Student loans are not the real heart of the problem with education debt. Yes, they open opportunities to pay for an education one might otherwise be unable to afford. But the fact so many people need loans to go to those colleges is indicative of the need for better government support in education. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, as well as in states like California, education is surprisingly inexpensive because it is subsidised for local residents.
In America this would be a controversial use of tax dollars, but I can't imagine it being more controversial than using tax dollars for a war in Iraq, or for a tax refund that will bankrupt our Social Security and Medicare programs before I'm old enough to use them. I don't mean to bash the current president specifically when I say this. Rather, I mean to point out that subsidised education would benefit a lot of people, and be more useful than what we're doing with our government now. It's money well spent if it means that people graduate with little or no debt. I'd probably own a house right now if I wasn't still paying loans.
Having said that, imagine Ewan MacGregor. We know he can go from Trainspotting (think thin, pale) for the real world to ATOTC (action hero) for the Matrix. I think he would have added a lot more dimension to Neo than Keanu did.
I quite like the first film with Keanu, and I think it's his best role to date (which isn't saying much, but admit it - you didn't cringe at his acting in Matrix like you did in his other films). But I think a film with Ewan would have been a really interesting choice.
You're right, though. Will Smith has a lot going for him, but he might have ruined The Matrix.
Your management's point is valid, but it is made less so by the fact that telephone support for proprietary software is not all that it's cracked up to be, and also by the very strong support for free and open source offerings.
The people who provide support for proprietary products are often quite good, and they are familiar with the most common issues you'll encounter with their software. But I've found them to be rather bad with unexpected issues. They'll sometimes tell you to upgrade to the newest version, which is the last thing you want to hear.
On the other hand, if you deal with free or open source software you'll often get support from people who have an active role in developing the software - perhaps even the founder of the project. These people can identify problems, and even fix them and release a new version to address your needs. No joke. I use a program called MIMEDefang to add an annoying disclaimer to our company e-mail (a legal requirement, but a PITA nonetheless). I regularly get list e-mail about this program in which the core developers answer questions posted on the list. They do this numerous times a day.
Ever get a support-related reply from Bill Gates when you've had a Windows BSOD? It's a different world, and one I like a lot better.
The current state of e-mail makes a tax impossible. It gives anyone the freedom to set up a mail server anywhere they want. You could easily set up two mail servers at home and send mail back and forth between them and no IRS official would know either exists.
If the federal government wanted to collect a tax on e-mail there is only one way I can conceive to do it - a way that would not make U.S. e-mail incompatible with that of the rest of the world. It could force individuals and businesses use ISP-supplied SMTP servers as relays, and then change ISP behavior by requiring them to tally outgoing mail from their customers, while also blocking SMTP traffic that doesn't use the relay. This requires no changes in the SMTP protocol, but is a major change to the information infrastructure in the U.S., and probably not worth the tax revenue it would generate. It would also be an incredible pain.
I'm not against taxes, I just don't think you can tax e-mail without ruining it. I like Larry Lessig's idea better.
SCO's refusal to divulge which code is tainted is part of their ploy. On CNet, SCO's CEO said that "the Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go." (story)
But this is silly. While the community could remove UnixWare code if it exists, old copies of the software would still contain it. The evidence would still exist for the case against IBM; it wouldn't disappear.
So SCO's goal is probably to secure a legal resolution as soon after the code is divulged as is possible. That way if SCO succeeds, though the community will remove and/or replace the tainted code, it won't happen quickly enough to avoid a few months of licensing hell for distributors like RedHat, SuSe and Fill-In-Your-Favorite-Distro-Here. As long as the old code exists, those companies won't be able to allow free downloads. And they won't even be able to put their old distros online for download - and never will, since the old distros will contain the tainted code.
If it comes to pass, this licensing will be very disruptive to the GNU/Linux community.
You're right. But the problem with using the term Linux for the OS is, for me, not related to a movement, and nothing against Linus, and not because I am a zealot. It's for clarity. SCO has said that none of the "tainted" code is in the kernel itself. So the legal battle between IBM and SCO promises to be very confusing when both sides argue about code in "Linux" and each side is speaking about a different thing.
Quite right, jawtheshark. My girlfriend also works for a marketing company that sends direct e-mail; in fact it's one of the members of this ESPC group. She is similarly outraged by spammers.
What's the difference between spam and the e-mail that these companies send out? The difference is huge: they let you unsubscribe, they don't hide their sending server, and they don't use open relays as a go-between.
If one of these companies sends you mail, you probably asked for it - and if you don't like it, you can easily prevent its recurrence. Though I don't personally like commercial e-mail, many people do ask for it. There are reasons for solicited commercial mail: travel sites send updates about low-cost vacations, Red Hat sends info on its GNU/Linux offerings, and so forth.
These companies send non-spam, and spammers threaten to ruin their businesses. While the idea of a DNS-type lookup service for SMTP is something we shouldn't jump right into, it's good to see that these companies are generating ideas.
Of course if everyone (and I mean everyone) used RBLs like Spamcop that might also take a chink out of the spam problem.
This is a much better solution than tape, really. It's predictable that the industry will probably move in this direction, now that the hardware is cheap enough and of high enough capacity to serve this function.
Imagine: instant recovery. Your backup could be a usable image of your live server.
This guy has a very good point - there's a lot of free software entropy out there, and it might benefit all of us to stand behind the projects that have the most potential.
Most computer users are not sophisticated enough to see beyond the "mainstream" applications for a given platform. That's probably half the reason why Microsoft Word is such a popular piece of boatware in the Windows world: people use it like you or I would use a text editor. They do this, even though it's overkill, because Word is the mainstream editing program. I have even seen people write a paragraph in Word and then e-mail the resluting document, rather than simply writing the paragraph in an e-mail. Insane as this may be, it's evidence of how non-techies perceive and use software. In order for free software to thrive it needs its own set of "mainstream" programs.
A couple months ago I encountered an article here in which it was revealed that Microsoft was making changes to the XBox system that would make it harder to run rival software like XBox Linux on it. I replied with, who cares? XBox Linux is probably a fun and stimulating project, but it's waste of programmers. Ditto for the dozens of new text editors and new MP3 players that get churned out on a regular basis. Free software needs focus.
Software will still be available online, and from other vendors. As long as Microsoft doesn't require software makers to register with MS in order to make their products function properly on the OS, it can't be as bad as the article makes it out to be.
Software patents in the U.S. - and the haphazardly generous way in which they're given out - will make things much worse for the technology industry than cheaper, smaller cars ever made things for Detriot in the 70s. The U.S. industry could approach the point of stagnation if innovative development remains encumbered by these "intellectual property" laws.
Look at the rumors surrounding SCO and the BSD-derived code in Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux that SCO thinks it "owns." A court ordered licensing fee would set back the free and open source software movements, even if replacement code is eventually written. Developing nations do not have these restrictions, and will benefit enormously. Without a change the U.S. will be come less relevant.
How did they test that it works? Easy. You or I could probably do it. Just pick up a proton and measure it with a yardstick, and compare that measurement to that of the gravity wave sensor.
This is a very good point. I love Google, and use it almost excluseively. In my mind they can do no evil.
But then again, I used to love Microsoft. I shunned competing products in favor of those from Redmond whenever I had a choice. Then I discovered why it's bad for one company to gain too much market share, particularly in the software industry.
Google is great, but there's no right way to serch the web, any more than there is a right operating system to use on your PC. The more options, the better - and we should probably try to encourage/support the underdog whenever possible.
What's Yahoo!? Is it anytyhing like Google?
Just kidding. But seriously, even thought AltaVista was once a great search engine (remember when Digital ran it?), you'd pretty much have to clone Google to compete with Google.
Pay for placement just isn't in the cards these days.
I personally predict that Microsoft will respond to free software by offering Windows for free (as in beer), rather than by abandoning their platform and selling GNU/Linux, which would force them to accept the double-edged sword of the GPL.
But it's possible, and it has been theorized before. I think it would actually be bad for GNU/Linux, even though it would increase its market share. You never know how Microsoft would damage/hijack the development process if, for example, they were to buy SUSE or RedHat, or just realease their own distro. They're a very clever company when you get them in a corner, so friendly acceptance of GNU/Linux might be the end of the OS we know today.
Remember: if you just shook hands with Microsoft, count your fingers...
I find it depressing that GNU/Linux hackers are paying Microsoft money to get XBoxen and port the OS to it. Now Microsoft has rendered their efforts futile.
Guess what - their efforts were futile to begin with. Why not develop a good substitute for MS Exchange so corporate customers have a good reason to switch? Why not do ANYTHING rather than focus on a project that has no useful outcome, all the while pumping money into Microsoft with each XBox purchase? It would be equally useful to write Microsoft a check for the cost of an XBox and spend some time watching TV instead.
I think the only real solution is to change the television industry from a broadcast model to a model more like that used by cable companies, which charge for service. This would, however, increase the cost of cable service because customers would pay for the stations they view.
Set up one system as an NIS (sometimes called YP, for "yellow pages") server. This shares out all configuration files, such as the/etc/passwd file that contains user account information. Then configure all desktops to be NIS clients. This way you can log in anywhere with the same generic "guest" account.
If you want to configure this a generic account so no one can change its look-and-feel, I recommend setting up a script on each machine that during the boot process deletes the guest account's home directory and replaces it with a root-owned master copy you created elsewhere, such as on a NFS shared filesystem.
So you'd have a central copy of the generic account's directory as you'd like it stored somewhere like/root/guest on the NFS server. The students can log in and deface a client system all they'd like, but this will only affect settings stored in/home/guest on each local machine. On boot their settings will be overwritten by the "master" home directory that is copied by the script.
The script would basically delete the local/home/guest directory, mount the NFS volume, copy the root-owned guest folder into/home, unmount the NFS share, and finally give the new/home/guest directory the correct ownership with "chown -R guest.guest/home/guest".
You'll just have to explain to students that anything they download will be deleted on each reboot, so they'll have to use floppies/CDs.
One alert commenter pointed out that students will be able to boot into single user mode and log on as root without a password; this can be curcumvented by using the GRUB boot loader instead of LILO. GRUB, which comes with the most recent RedHat distro and may also be supported by others, allows you to set security so you would need a boot password to use the single user hack.
Slashdot Mirror
Student loans are not the real heart of the problem with education debt. Yes, they open opportunities to pay for an education one might otherwise be unable to afford. But the fact so many people need loans to go to those colleges is indicative of the need for better government support in education. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, as well as in states like California, education is surprisingly inexpensive because it is subsidised for local residents.
In America this would be a controversial use of tax dollars, but I can't imagine it being more controversial than using tax dollars for a war in Iraq, or for a tax refund that will bankrupt our Social Security and Medicare programs before I'm old enough to use them. I don't mean to bash the current president specifically when I say this. Rather, I mean to point out that subsidised education would benefit a lot of people, and be more useful than what we're doing with our government now. It's money well spent if it means that people graduate with little or no debt. I'd probably own a house right now if I wasn't still paying loans.
This has nothing to do with the /. article, but makes good reading nonetheless.
I quite like the first film with Keanu, and I think it's his best role to date (which isn't saying much, but admit it - you didn't cringe at his acting in Matrix like you did in his other films). But I think a film with Ewan would have been a really interesting choice.
You're right, though. Will Smith has a lot going for him, but he might have ruined The Matrix.
Your management's point is valid, but it is made less so by the fact that telephone support for proprietary software is not all that it's cracked up to be, and also by the very strong support for free and open source offerings.
The people who provide support for proprietary products are often quite good, and they are familiar with the most common issues you'll encounter with their software. But I've found them to be rather bad with unexpected issues. They'll sometimes tell you to upgrade to the newest version, which is the last thing you want to hear.
On the other hand, if you deal with free or open source software you'll often get support from people who have an active role in developing the software - perhaps even the founder of the project. These people can identify problems, and even fix them and release a new version to address your needs. No joke. I use a program called MIMEDefang to add an annoying disclaimer to our company e-mail (a legal requirement, but a PITA nonetheless). I regularly get list e-mail about this program in which the core developers answer questions posted on the list. They do this numerous times a day.
Ever get a support-related reply from Bill Gates when you've had a Windows BSOD? It's a different world, and one I like a lot better.
The current state of e-mail makes a tax impossible. It gives anyone the freedom to set up a mail server anywhere they want. You could easily set up two mail servers at home and send mail back and forth between them and no IRS official would know either exists.
If the federal government wanted to collect a tax on e-mail there is only one way I can conceive to do it - a way that would not make U.S. e-mail incompatible with that of the rest of the world. It could force individuals and businesses use ISP-supplied SMTP servers as relays, and then change ISP behavior by requiring them to tally outgoing mail from their customers, while also blocking SMTP traffic that doesn't use the relay. This requires no changes in the SMTP protocol, but is a major change to the information infrastructure in the U.S., and probably not worth the tax revenue it would generate. It would also be an incredible pain.
I'm not against taxes, I just don't think you can tax e-mail without ruining it. I like Larry Lessig's idea better.
SCO's refusal to divulge which code is tainted is part of their ploy. On CNet, SCO's CEO said that "the Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go." (story)
But this is silly. While the community could remove UnixWare code if it exists, old copies of the software would still contain it. The evidence would still exist for the case against IBM; it wouldn't disappear.
So SCO's goal is probably to secure a legal resolution as soon after the code is divulged as is possible. That way if SCO succeeds, though the community will remove and/or replace the tainted code, it won't happen quickly enough to avoid a few months of licensing hell for distributors like RedHat, SuSe and Fill-In-Your-Favorite-Distro-Here. As long as the old code exists, those companies won't be able to allow free downloads. And they won't even be able to put their old distros online for download - and never will, since the old distros will contain the tainted code.
If it comes to pass, this licensing will be very disruptive to the GNU/Linux community.
You're right. But the problem with using the term Linux for the OS is, for me, not related to a movement, and nothing against Linus, and not because I am a zealot. It's for clarity. SCO has said that none of the "tainted" code is in the kernel itself. So the legal battle between IBM and SCO promises to be very confusing when both sides argue about code in "Linux" and each side is speaking about a different thing.
Sorry - that was a chunk out of the spam problem. My keyboarding class isn't until next week.
Quite right, jawtheshark. My girlfriend also works for a marketing company that sends direct e-mail; in fact it's one of the members of this ESPC group. She is similarly outraged by spammers.
What's the difference between spam and the e-mail that these companies send out? The difference is huge: they let you unsubscribe, they don't hide their sending server, and they don't use open relays as a go-between.
If one of these companies sends you mail, you probably asked for it - and if you don't like it, you can easily prevent its recurrence. Though I don't personally like commercial e-mail, many people do ask for it. There are reasons for solicited commercial mail: travel sites send updates about low-cost vacations, Red Hat sends info on its GNU/Linux offerings, and so forth.
These companies send non-spam, and spammers threaten to ruin their businesses. While the idea of a DNS-type lookup service for SMTP is something we shouldn't jump right into, it's good to see that these companies are generating ideas.
Of course if everyone (and I mean everyone) used RBLs like Spamcop that might also take a chink out of the spam problem.
This is a much better solution than tape, really. It's predictable that the industry will probably move in this direction, now that the hardware is cheap enough and of high enough capacity to serve this function.
Imagine: instant recovery. Your backup could be a usable image of your live server.
This guy has a very good point - there's a lot of free software entropy out there, and it might benefit all of us to stand behind the projects that have the most potential.
Most computer users are not sophisticated enough to see beyond the "mainstream" applications for a given platform. That's probably half the reason why Microsoft Word is such a popular piece of boatware in the Windows world: people use it like you or I would use a text editor. They do this, even though it's overkill, because Word is the mainstream editing program. I have even seen people write a paragraph in Word and then e-mail the resluting document, rather than simply writing the paragraph in an e-mail. Insane as this may be, it's evidence of how non-techies perceive and use software. In order for free software to thrive it needs its own set of "mainstream" programs.
A couple months ago I encountered an article here in which it was revealed that Microsoft was making changes to the XBox system that would make it harder to run rival software like XBox Linux on it. I replied with, who cares? XBox Linux is probably a fun and stimulating project, but it's waste of programmers. Ditto for the dozens of new text editors and new MP3 players that get churned out on a regular basis. Free software needs focus.
Come to think of it, I guess I'm the first person to be sitting in this office chair this morning ... and the smartest.
Software will still be available online, and from other vendors. As long as Microsoft doesn't require software makers to register with MS in order to make their products function properly on the OS, it can't be as bad as the article makes it out to be.
Look at the rumors surrounding SCO and the BSD-derived code in Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux that SCO thinks it "owns." A court ordered licensing fee would set back the free and open source software movements, even if replacement code is eventually written. Developing nations do not have these restrictions, and will benefit enormously. Without a change the U.S. will be come less relevant.
How did they test that it works? Easy. You or I could probably do it. Just pick up a proton and measure it with a yardstick, and compare that measurement to that of the gravity wave sensor.
This is a very good point. I love Google, and use it almost excluseively. In my mind they can do no evil.
But then again, I used to love Microsoft. I shunned competing products in favor of those from Redmond whenever I had a choice. Then I discovered why it's bad for one company to gain too much market share, particularly in the software industry.
Google is great, but there's no right way to serch the web, any more than there is a right operating system to use on your PC. The more options, the better - and we should probably try to encourage/support the underdog whenever possible.
What's Yahoo!? Is it anytyhing like Google? Just kidding. But seriously, even thought AltaVista was once a great search engine (remember when Digital ran it?), you'd pretty much have to clone Google to compete with Google. Pay for placement just isn't in the cards these days.
But it's possible, and it has been theorized before. I think it would actually be bad for GNU/Linux, even though it would increase its market share. You never know how Microsoft would damage/hijack the development process if, for example, they were to buy SUSE or RedHat, or just realease their own distro. They're a very clever company when you get them in a corner, so friendly acceptance of GNU/Linux might be the end of the OS we know today.
Remember: if you just shook hands with Microsoft, count your fingers...
I find it depressing that GNU/Linux hackers are paying Microsoft money to get XBoxen and port the OS to it. Now Microsoft has rendered their efforts futile. Guess what - their efforts were futile to begin with. Why not develop a good substitute for MS Exchange so corporate customers have a good reason to switch? Why not do ANYTHING rather than focus on a project that has no useful outcome, all the while pumping money into Microsoft with each XBox purchase? It would be equally useful to write Microsoft a check for the cost of an XBox and spend some time watching TV instead.
I think the only real solution is to change the television industry from a broadcast model to a model more like that used by cable companies, which charge for service. This would, however, increase the cost of cable service because customers would pay for the stations they view.
Set up one system as an NIS (sometimes called YP, for "yellow pages") server. This shares out all configuration files, such as the /etc/passwd file that contains user account information. Then configure all desktops to be NIS clients. This way you can log in anywhere with the same generic "guest" account.
/root/guest on the NFS server. The students can log in and deface a client system all they'd like, but this will only affect settings stored in /home/guest on each local machine. On boot their settings will be overwritten by the "master" home directory that is copied by the script.
/home/guest directory, mount the NFS volume, copy the root-owned guest folder into /home, unmount the NFS share, and finally give the new /home/guest directory the correct ownership with "chown -R guest.guest /home/guest".
If you want to configure this a generic account so no one can change its look-and-feel, I recommend setting up a script on each machine that during the boot process deletes the guest account's home directory and replaces it with a root-owned master copy you created elsewhere, such as on a NFS shared filesystem.
So you'd have a central copy of the generic account's directory as you'd like it stored somewhere like
The script would basically delete the local
You'll just have to explain to students that anything they download will be deleted on each reboot, so they'll have to use floppies/CDs.
One alert commenter pointed out that students will be able to boot into single user mode and log on as root without a password; this can be curcumvented by using the GRUB boot loader instead of LILO. GRUB, which comes with the most recent RedHat distro and may also be supported by others, allows you to set security so you would need a boot password to use the single user hack.
-Ed
ed-holden@lycos.com