Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." I've seen a few small projects pop up with Version 0.1 or 0.0.7 or 0.3, maybe add one more rev, and then stagnate. In most cases it's because the person didn't realize that managing a project like this does require real effort, and they've stopped doing their own development on it and lost interest and are off playing with other things, or studying if they're college students. Somebody else's comment about the difficulty of getting community support also applies. In at least one case, I gave up on following the project that would have been cool, was an "0.3" release, but wouldn't compile, and when I sent mail to the owner asking him about it, he sent back one reply that helped me get it to compile, but it was really clear after that that he must have never tried to run the thing, because it wouldn't really start either. It was just too rough to bother with.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" means us watching the government - not the other way around. Sometimes they get out of hand, and need to be reminded, like Senator Gregg, R-NH, whose speech started this discussion. We spent the whole Clinton Administration beating up on the NSA and the export bureaucrats and doing EFF lawsuits and anti-Clipper petitions and building DES-crackers to get the Feds to acknowledge that neither the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments nor the economics of computer technology were on their side, and generally it was the Democrats supporting the anti-civil-rights side (not too surprising) and the Republicans playing good guys (unusual, but it happened to align with business interests and oppose the administration.) Now that the Republicans are in control of the Presidency, we're seeing them start to switch sides (not too surprising, unfortunately, and there was always a split between the more pro-business Republicans who were mostly pro-crypto and the more social-conservative pro-police ones who were against it.)
For another perspective on eternal vigilance, David Brin's book The Transparent Society talks about the issues of ubiquitous cheap video cameras combined with cheap communications and computing. The recent face-recognition uses at Florida sports stadiums and the cheap X10 cameras with the annoying pop-up web ads are only the beginning.
If you want your mail to live on a laptop, so you can use it when you're not online, you need to do offline storage in a PST file. In practice, it's also an effective way to get users to manage their own mail storage - if they want to clean up their space, they can, and if they don't want to, it's their disk space tradeoff, but the central mail server doesn't have to do the weekly/monthly "please clean up your files, our disks are getting full" message or the also-popular "we're going to delete anything more than 3 months old." Disk space has been getting cheaper - a recent/. article discussed building a terabyte server for about $5000, and that was before the recent announcements of 160-MB disk drives for $400. But especially in an MS-Outlook environment, which encourages message bloating, you still can't manage a very large number of users on central storage very well.
Yes, that was precisely my complaint; I have to put up with this all the time:-) But you're right, it is an Outlook client problem, not a mail server problem.
Bush had a choice - the Secret Service and military folks who tend him would have been much happier if he'd been somewhere safe for a while, whether that's SAC HQ or just staying in Florida or doing the speech from Air Force 1, but certainly not back at either Ground Zero location. Going to the White House to make the speech was exactly the politically right move to make - this was a strength move, and the alternative would have been wimping out even if it's safer.
Too bad the speech was lame and he looked like a deer in the headlights. He looked better earlier in the day when he was speaking off the cuff between airplanes rather than staring at a teleprompter; the various world leaders that CNN and BBC were showing were mostly speaking from notes or without notes, and looked much more genuine. I agree with Katz that Giuliani was doing a good job of acting like a leader, and like a mayor, and reacting like an actual human (though almost getting killed like he did will certainly get your attention.) While Bush just didn't.
On the other hand, Bush at least didn't go off on a "we'll kick your ass" rant against anyone specific before they've really identified which Bin Laden was responsible for it; we're better off without that kind of warmongering.
Note on my political biases - I don't like either of these politicians - Giuliani's a fascist who substantially increased government power by inventing extensive abuses of RICO and by pushing poor people and non-"respectable" people out of the visible parts of NYC. But he's doing a great job here. Bush never struck me as being Presidential material - he's a frat boy along for the ride on the coattails of his despicable but competent father and doing whatever the military-industrial complex wants; Jeb Bush would have been a much better choice. And I'm not really impressed here. Bill Clinton would have done a much better job - he may be a sleazy used-car dealer, but he's a really really competent politician. I'm not sure how well Al Gore would have done - he'd be more genuine than the other two, and I'd guess he'd be more likely to end up looking like a leader than Bush, but he could also blow it pretty badly. I'm glad I'm not stick in their shoes this week.
Chances are your cable modem or DSL router has some firewall capabilities already. If your service provider lets you configure the box yourself (or makes you configure it, or you hack in), you can often get the box to do simple things like DHCP and NAT and maybe block some ports. So you don't even need an extra Cheap Little Router Box or Antique PC.
Also, rather than use your old PC as a firewall, sometimes it makes sense to use your main PC as both the active machine and the firewall and the NAT server for your other machines. This obviously only applies if your main PC runs a Real Operating System (e.g. Linux, *BSD), but it can front-end your Mac or Windoze boxes or that Beowulf cluster of game machines your kid's building.
Your old PC probably burns 100 watts. At a nice round but too low number of 10 cents/kwh, that's a penny an hour. So that's $1.68/week, or about $7.20/month, or $87.60/year. By contrast, most Cheap Little Routers cost under $100, so they're in the same price range. The real cost differences are your time installing the thing - if you view it as entertainment, along with the enjoyment of laughing at hax0rs, you win. If you view it as 15 minutes of your time at $200/your, you lose, unless it saves you half an hour of hauling the antique to the Computer Recycling Center, in which case you also win.
The obvious comparisons to make were Exchange on N PCs vs. Linux on N PCs vs. Linux on Mainframe, and perhaps the comparison of the dedicated mainframe vs. adding a virtual OS on the existing one. Obvious sets of mail software for the Linux boxes range include Sendmail (also runs on 390 mainframes), Several Netscape-or-its-descendants Products, Postfix, etc., if you want to use commercial products and not just Built In Unix Mail.
My experience as a user of Exchange is that if you let the administrator do a traditional Microsoft Office closed-system implementation, you're forcing all of your users into using an appallingly bad piece of software which leads to horrendous support problems down the road. It's not just the Virus Of The Week problem - Outlook Mail, while much much better than some of the previous MSMail products, fundamentally doesn't get it, and it keeps the user's mail in one big honking file that's increasingly fragile and bloated, and has an undocumented and unrepairable format - if it croaks beyond your client program's self-repair capabilities, you're hosed. It also Encourages Users To Mail Around Attached MSWord Documents or several other proprietary formats instead of just sending the message as real plaintext - leads to extra work for the reader (and usually sender), and bloats mail substantially, so your system has to carry a factor of 3-10 more traffic.
Exchange also encourages the users to send mail around with Internal Email Addresses - messages appear to come from "Joe User, Marketing" instead of "juser@foo.com", which looks pretty but fails badly whenever mail gets forwarded out of the system - if you send mail to Joe, Jane, and Fred@customer.com, Fred can reply to you@foo.com, but doesn't have a way to reply to "Joe User, Marketing" or whatever Jane's fictitious title is.
It's not like Sendmail doesn't have a long history of evil on its own, or like you can't build Turing Machines out of sendmail.cf files. But at least it's open, documented, and transparent, and runs on real operating systems.
The anti-trust attack on Microsoft was one of the three main causes of the dot-com market crash. The two others, which were more obvious, were Greenspan's jacking up interest rates in a capital-dependent market, and the fact that the dot-com boom was partly a tulip-bulb bubble, driven by hype and boundless optimism, so negative public opinion about the realism of advertising-funded petfood.com biz really can lead to the market declining.
Microsoft's vital contribution to the Silicon Valley business models, besides being the Evil Borg, was that the two main profit-realization methods for startups and their VCs are to either Go Public or Sell Out - and the big companies to sell out to were Cisco for hardware startups and Microsoft for software and services startups (e.g. Hotmail.) By threatening to rip Microsoft into little pieces and stomp on them and cutting its stock price in half, the anti-trust attack entirely destroyed MS's viability as somebody to sell your startup company to, which also means that VCs are less likely to give *you* funding because their only ways to make tons of money from your company are to Go Public in a now-shakier market or to Actually Make A Profit, which is a much slower and more speculative approach. But at the same time, the VCs' pool of money was drying up because the interest rates were getting jacked up and because the stock market was being hit hard by MS's nose-dive and by the simultaneous nose-dive of the money-intensive telecom sector, which had just acquired gigabucks of debt funding the fiber optic glut and was looking pretty shaky itself. And Actually Making A Profit was also becoming much harder, because the services startups and internet-doubling-every-15-minutes ISP expansions were Cisco's big revenue sources, so it's a vicious cycle spiraling downhill.
Microsoft's insistence on PC vendors' using their OS on everything may be overly greedy, but the Bundling Internet Explorer For Free issue that dominated the anti-trust hype is a bogus issue. First off all, it was largely PR and lobbying from Netscape, who had gained their market position by giving away their browser for free, so it's pretty hypocritical of them to complain that MS is doing the same. But beyond that, the Java/Netscape/Sun/Corel/Linux world was making it clear that once everybody had a Java-capable browser, the operating system underneath would be basically irrelevant, so you'd be able to replace the MS-DOS underneath with something Much, Much Better and still use the same applications you were comfortable with. I happen to think that's true, pretty much, and *I'd* like to jump in that direction at the office as well as on my home PC, but it is a machine gun pointed directly at Microsoft's heart, and they really had no choice but to derail it by trying to offer their own substitute for it. And having your competitors threaten to give away free software that makes your entire company obsolete and unnecessary would seem to be a reasonable justification for doing the same thing in response, and it's unfair of the AntiTrust thugs at DoJ to bust them for it, especially when it's that conspiracy of competitors that lobbying DoJ to do so. Even if they are the Borg.
There are a lot of different music programs, MIDI widgets, piano keyboard emulators, etc. Some are happier with special input devices, but there's a lot you can do with just vanilla soundcards, and there are programs for Macintoshen as well as Windows.
Doors Rock, and Doorknob Holes are good for the wires.
In the poster's case, one of the filing cabinets would probably be replaced by the beer cooler.
I'm actually using an old foot-treadle sewing machine table as the base - remember the old Singer ones that you cranked with your foot instead of using an electric motor? Gives me somthing fidgety to do while working.
How many bands and musicians have done bad covers of All Along the Watchtower and Free Bird and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and I did it MYYYYY Way! are out there? And that's from the commercial versions - the folk tradition shared far more music, sometimes keeping names attached. There was a while that everybody was recording Summertime and the Livin is Easy and Cold Rain and Snow and Pretty Peggy-O and everyting Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie or Alan Lomax wrote, sang, or collected and every female vocalist had to solo everything that Joan Baez soloed, whether they had a voice like hers or not. And this was good. (OK, 90% of it was crap, but 90% of everything was crap....) And you know Woody Guthrie's music far better than you know the music of some singer-songwriter from the 80s who had their 15 minutes of fame and the record company who owns their contract hasn't advertised it since then.
The 25X has lots of MIPS for grinding away on small amounts of data in each CPU's stack, but it looks like getting data on and off the CPUs from memory is the bottleneck, especially since the CPUs implement this in software - this means it can crunch very hard on very localized bits of data, but it's tough to give a single CPU enough for, say, a Fast Fourier Transform (at least for the interior CPUs). What kinds of applications work well on this sort of machine? How much cache is it practical to build around it? Has anybody built a bignum multiplier with it?
Seems that a wiretap warrant can do that, or some of the FISA court orders (FISA is something like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) which apply to the FBI chasing spies (remember spies? We used to have them back when there were Commies....)
Another poster mentioned that this works much better in geek-heavy urban neighborhoods than in random locations. He's right, and the recent articles in the press have been missing the infrastructure questions. To the extent that these networks can piggyback on DSL or Cable Modem users, they can access real bandwidth (unless there are too many bandwidth hogs per wireless gateway, but that's not too likely in most places.) Mostly the upstream bandwidth is 128kbps; downstream may be a bit more, or a lot more for cable modems. It's fine for email and web browsing, but not very useful for running servers on (one of the recent articles suggested that a small company could just pop up a wireless modem and have their server online. Most cable companies and some DSL providers block port 80, and you can't really trust a volunteer-net for your business, though it's just fine for your home website with pictures of your kids.)
The interesting potential for a wireless net is building a Fidonet-like backbone of wireless nodes that talk to each other without needing wired access points. If most of your demand is local, and you've got enough users close enough together that are running routing protocols, that can work, but unless you implement it carefully, routing tends do get ugly, you get lots of slow many-hop connections to get anywhere real, it flakes out whenever a well-connected node moves (causing the routing protocols to reconverge, slowly), and it's tough to get networks like that to load-balance well, so the traffic to the outside world is likely to concentrate on one or a few wired gateways - much nicer if that's a cable modem than a 144kbps IDSL line that's in the middle of town.
Also, many of the gateways are designed for a NAT environment - instead of using real addresses, everybody's recycling 192.168.1.* over and over again, and diagnosing problems becomes really ugly. It's a bit easier if somebody coordinates a backbone running on, say, 172.16.*.* with mandatory decent antennas for the backbone nodes, but keeping a system with lots of users from getting flaky can be tough.
The Mobile IP standards work addresses some of these issues.
Most cable modem services have pretty aggressive AUPs, which explicitly prohibit reselling service, and may either explicitly prohibit free sharing with too many people, or else have enough weasel words that they can drop you anyway. Some DSL ISPs are also that way; others are more flexible. Some of them have different policies for residential-priced DSL than for business-priced DSL - the latter can do a lot more, but cost more money.
One fairly serious problem with systems like this is that people who are using DSL to access their offices as opposed to the Internet have to be careful to set up the wireless LAN to connect to the Internet and not their VPN. For instance, if you're using a separate 802.11 box, you're probably fine, but if you're using an 802.11 card and also the DSL/Cable in your PC, you need to be sure that it's not routing to the inside of your VPN. Using one PC as the 802.11 gateway and a laptop with 802.11 card and VPN software is probably safe.
If you're using a Linux or BSD box for the 802.11 gateway, you've got some flexibility in building firewall rules so that the wireless guest users can only talk to the outside internet and not to your home machines. I don't know if anybody makes Linux transparent-firewall code that would let you intercept specific ports or not - it's probably worth doing some kind of proxy for SMTP that indicates that your machine was just relaying the mail, and limits the volume of traffic so spammers can't send huge quantities of mail (if they can only send small numbers of messages, that cuts down the abuse to a level that discourages drivebys as well as reducing the chances that your ISP will get complaints.)
The Constitution doesn't give the FBI any authority to create "Classified Information". That doesn't mean they haven't found some weasel words to authorize themselves to do so anyway, but there's nothing specific.
Most of the issues here are with rules of evidence, due process, and right to challenge your accuser in court; the Constitution isn't very detailed on these, particularly about issues of high technology.
The Exclusionary Rule, from the 1960s, says that evidence obtained illegally is inadmissable in court. The year before it was promulgated, the New York City police department didn't bother getting any search warrants - they'd just search, and if they did so illegally, too bad, they got the evidence anyway. The year after that, they got warrants (well, most of the time...)
The big interesting Constitutional issue here is that the Feds had a search warrant, which could fetch them a bunch of encrypted bits, but not a wiretap warrant, and what they did sounds extremely like wiretapping to me. Wiretap warrants require much more procedure than simple search warrants, and are mainly a creation of telephone regulatory law that's not clearly applicable here, since the Consitutional justification for telephone wiretaps is that the phone company is outside your house.
The accused computer had PGP, and the interesting messages or disk sections were encrypted with PGP. That means that if you have the keyring file (which usually lives on the disk) and passphrase (the important secret part), you can verify that the encrypted bits correspond to the decrypted bits. The usual rules of evidence for computer searches (which are rapidly evolving) apply here - were the files really written by the accused, or were they planted, or was there another person using the machine, etc.
If they'd found the passphrase on a yellow sticky note by the computer, there'd be no issue here. If they'd paid a snitch to give it to them, there'd be no issue either. If they'd tortured the accused without his lawyer present, there'd also be no issue - the decrypted material would pretty clearly be inadmissible. If they'd had a wiretap warrant, it would have been potentially interesting Constitutionally, but the police would almost certainly win. Instead, they found the somewhat interesting midpoint, because they pretty clearly cheated, but didn't cheat really badly.
In the UK, this evidence would probably be admissible, or at least the Home Office would try extremely hard to make it so.
If this case is to be prosecuted, it's because the PDNS are asking the police to do so and cooperating with them in the prosecution - it's not like the DMCA cases where a company can make an accusation and the Feds run with it even after the accuser backs off. The paper needs to understand the moral position they're in and do something about it. Among other things, that's a job for letters to the editor that really *are* to the editor...
Their advertisers ought to understand as well. The web page lists a Directory of them. Most of them aren't technical people; it's much better off to do a friendly "Hey, this guy tried to help out the paper you're advertising in and the publisher's gone ballistic and trying to get him jailed" rather than geekish flamage. Most of them don't have email addresses listed - most have snail-mail addresses, and while some have phone numbers, I'd advise against bothering them that way.
Some other features that Unix System V concentrated heavily on were support for symmetric multiprocessing (not just 2-4 processors but much larger numbers) and schedulers designed to handle hard real-time constraints, e.g. aircraft control or chemical process control applications that get really grumpy if you don't handle them every millisecond, on the millisecond. The real-time *has* gotten much easier since the days of the 386 and its ~5 bogomips, but it still takes grunging through the entire kernel and finding anything that blocks critical resources and makes sure the blocking is limited to short enough time periods to meet the constraints.
The new business-card-sized small CDs are sufficiently practical that source can be downloaded using ISO9660-equipped avian carriers instead of the older paper-based techniques. rfc1149
Additionally, the Free Software Foundation is providing GNU-based delivery for full-sized CD sets. Gnus travel more slowly than carrier pigeons, but have the advantage of being able to carry a complete set, reducing the need for retransmissions, and they support for multicasting and parallel processing if you need to ship a whole HURD of the things at once.
One of the purposes of the Library GPL was to provide a less-Stallmanized environment, so you could compile code using gcc without it becoming infected by the Gnu Public Virus - particularly libc, but also other libraries whose authors didn't feel the need to control everything they touched. RMS prefers to call it the Lesser GPL, since he doesn't like that kind of flexibilty.
ICBMs are big and expensive, and only a couple countries have had the technological base to develop them (at least until recently) - and you'd only use them if you wanted to have a real war. The Russians wouldn't shoot at us because of Mutually Assured Destruction (i.e. if we thought it was a real attack, we'd massively nuke them and they'd massively nuke us.) China's in a similar position. India's not that mad at us, and if they nuked any body it would be Pakistan or China. Western Europe are our allies, plus anything that turned into a nuclear war with Russia would probably involve lots of tactical nukes used in Germany. Cuba had Russian ICBMs there, but that problem's been taken care of.
A much more realistic attack model for a small country would be to put the nuke in a truck or a shipping container and drive or sail across the border to a major city. If they need extra security, they can always pack the stuff in drugs and smuggling it across the border is no problem at all....
Knuth's books were both joy and pain to read. The mathematical depth, the connection of math to algorithms and algorithms to code, all of those were wonderful. But man was that appallingly ugly spaghetti code for the pseudocode parts and a baroque ugly machine model and assembly code for MIX. It would have been *much* more usable, as well as much more accessible, if the pseudocode had been written somewhat cleanly, perhaps in ALGOL (a language designed years earlier for expressing algorithms, that had structured programming conventions like loops instead of Knuth's jump-in-or-out-of-the-middle and test-at-the-bottom goto colas), and for the places where explaining in low-level assembler is useful (which it often was), using some relatively clean design instead of something deliberately complexified. MIX is basically even less readable than the PDP-10 assembler in HAKMEM(jargon entry) MIT doc.
Not only do these things make the book unnecessarily hard to read when you're learning stuff for the first time, because you have to pay attention to the complexity of the coding style instead focusing on the ideas that the code is expressing, but it makes it even harder to use as a reference book when you're no longer in the midst of an undergraduate heavy reading phase and just trying to find out about the kinds of algorithms that apply to the problems you're solving.
If you were writing something like this today, it's a tossup whether the right language to use for the assembly portions would be the ugly but well-known and widely available Intel 8086 assemblers, or Java Bytecode which are a simpler model for a virtual machine.
If you look at True Names in Amazon, you'll see that it's going to be reissued Real Soon Now, with a bunch of introductory essays on various topics, as True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. Friends of mine wrote some of the essays, so I've been interested in getting a copy. Unfortunately, it's been going to come out Real Soon Now for about 5 years, and every 6-12 months the publication date slips another 6-12 months - This time for Sure! Some of the essays that were cutting-edge when they were written are going to start to look like old science-fiction by the time they actually get published...
My Palm7 is dog-slow. My Psion 3A wasn't, in spite of having 3 times as much gorgeous screen area and a 7.8MHz 8086-clone processor (Of course, having an excellent keyboard instead of a touch-screen with handwriting recognition saves a lot of horsepower.) Quadrupling the CPU might make the handwriting recognition faster and more accurate, and make up for the clunky operating system. And somebody else already commented that using an ARM core makes it much easier to use already-written ASIC libraries, which means that Palm can do more integration and keep costs down in the future, which is important when you want your product to cost less than 50 shares of your stock. The other big win is that changing processors gives you an excuse to fix some of the appallingly small limits built into the OS, like the 4KB data structures used for memos and email. The Psion had a few 32KB or 64KB limits from 8086 small model, but the last system I used with a 4KB limit was IBM 360 Assembler Language - the PDP-11 had gotten away from the PDP-8's 12-bit limit....
Memory is important, and it's pretty close to free. Selling a 2MB machine is tacky enough if you're doing it to get people to buy the overpriced memory expansion card, but there's simply no excuse for doing so on a non-expandable machine just to create product differentiation, or to bait&switch people into buying the much more expensive model just to get $6 more RAM. For many applications it doesn't matter, but if you want people do buy the box for things beyond the basics - ebooks, or industry-specific applications that require more data, or reading some real fraction of their email (especially using the overpriced radio link), you need more memory, sometimes lots more. Even if the future Palms don't play MP3s, storing compressed speech uses about 1MB per 20 minutes, so it helps to have more memory.
Better Screens - the Psion 3a has 480x160 mono, and lasts about as long on batteries as the Palm; the WinCE and iPaQ machines really do have good-looking screens, more readable as well as flashy, but the battery life is too short for practicality.
Audio, especially speech recognition - that does need more horsepower, though some of it can be done with ASICs like cell-phone voice compression instead of the CPU if that makes sense. Microsoft is going after the MP3-player / Video Game / TV set in your pocket market, but for business users and other people who want organizers rather than toys, the two obvious directions to go are cellphone capability and speech recognition interfaces to the box, and those may be CPU burners.
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Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." I've seen a few small projects pop up with Version 0.1 or 0.0.7 or 0.3, maybe add one more rev, and then stagnate. In most cases it's because the person didn't realize that managing a project like this does require real effort, and they've stopped doing their own development on it and lost interest and are off playing with other things, or studying if they're college students. Somebody else's comment about the difficulty of getting community support also applies. In at least one case, I gave up on following the project that would have been cool, was an "0.3" release, but wouldn't compile, and when I sent mail to the owner asking him about it, he sent back one reply that helped me get it to compile, but it was really clear after that that he must have never tried to run the thing, because it wouldn't really start either. It was just too rough to bother with.
For another perspective on eternal vigilance, David Brin's book The Transparent Society talks about the issues of ubiquitous cheap video cameras combined with cheap communications and computing. The recent face-recognition uses at Florida sports stadiums and the cheap X10 cameras with the annoying pop-up web ads are only the beginning.
If you want your mail to live on a laptop, so you can use it when you're not online, you need to do offline storage in a PST file. In practice, it's also an effective way to get users to manage their own mail storage - if they want to clean up their space, they can, and if they don't want to, it's their disk space tradeoff, but the central mail server doesn't have to do the weekly/monthly "please clean up your files, our disks are getting full" message or the also-popular "we're going to delete anything more than 3 months old." Disk space has been getting cheaper - a recent /. article discussed building a terabyte server for about $5000, and that was before the recent announcements of 160-MB disk drives for $400. But especially in an MS-Outlook environment, which encourages message bloating, you still can't manage a very large number of users on central storage very well.
Yes, that was precisely my complaint; I have to put up with this all the time :-) But you're right, it is an Outlook client problem, not a mail server problem.
Too bad the speech was lame and he looked like a deer in the headlights. He looked better earlier in the day when he was speaking off the cuff between airplanes rather than staring at a teleprompter; the various world leaders that CNN and BBC were showing were mostly speaking from notes or without notes, and looked much more genuine. I agree with Katz that Giuliani was doing a good job of acting like a leader, and like a mayor, and reacting like an actual human (though almost getting killed like he did will certainly get your attention.) While Bush just didn't.
On the other hand, Bush at least didn't go off on a "we'll kick your ass" rant against anyone specific before they've really identified which Bin Laden was responsible for it; we're better off without that kind of warmongering.
Note on my political biases - I don't like either of these politicians - Giuliani's a fascist who substantially increased government power by inventing extensive abuses of RICO and by pushing poor people and non-"respectable" people out of the visible parts of NYC. But he's doing a great job here. Bush never struck me as being Presidential material - he's a frat boy along for the ride on the coattails of his despicable but competent father and doing whatever the military-industrial complex wants; Jeb Bush would have been a much better choice. And I'm not really impressed here. Bill Clinton would have done a much better job - he may be a sleazy used-car dealer, but he's a really really competent politician. I'm not sure how well Al Gore would have done - he'd be more genuine than the other two, and I'd guess he'd be more likely to end up looking like a leader than Bush, but he could also blow it pretty badly. I'm glad I'm not stick in their shoes this week.
Also, rather than use your old PC as a firewall, sometimes it makes sense to use your main PC as both the active machine and the firewall and the NAT server for your other machines. This obviously only applies if your main PC runs a Real Operating System (e.g. Linux, *BSD), but it can front-end your Mac or Windoze boxes or that Beowulf cluster of game machines your kid's building.
Your old PC probably burns 100 watts. At a nice round but too low number of 10 cents/kwh, that's a penny an hour. So that's $1.68/week, or about $7.20/month, or $87.60/year. By contrast, most Cheap Little Routers cost under $100, so they're in the same price range. The real cost differences are your time installing the thing - if you view it as entertainment, along with the enjoyment of laughing at hax0rs, you win. If you view it as 15 minutes of your time at $200/your, you lose, unless it saves you half an hour of hauling the antique to the Computer Recycling Center, in which case you also win.
My experience as a user of Exchange is that if you let the administrator do a traditional Microsoft Office closed-system implementation, you're forcing all of your users into using an appallingly bad piece of software which leads to horrendous support problems down the road. It's not just the Virus Of The Week problem - Outlook Mail, while much much better than some of the previous MSMail products, fundamentally doesn't get it, and it keeps the user's mail in one big honking file that's increasingly fragile and bloated, and has an undocumented and unrepairable format - if it croaks beyond your client program's self-repair capabilities, you're hosed. It also Encourages Users To Mail Around Attached MSWord Documents or several other proprietary formats instead of just sending the message as real plaintext - leads to extra work for the reader (and usually sender), and bloats mail substantially, so your system has to carry a factor of 3-10 more traffic.
Exchange also encourages the users to send mail around with Internal Email Addresses - messages appear to come from "Joe User, Marketing" instead of "juser@foo.com", which looks pretty but fails badly whenever mail gets forwarded out of the system - if you send mail to Joe, Jane, and Fred@customer.com, Fred can reply to you@foo.com, but doesn't have a way to reply to "Joe User, Marketing" or whatever Jane's fictitious title is.
It's not like Sendmail doesn't have a long history of evil on its own, or like you can't build Turing Machines out of sendmail.cf files. But at least it's open, documented, and transparent, and runs on real operating systems.
Microsoft's vital contribution to the Silicon Valley business models, besides being the Evil Borg, was that the two main profit-realization methods for startups and their VCs are to either Go Public or Sell Out - and the big companies to sell out to were Cisco for hardware startups and Microsoft for software and services startups (e.g. Hotmail.) By threatening to rip Microsoft into little pieces and stomp on them and cutting its stock price in half, the anti-trust attack entirely destroyed MS's viability as somebody to sell your startup company to, which also means that VCs are less likely to give *you* funding because their only ways to make tons of money from your company are to Go Public in a now-shakier market or to Actually Make A Profit, which is a much slower and more speculative approach. But at the same time, the VCs' pool of money was drying up because the interest rates were getting jacked up and because the stock market was being hit hard by MS's nose-dive and by the simultaneous nose-dive of the money-intensive telecom sector, which had just acquired gigabucks of debt funding the fiber optic glut and was looking pretty shaky itself. And Actually Making A Profit was also becoming much harder, because the services startups and internet-doubling-every-15-minutes ISP expansions were Cisco's big revenue sources, so it's a vicious cycle spiraling downhill.
Microsoft's insistence on PC vendors' using their OS on everything may be overly greedy, but the Bundling Internet Explorer For Free issue that dominated the anti-trust hype is a bogus issue. First off all, it was largely PR and lobbying from Netscape, who had gained their market position by giving away their browser for free, so it's pretty hypocritical of them to complain that MS is doing the same. But beyond that, the Java/Netscape/Sun/Corel/Linux world was making it clear that once everybody had a Java-capable browser, the operating system underneath would be basically irrelevant, so you'd be able to replace the MS-DOS underneath with something Much, Much Better and still use the same applications you were comfortable with. I happen to think that's true, pretty much, and *I'd* like to jump in that direction at the office as well as on my home PC, but it is a machine gun pointed directly at Microsoft's heart, and they really had no choice but to derail it by trying to offer their own substitute for it. And having your competitors threaten to give away free software that makes your entire company obsolete and unnecessary would seem to be a reasonable justification for doing the same thing in response, and it's unfair of the AntiTrust thugs at DoJ to bust them for it, especially when it's that conspiracy of competitors that lobbying DoJ to do so. Even if they are the Borg.
There are a lot of different music programs, MIDI widgets, piano keyboard emulators, etc. Some are happier with special input devices, but there's a lot you can do with just vanilla soundcards, and there are programs for Macintoshen as well as Windows.
In the poster's case, one of the filing cabinets would probably be replaced by the beer cooler.
I'm actually using an old foot-treadle sewing machine table as the base - remember the old Singer ones that you cranked with your foot instead of using an electric motor? Gives me somthing fidgety to do while working.
How many bands and musicians have done bad covers of All Along the Watchtower and Free Bird and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and I did it MYYYYY Way! are out there? And that's from the commercial versions - the folk tradition shared far more music, sometimes keeping names attached. There was a while that everybody was recording Summertime and the Livin is Easy and Cold Rain and Snow and Pretty Peggy-O and everyting Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie or Alan Lomax wrote, sang, or collected and every female vocalist had to solo everything that Joan Baez soloed, whether they had a voice like hers or not. And this was good. (OK, 90% of it was crap, but 90% of everything was crap....) And you know Woody Guthrie's music far better than you know the music of some singer-songwriter from the 80s who had their 15 minutes of fame and the record company who owns their contract hasn't advertised it since then.
The 25X has lots of MIPS for grinding away on small amounts of data in each CPU's stack, but it looks like getting data on and off the CPUs from memory is the bottleneck, especially since the CPUs implement this in software - this means it can crunch very hard on very localized bits of data, but it's tough to give a single CPU enough for, say, a Fast Fourier Transform (at least for the interior CPUs). What kinds of applications work well on this sort of machine? How much cache is it practical to build around it? Has anybody built a bignum multiplier with it?
Seems that a wiretap warrant can do that, or some of the FISA court orders (FISA is something like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) which apply to the FBI chasing spies (remember spies? We used to have them back when there were Commies....)
The interesting potential for a wireless net is building a Fidonet-like backbone of wireless nodes that talk to each other without needing wired access points. If most of your demand is local, and you've got enough users close enough together that are running routing protocols, that can work, but unless you implement it carefully, routing tends do get ugly, you get lots of slow many-hop connections to get anywhere real, it flakes out whenever a well-connected node moves (causing the routing protocols to reconverge, slowly), and it's tough to get networks like that to load-balance well, so the traffic to the outside world is likely to concentrate on one or a few wired gateways - much nicer if that's a cable modem than a 144kbps IDSL line that's in the middle of town.
Also, many of the gateways are designed for a NAT environment - instead of using real addresses, everybody's recycling 192.168.1.* over and over again, and diagnosing problems becomes really ugly. It's a bit easier if somebody coordinates a backbone running on, say, 172.16.*.* with mandatory decent antennas for the backbone nodes, but keeping a system with lots of users from getting flaky can be tough.
The Mobile IP standards work addresses some of these issues.
One fairly serious problem with systems like this is that people who are using DSL to access their offices as opposed to the Internet have to be careful to set up the wireless LAN to connect to the Internet and not their VPN. For instance, if you're using a separate 802.11 box, you're probably fine, but if you're using an 802.11 card and also the DSL/Cable in your PC, you need to be sure that it's not routing to the inside of your VPN. Using one PC as the 802.11 gateway and a laptop with 802.11 card and VPN software is probably safe.
If you're using a Linux or BSD box for the 802.11 gateway, you've got some flexibility in building firewall rules so that the wireless guest users can only talk to the outside internet and not to your home machines. I don't know if anybody makes Linux transparent-firewall code that would let you intercept specific ports or not - it's probably worth doing some kind of proxy for SMTP that indicates that your machine was just relaying the mail, and limits the volume of traffic so spammers can't send huge quantities of mail (if they can only send small numbers of messages, that cuts down the abuse to a level that discourages drivebys as well as reducing the chances that your ISP will get complaints.)
If this case is to be prosecuted, it's because the PDNS are asking the police to do so and cooperating with them in the prosecution - it's not like the DMCA cases where a company can make an accusation and the Feds run with it even after the accuser backs off. The paper needs to understand the moral position they're in and do something about it. Among other things, that's a job for letters to the editor that really *are* to the editor...
Their advertisers ought to understand as well. The web page lists a Directory of them. Most of them aren't technical people; it's much better off to do a friendly "Hey, this guy tried to help out the paper you're advertising in and the publisher's gone ballistic and trying to get him jailed" rather than geekish flamage. Most of them don't have email addresses listed - most have snail-mail addresses, and while some have phone numbers, I'd advise against bothering them that way.
Some other features that Unix System V concentrated heavily on were support for symmetric multiprocessing (not just 2-4 processors but much larger numbers) and schedulers designed to handle hard real-time constraints, e.g. aircraft control or chemical process control applications that get really grumpy if you don't handle them every millisecond, on the millisecond. The real-time *has* gotten much easier since the days of the 386 and its ~5 bogomips, but it still takes grunging through the entire kernel and finding anything that blocks critical resources and makes sure the blocking is limited to short enough time periods to meet the constraints.
Additionally, the Free Software Foundation is providing GNU-based delivery for full-sized CD sets. Gnus travel more slowly than carrier pigeons, but have the advantage of being able to carry a complete set, reducing the need for retransmissions, and they support for multicasting and parallel processing if you need to ship a whole HURD of the things at once.
One of the purposes of the Library GPL was to provide a less-Stallmanized environment, so you could compile code using gcc without it becoming infected by the Gnu Public Virus - particularly libc, but also other libraries whose authors didn't feel the need to control everything they touched. RMS prefers to call it the Lesser GPL, since he doesn't like that kind of flexibilty.
A much more realistic attack model for a small country would be to put the nuke in a truck or a shipping container and drive or sail across the border to a major city. If they need extra security, they can always pack the stuff in drugs and smuggling it across the border is no problem at all....
Not only do these things make the book unnecessarily hard to read when you're learning stuff for the first time, because you have to pay attention to the complexity of the coding style instead focusing on the ideas that the code is expressing, but it makes it even harder to use as a reference book when you're no longer in the midst of an undergraduate heavy reading phase and just trying to find out about the kinds of algorithms that apply to the problems you're solving.
If you were writing something like this today, it's a tossup whether the right language to use for the assembly portions would be the ugly but well-known and widely available Intel 8086 assemblers, or Java Bytecode which are a simpler model for a virtual machine.
If you look at True Names in Amazon, you'll see that it's going to be reissued Real Soon Now, with a bunch of introductory essays on various topics, as True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. Friends of mine wrote some of the essays, so I've been interested in getting a copy. Unfortunately, it's been going to come out Real Soon Now for about 5 years, and every 6-12 months the publication date slips another 6-12 months - This time for Sure! Some of the essays that were cutting-edge when they were written are going to start to look like old science-fiction by the time they actually get published...
Memory is important, and it's pretty close to free. Selling a 2MB machine is tacky enough if you're doing it to get people to buy the overpriced memory expansion card, but there's simply no excuse for doing so on a non-expandable machine just to create product differentiation, or to bait&switch people into buying the much more expensive model just to get $6 more RAM. For many applications it doesn't matter, but if you want people do buy the box for things beyond the basics - ebooks, or industry-specific applications that require more data, or reading some real fraction of their email (especially using the overpriced radio link), you need more memory, sometimes lots more. Even if the future Palms don't play MP3s, storing compressed speech uses about 1MB per 20 minutes, so it helps to have more memory.
Better Screens - the Psion 3a has 480x160 mono, and lasts about as long on batteries as the Palm; the WinCE and iPaQ machines really do have good-looking screens, more readable as well as flashy, but the battery life is too short for practicality.
Audio, especially speech recognition - that does need more horsepower, though some of it can be done with ASICs like cell-phone voice compression instead of the CPU if that makes sense. Microsoft is going after the MP3-player / Video Game / TV set in your pocket market, but for business users and other people who want organizers rather than toys, the two obvious directions to go are cellphone capability and speech recognition interfaces to the box, and those may be CPU burners.