RMS is kooky, and a bit of a hippy, but this is where his ideas really shine.
A telling quote from the story:
"It's the world we live in," Sullivan said. "Microsoft has every right to ask us for the information."
When Mr. IT-guy says we, he means "we" Microsoft users.
They do have the right, because they were GIVEN the right by the users of the software.
It is clearly up to the individual to defend his own rights. And we can! Thanks in large part to all those who license their software under Free licences in general, and the FSF in particular.
Go Free Software!!!
I'm printing this article and giving copies to all of my clients.
FTP (or far better scp) paired with ubiquitous internet access does the trick.
You can use that 50 megs your ISP gives you, or the school could even give some space on the local net.
Odds are, you already have all the hardware you need in place (or use that $40/drive to buy a big HDD to add to the server that would be providing the service.)
As I understand it, we are talking about a small number of users (1).
A single system behind DSL is an AMPLE solution.
Why? Two reasons.
1. It "looks" like his mail server is up 100% of the time that he could tell if his ISP is up or not. (In other words, if his mail server is off the net, he must be too, so what is the difference? (In other, other words, his connection is the limiting factor anyway.)
2. Internet mail is VERY fault tolerant. An HOUR OR THREE of downtime is no biggie for a mailserver in terms of receiving mail.
I know what I am talking about, I ran my own behind a 56k modem for six months and it worked flawlessly.
Anyway, if you want an easy, secure, reliable way of doing it, just get a cheap domain or web hosing account (which is really determined by what you want besides mail, and how much control you want) and park your own domain on it.
Oh, and you are definitely going to want to run SquirrelMail on it. Check it out.
No, first spend two or three days (each) trying to get the some of the "other" webmail programs working, then check it out.
Obviously we have been seeing different media reports.
My impression of media's style over the last 8 years has been "Clinton/Gore fundraising scandal! (Of course everybody does it, so it's not that bad.)" The "main stream" media hasn't even been reporting on the way the justice department has given them a pass on questionable if not flat out criminal fundraiser after fundraiser. ("But it's okay, 'cause if it was a republican, his appointed justice department would turn a blind eye too.")
I hate to bring it up, but what about the sex scandal? Even if we ignore the bare-faced lying "(Any man would do it, and all men cheat. Besides, America doesn't even care, look at our polls!)" would the media have insisted that "America doesn't care" and that "it has nothing to do with the job" if it had been a high school principal fucking a 21 year old intern IN HIS OFFICE?
If you think so, you are clearly living in some form of altered reality.
Finally, it is plain as day to me that the media (armed with lovely quotes from NOW spokeswomen* saying how wonderful Hillary is for "standing by her man"** and how he is still a great president) did an ENORMOUS amount of spin-doctoring because he supports abortion.
I didn't hear anything about NOW condemning Bob Packwood or Bob Livingston's decisions to resign because PAST affairs had come to light.
So I must disagree with your statement, the "main stream" media has not printed anything "mean", his behavior has simply been SO outrageous that they have not been able to contain it.
-Peter
PS: The gloves reference was to boxing gloves vs. bare knuckles. It doesn't "smart" to be handled with bare hands.
PPS: Please don't fool yourself into believing that I am an "angry, hate filled conservative." This is a common trap of "modern"*** liberal thinking. I am quite accepting of other people's beliefs and opinions, but I am very intolerant (alert! P.C. blacklist word!) of emotional reactions (as yours clearly was) to factual, moral or ethical questions.
* I wonder if NOW uses affirmative action hiring polices to try to get a "representative number" of men on the payroll.
** Ever heard a so-called "women's libber" use that phrase before?
*** I consider myself to be a "Jeffersonian Liberal." That is the word liberal used in the sense of freedom, not generosity (with other people's money.) Most would call me a libertarian. This rant is clearly not going to end, so see http://peter.hutnick.com/freedom if you are interested in seeing it continue.
What is really new about this is that the wrongs of certain democrats in office have become SO egregious that even the liberal (in the sense of generosity, not freedom) media can no longer turn a blind eye.
Mr. Agre only finds this to be "new" because when it was Iran Contra, or Quail's bungling, the media was "just reporting the facts" in his distorted world view. (That is not to say that they weren't, but to say that the same thing seems different to him.)
The fact is that that this level of reporting of democrats is new, and despite the fact that the media STILL has the gloves on it smarts.
Even if we suppose internet filtering software works (it clearly doesn't) or that it will some day soon (it won't) government censorship is completely unacceptable. No matter how loudly advocates cry "It's for the CHILDREN."
The solution is for any public internet access provider to have the strict rule "No internet access for unsupervised children."
What children see on the internet is being treated as a technical problem. It is not. It is a societal (and more specifically a parenting) problem.
I am a big fan of technology, but unsupervised children in an uncontrolled (and inherently adult) environment was a problem before computers were ever dreamed of. Fifty years ago people weren't demanding guards in the red-light districts to prevent their unsupervised children from seeing something they shouldn't!
Everyone where I work now is salary. Management is VERY reasonable about comp time, etc. on the occasions where paging is necessary.
At my last (support) job it worked like this. You get paged, you get two hours for starters. This would typically be at 1.5 time because you would already be working a 40 hour week, but this was not automatic. If it took more than two hours, you get payed for the time it took, rounded to the next 15 min. So you get paged for 1 hour, 30 min and 3:20min you get 2+2+3.5=7.5 hours. If it became too much (say 4 hours in a night) this, or some part, could normally be taken as comp time.
This seemes fair, because it really is a chunk of time (say, 2 hours) out of your night or weekend, if you have to drop everything for a five minute call.
Dude, do something about the special characters. Putting a link in your post with all the periods replaced by %A9 is just shitty.
What the hell are you using for an editor? Seriously, I would like to know what excuse for an editor mangles characters that badly. Email me if you are embarassed to say what you are using on/.
No need to start with a virgin disk. "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/whatever"
If you want to be totally paranoid, set up a script to do that 20 times, run it over night, and you're in pretty good shape.
I don't have any idea what "Of course in Windows everything is placed in one filesystem so you don't have to worry about this. FDISK once, install Windows, and encrypt." means.
Computers do not "cause information overload." NEVER has anyone been innocently sitting in a cubicle and a computer started forcing information into them.
People are stressed out and feel information overload due to the WAY THEY WORK. Now, the way they work is largely driven by the way they are
managed.
So, bad management leads to bad work habits, lead to stress.
[OEMs] install system software day in, day out, so there is little question [they are] best equipped to do it well.
Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software.
I used to work for an OEM, and there is a subtle implication in the second part. The reason that "OEM" versions of MS software are so cheap is that the OEM takes on the support costs.
The subtlty is this, the first part implies that customers are not qualified to install Windows (which, in itself, is interesting, since one of MS arguments against non-MS OSes is that they are too hard for users to install . ..), while the second part is clearly (to me) an attempt to avoid leaving the thought "but if we OEM windows, we own the suport FOREVER."
Piracy aside, it strikes me that small shops could sell retail Windows at cost (installed) and save money in the end. In fact they could use it as a selling point, "We give you the 'shiny box' version of Windows, which comes with support DIRECTLY FROM MICROSOFT."
That is a bigger nightmare for MS than wide-spread piracy. Pirated copies of Windows don't cost MS anything, on the other hand, retail copies can end up costing them quite a bit in support costs.
I thought I avoided that confusion by saying "platforms (or architectures)."
To be clear, there will next be an abstraction of platforms (architectures), not to be confused with an abstraction of platforms (OSes).
What I meant is that the next level is something like Transmeta's code morphing software which will "abstract out" (or "make transparent") the hardware
architecture. This will make it irrelevant to OSes (be it Windows 2006 or Linux 4.2.x) whether the system is a sub-palm with a scant 256 megs of
RAM, or a super computer with 1/4 T of RAM (or whatever.) This is the subtext, which you seem to have missed, which makes my post relevant to
the article, which is about Linux possibly having to fork to properly support the growing rift in supported architectures.
I'm not really sure why I am even replying, since your sig clearly demonstrates that you are going out of your way to mis-understand.
Okay, first there were systems, and the were all different.
Then someone "abstracted" them with "BIOS"
Then there were lines of systems, and they were all different.
Then someone "abstracted" them with "C"
Then there were platforms, and they were all different.
Someone (Transmeta?) will come up with a way of abstracting platforms (or architectures) and
make them "seem" the same.
This relates directly with performance increases. When you find yourself wondering what is going to make a 10GHz system better than a 1GHz system I think the answer is the level of abstraction.
Any number of quibbles can be made with the above statements, but I am illustrating a point, not
being a historian.
I don't know if you can get them any more, but they used to make "SIMM expanders" which would let you put 4 1mb simms in one SIMM slot. They came in two heights, and alternate sides, so you could actually fit 16 1mb simms into 4 slots, sort of like this:
=| |=
=| |=
=| | | |=
=| | | |=
| | | |
You need good cooling though. Note that the SIMMs are horizontal ( "=" is two SIMMs.)
Slashdot Mirror
RMS is kooky, and a bit of a hippy, but this is where his ideas really shine.
A telling quote from the story:
"It's the world we live in," Sullivan said. "Microsoft has every right to ask us for the information."
When Mr. IT-guy says we, he means "we" Microsoft users.
They do have the right, because they were GIVEN the right by the users of the software.
It is clearly up to the individual to defend his own rights. And we can! Thanks in large part to all those who license their software under Free licences in general, and the FSF in particular.
Go Free Software!!!
I'm printing this article and giving copies to all of my clients.
-Peter
yet bible claims thou shalt not kill.
Neither Jewish law (upon which Christian doctrine is based, i.e. the ten commandments,) nor any Christian doctrine that I know of forbids killing.
In fact Jewish law prescribes kosher METHODS of killing.
I believe you are misquoting the commandment "Thou shalt not do murder."
Neither of the candidates have done murder as far as I know.
-Peter
The question is, will this help meet my unbound desire for cheap, ubiquitous, unmetered, wireless Internet access?
Puts the phrase "my internet service crashed" in a different light, huh?
-Peter
I have to disagree with scp being clumsy. It is as simple and powerful as cp.
I don't uses Macs, but pscp.exe (brought to you by Simon Tatham who wrote putty) works fine for me on windoze platforms.
I carry a floppy with pscp, putty, and vncviewer.exe to turn any connected windows box into a psudo-*nix workstation.
But now were are full circle on the floppy thing, aren't we?
I am, however, going to look into doing it all by https. Do you have example code for using the input file thing?
-Peter
FTP (or far better scp) paired with ubiquitous internet access does the trick.
You can use that 50 megs your ISP gives you, or the school could even give some space on the local net.
Odds are, you already have all the hardware you need in place (or use that $40/drive to buy a big HDD to add to the server that would be providing the service.)
-Peter
"boots Linux in normal mode"
As opposed to safe mode?
Is "normal mode" anything like runlevel 3?
Read to the end for the "real" answer.
As I understand it, we are talking about a small number of users (1).
A single system behind DSL is an AMPLE solution.
Why? Two reasons.
1. It "looks" like his mail server is up 100% of the time that he could tell if his ISP is up or not. (In other words, if his mail server is off the net, he must be too, so what is the difference? (In other, other words, his connection is the limiting factor anyway.)
2. Internet mail is VERY fault tolerant. An HOUR OR THREE of downtime is no biggie for a mailserver in terms of receiving mail.
I know what I am talking about, I ran my own behind a 56k modem for six months and it worked flawlessly.
Anyway, if you want an easy, secure, reliable way of doing it, just get a cheap domain or web hosing account (which is really determined by what you want besides mail, and how much control you want) and park your own domain on it.
Oh, and you are definitely going to want to run SquirrelMail on it. Check it out.
No, first spend two or three days (each) trying to get the some of the "other" webmail programs working, then check it out.
How ironic is that.
Well, slashdot won't let me post the link. It keeps inserting spaces. Anyway, just plug http://www.uwink.com/netscape/4_5/i nde x.html into http://validator.w3.org
The site looks like crap, even on the "just for Netscape 4.5" version.
They have a bad case of the bad HTML.
Why is it so hard to write valid HTML?
Obviously we have been seeing different media reports.
My impression of media's style over the last 8 years has been "Clinton/Gore fundraising scandal! (Of course everybody does it, so it's not that bad.)" The "main stream" media hasn't even been reporting on the way the justice department has given them a pass on questionable if not flat out criminal fundraiser after fundraiser. ("But it's okay, 'cause if it was a republican, his appointed justice department would turn a blind eye too.")
I hate to bring it up, but what about the sex scandal? Even if we ignore the bare-faced lying "(Any man would do it, and all men cheat. Besides, America doesn't even care, look at our polls!)" would the media have insisted that "America doesn't care" and that "it has nothing to do with the job" if it had been a high school principal fucking a 21 year old intern IN HIS OFFICE?
If you think so, you are clearly living in some form of altered reality.
Finally, it is plain as day to me that the media (armed with lovely quotes from NOW spokeswomen* saying how wonderful Hillary is for "standing by her man"** and how he is still a great president) did an ENORMOUS amount of spin-doctoring because he supports abortion.
I didn't hear anything about NOW condemning Bob Packwood or Bob Livingston's decisions to resign because PAST affairs had come to light.
So I must disagree with your statement, the "main stream" media has not printed anything "mean", his behavior has simply been SO outrageous that they have not been able to contain it.
-Peter
PS: The gloves reference was to boxing gloves vs. bare knuckles. It doesn't "smart" to be handled with bare hands.
PPS: Please don't fool yourself into believing that I am an "angry, hate filled conservative." This is a common trap of "modern"*** liberal thinking. I am quite accepting of other people's beliefs and opinions, but I am very intolerant (alert! P.C. blacklist word!) of emotional reactions (as yours clearly was) to factual, moral or ethical questions.
* I wonder if NOW uses affirmative action hiring polices to try to get a "representative number" of men on the payroll.
** Ever heard a so-called "women's libber" use that phrase before?
*** I consider myself to be a "Jeffersonian Liberal." That is the word liberal used in the sense of freedom, not generosity (with other people's money.) Most would call me a libertarian. This rant is clearly not going to end, so see http://peter.hutnick.com/freedom if you are interested in seeing it continue.
What is really new about this is that the wrongs of certain democrats in office have become SO egregious that even the liberal (in the sense of generosity, not freedom) media can no longer turn a blind eye.
Mr. Agre only finds this to be "new" because when it was Iran Contra, or Quail's bungling, the media was "just reporting the facts" in his distorted world view. (That is not to say that they weren't, but to say that the same thing seems different to him.)
The fact is that that this level of reporting of democrats is new, and despite the fact that the media STILL has the gloves on it smarts.
-Peter
Even if we suppose internet filtering software works (it clearly doesn't) or that it will some day soon (it won't) government censorship is completely unacceptable. No matter how loudly advocates cry "It's for the CHILDREN."
The solution is for any public internet access provider to have the strict rule "No internet access for unsupervised children."
What children see on the internet is being treated as a technical problem. It is not. It is a societal (and more specifically a parenting) problem.
I am a big fan of technology, but unsupervised children in an uncontrolled (and inherently adult) environment was a problem before computers were ever dreamed of. Fifty years ago people weren't demanding guards in the red-light districts to prevent their unsupervised children from seeing something they shouldn't!
Everyone where I work now is salary. Management is VERY reasonable about comp time, etc. on the occasions where paging is necessary.
At my last (support) job it worked like this. You get paged, you get two hours for starters. This would typically be at 1.5 time because you would already be working a 40 hour week, but this was not automatic. If it took more than two hours, you get payed for the time it took, rounded to the next 15 min. So you get paged for 1 hour, 30 min and 3:20min you get 2+2+3.5=7.5 hours. If it became too much (say 4 hours in a night) this, or some part, could normally be taken as comp time.
This seemes fair, because it really is a chunk of time (say, 2 hours) out of your night or weekend, if you have to drop everything for a five minute call.
-Peter
You missed it.
The question that Frankie and Benji mouse were looking for was "How many ways are there to distribute the DeCSS source code."
Hmmm. The universe seems to have suddenly ceased to exist, and has been replaced by something even more inexplicable.
-Peter
Dude, do something about the special characters. Putting a link in your post with all the periods replaced by %A9 is just shitty.
/.
What the hell are you using for an editor? Seriously, I would like to know what excuse for an editor mangles characters that badly. Email me if you are embarassed to say what you are using on
Try the preview link next time!
-Peter
No need to start with a virgin disk. "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/whatever"
If you want to be totally paranoid, set up a script to do that 20 times, run it over night, and you're in pretty good shape.
I don't have any idea what "Of course in Windows everything is placed in one filesystem so you don't have to worry about this. FDISK once, install Windows, and encrypt." means.
Encrypting the "page files" is a very good point.
-Peter
Why do people have such a hard time with this?
Computers do not "cause information overload." NEVER has anyone been innocently sitting in a cubicle and a computer started forcing information into them.
People are stressed out and feel information overload due to the WAY THEY WORK. Now, the way they work is largely driven by the way they are
managed.
So, bad management leads to bad work habits, lead to stress.
[OEMs] install system software day in, day out, so there is little question [they are] best equipped to do it well.
.), while the second part is clearly (to me) an attempt to avoid leaving the thought "but if we OEM windows, we own the suport FOREVER."
Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software.
I used to work for an OEM, and there is a subtle implication in the second part. The reason that "OEM" versions of MS software are so cheap is that the OEM takes on the support costs.
The subtlty is this, the first part implies that customers are not qualified to install Windows (which, in itself, is interesting, since one of MS arguments against non-MS OSes is that they are too hard for users to install . .
Piracy aside, it strikes me that small shops could sell retail Windows at cost (installed) and save money in the end. In fact they could use it as a selling point, "We give you the 'shiny box' version of Windows, which comes with support DIRECTLY FROM MICROSOFT."
That is a bigger nightmare for MS than wide-spread piracy. Pirated copies of Windows don't cost MS anything, on the other hand, retail copies can end up costing them quite a bit in support costs.
Except, of course for the fact that Windows has no bugs
-Peter
It's not a PC. It is just a backplane (and probably an IDE interface)
That is to say, there is no memory or processor.
Doesn't seem so inexpensive now, does it?
-Peter
That is not what I meant.
I thought I avoided that confusion by saying "platforms (or architectures)."
To be clear, there will next be an abstraction of platforms (architectures), not to be confused with an abstraction of platforms (OSes).
What I meant is that the next level is something like Transmeta's code morphing software which will "abstract out" (or "make transparent") the hardware
architecture. This will make it irrelevant to OSes (be it Windows 2006 or Linux 4.2.x) whether the system is a sub-palm with a scant 256 megs of
RAM, or a super computer with 1/4 T of RAM (or whatever.) This is the subtext, which you seem to have missed, which makes my post relevant to
the article, which is about Linux possibly having to fork to properly support the growing rift in supported architectures.
I'm not really sure why I am even replying, since your sig clearly demonstrates that you are going out of your way to mis-understand.
-Peter
Okay, first there were systems, and the were all different.
Then someone "abstracted" them with "BIOS"
Then there were lines of systems, and they were all different.
Then someone "abstracted" them with "C"
Then there were platforms, and they were all different.
Someone (Transmeta?) will come up with a way of abstracting platforms (or architectures) and
make them "seem" the same.
This relates directly with performance increases. When you find yourself wondering what is going to make a 10GHz system better than a 1GHz system I think the answer is the level of abstraction.
Any number of quibbles can be made with the above statements, but I am illustrating a point, not
being a historian.
-Peter
Check again. Try the downloads section.
Local server in Vienna, and a couple of mirrors (looks like in the US) (for Linux x86)
Do don't say what arch you are looking for. Maybe you are taking your UltraSPARC to the lan party?
Looks nice, won't compile. Not worth much.
Tried it with egcs and *shudder* MSVC.
-Peter
Damn! Why didn't I preview?
Well, slashdot says I'm too lame to post the corrected version. I hope you get the idea.
I don't know if you can get them any more, but they used to make "SIMM expanders" which would let you put 4 1mb simms in one SIMM slot. They came in two heights, and alternate sides, so you could actually fit 16 1mb simms into 4 slots, sort of like this:
=| |=
=| |=
=| | | |=
=| | | |=
| | | |
You need good cooling though. Note that the SIMMs are horizontal ( "=" is two SIMMs.)
-Peter