Several months ago, I was looking to switch the non-profit site that I run from it's current virtual hosting home (MindSpring) to a new virtual hosting provider, primarily because MindSpring was charging near the top of the line for not a whole lot of disk space (about 50 bucks for 20 MB, or something like that).
At the time that I was searching, I heard from somebody else about CIHost, and what I saw on their site was too good to believe. I don't remember the numbers (and I can't hit their site to refresh my memory), but it was perhaps 300 MB of disk space and all the fixin's... you know, MySQL database, Real Server, shell account, multiple users, yada yada.... for less then I was paying at MindSpring.
They definitely looked like the right one, so I picked up the phone and gave them a call. You can talk to me about e-mail tech support 'til you're blue in the face. Even as an internet guy, I don't give a rat's ass. I'm pickin' up a phone when I need something, and you'd better be there to answer it and to give a hand.
Well, as I recall (I've kind of blocked it out), they didn't even answer the phone AT ALL the first couple of times I called. Oh yeah, I think I remember now... they had a "press 1 for sales, 2 full body shampoo, 3 for something else" menu. I pressed 1 and nobody answered. I finally gave up and used the other option, in hopes of getting SOMEBODY on the phone. Ah yes, the other option was billing. Big surprise that the people who collect the bucks were there to answer the phone. I reamed out some chick in billing and let her know that I expected somebody in sales to answer the damn phone. I don't remember much else, except that the sales person I finally spoke with had an attitude that I didn't agree with. I was asking him questions like, "How many people work at your company?" and things like that, because you never know about these web storefronts. He danced around my questions like he was REAL uncomfortable talking about things like that.
It was then that I decided that it didn't matter how good the deal was... I just didn't want to screw around with that. Especially the fact that there's no telephone tech support. That's one thing I'll give MindSpring, aside from the fact that the site has NEVER been down: They're tech support rocks... on the phone 24/7, and they'll talk to you for as long as it takes to resolve issues. They're great. Oh, and they raised our disk space up at about that same time, so we didn't need to move after all.
BTW, we have definitely outgrown virtual hosting and will be moving to Digital Nation, which happens to be where/. is hosted (although that wasn't the reason we chose it).
This current CIHost thing is sad as hell. It's quite obvious that they're lying and it's much worse than they're letting on. Any minor snag would have been fixed. Some dumbass lost probably lost serious quantities of data and they've been trying to figure out how to spin it ever since. All on top of trying to deal with the planned Y2K stuff. Sucks.
Oh, happy Y2K... it was actually FUN watching the 'round the world with Peter Jennings thing on ABC. Go figure.
Go ahead and moderate this down... it doesn't matter to me. I just looked at the source of my previous post and not one, but BOTH of my links are missing the closing anchor tag, and it's just not possible that I would miss both of them... besides, they were right in the preview.
So here we go, two links: One with a captital A in the closing tag and one with a lowercase a:
Well ain't that a kick in the head! I had two links in this post, both were checked and previewed. Now I see the post on the site and my last link is one of those incredibly annoying endless links that was never closed.
I promise, I previewed and it was fine. Any further critiquing of the link problem in my post will be superfluous:) Thanks.
Roblimo wrote: "Free clue for Fox: start by dumping the flashy splash page. All it adds to the site is download time."
Sorry Rob, I've got to disagree with you on this. I'm sure the/. crowd is no fan of Flash, and there can be a multitude of reasons for it (in all honesty, there's a lot of "If it looks nice it must suck" in this community. Not everybody, but many).
Anyway, amid all the reasons, download time shouldn't be it. Sure you *could* make a Flash movie that requires the browser to download all day before it starts, but most Flash downloads very quickly. And if it's big, there's a small initial download followed by streaming.
That has been true from the earliest days of the technology, when it was called FutureSplash (before Macromedia bought it).
Many of us geeks enjoy the whole multimedia experience, even in a web browser under the right circumstances, as long as it's done right and isn't forced upon us when we don't want it. Kind of like porn, now that I think about it:)
If this has been discussed recently, I missed it and I apologize.
I think it's all in the ticker and in the company's new name. Calling themselves "VA Linux" and LNUX is causing the unwashed masses to think they are Linux. All the hype that they've been hearing about? Oh, that's where this Linux thing comes from. This company called VA that makes an operating system called Linux. They must be the next Microsoft.
Was it wrong for VA to choose a ticker symbol that suggests that their company is all about linux, when actually their company is all about hardware? Perhaps.
Dell Computer is not considered to be a Microsoft Windows company. They're a hardware company that made a choice early on to install the Operating System that they believed in. Now they're also choosing Linux, but that's pretty recent.
VA is not Linux. Red Hat is much closer to "being" Linux than VA is, and they're certainly not Linux either. Linux is a group of people all over the world, and they can't be bought and sold on Nasdaq or anywhere else.
I'm done ranting, I think. If you made it this far, you might as well moderate my sorry ass up:)
So, curiosity, having killed the cat, came knocking on my door. Streaming TV on the web, huh? OK, I'll take a look.
"Enter your Canadian area code" the site says. Ah, this is rock solid security. How many slashdotters don't know where to find a list of area codes on the web. Ah, there's one. I think I'll use 604.
Then comes the surprise. Now I have to "certify", which consists of anonymously clicking a button, that I'm actually in Canada! Oh, this is ripe. It wouldn't terribly difficult for them to make a good solid guess based on my IP address -- then they could have dismissed me early on. Does this remind anybody of a "Yes I've over 18" button on a porn site? not that I've ever seen a porn site, mind you... but I've heard about them:)
What the hell! I went ahead and clicked the "I'm in Canada" button... what's the worst that could happen, right? Then the Terms & Conditions, blah, blah, blah... agree, agree, agree...
Then I get a friggin' link to a RealAudio stream, which is pretty funny because the crappy firewall at my work doesn't let RealAudio get through. So there you have it. Game over:(
Yep, it seems I did indeed echo exactly what you said. Strange. I either misread your post the first time or replied to the wrong one. Either way, it looks pretty dumb now:)
Sure it's enforceable. Have you ever used demo software that said, "Sorry, you can't Save in this version. Please register your software today!". The software always knows what it's doing. So W2K can know how many licenses you've purchased and tell your sixth concurrent user, "Hey, this loser site only purchased 5 licenses and you're the 6th. Please send an e-mail to webmaster@losersite.microsoft.com to join us in calling them a loser."
No, because CGI authentication is different. It's not really authentication as far as the webserver is concerned. With W2K's integrated webserver, the OS knows what the webserver knows and vice-versa. So if you use actual HTTP authentication (so the little browser dialogue box pops up asking for username and password), the webserver will need an account for you, hence the OS sees that as a unique client, hence you have to pay the CAL.
On the other hand, using some sort of CGI authentication, as is the case with most online stores, nobody is authenticated with the webserver software itself, and users are stored in a backend data source.
I agree that the C-Net article is misleading, as it pretty clearly says that client authentication is required for secure electronic commerce.
I recently had an experience with the problem of computer re-naming.
At my previous employer, I was the de facto Network Administrator. Before I started doing that job in addition to my development job, when I had first joined the company, they had one server named ATLPROD1. This office was in Atlanta, it was a production server, and it was NT (which seems to prefer CAPITALIZATION).
A few months down the road, there was a development server added, which inevitably became ATLDEV1. The trend had begun and there appeared to be no stopping it. Next came ATLDEV2, and it went on from there.
One day, ATLPROD1 died and was replaced very rapidly with a brand new box called, of course, ATLPROD1. When the box formerly known as ATLPROD1 was fixed (you see where this is going?), it was temporarily called ATLPROD2. We then decided that ATLGATE (the crappy P90 they had given me for the Linux firewall, surprise surprise) needed to be decommisioned, so we took it out of production service and named it ATLGATE2, switched ATLDEV2 to ATLGATE, and switched ATLPROD2 to ATLDEV2. Needless to say, this was confusing.
If each computer had been given it's own name and, hence, it's own identity, letting everybody know that different computers were going to be doing different jobs would be as easy as explaining new jobs that people they know will be doing.
>We understand why you're doing this, but we can't let you do this, and here's the reasons why.
That's just it... they *don't* understand. The spirit of the letter is, "You have chosen to use our registered trademark as the title of your 'chat room', and we would like you to call it something else". And they're completely wrong. If they would research it the slightest bit, they would realize that what they found is a record of things that were said by other people. They obviously don't get that at all.
Let's say that I'm filming a documentary on the streets of New York City. It's a "real life" type of thing, following around crack dealers or something. One of them, in a conversation about his wares, says something along the lines of, "Good to the last drop".
Sure, it's a Maxwell House ad, but I didn't use it in the the context of an advertisement for something. It was an incidental comment made by someone, and it happened to get captured as a very small part of a larger work.
Now, let's continue and suppose that the documentary is aired by PBS, and some lawyer from Kraft Foods saw it and considered taking action against PBS, or perhaps myself, as the producer of the work.
Now one might argue that this is very different, because it was aired on PBS one time and now it's over. OK, let's take it one step further and suppose that PBS liked this documentary so much that they decided to sell the video. There they go, blatantly using Maxwell House's slogan to sell their video, erroding the brand recognition that in which they have invested so much.
Is this the stupidest thing you've ever heard? Me too, and I see no difference between the two.
Along the same lines, if somebody out there is looking for a delicious and nutricious project, I'm sure you could find a slogan or something in CNN's transcript archives, which would be pretty much the EXACT same thing as we're talking about in this story.
BTW, I suppose my using the actual slogan in this posting is just as serious an infraction, so I'm sure Kraft will be jumping on Rob and the Boys real soon.
Yes. This is very good, and along the lines of what I was thinking, but I would expand on this statement:
-------snip-------- That message is really nothing more than a suggestion that someone publish a book entitled "Sendmail for Dummies". -------snip--------
Here's my version:
-------snip-------- That message is really nothing more than a suggestion that someone, either IDG or another publisher, publish a "...for Dummies" style book. As you know, your name recognition is exceptional, thanks to the great series of books that you have published. -------snip--------
Seriously, if you don't know where to find Yahoo, it's time to pull the friggin' plug. I'm not one of those hardliners, either. I'm all for newbie accessibility. But you've gotta start somewhere. If you can't get to www.yahoo.com, forget it. </RANT>
Oh, BTW, we've all seen people put hostnames in search engines, haven't we? Isn't that the funniest thing? I remember seeing my wife typing "www.lifetimetv.com" in a Yahoo! search box...
I'm not sure how new and exciting this is. Thinking of a screensaver, I think this is very similar to what we already have.
When most people touch the mouse, they can't help but move it. What's keeping the applications of today from having toolbars fade away after an input timeout and come back as soon as the mouse is moved slightly (in most cases, that would be when it's touched).
Is it a cool invention? Sure, it's great to make devices more responsive to natural human movements, but I don't see this as revolutionary... moreover, I stuggle to think of even one piece of real functionality that this mouse would enable, that cannot be done today.
I wasn't going to mention this product, since it's doesn't meet your "800-number" requirement... but I saw similar stuff posted, so I thought I would toss it out there: MiniVend is an interestingly feature-rich product done largely in Perl.
The installer takes the administrator throught an intensive Q&A session, asking everything from what user will be running MiniVend to what background colors you want your default pages. It loads up sample data and starts up a fully-functional store that you can use as soon as it's installed.
There's a lot more to MiniVend. I've looked at it only briefly, out of curiosity, and I have yet to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (as if anyone would care:) I'm just throwing it out there.
First of all, I agree with davie's reply to your post. Aliases are your friend, and it's one very simple example of the customizations that you can make to make things easier for you. If you don't like the name of a command, make an alias to it or a link to it. You can't expect the people who maintain the command to anticipate everything that anybody in the world might be more comfortable typing. They make a command that does what it's supposed to do and document it. That's enough.
To continue:
> Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself...
Perhaps you haven't seen KDE... double-click the CD-ROM icon on the desktop and the CDROM is mounted automatically. Get over it.
>...nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware...
I can't tell you the last time I had to manually give an IRQ and an I/O address under Linux. My last install, my NIC card was autodetected without even prompting me for which one to look for, my video card the same way, and my monitor was right there on the list.
> A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros...
Pick one: Gnome or KDE. They're both great and free. Red Hat comes with both. As far as all distributions coming with them (I think most do), surely you can admit that "Joe Blow" isn't going to go out and get Debian. Let's concentrate on making a couple of distributions "good enough" for Joe. Hey, how about you come out with JBLinux? Never mind.
> Official suppourt from hardware vendors...
Well, that one's up to the hardware vendors, isn't it? Many do have it, finally.
> Just because M$ and Apple are the big commercial doesn't necessarily make all their ideas evil...
That's true, and I defend those operating systems based on the good they have done for the popularily of personal computing.
>...we should feel free to clone the parts of their interfaces that make computers easy to use.
Gee, you haven't seen KDE, have you? Win, win, win! If it's not a blatant copy of Windows 95, I don't know what is. And I'm not saying that's an incredibly bad thing, either.
Now I get it -- I'm a mapper! And I've been working with packers all my life (and a mapper here and there, of course).
No wonder all the TQM and ISO 9000 and Vision Statements and Mission Statements seem to me to be a pile of crap, and yet genuine "quality" has always been more important to me that to everyone else.
No wonder it's so important for me to gain a real understanding of the problem, while everyone else just dusts off one of their old methodologies.
Suddenly it all becomes clear. I can't wait to read the rest of it!
Slashdot Mirror
At the time that I was searching, I heard from somebody else about CIHost, and what I saw on their site was too good to believe. I don't remember the numbers (and I can't hit their site to refresh my memory), but it was perhaps 300 MB of disk space and all the fixin's... you know, MySQL database, Real Server, shell account, multiple users, yada yada.... for less then I was paying at MindSpring.
They definitely looked like the right one, so I picked up the phone and gave them a call. You can talk to me about e-mail tech support 'til you're blue in the face. Even as an internet guy, I don't give a rat's ass. I'm pickin' up a phone when I need something, and you'd better be there to answer it and to give a hand.
Well, as I recall (I've kind of blocked it out), they didn't even answer the phone AT ALL the first couple of times I called. Oh yeah, I think I remember now... they had a "press 1 for sales, 2 full body shampoo, 3 for something else" menu. I pressed 1 and nobody answered. I finally gave up and used the other option, in hopes of getting SOMEBODY on the phone. Ah yes, the other option was billing. Big surprise that the people who collect the bucks were there to answer the phone. I reamed out some chick in billing and let her know that I expected somebody in sales to answer the damn phone. I don't remember much else, except that the sales person I finally spoke with had an attitude that I didn't agree with. I was asking him questions like, "How many people work at your company?" and things like that, because you never know about these web storefronts. He danced around my questions like he was REAL uncomfortable talking about things like that.
It was then that I decided that it didn't matter how good the deal was... I just didn't want to screw around with that. Especially the fact that there's no telephone tech support. That's one thing I'll give MindSpring, aside from the fact that the site has NEVER been down: They're tech support rocks... on the phone 24/7, and they'll talk to you for as long as it takes to resolve issues. They're great. Oh, and they raised our disk space up at about that same time, so we didn't need to move after all.
BTW, we have definitely outgrown virtual hosting and will be moving to Digital Nation, which happens to be where /. is hosted (although that wasn't the reason we chose it).
This current CIHost thing is sad as hell. It's quite obvious that they're lying and it's much worse than they're letting on. Any minor snag would have been fixed. Some dumbass lost probably lost serious quantities of data and they've been trying to figure out how to spin it ever since. All on top of trying to deal with the planned Y2K stuff. Sucks.
Oh, happy Y2K... it was actually FUN watching the 'round the world with Peter Jennings thing on ABC. Go figure.
Later,
RP
I guess not everybody has given up on client-side Java.
RP
So here we go, two links: One with a captital A in the closing tag and one with a lowercase a:
slashdot test | slashdot test
And now some additional text to see if the link turned off.
OK, I just previewed it and it's perfect. Now submitting...
Sorry for the test, but you gotta relieve curiosity.
RP
I promise, I previewed and it was fine. Any further critiquing of the link problem in my post will be superfluous :) Thanks.
RP
I saw somewhere a few months ago (don't you love it when people really back up their information like that?) that the growth of the web vs. the available indexing technology meant that only about 4% of the web was being indexed. Goodness, that's a surprisingly low number, isn't it? I've heard it mentioned, and have often mulled over the idea myself, that some sort of distributed indexing is probably the next logical step. With the apparent successes of distributed.net and SETI@home, this is at the very least intriguing. So let's just say, for the sake of discussion, that I had some time on my hands and the motivation to see a monster search database project through (these are both very hypothetical points). I could create the central database and write some client code. My dedicated AOV (Army of Volunteers) could come in veritable droves to download the client code and join the team (which they certainly would, right? Right?!?!?) Anyway, their client would initialize and get one of the starting URLs from the root database and go to down indexing and spidering. Shouldn't be too much of a bandwidth hog, since it will be just text, but it would be constant. Maybe not a good idea to do this with an analog modem. When the client has "eaten it's fill", or once a day, or something like that, it would slam it's content my way.... ah, there's a potential problem. That's a lot of content. Well, it's all text, so my client could maybe get some decent compression out of it by gzipping it up. Still, it wouldn't exactly be trivial. Thinking on about this, why will it help me to have my AOV doing these HTTP transactions for me when my server could do them it's own damn self. Surely my server would have a big enough pipe that the bandwidth wouldn't be a problem, and I could start any number of processes. What's the big difference between web indexing sites like distributed.net and SETI@home? Ah, it's processing power. That's what's required for the "traditional" distributed application. That kind of number crunching isn't helped by bandwidth... you need such a honkin' processor to do all that chewing that it's not cost-effective to create the system... it makes a whole lot more sense to distribute the work to any number of "normal" machines, thereby simulating a "super computer". That's right... it's all coming back to me now. So, what would be helped by distributing the web indexing process? And wouldn't the smart fellas at Google or AltaVista or have thought this through by now and come out with some sort of beta? Hmmmmmmmmmmm...... What? You actually read this whole thing? Sheesh. That's impressive. Oh well, might as well moderate me up :) RP
Thanks for your time :)
RP
"Free clue for Fox: start by dumping the flashy splash page. All it adds to the site is download time."
Sorry Rob, I've got to disagree with you on this. I'm sure the /. crowd is no fan of Flash, and there can be a multitude of reasons for it (in all honesty, there's a lot of "If it looks nice it must suck" in this community. Not everybody, but many).
Anyway, amid all the reasons, download time shouldn't be it. Sure you *could* make a Flash movie that requires the browser to download all day before it starts, but most Flash downloads very quickly. And if it's big, there's a small initial download followed by streaming.
That has been true from the earliest days of the technology, when it was called FutureSplash (before Macromedia bought it).
Many of us geeks enjoy the whole multimedia experience, even in a web browser under the right circumstances, as long as it's done right and isn't forced upon us when we don't want it. Kind of like porn, now that I think about it :)
RP
I think it's all in the ticker and in the company's new name. Calling themselves "VA Linux" and LNUX is causing the unwashed masses to think they are Linux. All the hype that they've been hearing about? Oh, that's where this Linux thing comes from. This company called VA that makes an operating system called Linux. They must be the next Microsoft.
Was it wrong for VA to choose a ticker symbol that suggests that their company is all about linux, when actually their company is all about hardware? Perhaps.
Dell Computer is not considered to be a Microsoft Windows company. They're a hardware company that made a choice early on to install the Operating System that they believed in. Now they're also choosing Linux, but that's pretty recent.
VA is not Linux. Red Hat is much closer to "being" Linux than VA is, and they're certainly not Linux either. Linux is a group of people all over the world, and they can't be bought and sold on Nasdaq or anywhere else.
I'm done ranting, I think. If you made it this far, you might as well moderate my sorry ass up :)
RP
"Enter your Canadian area code" the site says. Ah, this is rock solid security. How many slashdotters don't know where to find a list of area codes on the web. Ah, there's one. I think I'll use 604.
Then comes the surprise. Now I have to "certify", which consists of anonymously clicking a button, that I'm actually in Canada! Oh, this is ripe. It wouldn't terribly difficult for them to make a good solid guess based on my IP address -- then they could have dismissed me early on. Does this remind anybody of a "Yes I've over 18" button on a porn site? not that I've ever seen a porn site, mind you... but I've heard about them :)
What the hell! I went ahead and clicked the "I'm in Canada" button... what's the worst that could happen, right? Then the Terms & Conditions, blah, blah, blah... agree, agree, agree...
Then I get a friggin' link to a RealAudio stream, which is pretty funny because the crappy firewall at my work doesn't let RealAudio get through. So there you have it. Game over :(
RP
RP
RP
On the other hand, using some sort of CGI authentication, as is the case with most online stores, nobody is authenticated with the webserver software itself, and users are stored in a backend data source.
I agree that the C-Net article is misleading, as it pretty clearly says that client authentication is required for secure electronic commerce.
RP
At my previous employer, I was the de facto Network Administrator. Before I started doing that job in addition to my development job, when I had first joined the company, they had one server named ATLPROD1. This office was in Atlanta, it was a production server, and it was NT (which seems to prefer CAPITALIZATION).
A few months down the road, there was a development server added, which inevitably became ATLDEV1. The trend had begun and there appeared to be no stopping it. Next came ATLDEV2, and it went on from there.
One day, ATLPROD1 died and was replaced very rapidly with a brand new box called, of course, ATLPROD1. When the box formerly known as ATLPROD1 was fixed (you see where this is going?), it was temporarily called ATLPROD2. We then decided that ATLGATE (the crappy P90 they had given me for the Linux firewall, surprise surprise) needed to be decommisioned, so we took it out of production service and named it ATLGATE2, switched ATLDEV2 to ATLGATE, and switched ATLPROD2 to ATLDEV2. Needless to say, this was confusing.
If each computer had been given it's own name and, hence, it's own identity, letting everybody know that different computers were going to be doing different jobs would be as easy as explaining new jobs that people they know will be doing.
RP
RP
That's just it... they *don't* understand. The spirit of the letter is, "You have chosen to use our registered trademark as the title of your 'chat room', and we would like you to call it something else". And they're completely wrong. If they would research it the slightest bit, they would realize that what they found is a record of things that were said by other people. They obviously don't get that at all.
RP
Sure, it's a Maxwell House ad, but I didn't use it in the the context of an advertisement for something. It was an incidental comment made by someone, and it happened to get captured as a very small part of a larger work.
Now, let's continue and suppose that the documentary is aired by PBS, and some lawyer from Kraft Foods saw it and considered taking action against PBS, or perhaps myself, as the producer of the work.
Now one might argue that this is very different, because it was aired on PBS one time and now it's over. OK, let's take it one step further and suppose that PBS liked this documentary so much that they decided to sell the video. There they go, blatantly using Maxwell House's slogan to sell their video, erroding the brand recognition that in which they have invested so much.
Is this the stupidest thing you've ever heard? Me too, and I see no difference between the two.
Along the same lines, if somebody out there is looking for a delicious and nutricious project, I'm sure you could find a slogan or something in CNN's transcript archives, which would be pretty much the EXACT same thing as we're talking about in this story.
BTW, I suppose my using the actual slogan in this posting is just as serious an infraction, so I'm sure Kraft will be jumping on Rob and the Boys real soon.
That's my take,
RP
-------snip--------
That message is really nothing more than a suggestion that someone publish a book entitled "Sendmail for Dummies".
-------snip--------
Here's my version:
-------snip--------
That message is really nothing more than a suggestion that someone, either IDG or another publisher, publish a "...for Dummies" style book. As you know, your name recognition is exceptional, thanks to the great series of books that you have published.
-------snip--------
RP
Seriously, if you don't know where to find Yahoo, it's time to pull the friggin' plug. I'm not one of those hardliners, either. I'm all for newbie accessibility. But you've gotta start somewhere. If you can't get to www.yahoo.com, forget it.
</RANT>
Oh, BTW, we've all seen people put hostnames in search engines, haven't we? Isn't that the funniest thing? I remember seeing my wife typing "www.lifetimetv.com" in a Yahoo! search box...
RP
When most people touch the mouse, they can't help but move it. What's keeping the applications of today from having toolbars fade away after an input timeout and come back as soon as the mouse is moved slightly (in most cases, that would be when it's touched).
Is it a cool invention? Sure, it's great to make devices more responsive to natural human movements, but I don't see this as revolutionary... moreover, I stuggle to think of even one piece of real functionality that this mouse would enable, that cannot be done today.
But maybe that's just me...
RP
Oh yeah, that hit me hard too. But your "Come on Ma" quote was what put me over the edge :) RP
Is it just me, or does the YAMS logo look like Mr. Hanky and a couple of his buddies? RP
The installer takes the administrator throught an intensive Q&A session, asking everything from what user will be running MiniVend to what background colors you want your default pages. It loads up sample data and starts up a fully-functional store that you can use as soon as it's installed.
There's a lot more to MiniVend. I've looked at it only briefly, out of curiosity, and I have yet to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (as if anyone would care :) I'm just throwing it out there.
RP
To continue:
> Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself...
Perhaps you haven't seen KDE... double-click the CD-ROM icon on the desktop and the CDROM is mounted automatically. Get over it.
> ...nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware...
I can't tell you the last time I had to manually give an IRQ and an I/O address under Linux. My last install, my NIC card was autodetected without even prompting me for which one to look for, my video card the same way, and my monitor was right there on the list.
> A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros...
Pick one: Gnome or KDE. They're both great and free. Red Hat comes with both. As far as all distributions coming with them (I think most do), surely you can admit that "Joe Blow" isn't going to go out and get Debian. Let's concentrate on making a couple of distributions "good enough" for Joe. Hey, how about you come out with JBLinux? Never mind.
> Official suppourt from hardware vendors...
Well, that one's up to the hardware vendors, isn't it? Many do have it, finally.
> Just because M$ and Apple are the big commercial doesn't necessarily make all their ideas evil...
That's true, and I defend those operating systems based on the good they have done for the popularily of personal computing.
> ...we should feel free to clone the parts of their interfaces that make computers easy to use.
Gee, you haven't seen KDE, have you? Win, win, win! If it's not a blatant copy of Windows 95, I don't know what is. And I'm not saying that's an incredibly bad thing, either.
RP
No wonder all the TQM and ISO 9000 and Vision Statements and Mission Statements seem to me to be a pile of crap, and yet genuine "quality" has always been more important to me that to everyone else.
No wonder it's so important for me to gain a real understanding of the problem, while everyone else just dusts off one of their old methodologies.
Suddenly it all becomes clear. I can't wait to read the rest of it!
RP
- The government puts out the word and interviews some people qualified to run such a volunteer operation.
- An organization is set up and, ironically, a domain registered (say usdomainreg.org, for example).
- An army of volunteers is recruited to manage the database, the registration process, and everything that goes with it.
- The cost for registering a domain goes down, perhaps not -- and the money would go to fund the project.
Wacky idea? It has worked well for Linux, Apache, Perl, etc...Just wondering, RP