Except that you don't get to define what open source means. The Open Source Initiative has that luxury. IIRC, they went to great lengths to differentiate Open Source and Free Software as two distinct entities. Open Source means you get the code and nothing more. No guarantee that you can redistribute
Please RTFM. If you're going to have an opinion, make it an informed one. From the OSI's website, this is taken from Clause 2 of the Open Source Definition:
"The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form."
Note that the Open Source Definition also requires that distribution of modifications in source form must be allowed.
No, the real difference between Open Source advocates and Free Software advocates is on a philosophical level. Open Source advocates proclaim that as a software development methodology, open source offers advantages in certain contexts. No overarching moral claim is made about the software, its developers, or its consumers. Free Software advocates tend to agree with the methodological point, but go further in pronouncing that there is some sort of basic right to source code that people have. This is a moral claim, and hence not something that can be resolved as a matter of fact. You either subscribe to that moral view of the world, or you don't. Most businesses do not subscribe to that view of the world, and most open source advocates remain agnostic. Thus Open Source tends to be a more business-friendly view of the world than Free Software.
Yes, atheism is a religion in exactly the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Go take a Philosophy 101 class; you're way off base. Your statement would be closer to the truth (though still not quite apt) if you said "agnosticism" instead of "atheism". But in fact:
Any religion is a set of beliefs about the spirituality of mankind and our moral purpose in the world. Some of these religions do (Christianity) or do not (Taoism) include a concept of a supreme being. Some of these religions do (Islam) or do not (Judaism, depending on your take on it) include a concept of immortality and the afterlife. Atheism, unlike agnosticism, certainly does have strong views on all of these issues.
I'm an atheist. I have very definite beliefs about the spirituality of mankind. I also believe that I, and other sentients, have a moral purpose in the world. I just don't happen to believe that purpose is constrained by the accidents of history that led to the particular cultural and ethical traditions that we normally call religions.
And indeed I'd argue that atheism affords a clearer and more consistent set of moral guidelines than any traditional religions, since you have to actually think through and solve moral problems for yourself, rather than abdicate moral responsibility to what some religious tradition tells you about right and wrong.
And before you respond by touting the virtues of whatever your particular favored religion is, make sure you have a good answer to the dilemma that Plato lays out in the "Euthyphro": Is a moral principle right because God says it is, or does God say it is a moral principle because it is right? If the former, then you have to at least countenance the logical possibility that if God says exterminating 6 million Jews (or all people who are left-handed, or anyone born on a Tuesday...) is a good thing, then it is automatically a good thing. If the latter, then why are you using God as an intermediary? Grow up and think for yourself.
Mark Golden has written a fair and accurate piece describing a non-technical user's experience with the switch to Linux. The negative tone of most/. comments in response is disappointing, but not particularly surprising.
As a desktop Linux user since 1994, and the author of Manning Press's forthcoming "Desktop Linux with Ubuntu", I've spent a lot of time thinking about the viability of Linux on the desktop and who exactly the target audience is for desktop Linux. This has been a topic of some debate with my editor at Manning.
Let's note a couple of things about Mr. Golden's article. First, he's clearly not a technical guy at all, as several misstatements in his article reveal:
He confuses a distribution with an operating system
He talks of "Internet browsing" when he really means "Web browsing"; Internet browsing pretty much went out with Gopher
He says "I couldn't transfer, via email or a disk, some complicated word-processor and spreadsheet files between my Linux system at home and Microsoft Windows on my work PC" which of course isn't what he means. The complexity of a document has nothing to do with its transferability, and in fact later in the article he says that he could transfer, he just couldn't preserve all the formatting from OpenOffice to MS Office
He says "hacking" when he means "cracking"; that's OK -- just about every journalist on the planet makes this mistake.
I point these remarks out not by way of criticism, but by way of setting context. Mr. Golden is a classic end user, someone who has no in-depth technical understanding of the systems he is using, but someone who, by and large, is self-admining his systems.
Second: note the remarkable advances he mentions in the course of the article. Think, for a moment, to the state of Linux 5 years ago, and then think about these comments:
"Installation went quickly and, for the most part, smoothly. All six systems recognized my disk drives, cable modem and wireless mouse. There's no need to dump Windows when putting in any of the Linux distributions, as long as there's enough room on the computer's hard drive. After installation, you simply select whether to launch Windows or Linux each time you start the computer." In other words, installation, dynamic repartitioning with data loss, and dual boot setup of the boot manager were all things the installer accomplished without the user having to know very much at all; and these tasks were accomplished seamlessly in six different Linux distributions.
"Basic tasks like printing, email and Internet browsing worked easily."
"The Linux systems could make sense for users who just want to send and receive email and surf the Web without the need for multimedia programs, or to perform home-office tasks without a lot of interaction with Microsoft systems."
While Mr. Golden did note a number of hardware compatibility problems, I tend to downplay those in the context of this comparison. As others on/. have noted, anyone buying a white box computer with no OS installed and hoping that Windows XP would "just work" with all of its components would no doubt be equally disappointed. Either do the comparison on the basis of installing Windows XP from scratch, or do the comparison on the basis of a computer with Linux pre-installed. Anything else is comparing pears and oranges.
Mr. Golden's greatest difficulty was with incompatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office when it came to complex documents or spreadsheets. This is not surprising, since these are Mr. Golden's professional tools. And the compatibility that needs to be there simply isn't there. If your spreadsheets involve pivot tables or embedded charts, don't expect good results when moving back and forth between OpenOffice and MS Office. If your word processing
I have a son who's 10, and very much into computers. In the last year or so that interest has expanded from desktop games to the online world. Our solution is simple:
Every computer on our home network runs through a proxy server. I have a simple script that grabs the access list from the proxy server once a week and tabulates the results of where online we have been as a family, and how many times. This list is posted on the refrigerator for all to see.
At age 10 my son thinks nothing of this. It is a source of mild curiousity, and an occaisional discussion topic ("what's this site, and why'd you go there?"). Later, as he gets older, it will occur to him that wherever he goes online -- indeed wherever any of us go online -- is a matter of public knowledge, and that he should choose his destinations accordingly.
At some later point he'll no doubt figure out how to hack his way around this, and browse anonymously. But I figure if he's sophisticated enough to figure that out, then he's sophisticated enough to go where he wants online, do what he wants, and make his own judgments.
In its day Altavista was the best search engine available by a wide margin. Sadly that day was about 5 years ago.
Altavista attempted to do what seemed like the obvious thing, and what most search engines did early on: it attempted to make hard searches easy.
Google's brilliant innovation was to do something far more useful, but less obvious: it attempted to make easy searches easy.
Put another way: Altavista competed with other search engines; Google competed with your bookmark file.
Back in 1996-97 I used to live by my bookmark file. Far fewer companies had actually managed to get hold of their company names as domains, important sites were tucked away in nonobvious places, and just finding what your were actually looking for was such a relief that you felt some real urgency in bookmarking the site and remembering how you got there.
In that time Altavista could almost always get me where I wanted to go, but often I have to look on page 2 or 3 of their search results for something that should have been on page 1.
Then came Google. Sure, the Web had evolved, and companies had figured out how to get their sites onto more intuitive domains. But mainly Google did a great job of making obvious things easy to find. Their "I'm feeling lucky" button is by far the link on the Web that I click on most often. I still have a bookmark file, but I hardly use it. My bookmark file loads only slightly faster than Google, it's less complete than Google, and frankly listings are in a more useful order in Google than they are in my bookmark file.
But let's not lose sight of the fact that early on in their competition, Altavista was _better_ than Google at what Altavista was trying to do. It's just that Google was trying to do something more useful. When it came to really hard searches -- looking for a particular file name used within a particular Linux device driver source tree, or looking for an old classmate when all you have is a very common last name, a place they used to live, and a hobby they used to have -- Altavista beat Google hands down. And no one to this day has an advanced search syntax as sophisticated as what Altavista had, despite the crappy (and undocumented) interface.
No, at the time that their Raging Search was launched, their best attempt at a Google competitor, they were better for _hard_ searches.
Google had gotten better, even at the hard searches, and Altavista hasn't been maintained. But this is a sad day.
The opportunity is still out there. Google will continue to win the competition with my bookmark file. But someone could still do an uncluttered, no-ad or low-ad search engine, aiming to make hard searches easy, and do better than Google. It's not as big a niche as CMGI needed, but it is a niche worth having.
I have been using Starband as my primary Internet connection for about 8 months now. For rural Internet denizens, it isn't a perfect option, but may well be your best option. Here's a bit about my experience, and some recommendations.
My house is half a mile up a dirt road up in the Sierra Nevadas in rural California. DSL and cable are just never going to happen here. I'm so far from the telco CO switch that even dial-up sucks. I cannot even get a consistent 28.8 dial-up connection; 21k-24k is more typical.
I have a Starband 360, which is their latest model "modem". This comes with an option for either ethernet or USB connection to your computer, and I opted for ethernet because I was told, off the record by the installer, that Linux might work with the ethernet connection.
And indeed Linux does work with it, kind of. As far as Linux is concerned, the Starband modem looks just like a DHCP server on the other end of an ethernet interface. There's really nothing to configure other than plugging in your ethernet line and running dhcpcd (or pump, for you Debian users).
This setup works, but very slowly. Ping times are anywhere from 1.5 to 3 seconds, and this kind of default Linux setup does nothing to either deal with the latency issues or take advantage of the fat pipe offered by the connection.
Over a period of months I tried numerous strategies to compensate. I installed Smoothwall as my gateway machine, and turned on proxy serving to take advantage of squid as a caching server. I tried fiddling with some basic network configurations, like window size. None of these things made more than an incremental difference.
After several months I realized that I was always going to have high latency, and under Linux I was never going to achieve transfer speeds above 2k per second. What I basically had was a dedicated connection to the Internet that behaved like a sluggish 14.4 modem.
As much as I love Linux and Open Source, I am above all a pragmatist. I'm not shy about using Windows when it's the right tool for the job. And in this situation, Windows has an advantage.
Starband licenses a software package from Netgain that provides so-called "TCP/IP acceleration". Frankly I'm not sure what it does, but there are a number of possibilities I can imagine (extreme window sizes, multi-plexed downloads, etc.). The point is that it does it in a proprietary fashion, and it's available only for Windows. You can't beat the latency; nothing gets around the fact that every packet must travel 44,000 miles. But you can take advantage of the capacity with the right software.
The best approach is to run Windows 2000 as your gateway machine, and to use the Starband software (which in turn uses Netgain's software). If Netgain could be persuaded to support Linux, things might be different, but right now Windows 2000 is the way to go.
So my current configuration has a home network of 5 computers routed to the Internet through a 6th computer, which is running Windows 2000 and Starband's software. By the way, setting up a gateway server under Windows 2000 is trivial. Under the "properties" tab for the outbound network interface you simply turn network connection sharing on. Then Windows 2000 autmoaticaly runs a dhcp server on the internal interface.
The latency is still there. And that pretty much knocks out online gaming. I'm a big fan of "Age of Empires/Kings/Conquerors". That gaming system is set up to check ping times for network gaming, and throw everyone into a "wait for the connection to return" mode whenever ping times are above a certain level. Combined with satellite latency, that makes the game pretty much unplayable over the Internet. I'm sure other games would be similar.
And using ssh is pretty painful. I'm always typing several words ahead of what I see on the screen, or several vi commands ahead of what has been rendered, when using ssh this way.
Web browsing is not particularly fast. What matters is not the size of a web page, but the number of files on a web page. Each file is a session that must be initiated, and latency kills you on session initiation. So ironically a page with a few really huge graphics will load faster than a page with lots of little tiny graphics. Still, web browsing isn't any slower than it would be over, say, 28.8 dial-up. In other words it's better than any of my alternatives.
Tranfer rates rock. On downloads I'm getting anywhere from 20k per second to 80k per second. I have no qualms about downloading anything just because of size. The largest thing I've downloaded is Red Hat 7.2 iso's, and while it took a while it was reasonable. Upstream my experience isn't quite as good, but it's more than adequate. I'm often uploading batches of digital photos to my website, and on large file transfers I'm getting 10k - 20k per second. More than enough to keep me happy.
Whatever packet mangling Netgain does occaisionally causes problems. I've had sites that I can't access because of this. That's a rare problem, however, and using an external proxy like Anonymizer seems to take care of the problem.
There are also times with the latency foils secure connections. I've had SSL sessions fail because, presumably, the server on the other end is looking for a speedier response than my client is capable of giving over satellite.
Oh, and there are of course the weather problems. There's nothing quite like getting up on the ladder in the morning in the freezing cold to brush snow off of the satellite dish so that I can restore my Internet connection.
So I keep a dial-up account as a fall-back. It's good for those bad weather days, those fiesty SSL connections that just won't work over satellite, and the occaisional urge for online gaming.
Overall it's a pretty good value. The monthly Starband charge is $69.99 a month, but if you're going to go to the trouble of using Starband you might as well get satellite TV as well; it's all one installation visit and all one installation charge.
So for around $100 a month I'm getting an adequate web browsing connection, a great file transfer connection, 150 channels of TV, and 12 channels of audio (one of the best parts: no commercials, no DJ, just music). Add $15 a month for a backup dial-up account. That's a total of $115 a month. Even in an urban area with solid DSL I'd probably be paying $75+ a month for comparable Internet and cable TV services.
Personally, I'm willing to pay the $40 a month with slightly degraded service, and being forced to run a Windows 2000 server, for the privelege of living where I do. I work from home most of the time, and I'm not going to complain too loudly about a technology that allows me to maintain a high tech professional position from such a remote location. For all the gripes we might have, we have to have some sense of perspective: I'm doing what would have been unthinkable 5 years ago, and unimaginable 10 years ago.
-Mark Stone
s t r i d e r _a_t_ s t a r b a n d _d_o_t n e t
Slashdot Mirror
"The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form."
Note that the Open Source Definition also requires that distribution of modifications in source form must be allowed.
No, the real difference between Open Source advocates and Free Software advocates is on a philosophical level. Open Source advocates proclaim that as a software development methodology, open source offers advantages in certain contexts. No overarching moral claim is made about the software, its developers, or its consumers. Free Software advocates tend to agree with the methodological point, but go further in pronouncing that there is some sort of basic right to source code that people have. This is a moral claim, and hence not something that can be resolved as a matter of fact. You either subscribe to that moral view of the world, or you don't. Most businesses do not subscribe to that view of the world, and most open source advocates remain agnostic. Thus Open Source tends to be a more business-friendly view of the world than Free Software.
Any religion is a set of beliefs about the spirituality of mankind and our moral purpose in the world. Some of these religions do (Christianity) or do not (Taoism) include a concept of a supreme being. Some of these religions do (Islam) or do not (Judaism, depending on your take on it) include a concept of immortality and the afterlife. Atheism, unlike agnosticism, certainly does have strong views on all of these issues.
I'm an atheist. I have very definite beliefs about the spirituality of mankind. I also believe that I, and other sentients, have a moral purpose in the world. I just don't happen to believe that purpose is constrained by the accidents of history that led to the particular cultural and ethical traditions that we normally call religions.
And indeed I'd argue that atheism affords a clearer and more consistent set of moral guidelines than any traditional religions, since you have to actually think through and solve moral problems for yourself, rather than abdicate moral responsibility to what some religious tradition tells you about right and wrong.
And before you respond by touting the virtues of whatever your particular favored religion is, make sure you have a good answer to the dilemma that Plato lays out in the "Euthyphro": Is a moral principle right because God says it is, or does God say it is a moral principle because it is right? If the former, then you have to at least countenance the logical possibility that if God says exterminating 6 million Jews (or all people who are left-handed, or anyone born on a Tuesday...) is a good thing, then it is automatically a good thing. If the latter, then why are you using God as an intermediary? Grow up and think for yourself.
As a desktop Linux user since 1994, and the author of Manning Press's forthcoming "Desktop Linux with Ubuntu", I've spent a lot of time thinking about the viability of Linux on the desktop and who exactly the target audience is for desktop Linux. This has been a topic of some debate with my editor at Manning.
Let's note a couple of things about Mr. Golden's article. First, he's clearly not a technical guy at all, as several misstatements in his article reveal:
I point these remarks out not by way of criticism, but by way of setting context. Mr. Golden is a classic end user, someone who has no in-depth technical understanding of the systems he is using, but someone who, by and large, is self-admining his systems.
Second: note the remarkable advances he mentions in the course of the article. Think, for a moment, to the state of Linux 5 years ago, and then think about these comments:
While Mr. Golden did note a number of hardware compatibility problems, I tend to downplay those in the context of this comparison. As others on /. have noted, anyone buying a white box computer with no OS installed and hoping that Windows XP would "just work" with all of its components would no doubt be equally disappointed. Either do the comparison on the basis of installing Windows XP from scratch, or do the comparison on the basis of a computer with Linux pre-installed. Anything else is comparing pears and oranges.
Mr. Golden's greatest difficulty was with incompatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office when it came to complex documents or spreadsheets. This is not surprising, since these are Mr. Golden's professional tools. And the compatibility that needs to be there simply isn't there. If your spreadsheets involve pivot tables or embedded charts, don't expect good results when moving back and forth between OpenOffice and MS Office. If your word processing
I have a son who's 10, and very much into computers. In the last year or so that interest has expanded from desktop games to the online world. Our solution is simple:
Every computer on our home network runs through a proxy server. I have a simple script that grabs the access list from the proxy server once a week and tabulates the results of where online we have been as a family, and how many times. This list is posted on the refrigerator for all to see.
At age 10 my son thinks nothing of this. It is a source of mild curiousity, and an occaisional discussion topic ("what's this site, and why'd you go there?"). Later, as he gets older, it will occur to him that wherever he goes online -- indeed wherever any of us go online -- is a matter of public knowledge, and that he should choose his destinations accordingly.
At some later point he'll no doubt figure out how to hack his way around this, and browse anonymously. But I figure if he's sophisticated enough to figure that out, then he's sophisticated enough to go where he wants online, do what he wants, and make his own judgments.
Altavista attempted to do what seemed like the obvious thing, and what most search engines did early on: it attempted to make hard searches easy.
Google's brilliant innovation was to do something far more useful, but less obvious: it attempted to make easy searches easy.
Put another way: Altavista competed with other search engines; Google competed with your bookmark file.
Back in 1996-97 I used to live by my bookmark file. Far fewer companies had actually managed to get hold of their company names as domains, important sites were tucked away in nonobvious places, and just finding what your were actually looking for was such a relief that you felt some real urgency in bookmarking the site and remembering how you got there.
In that time Altavista could almost always get me where I wanted to go, but often I have to look on page 2 or 3 of their search results for something that should have been on page 1.
Then came Google. Sure, the Web had evolved, and companies had figured out how to get their sites onto more intuitive domains. But mainly Google did a great job of making obvious things easy to find. Their "I'm feeling lucky" button is by far the link on the Web that I click on most often. I still have a bookmark file, but I hardly use it. My bookmark file loads only slightly faster than Google, it's less complete than Google, and frankly listings are in a more useful order in Google than they are in my bookmark file.
But let's not lose sight of the fact that early on in their competition, Altavista was _better_ than Google at what Altavista was trying to do. It's just that Google was trying to do something more useful. When it came to really hard searches -- looking for a particular file name used within a particular Linux device driver source tree, or looking for an old classmate when all you have is a very common last name, a place they used to live, and a hobby they used to have -- Altavista beat Google hands down. And no one to this day has an advanced search syntax as sophisticated as what Altavista had, despite the crappy (and undocumented) interface.
No, at the time that their Raging Search was launched, their best attempt at a Google competitor, they were better for _hard_ searches.
Google had gotten better, even at the hard searches, and Altavista hasn't been maintained. But this is a sad day.
The opportunity is still out there. Google will continue to win the competition with my bookmark file. But someone could still do an uncluttered, no-ad or low-ad search engine, aiming to make hard searches easy, and do better than Google. It's not as big a niche as CMGI needed, but it is a niche worth having.
My house is half a mile up a dirt road up in the Sierra Nevadas in rural California. DSL and cable are just never going to happen here. I'm so far from the telco CO switch that even dial-up sucks. I cannot even get a consistent 28.8 dial-up connection; 21k-24k is more typical.
I have a Starband 360, which is their latest model "modem". This comes with an option for either ethernet or USB connection to your computer, and I opted for ethernet because I was told, off the record by the installer, that Linux might work with the ethernet connection.
And indeed Linux does work with it, kind of. As far as Linux is concerned, the Starband modem looks just like a DHCP server on the other end of an ethernet interface. There's really nothing to configure other than plugging in your ethernet line and running dhcpcd (or pump, for you Debian users).
This setup works, but very slowly. Ping times are anywhere from 1.5 to 3 seconds, and this kind of default Linux setup does nothing to either deal with the latency issues or take advantage of the fat pipe offered by the connection.
Over a period of months I tried numerous strategies to compensate. I installed Smoothwall as my gateway machine, and turned on proxy serving to take advantage of squid as a caching server. I tried fiddling with some basic network configurations, like window size. None of these things made more than an incremental difference.
After several months I realized that I was always going to have high latency, and under Linux I was never going to achieve transfer speeds above 2k per second. What I basically had was a dedicated connection to the Internet that behaved like a sluggish 14.4 modem.
As much as I love Linux and Open Source, I am above all a pragmatist. I'm not shy about using Windows when it's the right tool for the job. And in this situation, Windows has an advantage.
Starband licenses a software package from Netgain that provides so-called "TCP/IP acceleration". Frankly I'm not sure what it does, but there are a number of possibilities I can imagine (extreme window sizes, multi-plexed downloads, etc.). The point is that it does it in a proprietary fashion, and it's available only for Windows. You can't beat the latency; nothing gets around the fact that every packet must travel 44,000 miles. But you can take advantage of the capacity with the right software.
The best approach is to run Windows 2000 as your gateway machine, and to use the Starband software (which in turn uses Netgain's software). If Netgain could be persuaded to support Linux, things might be different, but right now Windows 2000 is the way to go.
So my current configuration has a home network of 5 computers routed to the Internet through a 6th computer, which is running Windows 2000 and Starband's software. By the way, setting up a gateway server under Windows 2000 is trivial. Under the "properties" tab for the outbound network interface you simply turn network connection sharing on. Then Windows 2000 autmoaticaly runs a dhcp server on the internal interface.
The latency is still there. And that pretty much knocks out online gaming. I'm a big fan of "Age of Empires/Kings/Conquerors". That gaming system is set up to check ping times for network gaming, and throw everyone into a "wait for the connection to return" mode whenever ping times are above a certain level. Combined with satellite latency, that makes the game pretty much unplayable over the Internet. I'm sure other games would be similar.
And using ssh is pretty painful. I'm always typing several words ahead of what I see on the screen, or several vi commands ahead of what has been rendered, when using ssh this way.
Web browsing is not particularly fast. What matters is not the size of a web page, but the number of files on a web page. Each file is a session that must be initiated, and latency kills you on session initiation. So ironically a page with a few really huge graphics will load faster than a page with lots of little tiny graphics. Still, web browsing isn't any slower than it would be over, say, 28.8 dial-up. In other words it's better than any of my alternatives.
Tranfer rates rock. On downloads I'm getting anywhere from 20k per second to 80k per second. I have no qualms about downloading anything just because of size. The largest thing I've downloaded is Red Hat 7.2 iso's, and while it took a while it was reasonable. Upstream my experience isn't quite as good, but it's more than adequate. I'm often uploading batches of digital photos to my website, and on large file transfers I'm getting 10k - 20k per second. More than enough to keep me happy.
Whatever packet mangling Netgain does occaisionally causes problems. I've had sites that I can't access because of this. That's a rare problem, however, and using an external proxy like Anonymizer seems to take care of the problem.
There are also times with the latency foils secure connections. I've had SSL sessions fail because, presumably, the server on the other end is looking for a speedier response than my client is capable of giving over satellite.
Oh, and there are of course the weather problems. There's nothing quite like getting up on the ladder in the morning in the freezing cold to brush snow off of the satellite dish so that I can restore my Internet connection.
So I keep a dial-up account as a fall-back. It's good for those bad weather days, those fiesty SSL connections that just won't work over satellite, and the occaisional urge for online gaming.
Overall it's a pretty good value. The monthly Starband charge is $69.99 a month, but if you're going to go to the trouble of using Starband you might as well get satellite TV as well; it's all one installation visit and all one installation charge.
So for around $100 a month I'm getting an adequate web browsing connection, a great file transfer connection, 150 channels of TV, and 12 channels of audio (one of the best parts: no commercials, no DJ, just music). Add $15 a month for a backup dial-up account. That's a total of $115 a month. Even in an urban area with solid DSL I'd probably be paying $75+ a month for comparable Internet and cable TV services.
Personally, I'm willing to pay the $40 a month with slightly degraded service, and being forced to run a Windows 2000 server, for the privelege of living where I do. I work from home most of the time, and I'm not going to complain too loudly about a technology that allows me to maintain a high tech professional position from such a remote location. For all the gripes we might have, we have to have some sense of perspective: I'm doing what would have been unthinkable 5 years ago, and unimaginable 10 years ago.
-Mark Stone
s t r i d e r _a_t_ s t a r b a n d _d_o_t n e t