Something you're all forgetting: when you consider paying $4.95 to Slashdot, you're not just paying to get rid of the banner ads. You're also making a donation because you like the site and you want to support them.
When I bought a Slackware Linux CD set and polo shirt, I wasn't paying $90 for the convenience of the extra discs (I'd already downloaded and burned install.iso) and a nice shirt to impress people at work (my boss loved it). I was making a donation to the guys who put together the distro I've been using since 1998, and that powers the web hosting company my friend and I run. The Slackware team has managed to survive after being acquired and fired by WindRiver, and still produce one of the nicest, cleanest distributions out there - and it keeps getting better.
Current uptime on my Slackware box at home: 10:45pm up 110 days, 4:26, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Free beer and free speech are NOT the same thing. Support free speech - pay for stuff that's cool, whether you're required to or not.
this is the first i've heard of this and this is the dumbest thing Slashdot can do. No one will pay. I don't care about the banner ads at the top. I ignore them anyway. Have you done any market research to back this up? Is there an official announcement that I missed?
If you think nobody will pay, then why do you care? You can still browse Slashdot to your heart's content, with banner ads, just like now. If nobody pays, things continue as they are, and nobody loses by this additional feature being available to anyone who might want it.
The trouble is that every address you use gets on spam lists and gets spammed forever. By having 100's of addresses, you get 100's of times more spam than you otherwise would. Even if you can filter it on arrival so you don't have to see it, it's still clogging your bandwidth and you can always filter a legitimate email.
Hmm, what about this?
Run your own DNS and mail servers, and use your own domain name. Generate a unique hostname every time you need an e-mail address, and use yourname@00001.yourdomain.com as the address. After you're done with that e-mail address, delete the hostname from the DNS, or change it to resolve to 127.0.0.1 or something. You might still get DNS queries, but that shouldn't take much bandwidth at all, especially since DNS is cached.
P.S. Everyone always whines about the Windows registry because it's binary, you can't edit it blah, blah, blah... But the fact is: It works.
Yeah, for about six months. For the next six months, it starts falling apart. If you really know what you're doing, or if you're just lucky (Windows is so inconsistent, it's not even consistently bad), you can keep it going longer than that. Often, the system will run fine until you try to make some configuration change, and the whole thing breaks - for example, install a NIC, load the drivers, and now the system hangs on boot.
If something is truly needed, do the Windows registry in text file format. Make it/etc/registry.conf. There is no reason it has to be binary.
I'm a big fan of plain text, although I really like the promise of XML (it's text, sort of, but it can be edited with a GUI front end). However, a registry is NOT the answer - if you think it is, you haven't spent enough time on a Mac.
One of the great things about the Mac OS is that the settings for each software component (applications, and pieces of the OS) are stored in seperate preferences files. If one of them corrupts itself, you can figure out which one, trash it (the app will generate a new one with default settings automatically), and everything is fine.
Sure, the Registry is binary, and that's a bad thing, but that's not the problem - Mac preferences files are (usually) binary too. The problem is that all apps store their settings in the same place, and there's nothing to keep an app from mucking about where it doesn't belong.
Another great thing about the Mac: instead of a database of which drivers and components and things need to be loaded at startup, you just move them into a folder, and everything in that folder gets loaded. This is amazingly simple for users to manage - they can configure what loads at boot time the same way they manage their own documents.
The ability to easily delete corrupted settings and replace them with a default copy, on a per-app basis, is something Microsoft will probably take years to catch up with.
FAT binaries helped immenseley in the 68k-PPC transition, and probably will again for the G4-G5 transition.
From what I understand, FAT binaries shouldn't be necessary, since the PowerPC instruction set is already completely 64-bit clean (it was designed that way from the beginning, and IBM has made 64-bit versions such as the 620 already). So, the same binary executable should work just fine on either a G4 or a G5.
It's entirely possible that I don't know what I'm talking about; feel free to correct me.
I read the article in the paper on the bus this morning on my way to work. I had a few thoughts:
As another posted mentioned, people who don't understand computers are the ones who think we need to teach computers. Sometimes that can be true - I think everyone needs some exposure to computers, because (and I say this after having done technical support for about four years now) people who don't have exposure to computers tend to fear computers, and people who fear computers will completely turn off their brains and disregard all common sense when any piece of technology is nearby. There are brain surgeons who can't decipher a plain-English dialog box simply because they believe computers to be too complicated to understand. Exposure to computers in a non-threatening (preferably non-Microsoft) environment would solve this problem and make the world a better place - and in fact, I've noticed a gradual decline in blatent stupidity over the years, as people use computers more.
However, what children should be taught about computers are concepts, not applications or specific tasks (you can use tasks to teach concepts, but be careful of the lines you draw). For example, teaching word processing (using Microsoft Word) is good, teaching Microsoft Word (which is used for word processing) is bad.
I remember a great game for the Apple II that let you set up a series of machines to rotate and punch holes in a square, and you had to figure out what it would look like when it got through to the end. That helps students to think, and really has nothing to do with the computer itself - the computer is just a tool for the simulation, because it wouldn't be a very practical game to play in the physical world.
Teaching programming is great. It teaches students how to think in a way they're not used to thinking, and that stretches the mind. Again, whether they're using BASIC or C or Python or VB or Java isn't that important (although some of those languages have annoying bits that get in the way of learning concepts, and I think it's helpful to start with a simpler language like BASIC before tackling a complex one like Java).
Too many schools have gotten technology grants that let them wire every classroom for Ethernet, but don't have qualified staff to make use of the computer lab they already had. Politicians think a computer in every classroom sounds like a great ambition, but don't realize it's really pretty useless. How do you make use of one or two computers in the back of a classroom? Sure, a couple students can type a paper while the rest of the class is working on projects without having to walk down the hall to the lab or library, and maybe with an LCD projector the teacher could use PowerPoint to illustrate a lecture (yeah, as if teachers have time to make PowerPoint presentations). That's about all I can think of.
What Microsoft is preparing us for is the next step: No root access to a machine.
It is generally recommended that when using a desktop system, you NOT be logged in as root, for security reasons. Use root for system administration when you must, but in general, stick to your own unprivaleged user account. This is for two reasons: first, to prevent bugs in the software from wiping out the system, and second, to prevent the user from wiping out the system by mistake at 3am (rm -rf / var/tmp/junk - whoops, there was an extra space there...).
Most Windows systems are desktop systems. Is having a "System" account with more privaleges than "Administrator" really a bad thing? Maybe, if you are prevented from doing things you want to do. How often do you find that to be the case?
Mac OS X is set up in a similar way. There is a root account, but there's no password (it's set to * so logins are disabled). Administrators have group write access to folders like/Applications and/Library, and can authenticate in System Preferences or the Installer to make changes and install software, but/System is owned by root and cannot be modified.
However, anyone in the admin group automatically gets sudo access to run anything as root, so sudo tcsh gets you a root prompt. I'm pretty sure Windows doesn't give you that ability.
(By the way, if you really want to enable root logins:/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager, Domain -> Security -> Enable Root User. I haven't found a good reason for doing this yet.)
Wireless access on the roof? That's not DSL, that's probably microwave or something. DSL only works over copper phone lines; any other form of broadband is not DSL. What's the deal here?
Oh, and I just "discovered" the other day that some http servers actually these things called refer logs, that not only log your IP and what page you're visiting but where you came from; in some cases being able to detect search engine keywords used to get to that page.
Yes, this is true. I find it fascinating to look through the logs on my home page and see what people were searching for that led them to me. If you're not happy about it, there are proxy servers to strip the HTTP_REFERER string, but it's part of the HTTP protocol.
Given the fact that they could call up your ISP and request modem and customer information it's possible that they could do a heck of alot more damage than knowing you're a grown man who still watches teletubbies.
I've worked at four ISPs in the last five years. In general I've found my coworkers to be very aware of customer privacy issues. Less experienced employees are susceptible to basic social engineering, of course, but to suggest that ISPs will give out your personal information to any individual or corporation who calls and asks for it is insulting to those of us who work in that industry.
If you find out that your ISP has disclosed personal information about you to a third party without your consent, check their service agreement to see if it permits them to do so. If not, you should consult an attorney. If so, you should find another ISP - and read their service agreement before signing up.
I'm not trying to say it doesn't happen. Even the best of us make mistakes, and the worst of us just don't care that much. But please, don't generalize like that.
How does Slackware stack up to other distributions and to Win2k? I know Slackware 8.0 (like most other *nix distros) had a remote root exploit in telnetd, and there are updates for about a dozen other packages; how does this compare to RedHat?
Saying "Linux has more security holes than Windows" is at least as stupid as saying "I just got Linux 7.2".
Last time they did this we got Java. And look what it has done for our web browsing experience! Oh wait, you don't like lag?
Java is (sort of) slow because Java uses a virtual machine, basically emulating everything. Id Software's code runs natively on each platform, so it runs at full speed. It's easy to port to new platforms, because it's designed with cross-platform compatibility in mind from the beginning. Some other games and apps are written just for win32 on x86 with no thought given to other platforms, so when they decide it'd be nice to have a Mac or Linux version, major chunks of code have to be completely rewritten. Companies like Loki and MacSoft specialize in exactly that. Ever notice that a lot of games are released for win32 6 months before other platforms? Quake 3 was released simultaneously for win32, Linux and Mac OS.
Does MOV AX,4C00 set the exit code then? I never bothered.
The fear comes in when you see it, know what it means and realize just how full your brain is of stuff you are never likely to use again...
I'm well aware of what you meant. I can't quite recall which memory location on the Apple II would evoke a pop from the speaker when PEEK'd, but that's about as useless.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Looks like x86 machine code. CD 21 is INT 21 in assembly, which prints a $-terminated string in MS-DOS. What are the other three bytes? I haven't played with that stuff since high school.
Hardly my field of expertise, but from what I understand, because the Cocoa and Carbon APIs don't completely suck ass, applications use them a lot, and those APIs are multithreaded, so anything that the API does will be faster on a dual-proc system. The Win32 API, in contrast, is so poorly designed and useless that applications tend to avoid it, going around the API to do things their own way. That's why there's so little consistency between how different Windows apps behave.
Want to see something interesting? In Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer, click-and-hold on the Favorites menu, drag the mouse down away from the menu, and release. The menu disappears - this behavior is consistent with menus in most other apps such as Notepad. Now, do the same thing with any other menu (besides Favorites) in Explorer/MSIE: the menu doesn't disappear until you click. Can someone explain that to me?
(Repeat is usually sent as multiple key down events with no intervening "up", and I'm pretty sure this is actually done in the keyboard.)
Key repeat rate is controlled by the operating system. Besides, most games bypass the key repeat.
On Mac OS, games usually use InputSprockets (an API set) to access input devices like keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc., bypassing the standard OS behavior. Interestingly, InputSprockets allow a game to use both buttons on a two-button mouse even though the OS itself (with no driver installed) treats both buttons the same. Why Apple didn't add multi-button support into the OS years ago I'll never know...
Does AudioGalaxy's EULA have anything interesting to say about this? Like the license in Windows Media Player that says Microsoft has the right to erase your hard drive if they want?
If you're using a commercial broadband router (Linksys, Netgear, DLink, etc.) they may have a way that they can probe IPs for that specific type of device. It might have a web page on port 80, or something else open that identifies it as being a router. They wouldn't be able to identify a Linux box doing IP Masquerading, but they'd find all the Linksys routers easily, and since those are quite popular, they'd figure that was good enough.
Another consideration: How does the NAT box know where to send incoming replies? Isn't there something added to the IP header to indicate the internal source IP of the packet? I would think there would have to be. Could they scan packets for these identifying signatures?
A problem with this: some people use NAT routers as a firewall, with only a single computer connected, simply for security reasons. It's certainly more secure (and less problematic, from what I understand) than ZoneAlarm or BlackIce. How is the ISP going to know the difference?
If they're scanning IP packets, are they looking for multiple internal sources from the same external IP?
The same geek that wants to run America Online. Not too many of them. An AOL-branded Linux distro will NOT be targeted at geeks, it will be targeted at people like your mother. The idea that your mom can't run Linux because she's not a geek is exactly what AOL would change.
AOL is the only company with the power to take on Microsoft and win. I'm surprised they've waited this long, to be honest, but I suppose it will be less bloody now than it would have been 2 or 3 years ago.
Throw in a little special version of Abiword. Throw in a special version Gnumeric.
Why not throw in StarOffice? AOL already has a relationship with Sun, and StarOffice is disturbingly similar to Microsoft Office in many ways, down to the placement and naming of menus.
Slashdot Mirror
Something you're all forgetting: when you consider paying $4.95 to Slashdot, you're not just paying to get rid of the banner ads. You're also making a donation because you like the site and you want to support them.
When I bought a Slackware Linux CD set and polo shirt, I wasn't paying $90 for the convenience of the extra discs (I'd already downloaded and burned install.iso) and a nice shirt to impress people at work (my boss loved it). I was making a donation to the guys who put together the distro I've been using since 1998, and that powers the web hosting company my friend and I run. The Slackware team has managed to survive after being acquired and fired by WindRiver, and still produce one of the nicest, cleanest distributions out there - and it keeps getting better.
Current uptime on my Slackware box at home:
10:45pm up 110 days, 4:26, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Free beer and free speech are NOT the same thing. Support free speech - pay for stuff that's cool, whether you're required to or not.
Doesn't everyone use Junkbuster? What are these "banner ads" you refer to? =)
For those running Squid, I wrote BannerFilter.
this is the first i've heard of this and this is the dumbest thing Slashdot can do. No one will pay. I don't care about the banner ads at the top. I ignore them anyway. Have you done any market research to back this up? Is there an official announcement that I missed?
If you think nobody will pay, then why do you care? You can still browse Slashdot to your heart's content, with banner ads, just like now. If nobody pays, things continue as they are, and nobody loses by this additional feature being available to anyone who might want it.
I'm sure nobody cares, but I've never had a problem.
The trouble is that every address you use gets on spam lists and gets spammed forever. By having 100's of addresses, you get 100's of times more spam than you otherwise would. Even if you can filter it on arrival so you don't have to see it, it's still clogging your bandwidth and you can always filter a legitimate email.
Hmm, what about this?
Run your own DNS and mail servers, and use your own domain name. Generate a unique hostname every time you need an e-mail address, and use yourname@00001.yourdomain.com as the address. After you're done with that e-mail address, delete the hostname from the DNS, or change it to resolve to 127.0.0.1 or something. You might still get DNS queries, but that shouldn't take much bandwidth at all, especially since DNS is cached.
P.S. Everyone always whines about the Windows registry because it's binary, you can't edit it blah, blah, blah... But the fact is: It works.
/etc/registry.conf. There is no reason it has to be binary.
Yeah, for about six months. For the next six months, it starts falling apart. If you really know what you're doing, or if you're just lucky (Windows is so inconsistent, it's not even consistently bad), you can keep it going longer than that. Often, the system will run fine until you try to make some configuration change, and the whole thing breaks - for example, install a NIC, load the drivers, and now the system hangs on boot.
If something is truly needed, do the Windows registry in text file format. Make it
I'm a big fan of plain text, although I really like the promise of XML (it's text, sort of, but it can be edited with a GUI front end). However, a registry is NOT the answer - if you think it is, you haven't spent enough time on a Mac.
One of the great things about the Mac OS is that the settings for each software component (applications, and pieces of the OS) are stored in seperate preferences files. If one of them corrupts itself, you can figure out which one, trash it (the app will generate a new one with default settings automatically), and everything is fine.
Sure, the Registry is binary, and that's a bad thing, but that's not the problem - Mac preferences files are (usually) binary too. The problem is that all apps store their settings in the same place, and there's nothing to keep an app from mucking about where it doesn't belong.
Another great thing about the Mac: instead of a database of which drivers and components and things need to be loaded at startup, you just move them into a folder, and everything in that folder gets loaded. This is amazingly simple for users to manage - they can configure what loads at boot time the same way they manage their own documents.
The ability to easily delete corrupted settings and replace them with a default copy, on a per-app basis, is something Microsoft will probably take years to catch up with.
FAT binaries helped immenseley in the 68k-PPC transition, and probably will again for the G4-G5 transition.
From what I understand, FAT binaries shouldn't be necessary, since the PowerPC instruction set is already completely 64-bit clean (it was designed that way from the beginning, and IBM has made 64-bit versions such as the 620 already). So, the same binary executable should work just fine on either a G4 or a G5.
It's entirely possible that I don't know what I'm talking about; feel free to correct me.
I read the article in the paper on the bus this morning on my way to work. I had a few thoughts:
As another posted mentioned, people who don't understand computers are the ones who think we need to teach computers. Sometimes that can be true - I think everyone needs some exposure to computers, because (and I say this after having done technical support for about four years now) people who don't have exposure to computers tend to fear computers, and people who fear computers will completely turn off their brains and disregard all common sense when any piece of technology is nearby. There are brain surgeons who can't decipher a plain-English dialog box simply because they believe computers to be too complicated to understand. Exposure to computers in a non-threatening (preferably non-Microsoft) environment would solve this problem and make the world a better place - and in fact, I've noticed a gradual decline in blatent stupidity over the years, as people use computers more.
However, what children should be taught about computers are concepts, not applications or specific tasks (you can use tasks to teach concepts, but be careful of the lines you draw). For example, teaching word processing (using Microsoft Word) is good, teaching Microsoft Word (which is used for word processing) is bad.
I remember a great game for the Apple II that let you set up a series of machines to rotate and punch holes in a square, and you had to figure out what it would look like when it got through to the end. That helps students to think, and really has nothing to do with the computer itself - the computer is just a tool for the simulation, because it wouldn't be a very practical game to play in the physical world.
Teaching programming is great. It teaches students how to think in a way they're not used to thinking, and that stretches the mind. Again, whether they're using BASIC or C or Python or VB or Java isn't that important (although some of those languages have annoying bits that get in the way of learning concepts, and I think it's helpful to start with a simpler language like BASIC before tackling a complex one like Java).
Too many schools have gotten technology grants that let them wire every classroom for Ethernet, but don't have qualified staff to make use of the computer lab they already had. Politicians think a computer in every classroom sounds like a great ambition, but don't realize it's really pretty useless. How do you make use of one or two computers in the back of a classroom? Sure, a couple students can type a paper while the rest of the class is working on projects without having to walk down the hall to the lab or library, and maybe with an LCD projector the teacher could use PowerPoint to illustrate a lecture (yeah, as if teachers have time to make PowerPoint presentations). That's about all I can think of.
What Microsoft is preparing us for is the next step: No root access to a machine.
/Applications and /Library, and can authenticate in System Preferences or the Installer to make changes and install software, but /System is owned by root and cannot be modified.
/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager, Domain -> Security -> Enable Root User. I haven't found a good reason for doing this yet.)
It is generally recommended that when using a desktop system, you NOT be logged in as root, for security reasons. Use root for system administration when you must, but in general, stick to your own unprivaleged user account. This is for two reasons: first, to prevent bugs in the software from wiping out the system, and second, to prevent the user from wiping out the system by mistake at 3am (rm -rf / var/tmp/junk - whoops, there was an extra space there...).
Most Windows systems are desktop systems. Is having a "System" account with more privaleges than "Administrator" really a bad thing? Maybe, if you are prevented from doing things you want to do. How often do you find that to be the case?
Mac OS X is set up in a similar way. There is a root account, but there's no password (it's set to * so logins are disabled). Administrators have group write access to folders like
However, anyone in the admin group automatically gets sudo access to run anything as root, so sudo tcsh gets you a root prompt. I'm pretty sure Windows doesn't give you that ability.
(By the way, if you really want to enable root logins:
Wireless access on the roof? That's not DSL, that's probably microwave or something. DSL only works over copper phone lines; any other form of broadband is not DSL. What's the deal here?
Oh, and I just "discovered" the other day that some http servers actually these things called refer logs, that not only log your IP and what page you're visiting but where you came from; in some cases being able to detect search engine keywords used to get to that page.
Yes, this is true. I find it fascinating to look through the logs on my home page and see what people were searching for that led them to me. If you're not happy about it, there are proxy servers to strip the HTTP_REFERER string, but it's part of the HTTP protocol.
Given the fact that they could call up your ISP and request modem and customer information it's possible that they could do a heck of alot more damage than knowing you're a grown man who still watches teletubbies.
I've worked at four ISPs in the last five years. In general I've found my coworkers to be very aware of customer privacy issues. Less experienced employees are susceptible to basic social engineering, of course, but to suggest that ISPs will give out your personal information to any individual or corporation who calls and asks for it is insulting to those of us who work in that industry.
If you find out that your ISP has disclosed personal information about you to a third party without your consent, check their service agreement to see if it permits them to do so. If not, you should consult an attorney. If so, you should find another ISP - and read their service agreement before signing up.
I'm not trying to say it doesn't happen. Even the best of us make mistakes, and the worst of us just don't care that much. But please, don't generalize like that.
and hope for the best, sorry.
The easy way:
/dev/urandom > a.out
cat
and home for the best.
How does Slackware stack up to other distributions and to Win2k? I know Slackware 8.0 (like most other *nix distros) had a remote root exploit in telnetd, and there are updates for about a dozen other packages; how does this compare to RedHat?
Saying "Linux has more security holes than Windows" is at least as stupid as saying "I just got Linux 7.2".
Last time they did this we got Java. And look what it has done for our web browsing experience! Oh wait, you don't like lag?
Java is (sort of) slow because Java uses a virtual machine, basically emulating everything. Id Software's code runs natively on each platform, so it runs at full speed. It's easy to port to new platforms, because it's designed with cross-platform compatibility in mind from the beginning. Some other games and apps are written just for win32 on x86 with no thought given to other platforms, so when they decide it'd be nice to have a Mac or Linux version, major chunks of code have to be completely rewritten. Companies like Loki and MacSoft specialize in exactly that. Ever notice that a lot of games are released for win32 6 months before other platforms? Quake 3 was released simultaneously for win32, Linux and Mac OS.
or, in terms of the old DOS days, exit(0).
Does MOV AX,4C00 set the exit code then? I never bothered.
The fear comes in when you see it, know what it means and realize just how full your brain is of stuff you are never likely to use again...
I'm well aware of what you meant. I can't quite recall which memory location on the Apple II would evoke a pop from the speaker when PEEK'd, but that's about as useless.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Looks like x86 machine code. CD 21 is INT 21 in assembly, which prints a $-terminated string in MS-DOS. What are the other three bytes? I haven't played with that stuff since high school.
Hardly my field of expertise, but from what I understand, because the Cocoa and Carbon APIs don't completely suck ass, applications use them a lot, and those APIs are multithreaded, so anything that the API does will be faster on a dual-proc system. The Win32 API, in contrast, is so poorly designed and useless that applications tend to avoid it, going around the API to do things their own way. That's why there's so little consistency between how different Windows apps behave.
Want to see something interesting? In Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer, click-and-hold on the Favorites menu, drag the mouse down away from the menu, and release. The menu disappears - this behavior is consistent with menus in most other apps such as Notepad. Now, do the same thing with any other menu (besides Favorites) in Explorer/MSIE: the menu doesn't disappear until you click. Can someone explain that to me?
(Repeat is usually sent as multiple key down events with no intervening "up", and I'm pretty sure this is actually done in the keyboard.)
Key repeat rate is controlled by the operating system. Besides, most games bypass the key repeat.
On Mac OS, games usually use InputSprockets (an API set) to access input devices like keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc., bypassing the standard OS behavior. Interestingly, InputSprockets allow a game to use both buttons on a two-button mouse even though the OS itself (with no driver installed) treats both buttons the same. Why Apple didn't add multi-button support into the OS years ago I'll never know...
Does AudioGalaxy's EULA have anything interesting to say about this? Like the license in Windows Media Player that says Microsoft has the right to erase your hard drive if they want?
Exactly my thought.
If you're using a commercial broadband router (Linksys, Netgear, DLink, etc.) they may have a way that they can probe IPs for that specific type of device. It might have a web page on port 80, or something else open that identifies it as being a router. They wouldn't be able to identify a Linux box doing IP Masquerading, but they'd find all the Linksys routers easily, and since those are quite popular, they'd figure that was good enough.
Another consideration: How does the NAT box know where to send incoming replies? Isn't there something added to the IP header to indicate the internal source IP of the packet? I would think there would have to be. Could they scan packets for these identifying signatures?
A problem with this: some people use NAT routers as a firewall, with only a single computer connected, simply for security reasons. It's certainly more secure (and less problematic, from what I understand) than ZoneAlarm or BlackIce. How is the ISP going to know the difference?
If they're scanning IP packets, are they looking for multiple internal sources from the same external IP?
what geek wants to run an AOL OS??
The same geek that wants to run America Online. Not too many of them. An AOL-branded Linux distro will NOT be targeted at geeks, it will be targeted at people like your mother. The idea that your mom can't run Linux because she's not a geek is exactly what AOL would change.
AOL is the only company with the power to take on Microsoft and win. I'm surprised they've waited this long, to be honest, but I suppose it will be less bloody now than it would have been 2 or 3 years ago.
Throw in a little special version of Abiword. Throw in a special version Gnumeric.
Why not throw in StarOffice? AOL already has a relationship with Sun, and StarOffice is disturbingly similar to Microsoft Office in many ways, down to the placement and naming of menus.
What else should they focus on? Skeeball tickets?
Well, they do own the Atlanta Braves and a few other sports teams....