By "authentication" I mean the security sense: verifying that you are who you claim to be.
This is not the only issue with online voting (the slashhorde has already pointed out that there is a privacy concern), but it is, in my opinion, the most important one. They mail you the PIN number. This means your vote is only as secure as the postal service. How secure is that? Not very damn secure at all.
Never mind that someone else could pilfer your mail and therefore your constitutional rights, someone in your own household could do it. Imagine your 10-year-old son deciding to get back at you by voting Republican (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
Absentee ballots also have this issue, but at least those have a physical signature. Until we all have smart cards with biometrics to use for identification, any such system will have a major authentication problem.
All this talk about Diebold has made me think about how scary it would be if the computer voting systems were installed in my county. I wouldn't want to use them, I wouldn't trust their results.
I have a vague recollection of someone saying that you can request an alternative voting method if you don't like the one they provide.. all write-ins or something to that effect.
Am I remembering correctly? Can you say, "No thank you, I'll use a pen" if you're faced with those horribly broken machines?
I think there are some counterforces at work against the IPv4 inertia that we're currently experiencing. We may not run out of addresses, but you imply yourself that we're running out of useful addresses - people can't provide services off of their own computers.
I believe that for the last 2-3 years we've seen a trend by "plebians" as you accurately put it - the second-class citizens of the Internet who have asynchronous bandwidth and not much address space - to want to publish their own content. Almost every ISP now offers webspace to its customers and tools to build a website. Blogs are skyrocketing in popularity, despire the lack of many with actual entertaining content. People want to read about . . . other people like them. It's the Reality TV trend, carried over to the Internet. (Or perhaps Reality TV is the Internet trend, carried over to television, but I digress.)
Powerful open source and for-pay web tools are making it easier and easier to publish dynamic content. Soon people will discover that there are other ports than port 80, and will want to establish dynamic applications over those protocols as well. Tools will spring up to help those entrepreneurs. All these trends are going to continue; I predict we'll see an exponential growth in people using the Internet to become creators, instead of just consumers.
With these citizen-created services will come a need for the security features, never mind the address space, that IPv6 has to offer. People are already starting to realize that NATs are making it more difficult to run the publication apps that they want to run. I see "I can do that at work; why can't I do it at home?" becoming a common complaint. "I want to publish on the Internet" will be the mantra that finally kicks IPv6 into gear.
That's a +5, Defintion of Loss Leader. Apple understands this; that's why they've been helping schools get Macs for so long. Teach them how to use one for free, and they'll still want to use it when it costs money. The free Linux was the loss leader for the pay support line. Maybe now Redhat has a strong enough brand that they don't need the loss leader any more, but I strongly suspect they will be hurt by this move in the long run.
Anyway, all I have to add is "hooray! maybe our product will only have to support Debian someday soon."
Symantec is not going to NRA households and taking away guns. It's preventing gun advocates from talking about the guns online. This is a free speech issue. For myself, I am vehemently and vociferously anti-gun, but I am pro-Bill of Rights in every particular.
Also: The fact that Symantec is a private, not a government entity and is legally allowed to do this does not necessarily prevent the ACLU from getting involved on behalf of gun speakers. (Again: This about gun speech, not gun ownership.) The problem is as the poster presented it: insidious, secretive spinning of public perception by organizations that have mindshare monopolies. FOX "News" and its chairman Ailes, and Symantec with this filtering product, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum; but they represent the exact same kind of threat to freedom. The ACLU can and should help those trying to put their speech online fight so that Symantec can't do this.
Finally: It should be clear by now that the government should not be mandating that these filters be installed in any public institution. The products--all of them--represent corporate slant, and they have no place in a society that relies on open exchange, never mind in places that are funded by the public for the express purpose of facilitating open exchange, such as a library.
I'll be one of the ones dancing. What's the downside of Python exactly? It's small, it's heavily tested, and its a powerhouse framework for adding more functionality to the base system without adding other dependencies.
At first I thought, "Yeah, AV companies selling a product that uninstalls another product the user agreed to, that's legal trouble."
But then I realized, the user must also agree to install the AV software. That means any actions the software takes are done on behalf of the user, and the user can certainly consent to have files deleted from his own computer. This doesn't, of course, rule out the possibility that spyware companies could sue your the mcafees of the world, but it does pretty much preclude the possibility of them winning such a suit.
GPG exists to Give Users a Tool to Use Crypto. Insofar as both ends of a communication channel must both use the same kinds of crypto, crypto projects should be trying to put their output in as many hands as possible; to put it more generally, the more people who have crypto, the stronger it gets. GPG's goal should be to put GPG in the hands of as many different applications as possible.
The GPL is not a means to that end. It is in fact contrary to the project's goal, because it discourages commercial adopters.
This is yet another example of the GNU project sacrificing usefulness in favor of principles. I like that they're there, promoting their principles, but in the meantime I won't expect gpg to ever be popular or useful for communicating with the general population.
has a habit of flapping their gums a lot. They make up terms and then act annoyed that other people don't use them. We know what someone means when they say 'intellectual property', thanks. Using the "right" words (according to whom?) does not change what the debate is about.
the fuck does that have to do with anything? Suing Rockstar games is retarded, but so is saying that a letter on the box intended to restrict access has any basis in reality. Are you saying that there's a direct correlation between getting access to entertainment targeted at older people, and shooting people? That, had the rating been obeyed, these crimes wouldn't have happened?
I say no. This argument has no scientific basis whatsoever. The rating on the box is there to appease parents, not to prevent crimes. And parents are not rational individuals when it comes to their kids. If they were, they might try raising their children correctly and thereby preventing their kids from becoming sociopaths.
Kids become sociopaths for a number of reasons, but it takes a hell of a lot more than a video game or a porno movie to do it. Being paid attention, having a stable environment, love--these are the things that help someone grow up well-adjusted. In order for a crime like this to happen, all of those things have to be missing.
Little startups figure out ways to make money off the new technology, because they're not so entrenched. Massive megacorps trying to adapt to new technology are like covered wagons trying to chase a bee. As much as they'd like to catch that bee, they just can't maneuver fast enough. So rather than let somebody else eat their honey, they pass a law requiring that the entire prairie be filled with bug spray. "Bees can sting!" they say, ignoring the fact that bees make edible products.
Eventually, they get the covered wagon heading in the right direction, they roll on up to the bee carcass now lying in the road, and then "relent", "embracing the new technology". I.e., through legislation they've succeeded in making technology no longer a moving target, and now they want their piece of the action.
I don't think it's surprising that many of these technologies are proving somewhat resistant to legislative bug spray. People are still swapping music and movies, people are still using Internet telephony and listening to Internet radio. Evolution will naturally start to produce tech that can't be hurt by legislative bug spray.
Choice isn't good for the user, it's good for the market. It's true that no user wants to make a choice they don't have to. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky, "The more similar two choices, the harder it is to choice between them, despite the fact that the choice is less important by the same degree." This is indeed the case when presenting the user a choice between Gnome and KDE. But that's not what "choice" really connotes in this case. Gnome and KDE are competing for mindshare, and competition is what makes both of them get better and better.
Each one of them continually tries to one-up the other, to support more and more features that the other is trying to implement. It is the competition between KDE and Gnome far more than the competition between Linux and Windows that drives the goal of finding the Next Big Thing for desktop environments. And both of those environments have introduced features that other desktops did not have, including Windows! Windows XP users: notice how Windows XP puts links to recently used applications in the Start Menu now? KDE has had that for ages. Without the competition between Gnome and KDE, the discovery and implementation of those features would slow down drastically.
As to the ridiculous claim that everyone has to be presented with an interface that's familiar to them, if that were true, Microsoft itself wouldn't revamp the look and feel of Windows with every major revision. Furthermore, if that were true, no invention on the desktop would ever happen! Wildly different approaches (OEone, to name one) must be tried so we can continue to seek the perfect interface, and approaches with minor differences are practically going to be absorbed into the user's mental framework as soon as they're encountered.
Users are willing to learn. They all understand that, when sitting in front of a new environment, they're going to have to learn something new. Some people (in general: younger people) like to learn new technology and welcome new environments as a chance to try new things. Other people resist the idea, but they will still do whatever's necessary to learn to use the tools they have available; that is, whatever's in front of them.
That means that minor differences between Gnome and KDE--and they are minor, when you compare the time to learn them to the lifetime of a typical workstation installation--are irrelevant, and therefore the user's choice between the two environments is irrelevant. Choose for them, it'll work out in the end. Most Linux distros already do this, giving a default which the user can change.
And stop kicking this horse corpse about applications. Every modern Linux distro includes the libraries necessary to run both Gnome and KDE apps, regardless of which environment is on the desktop.
There is no expectation of privacy in public now because the current perception is that your actions in a public place will be observed. So, in any given public place, you can't just start vandalizing and stealing stuff and expect nobody to see those actions.
The same perception used to (and to some extent, still does) surround the presence of your data in a particular vendor's database. I give my ccn to vendor A in order to buy a product; I used to expect that ccn to stay in vendor A's database, or possibly to be destroyed immediately. That expectation is now gone; data can be shared, and data mining is both extremely lucrative and extremely effective. Scattered bits of data about you in databases around the world can be combined to form a very accurate picture describing all your online activities, and quite a few of your offline ones.
I have a point. It's this:
Cameras in public places have the potential to become data mining tools as well. Camera footage is data when you get right down to it. It's data that's first available to whomever is operating the cameras, and then to whomever they trust with that data, and eventually to whomever they sell that data to. It can be mined, by correlating the data from multiple cameras; already, virtually every commercial space is watched by cameras. If the same state of affairs starts to apply to public places, cameras will be watching us every hour of the day.
Anyone who sees that data can use it to track our every movement. We have no legal protection against being spied on in this country (anti-stalking laws aside) but only because the government has no imagination.
Imagine criminals doing data mining on camera data to find out the routes of armored cars without ever having to be in the presence of said car. Imagine corporations buying this data and spying on all of their employees to ensure they uphold moral standards. Imagine a number of other abuses I can't imagine, but someone with a criminal mind could probably come up with to con, to oppress, to discriminate.
Don't underestimate the power of cameras in public places to destroy our rights.
Interesting, this is essentially how public key encryption works.
The problem they're trying to solve is that a message gets sent through a public channel (such as the postal service) without either party giving up their private key and without the data ever being unencrypted until it's safely in the hands of the recipient. The best explanation of it I've heard goes like this.
"Alice writes a message and locks it in a chest with her padlock. This chest has holes (hasps) for two separate padlocks. [Note: no reason it can't have n hasps, as in the wiring example.] She sends the locked box to Bob through the mail.
Bob places his own padlock through the remaining hasp, and mails it back to Alice.
Alice removes her own padlock and mails the box, with just Bob's padlock on it, back to Bob.
Bob removes his own padlock and reads the message."
Of course, this is all being done over TCP instead of the post, and with math instead of padlocks, but you get the idea.
None of this has anything to do with a wiring mess, but the similarities are striking.
For these security certifications the configuration of the system is very important. You won't get a cert if install a distro where you have webmin running by default with no password, or something.
How did IBM configure the box? What patches were applied to the kernel? Was proprietary software involved at all?
Teachers, like cops, are human, and when they see the same things happen over and over they tend to stop trying to fix them. Now you're giving them a model that predicts failure. Now it no longer even matters what the student thinks about his own chances, because many jaded teachers will not even attempt to help a doomed person.
I love this idea. It also nicely circumvents the problems many Unixy programs get when you have spaces in filenames (quite a few windowsy programs as well).
ok, 5% crash 2 or more times per day. Let's say then, that maybe 10% crash once per day, 20% crash every couple of days, 40% crash once a week, etc. If we only go that far that's saying
75% of windows computers crash at least once a week.
If once a week doesn't sound like a lot to you, imagine how annoyed you'd be if your ISP was down once a week, because that's what we're talking about.... and here's some for-pay updates to fix that problem, you drooling idiot customer. WINDOWS IS YOUR GOD. WORSHIP IT.
I'm thinking that somewhere in/etc/rc.d/init.d there should be launched an OpenOfficeServices Daemon to sit around like a memory hog but make user launches seem snappier.
Hey, I'd be fine with that if it existed. I used mozilla's quick launcher on Win and loved it. (Now I use firebird, which is so damn fast it doesn't need the quick launcher, but I digress.)
Slashdot Mirror
By "authentication" I mean the security sense: verifying that you are who you claim to be.
This is not the only issue with online voting (the slashhorde has already pointed out that there is a privacy concern), but it is, in my opinion, the most important one. They mail you the PIN number. This means your vote is only as secure as the postal service. How secure is that? Not very damn secure at all.
Never mind that someone else could pilfer your mail and therefore your constitutional rights, someone in your own household could do it. Imagine your 10-year-old son deciding to get back at you by voting Republican (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is).
Absentee ballots also have this issue, but at least those have a physical signature. Until we all have smart cards with biometrics to use for identification, any such system will have a major authentication problem.
All this talk about Diebold has made me think about how scary it would be if the computer voting systems were installed in my county. I wouldn't want to use them, I wouldn't trust their results.
I have a vague recollection of someone saying that you can request an alternative voting method if you don't like the one they provide.. all write-ins or something to that effect.
Am I remembering correctly? Can you say, "No thank you, I'll use a pen" if you're faced with those horribly broken machines?
Excellent essay.
I think there are some counterforces at work against the IPv4 inertia that we're currently experiencing. We may not run out of addresses, but you imply yourself that we're running out of useful addresses - people can't provide services off of their own computers.
I believe that for the last 2-3 years we've seen a trend by "plebians" as you accurately put it - the second-class citizens of the Internet who have asynchronous bandwidth and not much address space - to want to publish their own content. Almost every ISP now offers webspace to its customers and tools to build a website. Blogs are skyrocketing in popularity, despire the lack of many with actual entertaining content. People want to read about . . . other people like them. It's the Reality TV trend, carried over to the Internet. (Or perhaps Reality TV is the Internet trend, carried over to television, but I digress.)
Powerful open source and for-pay web tools are making it easier and easier to publish dynamic content. Soon people will discover that there are other ports than port 80, and will want to establish dynamic applications over those protocols as well. Tools will spring up to help those entrepreneurs. All these trends are going to continue; I predict we'll see an exponential growth in people using the Internet to become creators, instead of just consumers.
With these citizen-created services will come a need for the security features, never mind the address space, that IPv6 has to offer. People are already starting to realize that NATs are making it more difficult to run the publication apps that they want to run. I see "I can do that at work; why can't I do it at home?" becoming a common complaint. "I want to publish on the Internet" will be the mantra that finally kicks IPv6 into gear.
That's a +5, Defintion of Loss Leader. Apple understands this; that's why they've been helping schools get Macs for so long. Teach them how to use one for free, and they'll still want to use it when it costs money. The free Linux was the loss leader for the pay support line. Maybe now Redhat has a strong enough brand that they don't need the loss leader any more, but I strongly suspect they will be hurt by this move in the long run.
Anyway, all I have to add is "hooray! maybe our product will only have to support Debian someday soon."
Symantec is not going to NRA households and taking away guns. It's preventing gun advocates from talking about the guns online. This is a free speech issue. For myself, I am vehemently and vociferously anti-gun, but I am pro-Bill of Rights in every particular.
Also: The fact that Symantec is a private, not a government entity and is legally allowed to do this does not necessarily prevent the ACLU from getting involved on behalf of gun speakers. (Again: This about gun speech, not gun ownership.) The problem is as the poster presented it: insidious, secretive spinning of public perception by organizations that have mindshare monopolies. FOX "News" and its chairman Ailes, and Symantec with this filtering product, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum; but they represent the exact same kind of threat to freedom. The ACLU can and should help those trying to put their speech online fight so that Symantec can't do this.
Finally: It should be clear by now that the government should not be mandating that these filters be installed in any public institution. The products--all of them--represent corporate slant, and they have no place in a society that relies on open exchange, never mind in places that are funded by the public for the express purpose of facilitating open exchange, such as a library.
others will puke.
I'll be one of the ones dancing. What's the downside of Python exactly? It's small, it's heavily tested, and its a powerhouse framework for adding more functionality to the base system without adding other dependencies.
Never had any stability issues. The only thing you have to do after installing the extension is bookmark the chrome. Just make a bookmark to this:
x-jsd:debugger
At first I thought, "Yeah, AV companies selling a product that uninstalls another product the user agreed to, that's legal trouble."
But then I realized, the user must also agree to install the AV software. That means any actions the software takes are done on behalf of the user, and the user can certainly consent to have files deleted from his own computer. This doesn't, of course, rule out the possibility that spyware companies could sue your the mcafees of the world, but it does pretty much preclude the possibility of them winning such a suit.
GPG exists to Give Users a Tool to Use Crypto. Insofar as both ends of a communication channel must both use the same kinds of crypto, crypto projects should be trying to put their output in as many hands as possible; to put it more generally, the more people who have crypto, the stronger it gets. GPG's goal should be to put GPG in the hands of as many different applications as possible.
The GPL is not a means to that end. It is in fact contrary to the project's goal, because it discourages commercial adopters.
This is yet another example of the GNU project sacrificing usefulness in favor of principles. I like that they're there, promoting their principles, but in the meantime I won't expect gpg to ever be popular or useful for communicating with the general population.
That's what I want to know. SMB? SSH? (probably not). NFS? What services is it actually running?
has a habit of flapping their gums a lot. They make up terms and then act annoyed that other people don't use them. We know what someone means when they say 'intellectual property', thanks. Using the "right" words (according to whom?) does not change what the debate is about.
the fuck does that have to do with anything? Suing Rockstar games is retarded, but so is saying that a letter on the box intended to restrict access has any basis in reality. Are you saying that there's a direct correlation between getting access to entertainment targeted at older people, and shooting people? That, had the rating been obeyed, these crimes wouldn't have happened?
I say no. This argument has no scientific basis whatsoever. The rating on the box is there to appease parents, not to prevent crimes. And parents are not rational individuals when it comes to their kids. If they were, they might try raising their children correctly and thereby preventing their kids from becoming sociopaths.
Kids become sociopaths for a number of reasons, but it takes a hell of a lot more than a video game or a porno movie to do it. Being paid attention, having a stable environment, love--these are the things that help someone grow up well-adjusted. In order for a crime like this to happen, all of those things have to be missing.
Ah, accidentally clicked on the article, did you?
Is that they do this.
Little startups figure out ways to make money off the new technology, because they're not so entrenched. Massive megacorps trying to adapt to new technology are like covered wagons trying to chase a bee. As much as they'd like to catch that bee, they just can't maneuver fast enough. So rather than let somebody else eat their honey, they pass a law requiring that the entire prairie be filled with bug spray. "Bees can sting!" they say, ignoring the fact that bees make edible products.
Eventually, they get the covered wagon heading in the right direction, they roll on up to the bee carcass now lying in the road, and then "relent", "embracing the new technology". I.e., through legislation they've succeeded in making technology no longer a moving target, and now they want their piece of the action.
I don't think it's surprising that many of these technologies are proving somewhat resistant to legislative bug spray. People are still swapping music and movies, people are still using Internet telephony and listening to Internet radio. Evolution will naturally start to produce tech that can't be hurt by legislative bug spray.
Choice isn't good for the user, it's good for the market. It's true that no user wants to make a choice they don't have to. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky, "The more similar two choices, the harder it is to choice between them, despite the fact that the choice is less important by the same degree." This is indeed the case when presenting the user a choice between Gnome and KDE. But that's not what "choice" really connotes in this case. Gnome and KDE are competing for mindshare, and competition is what makes both of them get better and better.
Each one of them continually tries to one-up the other, to support more and more features that the other is trying to implement. It is the competition between KDE and Gnome far more than the competition between Linux and Windows that drives the goal of finding the Next Big Thing for desktop environments. And both of those environments have introduced features that other desktops did not have, including Windows! Windows XP users: notice how Windows XP puts links to recently used applications in the Start Menu now? KDE has had that for ages. Without the competition between Gnome and KDE, the discovery and implementation of those features would slow down drastically.
As to the ridiculous claim that everyone has to be presented with an interface that's familiar to them, if that were true, Microsoft itself wouldn't revamp the look and feel of Windows with every major revision. Furthermore, if that were true, no invention on the desktop would ever happen! Wildly different approaches (OEone, to name one) must be tried so we can continue to seek the perfect interface, and approaches with minor differences are practically going to be absorbed into the user's mental framework as soon as they're encountered.
Users are willing to learn. They all understand that, when sitting in front of a new environment, they're going to have to learn something new. Some people (in general: younger people) like to learn new technology and welcome new environments as a chance to try new things. Other people resist the idea, but they will still do whatever's necessary to learn to use the tools they have available; that is, whatever's in front of them.
That means that minor differences between Gnome and KDE--and they are minor, when you compare the time to learn them to the lifetime of a typical workstation installation--are irrelevant, and therefore the user's choice between the two environments is irrelevant. Choose for them, it'll work out in the end. Most Linux distros already do this, giving a default which the user can change.
And stop kicking this horse corpse about applications. Every modern Linux distro includes the libraries necessary to run both Gnome and KDE apps, regardless of which environment is on the desktop.
There is no expectation of privacy in public now because the current perception is that your actions in a public place will be observed. So, in any given public place, you can't just start vandalizing and stealing stuff and expect nobody to see those actions.
The same perception used to (and to some extent, still does) surround the presence of your data in a particular vendor's database. I give my ccn to vendor A in order to buy a product; I used to expect that ccn to stay in vendor A's database, or possibly to be destroyed immediately. That expectation is now gone; data can be shared, and data mining is both extremely lucrative and extremely effective. Scattered bits of data about you in databases around the world can be combined to form a very accurate picture describing all your online activities, and quite a few of your offline ones.
I have a point. It's this:
Cameras in public places have the potential to become data mining tools as well. Camera footage is data when you get right down to it. It's data that's first available to whomever is operating the cameras, and then to whomever they trust with that data, and eventually to whomever they sell that data to. It can be mined, by correlating the data from multiple cameras; already, virtually every commercial space is watched by cameras. If the same state of affairs starts to apply to public places, cameras will be watching us every hour of the day.
Anyone who sees that data can use it to track our every movement. We have no legal protection against being spied on in this country (anti-stalking laws aside) but only because the government has no imagination.
Imagine criminals doing data mining on camera data to find out the routes of armored cars without ever having to be in the presence of said car. Imagine corporations buying this data and spying on all of their employees to ensure they uphold moral standards. Imagine a number of other abuses I can't imagine, but someone with a criminal mind could probably come up with to con, to oppress, to discriminate.
Don't underestimate the power of cameras in public places to destroy our rights.
Interesting, this is essentially how public key encryption works.
The problem they're trying to solve is that a message gets sent through a public channel (such as the postal service) without either party giving up their private key and without the data ever being unencrypted until it's safely in the hands of the recipient. The best explanation of it I've heard goes like this.
"Alice writes a message and locks it in a chest with her padlock. This chest has holes (hasps) for two separate padlocks. [Note: no reason it can't have n hasps, as in the wiring example.] She sends the locked box to Bob through the mail.
Bob places his own padlock through the remaining hasp, and mails it back to Alice.
Alice removes her own padlock and mails the box, with just Bob's padlock on it, back to Bob.
Bob removes his own padlock and reads the message."
Of course, this is all being done over TCP instead of the post, and with math instead of padlocks, but you get the idea.
None of this has anything to do with a wiring mess, but the similarities are striking.
A live penguin.
And several fresh dead fish, right around his crotch region.
For these security certifications the configuration of the system is very important. You won't get a cert if install a distro where you have webmin running by default with no password, or something.
How did IBM configure the box? What patches were applied to the kernel? Was proprietary software involved at all?
These are the questions I want answered.
Teachers, like cops, are human, and when they see the same things happen over and over they tend to stop trying to fix them. Now you're giving them a model that predicts failure. Now it no longer even matters what the student thinks about his own chances, because many jaded teachers will not even attempt to help a doomed person.
I love this idea. It also nicely circumvents the problems many Unixy programs get when you have spaces in filenames (quite a few windowsy programs as well).
ok, 5% crash 2 or more times per day.
... and here's some for-pay updates to fix that problem, you drooling idiot customer. WINDOWS IS YOUR GOD. WORSHIP IT.
Let's say then, that maybe 10% crash once per day, 20% crash every couple of days, 40% crash once a week, etc. If we only go that far that's saying
75% of windows computers crash at least once a week.
If once a week doesn't sound like a lot to you, imagine how annoyed you'd be if your ISP was down once a week, because that's what we're talking about.
They must have seen my post.
The IRS is a great agency for exacting revenge on people idiotic enough to declare themselves your enemy.
;-)
(OK, it's not really worse than internment, but it is slightly more likely
I'm thinking that somewhere in /etc/rc.d/init.d there should be launched an OpenOfficeServices Daemon to sit around like a memory hog but make user launches seem snappier.
Hey, I'd be fine with that if it existed. I used mozilla's quick launcher on Win and loved it. (Now I use firebird, which is so damn fast it doesn't need the quick launcher, but I digress.)