When I was in college, losing computers wasn't a problem - the computer was a mainframe that lived in its own building, and we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the keypunches / remote job entry terminals, and "backing up your data" meant printing out a copy of your punchcards.
Fortunately, if you're in college now you've got a less obsolete environment, and if your data lives on a laptop, you need to make backups and store them somewhere outside your backpack. Sure, insurance might cover replacing your laptop if it gets stolen or banged up too hard, but it won't cover losing your notes for the term or the draft of your thesis. CD-Rs are cheap, and you're going to treat your laptop like a laptop, so expect it to lose a disk drive once or twice before the rest of the machine fries.
Tivo's pretty far east, past the sewage plant and garbage dump. The town is west of all that, and I've never noticed it smelling bad, though I'm used to living in places with freshwater or saltwater marshes before I moved to CA, and your tastes may be different. Occasionally the wind blows the wrong way, though.
There were a couple of houses I looked at renting or buying when I moved out here in ~93. Before 237 was upgraded and the Dot-Com era office buildings and accompanying yuppies got there, Alviso was mostly a blue-collar Mexican town that's technically part of San Jose, not much money, not much crime, wrong side of the tracks/freeways/airports/etc., with a couple of restaurants and some boat docks and something that was either a junkyard or a boat-building place. One house was never on the market at the right time (the lease cycle was off by six months), little place at the corner of the levees, and from the second floor you could see a large chunk of the marshes and the bottom end of the bay. (It got sold for some outrageous-seeming price, twice what my house in New Jersey had been, and I ended up paying about the same for a condo in Mountain View.) The other was a rambling Victorian that had been owned by a family in the plastering business who kept adding onto it any time they had another kid, with about an acre, a collapsed barn, a not-yet-collapsed barn, and a small house in the back. It was about three times the price of my New Jersey house, once you figure in the cost of jacking it up to add a foundation (:-), but my wife and I would have needed to both be working to be able to afford it, and both be not working to deal with the construction work, and that wasn't really our set of talents. Grandpaw had recently moved them all down to Texas, and the woman who was selling it was one of the inlaws, who told us a lot about the area - Alviso used to flood occasionally before San Jose built the Sharks Arena, but that diverted the local rivers so that the Sharks parking lot would flood instead. The city wanted to fix that, but that would have caused it to flood in Alviso instead, and you're not allowed to do wetlands construction that would cause residential areas to flood, so the city was stuck and folks in Alviso were quite happy about it.
Sometimes there aren't enough votes to matter. But sometimes there are. It's especially easy to forge votes for people who don't show up - much cheaper than vote buying.
A few years ago, a friend of mine was running for Nevada State Senate, as a Libertarian in a two-way race. She was well-connected locally, and her "official" vote results were 45%. The local elections clerk, a Democrat, was busted shredding "unused absentee ballots" right after the election, in an election with high absentee ballot submissions, and the local Republicans estimated that the amount of fraud was about 6%, based on the differences between their polling for their candidates' races and the election results. The state senate would have been split 10-10-1 had she won.
There are lots of people who have cool ideas for cool-sounding projects, but turning anything large into usable working code requires resources. Some people do that for free, some people get customers to pay them to do it, some people do that because they're building tools that will help them do the things they're actually being paid to do, some people work at universities that pay them to teach undergrads while developing cool stuff in a desperate attempt to get tenure.
But often it's done by talking somebody into investing money in the development effort, and usually people only invest money if they think they'll make a profit. One way to make that profit is to actually sell products for money (though the DotCom boom was a little sketchy on that concept), and another way is to sell your company to the public in an IPO, and another way is to sell your company to a big company with lots of spare cash, like Microsoft or Cisco. And the dotcom boom got a lot of people involved with developing really cool stuff, some of which actually got finished and most of which didn't, either because the business models were stupid and failed or because the developers weren't up to the level of work they'd really need to finish the job, but lots because the business models weren't strong enough to get investors to keep kicking in money during the development process. I don't know if you were watching the SF Bay Area market in mid-2000, but it looked a lot like the VCs yanked the intravenous cocaine drip out of everybody's arm, cutting off the huge flow of cash that was keeping everybody busy developing cool stuff and buying cars, toys, and rent they couldn't afford. And one of the reasons, besides the rapidly increased cost of money and the decreased credibility of IPOs as a liquidity event, was the sudden inability to cash out by selling out to MS.
The anti-trust suits struck me as pure greed - much of the agitation came from Netscape, ranting about how EVIL MS was for giving away their browser for free, when Netscape's fortune came from their market dominance which came from giving away their browser for near-free. To the extent MS may have had business practices that legitimately weren't kosher, they were in bullying computer vendors into buying DOS/Windows for all the machines they sold if they wanted to be able to buy any at OEM prices.
As far as the quality of MS products goes, I've found them annoying since I first started using them in the early 80s; they'd always been a company that was much better at marketing and developer/supplier synergy than at technology, too slow to get around to adopting better ideas from academia and other companies, more concerned with the next quarter's revenue than with improving quality problems, too convinced that the market will pay more for more bells and whistles than for solid quality, too unwilling to risk their installed base by producing an operating system that was better if it didn't have backward compatibility with the similarly-uninspired PC hardware design that everybody was using and the installed base of third-party applications . And they've made billions and billions of dollars at it, so in some sense it works, and the public keeps buying it even if they _could_ be buying Macintoshes or installing Linux From Scratch on their PC hardware, and apparently the public thinks it really _is_ more important to run Game_Du_Jour 50% faster on their PC hardware than to have an OS that doesn't get viruses and doesn't blue-screen twice a day (though the BSoD has pretty much disappeared with Win2K and WinXP, and the viruses are mostly in the applications.)
Netgear's problem wasn't lack of technological tools - it was lack of thought when they were designing those routers. Extra hardware tools can't fix that, I'm afraid. There was one hardware tool that would have _helped_, which would have been flash memory for storing the firmware, so that the attacking routers could have been upgraded. But when you're trying to design a device for $50 retail, you don't have much headroom for buying more flash or atomic clocks or whatever. DNS would have been a much more useful tool, of course, and it already existed at the time they hardwired in the IP address.
The City of San Francisco is apparently one of the plaintiffs in the suit. They've been having a budget crisis for the last couple of years, but what "crisis" really means is that they've raised their spending from about $4 billion to about $5 billion, and they're having trouble finding all that money, since the city only has 750,000 people to tax. If you want to live in the city of San Francisco, you have to pay them, and return you get things like new baseball stadiums for the baseball company without even giving the citizens free baseball tickets, and lots of favors for the real estate developers who are friends of the old mayor.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's "business power" comes from giving people things they want in return for money, and using the money to develop more things that people want (or do more advertising so more people want the things they make.) There's entirely nothing wrong with that, and if you don't like it, you can buy a Macintosh instead, or buy QNX or WindRiver or Symbian or PalmOS or SCO, or use free Linux or BSD software, or write your own software. The justice system's job isn't to get you a refund on products you decided were worth paying for when you bought them, or to tell Microsoft to deliver products you like better than the ones you bought - it's to make sure that nobody assassinates Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs or RMS. And if you can't get the software you want on a the cheap PC hardware you want to pay for, don't blame Bill Gates, blame Steve Jobs.
Market Forces are less, not more, likely to deliver working and cool IT products if every time they're successful at it, some bunch of thugs comes and steals it through anti-trust laws. The Federal Government's anti-trust suits against Microsoft were one of the three main causes of the software industry crash of 2000: sure, the "sell dogfood on line and don't worry about profits" business model had had enough time for its weaknesses to become apparent, and Alan Greenspan jacking interest rates six times in month or so to cool down the economy in time for Bush to get elected had a major impact on a capital-funding-intensive industry, but one of the major business models of the Internet Boom was "make something cool, and if it's successful, sell out to Microsoft if it's software or Cisco if it's hardware." By threatening break Microsoft into little pieces and take all their money, the anti-trust thugs guaranteed that Microsoft wasn't going to be buying lots of interesting startup companies (so they were no longer as attractive to VCs who'd previously been funding them), and the demise of the dogfood-on-line hype was already making IPOs less attractive as a VC exit strategy, so the funding dried up very fast.
The US Federal government and many state governments have had anti-trust suits against Microsoft in the last few years - this is just a couple of cities trying to get more money now that the difficult legal work has been done. They're not doing this because of any principles about supporting open source, they're doing it because they think they can get some money. The only thing special about California in this process is that the state government has had a budget crisis in the last year or two, and one of the things they've done about it has been to reduce the amount of money they give city governments, so the cities are looking for any source of money they can steal right now.
The Silicon Valley area in Northern California does have a lot of Open Source interest - it's a very dynamic technical culture, and lots of people moved here because of the computer and Internet boom of the late 1990s. (The Internet means that you can do your work from anywhere in the world, so everybody moved to the same city....) Many of the projects people wanted to develop needed some kind of Unix platform, and Linux and BSD and other open-source projects gave them that platform, and open source was a good model for developing many of the tools they needed to develop their real applications.
One particular timing issue is that in the Internet business crash of the last 3-4 years, lots of computer people were unemployed, and they wanted to keep their technical skills strong, have fun, do something that got their name well-known, keep in touch with their friends, and maybe create a new business or new job, so writing open-source software was a popular thing to do. Also, for many people, they learned a lot of interesting technology during the boom, but were too busy with their jobs to have fun experimenting with it, but once they were unemployed, they had time to work on the projects they'd been thinking about.
I got some spam a few months back claiming that Bill Gates would send me money in return for giving a lot of my personal information to the spammer, who claimed to be the lawyers administering the class action lawsuit settlement. While it may have been true, it's just about as rude as the other spam I've gotten claiming that Bill Gates would send me money in return for spamming everybody I know.
But those vouchers you get aren't worthless. The lawsuit says that you paid too much money for your Microsoft software because Bill Gates is mean, nasty, ugly, greedy, and the only source for the stuff that you want, so if you're in the class of people who were allegedly "harmed", it's because you "needed" Microsoft software, so giving you _more_ of it must be a Good Thing.
If the vouchers were _worthless_ that would mean that Microsoft software wasn't something you really needed, so there'd be no more reason for an anti-trust suit against Microsoft than for an anti-trust suit against Britney Spears's record label which is the only source of _her_ products.
Besides, if you're the kind of greedy person who wants to sue Microsoft for being so mean as to _sell_ you their products, you deserve to be given more Microsoft products good and hard.
Linux is free, and *BSD is free, and if you don't like Unixes, there's always Macintosh, and if you can't get Macintosh software on the cheap hardware you own, blame Steve Jobs, not Bill Gates. If I've bought Windows, it's because it came with something I wanted that made it worth putting up with Windows.
I've used various kinds of Unix for 25+ years, and I confess that, yes, I'm writing this on a Windows machine (belongs to work) and my home machine is also running XP (supports TurboTax) most of the time and Linux sometimes, and my mother-in-law's machine is running XP (supports AOL, and at least it's cleaner than Windows ME was.) I knew the XP disk had Windows on it when I bought it. It wasn't a Surprise. It was annoying to have to pay Bill Gates yet another $100 to get it, but the alternative was trying to get Windows ME re-installed, which had been supposed to fix up the Win98SE problems, which were supposed to fix the Win98 problems. I think the old PC came with Win95, but maybe Win98; I reinstalled enough times over the years that I've forgotten now. I don't remember if the 386 box ever ran Win95 or if it was only Win3.1 and DOS...
For most email mailbox specialist companies, any spam protection that doesn't require them to triple their capital investment really does pay off this quarter, because it lets them save a lot of bandwidth and email server hardware, since 70-80% of their traffic is spam that their customers don't want, and being able to offer "less spam" is a strong selling point (if they're any good at it in practice.) Graylisting and rejecting SMTP based on IP address or envelope let them avoid receiving email bodies, so that's a big win.
For ISPs that are mainly bandwidth sellers, for whom email is just a small sideline, it's a different case, because they're carrying a lot more bandwidth from users doing web browsing, than real or spam email, so it may or may not be the top of their priority list (unlike virus protection, which can prevent really big spikes in traffic depending on the worm (e.g. Slammer was really big, but most of the Outlook-hoax-of-the-week mails aren't that heavy traffic.) Also, how high up the priority list a problem is at some ISPs depends on whether they're charging flat-rate or usage-based for traffic.
If greylisting were such a magic bullet solution, lots more ISPs would be using it. While the most important cost of spam is the wasted time of the recipients, the most direct economic costs are to companies that provide mailboxes for users (i.e. ISPs and email outsourcers), and they'd not only love to avoid the direct costs, they'd love to have a big competitive advantage over other providers. So if it were easy to implement and worked really really well, they'd jump at it.
That doesn't mean it's not a helpful tool - just that it's either harder to implement than it looks, or less effective than it looks, probably the former. So get to work writing greylisting tools:-)
Of course, if greylisting were very common, spammers would try to find a way around it, but we knew this was an arms race when we started the discussion.
The US now has Federal laws against spam, as well as a number of state laws. The CAN-SPAM law theoretically legalized some forms of spam, but in practice it had no effect - one well-reported study says that about 3% of spam made a pretense of compliance when it first came out, but it's now down to 1% or so, and I saw less effect from California's anti-spam laws. Scotty Richter's OptInRealBig made that pretense, and they're gone, but the pretense was really just to slow down the process of getting kicked off of more and more ISPs.
CAN-SPAM was a great example of why legislation usually doesn't work - Politicians aren't technologists, and usually aren't competent economists, and even technologists have trouble coming up with solid definitions of what the problems are and what they want to do about them without having adverse side-effects. But politicians _are_ politicians, so if there are people clamoring for them to Do Something, they'll come up with Something to Do, and Do that, and at best it'll involve hiring some technologists who'll come up with something at least half-assed and not totally evil. But Politicians aren't technologists, so they can't tell if laws they make about technology are any good - the part they're good at is deciding whether the laws Look Aggressive, or Look Fair and Balanced, or Kick Asses and Take Names, or Kiss Asses and Take Campaign Contributions, or help their buddies in Homeland Security achieve other political goals, and those aren't the parts of the law that really matter much.
Spam makes economic sense for the spammer, and until that changes, spam won't go away. You talk about Congress preferring spammers over consumers, but you're not correct - they don't care about spammers, and the reason there's spam is that there are enough consumers willing to buy "Fake Herbal Vi@gra" or "Great Mortgage Deals" that spammers can make money even though they need to send out billions of emails to people who don't want to be consumers of their products to find the few who do. Most laws don't have any effect, because they depend on police, and police are too busy fighting the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs or dealing with bad drivers or actually fighting real crime to waste their time on the hopeless and unprofitable job of catching spammers. Some proposed laws give bounties to spam recipients for successfully catching spammers, and allow them to use mechanisms like small claims court instead of criminal prosecution, and that's more likely to have some effect.
But fundamentally, until you change the economics, you won't get rid of spam. The economics include the facts that
sending email is very low real cost,
finding addresses to send the mail to is very low cost due to automation,
operating from anywhere in the world is relatively low cost,
some countries have low-cost politicians who don't mind taking spammers' money even though it annoys a bunch of foreigners,
free or low-price email receiving is available from thousands of providers, generally funded by advertising,
spam is sufficiently profitable (or believed by gullible wannabee spammers to be sufficiently profitable) that spamware vendors are willing to violate Rule 2 and make products that will get around popular anti-spam defenses,
most people either run appallingly insecure email software on appallingly insecure operating systems or else use webmail or AOLmail from appallingly insecure operating systems, where the sources of the insecurity not only include the basic product (which is getting better), but the system administration (which is usually nonexistent), and the user behaviour (which is willing to click on random buttons to install cute screensavers with funny dancing pigs), making it easy for spam-support vendors to install spam-forwarders on millions of machines,
corporations can be formed for low enough prices, typically $100-500, that you can move the legal jurisdiction of your activities around and hide your money trail e
Don't know about Teller, but Penn used to write columns for some computer rag. One I particularly remember was back when US airports were starting to freak out about laptops and insisting that people turn them on at the rent-a-cop checkpoints, and he was annoyed enough about the general harassment and interference with civil liberties to suggest that an appropriate startup screen would be one that goes "10" "9" "8" "7" etc. in big scary-looking letters.
I'm sorry, but I can't allow the term "American Customs Officials" to go by unchallenged - those thugs were pretty much the antithesis of American values until the even worse Homeland Security displaced/absorbed them.
One year I was travelling and saw the customs thugs wearing a badge saying "US Customs Service - Defenders of Liberty", and it was really annoying to have to refrain from telling that thug that my great**6 grandparents ran a revolution to get rid of tax collectors like him.
I'm afraid I never gave Enlightenment a fair trial. I tried running it on a couple of machines with 64-96MB of RAM, and after a couple of attempts to do anything at all responded with the smoothness of Max Headroom on barbiturates, I backed it off and ran fvtwm, which performed adequately (at least for definitions of adequacy that includ fvtwm:-) (Basically, I'd rather have Sun Open Look on a Sparcstation 2 back....) And when we got a lot more RAM on the next budget cycle, I installed Gnome on some machines and KDE on others, and we ran Win2K and XP on the faster hardware...
I'm not sure that I'd call what happened to it "marketing", exactly:-) Sure, there were some third parties like Grasshopper Group that actually tried to market ports of NeWS to various hardware, and there was Sun's hybrid "NeWS/X" stuff, but Sun really wasn't all that helpful, from what I remember.
Right now I've got ~8 windows open on my Windows box, including File Manager, Outlook (for work email), Eudora (for my email), and a bunch of tabbed Mozilla browsers. I switch between windows fairly often, and I switch between tabs fairly often in the browsers I'm using. If you've got a rendering system that lets you download each one of those to the window server, and only refresh the parts of each hidden window that change, then yes, that's pretty rare, but if you need to refresh a whole screen whenever it you switch windows, that's a lot.
OK, not _all_ of Nevada, but lots of desert areas are susceptible to flash floods when it rains - that's why they teach you stuff about "never go down in the arroyo unless you can climb to safety if there's a flash flood". And there are lots of mountain areas in Nevada that do actually have water in the rivers, and you'll find cities usually get built where there's water. Reno in particular is at some risk of floods, though Las Vegas is much less so.
"The Day After" was mostly a made-for-TV disaster movie; I didn't get much emotional effect from it. "Testament" was far more frightening and gripping, by avoiding all the destruction-pr0n and focusing on the people, and it still hurts to remember it 20 years later.
It's set in a quiet northern California town, nice family place, Dad's commuted to work in San Francisco the day the bomb hits, so after the TV goes out and enough communications gets restored to know there's been a nuclear attack, they know he's not coming back, and everybody starts dieing of radation from the fallout over the next few months, kids and old people first. None of the black twisted cities, it's still a nice sunny day out, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.
I'm in my late 40s, so I grew up with the US/Russian Cold War terrorist threat of nuclear war and I remember people building bomb shelters in their back yards when I was a kid. The first time I heard the Emergency Broadcasting System announce that this was a real warning, not a test, was probably around the late 80s, and I really freaked for a few seconds before realizing that they were using the thing for flood warnings. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do with it (:-), but for my whole life it had meant "If it's not a test, then Nuclear War Starts Now"
Chang Kai-Shek's old KuoMinTang gang haven't been in power in Taiwan for a few years. The attitude I've seen from the last few governments has mostly been "look, those old foreign guys who ran our country for decades are dead, we're not claiming to be the rulers of all China like they did, we're trying to be the Taiwan we were without them, so leave us alone." And of course the Chinese government doesn't want to hear this, because it spent all those decades insisting that it was the real ruler of All China and that the rebel ex-government in Taiwan had better submit to it, so owning Taiwan is an ego thing for them, and the US old Cold Warriors don't really want to hear it, because they like having Taiwan tweaking the Chinese Commies, and because they really like puppet governments much better than independent governments also. And then of course there's money, which Taiwan makes lots of, and China wants, and there does seem to be a lot of trade building up between Taiwan and nearby Shanghai.
It's worth keeping the personalities and time frames here in perspective.
James Gosling wrote the NeWS Network Extensible Windowing System.
Don Hopkins was one of the absolute wizardly programmers using NeWS.
JCR was a NeXT Weenie, and is now an Apple Weenie. (I forget if you worked directly for NeXT or only were a heavy user...)
The Unix-Hater's Handbook was written in the late 80s, so the comments mostly relate to X11R2 or thereabouts, and when Don was referring to a 486, that was a fast computer. I thought the book was misnamed - it was largely the sendmail- vi- and emacs-hater's handbook, and many of the things that were evil about Sendmail, Vi, and Emacs then are still evil today.
So when Don was ranting about architectural choices that were wrong with X, he was comparing it to more interesting architectures like NeWS or various experimental things that have been left in the past, or to Windows which was relatively lightweight (though badly buggy) back then (the "lightweight" part has since been fixed.) And the things that he complained about mostly haven't changed a lot, except that Motif was really bloated back then, while these days Gnome looks bloated (but does a lot more) and Motif looks comparatively lightweight.
The one major difference is that today, the main uses for X are to run a browser as well as Xterm. To some extent, this balances the really big advantage of X (or NeWS) over Windows, which is being able to access resources on lots of machines at once.
What Don *didn't* rant about, because he was ranting about X, was that NeWS had its own horribly broken tradeoffs as well. The way it implemented really good WYSIWYG rendering and let applications decide which pieces of work should run on the client vs. the server was to pass executable chunks of Postscript code around for the interpreter on the NeWS Window Server to run. When everything worked, it was excellent, a joy to work with, and received the kind of raves that NeXtStEp enthusiasts give NeXt'S environment, but it had an almost total lack of security between applications, and if anything broke your screen tended to explode into an angry fruit salad. There were few people capable of doing real debugging in this environment, though Don, who was one of them. wrote an amazing debugger for it.
Java took many of the good ideas from NeWS about letting you safely hand chunks of code between cooperating interpreted processes, but did so with an actual security model built in from the beginning. There are people who don't like it (especially ObjectiveC fans), but one of its worst problems, slowness, has been fixed in part by JIT compilers and in part by Moore's Law. Unfortunately, some of Java's competitors, like ActiveX and JavaScript, didn't have a solid security model built in to them, so while they also let you divide labor between clients and servers, they're a security nightmare that could, and should, have been avoided.
Disclaimer: JCR and Don are friends of mine. I've met Gosling occasionally, but it's been a few years.
Rob Pike gave a talk at Usenix in the early 90s about Plan 9's 8.5 windowing system. His memorable comment was that he and Ken had spent a decade learning all the things that a window system shouldn't do and had written one that didn't do them.
Startup time was basically instantaneous - from the command line, you type "8 1/2" (in Unicode:-), hit carriage return, and the window system was up and running in about the time you'd expect to wait for shell to give you a $. I think it was about 64K lines of C code. This was running on a Next pizza box workstation, so it was a 68040 at probably 33 MHz - nice for its day, but not blazingly fast. The screen was 2-bit grayscale, which is fine for software development though obviously it'd be nice to have something a bit fancier...
C'mon now, don't you remember Cray's advertising slogan from the 80s? They used to make nice posters with it.
Back in the 80s I was doing a telecomm project for a large research lab that had a number of Cray supercomputers on one side of campus, and their campus backbone was a 30 Mbps baseband cable system feeding a bunch of 10 Mbps Ethernets, and a few of their buildings were starting to get brand-new 100 Mbps FDDI. They were getting very worried about what would happen if too many people _did_ imagine what they could do with a Cray, and wanted to do it from the other side of campus... Fortunately, the number of people who had access to the Cray was small enough that a variant on "sneakernet" worked fine - not using the sneakers to carry floppy disks around, but using the sneakers to carry the users to the building where the Cray lived:-)
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Fortunately, if you're in college now you've got a less obsolete environment, and if your data lives on a laptop, you need to make backups and store them somewhere outside your backpack. Sure, insurance might cover replacing your laptop if it gets stolen or banged up too hard, but it won't cover losing your notes for the term or the draft of your thesis. CD-Rs are cheap, and you're going to treat your laptop like a laptop, so expect it to lose a disk drive once or twice before the rest of the machine fries.
There were a couple of houses I looked at renting or buying when I moved out here in ~93. Before 237 was upgraded and the Dot-Com era office buildings and accompanying yuppies got there, Alviso was mostly a blue-collar Mexican town that's technically part of San Jose, not much money, not much crime, wrong side of the tracks/freeways/airports/etc., with a couple of restaurants and some boat docks and something that was either a junkyard or a boat-building place. One house was never on the market at the right time (the lease cycle was off by six months), little place at the corner of the levees, and from the second floor you could see a large chunk of the marshes and the bottom end of the bay. (It got sold for some outrageous-seeming price, twice what my house in New Jersey had been, and I ended up paying about the same for a condo in Mountain View.) The other was a rambling Victorian that had been owned by a family in the plastering business who kept adding onto it any time they had another kid, with about an acre, a collapsed barn, a not-yet-collapsed barn, and a small house in the back. It was about three times the price of my New Jersey house, once you figure in the cost of jacking it up to add a foundation (:-), but my wife and I would have needed to both be working to be able to afford it, and both be not working to deal with the construction work, and that wasn't really our set of talents. Grandpaw had recently moved them all down to Texas, and the woman who was selling it was one of the inlaws, who told us a lot about the area - Alviso used to flood occasionally before San Jose built the Sharks Arena, but that diverted the local rivers so that the Sharks parking lot would flood instead. The city wanted to fix that, but that would have caused it to flood in Alviso instead, and you're not allowed to do wetlands construction that would cause residential areas to flood, so the city was stuck and folks in Alviso were quite happy about it.
A few years ago, a friend of mine was running for Nevada State Senate, as a Libertarian in a two-way race. She was well-connected locally, and her "official" vote results were 45%. The local elections clerk, a Democrat, was busted shredding "unused absentee ballots" right after the election, in an election with high absentee ballot submissions, and the local Republicans estimated that the amount of fraud was about 6%, based on the differences between their polling for their candidates' races and the election results. The state senate would have been split 10-10-1 had she won.
But often it's done by talking somebody into investing money in the development effort, and usually people only invest money if they think they'll make a profit. One way to make that profit is to actually sell products for money (though the DotCom boom was a little sketchy on that concept), and another way is to sell your company to the public in an IPO, and another way is to sell your company to a big company with lots of spare cash, like Microsoft or Cisco. And the dotcom boom got a lot of people involved with developing really cool stuff, some of which actually got finished and most of which didn't, either because the business models were stupid and failed or because the developers weren't up to the level of work they'd really need to finish the job, but lots because the business models weren't strong enough to get investors to keep kicking in money during the development process. I don't know if you were watching the SF Bay Area market in mid-2000, but it looked a lot like the VCs yanked the intravenous cocaine drip out of everybody's arm, cutting off the huge flow of cash that was keeping everybody busy developing cool stuff and buying cars, toys, and rent they couldn't afford. And one of the reasons, besides the rapidly increased cost of money and the decreased credibility of IPOs as a liquidity event, was the sudden inability to cash out by selling out to MS.
The anti-trust suits struck me as pure greed - much of the agitation came from Netscape, ranting about how EVIL MS was for giving away their browser for free, when Netscape's fortune came from their market dominance which came from giving away their browser for near-free. To the extent MS may have had business practices that legitimately weren't kosher, they were in bullying computer vendors into buying DOS/Windows for all the machines they sold if they wanted to be able to buy any at OEM prices.
As far as the quality of MS products goes, I've found them annoying since I first started using them in the early 80s; they'd always been a company that was much better at marketing and developer/supplier synergy than at technology, too slow to get around to adopting better ideas from academia and other companies, more concerned with the next quarter's revenue than with improving quality problems, too convinced that the market will pay more for more bells and whistles than for solid quality, too unwilling to risk their installed base by producing an operating system that was better if it didn't have backward compatibility with the similarly-uninspired PC hardware design that everybody was using and the installed base of third-party applications . And they've made billions and billions of dollars at it, so in some sense it works, and the public keeps buying it even if they _could_ be buying Macintoshes or installing Linux From Scratch on their PC hardware, and apparently the public thinks it really _is_ more important to run Game_Du_Jour 50% faster on their PC hardware than to have an OS that doesn't get viruses and doesn't blue-screen twice a day (though the BSoD has pretty much disappeared with Win2K and WinXP, and the viruses are mostly in the applications.)
Netgear's problem wasn't lack of technological tools - it was lack of thought when they were designing those routers.
Extra hardware tools can't fix that, I'm afraid. There was one hardware tool that would have _helped_, which would have been flash memory for storing the firmware, so that the attacking routers could have been upgraded. But when you're trying to design a device for $50 retail, you don't have much headroom for buying more flash or atomic clocks or whatever. DNS would have been a much more useful tool, of course, and it already existed at the time they hardwired in the IP address.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's "business power" comes from giving people things they want in return for money, and using the money to develop more things that people want (or do more advertising so more people want the things they make.) There's entirely nothing wrong with that, and if you don't like it, you can buy a Macintosh instead, or buy QNX or WindRiver or Symbian or PalmOS or SCO, or use free Linux or BSD software, or write your own software. The justice system's job isn't to get you a refund on products you decided were worth paying for when you bought them, or to tell Microsoft to deliver products you like better than the ones you bought - it's to make sure that nobody assassinates Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs or RMS. And if you can't get the software you want on a the cheap PC hardware you want to pay for, don't blame Bill Gates, blame Steve Jobs.
Market Forces are less, not more, likely to deliver working and cool IT products if every time they're successful at it, some bunch of thugs comes and steals it through anti-trust laws. The Federal Government's anti-trust suits against Microsoft were one of the three main causes of the software industry crash of 2000: sure, the "sell dogfood on line and don't worry about profits" business model had had enough time for its weaknesses to become apparent, and Alan Greenspan jacking interest rates six times in month or so to cool down the economy in time for Bush to get elected had a major impact on a capital-funding-intensive industry, but one of the major business models of the Internet Boom was "make something cool, and if it's successful, sell out to Microsoft if it's software or Cisco if it's hardware." By threatening break Microsoft into little pieces and take all their money, the anti-trust thugs guaranteed that Microsoft wasn't going to be buying lots of interesting startup companies (so they were no longer as attractive to VCs who'd previously been funding them), and the demise of the dogfood-on-line hype was already making IPOs less attractive as a VC exit strategy, so the funding dried up very fast.
The Silicon Valley area in Northern California does have a lot of Open Source interest - it's a very dynamic technical culture, and lots of people moved here because of the computer and Internet boom of the late 1990s. (The Internet means that you can do your work from anywhere in the world, so everybody moved to the same city....) Many of the projects people wanted to develop needed some kind of Unix platform, and Linux and BSD and other open-source projects gave them that platform, and open source was a good model for developing many of the tools they needed to develop their real applications.
One particular timing issue is that in the Internet business crash of the last 3-4 years, lots of computer people were unemployed, and they wanted to keep their technical skills strong, have fun, do something that got their name well-known, keep in touch with their friends, and maybe create a new business or new job, so writing open-source software was a popular thing to do. Also, for many people, they learned a lot of interesting technology during the boom, but were too busy with their jobs to have fun experimenting with it, but once they were unemployed, they had time to work on the projects they'd been thinking about.
But those vouchers you get aren't worthless. The lawsuit says that you paid too much money for your Microsoft software because Bill Gates is mean, nasty, ugly, greedy, and the only source for the stuff that you want, so if you're in the class of people who were allegedly "harmed", it's because you "needed" Microsoft software, so giving you _more_ of it must be a Good Thing.
If the vouchers were _worthless_ that would mean that Microsoft software wasn't something you really needed, so there'd be no more reason for an anti-trust suit against Microsoft than for an anti-trust suit against Britney Spears's record label which is the only source of _her_ products.
Besides, if you're the kind of greedy person who wants to sue Microsoft for being so mean as to _sell_ you their products, you deserve to be given more Microsoft products good and hard.
I've used various kinds of Unix for 25+ years, and I confess that, yes, I'm writing this on a Windows machine (belongs to work) and my home machine is also running XP (supports TurboTax) most of the time and Linux sometimes, and my mother-in-law's machine is running XP (supports AOL, and at least it's cleaner than Windows ME was.) I knew the XP disk had Windows on it when I bought it. It wasn't a Surprise. It was annoying to have to pay Bill Gates yet another $100 to get it, but the alternative was trying to get Windows ME re-installed, which had been supposed to fix up the Win98SE problems, which were supposed to fix the Win98 problems. I think the old PC came with Win95, but maybe Win98; I reinstalled enough times over the years that I've forgotten now. I don't remember if the 386 box ever ran Win95 or if it was only Win3.1 and DOS...
For ISPs that are mainly bandwidth sellers, for whom email is just a small sideline, it's a different case, because they're carrying a lot more bandwidth from users doing web browsing, than real or spam email, so it may or may not be the top of their priority list (unlike virus protection, which can prevent really big spikes in traffic depending on the worm (e.g. Slammer was really big, but most of the Outlook-hoax-of-the-week mails aren't that heavy traffic.) Also, how high up the priority list a problem is at some ISPs depends on whether they're charging flat-rate or usage-based for traffic.
That doesn't mean it's not a helpful tool - just that it's either harder to implement than it looks, or less effective than it looks, probably the former. So get to work writing greylisting tools :-)
Of course, if greylisting were very common, spammers would try to find a way around it, but we knew this was an arms race when we started the discussion.
CAN-SPAM was a great example of why legislation usually doesn't work - Politicians aren't technologists, and usually aren't competent economists, and even technologists have trouble coming up with solid definitions of what the problems are and what they want to do about them without having adverse side-effects. But politicians _are_ politicians, so if there are people clamoring for them to Do Something, they'll come up with Something to Do, and Do that, and at best it'll involve hiring some technologists who'll come up with something at least half-assed and not totally evil. But Politicians aren't technologists, so they can't tell if laws they make about technology are any good - the part they're good at is deciding whether the laws Look Aggressive, or Look Fair and Balanced, or Kick Asses and Take Names, or Kiss Asses and Take Campaign Contributions, or help their buddies in Homeland Security achieve other political goals, and those aren't the parts of the law that really matter much.
Spam makes economic sense for the spammer, and until that changes, spam won't go away. You talk about Congress preferring spammers over consumers, but you're not correct - they don't care about spammers, and the reason there's spam is that there are enough consumers willing to buy "Fake Herbal Vi@gra" or "Great Mortgage Deals" that spammers can make money even though they need to send out billions of emails to people who don't want to be consumers of their products to find the few who do. Most laws don't have any effect, because they depend on police, and police are too busy fighting the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs or dealing with bad drivers or actually fighting real crime to waste their time on the hopeless and unprofitable job of catching spammers. Some proposed laws give bounties to spam recipients for successfully catching spammers, and allow them to use mechanisms like small claims court instead of criminal prosecution, and that's more likely to have some effect.
But fundamentally, until you change the economics, you won't get rid of spam. The economics include the facts that
Don't know about Teller, but Penn used to write columns for some computer rag. One I particularly remember was back when US airports were starting to freak out about laptops and insisting that people turn them on at the rent-a-cop checkpoints, and he was annoyed enough about the general harassment and interference with civil liberties to suggest that an appropriate startup screen would be one that goes "10" "9" "8" "7" etc. in big scary-looking letters.
One year I was travelling and saw the customs thugs wearing a badge saying "US Customs Service - Defenders of Liberty", and it was really annoying to have to refrain from telling that thug that my great**6 grandparents ran a revolution to get rid of tax collectors like him.
I'm afraid I never gave Enlightenment a fair trial. I tried running it on a couple of machines with 64-96MB of RAM, and after a couple of attempts to do anything at all responded with the smoothness of Max Headroom on barbiturates, I backed it off and ran fvtwm, which performed adequately (at least for definitions of adequacy that includ fvtwm :-) (Basically, I'd rather have Sun Open Look on a Sparcstation 2 back....) And when we got a lot more RAM on the next budget cycle, I installed Gnome on some machines and KDE on others, and we ran Win2K and XP on the faster hardware...
I'm not sure that I'd call what happened to it "marketing", exactly :-) Sure, there were some third parties like Grasshopper Group that actually tried to market ports of NeWS to various hardware, and there was Sun's hybrid "NeWS/X" stuff, but Sun really wasn't all that helpful, from what I remember.
Right now I've got ~8 windows open on my Windows box, including File Manager, Outlook (for work email), Eudora (for my email), and a bunch of tabbed Mozilla browsers. I switch between windows fairly often, and I switch between tabs fairly often in the browsers I'm using. If you've got a rendering system that lets you download each one of those to the window server, and only refresh the parts of each hidden window that change, then yes, that's pretty rare, but if you need to refresh a whole screen whenever it you switch windows, that's a lot.
OK, not _all_ of Nevada, but lots of desert areas are susceptible to flash floods when it rains - that's why they teach you stuff about "never go down in the arroyo unless you can climb to safety if there's a flash flood". And there are lots of mountain areas in Nevada that do actually have water in the rivers, and you'll find cities usually get built where there's water. Reno in particular is at some risk of floods, though Las Vegas is much less so.
It's set in a quiet northern California town, nice family place, Dad's commuted to work in San Francisco the day the bomb hits, so after the TV goes out and enough communications gets restored to know there's been a nuclear attack, they know he's not coming back, and everybody starts dieing of radation from the fallout over the next few months, kids and old people first. None of the black twisted cities, it's still a nice sunny day out, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.
I'm in my late 40s, so I grew up with the US/Russian Cold War terrorist threat of nuclear war and I remember people building bomb shelters in their back yards when I was a kid. The first time I heard the Emergency Broadcasting System announce that this was a real warning, not a test, was probably around the late 80s, and I really freaked for a few seconds before realizing that they were using the thing for flood warnings. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do with it (:-), but for my whole life it had meant "If it's not a test, then Nuclear War Starts Now"
Chang Kai-Shek's old KuoMinTang gang haven't been in power in Taiwan for a few years. The attitude I've seen from the last few governments has mostly been "look, those old foreign guys who ran our country for decades are dead, we're not claiming to be the rulers of all China like they did, we're trying to be the Taiwan we were without them, so leave us alone." And of course the Chinese government doesn't want to hear this, because it spent all those decades insisting that it was the real ruler of All China and that the rebel ex-government in Taiwan had better submit to it, so owning Taiwan is an ego thing for them, and the US old Cold Warriors don't really want to hear it, because they like having Taiwan tweaking the Chinese Commies, and because they really like puppet governments much better than independent governments also. And then of course there's money, which Taiwan makes lots of, and China wants, and there does seem to be a lot of trade building up between Taiwan and nearby Shanghai.
- James Gosling wrote the NeWS Network Extensible Windowing System.
- Don Hopkins was one of the absolute wizardly programmers using NeWS.
- JCR was a NeXT Weenie, and is now an Apple Weenie. (I forget if you worked directly for NeXT or only were a heavy user...)
- The Unix-Hater's Handbook was written in the late 80s, so the comments mostly relate to X11R2 or thereabouts, and when Don was referring to a 486, that was a fast computer. I thought the book was misnamed - it was largely the sendmail- vi- and emacs-hater's handbook, and many of the things that were evil about Sendmail, Vi, and Emacs then are still evil today.
So when Don was ranting about architectural choices that were wrong with X, he was comparing it to more interesting architectures like NeWS or various experimental things that have been left in the past, or to Windows which was relatively lightweight (though badly buggy) back then (the "lightweight" part has since been fixed.) And the things that he complained about mostly haven't changed a lot, except that Motif was really bloated back then, while these days Gnome looks bloated (but does a lot more) and Motif looks comparatively lightweight.The one major difference is that today, the main uses for X are to run a browser as well as Xterm. To some extent, this balances the really big advantage of X (or NeWS) over Windows, which is being able to access resources on lots of machines at once.
What Don *didn't* rant about, because he was ranting about X, was that NeWS had its own horribly broken tradeoffs as well. The way it implemented really good WYSIWYG rendering and let applications decide which pieces of work should run on the client vs. the server was to pass executable chunks of Postscript code around for the interpreter on the NeWS Window Server to run. When everything worked, it was excellent, a joy to work with, and received the kind of raves that NeXtStEp enthusiasts give NeXt'S environment, but it had an almost total lack of security between applications, and if anything broke your screen tended to explode into an angry fruit salad. There were few people capable of doing real debugging in this environment, though Don, who was one of them. wrote an amazing debugger for it.
Java took many of the good ideas from NeWS about letting you safely hand chunks of code between cooperating interpreted processes, but did so with an actual security model built in from the beginning. There are people who don't like it (especially ObjectiveC fans), but one of its worst problems, slowness, has been fixed in part by JIT compilers and in part by Moore's Law. Unfortunately, some of Java's competitors, like ActiveX and JavaScript, didn't have a solid security model built in to them, so while they also let you divide labor between clients and servers, they're a security nightmare that could, and should, have been avoided.
Disclaimer: JCR and Don are friends of mine. I've met Gosling occasionally, but it's been a few years.
Startup time was basically instantaneous - from the command line, you type "8 1/2" (in Unicode :-), hit carriage return, and the window system was up and running in about the time you'd expect to wait for shell to give you a $. I think it was about 64K lines of C code. This was running on a Next pizza box workstation, so it was a 68040 at probably 33 MHz - nice for its day, but not blazingly fast. The screen was 2-bit grayscale, which is fine for software development though obviously it'd be nice to have something a bit fancier...
Back in the 80s I was doing a telecomm project for a large research lab that had a number of Cray supercomputers on one side of campus, and their campus backbone was a 30 Mbps baseband cable system feeding a bunch of 10 Mbps Ethernets, and a few of their buildings were starting to get brand-new 100 Mbps FDDI. They were getting very worried about what would happen if too many people _did_ imagine what they could do with a Cray, and wanted to do it from the other side of campus... Fortunately, the number of people who had access to the Cray was small enough that a variant on "sneakernet" worked fine - not using the sneakers to carry floppy disks around, but using the sneakers to carry the users to the building where the Cray lived :-)
Sure you've got enough money for a Cray! Cray J932SE supercomputer (dual IOS, 3 cabinet) for $4500, not including disk drives.