What is the best, high powered 100mw-200mw, high sensitivity receiver pcmcia/pccard adapter you can buy that works great with Linux? External antenna ports are a plus.
I have looked at the Senao 200mw cards and am thinking about buying one, good or bad choice?
I did a pretty thorough review of a bunch of (Globespan-Virata, nee Intersil) Prism chipset-based cards for my new startup just a few months ago, and the Senao is far and away the best, although the ubiquitous and very inexpensive Netgear MA401 was surprisingly good for the money, among lower-power cards. (I've heard some people say they don't like these, but I own several, purchased at different times, and all seem better than the average of other Prism-based cards. YMMV.)
The thing that makes the Senao cards great, surprisingly, isn't its high-power transmitter though (other companies offer those, too), but rather the fact that Senao's engineers were sharp enough to realize that a better transmitter doesn't really do much good without a better reciever to go with it.
The receiver is the weak spot in most Wi-Fi cards, and better performance here *really* pays off in the real world, which is why there are so many Senao fans among those building wireless setups that *need* to work.
FWIW, I think external antennae are a PITA if you're moving around, none of the tiny coax connectors are really going to stand the large number of mating cycles required to remove and reinstall the antenna everytime you relocate your laptop. If you really have to have the exteranl (for instance, if you plan to use it in a fixed installation in the future), you can get the compact "vampire tooth" antennae to snap into the Senao's MMCX connector from Netgate.com. (No connection, other than as a happy customer and friendships with the owners from when they lived here in Austin.)
These comments apply only to Senao's 802.11b Prism-based products. Their newer cards are based on chipsets from other vendors (Atheros Mercury for 802.11b/g, among others) , and I've heard those are not nearly so superior to their competition. (Not to mention you have to decide if Broadcom is right in thier claims that Atheros violates the spec., thus "poisoning the waterhole" by slowing other vendors' 802.11b radios in the vicinity to a crawl. I don't know if this is real or not yet, but anecdotal evidence seems to support it, although I don't use G myself...)
Really, this is the part that made me get to the point that now, if someone gives me a media url, if it can't be played in Quicktime or VLC I just don't bother.
Oh, come on, Quicktime is every bit as bad as Real about taking over media types. At least Real doesn't insist on making itself the only valid TIFF viewer on my system like Quicktime does.
All said, I hate Quicktime worse than Real - at least it's easier to reclaim stolen media formats from Real. Installing Quicktime pretty much hoses the machine until the next OS reinstall...
Yeah, you can cobble together basic PC, but to replace TiVo it needs to be
* Be quiet Well, that would certainly make it different from a real TiVO. The HD in my Series 2 is so horrendously loud I'm thinking about just pitching the thing, and I've been known to unplug it because the noise it makes down in the living room bothers us in the master bedroom upstairs. I got mine for free (won it), but I've reached the conclusion that there's no way the thing is worth the $13 they charge me for "service" every month, especially when that service routinely whacks off the last 5 minutes of old movies, which are about all I care to watch. (The rest of TV really is a "vast wasteland"...)
* Be fast enough to encode MPEG and decode MPEG simultaneously
* Have a form factor that looks good under a TV
* Have an IR input
Calvary is one of the names for the place where Christ was crucified (allegedly, if you believe that stuff anyway, which I don't).
Whether or not you beleive in Christ's divinity, His crucifixion is the most well-established *fact* in all of history. And the event is by no means attested to only in Christian manuscripts, but in many, many secular manuscripts of the time as well.
The manuscript evidence for this event dwarfs that of any other happening in the ancient world. By any reasonable analysis of the data, one *has* to conclude that Christ was indeed crucified as the Bible relates the story. If not, then you *have* to throw out *everything* we "know" about the ancient world, because all of those events have far less proof available...
They do allow cigarettes, gum, and alcohol on the ISS, don't they? Of course! All of the movie space stations do!
I don't know about the other two, but I know for a fact that the Russians occasionally smoked on Mir, so the other two wouldnt surprise me at all.
Really nasty when you realize the difficulty of airing out such a situation - it's not like you can open a window... This was one of the reasons that the only time NASA astronauts tried to avoid a flight was as the American crew member on Mir. It was apparently quite rank, and although"you got used to it", it was never pleasant - kinda like hanging around in a stinky bar for months on end.
My source for this is not hearsay, but one of the astronauts himself that I was working with when I worked for Sun at JSC. (Well, not indirect hearsay, anyway - that particular astronaut had not flown on Mir, but was attempting to avoid such an assignment for this very reason. I left Sun shortly afterwards (mid-1997) and don't know if he was "drafted" for Mir service or not...)
A company is a monopoly when it has a particular community that is locked into their religion enough to allow them to utilize monopolistic practices without losing the community. Sun definitely has that community and has definitely utilized monopolistic practices such as buying out those that are competing for their particular community.
Sorry, but the facts show you're wrong on two points here:
1) Sun is definitely NOT a monopoly, even by your own criteria: There is absolutely nothing preventing 99% of Sun customers from switching to IBM, HP, or even Linux or BSD, for that matter. If they stay, it's because they want to, and find value in doing so. Almost all applications that run on SPARC Solaris function neraly identically on other platforms. That's hardly any way to "lock in" customers, and it is anything but a monopoly.
2) Sun is by no means an acquisitive company: In fact Sun is significantly *less* active in acquisitions than any of its competitors, in either the hardware or software spaces. This makes a great deal of sense, whn you think about it, since Scott has always been fixated on Sun being vertically integrated to the point of owning all its own core technologies, allowing it to be the only computer company in the world other than IBM that can make that claim. As a result, Sun doesn't *need* to acquire very much, so they don't. Compare Sun's acquisitions over the past ten years to say, IBM's or HP's (which, of course, includes Compaq's and DEC's acquisitions, too) in hardware, or a company like CA in software, and you'll see that Sun actually engages in *very* few acquisitions, the ones that it does engage in expand Sun's capabilities in important ways, like Highground's storage or Waveset's security software, for instance. In any case, acquisitions are almost never a monopolistic practice, and I can't think of a single one in which Sun could be reasonably accused of buying a technolgy to bury it. It seems rather that they're just staggeringly bad at integrating most things they buy. In reality, Sun would have been much better off if most of its acquisitions *hadn't* sunk without a trace. For instance, if Sun hadn't been so careless after buying Lighthouse Design (which gave Sun the world's premeire object-oriented office suite, which *could* have been ported to Java, I checked), then they might not have had to buy Star Division to get StarOffice only a couple of years later...
I've dealt with Sun both as a customer and an employee. Althogh maddening at times, Sun is generally that rare kind of company that you can trust and rely on as a customer, and also represent with integrity and honor as an employee. I've also worked for a large PC company here in Austin which is most deinitely NOT that kind of company on either count, so I fully appreciate the difference.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
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What You Can't Say
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It is socially unacceptable to use that term when you are white because, let's face it, our European ancestors have committed one hell of a sin against African-Americans (not mention Native Americans).
What happened hundreds of years ago (whether or not my ancestors were involved) is absolutely irrelevant in this context. No one is enslaving anyone today - we are in fact all equal, as God made us, and no action of man can change that in any case.
If the historical fact of slavery is not irrelevant, then the damn Scandavians owe me some very serious reparations for repressing and enslaving my Celtic ancestors, and I suppose I'll have to get with others of my formerly oppressed kinsmen and make up a list of words and phrases that they may not use, because to do so would be "insensitive" or show "racial hatred".
I fail to see why blacks (oops, sorry, I'm not one, so I have to call them African-American, even though that phrase can refer to white South African immigrants) insist on claiming special staus and treatment. The fact is that pretty much all races and ethnic groups have both been enslaved and enslaved others at some point in their history. Mine, yours, black, white. It's over. Forget it.
This was just Sun being Sun. They utilized the standard technique of all monopolies. Buy out the low cost competitors and trash them.
No, Sun really *is* different, and far more open than any other mainline computer company (hardware or software)out there. In fact, not other company even approaches thier openness and thier commitment to it in terms of really putting their money where their mouth is. (Sure they have some proprietary hardware and software - That's no sin, and it often provides tremendous value for thier customers, who are quite glad they do so. I speak as a Sun customer off and on for almost 20 years, fully aware of every alternative.)
But let's look at just a few examples of Sun's openness over the years:
Open Unix-based systems: Almost all of the modern computing world (including the Internet itself) is a result of Sun deciding that open was the way to go. Within a few years of introducing tworkstations based on the open Unix (and the brilliant stroke of hiring Bill Joy, the creator of BSD to head up the OS effort), all of their competitors had been forced to also offer open systems: Apollo (later the workstation division of HP), DEC, and even stunningly, IBM. Remember that even the Ethernet and TCP/IP support that has been in all Suns since day one was a revolutionary statement of openness in a world then-dominated by vendor-proprietary networking schemes. The fact that we all now use the one Sun championed is NOT an accident.
NFS: The engine behind Sun's early growth, opened up files between computers, using a protocol that Sun made available on commercially attractive terms to all comers, even competitors. A radical, revolutionary step in openness, and still a very important protocol even today.
Java: Unarguably a vitally important modern technology, whether you like it or not, and perhaps the biggest single reason Microsoft doesn't have far more control today. Sun opened this up more than any company has ever opened up a revolutionary new technology, and it has become the backbone of modern enterprise computing and applications.
StarOffice/Open Office: Sun shelled out a chunk of cash to buy Star Division, and sunk tons more into it to make it really usable. Then they *gave* it away as OO, the basis for the commercial StarOffice. (What wasn't given away, they *couldn't* give away - it was third-party code licensed by Star Division that they had no right to redistribute.) If you haven't bought a copy of StarOffice, why not? Support the biggest single contributor to the open source community in history. Yep, that's Sun.
Cobalt: And now, we see for the first time, something truly revolutionary from a major company: Instead of simply letting the Cobalt code rot in thier tape archives, Sun is releasing the code for an old product line to the developer community, so it can continue to benefit people. To my knowledge, this has never been done for any other product sold in significant volume, as the ubiquitous Raq servers were.
Hate Sun for other reasons if you want to, but it's just dead wrong to say they're not the most open large computer company on the planet. And yes, they beat IBM in that regard by a very large margin, not only now, but over their entire history. Unlike IBM, openness is and has been in Sun's DNA since day one. You cannot accuse Sun of being a "monopolist" with any degree of credibilty. It's just laughable. (BTW, Sun bought Cobalt mostly for Chilisoft, which is still an active and important Sun product that lives on in thier Java Applicaiton Server. So no, they didn't "trash" Cobalt, although they certainly could have managed it better...)
e-smith.org The original Mitel developer site, which is moving to: contribs.org the community development site, and a repository for extensions and modifications for the server, as well as docs, howtos, and the new home for the user discussion forums.
Things are a bit rough at contribs.org right now, but they only found out Mitel was looking to hand the distro over a few weeks ago, so things are still (messily) in transition. It should be getting much smoother over the next few weeks...
Has anyone made an "Internet Appliance" to replace the Cobalt RAQ line? Although the RAQ line was not perfect, it's ease of use was unmatched.
There are lots of us using the Red Hat based e-smith distro for this. As mentioned in another post, it's currently being transitioned from Mitel back to full ownership by the developer community.
Installing and configuring e-smith on regular x86 hardware is about as easy as it gets - Seriously, anyone can use e-smith to install and configure a complete, working, secure server in less than half an hour, never once touching a command line prompt. And e-smith has a number of really cool features like "i-bay" virtual web/file servers and a high degree of integration between the various open source components, in addition to being a "just works" firewall/gateway, SMB/AFS server, Mail server (POP, IMAP, webmail), and much more.
Give e-smith a try, and I think you'll find it does pretty much everything you want a Cobalt to do, plus it has a more active and vibrant developer community, one that has been chomping at the bit to make improvements that are now more possible than ever with Mitel turning the code over to the community.
If you really want a preconfigured hardware/software solution you can find screwdriver shops that will sell you the e-smith/hardware combo, myezserver.com is one of them, run by an Darrell Mays, an active e-smith developer and contributor. There are others, but Darrell is the only one I've dealt with. I bought antivirus software and a hardware RAID unit from him, not one of his complete servers. The software was marginal (not his fault, just a marginal product), the RAID unit is great.
If you want to use code to do a server appliance, you'd get further, faster using something like Webmin.
Sorry, but you wouldn't. Obviously, you've never actually looked a the degree of difficulty of creating a real server appliance distro. It's a LOT of work, and webmin doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what's required there.
For confirmation, not only can you now check out Cobalt's code (I'm excited Sun has decided to open up the code of an EOL'ed product line - this shows their commitment to open source is *real*), but you might wan to check out the other two preeminent server distros:
E-smith (formerly owned by Mitel, and still the basis of their commercial products for both general and telecom servers) is currently in transition to full ownership by the developer community, so there are two sites: e-smith.org and contribs.org, it's new home.
Clarkconnect - not nearly as comprehensive as e-smith, but good for the basics: clarkconnect.com
somehow suspect, based on your apparent political leanings, that your stance on this full disclosure issue would be wildly inconsistent if we were discussing abortion and the need to graphically depict to aborting mothers the gruesome and ghastly violence of a procedure that literally rips a cornered and helpless living being to shreds
Quite correct, as a woman usually knows full well what is involved in the process and with/without your knowledge has probably spent 100 hours crying over it and thinking it over, decreasing their work productivity. We wouldn't need speed limits in front of schools if status of disembowelled children were erected in the middle of the tarmac. What we need is more informed consumers
Thank you for verifying that you are willing to be wildly logically inconsistent in applying policy just to support your political views.
If the carnage involved in something as inconsequential as fried chicken requires full disclosure, then surely at least that much disclosure should be applied when a human life is at stake. "Informing" consumers cannot be required in one case and proscribed in the other, especially since far, far more is at stake in the latter case- an assertion that is true even if you deny the humanity of a fetus. At the very least human potentiality is at stake in the latter case, which is far more valuable than an actual chicken. Or do you really believe that "a pig is a dog is a boy?" (I've never met anyone that actually does, despite what they may say to advance an agenda of consequence-free sexual activity...)
And for the record, Planned Parenthood and the like are rabidly opposed to informing women of the gruesome horrors of the abortion procedure - to say that women actually do know what's involved is not at all tru - in most cases, they may well have no idea - which is why abortion is so often associated with severe depression later in life, once the woman finds out what really happened, and that her baby suffered terribly as it was literally ripped limb-from-limb. (If you really want to know what the racist and anti-human agenda of Planned Parenthood is, I suggest reading Dr. George Grant's books on the subject - they are meticulously well-documented, and quite incontrovertibly show that Planned Parenthood is indeed sticking to Margaret Sanger's virulently racist and elitist ideals even today. (It's also a great indicator of callousness and lack of comapssion that the loss of a woman's productivity should even enter this discussion. I really don't even know how to begin to respond to such disregard for the plight of another person...)
Read, learn, and you may well be surprised by what you find, when you search for the real truth.
They also have a plan to use pulsars to see just how imperfect the atomic clocks are.
Terrific. So how do they check the pulsars? Or is it just turtles all the way down?
Ultimately, it's *always* turtles all the way down when it comes to measurements. Sooner or later, you have to pick *something* and say, "This is my standard against which all things are measured." Sadly, we have (and can have) no truly absolute metrics of physical quantities against which to measure. Witness continual redefinitions of basic SI units over the past few centuries for a perfect example...
Tha atomic cesium clocks are the standard because they are *believed* to be the most reliable timekeepers we have. But they may well be inconsistent, and subject to many vagaries in their regularity: quantum fluctations, distortions of space-time causing local compressions or expansions of time itself, or Vietnamese hegemony in Southeast Asia - we just don't know.
In fact, we *can't* know, so we pick something, and hope it's good enough, vainly hoping that in this small way, man really can be the measure of all things...
But anti-evolutionists are normally not driven by science, but rather faith, so no amount of argumentation (as shown by the ancient Usenet group talk.origins, in which the same arguments have been rehashed for decades) will persuade them.
I'm not going to turn this into an OT debate, but you're confusing "microevolution", that is, varying frequencies of existing genes to provide adaptive variations within a kind, with "macroevolution", or transition of one kind of living thing into another, which requires not modification, but *creation* of new genes and new information.
Only a very few wacko (IMO) anti-evolutionists would attempt to deny microevolution. It clearly exists and does indeed work in both theory and practice (and is not in the least bit inconsistent or incompatible with a creationist viewpoint.) Extending that to macroevolution is where the argument appears, as there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing is possible, and thousands of very good scientific reasons to believe that it is not. I find it continually intriguing that standards that are considered "absolute proof" in other areas (such as solid stistical analysis resulting in odds of 10e40:1 against)are not accepted by evolutionists. This is no doubt due to their treating their unsupportable theory of macroevolution as a "religion" in its own right...
A picture of a chicken leg rotted with feaces [sic, and sick] must be placed as a label on every KFC meal to indicate the toxicity of the animals' living conditions, then we'll see what happens when the consumer is informed.
I somehow suspect, based on your apparent political leanings, that your stance on this full disclosure issue would be wildly inconsistent if we were discussing abortion and the need to graphically depict to aborting mothers the gruesome and ghastly violence of a procedure that literally rips a cornered and helpless living being to shreds.
(A being, by the way, that is fully human by every testable method, and thus should be entitled to the full protection of the 13th and 14th amendments here in the US, since those amendments were explicitly intended to prevent any group of people from ever again being considered as sub-human...)
It's because it is the #1 argument the nuclear industry uses to oppose wind farms (often under the guise of a "public interest" pressure group). It is trotted out every single time.
Doesn't surprise me at all to know that Fox spreads this meme.
You're wrong, it was not the nuclear industry, FoxNews, or any other bogeyman your poilitics opposes that actually raised this as a real and significant issue.
The issue of bird deaths in wind turbines was first seriously raised by none other than the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, hardly bastions of anti-environmental rhetoric. This is a matter of public record, not opinion.
In fact, a Sierra Club official was quoted in the March 29-April 4, 1995, issue of SF Weekly calling wind tubines "the Cuisinarts of the air" in an article cleary showing such opposition to wind turbines. Similarly, the National Audubon Society has in the past called for a moratorium on wind turbine construction, a position they backed away from when pressured by radical environmental groups (thus proving that the radicals' agenda now outweighs the conservation and well-being of birds at the Audobon Society...)
<soapbox>Wind power is a joke, though: In addition to the bird problem, it descrates the landscape (and, yes I've driven past dozens of miles of such ugliness in California) and could not even exist without gill-advised government tax subsidies, since it is not economically viable as a serious alternative energy source on its own. The enviros' outright hatred of anything nuclear means they must always refuse to recognize that it produces more energy with less environmental impact than any other method. Is nuclear a panacea? Clearly not, and like all other energy sources it has some serious drawbacks. But it is the best option possible with known technology... <soapbox>
Eliminating Pentium 4 room-heaters would do more for the environment than all the wind turbines ever built.
Yeah..the XLR just looks weird; certainly the corvette engine makes it interesting.
All the new Cadillacs are hideous. In fact, here in Austin, I've noticed some people recently using the expression "ugly as a Cadillac" as a perjorative regarding design, style, or even architecture/structure.
Two instances come to mind - one was describing a ghastly room someone had seen on "Trading Spaces" or some similar show, the other was amongst Slashdot-type folks discussing the Windows Registry. (If the Registry isn't "ugly as a Cadillac", I don't know what is...)
Really, it's a shame, some of the new Cadillacs are actually decent cars (the CTS-V comes to mind), but there is no way I'd ever buy a car that ugly, no matter how good it is or how well it performs. Of course, my last experience with GM was with what was billed as "the best car GM can build" - the Aurora. Awesome engine, excellent body stiffness and handling, and the very worst of everything else. Interior trim quality was abysmal. The tan leather turned *green*. The cars far-too-numerous electronic systems were beset by demons and gremlins incessantly. When I finally traded the turkey in, the in-dash computer was on the fritz, the seats settled at a point about a tenth of an inch higher every time you adjusted them through the presets, which was the only way that they moved at all, and the twilight sentinel would lose its mind and flash the headlights on and off for no good reason when the car was parked in the garage, draining the battery. I've owned many Italian cars, and I never thought I'd see an American car with a worse electrical system. This "flagship of General Motors" was afflicted with worse problems than the 1974-75 Italian cars I've owned, built during the worst of the hard-core labor strikes and protests, when they were lucky to get anything out the door at all, and quality wasn't even mentioned...
Sadly, the Aurora ended my desire to support my own countrymen by buying American. I'm done with GM, done with Chrysler (what good is a long warranty if the company refuses to honor it?), and Ford seems to refuse to build anything I want to drive. (Why they don't offer SVT packages as options across their line, with automatic transmissions is beyond me - they have the incredible sales boost of the original Taurus SHO automatic to prove this is a combo people really want to buy...)
On the other hand, Acura seems to be cribbing from tha Alfa Romeo design department these days, so perhaps that will have to do until Alfa finally returns in 2007. (One of my favorite cars was a 1991 Alfa Romeo 164S - Awesome car, in every respect - the "S" is a *very* different car from the other 164s. Compare the bodyside groove of the new TL with the 164... )
What we didn't take into account was the severe difficult of converting all those legacy print documents into some easily manipulated online. Tools for creating online documents have improved a lot since then, but they still don't tackle a lot of basic problems, and many (Word, Acrobat) are still biased towards creating hard copy.
This is another benefit of fax as opposed to electronic files- So long as the fax isn't on that slimy thermal paper (meaning you either have a plain paper fax machine, or a secretary copies incoming faxes to a fax reader file, as is common in many companies), fax information is usable and readable for decades. Although I have tons of Mac, PC and Unix files in WordStar, MultiMate, WordPerfect, IslandOffice and even ancient Microsoft Word Files (not to mention 1-2-3, WingZ and probably seven different incompatible versions of Excel for the spreadsheets), actually reading any of those would be next to impossible today - I keep that stuff because disk space is cheap, and perhaps one day it will be easier to get use them, but to be honest, if I needed something, it would probably take half a day to put it in a usable form...)
Since electronic document formats have a half-life just the far side of bananas, paper starts to look like a damn good idea...
To be honest, I'm getting *really* tired of the "do everything electronically" crowd. Keeping paper copies of *everything* I've used and generated over the past 20 years would probably have considerably less adverse environmental impact than all the toxic disposable technology I've used to produce it over the years...
A few years ago I worked with an HP digital sender, which is really nice. You feed the paper, put in an e-mail address, and they get a PDF.
Of course, you're in for three grand for a $199 scanner with a bolted on $199 computer, for the convienience.
sounds like HP's usual value proposition - ouch. FYI, Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose's tpc.int has been able to bridge the fax and e-mail worlds for ten years, for free.
The tpc.int system sends the fax as a TIFF/F file (the bitmap specified by the G3 fax standard), rather than a PDF. (And Malamud and Rose are long gone from the project, which was picked up by Darren Nickerson at Oxford...) Since it starts as a bitmap scan rather than a document file anyway, there's not much difference - why bother to build a PDF of a bitmap? This is even less of a problem now that (finally!) XP can display TIFFs without extra software.
Aside: tpc.int is a rather unique domain name, btw. It prompted the UN to keep the riff-raff out by requiring later.int registerees to be recognized UN organizations - is this just another step to world tyranny by the UN?:-)
In an excellent troll you tell us fax machines are wonderful:... soo easy to use. They don't have operating systems... idiot proof, cheap, and portable....hey [sic] do one thing and do it well.
Actually, that's not a troll, it's what the *majority* of the world's people engaging in some form of electronic document communication and/or commerce actually believe, based on their actual practices, not spouting of platitudes...
The easiest to dispell things you say are:
* faxes have operating systems. They don't say Microsoft so they work but they are opeerating systems that can image, store and dial repeatedly.
Actually, most of them *don't* have operating systems by the traditional definition - being single function devices, fax machines don't need the things an OS provides, and to reduce cost and complexity, there's no reason to actually have an OS. Besides, you've missed the point, which was that it's not necessary to wiat for your fax machine to boot before you can use it, or reboot it because an OS gets wedged.
* faxes are not portable. Have you ever seen anyone carry a fax around? Did they also forward the land line that they were using? The mind boggles at that kind of "portability" compared to a laptop computer SSH and email.
So what? Fax machines are ubiquitous, and entirely interoperable worldwide. I can pretty much count on being able to send or receive a fax from any hotel in the world, ignoring the complexities of trying to connect to some literally third-world hacked-together ISP before I can even check my mail. I know it's a shock to you, but there are a lot of people whose time is far too valuable to spend tryuing to deal with the care and feeding of arcane technology.
Fax is definitely not elegant, but I find it more and more useful as time goes on, and I've been using the Internet and e-mail longer than some people here on Slashdot have been alive...
Give me a phone number to call you at, and tell me what phone number you want me to appear to be calling from. It will take me about as long to set the outbound caller ID up as it takes to actually dial the number.
Your approach will spoof CLID (Calling Line ID), but not ANI (Automatic Number Identification, which is what the telco uses for billing, etc. and is the basis for "official" record of calls.)
Perhaps you ought to read up on the way the telephone network really works (especially the SS7 parts that you can't touch at all) before making such sweeping generalizations about your ability to hack it. After all, the telcos have had decades of significant losses to phreakers and thier ilk as an incentive to make the system safe, secure, and relatively impervious to tampering.
*Really* spoofing the origin of a call on the phone network is practically impossible - and no, VoIP won't change that, because only licensed carriers can touch the SS7 network, which is what really matters for security and billing. The FCC and PTTs will pull the plug (and begin criminal investigations)in a heartbeat on anyone abusing the SS7 network - that's their job...
It's worth noting that substituting "evolution" for environmental results in a set of statements that is just as true. Like environmentalism, it is also a religion in its own right, and absolutely intolerant of anything that might question its own primacy.
This month's Disclosure puts this in great perspective...
When BSD peddlers like you say things like "there are a huge number of technical advantages" without having a single factual piece of evidence to back it up with. Same goes for your "less stable" crapola.
As for features, go use the web, I'm not doing your work for you. There are literally dozens of solid architectural reasons why the BSDs (and particularly Open BSD) are superior. This is especially true from a security point of view. (IMO, the Linux community rarely takes real security much more seriously than Microsoft does.)
The "with lots of eyeballs all bugs are shallow" approach does not and cannot assure good secure code - that takes real analysis by people that know what they're doing, which is exactly the BSD approach.
Systems are becoming incerasingly complex, which can create real security problems - witness XP for validation. The alternative is to simplify and verify the heck out of what's left. OpenBSD is the only organization I know of doing this, and doing so in a way that is publicly viewable, to boot. (That lets out the NSA's Linux...)
The market itself provides validation on the stability front, as the generally far-less-popular BSDs are actually far more prevalent in large service-provider types of installations where stability and reliability are highly valued by paying customers. (Think pair.com and the like.)
I primarily use Slackware. To date, I've had a total of zero crashes or stability problems with either it or FreeBSD. How is this "dramatically less stable"?
Sounds like you haven't used both extensively, or you would have seen some crashes. I've never encountered an OS that didn't crash when pushed hard in the right (or wrong) way, including UniCOS on the Cray.
Single-user slackware in a non-critical desktop role is a far cry from "mission critical enterprise" use, which is the role envisioned by Perens for UserLinux.
Of course BSD is superior to Linux in stability and robustness - all it takes is a look at the number of large-scale hosting providers that prefer it: BSD is far more prevalent in these markets than in some others, precisely because that market highly values the BSDs' advantages in performance, stability, security, and reliability. OpenBSD is demonstrably far more secure than Linux, which owes the security it does have to techniques pioneered by the BSD guys several years ago for detecting buffer overflow vulnerabilities and the like. OpenBSD is still a good two years ahead of Linux on the security front. That's enough of a difference to make a real difference.
I'm designing an embedded appliance now, and it will be BSD, because it's an order of magnitude more secure and stable than Linux. (And yes, I've looked extensively at both again just to make sure this is the right call. It is.)
Perhaps you should read to find out why the GPL is such a stunningly bad idea - I've read quite extensively on the subject. I suggest starting with Nikolai Bezroukov's excellent and very thorough treatment of the subject at SoftPanorama.org (Warning - reading this through thoughtfully and checking references will take a considerable amount of time, which is why most GPL proponents are so badly informed - they are generally unwilling to be anything other than shallow cheerleaders for RMS - actually thinking is way too much like work...)
The GPL was never a good idea, but the free/open source software community has gleaned what it can from that mess, and it's time to move on. Any suggestions I have for changing the BSD license do NOT turn it into the GPL, but rather are explicitly designed to *prevent* BSD licensed software from being GPL'ed. That was obvious if you were paying attention.
Don't bother to reply unless you've spent the time to read Bezroukov, as I no longer engage in flame wars with those that refuse to do thier homework...
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What is the best, high powered 100mw-200mw, high sensitivity receiver pcmcia/pccard adapter you can buy that works great with Linux? External antenna ports are a plus.
I have looked at the Senao 200mw cards and am thinking about buying one, good or bad choice?
I did a pretty thorough review of a bunch of (Globespan-Virata, nee Intersil) Prism chipset-based cards for my new startup just a few months ago, and the Senao is far and away the best, although the ubiquitous and very inexpensive Netgear MA401 was surprisingly good for the money, among lower-power cards. (I've heard some people say they don't like these, but I own several, purchased at different times, and all seem better than the average of other Prism-based cards. YMMV.)
The thing that makes the Senao cards great, surprisingly, isn't its high-power transmitter though (other companies offer those, too), but rather the fact that Senao's engineers were sharp enough to realize that a better transmitter doesn't really do much good without a better reciever to go with it.
The receiver is the weak spot in most Wi-Fi cards, and better performance here *really* pays off in the real world, which is why there are so many Senao fans among those building wireless setups that *need* to work.
FWIW, I think external antennae are a PITA if you're moving around, none of the tiny coax connectors are really going to stand the large number of mating cycles required to remove and reinstall the antenna everytime you relocate your laptop. If you really have to have the exteranl (for instance, if you plan to use it in a fixed installation in the future), you can get the compact "vampire tooth" antennae to snap into the Senao's MMCX connector from Netgate.com. (No connection, other than as a happy customer and friendships with the owners from when they lived here in Austin.)
These comments apply only to Senao's 802.11b Prism-based products. Their newer cards are based on chipsets from other vendors (Atheros Mercury for 802.11b/g, among others) , and I've heard those are not nearly so superior to their competition. (Not to mention you have to decide if Broadcom is right in thier claims that Atheros violates the spec., thus "poisoning the waterhole" by slowing other vendors' 802.11b radios in the vicinity to a crawl. I don't know if this is real or not yet, but anecdotal evidence seems to support it, although I don't use G myself...)
Really, this is the part that made me get to the point that now, if someone gives me a media url, if it can't be played in Quicktime or VLC I just don't bother.
Oh, come on, Quicktime is every bit as bad as Real about taking over media types. At least Real doesn't insist on making itself the only valid TIFF viewer on my system like Quicktime does.
All said, I hate Quicktime worse than Real - at least it's easier to reclaim stolen media formats from Real. Installing Quicktime pretty much hoses the machine until the next OS reinstall...
Yeah, you can cobble together basic PC, but to replace TiVo it needs to be
* Be quiet
Well, that would certainly make it different from a real TiVO. The HD in my Series 2 is so horrendously loud I'm thinking about just pitching the thing, and I've been known to unplug it because the noise it makes down in the living room bothers us in the master bedroom upstairs. I got mine for free (won it), but I've reached the conclusion that there's no way the thing is worth the $13 they charge me for "service" every month, especially when that service routinely whacks off the last 5 minutes of old movies, which are about all I care to watch. (The rest of TV really is a "vast wasteland"...)
* Be fast enough to encode MPEG and decode MPEG simultaneously
* Have a form factor that looks good under a TV
* Have an IR input
Calvary is one of the names for the place where Christ was crucified (allegedly, if you believe that stuff anyway, which I don't).
Whether or not you beleive in Christ's divinity, His crucifixion is the most well-established *fact* in all of history. And the event is by no means attested to only in Christian manuscripts, but in many, many secular manuscripts of the time as well.
The manuscript evidence for this event dwarfs that of any other happening in the ancient world. By any reasonable analysis of the data, one *has* to conclude that Christ was indeed crucified as the Bible relates the story. If not, then you *have* to throw out *everything* we "know" about the ancient world, because all of those events have far less proof available...
They do allow cigarettes, gum, and alcohol on the ISS, don't they? Of course! All of the movie space stations do!
I don't know about the other two, but I know for a fact that the Russians occasionally smoked on Mir, so the other two wouldnt surprise me at all.
Really nasty when you realize the difficulty of airing out such a situation - it's not like you can open a window... This was one of the reasons that the only time NASA astronauts tried to avoid a flight was as the American crew member on Mir. It was apparently quite rank, and although"you got used to it", it was never pleasant - kinda like hanging around in a stinky bar for months on end.
My source for this is not hearsay, but one of the astronauts himself that I was working with when I worked for Sun at JSC. (Well, not indirect hearsay, anyway - that particular astronaut had not flown on Mir, but was attempting to avoid such an assignment for this very reason. I left Sun shortly afterwards (mid-1997) and don't know if he was "drafted" for Mir service or not...)
A company is a monopoly when it has a particular community that is locked into their religion enough to allow them to utilize monopolistic practices without losing the community. Sun definitely has that community and has definitely utilized monopolistic practices such as buying out those that are competing for their particular community.
Sorry, but the facts show you're wrong on two points here:
1) Sun is definitely NOT a monopoly, even by your own criteria: There is absolutely nothing preventing 99% of Sun customers from switching to IBM, HP, or even Linux or BSD, for that matter. If they stay, it's because they want to, and find value in doing so. Almost all applications that run on SPARC Solaris function neraly identically on other platforms. That's hardly any way to "lock in" customers, and it is anything but a monopoly.
2) Sun is by no means an acquisitive company: In fact Sun is significantly *less* active in acquisitions than any of its competitors, in either the hardware or software spaces. This makes a great deal of sense, whn you think about it, since Scott has always been fixated on Sun being vertically integrated to the point of owning all its own core technologies, allowing it to be the only computer company in the world other than IBM that can make that claim. As a result, Sun doesn't *need* to acquire very much, so they don't. Compare Sun's acquisitions over the past ten years to say, IBM's or HP's (which, of course, includes Compaq's and DEC's acquisitions, too) in hardware, or a company like CA in software, and you'll see that Sun actually engages in *very* few acquisitions, the ones that it does engage in expand Sun's capabilities in important ways, like Highground's storage or Waveset's security software, for instance. In any case, acquisitions are almost never a monopolistic practice, and I can't think of a single one in which Sun could be reasonably accused of buying a technolgy to bury it. It seems rather that they're just staggeringly bad at integrating most things they buy. In reality, Sun would have been much better off if most of its acquisitions *hadn't* sunk without a trace. For instance, if Sun hadn't been so careless after buying Lighthouse Design (which gave Sun the world's premeire object-oriented office suite, which *could* have been ported to Java, I checked), then they might not have had to buy Star Division to get StarOffice only a couple of years later...
I've dealt with Sun both as a customer and an employee. Althogh maddening at times, Sun is generally that rare kind of company that you can trust and rely on as a customer, and also represent with integrity and honor as an employee. I've also worked for a large PC company here in Austin which is most deinitely NOT that kind of company on either count, so I fully appreciate the difference.
It is socially unacceptable to use that term when you are white because, let's face it, our European ancestors have committed one hell of a sin against African-Americans (not mention Native Americans).
What happened hundreds of years ago (whether or not my ancestors were involved) is absolutely irrelevant in this context. No one is enslaving anyone today - we are in fact all equal, as God made us, and no action of man can change that in any case.
If the historical fact of slavery is not irrelevant, then the damn Scandavians owe me some very serious reparations for repressing and enslaving my Celtic ancestors, and I suppose I'll have to get with others of my formerly oppressed kinsmen and make up a list of words and phrases that they may not use, because to do so would be "insensitive" or show "racial hatred".
I fail to see why blacks (oops, sorry, I'm not one, so I have to call them African-American, even though that phrase can refer to white South African immigrants) insist on claiming special staus and treatment. The fact is that pretty much all races and ethnic groups have both been enslaved and enslaved others at some point in their history. Mine, yours, black, white. It's over. Forget it.
No, Sun really *is* different, and far more open than any other mainline computer company (hardware or software)out there. In fact, not other company even approaches thier openness and thier commitment to it in terms of really putting their money where their mouth is. (Sure they have some proprietary hardware and software - That's no sin, and it often provides tremendous value for thier customers, who are quite glad they do so. I speak as a Sun customer off and on for almost 20 years, fully aware of every alternative.)
But let's look at just a few examples of Sun's openness over the years:
Hate Sun for other reasons if you want to, but it's just dead wrong to say they're not the most open large computer company on the planet. And yes, they beat IBM in that regard by a very large margin, not only now, but over their entire history. Unlike IBM, openness is and has been in Sun's DNA since day one. You cannot accuse Sun of being a "monopolist" with any degree of credibilty. It's just laughable. (BTW, Sun bought Cobalt mostly for Chilisoft, which is still an active and important Sun product that lives on in thier Java Applicaiton Server. So no, they didn't "trash" Cobalt, although they certainly could have managed it better...)
Sorry, forgot to include the links to e-smith:
e-smith.org The original Mitel developer site, which is moving to: contribs.org the community development site, and a repository for extensions and modifications for the server, as well as docs, howtos, and the new home for the user discussion forums.
Things are a bit rough at contribs.org right now, but they only found out Mitel was looking to hand the distro over a few weeks ago, so things are still (messily) in transition. It should be getting much smoother over the next few weeks...
Has anyone made an "Internet Appliance" to replace the Cobalt RAQ line? Although the RAQ line was not perfect, it's ease of use was unmatched.
There are lots of us using the Red Hat based e-smith distro for this. As mentioned in another post, it's currently being transitioned from Mitel back to full ownership by the developer community.
Installing and configuring e-smith on regular x86 hardware is about as easy as it gets - Seriously, anyone can use e-smith to install and configure a complete, working, secure server in less than half an hour, never once touching a command line prompt. And e-smith has a number of really cool features like "i-bay" virtual web/file servers and a high degree of integration between the various open source components, in addition to being a "just works" firewall/gateway, SMB/AFS server, Mail server (POP, IMAP, webmail), and much more.
Give e-smith a try, and I think you'll find it does pretty much everything you want a Cobalt to do, plus it has a more active and vibrant developer community, one that has been chomping at the bit to make improvements that are now more possible than ever with Mitel turning the code over to the community.
If you really want a preconfigured hardware/software solution you can find screwdriver shops that will sell you the e-smith/hardware combo, myezserver.com is one of them, run by an Darrell Mays, an active e-smith developer and contributor. There are others, but Darrell is the only one I've dealt with. I bought antivirus software and a hardware RAID unit from him, not one of his complete servers. The software was marginal (not his fault, just a marginal product), the RAID unit is great.
Sorry, but you wouldn't. Obviously, you've never actually looked a the degree of difficulty of creating a real server appliance distro. It's a LOT of work, and webmin doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what's required there.
For confirmation, not only can you now check out Cobalt's code (I'm excited Sun has decided to open up the code of an EOL'ed product line - this shows their commitment to open source is *real*), but you might wan to check out the other two preeminent server distros:
somehow suspect, based on your apparent political leanings, that your stance on this full disclosure issue would be wildly inconsistent if we were discussing abortion and the need to graphically depict to aborting mothers the gruesome and ghastly violence of a procedure that literally rips a cornered and helpless living being to shreds
Quite correct, as a woman usually knows full well what is involved in the process and with/without your knowledge has probably spent 100 hours crying over it and thinking it over, decreasing their work productivity. We wouldn't need speed limits in front of schools if status of disembowelled children were erected in the middle of the tarmac. What we need is more informed consumers
Thank you for verifying that you are willing to be wildly logically inconsistent in applying policy just to support your political views.
If the carnage involved in something as inconsequential as fried chicken requires full disclosure, then surely at least that much disclosure should be applied when a human life is at stake. "Informing" consumers cannot be required in one case and proscribed in the other, especially since far, far more is at stake in the latter case- an assertion that is true even if you deny the humanity of a fetus. At the very least human potentiality is at stake in the latter case, which is far more valuable than an actual chicken. Or do you really believe that "a pig is a dog is a boy?" (I've never met anyone that actually does, despite what they may say to advance an agenda of consequence-free sexual activity...)
And for the record, Planned Parenthood and the like are rabidly opposed to informing women of the gruesome horrors of the abortion procedure - to say that women actually do know what's involved is not at all tru - in most cases, they may well have no idea - which is why abortion is so often associated with severe depression later in life, once the woman finds out what really happened, and that her baby suffered terribly as it was literally ripped limb-from-limb. (If you really want to know what the racist and anti-human agenda of Planned Parenthood is, I suggest reading Dr. George Grant's books on the subject - they are meticulously well-documented, and quite incontrovertibly show that Planned Parenthood is indeed sticking to Margaret Sanger's virulently racist and elitist ideals even today. (It's also a great indicator of callousness and lack of comapssion that the loss of a woman's productivity should even enter this discussion. I really don't even know how to begin to respond to such disregard for the plight of another person...)
Read, learn, and you may well be surprised by what you find, when you search for the real truth.
They also have a plan to use pulsars to see just how imperfect the atomic clocks are.
Terrific. So how do they check the pulsars? Or is it just turtles all the way down?
Ultimately, it's *always* turtles all the way down when it comes to measurements. Sooner or later, you have to pick *something* and say, "This is my standard against which all things are measured." Sadly, we have (and can have) no truly absolute metrics of physical quantities against which to measure. Witness continual redefinitions of basic SI units over the past few centuries for a perfect example...
Tha atomic cesium clocks are the standard because they are *believed* to be the most reliable timekeepers we have. But they may well be inconsistent, and subject to many vagaries in their regularity: quantum fluctations, distortions of space-time causing local compressions or expansions of time itself, or Vietnamese hegemony in Southeast Asia - we just don't know.
In fact, we *can't* know, so we pick something, and hope it's good enough, vainly hoping that in this small way, man really can be the measure of all things...
But anti-evolutionists are normally not driven by science, but rather faith, so no amount of argumentation (as shown by the ancient Usenet group talk.origins, in which the same arguments have been rehashed for decades) will persuade them.
I'm not going to turn this into an OT debate, but you're confusing "microevolution", that is, varying frequencies of existing genes to provide adaptive variations within a kind, with "macroevolution", or transition of one kind of living thing into another, which requires not modification, but *creation* of new genes and new information.
Only a very few wacko (IMO) anti-evolutionists would attempt to deny microevolution. It clearly exists and does indeed work in both theory and practice (and is not in the least bit inconsistent or incompatible with a creationist viewpoint.) Extending that to macroevolution is where the argument appears, as there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing is possible, and thousands of very good scientific reasons to believe that it is not. I find it continually intriguing that standards that are considered "absolute proof" in other areas (such as solid stistical analysis resulting in odds of 10e40:1 against)are not accepted by evolutionists. This is no doubt due to their treating their unsupportable theory of macroevolution as a "religion" in its own right...
A picture of a chicken leg rotted with feaces [sic, and sick] must be placed as a label on every KFC meal to indicate the toxicity of the animals' living conditions, then we'll see what happens when the consumer is informed.
I somehow suspect, based on your apparent political leanings, that your stance on this full disclosure issue would be wildly inconsistent if we were discussing abortion and the need to graphically depict to aborting mothers the gruesome and ghastly violence of a procedure that literally rips a cornered and helpless living being to shreds.
(A being, by the way, that is fully human by every testable method, and thus should be entitled to the full protection of the 13th and 14th amendments here in the US, since those amendments were explicitly intended to prevent any group of people from ever again being considered as sub-human...)
It's because it is the #1 argument the nuclear industry uses to oppose wind farms (often under the guise of a "public interest" pressure group). It is trotted out every single time.
Doesn't surprise me at all to know that Fox spreads this meme.
You're wrong, it was not the nuclear industry, FoxNews, or any other bogeyman your poilitics opposes that actually raised this as a real and significant issue.
The issue of bird deaths in wind turbines was first seriously raised by none other than the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, hardly bastions of anti-environmental rhetoric. This is a matter of public record, not opinion.
In fact, a Sierra Club official was quoted in the March 29-April 4, 1995, issue of SF Weekly calling wind tubines "the Cuisinarts of the air" in an article cleary showing such opposition to wind turbines. Similarly, the National Audubon Society has in the past called for a moratorium on wind turbine construction, a position they backed away from when pressured by radical environmental groups (thus proving that the radicals' agenda now outweighs the conservation and well-being of birds at the Audobon Society...)
<soapbox>Wind power is a joke, though: In addition to the bird problem, it descrates the landscape (and, yes I've driven past dozens of miles of such ugliness in California) and could not even exist without gill-advised government tax subsidies, since it is not economically viable as a serious alternative energy source on its own. The enviros' outright hatred of anything nuclear means they must always refuse to recognize that it produces more energy with less environmental impact than any other method. Is nuclear a panacea? Clearly not, and like all other energy sources it has some serious drawbacks. But it is the best option possible with known technology... <soapbox>
Eliminating Pentium 4 room-heaters would do more for the environment than all the wind turbines ever built.
Yeah..the XLR just looks weird; certainly the corvette engine makes it interesting.
All the new Cadillacs are hideous. In fact, here in Austin, I've noticed some people recently using the expression "ugly as a Cadillac" as a perjorative regarding design, style, or even architecture/structure.
Two instances come to mind - one was describing a ghastly room someone had seen on "Trading Spaces" or some similar show, the other was amongst Slashdot-type folks discussing the Windows Registry. (If the Registry isn't "ugly as a Cadillac", I don't know what is...)
Really, it's a shame, some of the new Cadillacs are actually decent cars (the CTS-V comes to mind), but there is no way I'd ever buy a car that ugly, no matter how good it is or how well it performs. Of course, my last experience with GM was with what was billed as "the best car GM can build" - the Aurora. Awesome engine, excellent body stiffness and handling, and the very worst of everything else. Interior trim quality was abysmal. The tan leather turned *green*. The cars far-too-numerous electronic systems were beset by demons and gremlins incessantly. When I finally traded the turkey in, the in-dash computer was on the fritz, the seats settled at a point about a tenth of an inch higher every time you adjusted them through the presets, which was the only way that they moved at all, and the twilight sentinel would lose its mind and flash the headlights on and off for no good reason when the car was parked in the garage, draining the battery. I've owned many Italian cars, and I never thought I'd see an American car with a worse electrical system. This "flagship of General Motors" was afflicted with worse problems than the 1974-75 Italian cars I've owned, built during the worst of the hard-core labor strikes and protests, when they were lucky to get anything out the door at all, and quality wasn't even mentioned...
Sadly, the Aurora ended my desire to support my own countrymen by buying American. I'm done with GM, done with Chrysler (what good is a long warranty if the company refuses to honor it?), and Ford seems to refuse to build anything I want to drive. (Why they don't offer SVT packages as options across their line, with automatic transmissions is beyond me - they have the incredible sales boost of the original Taurus SHO automatic to prove this is a combo people really want to buy...)
On the other hand, Acura seems to be cribbing from tha Alfa Romeo design department these days, so perhaps that will have to do until Alfa finally returns in 2007. (One of my favorite cars was a 1991 Alfa Romeo 164S - Awesome car, in every respect - the "S" is a *very* different car from the other 164s. Compare the bodyside groove of the new TL with the 164... )
What we didn't take into account was the severe difficult of converting all those legacy print documents into some easily manipulated online. Tools for creating online documents have improved a lot since then, but they still don't tackle a lot of basic problems, and many (Word, Acrobat) are still biased towards creating hard copy.
This is another benefit of fax as opposed to electronic files- So long as the fax isn't on that slimy thermal paper (meaning you either have a plain paper fax machine, or a secretary copies incoming faxes to a fax reader file, as is common in many companies), fax information is usable and readable for decades. Although I have tons of Mac, PC and Unix files in WordStar, MultiMate, WordPerfect, IslandOffice and even ancient Microsoft Word Files (not to mention 1-2-3, WingZ and probably seven different incompatible versions of Excel for the spreadsheets), actually reading any of those would be next to impossible today - I keep that stuff because disk space is cheap, and perhaps one day it will be easier to get use them, but to be honest, if I needed something, it would probably take half a day to put it in a usable form...)
Since electronic document formats have a half-life just the far side of bananas, paper starts to look like a damn good idea...
To be honest, I'm getting *really* tired of the "do everything electronically" crowd. Keeping paper copies of *everything* I've used and generated over the past 20 years would probably have considerably less adverse environmental impact than all the toxic disposable technology I've used to produce it over the years...
A few years ago I worked with an HP digital sender, which is really nice. You feed the paper, put in an e-mail address, and they get a PDF.
.int registerees to be recognized UN organizations - is this just another step to world tyranny by the UN? :-)
Of course, you're in for three grand for a $199 scanner with a bolted on $199 computer, for the convienience.
sounds like HP's usual value proposition - ouch. FYI, Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose's tpc.int has been able to bridge the fax and e-mail worlds for ten years, for free.
The tpc.int system sends the fax as a TIFF/F file (the bitmap specified by the G3 fax standard), rather than a PDF. (And Malamud and Rose are long gone from the project, which was picked up by Darren Nickerson at Oxford...) Since it starts as a bitmap scan rather than a document file anyway, there's not much difference - why bother to build a PDF of a bitmap? This is even less of a problem now that (finally!) XP can display TIFFs without extra software.
Aside: tpc.int is a rather unique domain name, btw. It prompted the UN to keep the riff-raff out by requiring later
In an excellent troll you tell us fax machines are wonderful: ... soo easy to use. They don't have operating systems ... idiot proof, cheap, and portable. ...hey [sic] do one thing and do it well.
Actually, that's not a troll, it's what the *majority* of the world's people engaging in some form of electronic document communication and/or commerce actually believe, based on their actual practices, not spouting of platitudes...
The easiest to dispell things you say are:
* faxes have operating systems. They don't say Microsoft so they work but they are opeerating systems that can image, store and dial repeatedly.
Actually, most of them *don't* have operating systems by the traditional definition - being single function devices, fax machines don't need the things an OS provides, and to reduce cost and complexity, there's no reason to actually have an OS. Besides, you've missed the point, which was that it's not necessary to wiat for your fax machine to boot before you can use it, or reboot it because an OS gets wedged.
* faxes are not portable. Have you ever seen anyone carry a fax around? Did they also forward the land line that they were using? The mind boggles at that kind of "portability" compared to a laptop computer SSH and email.
So what? Fax machines are ubiquitous, and entirely interoperable worldwide. I can pretty much count on being able to send or receive a fax from any hotel in the world, ignoring the complexities of trying to connect to some literally third-world hacked-together ISP before I can even check my mail. I know it's a shock to you, but there are a lot of people whose time is far too valuable to spend tryuing to deal with the care and feeding of arcane technology.
Fax is definitely not elegant, but I find it more and more useful as time goes on, and I've been using the Internet and e-mail longer than some people here on Slashdot have been alive...
Give me a phone number to call you at, and tell me what phone number you want me to appear to be calling from. It will take me about as long to set the outbound caller ID up as it takes to actually dial the number.
Your approach will spoof CLID (Calling Line ID), but not ANI (Automatic Number Identification, which is what the telco uses for billing, etc. and is the basis for "official" record of calls.)
Perhaps you ought to read up on the way the telephone network really works (especially the SS7 parts that you can't touch at all) before making such sweeping generalizations about your ability to hack it. After all, the telcos have had decades of significant losses to phreakers and thier ilk as an incentive to make the system safe, secure, and relatively impervious to tampering.
*Really* spoofing the origin of a call on the phone network is practically impossible - and no, VoIP won't change that, because only licensed carriers can touch the SS7 network, which is what really matters for security and billing. The FCC and PTTs will pull the plug (and begin criminal investigations)in a heartbeat on anyone abusing the SS7 network - that's their job...
It's worth noting that substituting "evolution" for environmental results in a set of statements that is just as true. Like environmentalism, it is also a religion in its own right, and absolutely intolerant of anything that might question its own primacy.
This month's Disclosure puts this in great perspective...
When BSD peddlers like you say things like "there are a huge number of technical advantages" without having a single factual piece of evidence to back it up with. Same goes for your "less stable" crapola.
As for features, go use the web, I'm not doing your work for you. There are literally dozens of solid architectural reasons why the BSDs (and particularly Open BSD) are superior. This is especially true from a security point of view. (IMO, the Linux community rarely takes real security much more seriously than Microsoft does.)
The "with lots of eyeballs all bugs are shallow" approach does not and cannot assure good secure code - that takes real analysis by people that know what they're doing, which is exactly the BSD approach.
Systems are becoming incerasingly complex, which can create real security problems - witness XP for validation. The alternative is to simplify and verify the heck out of what's left. OpenBSD is the only organization I know of doing this, and doing so in a way that is publicly viewable, to boot. (That lets out the NSA's Linux...)
The market itself provides validation on the stability front, as the generally far-less-popular BSDs are actually far more prevalent in large service-provider types of installations where stability and reliability are highly valued by paying customers. (Think pair.com and the like.)
I've used both extensively
As have I.
I primarily use Slackware. To date, I've had a total of zero crashes or stability problems with either it or FreeBSD. How is this "dramatically less stable"?
Sounds like you haven't used both extensively, or you would have seen some crashes. I've never encountered an OS that didn't crash when pushed hard in the right (or wrong) way, including UniCOS on the Cray.
Single-user slackware in a non-critical desktop role is a far cry from "mission critical enterprise" use, which is the role envisioned by Perens for UserLinux.
Of course BSD is superior to Linux in stability and robustness - all it takes is a look at the number of large-scale hosting providers that prefer it: BSD is far more prevalent in these markets than in some others, precisely because that market highly values the BSDs' advantages in performance, stability, security, and reliability. OpenBSD is demonstrably far more secure than Linux, which owes the security it does have to techniques pioneered by the BSD guys several years ago for detecting buffer overflow vulnerabilities and the like. OpenBSD is still a good two years ahead of Linux on the security front. That's enough of a difference to make a real difference.
I'm designing an embedded appliance now, and it will be BSD, because it's an order of magnitude more secure and stable than Linux. (And yes, I've looked extensively at both again just to make sure this is the right call. It is.)
Perhaps you should read to find out why the GPL is such a stunningly bad idea - I've read quite extensively on the subject. I suggest starting with Nikolai Bezroukov's excellent and very thorough treatment of the subject at SoftPanorama.org (Warning - reading this through thoughtfully and checking references will take a considerable amount of time, which is why most GPL proponents are so badly informed - they are generally unwilling to be anything other than shallow cheerleaders for RMS - actually thinking is way too much like work...)
The GPL was never a good idea, but the free/open source software community has gleaned what it can from that mess, and it's time to move on. Any suggestions I have for changing the BSD license do NOT turn it into the GPL, but rather are explicitly designed to *prevent* BSD licensed software from being GPL'ed. That was obvious if you were paying attention.
Don't bother to reply unless you've spent the time to read Bezroukov, as I no longer engage in flame wars with those that refuse to do thier homework...