Microsoft is the company that recently tried to push the acronym "DNS" to mean "Digital Nervous System" instead of the industry-standard well-established meaning for one of the core protocols of the Internet. Given the obvious problem with their priorities, I can't say that a Digital Nervous Breakdown isn't poetic justice.
Sure, there are limited-functionality mail clients that can't send email directly, and some people use them even on Unix machines. But standard Unix mail follows the RFCs and a decade and a half of Internet tradition, which is that you send mail directly to Port 25 of the destination, unless you're running some other mail protocol like UUCP bang-mail, in which case you find a "smart mailer" like sendmail to relay it for you, or unless the destination has an MX record saying somebody else will handle their mail for them. If I'm one of your dialup customers, I doubt I'll see many systems using you as their MX service?
Furthermore, even using a Eudora client-oriented mail system, I don't want to have to reconfigure my client every time I dial in from somewhere different (e.g. take the laptop from home to the office or plug it into the DSL in the lab or a customer's LAN) - I should be able to send directly. If each ISP blocked port 25 except through its servers, laptops would be much lamer.
I use Netcom for most of my dialup, since they still have unlimited dialing for $19.95 per month,
as opposed to most other companies that charge per hour after some limit like 20 or 100 hours. They're not who I use for my shell account, or web page, or incoming email, or outgoing email - I'm very happy with idiom.com , and sometimes I'll use my company-provided dialup instead of Netcom. The Real Netcom dial pops let me connect to Port 25 at my ISP, where I'm recognized as a customer and can send email. But the Mindspring-flavored Netcom dialups don't - the connection just hangs unless I'm using one of Netcom's email relays. Yes, I realize this blocks many spammers. But it also blocks many legitimate users, particularly of Unix systems.
Sure, a brick would be cool, but laptops aren't that big, especially if you get ones with wimpy screens (which are also less expensive.) You should be able to get one under 4 pounds without much trouble, and the screen and keyboard make it easier to configure for the site.
Nice fast alternative to encrypted file system - spg's got a good idea here. You have to be pick an appropriate RAID format - if the files are broken up into 8KB pieces, that's probably enough that the disk controllers will latch onto them anyway, though only the blocks with the start of the copy protection software should trigger it. But there ought to be some straightforward way to deal with that problem.
The article quite noticeably said Nothing about built-in copy protection. That's a nice change from the other commercially developed compression algorithms that claim to be twice as tight as MP3, like AT&T's a2b-music, Sony's system used in their memory stick widgets, etc. It's still software they're planning to license, but the hook is only "you'll get twice as much music in your portable player", not "record labels can use this to take back control of the music industry". Cool.
Caleb Car suggests we need a government organization designed to protect the American public's information sources. We've done that already. It was called the "House Un-American Activities Committee", and it took way too long to die the death it deserved. Has he no sense of decency?
Big company mergers usually involve some payment to the people being dumped, if they're done in crude ways that involve dumping people. Might as well take it. That's separate from the issue of printing up more resumes and heading for the phone.
Of course it sounds like a Vulture-Capital briefing - getting academic projects funded by grants from Darpa is a similar process, except the project can be much more researchy, doesn't have to be as close to production (depending on how long you plan to be in grad school), and has to make a brief nod to military usefulness as opposed to a BIG! FLASHY!! EXCITING!!! plan to reach profitability in amazingly short times and Enhance Shareholder Value.
Unlike sourceforgeware, however, once you talk people into giving you the cash, then you *do* have to work on the project. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed at its original goals - if you knew what the results were going to be, it wouldn't be *research*.
Most of us agree that this technology is Nasty Copy Protection
pushed by Nasty Software Hoarders opposed to Honest Open Source,
and by Nasty Music Hoarders who want us to Pay Per View for
music, videos, e-books, and other products that we've bought,
using them technical workarounds for activities that
would normally be covered by First Sale and Fair Use
and only be covered by the limited protections of copyright,
and they richly deserve to Die Like DIVX (remember DIVX?*)
and get rejected by the market like Lotus Copy Protection.
(*I'm told DIVX's cracked format has been recycled
as a convenient tool for Napsterizing videos...)
Much worse, these Mindshare Marketing Thugs are in league with
the sleazy DMCA-abusers who got a law written badly enough that
it not only directly confiscates the previous rights of
information consumers but goes far beyond that to
criminalize people who are engaged in the legitimate activity
of seeing what it is they bought and using it in interesting ways.
The technical side is bad enough, but left to itself,
either Darwin would get them or they'd find a market that's
willing to be couch-potato consumers we can sneer at,
either of which are ok, while the legal side is outright evil.
But what happens if we look at this from a cypherpunks crypto enthusiast viewpoint?
Cypherpunks write code. Nasty MusicHoarderPunks can too.
The right way to protect information isn't to write laws,
which are ineffective against crackers (whether government or
free-lance), usually contain loopholes for cops to abuse,
and can be changed if the government wants to -
it's to write code and algorithms and hardware designs
that actually protect the information.
That's what these guys are doing, and it's what we WANT them
to do, though we'd rather have them operate a gift economy,
the way the folk music profession did before it commercialized,
and the church music and hacking professions.
(I'm not counting the use of DMCA to criminalize
working around bad software - that's still evil.)
How do you build tools to protect information,
at a level of granularity that someone who'd
cracked root on a Unix box or bought or cracked User on a
Windows box can't break into? You use crypto to encrypt data,
with public-key algorithms to do appropriate parts in public,
use objects that maintain their own data and keys,
and maybe you build capability-based operating systems,
or partition functions into separate devices like smartcards
or intelligent peripherals to keep the private parts more isolated.
If you want to build a For Your Ears Only secure telephone,
it's much easier if you can ship an encrypted data stream
that only the recipient's headphone can decrypt.
And if you want a digital signature system that
can't easily be forged by FBI spook who shoulder-surfs
your passphrase, or want a digital payment system that
can't easily be ripped off by some online store clerk,
it's easier if you can use some hardware object in the process.
To a large extent, the threat models are critical to your security -
but if being overprotected doesn't interfere with regular use,
and doesn't interfere with the other protection you're building,
it's not a Bad Thing. Of course, it cuts two ways -
if you're not a Good Guy building hardware protection against
virus crackers, but an NSA Spook building cracking tools
to workaround for the software protections, it's nice to get
down and dirty in the hardware and hire Chip-R-Us to include
an undocumented Export Chip Private Key instruction in addition
to the Export Chip Public Key instruction...
Music Hoarders have a somewhat harder problem, in that they
want to copy-protect information while providing near-identical
copies to large numbers of people, while you're more likely
to want to provide your personal transaction information or
private messages only to a small number of recipients -
but you may still want some kind of watermarking to identify
who sold your "private" information to somebody you didn't authorize.
As long as watermarking isn't seriously obnoxious, the fact
that different listeners hear slightly different versions
isn't that bad - listeners at a concert also hear different versions
depending on whether they're in the front row, the nosebleed seats,
or the Phil Zone, as well as how hard they've been dancing,
how bouncily the people in front are dancing, whether Jerry
forgot some of the words or had a magical guitar night that reminds
them of a previous concert, and how, umm, chemically enhanced they are:-)
Somebody allegedly wrote to RAH:
>Don't forget Intel and IBM are charter members of both these scuzzy
>outfits. And somebody please tell me what good an encrypted hard
>drive is gonna be when the key material has to pass through an untrusted
>PC running a see-through OS such as Windows? If one is actually
>trying to save the data _from_ the PC operator not _for_ him/her, one
>needs a TCPA-like hardening. At least Intel and IBM must realize this
Intel and IBM know that Windows isn't going to protect their data -
if they want it protected, they'll have to work around it,
using techniques like CPUs, speakers, and disk drives that
share public keys and only pass encrypted data through the OS.
I've got some friends who still own Betamax systems, doomed to obsolesence by the dominance of VHS. (In this case, the dominance of VHS was largely because VHS was easier to license than Beta, plus VHS tapes held two hours of movies instead of Beta's one hour.) The rental market is VHS-dominated, with DVDs beginning to move in, and if digital-TV-compatible recording formats take over, and you replace that VCR with Tivo, you may find your VHS gear stuck in the attic next to your Betamax.
Or you may find your New-Copy-Protection-Mafia-Capable gear stuck in the attic next to that DIVX lame-o format which failed quickly in the market.
Lotus dropped copy-protection because everybody hated it. Maybe IBM and friends have a new variant on copy-protection that's less annoying, and maybe everybody will hate it less passionately and develop their annoyance more slowly, but it has a high probability of dieing like DIVX movies.
There are two reasons this is an issue - one is that stuff ships that really _doesn't_ compile (sad but true...). The other is that stuff ships that the original author got to compile, but it doesn't necessarily mean that anybody _else_ can get it to compile, and it needs to get kicked around till the dependencies are identified and it does become possible for somebody else to compile.
The manufacturing model is fine for developing-world economies, where there's a substantial demand for stuff to improve living standards of people and stuff to improve efficiencies of business, but it's hard to sustain in the long run. Aside from the ecological disasters of the big-iron economy, it's hard to sustain financially once you've got a reasonably broad supply of cars and houses and basic clothing - consumer electronics keeps getting cheaper by a factor of two every year, which makes it hard to keep paying engineers the high salaries to which we've become accustomed, and the rest of it's basically an information and service economy. Some of that's entertainment, some of that's providing the infrastructure for business, some of that's low-paying services like running restaurants and Starbucks franchises.
The information industry partly feeds the internal demands of the computer industry, but to a large extent the dot-com boom has come from transforming business models and business relationships through increased communications and increased information storage and processing capabilities, and through building user interfaces to make it easier for people to use the increasingly affordable hardware. Face it, doing business in the paper-pushing world was unnecessarily difficult, and we're making that simpler and faster (though also making it simpler and faster to generate unnecessary paper, and making that paper or web-equivalent flashier and more decorative without necessarily being more useful - the parts of our business that are essentially the entertainment industry are remarkably pervasive:-)
Some of the failures of the dot-coms are from unreasonably optimistic expectations about our ability to transform other industries (especially transforming them from the outside by people who don't understand them), and the usual failures due to the difficulties of fast, cheap, good (choose all three at once) execution of business models. And some are due to the entertainment-business nature of much of our industry - sometimes you succeed, sometimes you flop, and sometimes you end up as a waiter while trying to get the next performing gig. (Unfortunately, Silicon Valley rents are way too high to hang out on a waiter's salary, though tech-support and sysadmin are similar job niches for many people.)
A few decades back, at The Phone Company, I'd occasionally get resumes from defense contractors who had _really_ unstable careers - they'd be at one company for three years, then another, then another, never staying anywhere very long. These days, that looks like an extremely stable career - imagine three years in ONE PLACE! That only happens when it looks like your startup really will start, or when it really does start, and either you've made your money or watched it go down the tubes.
I've been in my current job about 5 years - it's at a much different AT&T than the stuffy phone company, and unfortunately a year or so ago we managed to convince Wall Street to think of us as a high-tech company rather than a blue-chip, and rode the crash&burn of the high-tech industry stocks instead of the annoying 10% slide of the blue-chips:-)
And we're finally seeing resumes from people who left for the dot-com business interested in coming back - though that's more common in sales, where most people are more mobile than the technology side.
A new clean reel mower is pretty nice, as long as your lawn is only made of grass - they don't like tough weeds like buckthorn. I last used one a decade or so ago (back when I had a lawn, before moving to Silicon Valley...) which I'd borrowed when my electric was in the shop. It kept the bulk of the grass short, but didn't have the power it needed. And a _rusty_ reel mower is terrible - if you don't keep the things really sharp, they fail badly.
Electric mowers are nice, if your lawn's not too big to handle the cords. You need to learn what directions to go to not run over your power cord, and you can't use it when it's too dark, but they work pretty well and they're much quieter than gas-powered, though the quietness and ecological advantages of avoiding the internal combustion engine are balanced out by the Nuclear Power Plant on the other end of the electrical grid:-) Electric mowers are also much easier to keep working. Occasionally their motors do fry themselves and need rebuilding, but it's not like gasoline ICEs that need constant tinkering.
It's often hard to get alpha code to compile reliably; sometimes beta code is even harder because it's got more opportunities to acquire system-dependence. Providing compiled binaries not only makes it easier for someone to try your still-too-early-not-to-explode-catastrophically alpha version, it gives them some idea of whether the project is worth working on even if their environment is randomly different from yours. This is good.
It's also a proof that you got the thing to compile so it's at least releasable as alpha code. I won't name the author or package of the really cool widget that would have been extremely useful for teaching the people I work with useful skills and giving them a testbed for trying out things, but once I got version 0.4 to compile (with a bit of help from the author on what packages he used), I couldn't get it to operate past the first step, and from reading the source code I'm not convinced there's any way the author could have done so either. So I suspect that either there's an old distribution around and I need to find the newer one (unlikely - it's in Freshmeat) or that the author posted the thing a year ago and hasn't done anything with it since then. (sigh... that's not what Abandonware is supposed to mean:-)
OK, it's a bit like advertising (:-), but if you've got an application for which screenshots show anything either meaningful or cool-looking, making the screenshots available may help get people interested in using and/or contributing effort to your project.
Also, if your project is the type that writes the documentation after the code (instead of before, which is my preference), screenshots may be the closest you've got to user documentation other than whatever level of obviousness exists in the not-yet-completed menus of your alpha-level product.
That's specifically because Ted Kascynski the Unibomber was mailing people bombs, and the Feds wanted to discourage that. (You can argue how much "discourage" means "make difficult" and how much it means "promote the anti-civil-rights propaganda campaign that doesn't let us fly on airlines without showing government-approved permission to travel", but either way....).
More precisely, you can only mailbox packages up to 16 ounces, or 454 grams for you non-Yankees; if you've got a heavier package than that, you have to either go to a US Postal Service window or use a competing package carrier like Fedex or DHL.
Sure it's a "silver bullet" - you're trying to get rid of werewolves, and you think it'll magically help the problem. As another poster pointed out, it'll just drive the problem underground. If the free market thinks names have value, which it apparently does, it'll apply economic processes to them, and price controls never do work well.
Besides, there's an easy workaround, which the free market will discover about 15 minutes after you get such a rule passed, which is that corporations are cheap and fungi-bull. Instead of Joe Cybersquatter buying "ValuableName.Com", and selling it to Valuable, Inc., he
spends $50 setting up a Delaware Corporation "FooBarClone Inc.",
sells the name "ValuableName.Com" to FooBarClone for $35, and
sells Valuable Inc. the keys to FooBarClone Inc. for $Negotiable.
So it's raised the cost of cybersquatting the name by $50, which may keep a couple of the small players out, but doesn't change anything fundamental. Alternatively, if Joe's more of a technical guy than a business guy, he could do a technical dodge around the rules
Sets up Joe Cybersquatter's DNS Outsourcing Service,
Hosts a couple of nameservers at a colo vendor,
Provides primary and secondary DNS service for customers who own their own names,
Provides primary and secondary DNS service for customers who want to use one of Joe's names, like ValuableName.Com, for $Negotiable/year,
Charges extra for complex subdomain structures
Keeps renewing the names with NSI so they don't get away.
Offers "Cybersquatter Prevention Service" to keep those nasty cybersquatters from stealing the name you've been renting if you don't renew your service promptly every year. You wouldn't want something bad should happen to your name, like some pr0n site renting it after you, now would you.....
In SlashGeek's storefront example, there are "Sign Police" who come around every year and demand that you pay them off or they'll shut you down - in the US, it's typically your town government, though your state and the Feds also want a piece of the action. The difference here is that NSI and ICANN are more recent and blatant in their attempts to control namespace.
By contrast, the "Yellow Pages" will also come around every year and ask if you'd like a Really Cool Sign in their Yellow Pages, and they'll drop you if you don't pay, but nobody really minds because people can find you even if you're not advertising there (though they're an almost mission-critical advertising location for many types of business.) Also, nobody thinks they're thugs, even if they do use those "Dragnet"-themed radio ads on occasion.
It's one of those companies that registers lots of names, so you can pay them to support yourname@kenny.net or mysubdomain.kenny.net.
Kenny.com and kenny.org are also registered.
www.kenny.com appears dead.
www.kenny.org has "Please upload your homepage and name it index.html. If you have any further questions, please contact: Support@icom.com"
Slashdot Mirror
www.theregister.co.uk reports that MS's DNS is back up. (Of course, if it had been backed up better, it would have been back up much sooner :-)
Furthermore, even using a Eudora client-oriented mail system, I don't want to have to reconfigure my client every time I dial in from somewhere different (e.g. take the laptop from home to the office or plug it into the DSL in the lab or a customer's LAN) - I should be able to send directly. If each ISP blocked port 25 except through its servers, laptops would be much lamer.
I use Netcom for most of my dialup, since they still have unlimited dialing for $19.95 per month,
as opposed to most other companies that charge per hour after some limit like 20 or 100 hours. They're not who I use for my shell account, or web page, or incoming email, or outgoing email - I'm very happy with idiom.com , and sometimes I'll use my company-provided dialup instead of Netcom. The Real Netcom dial pops let me connect to Port 25 at my ISP, where I'm recognized as a customer and can send email. But the Mindspring-flavored Netcom dialups don't - the connection just hangs unless I'm using one of Netcom's email relays. Yes, I realize this blocks many spammers. But it also blocks many legitimate users, particularly of Unix systems.
Sure, a brick would be cool, but laptops aren't that big, especially if you get ones with wimpy screens (which are also less expensive.) You should be able to get one under 4 pounds without much trouble, and the screen and keyboard make it easier to configure for the site.
Nice fast alternative to encrypted file system - spg's got a good idea here. You have to be pick an appropriate RAID format - if the files are broken up into 8KB pieces, that's probably enough that the disk controllers will latch onto them anyway, though only the blocks with the start of the copy protection software should trigger it. But there ought to be some straightforward way to deal with that problem.
Caleb Car suggests we need a government organization designed to protect the American public's information sources. We've done that already. It was called the "House Un-American Activities Committee", and it took way too long to die the death it deserved. Has he no sense of decency?
Big company mergers usually involve some payment to the people being dumped, if they're done in crude ways that involve dumping people. Might as well take it. That's separate from the issue of printing up more resumes and heading for the phone.
Unlike sourceforgeware, however, once you talk people into giving you the cash, then you *do* have to work on the project. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed at its original goals - if you knew what the results were going to be, it wouldn't be *research*.
pushed by Nasty Software Hoarders opposed to Honest Open Source,
and by Nasty Music Hoarders who want us to Pay Per View for
music, videos, e-books, and other products that we've bought,
using them technical workarounds for activities that
would normally be covered by First Sale and Fair Use
and only be covered by the limited protections of copyright,
and they richly deserve to Die Like DIVX (remember DIVX?*)
and get rejected by the market like Lotus Copy Protection.
(*I'm told DIVX's cracked format has been recycled
as a convenient tool for Napsterizing videos...)
Much worse, these Mindshare Marketing Thugs are in league with
the sleazy DMCA-abusers who got a law written badly enough that
it not only directly confiscates the previous rights of
information consumers but goes far beyond that to
criminalize people who are engaged in the legitimate activity
of seeing what it is they bought and using it in interesting ways.
The technical side is bad enough, but left to itself,
either Darwin would get them or they'd find a market that's
willing to be couch-potato consumers we can sneer at,
either of which are ok, while the legal side is outright evil.
But what happens if we look at this from a cypherpunks crypto enthusiast viewpoint?
Cypherpunks write code. Nasty MusicHoarderPunks can too.
The right way to protect information isn't to write laws,
which are ineffective against crackers (whether government or
free-lance), usually contain loopholes for cops to abuse,
and can be changed if the government wants to -
it's to write code and algorithms and hardware designs
that actually protect the information.
That's what these guys are doing, and it's what we WANT them
to do, though we'd rather have them operate a gift economy,
the way the folk music profession did before it commercialized,
and the church music and hacking professions.
(I'm not counting the use of DMCA to criminalize
working around bad software - that's still evil.)
How do you build tools to protect information,
at a level of granularity that someone who'd
cracked root on a Unix box or bought or cracked User on a
Windows box can't break into? You use crypto to encrypt data,
with public-key algorithms to do appropriate parts in public,
use objects that maintain their own data and keys,
and maybe you build capability-based operating systems,
or partition functions into separate devices like smartcards
or intelligent peripherals to keep the private parts more isolated.
If you want to build a For Your Ears Only secure telephone,
it's much easier if you can ship an encrypted data stream
that only the recipient's headphone can decrypt.
And if you want a digital signature system that
can't easily be forged by FBI spook who shoulder-surfs
your passphrase, or want a digital payment system that
can't easily be ripped off by some online store clerk,
it's easier if you can use some hardware object in the process.
To a large extent, the threat models are critical to your security -
but if being overprotected doesn't interfere with regular use,
and doesn't interfere with the other protection you're building,
it's not a Bad Thing. Of course, it cuts two ways -
if you're not a Good Guy building hardware protection against
virus crackers, but an NSA Spook building cracking tools
to workaround for the software protections, it's nice to get
down and dirty in the hardware and hire Chip-R-Us to include
an undocumented Export Chip Private Key instruction in addition
to the Export Chip Public Key instruction...
Music Hoarders have a somewhat harder problem, in that they
want to copy-protect information while providing near-identical
copies to large numbers of people, while you're more likely
to want to provide your personal transaction information or
private messages only to a small number of recipients -
but you may still want some kind of watermarking to identify
who sold your "private" information to somebody you didn't authorize.
As long as watermarking isn't seriously obnoxious, the fact
that different listeners hear slightly different versions
isn't that bad - listeners at a concert also hear different versions
depending on whether they're in the front row, the nosebleed seats,
or the Phil Zone, as well as how hard they've been dancing,
how bouncily the people in front are dancing, whether Jerry
forgot some of the words or had a magical guitar night that reminds
them of a previous concert, and how, umm, chemically enhanced they are
Somebody allegedly wrote to RAH:
Intel and IBM know that Windows isn't going to protect their data -
if they want it protected, they'll have to work around it,
using techniques like CPUs, speakers, and disk drives that
share public keys and only pass encrypted data through the OS.
Or you may find your New-Copy-Protection-Mafia-Capable gear stuck in the attic next to that DIVX lame-o format which failed quickly in the market.
Lotus dropped copy-protection because everybody hated it. Maybe IBM and friends have a new variant on copy-protection that's less annoying, and maybe everybody will hate it less passionately and develop their annoyance more slowly, but it has a high probability of dieing like DIVX movies.
There are two reasons this is an issue - one is that stuff ships that really _doesn't_ compile (sad but true...). The other is that stuff ships that the original author got to compile, but it doesn't necessarily mean that anybody _else_ can get it to compile, and it needs to get kicked around till the dependencies are identified and it does become possible for somebody else to compile.
The information industry partly feeds the internal demands of the computer industry, but to a large extent the dot-com boom has come from transforming business models and business relationships through increased communications and increased information storage and processing capabilities, and through building user interfaces to make it easier for people to use the increasingly affordable hardware. Face it, doing business in the paper-pushing world was unnecessarily difficult, and we're making that simpler and faster (though also making it simpler and faster to generate unnecessary paper, and making that paper or web-equivalent flashier and more decorative without necessarily being more useful - the parts of our business that are essentially the entertainment industry are remarkably pervasive
Some of the failures of the dot-coms are from unreasonably optimistic expectations about our ability to transform other industries (especially transforming them from the outside by people who don't understand them), and the usual failures due to the difficulties of fast, cheap, good (choose all three at once) execution of business models. And some are due to the entertainment-business nature of much of our industry - sometimes you succeed, sometimes you flop, and sometimes you end up as a waiter while trying to get the next performing gig. (Unfortunately, Silicon Valley rents are way too high to hang out on a waiter's salary, though tech-support and sysadmin are similar job niches for many people.)
I've been in my current job about 5 years - it's at a much different AT&T than the stuffy phone company, and unfortunately a year or so ago we managed to convince Wall Street to think of us as a high-tech company rather than a blue-chip, and rode the crash&burn of the high-tech industry stocks instead of the annoying 10% slide of the blue-chips :-)
And we're finally seeing resumes from people who left for the dot-com business interested in coming back - though that's more common in sales, where most people are more mobile than the technology side.
Electric mowers are nice, if your lawn's not too big to handle the cords. You need to learn what directions to go to not run over your power cord, and you can't use it when it's too dark, but they work pretty well and they're much quieter than gas-powered, though the quietness and ecological advantages of avoiding the internal combustion engine are balanced out by the Nuclear Power Plant on the other end of the electrical grid :-) Electric mowers are also much easier to keep working. Occasionally their motors do fry themselves and need rebuilding, but it's not like gasoline ICEs that need constant tinkering.
It's also a proof that you got the thing to compile so it's at least releasable as alpha code. I won't name the author or package of the really cool widget that would have been extremely useful for teaching the people I work with useful skills and giving them a testbed for trying out things, but once I got version 0.4 to compile (with a bit of help from the author on what packages he used), I couldn't get it to operate past the first step, and from reading the source code I'm not convinced there's any way the author could have done so either. So I suspect that either there's an old distribution around and I need to find the newer one (unlikely - it's in Freshmeat) or that the author posted the thing a year ago and hasn't done anything with it since then. (sigh... that's not what Abandonware is supposed to mean
Also, if your project is the type that writes the documentation after the code (instead of before, which is my preference), screenshots may be the closest you've got to user documentation other than whatever level of obviousness exists in the not-yet-completed menus of your alpha-level product.
eight megs and continuously swapping.
More precisely, you can only mailbox packages up to 16 ounces, or 454 grams for you non-Yankees; if you've got a heavier package than that, you have to either go to a US Postal Service window or use a competing package carrier like Fedex or DHL.
Besides, there's an easy workaround, which the free market will discover about 15 minutes after you get such a rule passed, which is that corporations are cheap and fungi-bull. Instead of Joe Cybersquatter buying "ValuableName.Com", and selling it to Valuable, Inc., he
So it's raised the cost of cybersquatting the name by $50, which may keep a couple of the small players out, but doesn't change anything fundamental. Alternatively, if Joe's more of a technical guy than a business guy, he could do a technical dodge around the rules
By contrast, the "Yellow Pages" will also come around every year and ask if you'd like a Really Cool Sign in their Yellow Pages, and they'll drop you if you don't pay, but nobody really minds because people can find you even if you're not advertising there (though they're an almost mission-critical advertising location for many types of business.) Also, nobody thinks they're thugs, even if they do use those "Dragnet"-themed radio ads on occasion.
Kenny.com and kenny.org are also registered.
www.kenny.com appears dead.
www.kenny.org has "Please upload your homepage and name it index.html. If you have any further questions, please contact: Support@icom.com"