I got my 70-something mom an iBook a couple years ago. She is the paradigm case of someone who knows nothing about technology, and she was able to learn to use it with relatively little hassle. Before the Mac she didn't even know how to type. Now she doesn't go a day without sending & receiving email to/from friends & family. And I have the filters in Mail set up to kill spam and anything with nasty language, so she doesn't get bombarded with that crap.
The Mini would be great for our parents' generation, and with larger screens, can keep up with age-related changes in eyesight.
If your mom/dad/whoever likes to travel or lives in different parts of the country/world at different times of year, an iBook is probably the best solution since they can take the whole thing with them.
But if they stay mostly in one place, then yeah, the Mini is the answer.
Yep, see also my thread on using these as standardized adjunct devices for custom industrial process control applications.
I see these Minis proliferating into all kinds of use-cases that previously called for custom scratchbuilt PCs.
Steve's just given the world a great little geektool there.
Think of all the instances where you have a customer who needs an inexpensive processor/controller similar to an industrial PC, or an "adjunct device" to add functionality to another system.
For example infrastructure in commercial buildings (HVAC control, energy-systems control, security & access control) and residential equivalents, various types of process-control, science lab applications, etc. All of those industrial use-cases that currently tend to default to Windows machines (which in turn go buggy when some nitwit pops in a CD full of infected games they downloaded) or where you want to (or have to) scratchbuild a machine to run an open-source OS.
In the past you'd assemble a PC from parts (about $250), compile and/or load your preferred OS, test & debug, etc. (a few hours' labor, often non-billable time). Then you load your custom apps and connect it to (whatever) at the customer's site.
Depending on how you value your labor, the Mini ends up being the same or lower cost than the custom-built PC by the time you're done. A more profitable way to use your time and your customers' money than troubleshooting, debugging, or fixing stuff that breaks.
Think of it as a compact, inexpensive BSD machine, with a clean user-interface, that can be stacked, racked, or wall-mounted if need be. A standard little box you can get off-the-shelf from a local supplier, load your custom apps, install quickly, and never have to worry about. Less hassles, more time to develop new apps and bring in new business.
I think the Mini is going to become a regular part of the geek toolkit immediately, and we're going to see these things popping up in plenty of (previously) unexpected places.
Email insurance: bad. It is an attempt to stop two forms of parasitism (spam and hacking of individuals' computers) by creating a third parasitic ecosystem. Logically it is equivalent to demanding people insure their telephone line against the "risk" that someone might break into a bridging terminal with a test handset and use their line to make threatening or harassing phone calls.
There is no end to the ways this kind of "risk management mindset" can take over peoples' lives. It goes hand in hand with the creeping economism and legalism that reduces every facet of human behavior to economically quantifyable commodity, and then sequesters it under layers of regulation for the gain of those ruthless enough to exploit it. SCO's letter to Congress is a paradigm case of where this inevitably leads: that an uncommodifiable community of peers is somehow inherently subversive and must be regulated as property. No, no, a thousand times, no.
Speaking of parasite-conducive ecosystems, an escrow infrastructure ends up putting small sums of money in millions of unsecured locations: it is begging to be attacked. The law enforcement system will not be able to handle thousands of complaints from the victims of escrow-hijacking, which is in effect petty theft. Ever have a bicycle stolen in a large city and try to have the police get it back? They can't, they're swamped with murders and mayhem. If you think they or any agency would have the time to track down escrow hijackers you're hallucinating.
Here's another thing. A financial barrier to true person-to-person communication creates a caste system with a vengeance. The wealthy will naturally set their fees higher if nothing else because they are used to dealing with larger sums of money (to a millionaire a few hundred dollars are like pennies to an ordinary worker) and the high threshold will still allow their (similarly wealthy) friends and families to reach them.
The poor, such as those who use free terminals in libraries, will set their fees low because they have to be accessible to their own friends and families who are likewise poor. But the poor person will be discouraged from sending email to the rich person, lest the latter, by accident or out of bad temper, trash the former's email and empty his account in one stroke.
The result of this must be a degree of permanent stratification. A caste system of communication. It would be as if the price of making a telephone call depended upon the whim of the person who received the call.
In one stroke this kills off the democratic principle of uniform and predictable rates that has been inherent in communications utilities back to the "Penny Post" of England in the days of horse-drawn transportation. The inherent unfairness is appalling in principle, and the concrete effect is to add one more factor to the growing conditions of disparity that historically have been the primary cause of violent social upheavals.
If there are to be fees for sending email, they must be uniform, fair, and bidirectionally equal (i.e. the cost for A to send to B must be the same as for B to send to A). In a practical sense, even a fee of one cent per email (the digital Penny Post) will be sufficient to make spamming unprofitable and therefore to kill it deader than a door-nail.
As someone mentioned above, escrow hijacking could be prevented by requiring that anyone attempting to "cash out" their received escrow payments, must do so in person with proper identification. Problem is that this destroys anonymity for anyone seeking to use email: and thereby unleashes another potential plague against human rights.
Ultimately I have to agree with the security dude a ways back who said, in effect, the most viable solution is to pass stiff laws against spam, enforce them vigorously, and put spammers in the slammer. The stiffer the law, the more seriously it's taken by the authorities as a
Don't be so sure. Over the last few years, the main priorities of average Americans regarding the internet were a) privacy, b) spam, and c) fraud & identity theft. What did Congress give its highest priority to? Right, Mickey Mouse and the Hollywood Lobby including the rapacious record companies in their quest to preserve their own obsolete business models.
Never underestimate the ability of people who are motivated by hatred and fear to cause entropy for the rest of us. Look at the huge tweak about "gay marriage." They say it "threatens" marriage-in-general. How many marriages break up every year because one of the partners suddenly finds out they're gay, vs breaking up due to old-fashioned heterosexual adultery? Oh, but instead of doing something about adultery (how'bout make it a form of criminal fraud?), they make a red herring by scapegoating a minority into second-class citizenship.
So don't say it can't happen here. Can, has done, will do, and the only thing that stops it is when we fight like hell for our rights.
Only one problem with that: it may be that this is exactly what SCO wants. To get bought out in order to make the lawsuit go away. Then McBride et.al. get fat payoffs and retire happily ever after, in effect getting rewarded for committing extortion against an entire industry.
As some General said, Americans are reluctant to go to war, but when we do, we're ferocious. There are definitely times when it's necessary to fight, to defend ourselves from a clear & present threat. This is one of them.
Maybe it's time for their office staff, admins, etc. to start leaving too! Best part is, we can help them, and in a more orderly way than if they all get fired after SCO loses the lawsuit and puts all four paws up in the air.
Every company is absolutely dependent upon its admin staff. The office workers are the mortar that holds the bricks of business together so the rest of us geeks can have interesting jobs. If the admins & clericals leave, the company grinds to a halt as surely as if the power went off.
What's needed here is, a bunch of people to go to SCO's offices, morning and evening, and hand leaflets to everyone coming or going, telling them in effect that they'd better jump off the sinking ship before they drown when it goes under.
Talk to the people who work there, educate them about the risk of working for SCO or waiting to find another job. Help get them job leads and find new jobs. It's the least we can do, especially since most of the folks who still work there may not be fully aware of both sides of the issue.
Say goodbye to all forms of volunteerism, charity, mutual-benefit organizations, cooperatives, etc. All of these are "stealing" someone's possibility of getting a sale or doing paid work.
What really burns me bigtime about this is, it violates some really core stuff that all of the world's religions, most philosophical systems, and civilized societies around the world, all hold in common.
McBride doesn't like volunteerism, he should try telling that to the men & women who *volunteer* to serve in our Armed Forces, at risk of their own lives, for a hell of a lot less money than they deserve. The patriot in me thinks McBride ought to go talk to some soldiers and get a clue. And then he should talk to the people who work in homeless shelters, and free clinics, and countless other "not for profit" operations that make the difference between life and death for the people they serve.
As I said somewhere else around here, we should turn "sco"into a generic noun and verb.
The noun form would be synonymous with "scumbag" and "scam," as in "Don't trust that guy, he's a real sco," and "Don't invest in that company, their offering is a nothing but a sco."
The verb form would be synonymous with "to screw," as in, "He tried to sco me, but we fought hard and won."
I suppose we could then say that a screw-up was a "sco-up." That's also a useful expression for what happens when you get sick to your stomach ("Aw hell, I knew that food smelled funny, I think I'm going to sco-up!")
Let McBride try to get license fees from us (or sue us) for using their name as a generic! Ha! Poetic justice!
Anyone else have ideas for generic words based on a clearly identifyable use of "sco"..?
Excellent point. Someone ought to document this in detail, and put it in front of Congress and the Defense Department. Ha, speaking of national security issues, one more case where SCO's lies are transparent.
Strictly speaking of course, there won't be a mass meltdown. Just a nasty slow grind of licenses and lawsuits and the fold-ups of companies that were otherwise perfectly sound, and the endless petty bugs and inconveniences as previously robust services are shuffled to new owners. The death of a thousand cuts, with a whimper rather than a bang. But even so, a slow-motion disaster that is so damn easy to avoid.
Hate & vengeance vs. love & contagious inspiration:
Look no further than the second law of thermodynamics, as applied to social dynamics. Hatred and vengeance, and fear, are inherently entropic; they cause more-highly-organized social sytems to break down. Love & inspiration are inherently "negentropic" (that's the accepted term, but it's an awkward construction, so I prefer the term "syntropic"); they lead to the evolution of social systems to higher levels of organization and complexity.
It's always easier (in a thermodynamic sense or a sociodynamic sense) to create entropy, than it is to create syntropy. How long did it take to build the World Trade Center, vs. how long to knock it down? How long to build a library vs. how long to burn the books in it?
It takes relatively little effort to convene a lynch-mob and get them whipped into a hateful frenzy to go out and kill someone. It takes far more effort to convene a group of people to thoughtfully consider a scientific or philosophical issue and then do the hard work of experiments and writing to test their theories or prove their points. It takes much less intelligence to rule by fear than to lead by love.
Engineers build stuff: our work is inherently syntropic. We build stuff because we love what we're doing, and we want to contribute something useful and good to the world-at-large. Threats and fear do little to motivate us or even scare us off, but a good idea will have us working late nights for months.
One of SCO's biggest screw-ups (sco-ups?) is that they mis-read our culture. They thought they could use fear to dominate us. But we'll keep building stuff long after SCO is a footnote in legal history.
Interesting point. At first it seems a bit far-fetched, but a few moments' thought shows a number of ways terrorists could use this method, most of which begin with "disguise their comms operations as spamhauses." Terrs could also steg messages into *pictures* embedded in spam.
Coders in the antispam community should consider collaborating on theoretical approaches to analysis of this stuff and perhaps write some apps that would do it, and send 'em in.
NSA may be ahead of the civilian world by a decade in most areas, but they may not have the kind of specialist expertise in this particular issue that the antispam community has. This is one of those areas where you may be able to make a real contribution to protecting us from the next 9-11 or worse.
One more thing: it may be that ultimately the only way to stop stego-spam is to stop spam entirely. What a great incentive for the Feds to start busting spammers!
Exactly! We have got to start insisting on the Kantian "categorical imperative," which is nothing more or less than a demand for logical consistency in rule-sets. It is (was?) also the basis for the American Constitutional provision for equality before the law, and the rejection of arbitrary exceptions based on social status.
It's time to turn "sco" into a generic noun and a generic verb.
Noun definition: "a loser who resorts to deceitful or coersive tactics due to a lack of imagination or principles." Synonymous with "scumbag." Also, "a fraudulent or coercive scheme." Synonymous with "scam."
For example, "That sco tried to rip me off!" and "Don't fall for that, it's just a sco."
Verb definition: "to deceive or coerce someone, or obtain something through deceit or coersion, due to a lack of imagination or principles, or a combination of laziness and greed." Synonymous with "to screw."
For example, "They tried to sco me, but I didn't fall for it."
There's a certain poetic justice in this. SCO is trying to take something that belongs to *all of us* and make it exclusively *theirs*. Turning their name into a generic noun and verb, turns the tables and makes something that is/was "theirs" into something that belongs to *everyone*. Best part is, they can't stop it!
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I got my 70-something mom an iBook a couple years ago. She is the paradigm case of someone who knows nothing about technology, and she was able to learn to use it with relatively little hassle. Before the Mac she didn't even know how to type. Now she doesn't go a day without sending & receiving email to/from friends & family. And I have the filters in Mail set up to kill spam and anything with nasty language, so she doesn't get bombarded with that crap.
The Mini would be great for our parents' generation, and with larger screens, can keep up with age-related changes in eyesight.
If your mom/dad/whoever likes to travel or lives in different parts of the country/world at different times of year, an iBook is probably the best solution since they can take the whole thing with them.
But if they stay mostly in one place, then yeah, the Mini is the answer.
Yep, see also my thread on using these as standardized adjunct devices for custom industrial process control applications. I see these Minis proliferating into all kinds of use-cases that previously called for custom scratchbuilt PCs. Steve's just given the world a great little geektool there.
I haven't seen this mentioned so far:
Think of all the instances where you have a customer who needs an inexpensive processor/controller similar to an industrial PC, or an "adjunct device" to add functionality to another system.
For example infrastructure in commercial buildings (HVAC control, energy-systems control, security & access control) and residential equivalents, various types of process-control, science lab applications, etc. All of those industrial use-cases that currently tend to default to Windows machines (which in turn go buggy when some nitwit pops in a CD full of infected games they downloaded) or where you want to (or have to) scratchbuild a machine to run an open-source OS.
In the past you'd assemble a PC from parts (about $250), compile and/or load your preferred OS, test & debug, etc. (a few hours' labor, often non-billable time). Then you load your custom apps and connect it to (whatever) at the customer's site.
Depending on how you value your labor, the Mini ends up being the same or lower cost than the custom-built PC by the time you're done. A more profitable way to use your time and your customers' money than troubleshooting, debugging, or fixing stuff that breaks.
Think of it as a compact, inexpensive BSD machine, with a clean user-interface, that can be stacked, racked, or wall-mounted if need be. A standard little box you can get off-the-shelf from a local supplier, load your custom apps, install quickly, and never have to worry about. Less hassles, more time to develop new apps and bring in new business.
I think the Mini is going to become a regular part of the geek toolkit immediately, and we're going to see these things popping up in plenty of (previously) unexpected places.
Email insurance: bad. It is an attempt to stop two forms of parasitism (spam and hacking of individuals' computers) by creating a third parasitic ecosystem. Logically it is equivalent to demanding people insure their telephone line against the "risk" that someone might break into a bridging terminal with a test handset and use their line to make threatening or harassing phone calls.
There is no end to the ways this kind of "risk management mindset" can take over peoples' lives. It goes hand in hand with the creeping economism and legalism that reduces every facet of human behavior to economically quantifyable commodity, and then sequesters it under layers of regulation for the gain of those ruthless enough to exploit it. SCO's letter to Congress is a paradigm case of where this inevitably leads: that an uncommodifiable community of peers is somehow inherently subversive and must be regulated as property. No, no, a thousand times, no.
Speaking of parasite-conducive ecosystems, an escrow infrastructure ends up putting small sums of money in millions of unsecured locations: it is begging to be attacked. The law enforcement system will not be able to handle thousands of complaints from the victims of escrow-hijacking, which is in effect petty theft. Ever have a bicycle stolen in a large city and try to have the police get it back? They can't, they're swamped with murders and mayhem. If you think they or any agency would have the time to track down escrow hijackers you're hallucinating.
Here's another thing. A financial barrier to true person-to-person communication creates a caste system with a vengeance. The wealthy will naturally set their fees higher if nothing else because they are used to dealing with larger sums of money (to a millionaire a few hundred dollars are like pennies to an ordinary worker) and the high threshold will still allow their (similarly wealthy) friends and families to reach them.
The poor, such as those who use free terminals in libraries, will set their fees low because they have to be accessible to their own friends and families who are likewise poor. But the poor person will be discouraged from sending email to the rich person, lest the latter, by accident or out of bad temper, trash the former's email and empty his account in one stroke.
The result of this must be a degree of permanent stratification. A caste system of communication. It would be as if the price of making a telephone call depended upon the whim of the person who received the call.
In one stroke this kills off the democratic principle of uniform and predictable rates that has been inherent in communications utilities back to the "Penny Post" of England in the days of horse-drawn transportation. The inherent unfairness is appalling in principle, and the concrete effect is to add one more factor to the growing conditions of disparity that historically have been the primary cause of violent social upheavals.
If there are to be fees for sending email, they must be uniform, fair, and bidirectionally equal (i.e. the cost for A to send to B must be the same as for B to send to A). In a practical sense, even a fee of one cent per email (the digital Penny Post) will be sufficient to make spamming unprofitable and therefore to kill it deader than a door-nail.
As someone mentioned above, escrow hijacking could be prevented by requiring that anyone attempting to "cash out" their received escrow payments, must do so in person with proper identification. Problem is that this destroys anonymity for anyone seeking to use email: and thereby unleashes another potential plague against human rights.
Ultimately I have to agree with the security dude a ways back who said, in effect, the most viable solution is to pass stiff laws against spam, enforce them vigorously, and put spammers in the slammer. The stiffer the law, the more seriously it's taken by the authorities as a
Never underestimate the ability of people who are motivated by hatred and fear to cause entropy for the rest of us. Look at the huge tweak about "gay marriage." They say it "threatens" marriage-in-general. How many marriages break up every year because one of the partners suddenly finds out they're gay, vs breaking up due to old-fashioned heterosexual adultery? Oh, but instead of doing something about adultery (how'bout make it a form of criminal fraud?), they make a red herring by scapegoating a minority into second-class citizenship.
So don't say it can't happen here. Can, has done, will do, and the only thing that stops it is when we fight like hell for our rights.
As some General said, Americans are reluctant to go to war, but when we do, we're ferocious. There are definitely times when it's necessary to fight, to defend ourselves from a clear & present threat. This is one of them.
Maybe it's time for their office staff, admins, etc. to start leaving too! Best part is, we can help them, and in a more orderly way than if they all get fired after SCO loses the lawsuit and puts all four paws up in the air.
Every company is absolutely dependent upon its admin staff. The office workers are the mortar that holds the bricks of business together so the rest of us geeks can have interesting jobs. If the admins & clericals leave, the company grinds to a halt as surely as if the power went off.
What's needed here is, a bunch of people to go to SCO's offices, morning and evening, and hand leaflets to everyone coming or going, telling them in effect that they'd better jump off the sinking ship before they drown when it goes under.
Talk to the people who work there, educate them about the risk of working for SCO or waiting to find another job. Help get them job leads and find new jobs. It's the least we can do, especially since most of the folks who still work there may not be fully aware of both sides of the issue.
Say goodbye to all forms of volunteerism, charity, mutual-benefit organizations, cooperatives, etc. All of these are "stealing" someone's possibility of getting a sale or doing paid work.
What really burns me bigtime about this is, it violates some really core stuff that all of the world's religions, most philosophical systems, and civilized societies around the world, all hold in common.
McBride doesn't like volunteerism, he should try telling that to the men & women who *volunteer* to serve in our Armed Forces, at risk of their own lives, for a hell of a lot less money than they deserve. The patriot in me thinks McBride ought to go talk to some soldiers and get a clue. And then he should talk to the people who work in homeless shelters, and free clinics, and countless other "not for profit" operations that make the difference between life and death for the people they serve.
As I said somewhere else around here, we should turn "sco"into a generic noun and verb.
The noun form would be synonymous with "scumbag" and "scam," as in "Don't trust that guy, he's a real sco," and "Don't invest in that company, their offering is a nothing but a sco."
The verb form would be synonymous with "to screw," as in, "He tried to sco me, but we fought hard and won."
I suppose we could then say that a screw-up was a "sco-up." That's also a useful expression for what happens when you get sick to your stomach ("Aw hell, I knew that food smelled funny, I think I'm going to sco-up!")
Let McBride try to get license fees from us (or sue us) for using their name as a generic! Ha! Poetic justice!
Anyone else have ideas for generic words based on a clearly identifyable use of "sco"..?
Strictly speaking of course, there won't be a mass meltdown. Just a nasty slow grind of licenses and lawsuits and the fold-ups of companies that were otherwise perfectly sound, and the endless petty bugs and inconveniences as previously robust services are shuffled to new owners. The death of a thousand cuts, with a whimper rather than a bang. But even so, a slow-motion disaster that is so damn easy to avoid.
Look no further than the second law of thermodynamics, as applied to social dynamics. Hatred and vengeance, and fear, are inherently entropic; they cause more-highly-organized social sytems to break down. Love & inspiration are inherently "negentropic" (that's the accepted term, but it's an awkward construction, so I prefer the term "syntropic"); they lead to the evolution of social systems to higher levels of organization and complexity.
It's always easier (in a thermodynamic sense or a sociodynamic sense) to create entropy, than it is to create syntropy. How long did it take to build the World Trade Center, vs. how long to knock it down? How long to build a library vs. how long to burn the books in it?
It takes relatively little effort to convene a lynch-mob and get them whipped into a hateful frenzy to go out and kill someone. It takes far more effort to convene a group of people to thoughtfully consider a scientific or philosophical issue and then do the hard work of experiments and writing to test their theories or prove their points. It takes much less intelligence to rule by fear than to lead by love.
Engineers build stuff: our work is inherently syntropic. We build stuff because we love what we're doing, and we want to contribute something useful and good to the world-at-large. Threats and fear do little to motivate us or even scare us off, but a good idea will have us working late nights for months.
One of SCO's biggest screw-ups (sco-ups?) is that they mis-read our culture. They thought they could use fear to dominate us. But we'll keep building stuff long after SCO is a footnote in legal history.
Coders in the antispam community should consider collaborating on theoretical approaches to analysis of this stuff and perhaps write some apps that would do it, and send 'em in.
NSA may be ahead of the civilian world by a decade in most areas, but they may not have the kind of specialist expertise in this particular issue that the antispam community has. This is one of those areas where you may be able to make a real contribution to protecting us from the next 9-11 or worse.
One more thing: it may be that ultimately the only way to stop stego-spam is to stop spam entirely. What a great incentive for the Feds to start busting spammers!
Exactly! We have got to start insisting on the Kantian "categorical imperative," which is nothing more or less than a demand for logical consistency in rule-sets. It is (was?) also the basis for the American Constitutional provision for equality before the law, and the rejection of arbitrary exceptions based on social status.
It's time to turn "sco" into a generic noun and a generic verb.
Noun definition: "a loser who resorts to deceitful or coersive tactics due to a lack of imagination or principles." Synonymous with "scumbag." Also, "a fraudulent or coercive scheme." Synonymous with "scam."
For example, "That sco tried to rip me off!" and "Don't fall for that, it's just a sco."
Verb definition: "to deceive or coerce someone, or obtain something through deceit or coersion, due to a lack of imagination or principles, or a combination of laziness and greed." Synonymous with "to screw."
For example, "They tried to sco me, but I didn't fall for it."
There's a certain poetic justice in this. SCO is trying to take something that belongs to *all of us* and make it exclusively *theirs*. Turning their name into a generic noun and verb, turns the tables and makes something that is/was "theirs" into something that belongs to *everyone*. Best part is, they can't stop it!