Ubuntu's like Debian, except it has regular release cycles, up-to-date software and a thriving community. And it is based on Debian - so in effect it is Debian, only better.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
Try it, you'll like it. Much of Debian's developers are working on Ubuntu - you'll see them in Ubuntu's IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, etc.
One thing that was mentioned in the movie commentaries, but not mentioned in the medical journal reports is that the One Ring, along with other mystical phenomena, provides sensations of euphoria to its bearer. Also, if a bearer is deprived of contact with the One Ring, he experiences symptoms akin to withdrawl. All bearers of the One Ring experienced these symptoms, but because Gollum had possession of the Ring for over five centuries, his symptoms are extreme.
So, on top of Antisocial Personality Disorder, Dissociative Personality Disorder, as well as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I would have to diagnose Gollum with addiction to the One Ring, and have him checked into a substance abuse treatment center as soon as possible.
What's sickening is that it doesn't matter who you vote for this election - the MPAA & RIAA have bribed^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributed to the campaign funds of both sides. Democrat, Republican, they'll both vote for this monstrosity. They've stopped listening to the little guys.
The only hope is to challenge the constitutionality of this bill and hope the Supreme Court strikes it down.
Another thing I dislike about Windows is its gamma. Looking into a windows machine is a dim and dingy thing compared to Apple. (I wish Linux were brighter as well...)
You do understand that you've been able to adjust the gamma correction (and other video settings) in Windows and in Linux for a long time now. (though your mileage may vary depending on your video card and drivers.)
The key difference here is that Windows and Linux boxes are set by default to use no gamma correction, while Macs by default use a a gamma of 1.7. Since most pictures on the web are gamma corrected in Photoshop or other such tools to an average 2.2 gamma, which compensates for the natural gamma of a PC monitor, they usually look OK on PCs. The same images on Mac are overgammaed, making the colors appear washed out.
I used calibration images and set my system to a 1.0 gamma, with blacklevel adjusted as well. That makes images look nice on my system. Of course, you're free to adjust gamma to your personal tastes./nitpick
Amen brother. I've been running Debian for two years on my system, without nuking and installing. My system runs like a well oiled machine, and when something breaks, I can usually track down the exact cause and fix it.
Also another control related reason. With Linux, I control my computer. I control which programs run and don't run, and I can do whatever I damn well please on my box. With Windows, it's Microsoft that has control over your box, and by extension, the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and other organizations that want to take your freedom away.You get EULAs, DRM, product registration, etc.
You also have viruses, worms, adware, spyware, and so on that again, take control of your computer away from you.
I want control over my box. And I'm not willing to cede that control to anyone.
Something to make this defense more plausible
on
Safe and Insecure?
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· Score: 1
The point is made - if you open up your WAP for no legit reason, and some asshole does something naughty, you're held liable.
On the other hand, if you opened up your WAP for a legitimate reason - to enable your neighbors to log onto your system to play Nethack or something, then you can claim you opened your WAP for legal purposes, then some asshole abused it. It's harder for the.gov or four-letter-organizations to prove intent to cause harm.
In other words, if a plaintiff files a frivolous lawsuit and gets smacked down in court, the court should find that the loser's lawyer didn't do his required duties in making sure that the case was legitimate before filing, making him liable for paying legal fees to the winner.
Maybe that'll discourage slimeball ambulance chasers from filing frivolous lawsuits in hopes of extorting settlements.
If you're running XMMS or Beep Media Player, get ye out to http://www.luminal.org/wiki/index.php/IMMS/IMMS and pick up the IMMS plugin. It replaces XMMS's rather retarded and unrandom shuffler with one that uses an SQLite database. All you have to do is activate the plugin, hit play, queue up songs you like, and skip songs you don't like. As you play, it learns which songs you like and don't like, then plays the ones you like more often. It analyzes the song's spectrum and bpm, and gives more weight to songs that have similar characteristics. It also keeps track of songs that are recently played, and doesn't play them, so the playlist doesn't get too repetitive (essentially the opposite of what radio stations do.)
I think of it as Meldroc Radio - all the songs I like, all the time, without obnoxious ads or babbling DJs.
Just wanted to add that for anyone who's the least bit non-technical, or who doesn't have the time to constantly tinker, just use packages. They're easier, and are perfectly good 99.99% of the time.
I'm a lazy bastard, and I find that most packages don't need uber-performance (who's gonna notice if ls takes 10 ms to run instead of 15). I also think most packages won't get much mileage from compilation tweaks more complicated than gcc -O2, so for the most part I download precompiled packages.
I use Debian, and I understand other package-based distros do the same thing. For me, apt-get foo to fetch precompiled packages is good enough 99% of the time. If I'm debugging a package, or am curious, or think I might get better performance from rolling my own, it's as easy as apt-get -b source foo (automagically downloads original upstream source, diffs to make the Debian package, meta info; then uncompresses & patches the source tree; then builds a source package on the spot.) Heck, Debian has some tools specifically for building kernel debs, since the kernel is something many people want to build themselves (I hate distros' Christmas tree kernels.)
IOW, I don't have to pull a Gentoo and build from source all the time, because I don't find it necessary, but it's quite easy to build from source when I want.
Clearly, there are some jobs best done with higher level languages with goodies like garbage collection, like high-level GUI interface coding. There are also jobs that need low level, close to the metal languages like C or even assembler - anything that's CPU bound and requires high performance - games or number-crunching.
In other words, there is no One Great Language that everyone needs to switch to and use for everything. Lots of games are written with multiple languages - C for most low-level stuff, hand-coded assembler for the hot-spots, and Python for things like AI, level setup & such.
As for me, I don't much like virtual machines. You might as well either compile to native machine language or leave it in source and run it through an interpreter. VMs are just an unnecessary waste of cycles & memory, and an needless added level of complication. I like gcj's ability to compile Java to native binaries.
Both NVidia and ATI keep their driver sources and hardware-level programming information closely guarded secrets. This means unless NVidia and ATI decide to support the new X server, we're gonna be stuck with lousy 2-d drivers, maybe with accelerated blitting if the mfgrs decide to throw us a few crumbs.
I have a friend with retinitis pigmentosa who is legally blind, but has some vision left. He was running a Windows box with a few tricks: a high-contrast color scheme with a black background and gaudy purple and yellow text & widget decorations. He also used a text magnifier and a tool that snapped the mouse cursor to the middle of the screen when he middle-clicked (he frequently lost the mouse cursor.) He also had a hardware speech synthesizer, with text-to-speech software that would read icon labels when he moused over them, read web pages, emails, documents, etc.
For an open-source solution, you might want to try Festival, an open-source speech synthesis system.
If I remember correctly, apoptosis is an active process, not just the cell croaking. A cell undergoing apoptosis actually dismantles itself, putting toxic chemicals (yes, cells use some nasty substances in necessary life processes) into neat packages & such. This makes it much easier for the body to recycles those chemicals & get rid of wastes. This is far better than a badly damaged cell dying and dumping nasty stuff into the bloodstream and neighboring cells, or mutating into a cancer cell.
Back to economics - why do spammers go to all the trouble of sending zillions of messages advertising viagra, xanax, porn, scams? Because there are idiots that buy them. So let's try nailing the idiots. Make it a misdemeanor offense to purchase goods and services from spammers, with a $10,000 fine for each offense. The feds can catch the idiots by sending out their own fake spam (I know, lowers the signal-to-noise ratio even more) with links to honeypot web sites. If you go to the web site and try to buy some v1@6ra or whatever, you're nailed. The high fine is to encourage the small-town speed trap mentality - make nailing spam customers handsomely profitable. Limit the sting spam to a fraction of real spam, so if real spam dwindles, sting spam dwindles as well. Offer to cut the fine to $5,000 if the idiot gives the feds any information he has on spammers he bought products from.
Before long, the idiots won't know which spams are from "legitimate spammers" and which ones are from feds who want huge fines.
At the very least, it'll make me feel better knowing that the idiots who actually buy stuff from spammers are getting their attitudes adjusted.
/me ducks, knowing that this plan is most likely full of holes and will only make things worse...
In theory, at least, it should be possible to defend against a patent lawsuit by claiming the patent is for an invention that is "obvious to any skilled practitioner of the art."
Is it even possible to get a patent thrown out using this defense? Or have lawyers (who all can find twenty forms of ambiguity in a "NO SMOKING" sign) made this clause completely meaningless?
Listen not to the purveyors of drip coffee makers. And never, ever get instant coffee!
Instead, get yourself a French press. They're cheap, easy to operate, and you can just bring the thing with you to your cube or the break room. Just use the microwave to boil some water, put some coffee in the press (the good stuff that you find at decent coffee shops.) Get a little grinder & use it if there are no objections to the noise, as coffee beans have a short half-life once they're ground. Pour the boiling water into the press, let the coffee steep for four minutes, then press the plunger, pour your coffee & drink! This method is the absolute best at extracting all the subtle flavors out of the bean without the nasty flavors.
The french press kicks the combined asses of all drip coffeemakers.
You didn't sacrifice your job. Your job disappeared, and no amount of wishing, screaming, arguing, protesting, legislating, hoping, lobbying, letter-writing, bribing, petitioning, imagining, discussing, complaining, worrying, fretting, bothering, sign-writing, stalking, or planning will bring it back.
Your best bet is to find another job.
This is how it is; it cannot be otherwise.
That is the fundamental truth of the matter. The center of the article lies in this quote:
"But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next."
She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."
I'll admit that the outsourcing trend, combined with the recession has thrown me for a loop. Obviously, I'll have to adapt since no amount of ranting will put our economy back to the glory days of dot-com. I'll always hack computers, even if I can't do it for a living, but I do need to make a living.
So where do we go? What's the Next Big Thing? What kind of professions are out there that promise a big boom in the near future, where I could retrain and make an honest living (doesn't have to make me rich, but does give me the ability to pay my bills) that has something resembling stability, at least for a little while? Where should the middle class of the US migrate so they can stay in the middle class?
I was just reading through some of the EFI docs on Intel's site. EFI can be used for cryptographic authentication of boot images.
I can see Microsoft arm-twisting PC manufacturers into writing EFI code that will cause the PC to only allow authenticated, pre-specified boot images, Microsoft-approved Windows boot images, to be executed. Of course, this is only done for the best of reasons (for Microsoft) so viruses (and Linux kernels) can't run amok on your systems.
Yes, that's evil. But still, EFI is capable of lots of useful stuff as well.
A few years ago, I worked at HP on EFI firmware for IA-64 machines. Like all technologies, it can be used for good or evil.
EFI, short for External Firmware Interface can be described as BIOS on steroids, combined with MS-DOS. It's a programming API in firmware used specifically for low-level hardware configuration and bootstraping of OSes. It comes with a command shell that looks much like MS-DOS - it reads FAT filesystems, runs a TCP/IP stack, lets you manipulate files from the command line, set up scripts and execute programs. For the most part, these programs do things like boot OSes (from disk or network), splash screens & hardware configuration. I personally have seen Linux boot through a version of LILO hacked for EFI (though that was three years ago). It's much more flexible than the PC-style BIOS for such things. For those of you with Unix backgrounds, it's somewhat like the firmware in PA-RISC workstations that normally bootstraps HP-UX.
It isn't much of a stretch to suggest EFI can be used to set up Trusted Computing software or DRM, and even to lock out software that the Powers That Be consider to be undesireable, by running an initdrm program in the boot script just before it executes the hwconfig, splashscreen or bootos programs. As I said, EFI can be used for good or evil. EFI can be used for this, but doesn't have to be.
I personally doubt EFI will be used to cut off Linux, since a lot of the big players like HP and IBM have too much at stake to let themselves be shut out.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
on
Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 1
That all assumes that the escrowed code actually gets released to the buyer. If the developer declares bankruptcy, the code becomes an asset that can be used to pay creditors, so the judge may nullify the escrow contract so the software can be sold for more money.
You make a very valid point here. Robert Cringely makes this same point another way in I, Cringely:
Now against this backdrop of failure, I can't help but make one technical observation that I think has been missed by most of the other people covering this story. One of the key issues in touch screen voting is the presence or absence of a so-called paper trail. There doesn't seem to be any way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of auditing the election at all. This is what bugs the conspiracy theorists, that we just have to trust the voting machine developers -- folks whose actions strongly suggest that they haven't been worthy of our trust.
So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in touch.
Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that somebody is.
Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.
Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?
Seeing the story of Diebold wanting to gouge Maryland for adding printers & an audit trail to their voting systems makes me think that Diebold did not just forget to put in a printed audit trail, but they deliberately do not want one.
I'm all for your suggestion. REQUIRED open source software in voting machines, with an extensive audit trail, not just of the machines, but the servers, protocols, etc. Competent crypto should be used extensively to protect the systems' integrity.
If they use decent encryption, cracking this scheme will be nearly impossible. If they use a digital signature algorithm such as DSA or MD5, or public key algorithms such as RSA, the computational power required to crack these keys will be far beyond the means of the richest spammers.
Personally, I'd like to see two things.
1. The software Yahoo! is developing should be open-source, so nobody can monopolize it. At the very minimum, the protocols involved should be well documented so open-sourcers can make their own implementations if they have to.
2. Give this software a few months to propogate to a good chunk of the ISPs out there. Then, Yahoo! should announce that they will NOT accept any email that is not signed with this software. I'll guarantee that everyone will be using this new protocol in a matter of weeks, since no ISP wants customers screaming because they can't get mail through to Yahoo! accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ Try it, you'll like it. Much of Debian's developers are working on Ubuntu - you'll see them in Ubuntu's IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, etc.
One thing that was mentioned in the movie commentaries, but not mentioned in the medical journal reports is that the One Ring, along with other mystical phenomena, provides sensations of euphoria to its bearer. Also, if a bearer is deprived of contact with the One Ring, he experiences symptoms akin to withdrawl. All bearers of the One Ring experienced these symptoms, but because Gollum had possession of the Ring for over five centuries, his symptoms are extreme. So, on top of Antisocial Personality Disorder, Dissociative Personality Disorder, as well as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I would have to diagnose Gollum with addiction to the One Ring, and have him checked into a substance abuse treatment center as soon as possible.
What's sickening is that it doesn't matter who you vote for this election - the MPAA & RIAA have bribed^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributed to the campaign funds of both sides. Democrat, Republican, they'll both vote for this monstrosity. They've stopped listening to the little guys.
The only hope is to challenge the constitutionality of this bill and hope the Supreme Court strikes it down.
You do understand that you've been able to adjust the gamma correction (and other video settings) in Windows and in Linux for a long time now. (though your mileage may vary depending on your video card and drivers.)
The key difference here is that Windows and Linux boxes are set by default to use no gamma correction, while Macs by default use a a gamma of 1.7. Since most pictures on the web are gamma corrected in Photoshop or other such tools to an average 2.2 gamma, which compensates for the natural gamma of a PC monitor, they usually look OK on PCs. The same images on Mac are overgammaed, making the colors appear washed out.
I used calibration images and set my system to a 1.0 gamma, with blacklevel adjusted as well. That makes images look nice on my system. Of course, you're free to adjust gamma to your personal tastes. /nitpick
Amen brother. I've been running Debian for two years on my system, without nuking and installing. My system runs like a well oiled machine, and when something breaks, I can usually track down the exact cause and fix it.
Also another control related reason. With Linux, I control my computer. I control which programs run and don't run, and I can do whatever I damn well please on my box. With Windows, it's Microsoft that has control over your box, and by extension, the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and other organizations that want to take your freedom away.You get EULAs, DRM, product registration, etc.
You also have viruses, worms, adware, spyware, and so on that again, take control of your computer away from you.
I want control over my box. And I'm not willing to cede that control to anyone.
The point is made - if you open up your WAP for no legit reason, and some asshole does something naughty, you're held liable.
On the other hand, if you opened up your WAP for a legitimate reason - to enable your neighbors to log onto your system to play Nethack or something, then you can claim you opened your WAP for legal purposes, then some asshole abused it. It's harder for the .gov or four-letter-organizations to prove intent to cause harm.
In other words, if a plaintiff files a frivolous lawsuit and gets smacked down in court, the court should find that the loser's lawyer didn't do his required duties in making sure that the case was legitimate before filing, making him liable for paying legal fees to the winner.
Maybe that'll discourage slimeball ambulance chasers from filing frivolous lawsuits in hopes of extorting settlements.
I think of it as Meldroc Radio - all the songs I like, all the time, without obnoxious ads or babbling DJs.
Just wanted to add that for anyone who's the least bit non-technical, or who doesn't have the time to constantly tinker, just use packages. They're easier, and are perfectly good 99.99% of the time.
I'm a lazy bastard, and I find that most packages don't need uber-performance (who's gonna notice if ls takes 10 ms to run instead of 15). I also think most packages won't get much mileage from compilation tweaks more complicated than gcc -O2, so for the most part I download precompiled packages.
I use Debian, and I understand other package-based distros do the same thing. For me, apt-get foo to fetch precompiled packages is good enough 99% of the time. If I'm debugging a package, or am curious, or think I might get better performance from rolling my own, it's as easy as apt-get -b source foo (automagically downloads original upstream source, diffs to make the Debian package, meta info; then uncompresses & patches the source tree; then builds a source package on the spot.) Heck, Debian has some tools specifically for building kernel debs, since the kernel is something many people want to build themselves (I hate distros' Christmas tree kernels.)
IOW, I don't have to pull a Gentoo and build from source all the time, because I don't find it necessary, but it's quite easy to build from source when I want.
Clearly, there are some jobs best done with higher level languages with goodies like garbage collection, like high-level GUI interface coding. There are also jobs that need low level, close to the metal languages like C or even assembler - anything that's CPU bound and requires high performance - games or number-crunching.
In other words, there is no One Great Language that everyone needs to switch to and use for everything. Lots of games are written with multiple languages - C for most low-level stuff, hand-coded assembler for the hot-spots, and Python for things like AI, level setup & such.
As for me, I don't much like virtual machines. You might as well either compile to native machine language or leave it in source and run it through an interpreter. VMs are just an unnecessary waste of cycles & memory, and an needless added level of complication. I like gcj's ability to compile Java to native binaries.
Both NVidia and ATI keep their driver sources and hardware-level programming information closely guarded secrets. This means unless NVidia and ATI decide to support the new X server, we're gonna be stuck with lousy 2-d drivers, maybe with accelerated blitting if the mfgrs decide to throw us a few crumbs.
I have a friend with retinitis pigmentosa who is legally blind, but has some vision left. He was running a Windows box with a few tricks: a high-contrast color scheme with a black background and gaudy purple and yellow text & widget decorations. He also used a text magnifier and a tool that snapped the mouse cursor to the middle of the screen when he middle-clicked (he frequently lost the mouse cursor.) He also had a hardware speech synthesizer, with text-to-speech software that would read icon labels when he moused over them, read web pages, emails, documents, etc.
For an open-source solution, you might want to try Festival, an open-source speech synthesis system.
I hope not. I always imagined Marvin to be relatively tall, with square, blocky features, and baleful red eyes.
If I remember correctly, apoptosis is an active process, not just the cell croaking. A cell undergoing apoptosis actually dismantles itself, putting toxic chemicals (yes, cells use some nasty substances in necessary life processes) into neat packages & such. This makes it much easier for the body to recycles those chemicals & get rid of wastes. This is far better than a badly damaged cell dying and dumping nasty stuff into the bloodstream and neighboring cells, or mutating into a cancer cell.
Back to economics - why do spammers go to all the trouble of sending zillions of messages advertising viagra, xanax, porn, scams? Because there are idiots that buy them. So let's try nailing the idiots. Make it a misdemeanor offense to purchase goods and services from spammers, with a $10,000 fine for each offense. The feds can catch the idiots by sending out their own fake spam (I know, lowers the signal-to-noise ratio even more) with links to honeypot web sites. If you go to the web site and try to buy some v1@6ra or whatever, you're nailed. The high fine is to encourage the small-town speed trap mentality - make nailing spam customers handsomely profitable. Limit the sting spam to a fraction of real spam, so if real spam dwindles, sting spam dwindles as well. Offer to cut the fine to $5,000 if the idiot gives the feds any information he has on spammers he bought products from.
Before long, the idiots won't know which spams are from "legitimate spammers" and which ones are from feds who want huge fines.
At the very least, it'll make me feel better knowing that the idiots who actually buy stuff from spammers are getting their attitudes adjusted.
/me ducks, knowing that this plan is most likely full of holes and will only make things worse...
In theory, at least, it should be possible to defend against a patent lawsuit by claiming the patent is for an invention that is "obvious to any skilled practitioner of the art."
Is it even possible to get a patent thrown out using this defense? Or have lawyers (who all can find twenty forms of ambiguity in a "NO SMOKING" sign) made this clause completely meaningless?
Listen not to the purveyors of drip coffee makers. And never, ever get instant coffee!
Instead, get yourself a French press. They're cheap, easy to operate, and you can just bring the thing with you to your cube or the break room. Just use the microwave to boil some water, put some coffee in the press (the good stuff that you find at decent coffee shops.) Get a little grinder & use it if there are no objections to the noise, as coffee beans have a short half-life once they're ground. Pour the boiling water into the press, let the coffee steep for four minutes, then press the plunger, pour your coffee & drink! This method is the absolute best at extracting all the subtle flavors out of the bean without the nasty flavors.
The french press kicks the combined asses of all drip coffeemakers.
That is the fundamental truth of the matter. The center of the article lies in this quote:
I'll admit that the outsourcing trend, combined with the recession has thrown me for a loop. Obviously, I'll have to adapt since no amount of ranting will put our economy back to the glory days of dot-com. I'll always hack computers, even if I can't do it for a living, but I do need to make a living.
So where do we go? What's the Next Big Thing? What kind of professions are out there that promise a big boom in the near future, where I could retrain and make an honest living (doesn't have to make me rich, but does give me the ability to pay my bills) that has something resembling stability, at least for a little while? Where should the middle class of the US migrate so they can stay in the middle class?
I don't recall reading anything in the U.S. Constitution saying "The right of the people to not be offended shall not be infringed."
If you don't like the game, DON'T BUY IT!!! Nobody's pointing a gun at you to force you to buy.
I was just reading through some of the EFI docs on Intel's site. EFI can be used for cryptographic authentication of boot images.
I can see Microsoft arm-twisting PC manufacturers into writing EFI code that will cause the PC to only allow authenticated, pre-specified boot images, Microsoft-approved Windows boot images, to be executed. Of course, this is only done for the best of reasons (for Microsoft) so viruses (and Linux kernels) can't run amok on your systems.
Yes, that's evil. But still, EFI is capable of lots of useful stuff as well.
A few years ago, I worked at HP on EFI firmware for IA-64 machines. Like all technologies, it can be used for good or evil.
EFI, short for External Firmware Interface can be described as BIOS on steroids, combined with MS-DOS. It's a programming API in firmware used specifically for low-level hardware configuration and bootstraping of OSes. It comes with a command shell that looks much like MS-DOS - it reads FAT filesystems, runs a TCP/IP stack, lets you manipulate files from the command line, set up scripts and execute programs. For the most part, these programs do things like boot OSes (from disk or network), splash screens & hardware configuration. I personally have seen Linux boot through a version of LILO hacked for EFI (though that was three years ago). It's much more flexible than the PC-style BIOS for such things. For those of you with Unix backgrounds, it's somewhat like the firmware in PA-RISC workstations that normally bootstraps HP-UX.
It isn't much of a stretch to suggest EFI can be used to set up Trusted Computing software or DRM, and even to lock out software that the Powers That Be consider to be undesireable, by running an initdrm program in the boot script just before it executes the hwconfig, splashscreen or bootos programs. As I said, EFI can be used for good or evil. EFI can be used for this, but doesn't have to be.
I personally doubt EFI will be used to cut off Linux, since a lot of the big players like HP and IBM have too much at stake to let themselves be shut out.
That all assumes that the escrowed code actually gets released to the buyer. If the developer declares bankruptcy, the code becomes an asset that can be used to pay creditors, so the judge may nullify the escrow contract so the software can be sold for more money.
You make a very valid point here. Robert Cringely makes this same point another way in I, Cringely:
I, Cringely linkage...
Seeing the story of Diebold wanting to gouge Maryland for adding printers & an audit trail to their voting systems makes me think that Diebold did not just forget to put in a printed audit trail, but they deliberately do not want one.
I'm all for your suggestion. REQUIRED open source software in voting machines, with an extensive audit trail, not just of the machines, but the servers, protocols, etc. Competent crypto should be used extensively to protect the systems' integrity.
Personally, I'd like to see two things.
1. The software Yahoo! is developing should be open-source, so nobody can monopolize it. At the very minimum, the protocols involved should be well documented so open-sourcers can make their own implementations if they have to.
2. Give this software a few months to propogate to a good chunk of the ISPs out there. Then, Yahoo! should announce that they will NOT accept any email that is not signed with this software. I'll guarantee that everyone will be using this new protocol in a matter of weeks, since no ISP wants customers screaming because they can't get mail through to Yahoo! accounts.