Just as with anything else you'd have to prove that the computer owner was exhibiting negligence and that that enabled the crimes to be committed. What constitutes negligence is a difficult question. How much can you expect a user to know?
I'd imagine an exploit that had been around longer and that had had available patches longer would imply more negligence then the RPC hack that came out 24 hours ago. Still, though, fine lines. When it comes down to it computers are highly imperfect machines and it's hard to blame the user of a product for its flaws.
Your argument almost works. What you fail to acknowledge is that apple hardware runs free software very well.
Personally, I see a lot of value in switching to the mac platform (for a laptop, in particular). Right now I dual boot Linux and Windows XP. For years, I ran Linux alone, but then (just as with anything else), that killer app came around and It justified the purchase of a second hard drive and installing windows for the first time in four years to support that application. In my case, the app (Finale) will very likely never run under Linux. No emulation solution, (no, not VMWare or win4lin..believe me I've tried) can do it right because of midi synthesis/latency issues and general crappiness in the multimedia support in wine/winex/vmware/win4lin/etc. (multimedia != directx).
So I'm a developer and I need Finale. The *only* platform that can satisfy that is MacOS X. In the end, if I'm left with an unsupported piece of hardware (unlikely), I can always install Linux on it and be exactly where I am now--frustrated at the fact that I need to disrupt my work environment to use Finale, but no worse off. I can do my linux development with gcc set up as a cross compiler.
The bottom line is, even if the hardware were to lose support, you could switch back to free software at any time with little or no loss, aside from a weekend of getting everything transferred/back into place.
The beauty of that is your next system could be a pc or something else entirely, and your work using opensource tools would not be effected hardly at all--so long as gentoo or debian or something similarly cross platform were made available.
And for now, you get a very slick ui, very sexy hardware, and good product support. Sounds like a win-win to me.
I know there will be a lot of comments out there about the speed/stability of these drivers. I have a couple of thoughts about that.
I don't know how this wrapper system works but it could be written in a way such that a faulty windows driver being run through a wrapper couldn't take down the kernel. How? Create a kernel modle with a devicenode, use ioctl creatively and make a user-space harness to handle the windows stuff and pass it through to the module through the device. That way all of the nonsense is handled in userspace and a well tested , minimal, "pass-through" module in linux would provide all neccesary services. Neccesarily, only root should have access to this device node but that does without saying.
Also, the ultimate goal for this should not be 'lets replace the linux driver architecture with a windows one', but 'lets find a way to provide immediate compatibility with off-the-shelf hardware before a native driver can be written'.
If your scanner worked 10% slower, would you care? If you're in the industry of course you would, but as an individual? How about transferring pics to and from your digital camera. How's 1:06 as opposed to a minute sound? no big deal. This gives the linux kernel automatic compatibility with devices which is a good thing, even if the compatibility is slower/less stable.
Is it just me or do the slashdot editors post some story comparing the TCO of linux and something else EVERY DAY???
Isn't this a little excessive? Does it occur to anyone that the TCO of deployment for an OS might be different for different companies in different industries? Does it occur to them that one study doesn't answer the question with any finality at all?
All this inspires is the same worthless conversation about it with all the IT people (and 15 year olds who claim to be) arguing for and against linux and something else.
You forget so soon that in this economy, the song is copyrighted by the record company. Why should the artist get anything? It's the record company that deserves royalties for the use of their copyrighted materials.
duh...this isn't like website advertising. I'm not saying it's terribly effective, but if Mandrake can convince people that these will/could work then it's $$$ for them...and they need it badly.
The only ones that conceivably would be difficult to remove later would be the install ones. It's trivial to redo your bookmarks (I import a file anyways whenever i set up a system, so that becomes a nonissue) and it will probably take about fifteen minutes for some kindly mandrake user to put togehter an rpm that replaces the screensaver (uninstall screensaver, install new rpm). If Mandrake was really diabolical I suppose they could make efforts to detect this sort of behavior and disable things, but i think that would be too much trouble...
They just want people to pay for their product and there's nothing wrong with that. If you go to the store and spend a little money, voila...mandrake without ads...
Esp. since it's hard to put unremovable ads in an open source program, i see no problem with this.
is to make my email as public as possible and hope to win a settlement...$250k should cover my $40k/year education plus a little grad school quite nicely....
You've got a bit of a reality problem. Read the law. What is "Illegal" or not has nothing to do with whether you see it as being "Illegal" but what the law says. The law may not be just and you don't have to recognize its legitimacy, but at the end of the day, by sharing the music, you're commiting an "Illegal" act in the eyes of the government (Which has the authority to decide such things)
Here at CMU we have a newsgroup (aka bboard in on-campus terms) -- cmu.misc.market.books as well as cmu.misc.market.transit/music/software/etc. for on campus trading...
it's not what you're looking for but for one medium sized campus it works quite well.
"While only something like 20% of assets in the parent's name would be used"
The number's smaller, but the real inequities are for the owners of small, privately owned companies who are expected to contribute a PORTION OF THEIR STAKE OF THE COMPANY each year. Companies (even small ones) can easily be worth a million dollars. Even 5% of 1 million is $50,000. SO, if one of your parents happens to own stake in a private company, you lose big time.
You lose because there's absolutely no way to liquify that stake even if it were practical to do so (which often it isn't). Who'se going to buy the shares? On what market? This is a huge flaw in the system, because it punishes people who've taken their future into their own hands by starting a business of their own.
If you think it's reformed, you're sorely mistaken. It's as broken as ever. Another example: a friend of mine's parents divorced and as part of that legal agreement, his father was taking care of his college education. His mother remarried and his EFC was calculated completely on the basis of his step-father's income--even though in a legal and court recognized document, the disconnect between these two things is established. More wrongdoing on the part of the FAFSA.
How about this one--if a parent is in college (new in 2003), that doesn't count against your EFC at all...so for instance, a parent with $18k tuition bills (i know of it) who'se paying for it all out of pocket will get no extra help for their child who goes to school--period. It won't be looked upon as a sharing of tuition expenses as for a sibling, but it should be...the reason? Children shouldn't have to tell their parents to leave school so they can afford to go. The policy should be more concerned about protecting the children than the parents.
I'm going to a very expensive private school thanks to my parents being willing to sacrifice for that, not thanks to the FAFSA. My EFC was through the roof compared to what my family could actually pay and my school and government didn't care. Personally I don't think they should have to, at all, but if they're going to put together programs like this they should be implemented much much less poorly.
Yes but then again the neuro surgeon doesn't set up an 800-line that his patients can call to get the step by step instructions for cutting up their brains in the comfort of their own homes with common household tools.
Anyone ever notice that these open souce projects don't port well to non-unix systems?
Sure they can make it work...and when next version comes around, they can make it work and so on...but when can the codebase be stable? LAMP on windows is crappy even though there are official ports. It just doesn't integrate like it does on the core platforms (linux/bsd/*nix).
This is a real open-ended thought. Hopefully someone will be able to form it better than I just did. It just bothers me that we expect *nix ports of apps to be stable and our windows/macos ports are mostly cheap one-man hacks.
I've been on the inside of a miniscule software development team developing real world software for a few years now. Porting is tough, but it's all in the design. I can't see much of a flexible product being formed by a 100-man team unless you've got one supergenious designer who knows every line of code. All I know is that I can tear apart the code to our embedded software and redesign it in a few weeks with noone's help without losing portability. Go ahead. Say it's a performance hit to make well designed code. I won't believe you.
If you really wanted to get even smaller you could stub out libs like mmsound.drv and such and just make symbol-table accurate copies that return success all the time rather than actually containing code. (Since he already abandoned sound support).
pexports and mingw should do the trick for making these...and of course standards executable conpression software. Also you could check out DLL cross references and remove unreferenced functions/data using a sophisticated debugger/dll modifying tool (this I have not seen...but it's posible). Too bad there's no symlinks. Otherwise you could skimp on the fonts by linking them to eachother.
There's still work to be done in this (all but worthless) pursuit of smallness for one of the most unembeddable OS's I've ever met.
"Lots of free help available through your local LUG"...
Speak for yourself. Going to a LUG is certainly too much trouble for me and it's definitely too much trouble for grandma. Grandma can ask her sons/nephews/etc. for help with windows all she wants, she isn't gonna trek out to the lug with the computer in the back of her camry. Her nephew doesn't charge a "modest fee" to help her install windows, and he'll probably do an ok job at it too...many teenagers have the basic skills required to wrestle with simple windows issues (and the xp installer makes simple many of the driver issues of the past)
I know the grandmother stereotype is overused but you made some very bad assumptions here: 1. Everyone knows what a LUG is and that they exist 2. Everyone who doesn't know what a LUG is has a friend who runs Linux and is skilled enough to help (and patient enough to help, and not bigoted, etc.) 3. Everyone thinks it worth the time and effort to go through carrying the box to an installfest/LUG or paying extra to get some geek to install the OS.
I've been running Linux for years. Probably half a dozen times I've needed to ask a quick question on IRC, but otherwise it's been a solitary learning process. That's fine for me, but not for grandma or really anyone else who doesn't do computers for a living or serious hobby...
What's the point in screwing with the election. So long as you skew the vote for the incumbent they can pardon whatever you do...discreetly or otherwise
I think you missed the point--this isn't a complaint that the voting won't be open sourced, but that the voting will require a certain web browser. Isn't any standards compliant browser with SSL support good enough? I highly doubt they're going to be providing much security that couldn't be attained through SSL and a good website. the point is that they're taking the other road unneccesarily.
Which is no surprise coming from the government...
Plan A: Lets use an infrastructure map to take out internet access in northern California.
plan B: Lets fly two Boeing passenger aircraft into the world trade center.
Don't think these people aren't badass enough to go about creating the infrastructure map, but isn't plan B just that much more obvious? Is there really a shortage of known targets in the US to the point where we need maps of underground wires?
If terrorists want to make terror, they'll find a way. period. If someone feels strongly enough about something, there's no getting in their way. period. Noone is going to be inspired to commit acts of terror by this document, they just might be inclined to target information architecture over human life which IMHO isn't neccesarily a bad thing...
I've never had issues with onboard sound quality issues. Granted, my motherboard has an SB128 onboard...
of course the thing (embarrasingly enough) doesn't hardly work under windows so I had to get an SBLive to get rid of the crackle...(The card worked frone on Linux 2.4.17/18/19/20 from day one)
The real problem with onboard is those AC97 chips that (like a winmodem) depend on CPU cycles to do their work for them. Whether quality is good or bad, you don't want CPU load determining whether sound is working at this particular instant or not...
The innovation on the Web has moved to the server side. Even large sites five years ago were very dependent on static pages. ASP, PHP, mod_perl, and Servlets were not used nearly as much as they are today. The dynamicism of sites has dramatically increased. The browsers always supported this, it's just that the server software wasn't there. I think part of it must have had to do with the processing cost of dynamically generating all pages, but I am no expert.
There are still issues--multimedia delivery is one, so is effective user interfaces for more-than-web pages (something more powerful than javascript/html forms but not as cumbersome or ugly as java or.net or as single-platform as activex). Also large concepts like the page based model--which worked great for gopher and the early web, but which seems to be losing its luster lately.
For instance, when I'm viewing blog comments, I should be able to expand and contract the threads with + and - buttons (without a pageload), change the threshhold (at least higher, since the data wouldn't neccesarily be there to go lower from the initial state), even mark them read and unread without a form send. Yes some browsers have features that makes this more or less possible, but across the board this stuff should be easy and widespread.
The answer could be more and better client side scripting, or it could be interactive server connections (more robust than http). I personally like the client side scripting idea better, but that's me.
First of all, somewhere in the world, there's a webcast output plugin for xmms. Configure a copy of xmms to use it on the server machine, and point all your vnc sessions at that copy of xmms which is webcasting currently. Then you can have each of the smaller machines receive the webcast (just run a little daemon wrapper script around mpg123 that connects to the main server with a retry or something of the sort) and output it to their personal set of speakers with your method of choice.
You control music selections for the whole house from that xmms window, but i suppose you could have a local xmms window as well to play shared files from the server (or local files even) in a room-specific way. If you can somehow make the webcasting use broadcast packets or something you can probably minimize latency, but it could still be an issue (of course six sound cards would be only marginally better, since they'll all have different latencies anyhow, unless they are identical *and* written at the same time).
Of course the real stereo system style solution is to get a receiver with as many outputs as you need. six is commonplace and ten or twenty is not unheard of. Then you can run speaker wire (long distances if needed) to the locations. You can still VNC up those LCDs as much as you desire to. This, in conjuntion with a nice sound card would probably sound considerably better than your six sound card solution, though you'd never be able to change music in one room and not another.
If you use more than one sound card (either in one or many computers), you're going to need some way to handle latency differences. It really depends on how you use your house. If you can ever, in any appreciable way, hear two rooms at once then there's really no tolerance for latency differences at all, but if you're wiring rooms far from eachother (for instance the family room and the patio and the master bedroom, but nothing else), then the webcast solution is probably a better bet (and presumably uses existing wiring since someone asking such a question would be more likely to have run cat5 than speaker wire)
for developement libraries it's not unheard of to pay $1500 PER DEVELOPER...We've been quoted $27,000 for two developers and five product licenses on a library for windows, and for a similar setup on linux (albeit a different vendor), the library providng the same functionality was still over $10,000. That figure was without the $100 or so per product sold that we'd have had to pay...we went without either solution, opting a for free, but unsupported project.
$2000 is pocket change. Granted, LZW is simple, but that doesn't mean it might not be worth $2000. Sure that's a lot to an individual, but to a company, it should be nothing (or the company really needs to look at its profit margins to figure out why $2000 sounds like a lot--cause even in small business, it isn't).
Another example: Qt for commercial use (with support, etc.) costs over $1000 and well into the 2s and 3s if you want multiple platforms/any semblance of support.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as with anything else you'd have to prove that the computer owner was exhibiting negligence and that that enabled the crimes to be committed. What constitutes negligence is a difficult question. How much can you expect a user to know?
I'd imagine an exploit that had been around longer and that had had available patches longer would imply more negligence then the RPC hack that came out 24 hours ago. Still, though, fine lines. When it comes down to it computers are highly imperfect machines and it's hard to blame the user of a product for its flaws.
Brian
Your argument almost works. What you fail to acknowledge is that apple hardware runs free software very well.
Personally, I see a lot of value in switching to the mac platform (for a laptop, in particular). Right now I dual boot Linux and Windows XP. For years, I ran Linux alone, but then (just as with anything else), that killer app came around and It justified the purchase of a second hard drive and installing windows for the first time in four years to support that application. In my case, the app (Finale) will very likely never run under Linux. No emulation solution, (no, not VMWare or win4lin..believe me I've tried) can do it right because of midi synthesis/latency issues and general crappiness in the multimedia support in wine/winex/vmware/win4lin/etc. (multimedia != directx).
So I'm a developer and I need Finale. The *only* platform that can satisfy that is MacOS X. In the end, if I'm left with an unsupported piece of hardware (unlikely), I can always install Linux on it and be exactly where I am now--frustrated at the fact that I need to disrupt my work environment to use Finale, but no worse off. I can do my linux development with gcc set up as a cross compiler.
The bottom line is, even if the hardware were to lose support, you could switch back to free software at any time with little or no loss, aside from a weekend of getting everything transferred/back into place.
The beauty of that is your next system could be a pc or something else entirely, and your work using opensource tools would not be effected hardly at all--so long as gentoo or debian or something similarly cross platform were made available.
And for now, you get a very slick ui, very sexy hardware, and good product support. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Brian
I know there will be a lot of comments out there about the speed/stability of these drivers. I have a couple of thoughts about that.
I don't know how this wrapper system works but it could be written in a way such that a faulty windows driver being run through a wrapper couldn't take down the kernel. How? Create a kernel modle with a devicenode, use ioctl creatively and make a user-space harness to handle the windows stuff and pass it through to the module through the device. That way all of the nonsense is handled in userspace and a well tested , minimal, "pass-through" module in linux would provide all neccesary services. Neccesarily, only root should have access to this device node but that does without saying.
Also, the ultimate goal for this should not be 'lets replace the linux driver architecture with a windows one', but 'lets find a way to provide immediate compatibility with off-the-shelf hardware before a native driver can be written'.
If your scanner worked 10% slower, would you care? If you're in the industry of course you would, but as an individual? How about transferring pics to and from your digital camera. How's 1:06 as opposed to a minute sound? no big deal. This gives the linux kernel automatic compatibility with devices which is a good thing, even if the compatibility is slower/less stable.
Brian
Is it just me or do the slashdot editors post some story comparing the TCO of linux and something else EVERY DAY???
Isn't this a little excessive? Does it occur to anyone that the TCO of deployment for an OS might be different for different companies in different industries? Does it occur to them that one study doesn't answer the question with any finality at all?
All this inspires is the same worthless conversation about it with all the IT people (and 15 year olds who claim to be) arguing for and against linux and something else.
Why not real news?
Oh wait...this is slashdot...
Brian
You forget so soon that in this economy, the song is copyrighted by the record company. Why should the artist get anything? It's the record company that deserves royalties for the use of their copyrighted materials.
Brian
duh...this isn't like website advertising. I'm not saying it's terribly effective, but if Mandrake can convince people that these will/could work then it's $$$ for them...and they need it badly.
The only ones that conceivably would be difficult to remove later would be the install ones. It's trivial to redo your bookmarks (I import a file anyways whenever i set up a system, so that becomes a nonissue) and it will probably take about fifteen minutes for some kindly mandrake user to put togehter an rpm that replaces the screensaver (uninstall screensaver, install new rpm). If Mandrake was really diabolical I suppose they could make efforts to detect this sort of behavior and disable things, but i think that would be too much trouble...
They just want people to pay for their product and there's nothing wrong with that. If you go to the store and spend a little money, voila...mandrake without ads...
Esp. since it's hard to put unremovable ads in an open source program, i see no problem with this.
Brian
is to make my email as public as possible and hope to win a settlement...$250k should cover my $40k/year education plus a little grad school quite nicely....
goaheadandtryme@elinxubox.com
go ahead try...I'll see you in court
Brian
You've got a bit of a reality problem. Read the law. What is "Illegal" or not has nothing to do with whether you see it as being "Illegal" but what the law says. The law may not be just and you don't have to recognize its legitimacy, but at the end of the day, by sharing the music, you're commiting an "Illegal" act in the eyes of the government (Which has the authority to decide such things)
Brian
Here at CMU we have a newsgroup (aka bboard in on-campus terms) -- cmu.misc.market.books as well as cmu.misc.market.transit/music/software/etc. for on campus trading...
it's not what you're looking for but for one medium sized campus it works quite well.
Brian
"While only something like 20% of assets in the parent's name would be used"
The number's smaller, but the real inequities are for the owners of small, privately owned companies who are expected to contribute a PORTION OF THEIR STAKE OF THE COMPANY each year. Companies (even small ones) can easily be worth a million dollars. Even 5% of 1 million is $50,000. SO, if one of your parents happens to own stake in a private company, you lose big time.
You lose because there's absolutely no way to liquify that stake even if it were practical to do so (which often it isn't). Who'se going to buy the shares? On what market? This is a huge flaw in the system, because it punishes people who've taken their future into their own hands by starting a business of their own.
If you think it's reformed, you're sorely mistaken. It's as broken as ever. Another example: a friend of mine's parents divorced and as part of that legal agreement, his father was taking care of his college education. His mother remarried and his EFC was calculated completely on the basis of his step-father's income--even though in a legal and court recognized document, the disconnect between these two things is established. More wrongdoing on the part of the FAFSA.
How about this one--if a parent is in college (new in 2003), that doesn't count against your EFC at all...so for instance, a parent with $18k tuition bills (i know of it) who'se paying for it all out of pocket will get no extra help for their child who goes to school--period. It won't be looked upon as a sharing of tuition expenses as for a sibling, but it should be...the reason? Children shouldn't have to tell their parents to leave school so they can afford to go. The policy should be more concerned about protecting the children than the parents.
I'm going to a very expensive private school thanks to my parents being willing to sacrifice for that, not thanks to the FAFSA. My EFC was through the roof compared to what my family could actually pay and my school and government didn't care. Personally I don't think they should have to, at all, but if they're going to put together programs like this they should be implemented much much less poorly.
Brian
Really though...do you think that people who crack/pirate software really read the EULA first?
Brian
Simulation != Cryptography
Yes but then again the neuro surgeon doesn't set up an 800-line that his patients can call to get the step by step instructions for cutting up their brains in the comfort of their own homes with common household tools.
Brian
Anyone ever notice that these open souce projects don't port well to non-unix systems?
Sure they can make it work...and when next version comes around, they can make it work and so on...but when can the codebase be stable? LAMP on windows is crappy even though there are official ports. It just doesn't integrate like it does on the core platforms (linux/bsd/*nix).
This is a real open-ended thought. Hopefully someone will be able to form it better than I just did. It just bothers me that we expect *nix ports of apps to be stable and our windows/macos ports are mostly cheap one-man hacks.
I've been on the inside of a miniscule software development team developing real world software for a few years now. Porting is tough, but it's all in the design. I can't see much of a flexible product being formed by a 100-man team unless you've got one supergenious designer who knows every line of code. All I know is that I can tear apart the code to our embedded software and redesign it in a few weeks with noone's help without losing portability. Go ahead. Say it's a performance hit to make well designed code. I won't believe you.
Brian
If you really wanted to get even smaller you could stub out libs like mmsound.drv and such and just make symbol-table accurate copies that return success all the time rather than actually containing code. (Since he already abandoned sound support).
pexports and mingw should do the trick for making these...and of course standards executable conpression software. Also you could check out DLL cross references and remove unreferenced functions/data using a sophisticated debugger/dll modifying tool (this I have not seen...but it's posible). Too bad there's no symlinks. Otherwise you could skimp on the fonts by linking them to eachother.
There's still work to be done in this (all but worthless) pursuit of smallness for one of the most unembeddable OS's I've ever met.
Brian
"Lots of free help available through your local LUG"...
Speak for yourself. Going to a LUG is certainly too much trouble for me and it's definitely too much trouble for grandma. Grandma can ask her sons/nephews/etc. for help with windows all she wants, she isn't gonna trek out to the lug with the computer in the back of her camry. Her nephew doesn't charge a "modest fee" to help her install windows, and he'll probably do an ok job at it too...many teenagers have the basic skills required to wrestle with simple windows issues (and the xp installer makes simple many of the driver issues of the past)
I know the grandmother stereotype is overused but you made some very bad assumptions here:
1. Everyone knows what a LUG is and that they exist
2. Everyone who doesn't know what a LUG is has a friend who runs Linux and is skilled enough to help (and patient enough to help, and not bigoted, etc.)
3. Everyone thinks it worth the time and effort to go through carrying the box to an installfest/LUG or paying extra to get some geek to install the OS.
I've been running Linux for years. Probably half a dozen times I've needed to ask a quick question on IRC, but otherwise it's been a solitary learning process. That's fine for me, but not for grandma or really anyone else who doesn't do computers for a living or serious hobby...
Brian
What's the point in screwing with the election. So long as you skew the vote for the incumbent they can pardon whatever you do...discreetly or otherwise
hold on a sec...
Brian
I think you missed the point--this isn't a complaint that the voting won't be open sourced, but that the voting will require a certain web browser. Isn't any standards compliant browser with SSL support good enough? I highly doubt they're going to be providing much security that couldn't be attained through SSL and a good website. the point is that they're taking the other road unneccesarily.
Which is no surprise coming from the government...
Brian
there still are 10 types of people...in ternary
Plan A: Lets use an infrastructure map to take out internet access in northern California.
plan B: Lets fly two Boeing passenger aircraft into the world trade center.
Don't think these people aren't badass enough to go about creating the infrastructure map, but isn't plan B just that much more obvious? Is there really a shortage of known targets in the US to the point where we need maps of underground wires?
If terrorists want to make terror, they'll find a way. period. If someone feels strongly enough about something, there's no getting in their way. period. Noone is going to be inspired to commit acts of terror by this document, they just might be inclined to target information architecture over human life which IMHO isn't neccesarily a bad thing...
Brian
I've never had issues with onboard sound quality issues. Granted, my motherboard has an SB128 onboard...
of course the thing (embarrasingly enough) doesn't hardly work under windows so I had to get an SBLive to get rid of the crackle...(The card worked frone on Linux 2.4.17/18/19/20 from day one)
The real problem with onboard is those AC97 chips that (like a winmodem) depend on CPU cycles to do their work for them. Whether quality is good or bad, you don't want CPU load determining whether sound is working at this particular instant or not...
Brian
Uh oh. A working knowledge of the English language is neccesary to read this page. Better get a pop-up going to teach the IE users.
Slashdot has obviously already failed at teaching its patrons how to use their brains. Maybe we can get a pop-up for that too.
Brian
The innovation on the Web has moved to the server side. Even large sites five years ago were very dependent on static pages. ASP, PHP, mod_perl, and Servlets were not used nearly as much as they are today. The dynamicism of sites has dramatically increased. The browsers always supported this, it's just that the server software wasn't there. I think part of it must have had to do with the processing cost of dynamically generating all pages, but I am no expert.
.net or as single-platform as activex). Also large concepts like the page based model--which worked great for gopher and the early web, but which seems to be losing its luster lately.
There are still issues--multimedia delivery is one, so is effective user interfaces for more-than-web pages (something more powerful than javascript/html forms but not as cumbersome or ugly as java or
For instance, when I'm viewing blog comments, I should be able to expand and contract the threads with + and - buttons (without a pageload), change the threshhold (at least higher, since the data wouldn't neccesarily be there to go lower from the initial state), even mark them read and unread without a form send. Yes some browsers have features that makes this more or less possible, but across the board this stuff should be easy and widespread.
The answer could be more and better client side scripting, or it could be interactive server connections (more robust than http). I personally like the client side scripting idea better, but that's me.
Brian
First of all, somewhere in the world, there's a webcast output plugin for xmms. Configure a copy of xmms to use it on the server machine, and point all your vnc sessions at that copy of xmms which is webcasting currently. Then you can have each of the smaller machines receive the webcast (just run a little daemon wrapper script around mpg123 that connects to the main server with a retry or something of the sort) and output it to their personal set of speakers with your method of choice.
You control music selections for the whole house from that xmms window, but i suppose you could have a local xmms window as well to play shared files from the server (or local files even) in a room-specific way. If you can somehow make the webcasting use broadcast packets or something you can probably minimize latency, but it could still be an issue (of course six sound cards would be only marginally better, since they'll all have different latencies anyhow, unless they are identical *and* written at the same time).
Of course the real stereo system style solution is to get a receiver with as many outputs as you need. six is commonplace and ten or twenty is not unheard of. Then you can run speaker wire (long distances if needed) to the locations. You can still VNC up those LCDs as much as you desire to. This, in conjuntion with a nice sound card would probably sound considerably better than your six sound card solution, though you'd never be able to change music in one room and not another.
If you use more than one sound card (either in one or many computers), you're going to need some way to handle latency differences. It really depends on how you use your house. If you can ever, in any appreciable way, hear two rooms at once then there's really no tolerance for latency differences at all, but if you're wiring rooms far from eachother (for instance the family room and the patio and the master bedroom, but nothing else), then the webcast solution is probably a better bet (and presumably uses existing wiring since someone asking such a question would be more likely to have run cat5 than speaker wire)
Good luck.
Brian
$2000 is nothing....
for developement libraries it's not unheard of to pay $1500 PER DEVELOPER...We've been quoted $27,000 for two developers and five product licenses on a library for windows, and for a similar setup on linux (albeit a different vendor), the library providng the same functionality was still over $10,000. That figure was without the $100 or so per product sold that we'd have had to pay...we went without either solution, opting a for free, but unsupported project.
$2000 is pocket change. Granted, LZW is simple, but that doesn't mean it might not be worth $2000. Sure that's a lot to an individual, but to a company, it should be nothing (or the company really needs to look at its profit margins to figure out why $2000 sounds like a lot--cause even in small business, it isn't).
Another example: Qt for commercial use (with support, etc.) costs over $1000 and well into the 2s and 3s if you want multiple platforms/any semblance of support.
Brian