Take a good piece of double-sided velcro (that will bond to itself), about 10-20cm. Get a short, screw with a large, flat head. Put the screw through the middle of the velcro strip, and screw it onto the underside of your table, somewhere out of sight. Rinse, repeat.
Now you have velcro loops that can carry all your wires really neatly, with infinite and easy reconfigurability.
(Initially, I tried gluing / velcroing the velcro strips on. It never lasted, so I went with screws instead. That really works!)
Because you can't compile a mathematical definition.
If we imagine that the hash function came only as a mathematical definition, how would your test your new implementation in LangOfTheWeek is correct?
Well, you have 2 options. One, you can prove that your program behaves, in every important way, the same as the definition. This is long, tedious work, and most programmers don't even have the necessary skills for this. Two, you can make a reference implemention in some other language, and compare the outputs.
Now, given, say, 100 programmers each working on their own functions, we should have 1 resulting behaviour. This will mean that everybody implemented the algorithm 100% correctly. However, the actual number will be between 1 and 100, depending on the skills of the programmers, and the care they've taken in implementing the functions.
Now, what's the result here? (no pun intended). It's likely to be chaos.
That's why it's very convenient to have a single reference source.
Many people see MySQL as the consistent winner in database benchmarks. I don't mean this in a bad way, but a lot of people are so focused on the performance of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, that they forget that MySQL is usually only fast for really simple queries.
That would be fine, though, if it weren't for the failing integrity.
In terms of data integrity, PostgreSQL is kilometers ahead of MySQL. With MySQL, I have seen tables get badly corrupted, sometimes even beyond repair(!) if a disk runs full. That's simply unacceptable.
The syntax is also pretty lax. Adding an integer and a string? No problem. String and a float? Sure.
You want a contraint? Sure, it'll accept that query. Will it honour the constraint? Not so much.
Createing an InnoDB table, for (some) referential integrity? Sure, it'll give no errors, but if innodb support is disabled for any reason, it will create MyISAM tables instead, without any hint or warning. This has the potential to create great data loss.
Inserting a row with a primary key value outside the legal range? It'll give no errors, but it also wont insert the row. Instant data loss.
I know it's popular database, but I would probably not recommend MySQL for any project. If you need something lean and fast, try SQLite. Then you _know_ you don't get any type checks and fancy things like that, so you code for it. If you want to proper, free database, go with PostgreSQL. Half-baked is not my kind of tea. I really hope they will work on data integrity in the upcoming releases, but I fear it's not going to happen.
You are really, really, really comparing apples to oranges here.
Mono is comparable, yes.
However, Qt, GTK and wxWidgets are all just GUI toolkits! You still need a programming language (Pascal, C++, Perl, even Java(!)) to use these. Installation will be easier, though. I'm personally looking forward to "apt-get install sun-java" or somesuch.
Also, it will soon (when J2SE comes out) be possible to write better integration with existing apps, such as better (faster, more modern) browser applet plugins. That, I'm looking forward to.
(Oh, and now that the sources aer GPLed, it should be really easy to make this thing run on *BSD if it doesn't already)
As a freshman in the danish "gymnasium" (which is senior year of high school + 2 years of college), we had an project in physics class where we could write about anything we wanted to. As a group of three students we chose to write about digital logic. In the beginning, we only planned to write about digital logic theory, circuit design theory, and so on, but we soon realized we wanted to build an actual circuit design.
After spending days or even weeks designing the thing, we finally had our ÜberMachine - we called it the DALO (Digital Arithmetic and Logic Unit). It was essentially an ALU with support for addition, subtraction, logic "or", logic "and", and logic "not".
Now, in this day and age of computers, it would take most programmers just a few minutes to make such a program in most programming languages. But this was done entirely in hardware, with no fancy integrated circuits! We used about 15 simple chips (classic phillips 74xx-series), which only contains or, and, not and the occasional full-adder.
For the input, we used manual flip-switches, connected directly to the input legs on the microchips.
For output we used a series of LEDs to output each of the 4 digits in the A-input, B-input and the result. At the same time, we used a classic 7-segment display for each, driven by a 7-segment-decoder chip.
In the end, the things actually worked, which was quite amazing to see. We hadn't received any formal training in digital logic, electronics, or circuit design - and yet it worked. The entire machine was soldered with more wires than I ever wish to see again, and it took a lot of blood, sweat and... time - but we did it!
Some years later, I was employed as a teaching assistant at the university. One of my classes were in machine architecture, a course which most students couldn't see as relating to reality very much, because they didn't believe anybody except large companies could build computers or circuits. On the day of my last class, just a few days prior to the exam, I brought our high school project with me, and showed them how it was built. Several of them were amazed by it, and it really seemed to make a difference. Computers were no longer magical devices crafted by dwarven builders, they were simply complex machines, free for anybody to build.
That's the greatest thing I have ever built. Now, if we were talking about programming, that would be another matter...:-)
"The hood of your car is welded shut with an industry-standard flux-cored arc welding robot, and the instructions are freely available if you want to weld your doors too!"
I'm talking about the official specification, of course.
That's what I'm always using to look up attributes, values, etc. It's easy to use, light-weight, and I never have to doubt wether the author made a mistake or not.:-)
I hate to have to say this, but I seriously doubt he "stole the data", as it were.
It's not that he couldn't have stolen the data. Maybe he cracked the server, copied the data and then deleted their copy, or he stole a physical backup tape of the data, or whatnot.
But he probably didn't. He probably made a copy of the data, and used that copy to be a complete tool, with his like-minded tool-headed spammer friends.
This is certainly overrated - at least it's slashdotted for sure:-)
The key to good ping times is to have 2 things:
1) A stable, low-latency connection to your ISP
2) Short TX queues.
In essence, 1) is recursively defined by having 2) at your ISP, but ISPs aren't too keen on having minimal TX queues, because that will limit the throughput slightly. Since people behave ridiculous if they get 53 KB/s instead of 55 KB/s, it's a hard compromise between latency and throughput.
Since there is nothing you can do if your ISP isn't up to snuff, I don't see how this router can anything important. If you ping 200, how can that be fixed by carving off something like 10ms?
(yes, I did read as much as possible of the article, which was only page 1 I'm afraid..)
There is a reason for throwing out those chips! Maybe it's true that _most_ human ears wont notice that the least significant bit has been flipped in a über-noisy phone recording for a digital answering machine, but what if it was the most significant? That would make an audible "pop".
Ok, so maybe for non-critical equipment in the "use-and-throwaway" category. But this will not bring us cheaper hardware, just less functional hardware. Those chips are _literally_ going nowhere slow.
If you've ever had to debug something that turned out to be flaky hardware, you KNOW it's a PITA. If anything, awareness should be increased when it comes to the really cheap brands. They aren't always very stable, but people sometimes go for the cheapest RAM anyway, and then complain to ME when it doesn't work. There actually is some connection between what you pay, and what you get. Argh.
...if you wrote DeCSS in this. Perhaps the MPAA and the RIAA would sue each other over who has the right to sue you, thus annihilating themselves into pure energy?
Image: The seemingly chaotic motions of this page from a scientific journal became part of a computer modeling exercise to show why flat things don't fall straight down., J. Wang and U. Pensavento/Cornell University. Copyright Physical Review Letters 2004
The same falling-paper principles apply, the physicists believe, to naturally flat things like leaves. If they are right, Wang and Pensavento may have finally solved the mystery of why autumn leaves depart from a neighbor's tree on a windless day . ..
. . . rise into the air . . . . . . rise again . ..
. . . glide along . ..
. . . and have to be raked from yards that don't contain a single tree.
As Wang explains, "Leaves and paper fall and rise in a seeming chaotic manner. As they fall, air swirls up around their edges, which makes them flutter and tumble. Because the flow changes dramatically around the sharp edges of leaves and paper, known as flow singularity, it makes the prediction of the falling trajectory a challenge."
Among the first scientists to be intrigued by the behavior of falling paper was Scottish physicist James C. Maxwell, who pondered the tumbling motions of playing cards in 1853. But while Maxwell was a brilliant mathematician, he lacked the today's computer-modeling techniques, not to mention access to fast, powerful computers. Wang and Pensavento put those advanced tools to good use to show why the falling trajectory of thin flat things -- and the behavior of airflow and other forces -- is not predicted by the classical aerodynamic theory.
"There were a few surprises," Wang notes. "We found the flat paper rises on its own as it falls, which would not happen if the force due to air is similar to that on an airfoil. Instead, the force depends strongly on the coupling between the rotating and translational motions of the object."
Wang and Pesavento also showed that the falling-paper effect is almost twice as effective for slowing an object's descent, compared with the parachute effect (that is, if an object falls straight down). And that evidently benefits trees and other plants that need to disperse seeds some distance from the point of origin. Plants with flattened seedpods also take advantage of the falling-paper effect.
The research was funded by National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Packard Foundation.
Says the professor who does not use the falling-paper effect to grade student essays and forecast their future: "What is predictable is that as the autumn leaves tumble down, they drift in particular directions, depending on the way they turn. This may explain, Wang adds, "why you are getting the leaves from your neighbor."
Sure, Null Routes are great for throwing away traffic, but they don't work against DDoS (notice the extra "D"!). The whole _point_ of DDoS is that the traffic comes from so many sources that the manual work involved in blocking it is huge.
Welcome to MikeRoweSoft Design. I finally had time to design myself a portfolio to show off all of my work so I hope you enjoy.
My most recent work is located on the left. I just finished off the BattleStats site yesterday and I think it looks pretty good, my best work as of yet.
If he _really_ wanted the money, why would he wait more than 6 months, AND use the page to promote his work? Doesn't that seem like to much trouble for domain parking?
From the article:...for an estimated retail price of $129, $100 less than the Connectix price of $229
In case you don't remember, Connectix makes the VMWare series of products. Now suddenly, it's much cheaper (it used to be a bit more expensive). Is this another NetScape?
Also, Linux is not officially supported: "We don't support Linux, and we also don't support third-party applications. And it goes on to explain that "...if they have an issue running Linux on Virtual PC, and if that Linux provider triages that issue as a Virtual PC bug and submits a bug report, we'll work with them to fix the problem Is this only something companies like RedHat and SuSe can do? If so, why?
But it is not likely to become widely available any time soon. The problem with quantum encryption, is that it is based on quantum states. These states are destroyed when observer (literally, you just have to look at them!), so it's not possible to read the data out and perform a "quantum dictionary attack", because how you read the data is part of the encryption
This is what makes quantum encryption perfect. If somebody has even read the signal, you will know it. If they haven't, the problem is solved.
However, in order to make use of this perfect encryption, the quantum state must not change. Therefore, any obstacle along the way (imperfections in the fiber optic cable, or any attempts to read the signal) will destroy the signal. This means that a quantum encrypted message cannot be transmitted through a switched network. Every switch (as we know them) would have to read the data, and pass them along. That is not possible.
Instead, a technique known as Quantum Teleportation could be used. It's developed mainly in Denmark, and uses something called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-beams to transport the quantum state. The catch is that they never read the state, because that would crush it. They simply transport it on a carrier wave, much like in Star Trek:)
Is that the article goes on to explain that "[...] there is no evidence indicating that the settlement will have a meaningful impact.", and that "To restore competition, the settlement must go further than allowing OEMs to remove the Internet Explorer icon-it must require the separation of middleware code from the OS.".
On the subject of API Disclosure, Michael Lacovara (who represents Microsoft), said that "the challengers' request for greater API disclosure is not based in fact.", and further went on to state that "The theory of the states is that more is better.".
It's really no wonder they don't like Linux, when not even their own API's are open. For crying out loud!
I agree, however I would go out on a limb and say that Linux installations require a little more knowledge than other operating systems. I believe the Mandrake installer is on par with windows 2000, and almost windows xp. It will, among other (nice) things, auto-partition the harddrive for Joe mcUser.
What's my mom going to touch up her photos in, gimp? What would she use on windows... PhotoShop?
I'd *love* to see her try and install a printer under Linux;) I tried installing a HP LaserJet under Mandrake Linux. I plugged the printer in, booted linux, and it asked me if I wanted to install this shiny new HP LaserJet it had found. Clicked "ok". Worked perfectly from thereon. No hassle, whatsoever!
If rulings like this become everyday experiences, I honestly think the amount of spam will decrease.
It will not solve the problem, however. There are ALOT of ideas for this, one of which is POP-Before-SMTP, which seems somewhat sane. But then again, they (more or less) all do. I find it highly unlikely that any of these n solutions will find wide acceptance and use, before at most a handful standardized ways are selected.
Slashdot Mirror
I found a solution which I'm pretty happy about.
Take a good piece of double-sided velcro (that will bond to itself), about 10-20cm. Get a short, screw with a large, flat head. Put the screw through the middle of the velcro strip, and screw it onto the underside of your table, somewhere out of sight. Rinse, repeat.
Now you have velcro loops that can carry all your wires really neatly, with infinite and easy reconfigurability.
(Initially, I tried gluing / velcroing the velcro strips on. It never lasted, so I went with screws instead. That really works!)
Because you can't compile a mathematical definition.
If we imagine that the hash function came only as a mathematical definition, how would your test your new implementation in LangOfTheWeek is correct?
Well, you have 2 options. One, you can prove that your program behaves, in every important way, the same as the definition. This is long, tedious work, and most programmers don't even have the necessary skills for this. Two, you can make a reference implemention in some other language, and compare the outputs.
Now, given, say, 100 programmers each working on their own functions, we should have 1 resulting behaviour. This will mean that everybody implemented the algorithm 100% correctly. However, the actual number will be between 1 and 100, depending on the skills of the programmers, and the care they've taken in implementing the functions.
Now, what's the result here? (no pun intended). It's likely to be chaos.
That's why it's very convenient to have a single reference source.
MySQL fails in many other cases, too.
Many people see MySQL as the consistent winner in database benchmarks. I don't mean this in a bad way, but a lot of people are so focused on the performance of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, that they forget that MySQL is usually only fast for really simple queries.
That would be fine, though, if it weren't for the failing integrity.
In terms of data integrity, PostgreSQL is kilometers ahead of MySQL. With MySQL, I have seen tables get badly corrupted, sometimes even beyond repair(!) if a disk runs full. That's simply unacceptable.
The syntax is also pretty lax. Adding an integer and a string? No problem. String and a float? Sure.
You want a contraint? Sure, it'll accept that query. Will it honour the constraint? Not so much.
Createing an InnoDB table, for (some) referential integrity? Sure, it'll give no errors, but if innodb support is disabled for any reason, it will create MyISAM tables instead, without any hint or warning. This has the potential to create great data loss.
Inserting a row with a primary key value outside the legal range? It'll give no errors, but it also wont insert the row. Instant data loss.
I know it's popular database, but I would probably not recommend MySQL for any project. If you need something lean and fast, try SQLite. Then you _know_ you don't get any type checks and fancy things like that, so you code for it. If you want to proper, free database, go with PostgreSQL. Half-baked is not my kind of tea. I really hope they will work on data integrity in the upcoming releases, but I fear it's not going to happen.
You are really, really, really comparing apples to oranges here.
Mono is comparable, yes.
However, Qt, GTK and wxWidgets are all just GUI toolkits! You still need a programming
language (Pascal, C++, Perl, even Java(!)) to use these. Installation will be easier,
though. I'm personally looking forward to "apt-get install sun-java" or somesuch.
Also, it will soon (when J2SE comes out) be possible to write better integration with existing
apps, such as better (faster, more modern) browser applet plugins. That, I'm looking
forward to.
(Oh, and now that the sources aer GPLed, it should be really easy to make this thing run on *BSD if it doesn't already)
As a freshman in the danish "gymnasium" (which is senior year of high school + 2 years of college), we had
:-)
an project in physics class where we could write about anything we wanted to. As a group of three students
we chose to write about digital logic. In the beginning, we only planned to write about digital logic theory,
circuit design theory, and so on, but we soon realized we wanted to build an actual circuit design.
After spending days or even weeks designing the thing, we finally had our ÜberMachine - we called it the
DALO (Digital Arithmetic and Logic Unit). It was essentially an ALU with support for addition, subtraction,
logic "or", logic "and", and logic "not".
Now, in this day and age of computers, it would take most programmers just a few minutes to make such a program
in most programming languages. But this was done entirely in hardware, with no fancy integrated circuits! We
used about 15 simple chips (classic phillips 74xx-series), which only contains or, and, not and the occasional
full-adder.
For the input, we used manual flip-switches, connected directly to the input legs on the microchips.
For output we used a series of LEDs to output each of the 4 digits in the A-input, B-input and the result. At
the same time, we used a classic 7-segment display for each, driven by a 7-segment-decoder chip.
In the end, the things actually worked, which was quite amazing to see. We hadn't received any formal training
in digital logic, electronics, or circuit design - and yet it worked. The entire machine was soldered with more
wires than I ever wish to see again, and it took a lot of blood, sweat and... time - but we did it!
Some years later, I was employed as a teaching assistant at the university. One of my classes were in machine
architecture, a course which most students couldn't see as relating to reality very much, because they didn't
believe anybody except large companies could build computers or circuits. On the day of my last class, just a
few days prior to the exam, I brought our high school project with me, and showed them how it was built.
Several of them were amazed by it, and it really seemed to make a difference. Computers were no longer magical
devices crafted by dwarven builders, they were simply complex machines, free for anybody to build.
That's the greatest thing I have ever built. Now, if we were talking about programming, that would be
another matter...
Oh yes, absolutely. I'm sure those guys where surfing for... "fun"
"The hood of your car is welded shut with an industry-standard flux-cored arc welding robot, and the instructions are freely available if you want to weld your doors too!"
No thank you.
How on earth can they not list THE resource?
:-)
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
I'm talking about the official specification, of course.
That's what I'm always using to look up attributes, values, etc. It's easy to use, light-weight, and I never have to doubt wether the author made a mistake or not.
I hate to have to say this, but I seriously doubt he "stole the data", as it were.
It's not that he couldn't have stolen the data. Maybe he cracked the server, copied the data and then deleted their copy, or he stole a physical backup tape of the data, or whatnot.
But he probably didn't. He probably made a copy of the data, and used that copy to be a complete tool, with his like-minded tool-headed spammer friends.
(did I mention that I didn't like spammers?)
This is certainly overrated - at least it's slashdotted for sure :-)
The key to good ping times is to have 2 things:
1) A stable, low-latency connection to your ISP
2) Short TX queues.
In essence, 1) is recursively defined by having 2) at your ISP, but ISPs aren't too keen on having minimal TX queues, because that will limit the throughput slightly. Since people behave ridiculous if they get 53 KB/s instead of 55 KB/s, it's a hard compromise between latency and throughput.
Since there is nothing you can do if your ISP isn't up to snuff, I don't see how this router can anything important. If you ping 200, how can that be fixed by carving off something like 10ms?
(yes, I did read as much as possible of the article, which was only page 1 I'm afraid..)
There is a reason for throwing out those chips! Maybe it's true that _most_ human ears wont notice that the least significant bit has been flipped in a über-noisy phone recording for a digital answering machine, but what if it was the most significant? That would make an audible "pop".
Ok, so maybe for non-critical equipment in the "use-and-throwaway" category. But this will not bring us cheaper hardware, just less functional hardware. Those chips are _literally_ going nowhere slow.
If you've ever had to debug something that turned out to be flaky hardware, you KNOW it's a PITA. If anything, awareness should be increased when it comes to the really cheap brands. They aren't always very stable, but people sometimes go for the cheapest RAM anyway, and then complain to ME when it doesn't work. There actually is some connection between what you pay, and what you get. Argh.
I'm done rambling now, thanks for waiting..
...if you wrote DeCSS in this. Perhaps the MPAA and the RIAA would sue each other over who has the right to sue you, thus annihilating themselves into pure energy?
In case you missed the joke, "irgend eine" key means "any key" :-)
better save it here for posterity :-)
.
.
.
Image: The seemingly chaotic motions of this page from a scientific journal became part of a computer modeling exercise to show why flat things don't fall straight down., J. Wang and U. Pensavento/Cornell University. Copyright Physical Review Letters 2004
The same falling-paper principles apply, the physicists believe, to naturally flat things like leaves. If they are right, Wang and Pensavento may have finally solved the mystery of why autumn leaves depart from a neighbor's tree on a windless day . .
. . . rise into the air . . . . . . rise again . .
. . . glide along . .
. . . and have to be raked from yards that don't contain a single tree.
As Wang explains, "Leaves and paper fall and rise in a seeming chaotic manner. As they fall, air swirls up around their edges, which makes them flutter and tumble. Because the flow changes dramatically around the sharp edges of leaves and paper, known as flow singularity, it makes the prediction of the falling trajectory a challenge."
Among the first scientists to be intrigued by the behavior of falling paper was Scottish physicist James C. Maxwell, who pondered the tumbling motions of playing cards in 1853. But while Maxwell was a brilliant mathematician, he lacked the today's computer-modeling techniques, not to mention access to fast, powerful computers. Wang and Pensavento put those advanced tools to good use to show why the falling trajectory of thin flat things -- and the behavior of airflow and other forces -- is not predicted by the classical aerodynamic theory.
"There were a few surprises," Wang notes. "We found the flat paper rises on its own as it falls, which would not happen if the force due to air is similar to that on an airfoil. Instead, the force depends strongly on the coupling between the rotating and translational motions of the object."
Wang and Pesavento also showed that the falling-paper effect is almost twice as effective for slowing an object's descent, compared with the parachute effect (that is, if an object falls straight down). And that evidently benefits trees and other plants that need to disperse seeds some distance from the point of origin. Plants with flattened seedpods also take advantage of the falling-paper effect.
The research was funded by National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Packard Foundation.
Says the professor who does not use the falling-paper effect to grade student essays and forecast their future: "What is predictable is that as the autumn leaves tumble down, they drift in particular directions, depending on the way they turn. This may explain, Wang adds, "why you are getting the leaves from your neighbor."
Source: Cornell University
Sure, Null Routes are great for throwing away traffic, but they don't work against DDoS (notice the extra "D"!). The whole _point_ of DDoS is that the traffic comes from so many sources that the manual work involved in blocking it is huge.
.. but there's NO way I'm letting my dentist near my routers!
...and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side!
Flash update you say? I wont enjoy it.
What is your definition of "Doesn't depend on"?
They both use xlib exclusively for drawing!
QT (and possibly GTK) exists in a version for embedding/framebuffer devices, but that's not the version you see in everyday KDE/Gnome.
:: NEWS :: April 24th/2003 :: Site Launched
Welcome to MikeRoweSoft Design. I finally had time to design myself a portfolio to show off all of my work so I hope you enjoy.
My most recent work is located on the left. I just finished off the BattleStats site yesterday and I think it looks pretty good, my best work as of yet.
If he _really_ wanted the money, why would he wait more than 6 months, AND use the page to promote his work? Doesn't that seem like to much trouble for domain parking?
Then again, perhaps it's a practical joke.
From the article: ...for an estimated retail price of $129, $100 less than the Connectix price of $229
In case you don't remember, Connectix makes the VMWare series of products. Now suddenly, it's much cheaper (it used to be a bit more expensive). Is this another NetScape?
Also, Linux is not officially supported: "We don't support Linux, and we also don't support third-party applications.
And it goes on to explain that "...if they have an issue running Linux on Virtual PC, and if that Linux provider triages that issue as a Virtual PC bug and submits a bug report, we'll work with them to fix the problem
Is this only something companies like RedHat and SuSe can do? If so, why?
But it is not likely to become widely available any time soon. The problem with quantum encryption, is that it is based on quantum states. These states are destroyed when observer (literally, you just have to look at them!), so it's not possible to read the data out and perform a "quantum dictionary attack", because how you read the data is part of the encryption
:)
This is what makes quantum encryption perfect. If somebody has even read the signal, you will know it. If they haven't, the problem is solved.
However, in order to make use of this perfect encryption, the quantum state must not change. Therefore, any obstacle along the way (imperfections in the fiber optic cable, or any attempts to read the signal) will destroy the signal. This means that a quantum encrypted message cannot be transmitted through a switched network. Every switch (as we know them) would have to read the data, and pass them along. That is not possible.
Instead, a technique known as Quantum Teleportation could be used. It's developed mainly in Denmark, and uses something called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-beams to transport the quantum state. The catch is that they never read the state, because that would crush it. They simply transport it on a carrier wave, much like in Star Trek
Is that the article goes on to explain that "[...] there is no evidence indicating that the settlement will have a meaningful impact.", and that "To restore competition, the settlement must go further than allowing OEMs to remove the Internet Explorer icon-it must require the separation of middleware code from the OS.".
On the subject of API Disclosure, Michael Lacovara (who represents Microsoft), said that "the challengers' request for greater API disclosure is not based in fact.", and further went on to state that "The theory of the states is that more is better.".
It's really no wonder they don't like Linux, when not even their own API's are open. For crying out loud!
I agree, however I would go out on a limb and say that Linux installations require a little more knowledge than other operating systems.
;)
I believe the Mandrake installer is on par with windows 2000, and almost windows xp. It will, among other (nice) things, auto-partition the harddrive for Joe mcUser.
What's my mom going to touch up her photos in, gimp?
What would she use on windows... PhotoShop?
I'd *love* to see her try and install a printer under Linux
I tried installing a HP LaserJet under Mandrake Linux. I plugged the printer in, booted linux, and it asked me if I wanted to install this shiny new HP LaserJet it had found. Clicked "ok". Worked perfectly from thereon. No hassle, whatsoever!
Just my small monetarian unit.
...it wouldn't work. That fines wouldn't help.
If rulings like this become everyday experiences, I honestly think the amount of spam will decrease.
It will not solve the problem, however. There are ALOT of ideas for this, one of which is POP-Before-SMTP, which seems somewhat sane. But then again, they (more or less) all do. I find it highly unlikely that any of these n solutions will find wide acceptance and use, before at most a handful standardized ways are selected.
Oh yes, and all your money are belong to us!