Your post reads like the transcript of a NRA meeting.
The logical conclusions from your post are: - because the US has citizens with guns, crime and violence is decreased - any country that doesn't give guns to their citizens is doomed to be run by big bad bullies ("Kiss civilization goodby - it's back to feudialism, or worse")
How does this fit with real life, where crime and violence in the US is significantly higher (by any reasonable, objective measure) than in many other countries where the citizens are not armed?
Countries such as England, Australia, France, Singapore and Japan are not uncivilized, nor are they run by bandit warlords as your post suggests should be the case.
The desktop-specialist distros, such as Mepis, Lycoris, etc. are based on Debian. As Debian isn't about to go away any time soon, and these distros use Debian's package repository, I'd suggest they're probably a good fit.
The only thing I'd be concerned about is the impacts of doing an apt-get dist-upgrade on one of these distros, as it could give some wholesale UI changes when KDE's version rolls. Has anyone done this?
The first time I realised such a thing existed was when I read a report saying 'A is better than B', when only the day before I'd read 'B is better than A'. I compared the two reports and found they had been produced by the same company. I'm fairly sure 'A' was Microsoft, but I can't remember who 'B' was...
I mean, "research" tends to make *me* think "scientific basis", "objective", etc. Until then, I'd thought there was a clear distinction between research and marketing, but not from that point on.
From that point on, the first thing I check in any research is who produced it. To one extent, that's a positive thing - certain research companies (e.g. AdTI) definitely have a "brand presence" in my mind, and I now know their reports are worth reading for the humor alone.
Downloaded Sunbird, looked at it and it seems to be fine and dandy for what it is. However, what I really need is a central repository (e.g. Yahoo! Calendar) that syncs with everything I use: - Outlook (at work, because I'm forced to) - Mozilla (at home, because I like it) - Zaurus (in the field) - Thunderbird (which my SO uses, and we share calendars among other things...) - Pocket PC (which I'll probably switch to when my Zaurus eventually dies unless a viable Linux PDA emerges)
There's now zillions of free centralised calendars and address book options; which of them syncs with everything out there with *minimal expertise required*?
Consultants' recommendations being used as nothing more than negotiating tools? Welcome to reality, bud.
Most of the reports I write (and there's lots of them!) are ultimately used by some high-level guy to support his argument with another high-level guy. In the end, one of them wins out and any reports that were used as "evidence" by either side are stuck on a server and forgotten.
It's not exactly a strong motivation when you know that's going to happen, but it pays well and frankly that's all I care about.
The fact that Netproject has a guy speaking out on this issue tends to make me think he's more of an evangelist than a consultant. As soon as you introduce an emotional element into the discussion, as seems to be the case here, my thought is that it tends to strongly undermine the credibility of the report from a bias perspective.
> now she's married to a burly, 6'4", highly > protective prison guard
He wouldn't happen to be posted to Guantanamo Bay, would he???
I was thinking she looked a lot like a woman I used to work with as well - I suspect pale skinned, slim redheads with long curly hair aren't that rare after all...
if we take this guy at his word, then it's reasonable to think that non-US countries shouldn't use closed source, US-developed software because it could contain nasties as well.
The US govt isn't everyone else's best friend at the moment, and appears to be working particularly closely with US software companies at present in terms of pushing US' interpretation of intellectual property onto much of the world. It's more than feasible that the US govt could have said "Look, software vendors, we'll push your interests out into the world, but there's a favor you can do for us in return. Here's some source code we want you to bolt into your products for overseas distribution"...
At least FOSS gives people the opportunity to examine the source of what they're going to be running. No, most people don't bother, but with Windows, Solaris, etc. it's not even a possibility.
those of us who create FOSS will voluntarily register our products with some central group such as the FSF or EFF. I'll call this entity "FSF/EFF" for the rest of this rant... Maybe this registration will need to have some financial basis, and we all become "shareholders" - any developer registering their product loans the FSF/EFF $US1 on the understanding that this loan will never be collected. This registration will involve assigning all copyrights for the product we've developed to the FSF/EFF, who will then make it available under e.g. GPL.
If the "owner" of the product gets sued for patent infringement by Large Company X, then it's the FSF/EFF who'll be answering rather than an individual developer working from his kitchen table. The FSF/EFF will have the coordination skills and contacts to be able to verify if the patent infrigement claim is valid or not (note: I'm talking expert legal opinion here, not a bunch of techos using Google!), whether or not the claim is worth contesting, and is maybe even able to coordinate licencing or cross-licencing deals as necessary to generate operating $$$.
The FSF/EFF then functions as a not-for-profit, worldwide company, which seeks to keep important bits of FOSS out in the public arena. It has board elections and all the various paraphernalia involved in keeping it above suspicion. It won't be able to protect every person who creates FOSS, but it would be able to 'protect' key bits of software such as Linux, Apache,... from the likes of SCO.
Any thoughts? I'm particularly interested in feedback from people with legal expertise that goes beyond Google;->
> they issue government-mandated monopolies to > people on whole areas of technology, making it the > responsibility of everyone else to police the > system
It's a lot worse than that.
Consider that the stupid US government is coercing other stupid governments around the world, including my own, into adopting US laws covering intellectual property. The result is that the US patent office is essentially being given powers applicable to much of Europe and elsewhere.
In fact, granting ridiculous patents to US companies is quite a viable way of shoring up the US economy in the future; it must be nice to know that US companies can ensure a flow of patent licence cash into the US whenever they see fit to do so. Fixing the US patent system could ultimately cost US citizens a lot of money
It's a good thing my stupid country's patent office allowed a guy to patent *the wheel* only a few years ago; at least I know I can patent everyone out of existence courtesy of entrenched stupidity.
It still only tells you when something is happening, and an (approximate) distance from the detector where it's occurring. How will this help to detect cheating during exams, where there are potentially 100s of students within a 30m radius? Sure, they'll know a phone is being used, but who's using it? Is the plan to stop the exam and have everyone turn out their pockets?
I haven't taken exams for many years, but I know several people that rely on mobile phones for critical reasons (e.g. being in touch for health reasons, contact with kids on public transport, etc.) that would make them reluctant to give them up for the duration of a typical exam. How is this issue currently handled in academic environments?
So this thing can detect a mobile phone only when it sends or receives a call or text message? I'm not that smart, but I figure that would tend to coincide with either the phone making a ringing or beeping noise, or someone talking into it.
Hmm, how could I possibly detect this using attachments I've had on my head since birth...?
As an ex-HP person who left on happy terms several years ago, I'm continually impressed by what I read from and about Dell's execs. They seem to be doing a lot of the things that HP seems/seemed incapable of doing; establishing new markets (as distinct from new products), managing people upwards as well as downwards, keeping focus on their core products, managing change, excellent marketing, etc.
A lot of that existed in the "old HP" (except the excellent marketing!), and seems to have gone from HP over the past several years. It's remarkable how short a time it took for HP to transition into the company it is today. HP's status as a leading engineering company seems to have all but disappeared now.
Many years ago, I went to HP as I thought it was the best training ground on offer; these days, I'd probably go to Dell for the same thing.
In many sites, Exchange is the one MS product that is irreplaceable infrastructure. I know, alternatives exist, but plugging together 12 different pieces of FOSS with differing licences isn't something that a lot of IT departments are comfortable with. They'd rather live with their regularly unscheduled Exchange outages, thanks very much!
If OpenExchange was free, it would go close to being a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange. With a company the size of Novell behind it, it would be a much easier sell to those companies than plugging together a bunch of FOSS server products, most with no big vendor behind them.
Novell would get a *lot* of mind-share in these organizations, as they'd be the enablers for getting MS out of their core infrastructure once and for all. I'd bet they could leverage this mindshare when it came time to upgrade those desktops as well.
> But every four or five years, there will be a > competitor or two with credible competition.
I don't believe this is the case with consoles.
Nintendo, Sega, Sony and maybe one or two others essentially created this market from scratch; MS was able to enter it only because they had such huge cash reserves that they could afford to buy their way into it. Very few other companies would be in this position.
The days of the likes of Coleco and Atari coming up with big innovations in consoles are well and truly past.
As an adult, I'm very concerned about the idea of being able to track innocent people as they move about. I'm quite amenable to the idea of being able to trace the movements of known criminals as they reintegrate into society, but not innocent schoolkids.
As a parent of young kids, I'm very interested in a solution that would let me ensure my kids are safe and well. If I could tell where my kids were at any time, say within a 50-100 metre radius, I'd feel significantly better.
BTW, as many people have pointed out, there are implementation issues with this particular situation: kid takes off schoolbag and he/she is no longer traceable. However, that's not going to be the case for long; all that needs to happen is for this solution to become entrenched as "normal" and very quickly we'll start having chips embedded under the skin or somewhere that they aren't easily removed.
Never heard of this before, so I checked out the site.
My first reaction to it is that it looks very Star Trek. I can imagine Geordy/Scotty/etc. using version 697 of this to reroute more power to the engines.
My second reaction is that the price isn't that much. Once you've committed to buying e.g. VS.NET, the cost of this is pretty comparable and you seem to be getting something well beyond what VS.NET provides.
3rd reaction: documentation of any reasonably complicated system must be a challenge. For most complex apps, you need documentation at many layers: from architectural overview of how it all hangs together, down to documentation of object internals, plus a bunch of stuff "in the middle". How do you do this with LabView? If the answer is something like "you look at the pretty pictures and drill up/down to suit", they've lost me as a potential customer.
4th reaction: how well does this work for non-instrumentation/reporting applications? I can see it could be ideal for those types of apps, and the site doco definitely focuses on those. Does it work well for other stuff as well?
That was true, but it's steadily improved over the past several months. The current installer ('knoppix-installer'? - don't have it at my fingertips) has made things simpler still. Of course, like anything else, it's a relative thing; for any specific user, it may be either too hard or ridiculously easy at any point in time.
By the way, the original poster mentioned doing development with C#. I've been playing with Mono on my Knoppix-installed dev PC at home for a while now, and it works fine. Not sure if the original poster would be interested in Mono or not (...and I'm not sure if *I* am or not!), but I figured it might be worth a mention.
I'd start with Knoppix, as it has great hardware detection, a large selection of out-of-the-box apps that will meet most peoples' requirements, and has the huge Debian repository sitting behind it if/when you want to install extra stuff or keep versions of your existing stuff up to date.
I'm sure MandrakeMove is going to be about the same, but Knoppix would be my "default" choice simply because I've had great experiences with it to date.
I use Knoppix on my main development PC at home; works great and it takes about an hour to fully rebuild it from bare metal if/when I get the inclination. That hour includes the time to: - apt-get update, - install netselect-apt & run it to find the fastest repository - apt-get update again from the fast repository - apt-get upgrade to bring everything up to date - install a few other things like Postgres, Zope etc.
I agree with the consensus that what your employer is doing effectively constitutes a pay cut without notice, and you should consider your future accordingly.
Another aspect is that, if you're being told "use your own gear", you've got no real obligation to actually have your own gear in a state that's fit for use when the "I need help now" call comes through. If you happen to be rebuilding your home PC, or if your kids/wife/gf happen to have your mobile phone at the time, or your modem just died and you're gonna have to go out and pick up another one, or your cheap-as-chips ISP blocks outgoing port 22 access and you didn't know in advance, or you happen to have just put your clothes in the washing machines at the local laundromat when the call comes through and you won't be home for another 90 minutes, well that's just gonna be their bad luck.
What's that? They're expecting you to be available at no notice *and* have all your equipment in full working order at all times? Well, maybe they'd better then think about the disruption that could ensue if your (now unmaintainable) home PC happens to dump a virus on the corporate network - maybe it'd be cheaper all round if they bought you a PC for work purposes only and looked after it themselves.
Note that I'm not recommending you purposely disrupt things in the above described manner, but a email message outlining the risks of any of the above occurring due to their cost cutting and your requirement to now budget accordingly might do wonders.
If you're trying to access a full distro over USB 1, it's gonna be pretty slow. As many others have pointed out, I'd look at replacing your hard disc as an option if at all possible.
The company I'm working at at present is still on NT 4 for their desktop systems. As NT 4 doesn't support USB or Firewire natively, my USB key is essentially useless for transferring files from box to box.
They're looking at migrating to XP on the desktop now, and one of their requirements is to be able to disable USB access on their desktops for security reasons. I've got no idea how this requirement is progressing, but it seems appropriate for a locked-down desktop environment.
A related option would be for us to start patenting all sorts of stuff individually, then transferring ownership of those patents to the FSF....But they're not getting my patent on "Spam - a marketing tool based on email". I'm riding that one all the way to retirement, and I only patented it this morning. Good ol' USPTO
Slashdot Mirror
Your post reads like the transcript of a NRA meeting.
The logical conclusions from your post are:
- because the US has citizens with guns, crime and violence is decreased
- any country that doesn't give guns to their citizens is doomed to be run by big bad bullies ("Kiss civilization goodby - it's back to feudialism, or worse")
How does this fit with real life, where crime and violence in the US is significantly higher (by any reasonable, objective measure) than in many other countries where the citizens are not armed?
Countries such as England, Australia, France, Singapore and Japan are not uncivilized, nor are they run by bandit warlords as your post suggests should be the case.
The desktop-specialist distros, such as Mepis, Lycoris, etc. are based on Debian. As Debian isn't about to go away any time soon, and these distros use Debian's package repository, I'd suggest they're probably a good fit.
The only thing I'd be concerned about is the impacts of doing an apt-get dist-upgrade on one of these distros, as it could give some wholesale UI changes when KDE's version rolls. Has anyone done this?
The first time I realised such a thing existed was when I read a report saying 'A is better than B', when only the day before I'd read 'B is better than A'. I compared the two reports and found they had been produced by the same company. I'm fairly sure 'A' was Microsoft, but I can't remember who 'B' was...
I mean, "research" tends to make *me* think "scientific basis", "objective", etc. Until then, I'd thought there was a clear distinction between research and marketing, but not from that point on.
From that point on, the first thing I check in any research is who produced it. To one extent, that's a positive thing - certain research companies (e.g. AdTI) definitely have a "brand presence" in my mind, and I now know their reports are worth reading for the humor alone.
Time to burn a few off-topic points...
Downloaded Sunbird, looked at it and it seems to be fine and dandy for what it is. However, what I really need is a central repository (e.g. Yahoo! Calendar) that syncs with everything I use:
- Outlook (at work, because I'm forced to)
- Mozilla (at home, because I like it)
- Zaurus (in the field)
- Thunderbird (which my SO uses, and we share calendars among other things...)
- Pocket PC (which I'll probably switch to when my Zaurus eventually dies unless a viable Linux PDA emerges)
There's now zillions of free centralised calendars and address book options; which of them syncs with everything out there with *minimal expertise required*?
Consultants' recommendations being used as nothing more than negotiating tools? Welcome to reality, bud.
Most of the reports I write (and there's lots of them!) are ultimately used by some high-level guy to support his argument with another high-level guy. In the end, one of them wins out and any reports that were used as "evidence" by either side are stuck on a server and forgotten.
It's not exactly a strong motivation when you know that's going to happen, but it pays well and frankly that's all I care about.
The fact that Netproject has a guy speaking out on this issue tends to make me think he's more of an evangelist than a consultant. As soon as you introduce an emotional element into the discussion, as seems to be the case here, my thought is that it tends to strongly undermine the credibility of the report from a bias perspective.
> now she's married to a burly, 6'4", highly
> protective prison guard
He wouldn't happen to be posted to Guantanamo Bay, would he???
I was thinking she looked a lot like a woman I used to work with as well - I suspect pale skinned, slim redheads with long curly hair aren't that rare after all...
if we take this guy at his word, then it's reasonable to think that non-US countries shouldn't use closed source, US-developed software because it could contain nasties as well.
The US govt isn't everyone else's best friend at the moment, and appears to be working particularly closely with US software companies at present in terms of pushing US' interpretation of intellectual property onto much of the world. It's more than feasible that the US govt could have said "Look, software vendors, we'll push your interests out into the world, but there's a favor you can do for us in return. Here's some source code we want you to bolt into your products for overseas distribution"...
At least FOSS gives people the opportunity to examine the source of what they're going to be running. No, most people don't bother, but with Windows, Solaris, etc. it's not even a possibility.
those of us who create FOSS will voluntarily register our products with some central group such as the FSF or EFF. I'll call this entity "FSF/EFF" for the rest of this rant... Maybe this registration will need to have some financial basis, and we all become "shareholders" - any developer registering their product loans the FSF/EFF $US1 on the understanding that this loan will never be collected. This registration will involve assigning all copyrights for the product we've developed to the FSF/EFF, who will then make it available under e.g. GPL.
... from the likes of SCO.
;->
If the "owner" of the product gets sued for patent infringement by Large Company X, then it's the FSF/EFF who'll be answering rather than an individual developer working from his kitchen table. The FSF/EFF will have the coordination skills and contacts to be able to verify if the patent infrigement claim is valid or not (note: I'm talking expert legal opinion here, not a bunch of techos using Google!), whether or not the claim is worth contesting, and is maybe even able to coordinate licencing or cross-licencing deals as necessary to generate operating $$$.
The FSF/EFF then functions as a not-for-profit, worldwide company, which seeks to keep important bits of FOSS out in the public arena. It has board elections and all the various paraphernalia involved in keeping it above suspicion. It won't be able to protect every person who creates FOSS, but it would be able to 'protect' key bits of software such as Linux, Apache,
Any thoughts? I'm particularly interested in feedback from people with legal expertise that goes beyond Google
> they issue government-mandated monopolies to
> people on whole areas of technology, making it the
> responsibility of everyone else to police the
> system
It's a lot worse than that.
Consider that the stupid US government is coercing other stupid governments around the world, including my own, into adopting US laws covering intellectual property. The result is that the US patent office is essentially being given powers applicable to much of Europe and elsewhere.
In fact, granting ridiculous patents to US companies is quite a viable way of shoring up the US economy in the future; it must be nice to know that US companies can ensure a flow of patent licence cash into the US whenever they see fit to do so. Fixing the US patent system could ultimately cost US citizens a lot of money
It's a good thing my stupid country's patent office allowed a guy to patent *the wheel* only a few years ago; at least I know I can patent everyone out of existence courtesy of entrenched stupidity.
It still only tells you when something is happening, and an (approximate) distance from the detector where it's occurring. How will this help to detect cheating during exams, where there are potentially 100s of students within a 30m radius? Sure, they'll know a phone is being used, but who's using it? Is the plan to stop the exam and have everyone turn out their pockets?
I haven't taken exams for many years, but I know several people that rely on mobile phones for critical reasons (e.g. being in touch for health reasons, contact with kids on public transport, etc.) that would make them reluctant to give them up for the duration of a typical exam. How is this issue currently handled in academic environments?
So this thing can detect a mobile phone only when it sends or receives a call or text message? I'm not that smart, but I figure that would tend to coincide with either the phone making a ringing or beeping noise, or someone talking into it.
...?
Hmm, how could I possibly detect this using attachments I've had on my head since birth
I suggest "Ask Paris Hilton" may be the appropriate category for this type of request in future
As an ex-HP person who left on happy terms several years ago, I'm continually impressed by what I read from and about Dell's execs. They seem to be doing a lot of the things that HP seems/seemed incapable of doing; establishing new markets (as distinct from new products), managing people upwards as well as downwards, keeping focus on their core products, managing change, excellent marketing, etc.
A lot of that existed in the "old HP" (except the excellent marketing!), and seems to have gone from HP over the past several years. It's remarkable how short a time it took for HP to transition into the company it is today. HP's status as a leading engineering company seems to have all but disappeared now.
Many years ago, I went to HP as I thought it was the best training ground on offer; these days, I'd probably go to Dell for the same thing.
Release OpenExchange as open source.
In many sites, Exchange is the one MS product that is irreplaceable infrastructure. I know, alternatives exist, but plugging together 12 different pieces of FOSS with differing licences isn't something that a lot of IT departments are comfortable with. They'd rather live with their regularly unscheduled Exchange outages, thanks very much!
If OpenExchange was free, it would go close to being a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange. With a company the size of Novell behind it, it would be a much easier sell to those companies than plugging together a bunch of FOSS server products, most with no big vendor behind them.
Novell would get a *lot* of mind-share in these organizations, as they'd be the enablers for getting MS out of their core infrastructure once and for all. I'd bet they could leverage this mindshare when it came time to upgrade those desktops as well.
Well, Novell, what are you waiting for?
> But every four or five years, there will be a
> competitor or two with credible competition.
I don't believe this is the case with consoles.
Nintendo, Sega, Sony and maybe one or two others essentially created this market from scratch; MS was able to enter it only because they had such huge cash reserves that they could afford to buy their way into it. Very few other companies would be in this position.
The days of the likes of Coleco and Atari coming up with big innovations in consoles are well and truly past.
As an adult, I'm very concerned about the idea of being able to track innocent people as they move about. I'm quite amenable to the idea of being able to trace the movements of known criminals as they reintegrate into society, but not innocent schoolkids.
As a parent of young kids, I'm very interested in a solution that would let me ensure my kids are safe and well. If I could tell where my kids were at any time, say within a 50-100 metre radius, I'd feel significantly better.
BTW, as many people have pointed out, there are implementation issues with this particular situation: kid takes off schoolbag and he/she is no longer traceable. However, that's not going to be the case for long; all that needs to happen is for this solution to become entrenched as "normal" and very quickly we'll start having chips embedded under the skin or somewhere that they aren't easily removed.
Never heard of this before, so I checked out the site.
My first reaction to it is that it looks very Star Trek. I can imagine Geordy/Scotty/etc. using version 697 of this to reroute more power to the engines.
My second reaction is that the price isn't that much. Once you've committed to buying e.g. VS.NET, the cost of this is pretty comparable and you seem to be getting something well beyond what VS.NET provides.
3rd reaction: documentation of any reasonably complicated system must be a challenge. For most complex apps, you need documentation at many layers: from architectural overview of how it all hangs together, down to documentation of object internals, plus a bunch of stuff "in the middle". How do you do this with LabView? If the answer is something like "you look at the pretty pictures and drill up/down to suit", they've lost me as a potential customer.
4th reaction: how well does this work for non-instrumentation/reporting applications? I can see it could be ideal for those types of apps, and the site doco definitely focuses on those. Does it work well for other stuff as well?
All up, an interesting link. Thanks for the info
I'm inclined to think that having a request suddenly run 1000 times faster might be due to something a DBA has done, rather than a change of OS.
Of course, if you want to yell from the treetops "Linux runs 1000 times faster..." I'm sure people will back you up.
That was true, but it's steadily improved over the past several months. The current installer ('knoppix-installer'? - don't have it at my fingertips) has made things simpler still. Of course, like anything else, it's a relative thing; for any specific user, it may be either too hard or ridiculously easy at any point in time.
By the way, the original poster mentioned doing development with C#. I've been playing with Mono on my Knoppix-installed dev PC at home for a while now, and it works fine. Not sure if the original poster would be interested in Mono or not (...and I'm not sure if *I* am or not!), but I figured it might be worth a mention.
I'd start with Knoppix, as it has great hardware detection, a large selection of out-of-the-box apps that will meet most peoples' requirements, and has the huge Debian repository sitting behind it if/when you want to install extra stuff or keep versions of your existing stuff up to date.
I'm sure MandrakeMove is going to be about the same, but Knoppix would be my "default" choice simply because I've had great experiences with it to date.
I use Knoppix on my main development PC at home; works great and it takes about an hour to fully rebuild it from bare metal if/when I get the inclination. That hour includes the time to:
- apt-get update,
- install netselect-apt & run it to find the fastest repository
- apt-get update again from the fast repository
- apt-get upgrade to bring everything up to date
- install a few other things like Postgres, Zope etc.
I agree with the consensus that what your employer is doing effectively constitutes a pay cut without notice, and you should consider your future accordingly.
Another aspect is that, if you're being told "use your own gear", you've got no real obligation to actually have your own gear in a state that's fit for use when the "I need help now" call comes through. If you happen to be rebuilding your home PC, or if your kids/wife/gf happen to have your mobile phone at the time, or your modem just died and you're gonna have to go out and pick up another one, or your cheap-as-chips ISP blocks outgoing port 22 access and you didn't know in advance, or you happen to have just put your clothes in the washing machines at the local laundromat when the call comes through and you won't be home for another 90 minutes, well that's just gonna be their bad luck.
What's that? They're expecting you to be available at no notice *and* have all your equipment in full working order at all times? Well, maybe they'd better then think about the disruption that could ensue if your (now unmaintainable) home PC happens to dump a virus on the corporate network - maybe it'd be cheaper all round if they bought you a PC for work purposes only and looked after it themselves.
Note that I'm not recommending you purposely disrupt things in the above described manner, but a email message outlining the risks of any of the above occurring due to their cost cutting and your requirement to now budget accordingly might do wonders.
If you're trying to access a full distro over USB 1, it's gonna be pretty slow. As many others have pointed out, I'd look at replacing your hard disc as an option if at all possible.
The company I'm working at at present is still on NT 4 for their desktop systems. As NT 4 doesn't support USB or Firewire natively, my USB key is essentially useless for transferring files from box to box.
They're looking at migrating to XP on the desktop now, and one of their requirements is to be able to disable USB access on their desktops for security reasons. I've got no idea how this requirement is progressing, but it seems appropriate for a locked-down desktop environment.
A related option would be for us to start patenting all sorts of stuff individually, then transferring ownership of those patents to the FSF. ...But they're not getting my patent on "Spam - a marketing tool based on email". I'm riding that one all the way to retirement, and I only patented it this morning. Good ol' USPTO
> ...learning to walk properly.
Think of the Bee Gees in that old "Stayin' Alive" music video - that's the strut you want to cultivate. "Huh huh huh huh stayin' alive, stayin' alive"
No wait, wrong newsgroup - never mind...