Internet Explorer as a file system and Internet browser works almost perfectly under Crossover Office. The only bug I've found worthy of note is that there seems to be a "flicker" in the icon bar as it refreshes icons several times a second. It's strange, but not completely distracting. The only other functionality that is missing from it is some O/S hooks. For instance, I have automatic proxy detection (WPAD) set up at home. IE on Windows, it works just fine, finds the proxy, and out it goes without me touching a thing. Same for Konqueror/KDE (although I had to do some strange hacks to the setup due to a current bug in how Konqueror figures out the WPAD address, fixed in CVS), it goes without a hitch, finds the proxy, woohaah. IE on GNU/Linux it just never seems to find the proxy and goes out directly; I think CXOffice hard-codes a hostname or something. There are a couple of other quirks, but as far as the rendering engine and page viewing goes, it's perfect. Plugins work really well, although sound is a bit choppy on slower machines with some plugins. Overall, it was a very satisfying purchase. It's particularly nice to be able to play those.wmv files I run across at large sites such as CNN, and to be able to handle Apple stuff with Quicktime. Yeah, I know mplayer can handle it, but I haven't had luck with the wrapper yet (not that I've tried too hard).
So I don't think it's the IE integration completely at fault there. The other part of Quicken that doesn't work is the multimedia stuff, but I think that may be due to how the CD-ROM is handled more than anything else. One day I'll look into it more.
Looks like from the comment mirror I caught lower in the thread that MoneyDance has good graphing & budget functions. When it comes up, I'll have to check it out.
Things tying my family to Microsoft Windows at home: 1. Childrens Games 2. Quicken 3. Dad's Games 4. My wife's Print Shop app. Won't run under Wine, and I haven't found any good Print Shop-type apps under GNU/Linux that come with nearly the library of images she uses regularly on those six CDs...
So I personally use my Windows box a few minutes each night to update my Quicken information, and maybe 2 or 3 hours a week to play some Windows games that won't run on Linux yet (Battlezone II, NWN until just last week, Battlefield 1942). And the yutzes I LAN-party with always have some new weird game I'm not familiar with that they want to play, which only runs well on Windows...
One less thing making me reboot to use it (I prefer my machines run GNU/Linux most of the time) would be a good thing. Dance for me, money, dance...
I have a great deal of experience with Quicken under Linux using Codeweavers Wine (the actual Crossover Office product, which I bought largely to run Quicken). It does just fine for the basic checkbook management thing, but there is one huge usability bug that's a show-stopper for me. If you try to enter a "split" (itemize a transaction), and any of the splits have a negative value (like transfer to another account via the split) Quicken crashes hard. Doesn't happen on Windows, but all the time on Linux under CXOffice.
In case you're interested in repeating the experiment, try setting up a house payment with all the correct accounts: Asset: Escrow Debt: Home Loan Cash Flow: Checking
Set up payment from Checking to Home Loan for $900.00 (or whatever your house payment is). Then in House Payment, split that transfer into Principal (positive number), Interest (negative number), and Escrow (negative number). Click OK on Split window, BOOM! Down it goes. I use this technique all the time. Watching the Windows display, I think the Intuit folks actually do some goofiness with swapping the background window over to the account to which the negative transfer goes, and that may be the cause of the crash. In any case, happens every time on my two Linux machines.
The help is also broken, and I still rely on that a ton whenever I'm doing something new. You basically get blank screens on about half the help menu items. Some are populated, some aren't. It's very weird.
Other things that seem to be lacking in MoneyDance and GNUCash that I use all the time (I haven't tried either in about a year, though, so they may be updated):
* Most "planning" features, particularly setting up payment schedules automatically for debt reduction plans. My wife and I are on-track to get our house paid off in 9 years (only 5 years into the mortgage now), and it's largely due to this planning in Quicken. * Automatic import into TurboTax. May not seem like a big deal, but when you run several businesses and hire an external tax preparation specialist, it's helpful if everything is in Quicken already that you can hand them a floppy disk with your TurboTax data for them to import into their whatever-program. * Tax categories for just about everything under the sun, updated annually. I only use a handful of them, but when I know that a particular transaction is going to be a type of thing to end up on one of my forms at the end of the year, I can create a category for it and WOW! it appears on that form from TurboTax at the end of the year. * Superb graphing & reporting. One-click graphs of where our money goes, easy reporting if we're on our debt reduction/savings plan targets, etc.
Admittedly, those features may be present in MoneyDance or GNUCash now. But they are definitely show-stoppers if I don't have them. And due to the bug in CXOffice, Quicken under Linux is really a non-starter at the moment, except when I need to glance at my finances. I regularly back up my data from my Windows machine, and import it into my GNU/Linux Quicken to I have the information available on my laptop in GNU/Linux all the time.
Really, the automated import stuff is a non-issue for me. I download a.qif just about daily from my credit union, import it, and match what's cleared. Takes about two minutes total (as long as I've kept up, if I'm a few days behind it takes a bit longer to check for matches), then I'm done for the day. End of the month, we review our numbers, see if we need to adjust the family budget to account for something, and get on with our lives. I wasted a HUGE amount of time learning the thing when we first bought it, though, in large part because I was trying to work around problems running it under Crossover Office on my GNU/Linux machines. I eventually mostly gave up, installed Windows XP on one of my home boxes, and just use that box for gaming & Quicken now.
Hope that answers the question! I'm eager to give MoneyDance anot
Great link! I remember a few years ago, some guy coded a Tetris clone that could execute on Sun's Open Firmware (yes, that's in the firmware, not when any operating system is yet loaded). One of the sysadmins where I worked showed it off one day. I was pretty surprised!
I'm happy to hear that Apple has followed suit on intelligent firmware/BIOS. There is just simply no comparison in the PC world. There have been some great links from this thread that I'm going to have to check out to see BIOS improvements for PC, but that kind of manageability is just awesome.
And the earlier comment, too, was insightful -- companies that have control over the hardware & software seem to make more intelligent choices regarding hardware management features. Thus Apple does it right, Sun does it right, and HP does it right on their UNIX boxes, but the vast majority of PC server makers are stuck competing on price, and sacrifice excellent management to beat their competitors.
As an aside, SGI and IBM both seem to "get it" -- they are making expensive boxes that run GNU/Linux on the high end, and making improvements to the Linux kernel that support their boxes and style of doing business. Meanwhile, Dell & HP don't seem to want people to know they have GNU/Linux offerings sometimes. Of course, given the current depression in the States, there are fewer companies buying the nice, high-end, integrated hardware...
A few things that are very nice about some commercial UNIX variants you don't have on GNU/Linux systems:
1. Integrated systems management, ala "Sam" in HP/UX. Although I'm first in line to say that systems administration should never be handed over to imbeciles, Sam is easy enough that non-professionals can use it, yet it covers all the bases of systems administration from your hosts file through recompiling a kernel. It seems to be what Linuxconf wants to be, but isn't quite yet. It also does this without royally screwing up particularly hard-fought configuration files. Just use Linuxconf to configure network interfaces after you've set up a beautiful five-lne config and see what it does to/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX. Red Hat's config tools are getting there, and YaST seems to have nailed it -- but it's not free software.
2. Transparent X configuration w/3D support out of the box. When the installers get it right (about 75% of the time), Linux + X-windows is just fine. When it gets it wrong, the iterations are ugly: XFree86 -configure (blah blah blah) XFree86 -xf86config/root/XF86Config.new (dumps out, some obscure error) vi/etc/XF86Config.new (ad nausem)
I miss how trivial it is to adjust X on my old Sun. Then again, there, instead of hacking a config file, you had to hack some obscure command options. And setting up dual monitors on XFree86 is much better than on Solaris (or was, back when Solaris 8 was the standard, haven't mucked with Sun equipment much since then).
3. More on the X server: FAST X services. I've run XFree86 on really new, top-of-the-line Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox hardware, and not one of them can even touch the performance of X-windows on my old SGI O2. IRIX X is just amazingly faster. I'm not talking so much about 3D performance, but multi-head, full-window drag type stuff. Watching the ghosting as I wiggle this very screen I'm typing in back & forth on my RedHat 8.0 box at work right now on an Nvidia Geforce4 @ 1280x1024 is just painful. I know people are going to say "it's the configuration, stupid!" but if optimizing for decent X-windows performance isn't easy enough for a UNIX veteran of 7 years to do it without serious pain, it's not easy enough for an admin to want to deal with it. NOTE: I optimized all 686 at home on Gentoo with Nvidia's drivers. It's considerably better, but still doesn't compare. Then again, I don't have an O2 anymore for real head-to-head comparison, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. On the other hand, identical hardware in MS Windows gives immensely better 2D performance.)
Then again, that's just a graphics professional feature, more than a server-type feature. Comparing any other UNIX to SGI's IRIX for graphics work is just no contest.
4. Memory fault isolation. On Solaris, I'll actually get a message telling me which DIMM is bad, and which slot it is in. Admittedly, this is a failure not only of the operating system, but also of the hardware design. When you have 30-some-odd DIMMs in some E10K server, if you didn't have this kind of isolation, trying to find the bad stick of RAM would be beyond time-consuming. Ditto for HP/UX when replacing faulty RAM. Once again, though, IBM seems to be adressing this with their higher-end servers, and I look forward to about a year from now when it becomes more of a common feature on GNU/Linux servers.
5. Something like "OpenBIOS" or Sun's OpenBoot (I think that's the name? Been a while, I forgot). This is great to work with, for instance, on Alpha systems. Fairly complete diagnostics before the OS even boots, and it all gets shucked out the serial port. You can compensate for this by installing some kind of lights-out management board in your PC, but if you ask any UNIX admin that has used the non-PC-BIOS stuff on pro UNIX systems, a PC BIOS just doesn't compare. For instance, on the Alpha I have at home, I can hook up fibre channel and enumerate all the available partitions, flag one as bootable, mount some filesystems and make changes, force boot to HALT temporarily rather than boot to full, stop the OS, do a memory dump, sync the filesystems and reboot... a whole lot.
GNU/Linux on Alpha/Sparc inherits these benefits, and so it is a non-issue. GNU/Linux on X86 still really, really sucks in this dep't.
That's about all I can think of for now. The difference between managing UNIX systems from Sun & HP, versus PC-based GNU/Linux systems, is still large but shrinking. As evidenced above, a BIG chunk of what still sucks about Linux is due to hardware & hardware integration, not the O/S itself, really. GNU/Linux is definitely getting there; I love running it on my Alpha at home, because I get many of those benefits mentioned and still use the operating system I love.
I run servers inside User Mode Linux VM's all the time. Not only are they good for testing, they are also good for setting up firewalled hosts, low-usage shell accounts, and small web servers. For these kinds of applications, they are a great choice. Unless you're using a VMWare on some really nice hardware, though, it's folly to try to run most I/O intensive task on them. To run Apache for a few thousand hits a day, it's great. To run a massive Oracle database used by thousands of people simultaneous, I'd pass:)
VMWare has made great performance leaps recently, and IBM is using them to enable virtualization, like they've had for 15 years on mainframes, on PC hardware. It's a great application, and there are some nice benefits you gain from hosting a few dozen virtual machines on top of some really nice mid-range server hardware (mid-range being roughly $25,000 - $75,000 8-processor stuff), rather than investing in blade servers or a whole bunch of 1U rack units. Foremost among these is very, very easy recoverability. If the hardware hosting a virtual machine dies, fire up the virtual machine somewhere else, even on different hardware, or if it's a software problem, roll the disk image back one rev and see why it crashed. Easy. If your 1U or blade server dies, recovery time is generally far more. Not always worse, particularly if a competent sysadmin designed the architecture, but generally.
I don't mean to be a VMWare pundit, but particularly if you run ESX server, the results are very impressive. There are some limitations, notably that you can only have 1 logical "CPU" per virtual machine (up to 10 VM's per physical CPU), but aside from that, it's really nice. GSX server is a bit cheaper and runs on the GNU/Linux you know and love (rather than VMware's own version of Linux), and seems to be about on-par performance-wise. If you have some extra money to blow, give them a shot:)
With the changes he's made in the goals of Plex86, it sure seems as if he's targetting the same approach currently in use by User-Mode Linux. I understand it may be quite different under the hood, but will that matter to users? It doesn't matter much to me if the task is accomplished using a ptrace thread under kernel system calls or actually virtualizes hardware -- if I can run several virtual GNU/Linux systems on top of one physical system, at a reasonable speed for the load, using free software as much as possible, I'm happy. The technical details of how it's done are irrelevant to me -- what matters is the result.
If the Bochs/Plex86 combination is actually faster than Bochs by itself on X86 hardware, and can approach the speed of VMWare, well, that sounds interesting to me. Virtualization technology is a large and growing market, funding a lot of IBM's recent growth in the mid-range server market with quad and 8-processor systems running VMWare to aggregate systems, improve manageability, and reduce personnel management costs. There's no denying the need is there; VMWare posted their first profit ever last quarter because of these strong sales, with more big money coming down the pipe.
Competition among free software projects is a good thing. I'm glad to see Plex86 come out with something new that may work better than the old. But what most people wanted was to run multiple copies of Microsoft Windows on top of Linux, or to run MS Windows in VMs alongside GNU/Linux, and if that doesn't work easily & quickly, it may be a potent obstacle to widespread adoption.
Dead serious, you just nailed me. I didn't know that ALT-F4 was the shortcut in Windows to close the Window. Then again, I'm normally booted to Linux, running KDE, and that key combination pops me to virtual desktop four.
Yeah, I bind my keys funny, don't heckle me about it! And I booted to Windows to play Neverwinter Nights (sigh)...
The 12" Powerbook has USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, AirPort, and Ethernet all built in. If you need a modem, buy a USB modem. If you need an external hard drive, pick up a Firewire drive. Ad nauseum.
The lack of a PCMCIA slot sure seems to be a nitpick to me. If you didn't have external disk, serial, peripheral wireless, and network wireless stuff built into the machine, maybe it would be an issue. From where I sit, though, leaving out the PCMCIA slot was a smart decision so that they could keep a dramatically reduced form factor. Sure seems full-featured to me, I can't think of anything I'd want a PC card for that this laptop doesn't have a connection to handle, and I've been using PC laptops since my first 386SX-25 (no PC card there, either, had to wait till my 486SX-33 upgrade to get a PCMCIA slot. Of course, I don't think such a thing existed yet when I got my 386).
Increases in sales of member software in areas where the BSA is actively campaigning are counted as successes for the organization. Quite some time ago, I remember reading a copy of one of their reports to a member organization indicating an increase in software sales after the BSA sent out their form letters. It was somewhere on the order of 30% more sales.
The shakedown tactic is remarkably effective at increasing software sales, which is exactly what the BSA wants, so that they in turn get more funding from member companies. A few high-profile cases, where they have an open-and-shut case against an organization blatantly abusing copyrights, are all they need to inspire fear in the rest of society that the same will happen to them. Police work on the same system. They can't possibly prosecute every speeder on the highways, but merely pulling over a small fraction of speeders in a campaign on a certain stretch of highway for several weeks in a row is enough of a deterrent to reduce the average speed dramatically. Same thing with meth lab busts -- bust one large operation, and a lot of smaller operations shut down themselves in fear they'll be caught too.
In 99.9% of cases, the advice to just ignore the BSA letter, but tacitly make sure you aren't blatantly violating copyrights, is the right thing to do. In that remaining one out of a thousand, the BSA has your number and you've already got a real fight on your hands, particularly if you are an easy target like an educational institution (generally cash-poor), company with known cash problems (recent layoffs, for instance), or a high-profile target like a very successful and growing CAD workshop.
The solution I'm trying to drive at my work is GNU/Linux across the board wherever we can use it. And open-licensed products too. I agree with an earlier poster, the BSA has been one of the best forces for corporate migration to GNU/Linux on the face of the planet.
I never had good luck with the baked potatoes. At any decent muzzle velocity, they just tended to explode coming out of the barrel. When you launched the baked ones, were they cooked nice and soft (a good, solid 2 hours on an Idaho Baker at 425 degrees Farenheit) or just semi-cooked, like some people like them (maybe 45 minutes at 425)? What size were they?
I threw out my venerable potato cannon last year, after three years of starch-loving fun. I'm a twenty-nine year-old father of three, and never built one as a kid. It's never too late to finish childhood, I suppose...
Well, I use Postfix. Since I sign up for these sort of things so rarely, I simply do it manually using/etc/aliases (with Postfix,/etc/postfix/aliases). I point barnson.org's MX to my home DSL line, and the OpenBSD box running as my mail server is at my feet right now. It takes an extra 30 seconds whenever I register for something, but it's been fun to watch which companies sell my information and which don't!
Here are some samples from an aliases file:
quickcooks-spam: matthew bynarilla-spam: matthew dietstuff-spam: matthew beach-spam: matthew
I then run "postalias/etc/postfix/aliases" and voila! If someone sends mail to bynarila-spam on my barnson.org domain, it will end up in my inbox, with an appropriate header. If I ever get a mail to that email address which is not from bynarilla, I can be fairly certain my registration information with bynarilla.com was sold, and then immediately convert that to a spamtrap address:
bynarilla-spam: spamtrap
"spamtrap" is just an account for a mail spool with a job running against it every so often that does a "spamassassin -r </var/mail/spamtrap" then "rm/var/mail/spamtrap". Note on GNU/Linux, the path would be/var/spool/mail/spamtrap. Anyway, "spamassassin -r" is a Razor report to end up on the global spam corpus.
This machine has a whole lot of spare cycles, so I run the job as a daemon rather than from cron. This way, I can pick up and report spams to spamassassin's Razor implementation before much more than a few seconds have gone by. My domain is very low-traffic, so this is pretty easy on the box:
----
#!/bin/bash # # spamtrap.sh # A small daemon to automatically check for # the presence of spamtrap's mail spool and report # any messages caught there.
while [ 1 == 1 ]; do
if [ -f/var/mail/spamtrap ]; then
spamassassin -r </var/mail/spamtrap
rm/var/mail/spamtrap # (or cat/dev/null >/var/mail/spamtrap)
fi
sleep 15 done
----
I tacked this script onto the end of my/etc/rc.local like this (doing from memory, syntax problems may exist):
# Spamtrap stuff
if [ -x/usr/local/sbin/spamtrap.sh ]; then
echo -n ' spamtrap'; su - spamtrap -c "/usr/local/bin/spamtrap" &
fi
You can get more complicated if you want to do runlevels on a GNU/Linux box or whatever. I leave that as an exercise for your imagination -- the above should work if you tack it onto the end of/etc/rc.d/rc.local on a Redhat-ish box as well.
Anyway, hope that helps. Really, your MTA is irrelevant to this kind of scenario. Every MTA I know of supports some kind of "aliases" setup (or even a virtual-hosting setup), so you just set the aliases to what you want them to go to -- your real mail account, or else some spamtrap account for later processing and reporting.
If you want more details, feel free to email me. I prefer all correspondence from Slashdot stuff go to an account named "slashdot", and my domain is barnson.org. I think you can figure out my email address. Have fun!
I realize I'm not adding much to the discussion, but I've decided on a fun way to track who sells my names. I own the domain "barnson.org". For every place where I submit electronic mail details, they get their own account, so I have account names like "ediets-spam" (no such thing as confirmed opt-in there), "slashdot" (for obvious reasons), and more. I only use one email address per source, so if they sell my address, it's completely obvious who sold it. Pretty fun to watch what happens. If I get mail to any of these accounts that I did not explicitly agree to, the address immediately becomes a spamtrap. Whee!
I wouldn't naturally associate "unions", "idiot lawsuits", and "phbs" in the same sentence together. Although I'm a non-unionized technology worker, I value the contribution of unions to enforcing fair pay, fair working conditions, and providing valuable services to many employees. Given the chance, any corporation will exploit its workers to the maximum extent possible; unions provide a valuable balance to their overzealousness.
I know a lot of people, particularly intelligent computer people, are terrifically anti-union. Yet without the unions looking out for workers, we would have horrific working conditions and far bleaker employment prospects than we have today. It's largely due to the efforts of unions that we work less than 16 hours a day, enjoy health benefits, and in general have reasonable working conditions around the U.S.. In an ideal world, employees would be a scarce resource and employers would have to compete with nice benefits for workers, but we don't live there.
As with so many advancements, you won't notice them until they are gone. Unions are not the problem, corruption is. The solution is to get bright, ethical people into the professions the unions represent. There are smart people in every line of work on the planet.
What you're saying is pretty much standard political theory, nothing particularly new. The standard way of saying it is that "Govenment is a monopoly on violence."
I didn't have that phrase, "Government is a monopoly on violence" in my vernacular until this moment. I appreciate the quip!
I think not enough people understand the origins of government, though, and in cases like this rail and rant against "vigilante justice", failing to realize that organized justice systems spring from vigilante justice! Communities reach a certain size, and with it grows crime. Against the crime springs up vigilantes to pursue the "bad guys". The non-vigilantes/non-criminals grow concerned about vigilante justice and seek to organize vigilante forces so that they can feel that justice is "ordered". Seems like we're following the same pattern on the Internet, but it will still take another 2-5 years to iron out a lot of the order so that we can have an organized Internet justice system...
Next you will be telling us that it's ok for government A to overthrow government B if it thinks B is destabilizing to it.
It is OK for gov't A to overthrow gov't B if gov't B is doing things gov't A doesn't like. Humanity has been doing this since we were cave men drawing pictures on the walls. We're a bunch of kids in a world-sized sandbox, and the only referee is the one that can enforce his rules. Every so often, that balance of power shifts.
The question of whether it's ethical to make war is a personal one, but on a global scale, war is simply another tool for a government to enforce the collective wishes of their populace. We're all cogs in that machine, and large, wholesale change is only realized once people come to understand what impact their role plays in the overall scheme of things. Or once a sufficient number of the aggressors/defenders are dead so that they are no longer a threat.
Don't submit to authority if what you're doing feels wrong to you. Do that much, and I think you're halfway there to being an enlightened human being. I'm about a quarter of the way there, I'm cowed by authority way too much still. I'm trying to figure out what the other half of enlightenment is:)
(Oh, yeah, right, it's on the second head of my video card, dangit where'd I leave that monitor.)
In the US, "The Government" is another word for a body representing the collective will of the people. In other words, a 350-million-person lynch mob generally agrees (or fails to disagree much that) somebody should die, and paid a few people to do it for them.
Justice from "the government" is simply institutionalized vigilantism. We hire people who are interested in pursuing justice and pay them decent money to carry out justice on our behalfs. As a side benefit, we decided to pay for training programs so that these hired guns won't kill the wrong people or treat them unfairly (which doesn't always work, but we try).
If you're killed because you've killed, it's because a bunch of people want you dead for doing what you've done. Is it really more civilized to murder someone collectively as a "government" because all of one's friends (fellow voters) say to do it rather than because one is angry?
Not completely disagreeing, but just food for thought. Perhaps government == vigilantism with rules...
"Prior Art" is the solution to this problem: If a given invention existed "in the wild", or was in use in some public way by another party before one party filed for the patent, the patent will either be thrown out in court or never granted in the first place during the discovery phase.
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, the Patent & Trademark Office of the U.S. does throw out many patent applications during discovery due to prior art or previous patents. However, they still let through too many that should never have been granted, which then can go through lengthy infringement cases before they are finally discarded.
Regular Ethernet cards (10baseT, 100baseTX, GigE, etc.) have MAC addresses that are trivially easy to spoof. Every wireless card I've ever used (four, now, from different vendords) has the mac hard-coded into the card. You can try to spoof the mac, but coming out from your port (or responding to ARPs) it reports its hard-wired MAC address.
In general, most WAPs these days just require you to use a PPTP connection over them so that you have encrypted traffic and user authentication. Sign in using PPTP, and every packet on that PPP interface can be billed to you.
The first thing I did after reading this article, and realizing that there were Representatives interested in tilting the balance of copyright slightly in favor of citizens again, was to write my representative Rob Bishop. Here's the text of the letter. Let me encourage you to do likewise: look up the name of your representative at http://www.house.gov and write!
Unfortunately, I felt that in a half-page letter I couldn't get all the details in. And I should have included a referral to a URL for him to get more information. Oh well, it's already in the mail, I'll do better next letter.
---- Dear Representative Bishop,
I don't often write my Congressional representatives, but I feel the need to do so in this case. I'm writing to encourage your support of HR 5544, "The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2002", introduced by Reps. Boucher and Doolittle.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), while well-intentioned, has resulted in a massive power grab by the entertainment and media cartels. The grant of copyright by the citizens of this country to copyright holders was never intended by our founding fathers to be a bludgeon with which large corporations can force citizens and non-citizens into only writing software or publications of which they approve. It was granted as a measure to encourage new works, for limited times, by the author(s) who created an original work. Now it is being abused in an attempt to control not only the copying of works, but when, where, and how a legal purchaser of a copyrighted work can use it.
The DMCA has been appropriated by many companies now to prevent the publication of material which is not in their best interest, to prosecute competitors into oblivion with court cases rather than competing on product merit, and to silence would-be critics and whistle-blowers. We're now in a situation where a law is being abused by organizations to limit the free political and economic speech of individuals, and those individuals have insufficient resources to defend themselves from deep-pockets corporations in court.
HR 5544, while principally focussed on requiring media companies to label intentionally defective compact discs designed to prevent playback on non-approved devices, also includes a brief amendment to the DMCA which would be a valuable step towards preventing the egregious abuses of power currently trampling the first amendment landscape. Please support this bill, particularly the "Sec. 5. Fair Use Amendment", and restore the rights of scientific research, fair use, and free speech to the copyright landscape. With kind regards,
Matthew P. Barnson
P.S. See also the Electronic Frontier Foundation's information regarding the unintended consequences of the DMCA by searching Google for "DMCA unintended consequences"
Of course, as often demonstrated in various online role-playing games, "men will go where they *think* the women are, even if those women are actually men playing female avatars."
I play a Female Gnome Wizard from (rare) time to time in Everquest. I'm not 3 feet tall, I don't cast damaging spells, and I don't tinker with clockwork parts to create automatons (although I'm a sysadmin, so I guess that last part is kind of close). Yet people frequently assume that I'm female in real life. So these "There" developers should just get enough guys to cross-dress in the game, that should do the trick and bring the customers in droves!
I must, unfortunately, second the opinion regarding the bloat of basic GUI-based apps on most GNU/Linux distributions. Unfortunately, I love those features, too. I have a laptop here beside me that is basically so slow running many modern distributions as to be unusable, yet the specs aren't very bad for a laptop: 366MHz, 128MB RAM, 6GB HDD. Just a few years old. If I want to use a distribution that runs well using GUI tools on this platform, I basically have to pick a very old distribution or build one myself. I recently installed Mandrake 7 on it, and it worked OK with moderate swappage.
So I'm disappointed with the bloat, although one could call that the price of progress. Half a gig of RAM is less than a hundred bucks these days, but finding RAM for a 366 that belongs to my work seems a bit... off.
However, calling these projects a "failure" of open source is a bit over the top. Yes, some of the applications have bugs. But I've impressed several of my co-workers with my KDE desktop and GNU/Linux machine that runs for months on end, under very heavy day-to-day use, without crashes or memory leaks. Yeah, I grimace when I have KDE, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Evolution, and a bunch of shells open and see 200MBytes of RAM in use. But the machine has 512MB, is a 933MHz, and responds like a dream. The shortcuts are intuitive, desktop performance is responsive across dual monitors (a Nvidia TNT2 and ATI Rage 3d Pro), and I can do things with little effort that my co-workers still goggle at. Definitely not a failure, but it would certainly be nice to see a feature-rich environment for low-memory machines. Then again, there's always WindowMaker or Fluxbox...
My experience is that open source/free software projects which attempt to first do market research, feature requests, and aggressive documentation simply never get off the ground. People don't want to help in the project until it's something they can use and have a reason to use it.
There are a few dedicated hackers and organizations that have successfully worked around this problem. Notably, several of the Apache organization's projects have gone through formal design and review before coding, and are coming along fairly well. However, these do tend to be very small teams where someone is paid by a company to see the effort through -- your average "scratch an itch" developer, or post-college student may not have the time or interest to pursue it to fruition.
My take is that it's best to put something out there that "just works", to begin attracting development effort for it. If you are interested enough, it's a great idea to have formal design documentation which you've written as the primary developer. UI and usability testing generally cost a great deal, but I think that's another problem that can be solved by technology, and the correct implementation of social pressures for a user to submit a report on his experience during the beta phase.
I seem to recall a program that did that... by default, when the beta you were using expired, it poppped up a web page to download the new version. Now, a user could download the new version just by visiting the main page of the site, but this offered them a quick and easy way to get the correct upgrade, while asking them some non-personal questions about their experience with the software. Stuff like that I see as the next wave of open-source testing.
Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer as a file system and Internet browser works almost perfectly under Crossover Office. The only bug I've found worthy of note is that there seems to be a "flicker" in the icon bar as it refreshes icons several times a second. It's strange, but not completely distracting. The only other functionality that is missing from it is some O/S hooks. For instance, I have automatic proxy detection (WPAD) set up at home. IE on Windows, it works just fine, finds the proxy, and out it goes without me touching a thing. Same for Konqueror/KDE (although I had to do some strange hacks to the setup due to a current bug in how Konqueror figures out the WPAD address, fixed in CVS), it goes without a hitch, finds the proxy, woohaah. IE on GNU/Linux it just never seems to find the proxy and goes out directly; I think CXOffice hard-codes a hostname or something. There are a couple of other quirks, but as far as the rendering engine and page viewing goes, it's perfect. Plugins work really well, although sound is a bit choppy on slower machines with some plugins. Overall, it was a very satisfying purchase. It's particularly nice to be able to play those .wmv files I run across at large sites such as CNN, and to be able to handle Apple stuff with Quicktime. Yeah, I know mplayer can handle it, but I haven't had luck with the wrapper yet (not that I've tried too hard).
So I don't think it's the IE integration completely at fault there. The other part of Quicken that doesn't work is the multimedia stuff, but I think that may be due to how the CD-ROM is handled more than anything else. One day I'll look into it more.
Looks like from the comment mirror I caught lower in the thread that MoneyDance has good graphing & budget functions. When it comes up, I'll have to check it out.
Things tying my family to Microsoft Windows at home:
1. Childrens Games
2. Quicken
3. Dad's Games
4. My wife's Print Shop app. Won't run under Wine, and I haven't found any good Print Shop-type apps under GNU/Linux that come with nearly the library of images she uses regularly on those six CDs...
So I personally use my Windows box a few minutes each night to update my Quicken information, and maybe 2 or 3 hours a week to play some Windows games that won't run on Linux yet (Battlezone II, NWN until just last week, Battlefield 1942). And the yutzes I LAN-party with always have some new weird game I'm not familiar with that they want to play, which only runs well on Windows...
One less thing making me reboot to use it (I prefer my machines run GNU/Linux most of the time) would be a good thing. Dance for me, money, dance...
I have a great deal of experience with Quicken under Linux using Codeweavers Wine (the actual Crossover Office product, which I bought largely to run Quicken). It does just fine for the basic checkbook management thing, but there is one huge usability bug that's a show-stopper for me. If you try to enter a "split" (itemize a transaction), and any of the splits have a negative value (like transfer to another account via the split) Quicken crashes hard. Doesn't happen on Windows, but all the time on Linux under CXOffice.
.qif just about daily from my credit union, import it, and match what's cleared. Takes about two minutes total (as long as I've kept up, if I'm a few days behind it takes a bit longer to check for matches), then I'm done for the day. End of the month, we review our numbers, see if we need to adjust the family budget to account for something, and get on with our lives. I wasted a HUGE amount of time learning the thing when we first bought it, though, in large part because I was trying to work around problems running it under Crossover Office on my GNU/Linux machines. I eventually mostly gave up, installed Windows XP on one of my home boxes, and just use that box for gaming & Quicken now.
In case you're interested in repeating the experiment, try setting up a house payment with all the correct accounts:
Asset: Escrow
Debt: Home Loan
Cash Flow: Checking
Set up payment from Checking to Home Loan for $900.00 (or whatever your house payment is). Then in House Payment, split that transfer into Principal (positive number), Interest (negative number), and Escrow (negative number). Click OK on Split window, BOOM! Down it goes. I use this technique all the time. Watching the Windows display, I think the Intuit folks actually do some goofiness with swapping the background window over to the account to which the negative transfer goes, and that may be the cause of the crash. In any case, happens every time on my two Linux machines.
The help is also broken, and I still rely on that a ton whenever I'm doing something new. You basically get blank screens on about half the help menu items. Some are populated, some aren't. It's very weird.
Other things that seem to be lacking in MoneyDance and GNUCash that I use all the time (I haven't tried either in about a year, though, so they may be updated):
* Most "planning" features, particularly setting up payment schedules automatically for debt reduction plans. My wife and I are on-track to get our house paid off in 9 years (only 5 years into the mortgage now), and it's largely due to this planning in Quicken.
* Automatic import into TurboTax. May not seem like a big deal, but when you run several businesses and hire an external tax preparation specialist, it's helpful if everything is in Quicken already that you can hand them a floppy disk with your TurboTax data for them to import into their whatever-program.
* Tax categories for just about everything under the sun, updated annually. I only use a handful of them, but when I know that a particular transaction is going to be a type of thing to end up on one of my forms at the end of the year, I can create a category for it and WOW! it appears on that form from TurboTax at the end of the year.
* Superb graphing & reporting. One-click graphs of where our money goes, easy reporting if we're on our debt reduction/savings plan targets, etc.
Admittedly, those features may be present in MoneyDance or GNUCash now. But they are definitely show-stoppers if I don't have them. And due to the bug in CXOffice, Quicken under Linux is really a non-starter at the moment, except when I need to glance at my finances. I regularly back up my data from my Windows machine, and import it into my GNU/Linux Quicken to I have the information available on my laptop in GNU/Linux all the time.
Really, the automated import stuff is a non-issue for me. I download a
Hope that answers the question! I'm eager to give MoneyDance anot
Great link! I remember a few years ago, some guy coded a Tetris clone that could execute on Sun's Open Firmware (yes, that's in the firmware, not when any operating system is yet loaded). One of the sysadmins where I worked showed it off one day. I was pretty surprised!
I'm happy to hear that Apple has followed suit on intelligent firmware/BIOS. There is just simply no comparison in the PC world. There have been some great links from this thread that I'm going to have to check out to see BIOS improvements for PC, but that kind of manageability is just awesome.
And the earlier comment, too, was insightful -- companies that have control over the hardware & software seem to make more intelligent choices regarding hardware management features. Thus Apple does it right, Sun does it right, and HP does it right on their UNIX boxes, but the vast majority of PC server makers are stuck competing on price, and sacrifice excellent management to beat their competitors.
As an aside, SGI and IBM both seem to "get it" -- they are making expensive boxes that run GNU/Linux on the high end, and making improvements to the Linux kernel that support their boxes and style of doing business. Meanwhile, Dell & HP don't seem to want people to know they have GNU/Linux offerings sometimes. Of course, given the current depression in the States, there are fewer companies buying the nice, high-end, integrated hardware...
A few things that are very nice about some commercial UNIX variants you don't have on GNU/Linux systems:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX. Red Hat's config tools are getting there, and YaST seems to have nailed it -- but it's not free software.
/root/XF86Config.new /etc/XF86Config.new
1. Integrated systems management, ala "Sam" in HP/UX. Although I'm first in line to say that systems administration should never be handed over to imbeciles, Sam is easy enough that non-professionals can use it, yet it covers all the bases of systems administration from your hosts file through recompiling a kernel. It seems to be what Linuxconf wants to be, but isn't quite yet. It also does this without royally screwing up particularly hard-fought configuration files. Just use Linuxconf to configure network interfaces after you've set up a beautiful five-lne config and see what it does to
2. Transparent X configuration w/3D support out of the box. When the installers get it right (about 75% of the time), Linux + X-windows is just fine. When it gets it wrong, the iterations are ugly:
XFree86 -configure
(blah blah blah)
XFree86 -xf86config
(dumps out, some obscure error)
vi
(ad nausem)
I miss how trivial it is to adjust X on my old Sun. Then again, there, instead of hacking a config file, you had to hack some obscure command options. And setting up dual monitors on XFree86 is much better than on Solaris (or was, back when Solaris 8 was the standard, haven't mucked with Sun equipment much since then).
3. More on the X server: FAST X services. I've run XFree86 on really new, top-of-the-line Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox hardware, and not one of them can even touch the performance of X-windows on my old SGI O2. IRIX X is just amazingly faster. I'm not talking so much about 3D performance, but multi-head, full-window drag type stuff. Watching the ghosting as I wiggle this very screen I'm typing in back & forth on my RedHat 8.0 box at work right now on an Nvidia Geforce4 @ 1280x1024 is just painful. I know people are going to say "it's the configuration, stupid!" but if optimizing for decent X-windows performance isn't easy enough for a UNIX veteran of 7 years to do it without serious pain, it's not easy enough for an admin to want to deal with it.
NOTE: I optimized all 686 at home on Gentoo with Nvidia's drivers. It's considerably better, but still doesn't compare. Then again, I don't have an O2 anymore for real head-to-head comparison, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. On the other hand, identical hardware in MS Windows gives immensely better 2D performance.)
Then again, that's just a graphics professional feature, more than a server-type feature. Comparing any other UNIX to SGI's IRIX for graphics work is just no contest.
4. Memory fault isolation. On Solaris, I'll actually get a message telling me which DIMM is bad, and which slot it is in. Admittedly, this is a failure not only of the operating system, but also of the hardware design. When you have 30-some-odd DIMMs in some E10K server, if you didn't have this kind of isolation, trying to find the bad stick of RAM would be beyond time-consuming. Ditto for HP/UX when replacing faulty RAM. Once again, though, IBM seems to be adressing this with their higher-end servers, and I look forward to about a year from now when it becomes more of a common feature on GNU/Linux servers.
5. Something like "OpenBIOS" or Sun's OpenBoot (I think that's the name? Been a while, I forgot). This is great to work with, for instance, on Alpha systems. Fairly complete diagnostics before the OS even boots, and it all gets shucked out the serial port. You can compensate for this by installing some kind of lights-out management board in your PC, but if you ask any UNIX admin that has used the non-PC-BIOS stuff on pro UNIX systems, a PC BIOS just doesn't compare. For instance, on the Alpha I have at home, I can hook up fibre channel and enumerate all the available partitions, flag one as bootable, mount some filesystems and make changes, force boot to HALT temporarily rather than boot to full, stop the OS, do a memory dump, sync the filesystems and reboot... a whole lot.
GNU/Linux on Alpha/Sparc inherits these benefits, and so it is a non-issue. GNU/Linux on X86 still really, really sucks in this dep't.
That's about all I can think of for now. The difference between managing UNIX systems from Sun & HP, versus PC-based GNU/Linux systems, is still large but shrinking. As evidenced above, a BIG chunk of what still sucks about Linux is due to hardware & hardware integration, not the O/S itself, really. GNU/Linux is definitely getting there; I love running it on my Alpha at home, because I get many of those benefits mentioned and still use the operating system I love.
I run servers inside User Mode Linux VM's all the time. Not only are they good for testing, they are also good for setting up firewalled hosts, low-usage shell accounts, and small web servers. For these kinds of applications, they are a great choice. Unless you're using a VMWare on some really nice hardware, though, it's folly to try to run most I/O intensive task on them. To run Apache for a few thousand hits a day, it's great. To run a massive Oracle database used by thousands of people simultaneous, I'd pass :)
:)
VMWare has made great performance leaps recently, and IBM is using them to enable virtualization, like they've had for 15 years on mainframes, on PC hardware. It's a great application, and there are some nice benefits you gain from hosting a few dozen virtual machines on top of some really nice mid-range server hardware (mid-range being roughly $25,000 - $75,000 8-processor stuff), rather than investing in blade servers or a whole bunch of 1U rack units. Foremost among these is very, very easy recoverability. If the hardware hosting a virtual machine dies, fire up the virtual machine somewhere else, even on different hardware, or if it's a software problem, roll the disk image back one rev and see why it crashed. Easy. If your 1U or blade server dies, recovery time is generally far more. Not always worse, particularly if a competent sysadmin designed the architecture, but generally.
I don't mean to be a VMWare pundit, but particularly if you run ESX server, the results are very impressive. There are some limitations, notably that you can only have 1 logical "CPU" per virtual machine (up to 10 VM's per physical CPU), but aside from that, it's really nice. GSX server is a bit cheaper and runs on the GNU/Linux you know and love (rather than VMware's own version of Linux), and seems to be about on-par performance-wise. If you have some extra money to blow, give them a shot
With the changes he's made in the goals of Plex86, it sure seems as if he's targetting the same approach currently in use by User-Mode Linux. I understand it may be quite different under the hood, but will that matter to users? It doesn't matter much to me if the task is accomplished using a ptrace thread under kernel system calls or actually virtualizes hardware -- if I can run several virtual GNU/Linux systems on top of one physical system, at a reasonable speed for the load, using free software as much as possible, I'm happy. The technical details of how it's done are irrelevant to me -- what matters is the result.
If the Bochs/Plex86 combination is actually faster than Bochs by itself on X86 hardware, and can approach the speed of VMWare, well, that sounds interesting to me. Virtualization technology is a large and growing market, funding a lot of IBM's recent growth in the mid-range server market with quad and 8-processor systems running VMWare to aggregate systems, improve manageability, and reduce personnel management costs. There's no denying the need is there; VMWare posted their first profit ever last quarter because of these strong sales, with more big money coming down the pipe.
Competition among free software projects is a good thing. I'm glad to see Plex86 come out with something new that may work better than the old. But what most people wanted was to run multiple copies of Microsoft Windows on top of Linux, or to run MS Windows in VMs alongside GNU/Linux, and if that doesn't work easily & quickly, it may be a potent obstacle to widespread adoption.
Dead serious, you just nailed me. I didn't know that ALT-F4 was the shortcut in Windows to close the Window. Then again, I'm normally booted to Linux, running KDE, and that key combination pops me to virtual desktop four.
Yeah, I bind my keys funny, don't heckle me about it! And I booted to Windows to play Neverwinter Nights (sigh)...
Guess my IQ just dropped three or four points.
Just went by the list on the store.apple.com site. Didn't notice the modem there. In my book, one less reason to need a PC Card slot...
The 12" Powerbook has USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, AirPort, and Ethernet all built in. If you need a modem, buy a USB modem. If you need an external hard drive, pick up a Firewire drive. Ad nauseum.
The lack of a PCMCIA slot sure seems to be a nitpick to me. If you didn't have external disk, serial, peripheral wireless, and network wireless stuff built into the machine, maybe it would be an issue. From where I sit, though, leaving out the PCMCIA slot was a smart decision so that they could keep a dramatically reduced form factor. Sure seems full-featured to me, I can't think of anything I'd want a PC card for that this laptop doesn't have a connection to handle, and I've been using PC laptops since my first 386SX-25 (no PC card there, either, had to wait till my 486SX-33 upgrade to get a PCMCIA slot. Of course, I don't think such a thing existed yet when I got my 386).
Increases in sales of member software in areas where the BSA is actively campaigning are counted as successes for the organization. Quite some time ago, I remember reading a copy of one of their reports to a member organization indicating an increase in software sales after the BSA sent out their form letters. It was somewhere on the order of 30% more sales.
The shakedown tactic is remarkably effective at increasing software sales, which is exactly what the BSA wants, so that they in turn get more funding from member companies. A few high-profile cases, where they have an open-and-shut case against an organization blatantly abusing copyrights, are all they need to inspire fear in the rest of society that the same will happen to them. Police work on the same system. They can't possibly prosecute every speeder on the highways, but merely pulling over a small fraction of speeders in a campaign on a certain stretch of highway for several weeks in a row is enough of a deterrent to reduce the average speed dramatically. Same thing with meth lab busts -- bust one large operation, and a lot of smaller operations shut down themselves in fear they'll be caught too.
In 99.9% of cases, the advice to just ignore the BSA letter, but tacitly make sure you aren't blatantly violating copyrights, is the right thing to do. In that remaining one out of a thousand, the BSA has your number and you've already got a real fight on your hands, particularly if you are an easy target like an educational institution (generally cash-poor), company with known cash problems (recent layoffs, for instance), or a high-profile target like a very successful and growing CAD workshop.
The solution I'm trying to drive at my work is GNU/Linux across the board wherever we can use it. And open-licensed products too. I agree with an earlier poster, the BSA has been one of the best forces for corporate migration to GNU/Linux on the face of the planet.
I never had good luck with the baked potatoes. At any decent muzzle velocity, they just tended to explode coming out of the barrel. When you launched the baked ones, were they cooked nice and soft (a good, solid 2 hours on an Idaho Baker at 425 degrees Farenheit) or just semi-cooked, like some people like them (maybe 45 minutes at 425)? What size were they?
I threw out my venerable potato cannon last year, after three years of starch-loving fun. I'm a twenty-nine year-old father of three, and never built one as a kid. It's never too late to finish childhood, I suppose...
Well, I use Postfix. Since I sign up for these sort of things so rarely, I simply do it manually using /etc/aliases (with Postfix, /etc/postfix/aliases). I point barnson.org's MX to my home DSL line, and the OpenBSD box running as my mail server is at my feet right now. It takes an extra 30 seconds whenever I register for something, but it's been fun to watch which companies sell my information and which don't!
/etc/postfix/aliases" and voila! If someone sends mail to bynarila-spam on my barnson.org domain, it will end up in my inbox, with an appropriate header. If I ever get a mail to that email address which is not from bynarilla, I can be fairly certain my registration information with bynarilla.com was sold, and then immediately convert that to a spamtrap address:
/var/mail/spamtrap" then "rm /var/mail/spamtrap". Note on GNU/Linux, the path would be /var/spool/mail/spamtrap. Anyway, "spamassassin -r" is a Razor report to end up on the global spam corpus.
/var/mail/spamtrap ]; then /var/mail/spamtrap /var/mail/spamtrap # (or cat /dev/null >/var/mail/spamtrap)
/etc/rc.local like this (doing from memory, syntax problems may exist):
/usr/local/sbin/spamtrap.sh ]; then
/etc/rc.d/rc.local on a Redhat-ish box as well.
Here are some samples from an aliases file:
quickcooks-spam: matthew
bynarilla-spam: matthew
dietstuff-spam: matthew
beach-spam: matthew
I then run "postalias
bynarilla-spam: spamtrap
"spamtrap" is just an account for a mail spool with a job running against it every so often that does a "spamassassin -r <
This machine has a whole lot of spare cycles, so I run the job as a daemon rather than from cron. This way, I can pick up and report spams to spamassassin's Razor implementation before much more than a few seconds have gone by. My domain is very low-traffic, so this is pretty easy on the box:
----
#!/bin/bash
#
# spamtrap.sh
# A small daemon to automatically check for
# the presence of spamtrap's mail spool and report
# any messages caught there.
while [ 1 == 1 ]; do
if [ -f
spamassassin -r <
rm
fi
sleep 15
done
----
I tacked this script onto the end of my
# Spamtrap stuff
if [ -x
echo -n ' spamtrap'; su - spamtrap -c "/usr/local/bin/spamtrap" &
fi
You can get more complicated if you want to do runlevels on a GNU/Linux box or whatever. I leave that as an exercise for your imagination -- the above should work if you tack it onto the end of
Anyway, hope that helps. Really, your MTA is irrelevant to this kind of scenario. Every MTA I know of supports some kind of "aliases" setup (or even a virtual-hosting setup), so you just set the aliases to what you want them to go to -- your real mail account, or else some spamtrap account for later processing and reporting.
If you want more details, feel free to email me. I prefer all correspondence from Slashdot stuff go to an account named "slashdot", and my domain is barnson.org. I think you can figure out my email address. Have fun!
I realize I'm not adding much to the discussion, but I've decided on a fun way to track who sells my names. I own the domain "barnson.org". For every place where I submit electronic mail details, they get their own account, so I have account names like "ediets-spam" (no such thing as confirmed opt-in there), "slashdot" (for obvious reasons), and more. I only use one email address per source, so if they sell my address, it's completely obvious who sold it. Pretty fun to watch what happens. If I get mail to any of these accounts that I did not explicitly agree to, the address immediately becomes a spamtrap. Whee!
I wouldn't naturally associate "unions", "idiot lawsuits", and "phbs" in the same sentence together. Although I'm a non-unionized technology worker, I value the contribution of unions to enforcing fair pay, fair working conditions, and providing valuable services to many employees. Given the chance, any corporation will exploit its workers to the maximum extent possible; unions provide a valuable balance to their overzealousness.
I know a lot of people, particularly intelligent computer people, are terrifically anti-union. Yet without the unions looking out for workers, we would have horrific working conditions and far bleaker employment prospects than we have today. It's largely due to the efforts of unions that we work less than 16 hours a day, enjoy health benefits, and in general have reasonable working conditions around the U.S.. In an ideal world, employees would be a scarce resource and employers would have to compete with nice benefits for workers, but we don't live there.
As with so many advancements, you won't notice them until they are gone. Unions are not the problem, corruption is. The solution is to get bright, ethical people into the professions the unions represent. There are smart people in every line of work on the planet.
I didn't have that phrase, "Government is a monopoly on violence" in my vernacular until this moment. I appreciate the quip!
I think not enough people understand the origins of government, though, and in cases like this rail and rant against "vigilante justice", failing to realize that organized justice systems spring from vigilante justice! Communities reach a certain size, and with it grows crime. Against the crime springs up vigilantes to pursue the "bad guys". The non-vigilantes/non-criminals grow concerned about vigilante justice and seek to organize vigilante forces so that they can feel that justice is "ordered". Seems like we're following the same pattern on the Internet, but it will still take another 2-5 years to iron out a lot of the order so that we can have an organized Internet justice system...
It is OK for gov't A to overthrow gov't B if gov't B is doing things gov't A doesn't like. Humanity has been doing this since we were cave men drawing pictures on the walls. We're a bunch of kids in a world-sized sandbox, and the only referee is the one that can enforce his rules. Every so often, that balance of power shifts.
The question of whether it's ethical to make war is a personal one, but on a global scale, war is simply another tool for a government to enforce the collective wishes of their populace. We're all cogs in that machine, and large, wholesale change is only realized once people come to understand what impact their role plays in the overall scheme of things. Or once a sufficient number of the aggressors/defenders are dead so that they are no longer a threat.
Don't submit to authority if what you're doing feels wrong to you. Do that much, and I think you're halfway there to being an enlightened human being. I'm about a quarter of the way there, I'm cowed by authority way too much still. I'm trying to figure out what the other half of enlightenment is
(Oh, yeah, right, it's on the second head of my video card, dangit where'd I leave that monitor.)
In the US, "The Government" is another word for a body representing the collective will of the people. In other words, a 350-million-person lynch mob generally agrees (or fails to disagree much that) somebody should die, and paid a few people to do it for them.
Justice from "the government" is simply institutionalized vigilantism. We hire people who are interested in pursuing justice and pay them decent money to carry out justice on our behalfs. As a side benefit, we decided to pay for training programs so that these hired guns won't kill the wrong people or treat them unfairly (which doesn't always work, but we try).
If you're killed because you've killed, it's because a bunch of people want you dead for doing what you've done. Is it really more civilized to murder someone collectively as a "government" because all of one's friends (fellow voters) say to do it rather than because one is angry?
Not completely disagreeing, but just food for thought. Perhaps government == vigilantism with rules...
"Prior Art" is the solution to this problem: If a given invention existed "in the wild", or was in use in some public way by another party before one party filed for the patent, the patent will either be thrown out in court or never granted in the first place during the discovery phase.
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, the Patent & Trademark Office of the U.S. does throw out many patent applications during discovery due to prior art or previous patents. However, they still let through too many that should never have been granted, which then can go through lengthy infringement cases before they are finally discarded.
Regular Ethernet cards (10baseT, 100baseTX, GigE, etc.) have MAC addresses that are trivially easy to spoof. Every wireless card I've ever used (four, now, from different vendords) has the mac hard-coded into the card. You can try to spoof the mac, but coming out from your port (or responding to ARPs) it reports its hard-wired MAC address.
In general, most WAPs these days just require you to use a PPTP connection over them so that you have encrypted traffic and user authentication. Sign in using PPTP, and every packet on that PPP interface can be billed to you.
The first thing I did after reading this article, and realizing that there were Representatives interested in tilting the balance of copyright slightly in favor of citizens again, was to write my representative Rob Bishop. Here's the text of the letter. Let me encourage you to do likewise: look up the name of your representative at http://www.house.gov and write!
Unfortunately, I felt that in a half-page letter I couldn't get all the details in. And I should have included a referral to a URL for him to get more information. Oh well, it's already in the mail, I'll do better next letter.
----
Dear Representative Bishop,
I don't often write my Congressional representatives, but I feel the need to do so in this case. I'm writing to encourage your support of HR 5544, "The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2002", introduced by Reps. Boucher and Doolittle.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), while well-intentioned, has resulted in a massive power grab by the entertainment and media cartels. The grant of copyright by the citizens of this country to copyright holders was never intended by our founding fathers to be a bludgeon with which large corporations can force citizens and non-citizens into only writing software or publications of which they approve. It was granted as a measure to encourage new works, for limited times, by the author(s) who created an original work. Now it is being abused in an attempt to control not only the copying of works, but when, where, and how a legal purchaser of a copyrighted work can use it.
The DMCA has been appropriated by many companies now to prevent the publication of material which is not in their best interest, to prosecute competitors into oblivion with court cases rather than competing on product merit, and to silence would-be critics and whistle-blowers. We're now in a situation where a law is being abused by organizations to limit the free political and economic speech of individuals, and those individuals have insufficient resources to defend themselves from deep-pockets corporations in court.
HR 5544, while principally focussed on requiring media companies to label intentionally defective compact discs designed to prevent playback on non-approved devices, also includes a brief amendment to the DMCA which would be a valuable step towards preventing the egregious abuses of power currently trampling the first amendment landscape. Please support this bill, particularly the "Sec. 5. Fair Use Amendment", and restore the rights of scientific research, fair use, and free speech to the copyright landscape.
With kind regards,
Matthew P. Barnson
P.S. See also the Electronic Frontier Foundation's information regarding the unintended consequences of the DMCA by searching Google for "DMCA unintended consequences"
Of course, as often demonstrated in various online role-playing games, "men will go where they *think* the women are, even if those women are actually men playing female avatars."
I play a Female Gnome Wizard from (rare) time to time in Everquest. I'm not 3 feet tall, I don't cast damaging spells, and I don't tinker with clockwork parts to create automatons (although I'm a sysadmin, so I guess that last part is kind of close). Yet people frequently assume that I'm female in real life. So these "There" developers should just get enough guys to cross-dress in the game, that should do the trick and bring the customers in droves!
Or not.
Shake your Google :)
RSS as a news syndication method (sometimes expanded to "RDF Site Summary"):
http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=140
RSS when used to discuss anti-spam:
http://work-rss.mail-abuse.org/rss/
I must, unfortunately, second the opinion regarding the bloat of basic GUI-based apps on most GNU/Linux distributions. Unfortunately, I love those features, too. I have a laptop here beside me that is basically so slow running many modern distributions as to be unusable, yet the specs aren't very bad for a laptop: 366MHz, 128MB RAM, 6GB HDD. Just a few years old. If I want to use a distribution that runs well using GUI tools on this platform, I basically have to pick a very old distribution or build one myself. I recently installed Mandrake 7 on it, and it worked OK with moderate swappage.
So I'm disappointed with the bloat, although one could call that the price of progress. Half a gig of RAM is less than a hundred bucks these days, but finding RAM for a 366 that belongs to my work seems a bit... off.
However, calling these projects a "failure" of open source is a bit over the top. Yes, some of the applications have bugs. But I've impressed several of my co-workers with my KDE desktop and GNU/Linux machine that runs for months on end, under very heavy day-to-day use, without crashes or memory leaks. Yeah, I grimace when I have KDE, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Evolution, and a bunch of shells open and see 200MBytes of RAM in use. But the machine has 512MB, is a 933MHz, and responds like a dream. The shortcuts are intuitive, desktop performance is responsive across dual monitors (a Nvidia TNT2 and ATI Rage 3d Pro), and I can do things with little effort that my co-workers still goggle at. Definitely not a failure, but it would certainly be nice to see a feature-rich environment for low-memory machines. Then again, there's always WindowMaker or Fluxbox...
My experience is that open source/free software projects which attempt to first do market research, feature requests, and aggressive documentation simply never get off the ground. People don't want to help in the project until it's something they can use and have a reason to use it.
There are a few dedicated hackers and organizations that have successfully worked around this problem. Notably, several of the Apache organization's projects have gone through formal design and review before coding, and are coming along fairly well. However, these do tend to be very small teams where someone is paid by a company to see the effort through -- your average "scratch an itch" developer, or post-college student may not have the time or interest to pursue it to fruition.
My take is that it's best to put something out there that "just works", to begin attracting development effort for it. If you are interested enough, it's a great idea to have formal design documentation which you've written as the primary developer. UI and usability testing generally cost a great deal, but I think that's another problem that can be solved by technology, and the correct implementation of social pressures for a user to submit a report on his experience during the beta phase.
I seem to recall a program that did that... by default, when the beta you were using expired, it poppped up a web page to download the new version. Now, a user could download the new version just by visiting the main page of the site, but this offered them a quick and easy way to get the correct upgrade, while asking them some non-personal questions about their experience with the software. Stuff like that I see as the next wave of open-source testing.