back-lit display so that you could see what !@# button to push to turn the !@#!@ thing down?
So, what you have is a device that: 1) Can communicate with the parent company, 2) Has alot of buttons, 3) A small CPU in it, 4) A large backlit screen.
Sounds an awful lot like a cell phone, eh?
No, really! Just put an I/R LED at the end of your cell phone, it'd make an EXCELLENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE.
I have a remote-administered server in a colo in Mountain View, CA. I routinely have transfer rates of 2200 Mbit, for example, when updating via the Red Hat Network.
Yes, that's about 15 T-1 lines worth of bandwidth - my 1.5 Mb DSL line is always saturated when loading stuff down from it.
So, I wrote a quick PHP script to take a 100k file off the disk, and hurl it at you repeatedly 1000 times, with a mime-type of application/octet-stream. That's a 100 MB file being downloaded by HTTP.
Then, I hit the script with lynx -dump >/dev/null on the system being tested, and watched the graph with MRTG.
In my case, we did get effectively 1.48 Mbit on the T-1 line being tested, which is close enough to satisfy my curiousity.
I'd be happy to perform this test for you... BTW - if you are in North California, I recommend o1.com as an excellent provider!
So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!
10 years ago, I used a 286 with a 10 MB HD. Not a file on that thing went more than a month or so without being used or touched in some way - I did all kinds of stuff on it, and had to be very careful about what I kept on the small disk.
Today, I have a 32 GB HD on my main W/S. After counting my mp3s and such (I could play mp3s for over a week before repeating a single song) and every single email I've sent or received (except for the SPAM) for 3+ years, thousands of digital pictures of my family (also archived on CDs) and the like, all available at a moment's notice, I'm very happy with this arrangement!
Many of these files might not be "touched" for a year or more but that doesn't mean I don't want them!
When I get a bigger disk drive, it'll just inherit this file system that I've been nursing in various forms for over 3 years.
Look at it this way, you realize it's not a crisis! Really!
There is nothing viral about the GPL. It's code that's available for your use, and it comes with some restrictions that also provide a benefit.
With the GPL, you get code that improves itself! As a developer, you can release GPL code and know that you are likely going to get something out of it - the efforts of other developers improving your codebase.
The GPL is the "Golden Rule" enforced by license - Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
Don't like those terms? Don't use somebody else's code!
Now, how much of Microsoft's code base are you going to incorporate into YOUR pet project?!?!
This whole "viral" idea is marketing spin cooked up by Microsoft goons to discredit a very noble movement...
-Ben
PS: It's "coercion"...
Re:Secrecy failure in the entertainment industry
on
Distributed Security
·
· Score: 2
Once that secret gets out, the security is hopelessly compromised. The Germans learned this the hard way in WWII.
Actually, no. The germans used public key cryptography. We just came up with a computer fast enough to crack it. Their answer? Increase the length of the key. (sound familiar?)
Dunno if you are noticing, but Linux is rapidly losing its rough edges. Been using Red Hat since 5.0, and it's come a long way in the past few years!
New applications are popping out left and right! Open office, Mozilla, Blender, Crossover, etc. Linux is rapidly becoming a very viable contender.
I'm working on a project to digitize a bunch of audio (lectures) for streaming netcast. This is a volunteer thing, and must be done on the cheap.
My Windows 98 system (games, mostly, some browsing) has a SB Live! sound card which comes with Creative Studio.
Great functionality, but DOG SLOW on a system with only 128 MB RAM.
Guess what?!? There's this neat little GTK app I found on freshmeat - close functionality, performs fantastically even with low memory, runs great on my main (but comparable) Linux workstation.
The gaps are filling in fast - this is yet another example.
To be honest, I don't see the importance of this. Let's say that Linux installs faster 100% of the time. So?
Obviously, you've never run a computer store. We went to great lengths to avoid the 4+ hour time it took took to setup a system. We'd build a system with all the software, then carefully regedit the system to remove all the license keys, then make an image of the hard drive and duplicate from that image.
We went to great lengths to make sure that new systems were compatable, and drew up migration strategies from our better image copies.
It's quite a hassle, but the end result is that we could have a new system built and software installed and the system ready to hand to the customer in under an hour, though we usually let them burn for 24 just to make sure they seemed solid.
From the standpoint of system integrators and VARs, this can be a very big deal, especially when you remove the $50 MS tax...
As I write this, I'm busy transferring 4 GB of web sites from one server to another for a client from my home-based office, while updates are happening in two other systems, in towns hundreds of miles away. I'm running it all from here, where I look out the window and see black walnut trees and ivy in my front yard.
I have headphones on plugged into the sound card on my workstation, playing a wonderful (to me) mix of New Age, orchestra, folk, and Classic Rock music, whilst my 5 year old son plays just behind me.
How else can you work several places at once, in a relaxed chair, and interact with your children, while commanding decent wages without technology?
This is not FUN?!?!?
One of my 5 children is diabetic. Cell phones mean that my wife and I can go on dates, and go places with impunity, knowing that we can still keep an eye on our son from anywhere.
Also, my son has a computerized insulin pump, which automatically meters out insulin as he needs it. This results in excellent blood sugar control, and if we're careful, his life expectancy will be close to normal. 100 years ago, my wonderful son would be dead.
This is not FUN?!?!?
As a technology provider, I frequently have to sign contracts with clauses like "24 hour monitoring" and the like. What this means for me is setting up Big Brother Network Monitor. It checks all my stuff around the clock every 5 minutes, and lets me know if there's a problem.
Combine this with maintained, patched, high quality Linux servers, and you have a pretty worry-free life...
The trick is to use technology to empower yourself, to leverage technology to improve your life.
Maybe you'd like a life expectancy of 38 years, and a short, hard life digging for worms and bugs to eat, but I don't.
It's a very poor pitchfork that can't be used as a weapon against you - so make sure you're using your tools properly!
Slashdot Mirror
It's a common misunderstanding what "single signon" actually means. Even in this article that doesn't cover Passport in detail, when indicating the passport authentication process, look at step 3:
#3 Which redirects it back to its authorized Passport server
Notice that it's not "the" passport server, it's "its authorized...". The passport server may or may not be at Microsoft!
I'm busy setting up an LDAP server to allow a rapidly growing (and I do mean RAPIDLY growing, 4x growth in the last year) ISP to scale. We need to allow for future virtual servers, FTP, email, etc. and do so with a single authentication scheme.
LDAP does all this, and more, in a distributed, secure and encrypted fashion. Why are we bothering with HTTP "web services", when LDAP will do all this and lots more?
(Scratches head)
"Single Signon" doesn't mean there's some Microsoft server someplace the whole world logs in to, it means there's ONE server provided by somebody you trust, that authenticates you as YOU and which manages information on your behalf to determine what you should be granted/denied access to. You sign in once, and have immediate access to all the services you have set up.
There can be any number of authentication servers!
Passport, Plan 9, Kerberos, LDAP, and to a lesser extent, NIS and a few others give that ability!
So, if I get this right, you are asserting that there are two "English" languages... The spoken, and the written.
... and excepting words x, y, and z".
Is that true? The alphabet's inception is phonetic. As time has gone by, we've gotten further and further from our native, relatively simple, phonetic roots.
Thus, it seems, we are devolving to a arcane and complex chinese-like heiroglyphic system based on "spelling" with largely arbitrary rules, such as "i before e except
This is forward progress?
This article is exactly about the assertion that language is a method of communicating, written or oral. They intertwine, and in the case of chat-room english invading the classroom, we see that "r"=="are" to these kids.
Interestingly enough, somebody made a point in this thread that in England, "thought" doesn't sound like "hot".
If we used purely phonetic spelling, that would be clear when we communicate, and would lend a greater degree of "culture" to our conversation, wouldn't it?
Otherwise, how would I know or care if you are English, US, or Pakistani?
With pure phonics, dialect follows spelling, and the language becomes one straightforward language, rather than the far more complex dual system the parent poster seems to prefer.
A pure phonics system would allow us to focus on the concept being communicated rather than the mechanics of communicating!
I'd call this progress.
If you look at our website you'll find a web-based Contact Manager software accessable from (virtually) all the devices you mentioned above.
/Shameless Plug
It's tested with Konqueror, IE, and Mozilla, and is known to work with a number of Palm-based devices, including the Handspring Treo cellular phone.
Even though I'm very good at it, I hate spelling.
English spelling is a travesty, a point made particularly clear to me as a home-schooling parent.
In our initial studies, we determined that teaching our kids to read using a phonetic approach was probably the best. In actual practice, we did see some pretty immediate gains, the oldest two learning to read simple books in just a few short weeks.
There, however, is where progress stopped. We figured that since it was obviously working, we pounded through weeks and months of more lessons, all based on phonics. The number of exceptions, duplicate cases, and whatnot grew, and the lessons became arduous, boring, confusing, and ultimately, fruitless.
Our children lost the desire to read, and it's taken several YEARS of hard work to recover from that. (they now have, thankfully!)
Why would "thought" be spelled so differently from "hot"?
I cood slip into pyoorly fonetic spelling, but most of us will fined that hard too reed, as we're too used to the "spelling power elite's" way of doing it.
Our students spend years learning "phonetic heiroglyphics" when they could be spending this time learning stuff of value - mathematics, sociology, science and history.
Every hour you spend working on memorizing the exceptions to basic phonetic rules is an hour you could have spent playing quake, romancing your girlfriend, reading a book, or studying something useful.
But that's not what's happening, and I feel it is wrong. Millions of man-hours are wasted annually on non-phonetic reading, all to maintain the illusion for those who can spell that they are somehow "brighter".
If a purely phonic (and I do mean PURELY phonic, with no exceptions) spelling/language system were adopted, we'd have 1st grade students routinely able to read virtually any text, and always capable of writing their messages clearly and distinctly.
I feel this goal is a noble one, and this issue is one I'd happily vote for somebody to lobby.
It's just a shame, a real shame, that we waste so much on something so meaningless.
ipchains -i input -s 192.168.0.1/24 -d 0/0 -y -j MASQ
There. Done. "connection sharing" wizard.
You can download the source here if you like.
It's not from the same guy, but it's definitely derivative work.
Would moderate the parent as "interesting"!?!?!
It's a bunch of BS bogus marketing terms with no actual value whatsoever. Talk about the Dilbert drones!?!?
Whoever you are, you really, REALLY need to read more Dilbert - or is that one of those cartoons that just "isn't funny" 'cause it's just reality?!?
SHEESH...
When you click on a broken link and get an "oops!" page, remember that HTTP_REFERER tells the site where you came from, so that the broken link can be fixed.
It's standard on many of my sites to do this - it's a very good thing IMHO - improving customer experience is good, and we certainly don't CARE who you are!
So now, the little upstart "toy" operating system fully supports POSIX, full VM capabilities, and happily runs with some serious equipment and yet it also runs smoothly on
small, dedicated devices.
With each day that goes by, it seems that the folks in Redmond have a deeper hole to dig their way out of...
Although it's ostensibly about "self healing", it seems the largest portion of the page was about databases that self-optimize their queries. They make a big deal about Microsoft having stuff like that out, and that IBM has some big thing coming soon (LEO).
AFAIK, the free and open-source PostgreSQL also has similar technology built in.
*YAWN*
Come back when there's something to read, eh?
Seriously!
/.!
/tmp/mozilla-1.0*.rpm;
I tried the Moz 1.1 RPM on my RH 7.2 system, and suddently, the textarea tag screwed up constantly. Text did not wrap, and an "A" tag would cause not only the text in the textarea to become a link, but also submit buttons, and just about everything in the form!
I couldn't even post to
rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep mozilla`; rpm -Uvh
Now it's better...
1) PHP 4.2.x is stable, with libpspell, imap, pg and mysql support.
2) Apache supports the "per child" user definition. The inability to run as any user other than "nobody" is a real limitation. But, if I could define the user/group of a file and have the script run as that user/group, security for web applications would simply skyrocket! (I'd except "root" from that list, tho)
There's an interesting detail that's commonly misunderstood about OSS projects. They don't have to be #1 in market share to "win".
.ogg will win - eventually. So, re-rip your CDs, and with every single song, .ogg moves forward that much more.
All it takes for OSS projects (such as ogg) to succeed is that somebody continues to develop the project, and some people use it.
Linux is just now really starting to "take the enterprise"... I read about it every week in my CRN weekly trade rag, but Linux has been around over 10 YEARS before this!
Was Linux "losing" 4 years ago just because it wasn't well known yet?
OSS slowly wins because it is:
Good enough. Come on, let's face it: Apache isn't as easy to set up as IIS, and there are other alternatives out there that have some clear advantages over, say, Apache. But Apache is "good enough" and seems to have the most mindshare, so Apache it is.
Cheap/Free: Traditionally, the low-price leader is the one that wins. EG: WalMart, Microsoft. Linux is free, Apache is free, and OGG is free.
NT is cheaper than Unix (and so was slowly taking it over) until Linux came along, which is cheaper than NT. Now, Linux has arrested NT's progress into the enterprise & Unix spaces, and is slowly taking the market, piece by piece. Not overnight. Slowly. Linux will be here tomorrow, too.
Market share changes happen more rapidly when circumstances change to provide a clear financial incentive to switch.
Thus, Microsoft's license changes provide a financial incentive to switch. The active persuit of royalties for MP3 players provides a new financial incentive to switch.
And the price doesn't have to be high, it just has to be higher than before.
How many times have you driven by a gas station because the other one a mile down the road is $0.03 cheaper? Never mind that it adds up to $0.60 cents for a 20-gallon SUV, and you spend ~$0.50 of that savings driving the extra mile and a half, you do it. Be honest...
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why
So, give it time, and ENJOY!
No way until then.
Yeah, you can "get it" to work, but when it's good and production stable then I'll consider it...
So, what if you had a setup where you could call the company, their support staff'd ask for your model numbers, and they'd program it remotely!
Oh, and can you imagine, on this remote control, a big, back-lit display so that you could see what !@# button to push to turn the !@#!@ thing down?
So, what you have is a device that:
1) Can communicate with the parent company,
2) Has alot of buttons,
3) A small CPU in it,
4) A large backlit screen.
Sounds an awful lot like a cell phone, eh?
No, really! Just put an I/R LED at the end of your cell phone, it'd make an EXCELLENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE.
I have a remote-administered server in a colo in Mountain View, CA. I routinely have transfer rates of 2200 Mbit, for example, when updating via the Red Hat Network.
/dev/null on the system being tested, and watched the graph with MRTG.
Yes, that's about 15 T-1 lines worth of bandwidth - my 1.5 Mb DSL line is always saturated when loading stuff down from it.
So, I wrote a quick PHP script to take a 100k file off the disk, and hurl it at you repeatedly 1000 times, with a mime-type of application/octet-stream. That's a 100 MB file being downloaded by HTTP.
Then, I hit the script with lynx -dump >
In my case, we did get effectively 1.48 Mbit on the T-1 line being tested, which is close enough to satisfy my curiousity.
I'd be happy to perform this test for you... BTW - if you are in North California, I recommend o1.com as an excellent provider!
10 years ago, I used a 286 with a 10 MB HD. Not a file on that thing went more than a month or so without being used or touched in some way - I did all kinds of stuff on it, and had to be very careful about what I kept on the small disk.
Today, I have a 32 GB HD on my main W/S. After counting my mp3s and such (I could play mp3s for over a week before repeating a single song) and every single email I've sent or received (except for the SPAM) for 3+ years, thousands of digital pictures of my family (also archived on CDs) and the like, all available at a moment's notice, I'm very happy with this arrangement!
Many of these files might not be "touched" for a year or more but that doesn't mean I don't want them!
When I get a bigger disk drive, it'll just inherit this file system that I've been nursing in various forms for over 3 years.
Look at it this way, you realize it's not a crisis! Really!
Want to know something? Google it, and 10 minutes later, you are "in the know".
Tell me how that's not a radical change!?
You are an idiot.
I don't like the viral license in GPL
There is nothing viral about the GPL. It's code that's available for your use, and it comes with some restrictions that also provide a benefit.
With the GPL, you get code that improves itself! As a developer, you can release GPL code and know that you are likely going to get something out of it - the efforts of other developers improving your codebase.
The GPL is the "Golden Rule" enforced by license - Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
Don't like those terms? Don't use somebody else's code!
Now, how much of Microsoft's code base are you going to incorporate into YOUR pet project?!?!
This whole "viral" idea is marketing spin cooked up by Microsoft goons to discredit a very noble movement...
-Ben
PS: It's "coercion"...
Actually, no. The germans used public key cryptography. We just came up with a computer fast enough to crack it. Their answer? Increase the length of the key. (sound familiar?)
-Ben
However, with "sky hooks", it's not only pheasible, it's almost guaranteed!
Science advances most in areas where there's money to be made - witness cell phones, digital cameras, and 3D video cards.
You don't think that your average, middle-class guy wouldn't save up $10k or $20k to stay a week at the Hyatt - in space?!?
Hell yeah! No problem! Zero-G, floaty trinkets in the gift shop, etc.
There's MONEY TO BE MADE here... and by the time I'm an old fart (30 now) I hope this will be becoming everyday.
Of course, we can launch rockets to other planets like Venus and build hooks there, too. That's when serious colonization will begin.
-Ben
New applications are popping out left and right! Open office, Mozilla, Blender, Crossover, etc. Linux is rapidly becoming a very viable contender.
I'm working on a project to digitize a bunch of audio (lectures) for streaming netcast. This is a volunteer thing, and must be done on the cheap.
My Windows 98 system (games, mostly, some browsing) has a SB Live! sound card which comes with Creative Studio.
Great functionality, but DOG SLOW on a system with only 128 MB RAM.
Guess what?!? There's this neat little GTK app I found on freshmeat - close functionality, performs fantastically even with low memory, runs great on my main (but comparable) Linux workstation.
The gaps are filling in fast - this is yet another example.
Wahoo!
Obviously, you've never run a computer store. We went to great lengths to avoid the 4+ hour time it took took to setup a system. We'd build a system with all the software, then carefully regedit the system to remove all the license keys, then make an image of the hard drive and duplicate from that image.
We went to great lengths to make sure that new systems were compatable, and drew up migration strategies from our better image copies.
It's quite a hassle, but the end result is that we could have a new system built and software installed and the system ready to hand to the customer in under an hour, though we usually let them burn for 24 just to make sure they seemed solid.
From the standpoint of system integrators and VARs, this can be a very big deal, especially when you remove the $50 MS tax...
Our house, however, is an eternal mess. Always. When it's clean it's "not as dirty".
Why?!?!
None of us can stand the drudgery of housecleaning.
So, we do the minimum to make it livable, and occasionally call in a housecleaner for a deep cleaning...
Intelligence has its price, and can be a real limiting factor in your achievements...
As I write this, I'm busy transferring 4 GB of web sites from one server to another for a client from my home-based office, while updates are happening in two other systems, in towns hundreds of miles away. I'm running it all from here, where I look out the window and see black walnut trees and ivy in my front yard.
I have headphones on plugged into the sound card on my workstation, playing a wonderful (to me) mix of New Age, orchestra, folk, and Classic Rock music, whilst my 5 year old son plays just behind me.
How else can you work several places at once, in a relaxed chair, and interact with your children, while commanding decent wages without technology?
This is not FUN?!?!?
One of my 5 children is diabetic. Cell phones mean that my wife and I can go on dates, and go places with impunity, knowing that we can still keep an eye on our son from anywhere.
Also, my son has a computerized insulin pump, which automatically meters out insulin as he needs it. This results in excellent blood sugar control, and if we're careful, his life expectancy will be close to normal. 100 years ago, my wonderful son would be dead.
This is not FUN?!?!?
As a technology provider, I frequently have to sign contracts with clauses like "24 hour monitoring" and the like. What this means for me is setting up Big Brother Network Monitor. It checks all my stuff around the clock every 5 minutes, and lets me know if there's a problem.
Combine this with maintained, patched, high quality Linux servers, and you have a pretty worry-free life...
The trick is to use technology to empower yourself, to leverage technology to improve your life.
Maybe you'd like a life expectancy of 38 years, and a short, hard life digging for worms and bugs to eat, but I don't.
It's a very poor pitchfork that can't be used as a weapon against you - so make sure you're using your tools properly!
-Ben