Most decaf is pretty lame stuff. Supermarket-style decaf is even lamer. But if you shop around, you can find decaf that really does taste like coffee. It's easier to get with French Roast styles, because burning the beans that much generates some flavors to make up for what the decaffeination takes away, but you can also find other decent decaf. If you've got a local coffee-roasting company, try theirs. If all you've got is Starbucks, that'll do also - generally going for their heavier varieties is a good start. There's a local roaster here in Palo Alto that does a good Ethiopian decaf, which is a real art form to produce, since Ethiopian coffees are usually light enough that decaffeinating them kills everything.
But hey, if you like fizzy water in the morning, go for it.
I've had times that I've been abusing caffeine while working on projects, and you can reach a point that more coffee won't make you more awake, it'll just make you more grouchy; I've quit caffeine after several of those rounds, and the withdrawal headaches were much nastier than usual. It's not just dehydration - caffeine's a diuretic, so getting rid of it actually helps, plus I was going through lots of water washing down all the tylenol and aspirin:-)
But if you want to experience the pure nastiness of caffeine, you can do what an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends tried once, which is crunching up some caffeine pills and smoking them. They figured that most other psychoactives work differently depending on whether you eat the natural product, refine it into pure chemical, or smoke the chemical, and if it works for opiates, coca, and marijuana, why not caffeine? Answer: Do not do this... They found all the nasty effects of caffeine pretty much hit all at once - nausea, headaches, jitters, and it was an ugly experience they didn't plan to repeat, in spite of being experienced with all kinds of chemical entertainments. (And I get the impression they were mainly into the stimulants like cocaine rather than the hallucinogens, so it's not just a matter-of-taste thing.)
Tea has caffeine, but also has theophyllines, which are similar. Chocolate has theobromines. Mate has mateins. I find that I get more jittery with tea or mate than with coffee, but perhaps the differences help with the addiction. If you're going to drink tea, rather than getting stuff from Amazon or the supermarket, go find a local ethnic grocery store - the Chinese do a really wide range of subtle and interesting flavors, and the Indian and other South-West Asian stores have a more familiar set of flavors (because it's what the Brits mostly brought back), plus you tend to get about a kilo of good bulk Indian tea for the price of a small box of good teabags. Mate is also interesting, and you can either buy it for yuppie prices at healthfood stores or cheap kilo quantities at Mexican stores. Either way, you'll need teaballs or other filters.
Usually when I want to go off caffeine, I switch to half decaf coffee, and gradually decrease the amount of caffeine. It's really critical to find good decaf instead of lame-tasting decaf if you want to trick yourself into being satisfied with it. Try a bunch of brands and varietals - I usually just do French Roast, since my wife prefers that taste and there are more choices of brand because burning the beans usually covers up the decaffeination damage, but I also like most of Peet's flavors, and one local coffee roaster does a decaf Ethiopian that survives.
My mother-in-law smoked for about 50 years, and she'd only admit how much she was smoking when she was below 3 packs a day, which was maybe half the time. At least most of the time she said she definitely didn't want to quit - she liked smoking. She really liked the one time she visited Europe - people didn't hassle you about smoking like they do in California.
A decade or so ago, she got a bad cold or flu and couldn't cope with smoking, and went off it cold turkey, and hasn't started since. She's always been an apartment-dweller, so the next time she moved, it was to a place that wasn't drenched in smoke, and visiting her became much more pleasant:-) Quitting wasn't entirely good for her - she gained about 60 pounds the next year, which has made the rest of her life a lot tougher, but at least she's not smoking.
An acquaintance of mine is a writer, and back during his younger crazier days, he started using cocaine to give him the focus to keep writing, and then started snorting heroin to calm down the cocaine jitters. He could use either or both of them occasionally without getting addicted, but once he used heroin for four or five days in a row and found he was addicted. Cocaine withdrawal wasn't that bad - he did it a few times, and it was annoying to be grouchy for a few days, but tolerable, partly because as a freelance writer you can curl up and hide until you get over it, and smoke enough cigarettes all day without annoying your coworkers. Opiate withdrawal, on the other hand, was really really nasty - basically when you're addicted to opiates, your body stops making most of the natural endorphin pain killers that tell your nerves not to worry about getting banged around by things like walking, and when you've no longer got the opiates, everything hurts. Badly. For a long time.
Eventually he'd burned up all his money and his friendships and decided to clean up his act and stop using the drugs. But he was still a nicotine addict - he found that trying to quit smoking was much harder than either coke or heroin. His post-addiction replacement girlfriend figured that quitting once vice at a time is a good start, and she'd rather put up with the smoke than put up with him during nicotine withdrawal, at least until he'd been over the other stuff for a while. I haven't seen him in a couple of years, but I suspect he's still a smoker.
Everybody's reactions to drugs are individualized, of course, so your mileage may vary. I go back and forth between caffeine use, caffeine addiction, and decaf, and sometimes I've had really nasty withdrawal (which tends to keep my off the stuff for a while.) I also find that if I'm regularly using caffeine, even at below-addictive levels, most other drugs I take don't have much effect on my mood, but if I've been decaffeinated for a while, either uppers like Sudafed or downers like anti-histamines will have much more mental effect.
Well, there's always SMTP. If you don't like it, there's UUCP. If you don't like that either, there's Fidonet. If you don't like those, there's probably something else in the Amateur Packet Radio business.
As far as P2P servers for domain names go, there's a real difference between the distribution technology for the names (which isn't usually a problem) and the decision-making processes, which are hierarchical by design (and have a big ugly glaring mess at the top levels of the hierarchy.)
But yes, "Wired the Conde Nast Travel Magazine" is a bit different than "Wired" was the first year or two, when my friends were in it more often:-)
Spammers often impersonate people they don't like, so angry responders trash them. Make sure you don't get tricked into harassing the innocent. And far more often than that, they use fake addresses on real servers, such as YetAnotherBogusAddress@yahoo.com. Try not to waste their resources either. And your ISP would appreciate if you don't waste their resources.
However, if spammers have genuine "remove-me" addresses (at least genuine enough to be collecting your address so they can resell it as "validated", if not necessarily genuine enough to stop spamming you), then certainly you could sent them large email addresses, such as an MPEG of you telling them why you don't want any more spam, in case they didn't get the hint. Do make sure you tell their ISP's abuse department as well (which suggests your MPEG should _not_ include a demonstration of why you don't need their herbal expander pills...:-) If you can send mail directly, rather than using your ISP's SMTP relay, certainly sending any spammer 10-50 times as many bits as they sent you would be legitimate. It's not as effective unless everybody does it, but hey, it's a start.
TIA was really two things - letting one US government agency see all the data held by other US government agencies, and forcing the private sector to make more data available to the government with less supervision than ever before.
DARPA's TIA didn't get to be the agency in charge, but the various pretend "anti-terrorist" policy decrees are nonetheless increasing the amount of government data that's accessible by spooky agencies, decreasing the accountability levels (requests vs. formal administrative requests vs. court orders), letting the spooks who were previously only allowed to deal with non-US targets go after US targets as well, and in general there's lots more unprotected data floating around. And the government's been rapidly increasing their demands for private-sector data and data from private individuals - airlines giving the TSA info on who's flying, which they pass on to other spooks who issue no-fly lists, "financial institution" definitions extended to just about everybody including pawn shops, "PATRIOT" and "PATRIOT II" and the like.
Moore's Law means that lots of this is inevitable, in the private sector as well as government. Forty years ago, computers were room-sized and were limited to punch cards for input and magtape for mass storage, and people were worried about privacy then, but actually _doing_ anything with records was a slow process, required long expensive development cycles, and had trouble correlating any data that didn't have simple common keys like Social Security Numbers. These days, wristwatches sometimes have more CPU power and storage than those mainframes, pocket-sized computers have much more, and a spreadsheet and a few Excel macros running on any bureaucrat's desktop can run ad-hoc queries in minutes that would have taken the IRS a year to design and develop back then, and can match up names and addresses with reasonable accuracy.
The real key is minimizing creation of correlatable data, limiting access to data you have, not collecting (or giving out) information that people don't need, using different email addresses for different correspondents, etc. Cryptography gives us a few tools for things like that - hashes, Chaum's blinded signatures. Traditional business practices also have tools, like paying cash instead of credit cards, or Amex's one-use credit card numbers. But it fundamentally requires committment, and there are too many businesses that find it financially useful to collect more data for data mining, and the political climate was going downhill rapidly before the terrorist carte blanche. (Remember Louis Freeh?)
Segway's aren't very good bullet items - 12mph is too slow for a drive-by shooting...:-)
Actually, I think Segways were mostly banned from sidewalks, not streets, and mainly in cities where Segway was lobbying to get official permission to use them on sidewalks. The right place for them is bike lanes - they're fairly similar in speed.
Yes, NS's DNS hijacking was a major turkey, and was possible because the DNS system has centralized technology but no clear definition of who's really in charge. On the other hand, it was easily fixed, because everybody knew who was responsible, and almost everybody in the world yelled at them, including the two organizations whose dubious claims to ownership of namespace policy trump NS's.
NS's DNS hack was a pretty direct application of their Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) design, which brings up the problem that there's a large demand for non-7-bit-ASCII domain names, and the main proposed solution (from NS) has many of the same failures that their missing-DNS-resolver had - it's really only designed for the web, has marginal support at best for email, and fails completely for most other protocols. The alternative is to make the major DNS handlers (client as well as server) 8-bit-clean, do something different to address the uppercase/lowercase relationships, and make sure there aren't any problems with null bytes in Unicode names or other gotchas, and get enough standards committees (plus Microsoft) on board with it to get the thing actually deployed. It's an ugly job and somebody's still got to do it, otherwise somebody will do a much uglier job like NS did.
Ireland jumped on the Electronic voting machine bandwagon as well, but there are real problems with it. The catch is that the "If nobody's looking, change the vote to 'Republican'" feature was only tested in the US.......
If you're going to use UN resolutions as a justification for anything, please enforce them in numerical order.... The US's ally, Israel, has never complied with most of the UN resolutions about their denial of civil rights to Palestinian residents. There are probably UN resolutions that the US is in violation of, as well as International Criminal Court actions the US ignored about their mining of Nicaragua's harbors, which is an act of war.
And besides, this isn't a UN war. That resolution was from the *old* UN, that did whatever the US told it to. The *current* UN has France and Germany in it, so this war was run by the Coalition of the Willing, which let the US do whatever they wanted to.
Obviously for your company's wireless network you'd use WEP, as well as treating the wireless as outside the firewall. It's not a bad idea for home use, depending on your threat models (e.g. apartment vs. free-standing house.)
But if you're connecting to your company machines from a coffee shop, you need to be using IPSEC or at least SSH tunnels, and WEP doesn't really add anything to your security. It's strictly a tradeoff of limiting access to the coffee-shop's paying customers vs. inconveniencing potential customers, and if your model of "paying" is "keep them around so they drink more coffee", you want maximum convenience and minimal limitations.
Remember, this isn't the guy whose job is to make sure the company makes money - it's the job of writing all the reports that tell regulators and stockholders how much money you're making, which shouldn't take long at all these days.
SEC report: Expenses $X Income $0.00Y
FASB compliance report: Money ripped off $0 Money spent annoying existing and potential customers $Z
Draft Annual Report: We annoyed 66% of our current customer base and 99% of potential new customers. We're not producing anything new or interesting. There's a chance we might make money selling SNOBOL to Microsoft..... PROFIT!
Secret Plans for World Domination Status Report: Darl has successfully distracted everyone from investigating our Secret Plans. These aren't the secret plans you're looking for. You can move along.
(*Glass* windows, not Microsoft Windows, which arrives already broken.)
Bastiat, the ~1870s French economist, was probably not the first person to explain this fallacy, but he's the best-known. Sure, successful spammers create some jobs, but they also destroy other jobs, as well as wasting everybody's time and annoying everyone.
C isn't screwed up. It's a really great language, nice and transparent, does exactly what you tell it with no surprises. You can shoot yourself in the foot if you want.
The problem is that too many people aren't sufficiently careful, including the people who wrote the gets() I/O subroutine, so their Internet implementations typically resemble large quantities of foot-sized bright-colored bull's-eye signs marked "YOURS ARE HERE" and large numbers of guns and bullets of various sizes distributed to lots of people along with README files about attaching a sign to your foot to make sure it gets shot at.
One of the first lessons we learned in CS100 was to always validate the input, assuming that it might be bogus or actively malicious. I've been appalled over the last 25 years at the number of products, developers, and companies that don't understand that. Most of the internet security problems we've seen have been from inadequate handling of input data, typically the buffer overruns that are so easy to program in C if you're not paying attention.
The article's worth reading, and really does justify it's "Level: Intermediate" label. Unlike when I was learning to program, there are lots of sources of input beyond your deck of punch cards (:-), and the author does a good job of explaining many of them, such as evil things that environment variables and file descriptors can be used for.
There were two Bohemian Defenestrations. The first one was in July 1419, when the Hussite Protestants threw the town council out the castle windows, killing seven of them.
The initial PPTP was a total botch, with seven major security flaws. Some of them have since been fixed, but it gives you some idea of the professionalism and quality that didn't go into the basic design. If you want to use a VPN for security, use IPSEC - and this project has FreeS/WAN IPSEC in it. If you really really want to use a VPN to transport lame non-IP legacy Microsoft LAN protocols, go pay Microsoft some money for one of their server projects, and charge the silly customer who's hiring you as a consultant because they don't want to upgrade to the 1990s for it. If you want to use a VPN to carry private IP addresses, but don't actually care about security, use IPSEC anyway, or use GRE tunnels.
You do need a cheap DSL provider for this to be cost-effective, but you also need one with policies that will let you provide commercial shared open access like this. Some are really paranoid greedy types (cable modem companies are the worst), while others are extremely, deliberately open. The nice thing about DSL is that the people who provide the wires aren't the people who provide the upstream or set the policies - so you can get telco or Covad wire but still pick an ISP with open policies. I use Sonic.net at home, partly because they offer static addresses but largely because they let their users do anything they want with their connections (except spam, of course...) Speakeasy's also good, and even Earthlink's not bad, and if you don't need static addresses, there are probably a number of others out there. AT&T's business-priced services are good (even the $79 stuff), though their consumer policies are too restrictive. I don't know if any of the recent $29 deals let you use them this way, which is too bad because it's easier to PROFIT if you only need to sell 10 extra lattes per month than 20-30.
OK, you don't _strictly_ need two ethernet ports, if you're doing things like running two IP addresses on one port or playing other games with one-armed routing, but it's ugly if you don't. If you want something appliance-like, get a used laptop - anything that boots from CDROM will do, and you can find them for similar prices. Router filtering isn't a job that needs lots of horsepower.
The business model for coffee-shop wireless isn't the tip jar - it's the $3 latte, and the extra coffee people drink while they're hanging around using it, and the extra pastries. That's also why you've got the newspapers, the comfy chairs, the shelf of Really Bad Science Fiction books, the chess set. If you've also got a PC in the corner for people who didn't bring their lap top, maybe charge for using that.
WEP isn't necessary for your customers - the main reason coffee-shops use it is to restrict access to paying customers, and you're not doing that - you're selling them friendliness and coffee and chair space and pastries that aren't too sticky to eat next to a computer. If you've got an issue with one of your neighbors sucking down bandwidth, that's different, of course, but setting WEP is an obstacle for users, especially if they've got their own WEP settings for their home or office.
Security and quotas are less necessary than you'd expect, as long as your DSL ISP is good. Start open, and maybe monitor usage and see what problems you get, rather than starting locked down tight, i.e. use your router's security features rather than buying a PC to start with, unless you also want to have the PC for customers who don't bring laptops. (And if your ISP is the uptight, policy-heavy types, running free or especially paid wireless in your store probably violates their policies, plus they're probably already restricting SMTP.) For consumer DSL ISPs, I'm quite happy with sonic.net, Speakeasy's also good and has nationwide coverage, and ever Earthlink's not too bad. Business DSL providers will charge a bit more, and tend to have flexible policies. Cable Modems are a much better match technically, but are run by terminally clueless paranoids who don't understand their business models, so you can't use them except maybe with a higher-priced business-class service.
You're unlikely to have much problem with spammers - geeks hate them, and have fun imagining scenarios like drive-by spammers, but in a small town, it's more of a know-your-customer thing. If you're in a college town, or get lots of high-school kids, you may need to worry more about crackers using your system. On the other hand, you need to leave things open for gamers, and the problem there is making sure the high-school kids keep buying enough drinks to make up for chair space. KaZaa's not really much of a problem, as long as your ISP doesn't ban it, because users are transient enough that they won't be doing much uploading, just leeching.
Yes, they were 25 MFLOPS. The chip had a 12.5 MHz cycle rate (I think that was also the clock speed), and each cycle could do a 32-bit multiply, a 32-bit add, and a 24-bit simple integer operation (some integer ops took multiple clocks, I think?)
Your music application sounds like fun. I didn't know anybody was still doing anything quite like that by 1990 - there was a whole range of people around John Cage's time who did lots of prepared piano stuff.
Some of the people who were trying to sell our multi-processor supercomputer flavor came up with a music studio application, doing lots of audio processing and mixing, sort of like your device turned inside out. Don't know if they sold more than one of them before the Lucent spinoff took them away.
Well, this is getting downright annoying - it's the page that tells you that your comment has been submitted that does the crashing, since both postings were successful. Wonder what happens if I "preview"
Slashdot Mirror
But hey, if you like fizzy water in the morning, go for it.
But if you want to experience the pure nastiness of caffeine, you can do what an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends tried once, which is crunching up some caffeine pills and smoking them. They figured that most other psychoactives work differently depending on whether you eat the natural product, refine it into pure chemical, or smoke the chemical, and if it works for opiates, coca, and marijuana, why not caffeine? Answer: Do not do this... They found all the nasty effects of caffeine pretty much hit all at once - nausea, headaches, jitters, and it was an ugly experience they didn't plan to repeat, in spite of being experienced with all kinds of chemical entertainments. (And I get the impression they were mainly into the stimulants like cocaine rather than the hallucinogens, so it's not just a matter-of-taste thing.)
Usually when I want to go off caffeine, I switch to half decaf coffee, and gradually decrease the amount of caffeine. It's really critical to find good decaf instead of lame-tasting decaf if you want to trick yourself into being satisfied with it. Try a bunch of brands and varietals - I usually just do French Roast, since my wife prefers that taste and there are more choices of brand because burning the beans usually covers up the decaffeination damage, but I also like most of Peet's flavors, and one local coffee roaster does a decaf Ethiopian that survives.
A decade or so ago, she got a bad cold or flu and couldn't cope with smoking, and went off it cold turkey, and hasn't started since. She's always been an apartment-dweller, so the next time she moved, it was to a place that wasn't drenched in smoke, and visiting her became much more pleasant :-) Quitting wasn't entirely good for her - she gained about 60 pounds the next year, which has made the rest of her life a lot tougher, but at least she's not smoking.
Eventually he'd burned up all his money and his friendships and decided to clean up his act and stop using the drugs. But he was still a nicotine addict - he found that trying to quit smoking was much harder than either coke or heroin. His post-addiction replacement girlfriend figured that quitting once vice at a time is a good start, and she'd rather put up with the smoke than put up with him during nicotine withdrawal, at least until he'd been over the other stuff for a while. I haven't seen him in a couple of years, but I suspect he's still a smoker.
Everybody's reactions to drugs are individualized, of course, so your mileage may vary. I go back and forth between caffeine use, caffeine addiction, and decaf, and sometimes I've had really nasty withdrawal (which tends to keep my off the stuff for a while.) I also find that if I'm regularly using caffeine, even at below-addictive levels, most other drugs I take don't have much effect on my mood, but if I've been decaffeinated for a while, either uppers like Sudafed or downers like anti-histamines will have much more mental effect.
As far as P2P servers for domain names go, there's a real difference between the distribution technology for the names (which isn't usually a problem) and the decision-making processes, which are hierarchical by design (and have a big ugly glaring mess at the top levels of the hierarchy.)
But yes, "Wired the Conde Nast Travel Magazine" is a bit different than "Wired" was the first year or two, when my friends were in it more often :-)
However, if spammers have genuine "remove-me" addresses (at least genuine enough to be collecting your address so they can resell it as "validated", if not necessarily genuine enough to stop spamming you), then certainly you could sent them large email addresses, such as an MPEG of you telling them why you don't want any more spam, in case they didn't get the hint. Do make sure you tell their ISP's abuse department as well (which suggests your MPEG should _not_ include a demonstration of why you don't need their herbal expander pills... :-) If you can send mail directly, rather than using your ISP's SMTP relay, certainly sending any spammer 10-50 times as many bits as they sent you would be legitimate. It's not as effective unless everybody does it, but hey, it's a start.
DARPA's TIA didn't get to be the agency in charge, but the various pretend "anti-terrorist" policy decrees are nonetheless increasing the amount of government data that's accessible by spooky agencies, decreasing the accountability levels (requests vs. formal administrative requests vs. court orders), letting the spooks who were previously only allowed to deal with non-US targets go after US targets as well, and in general there's lots more unprotected data floating around. And the government's been rapidly increasing their demands for private-sector data and data from private individuals - airlines giving the TSA info on who's flying, which they pass on to other spooks who issue no-fly lists, "financial institution" definitions extended to just about everybody including pawn shops, "PATRIOT" and "PATRIOT II" and the like.
Moore's Law means that lots of this is inevitable, in the private sector as well as government. Forty years ago, computers were room-sized and were limited to punch cards for input and magtape for mass storage, and people were worried about privacy then, but actually _doing_ anything with records was a slow process, required long expensive development cycles, and had trouble correlating any data that didn't have simple common keys like Social Security Numbers. These days, wristwatches sometimes have more CPU power and storage than those mainframes, pocket-sized computers have much more, and a spreadsheet and a few Excel macros running on any bureaucrat's desktop can run ad-hoc queries in minutes that would have taken the IRS a year to design and develop back then, and can match up names and addresses with reasonable accuracy.
The real key is minimizing creation of correlatable data, limiting access to data you have, not collecting (or giving out) information that people don't need, using different email addresses for different correspondents, etc. Cryptography gives us a few tools for things like that - hashes, Chaum's blinded signatures. Traditional business practices also have tools, like paying cash instead of credit cards, or Amex's one-use credit card numbers. But it fundamentally requires committment, and there are too many businesses that find it financially useful to collect more data for data mining, and the political climate was going downhill rapidly before the terrorist carte blanche. (Remember Louis Freeh?)
Actually, I think Segways were mostly banned from sidewalks, not streets, and mainly in cities where Segway was lobbying to get official permission to use them on sidewalks. The right place for them is bike lanes - they're fairly similar in speed.
NS's DNS hack was a pretty direct application of their Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) design, which brings up the problem that there's a large demand for non-7-bit-ASCII domain names, and the main proposed solution (from NS) has many of the same failures that their missing-DNS-resolver had - it's really only designed for the web, has marginal support at best for email, and fails completely for most other protocols. The alternative is to make the major DNS handlers (client as well as server) 8-bit-clean, do something different to address the uppercase/lowercase relationships, and make sure there aren't any problems with null bytes in Unicode names or other gotchas, and get enough standards committees (plus Microsoft) on board with it to get the thing actually deployed. It's an ugly job and somebody's still got to do it, otherwise somebody will do a much uglier job like NS did.
Ireland jumped on the Electronic voting machine bandwagon as well, but there are real problems with it.
The catch is that the "If nobody's looking, change the vote to 'Republican'" feature was only tested in the US.......
If you're going to use UN resolutions as a justification for anything, please enforce them in numerical order.... The US's ally, Israel, has never complied with most of the UN resolutions about their denial of civil rights to Palestinian residents. There are probably UN resolutions that the US is in violation of, as well as International Criminal Court actions the US ignored about their mining of Nicaragua's harbors, which is an act of war.
And besides, this isn't a UN war. That resolution was from the *old* UN, that did whatever the US told it to. The *current* UN has France and Germany in it, so this war was run by the Coalition of the Willing, which let the US do whatever they wanted to.
But if you're connecting to your company machines from a coffee shop, you need to be using IPSEC or at least SSH tunnels, and WEP doesn't really add anything to your security. It's strictly a tradeoff of limiting access to the coffee-shop's paying customers vs. inconveniencing potential customers, and if your model of "paying" is "keep them around so they drink more coffee", you want maximum convenience and minimal limitations.
Bastiat, the ~1870s French economist, was probably not the first person to explain this fallacy, but he's the best-known. Sure, successful spammers create some jobs, but they also destroy other jobs, as well as wasting everybody's time and annoying everyone.
The problem is that too many people aren't sufficiently careful, including the people who wrote the gets() I/O subroutine, so their Internet implementations typically resemble large quantities of foot-sized bright-colored bull's-eye signs marked "YOURS ARE HERE" and large numbers of guns and bullets of various sizes distributed to lots of people along with README files about attaching a sign to your foot to make sure it gets shot at.
The article's worth reading, and really does justify it's "Level: Intermediate" label. Unlike when I was learning to program, there are lots of sources of input beyond your deck of punch cards (:-), and the author does a good job of explaining many of them, such as evil things that environment variables and file descriptors can be used for.
There were two Bohemian Defenestrations. The first one was in July 1419, when the Hussite Protestants threw the town council out the castle windows, killing seven of them.
... your sister letting you off the hook? :-)
The initial PPTP was a total botch, with seven major security flaws. Some of them have since been fixed, but it gives you some idea of the professionalism and quality that didn't go into the basic design. If you want to use a VPN for security, use IPSEC - and this project has FreeS/WAN IPSEC in it. If you really really want to use a VPN to transport lame non-IP legacy Microsoft LAN protocols, go pay Microsoft some money for one of their server projects, and charge the silly customer who's hiring you as a consultant because they don't want to upgrade to the 1990s for it. If you want to use a VPN to carry private IP addresses, but don't actually care about security, use IPSEC anyway, or use GRE tunnels.
You do need a cheap DSL provider for this to be cost-effective, but you also need one with policies that will let you provide commercial shared open access like this. Some are really paranoid greedy types (cable modem companies are the worst), while others are extremely, deliberately open. The nice thing about DSL is that the people who provide the wires aren't the people who provide the upstream or set the policies - so you can get telco or Covad wire but still pick an ISP with open policies. I use Sonic.net at home, partly because they offer static addresses but largely because they let their users do anything they want with their connections (except spam, of course...) Speakeasy's also good, and even Earthlink's not bad, and if you don't need static addresses, there are probably a number of others out there. AT&T's business-priced services are good (even the $79 stuff), though their consumer policies are too restrictive. I don't know if any of the recent $29 deals let you use them this way, which is too bad because it's easier to PROFIT if you only need to sell 10 extra lattes per month than 20-30.
OK, you don't _strictly_ need two ethernet ports, if you're doing things like running two IP addresses on one port or playing other games with one-armed routing, but it's ugly if you don't. If you want something appliance-like, get a used laptop - anything that boots from CDROM will do, and you can find them for similar prices. Router filtering isn't a job that needs lots of horsepower.
WEP isn't necessary for your customers - the main reason coffee-shops use it is to restrict access to paying customers, and you're not doing that - you're selling them friendliness and coffee and chair space and pastries that aren't too sticky to eat next to a computer. If you've got an issue with one of your neighbors sucking down bandwidth, that's different, of course, but setting WEP is an obstacle for users, especially if they've got their own WEP settings for their home or office.
Security and quotas are less necessary than you'd expect, as long as your DSL ISP is good. Start open, and maybe monitor usage and see what problems you get, rather than starting locked down tight, i.e. use your router's security features rather than buying a PC to start with, unless you also want to have the PC for customers who don't bring laptops. (And if your ISP is the uptight, policy-heavy types, running free or especially paid wireless in your store probably violates their policies, plus they're probably already restricting SMTP.) For consumer DSL ISPs, I'm quite happy with sonic.net, Speakeasy's also good and has nationwide coverage, and ever Earthlink's not too bad. Business DSL providers will charge a bit more, and tend to have flexible policies. Cable Modems are a much better match technically, but are run by terminally clueless paranoids who don't understand their business models, so you can't use them except maybe with a higher-priced business-class service.
You're unlikely to have much problem with spammers - geeks hate them, and have fun imagining scenarios like drive-by spammers, but in a small town, it's more of a know-your-customer thing. If you're in a college town, or get lots of high-school kids, you may need to worry more about crackers using your system. On the other hand, you need to leave things open for gamers, and the problem there is making sure the high-school kids keep buying enough drinks to make up for chair space. KaZaa's not really much of a problem, as long as your ISP doesn't ban it, because users are transient enough that they won't be doing much uploading, just leeching.
Your music application sounds like fun. I didn't know anybody was still doing anything quite like that by 1990 - there was a whole range of people around John Cage's time who did lots of prepared piano stuff.
Some of the people who were trying to sell our multi-processor supercomputer flavor came up with a music studio application, doing lots of audio processing and mixing, sort of like your device turned inside out. Don't know if they sold more than one of them before the Lucent spinoff took them away.
Well, this is getting downright annoying - it's the page that tells you that your comment has been submitted that does the crashing, since both postings were successful. Wonder what happens if I "preview"