Configuring Compiz to emulate Spaces and Expose

If you have an OpenGL-capable video card and driver for Linux, like the GeForce 7900 GS in my big box, you can run Compiz on Ubuntu 10.04 and emulate Spaces and Expose'. So here's how to do it in Gnome (I do not recommend KDE on Ubuntu 10.04 due to some serious bugs I found):

1. Install the latest proprietary driver via System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. Without this installed, my GeForce 7900 simply would not do 3D, and Compiz wouldn't run.
2. Install the Compiz settings manager:
   • # apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager simple-ccsm
3. Identify the X11 mouse buttons you wish to use. Sorry, I identified those via trial and error. On my Logitech Anywhere MX mouse, here is the map from mouse action to X11 mouse button:
   • Button 1: Left click
   • Button 2: Right click
   • Button 3: The 'menu' button
   • Button 4: scroll wheel forward
   • Button 5: scroll wheel back
   • Button 6: scroll wheel left
   • Button 7: scroll wheel right
   • Button 8: backmost-arrow button (on left side of mouse)
   • Button 9: forwardmost-arrow button (on left side of mouse)
4. Select Preferences->Appearances and select your theme that you want, then click the Visual Effects tab. Select 'Normal' unless you want the wobble-on-window-move effect (which I hate because it makes it hard to accurately place the window). It should do some work, then ask you if you want to keep it. Say yes :). Then exit out of that.
5. Select Preferences->CompizConfig Settings Manager
6. Under Desktop, choose "Expo". This is half of the Spaces look-alike, though it doesn't *quite* work like Spaces. Under Expo Key, set it to whatever key you wish to use to enable Expo, either Windows-E (the usual setting, note that the Windows key is called 'Super' in this UI because the Compiz folks apparently hate Windows ;), or a function key of your choice. Note that I recommend using the 'Super' prefix for that function key, because otherwise you end up conflicting with applications, since normal keyboards don't have a 'fn' key like Mac keyboards that can be used to access regular function key codes of function keys assigned functions in the GUI.
7. Expo won't work with four workspaces all in a row, so right-click on the four workspaces in a row at the bottom right of your screen, select 'Preferences' from the resulting pop-up menu, and set it to a 2x2 grid.
8. Now you need to set your arrow keys left/right/up/down to move you between the workspaces. Click 'Back' in the Compiz Settings UI, and select 'Desktop Wall'. Click the 'Bindings' tab. Expand the 'Move within wall' collection, and set the Move Left/Right/Up/Down keyboard shortcuts. I suggest Super-left, Super-right, Super-up, Super-down.
9. Okay, click Back, and now let's set our Expose'-lookalike. This is under 'Windows' and is called 'Scale'
10. The question is, which one of these do you want to use? "Initiate Window Picker" allows "Expose" on all windows on the current workspace. Unfortunately, if you have a multi-monitor system, it puts all those windows onto the monitor where your mouse is currently residing. This gets very cluttered if you have two large monitors (I'm running a pair of 1050p monitors). In that case, I suggest using 'Initiate Window Picker for Windows on Current Output', which does it just on the monitor your mouse pointer is hovering over. I selected Mouse Button 9, the forward-arrow button on the left side of my mouse, to do this.

The end result: Something that approximates what Expose' and Spaces would have looked like if implemented by someone in the Communist-era USSR who'd approximately heard descriptions of how they worked, but had never actually seen them. You can practically hear the clunks of heavy metal and whirring of primitive gyroscopes as you activate them. The Expose-clone doesn't work well with multiple displays because of its bad habit of trying to collect all the windows onto the current display, thus requiring the 'on Current Output' kludge to avoid getting window overload. The Spaces clone requires more mouse clicks to move windows between "Spaces" (it doesn't simply exit to the workspace you just moved the window to, it stays activated until you double-click on a workspace), and doesn't have a handy icon to get to it quickly in case you're using a laptop that lacks a 9-button mouse (!). And like virtually all things dealing with Linux user interfaces, it takes a jillion-step process to get it configured and set up, with oodles of trial and error to figure out which X11 "mouse button" corresponds to which actual button on a mouse.

In short, Linux programmers still haven't figured out that users just want things to work. I've had to whack my own teams on the hands a few times when they brought back a design prototype that had oodles of screens, buttons and widgets to tweak -- "No, I want one input box here, one submit button there, that's all the user cares about, he just wants to do the job, he doesn't want to adjust all the internal stuff you're exposing here." Complexity is the enemy of user interface usability and consistency -- something which geeks seem to not understand, I've had to do this (shoot down too-complex user interfaces) repeatedly over the past ten years. Sadly, there is nobody to do this for Linux (well, except what Nokia did for Maemo, which works really well at giving a consistent user interface to all Maemo apps, but Maemo is pretty specific to its particular environment) -- and thus Linux continues being an incoherent mess for the average end-user.

Still, for my purposes, it works fine at keeping my workflow working while I run a bunch of KVM virtual machines with VNC viewers into them. So I'm a bit less grumpy today. But I sure wish there was a benevolent dictator for the Linux user interface the way there is for the Linux kernel itself... it's frustrating, the technology is there, but nobody has actually turned it into a coherent whole, and the distribution vendors seem either overwhelmed by the situation or just don't care. Oh well, back to work...

-ELG

Attack of the Linux Penguins

Recently I've been using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx as my desktop development system. This is the first time in a long time that I've used Linux on the desktop -- for the past three years I've been using MacOS on the desktop, sharing the source code tree via NFS to a Linux VMware client to do compiles and testing. Since what I've been principally doing during this time is appliance and distribution design, the fact that VMware is not the speediest of environments did not make much difference.

However, I needed more virtual machines to look at potential client configurations than I could easily fit on a Macbook Pro, even the very well endowed Macbook Pro that I own (which has 8 gigabytes of memory), so clearly I needed to throw more hardware at the problem (heh! Typical software engineer answer!). So I installed 10.04 on a well-endowed desktop/server system complete with RAID5 array and 8GB of RAM, and set out to configure clients using the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) system that comes with Ubuntu 10.04.

So, the Good:

1. KVM rocks. The performance I get out of KVM is far superior to anything I've ever experienced with VMware even on faster hardware. I am currently running a load on my system that would have both cores maxed out under VMware due to VMware's per-VM overhead. Under KVM, I'm at around 30% on both cores.
2. The Virtual Machine Manager that ships with Ubuntu for managing KVM is far easier to use than the latest editions of VMware Server's management UI, but not as good as the VMware Fusion management UI on MacOS in that it doesn't have any equivalent, as far as I can tell, of the VMware Tools module that allows transparent window pointer moves between the KVM virtual screen window and the host OS screen.
3. Gibber is a really cool Twitter/Facebook/etc. client, easily as good as anything on MacOS. I especially like its multi-pane capabilities for viewing multiple streams in parallel.
4. Performance in general rocks. It feels snappy and things happen quickly, even though it's running software RAID5 so you'd expect significant overhead from the disk driver. But there isn't -- Linux's cache-block elevator does very well at optimizing RAID access.

Now for the bad:

1. The user interface in general is reminiscent of mid-1990's Windows. It looks and feels dated and obsolete, and lacks many of the modern navigational aids of Windows 7 or MacOS 10.5.
2. While I got multi-screen support working for two displays attached to my nVidia 7900 video card (which has two outputs), the dated UI gives no easy way to navigate between the various applications open on the two screens. The window boxes clustered at the bottom of the leftmost screen are not easily accessible from the rightmost screen, and there's no equivalent of Apple's Expose' or Windows 7's similar application-picker function that can be bound to a mouse button so selecting an application is a mouse button away.
3. Neither the KDE nor Gnome filesystem browser allowed providing a user name/password to a CIFS server whose shares you wished to list. As a result, I could not use the CIFS browser to browse to shares on my Mac or on our Windows servers here on the office, neither of which will provide you with a share list unless you authenticate first. On the Mac, this Just Works -- the initial attempt to get the share list fails, but then you click the "Connect As" button, put in the user name and password, voila.
4. In general, integration with Apple and Windows networks was pathetic. I was reduced to doing manual mounts via the CLI mount.cifs command, which I should never have to do on a supposedly modern desktop operating system.

And finally, the ugly:

1. KDE on Ubuntu 10.04 is atrocious. There is an important directory service under KDE that sucks up gigabytes of RAM. I had to switch back to the unsatisfactory, but at least functional and efficient, Gnome UI to get work done. KDE used to be fast and clean, but it has become as bloated and dysfunctional as Windows.
2. Multi-screen support on 10.04 has taken several steps backwards. Window managers crashed when I used the standard X11 Xinerama extension. So I used the proprietary TwinView nVidia driver for my nVidia 7900 video card (a high end card from two generations back, somewhat obsolete today but I use it for Linux because its support is mature) and now multi-screen support is back... but only for the displays attached to this single video card.

My conclusion: Ubuntu 10.04 is thus far the closest that Linux has gotten to a usable desktop operating system. It is a state of the art desktop environment -- if you have been locked in a server room with pizza slid under the door for the past 15 years and still think Windows 95 is the be-all and end-all of user interface design. Both Windows 7 and MacOS 10.5/10.6 put it to shame on all measures of appearance and usability.

I can appreciate the effort that has been put into Ubuntu 10.04, and the difficulties involved in trying to turn a mass of random software from miscellaneous strangers into a coherent operating environment. But that does not change the fact that Linux on the desktop remains stuck in a time warp, fighting the battles of two decades previous in an era where time has moved on. It is especially sad that KDE today is no more usable than KDE 2.0 was ten years ago -- indeed, is *less* usable because of the bloat that has been put on top of what was a clean fast simple and well-integrated user interface. KDE has become a 1959 Cadillac, with fins the size of a aircraft tailfin and a thousand pounds of chrome weighting it down as it staggers down the highway like a bloated whale. Windows 7 suffers from some similar user interface bloat, but it has an excuse -- it's Windows. KDE has no such excuse.

So for the meantime, here's what I say: If you want a coherent, usable user environment, buy a Mac. If you want a fast server environment, use Linux. And if you want something that's neither as coherent as a Mac or as good as a server as Linux, then run Windows 7, which gives you a mediocre implementation of both worlds. As for me, I'm going to stick with my Mac on the desktop, and continue using Linux on my server. That gives me the best user environment *AND* the best server environment... but not, alas, in the same box. So it goes.

-ELG

SaaS and the Dot-com Set

One of the hilarious things that has come about with cloud computing and the advent of large scale SaaS is that I'm seeing the same kinds of arguments I saw back in the dot-com days, that this is a fundamentally different business model that doesn't obey the same rules as traditional software development. Which, of course, is utter nonsense. The method of delivery to customers has changed, but customers remain customers.

My response to all this:

1. Our primary requirement is to meet the needs of the customer. Some customers have legal requirements which preclude SaaS in the sense of SaaS in the cloud, but still wish to have the advantages of SaaS. Think doctors, schools, etc. -- it is actually illegal for them to host patient / student data outside of their own facilities on shared servers. But if we can give them the benefits of SaaS inside their facility using the same software that we have deployed into the cloud -- i.e., *not* a separate version of the software -- then we've fulfilled their needs without any (zero) additional development overhead. And BTW, just to counter one of Marko's points, anybody who structures their sales commissions structure to reward selling private rather than SaaS in the cloud is an idiot and deserves to fail, cloud is generally *much* less support on our part, it just doesn't meet the needs of certain customers.

2. I have not encountered any customers who want rapid updates of critical applications, ever. My boss once ordered me to deploy a new update to a school scheduling program in the middle of a school year. I pointed out that a) school secretaries and counsellors were currently doing mid-term schedule changes, b) school secretaries and counsellors had not been trained on the changes, which were significant (I had re-written the entire scheduling system from scratch going back to first principles, because the old system was incapable of handling some of the new scheduling paradigms that had come out, such as multi-shift scheduling and quarter-system scheduling), and thus c) it would be a fiasco. He said the old system was broken, so deploy the new one anyhow. I did. And got to say "I told you so" to my boss when it turned into the fiasco I'd predicted. My point: Users are fond of *saying* they want the latest, greatest features, but what they actually want is to get their job done. Paying attention to what users say, as vs. what they actually want, can be a huge mistake costing you a lot of money in additional support costs and losing a lot of customer goodwill. Not only were our support lines clogged solid for a week, my boss had to eat a lot of crow at the next user group meeting to get some of that lost goodwill back.

3. I am on Twitter. Yes, customers will Tweet stuff. 140 characters doesn't exactly get you in-depth commentary though. If you let Twitter guide your product development, what you get is a product designed by tweets, which is indistinguishable from a product designed by twits. I have only met one customer in my entire life who actually knew what he wanted (a school discipline coordinator who said, "I want a computerized version of these three state-mandated forms, and reports that fulfill the requirements of these four legally-required forms that I must submit at the end of the school year"). The rest have some vague idea, but you must get with them and engage them in a lengthy discussion complete with design proposals that include sample screen displays of what the application might look like. For one clustered storage product I actually spent more time talking to potential customers, writing proposals, and getting feedback than I spent implementing the actual product. Needless to say, that is *not* a process that occurs in 140 characters.

4. Anybody who goes into a business where there is an entrenched incumbent expecting to compete on features is an idiot in the first place. The incumbent has basically infinite resources at his disposal compared to you and is capable of implementing far more features than any newcomer. He will simply steal any features you innovate in order to stay out ahead. In the old days incumbents like IBM weren't capable of innovating rapidly. But this is the Internet era, and the successful giants have become much more nimble. If there's a feature you have that the incumbent doesn't have, expect him to have it soon. The way to win today is to change the game -- to do something so novel, so different in a fundamental way, that the incumbent could not match you without re-writing his entire product from scratch and ditching his entire current customer base. In short, competing based on features is a fool's game in today's era unless you're the incumbent. The way to win is to change the paradigm, not attempt to compete on features within an existing one.

5. Yes, selling "private SaaS" means we basically end up having to support multiple versions. But that is true regardless, unless we want to force customers into a death march to new versions. Some customers are comfortable with that, the majority, however, arrive at a version they like and just want to stick with that, much as the majority of Windows users are still using Windows XP, or the majority of Linux users are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (basically a three-year-old version of Linux) rather than the latest and greatest Fedora or Ubuntu. They'll accept security fixes, but that's it -- if you attempt to death march them, they'll go to a competitor who won't.

I've been dealing with satisfying customer requirements for around 15 years now, and my actual experience of those 15 years is that customers are ornery folks where what they say and what they actually want are two different things, and your job as an architect and designer is to try to suss out what they actually want, which is often *not* the same as what they say. Young engineers tend to take customers at face value, then not understand why the customer rejects the result as not meeting his needs. I get called conservative sometimes because I call for slowing down release cycles, maintaining backward compatibility wherever feasible, extensive trials with customers prior to product release, etc., but my experience is that this is what customers want -- as vs. what they say they want, which is something else entirely.

For the record - my phone is an iPhone, and the only paper maps in my car are detailed 1:24000 USGS topographical maps not available on current GPS units with reasonable screen sizes. Just sayin' ;).

-EG

Cryptography engineering

A new post at the VPEP blog.

I'm currently reading Bruce Schneier's new book Cryptography Engineering (actually the second edition of Applied Cryptography), and the above was just me riffing on some thoughts I had while reading the first chapter.

-EG

About work...

One thing you'll notice, reading this blog, is that I haven't blogged about anything happening at work. There's a reason for that: It is, in general, a bad idea. If an employer believes a post puts the company in a bad light or simply decides that you have leaked proprietary information without permission, it's a great way to get fired -- dozens of bloggers have been fired over the past decade for posting about things that happened at work.

So anyhow, who I work for is no secret -- you can click on my LinkedIn profile and see -- but now I will be blogging about things I'm doing at work on my employer's own group blog. My first posts are up. You might recognize one of them as a revised version of one of the posts on this blog, except now I can say what I could only hint at then :).

-ELG

Standards and rent seeking behavior

Rent-seeking behavior is defined by economists as behavior intending to gain competitive advantage by manipulating the environment to your benefit, rather than through profiting from production of goods and services. An example of this would be if a company X managed to get a law passed specifying that all goods purchased by the government must comply with ISO standard 3.052345.32431, where company X happens to hold a critical patent on the technology in that ISO standard. In this case company X is profiting not because they produced goods and services, but, rather, because they manipulated the environment (got a law passed) which says that everybody wanting to do business with the government must pay rent (patent fees) to company X.

William Vambenepe complains that cloud standards are being created in a secretive manner. He complains that this means that those of us actually implementing cloud computing software are being locked out of the process. And this is true. Yet this is not unusual. Why? Well, because there are certain large corporations who, for some reason, still believe that rent-seeking behavior is useful when it comes to the standards process -- i.e., that, as with creating a law dictating that everybody pay rent to them, that they can set a standard that dictates that everybody pays rent to them.

Let me explain: The more complex the standard (and the more BigCorp-patented technologies included in it of course!), the more resources it will take to fully implement it. The goal is to make the resources and patent licenses needed to fully implement the standard so onerously huge that only large organizations will have the resources to do so, meaning they are the only ones who are “standards-compliant” and they can slam any potential upstart competitors as not being “standards-compliant”. Not going to name names here, but I’ll just point out that simpler standards tend to drive out the more complex standards, thereby leaving the big companies high and dry with a product that nobody wants to buy. Has anybody here used the complex X.25 protocol lately? What, you’re using the simpler TCP/IP protocol instead? Exactly.

Which points out why rent-seeking behavior is invariably self-defeating when it comes to standards. Unlike compliance with the law, compliance with standards is generally voluntary. If a standard is too complex or too expensive to implement, people simply won't use it, and a “standard” that nobody uses — or that only customers of a few large corporations use — is hardly a real standard. And keeping the standards discussions secretive is hardly in the best interests of anybody also, it means that real problems with “standards” will be overlooked until the “standard” is actually published, at which point all the effort used to produce the “standard” is useless because nobody will create products that implement the “standard” (thus rendering it *not* a standard). Yet we still see this sort of rent-seeking behavior on the part of certain large corporations that seem convinced that it actually works. Inexplicable…

-ELG

Is there such a thing as "open source management"?

The Open Source advocates have been talking about how we could apply "open source management" to things other than open source projects. But the question is, does such a thing exist?And my answer is... no. Open Source projects which do not have strong leadership fail. Commercial projects which do not have strong leadership fail. There is no "open source management" in the end, because people are people and software is software. I've been in both situations -- Open Source and commercial -- and software development is software development, in the end.

Any successful software development project of any scale other than a one-off one-person utility has some sort of leadership hierarchy where various people are in charge of various parts of the project and where there's a mechanism to insure that only high-quality code that complies with the general architectural vision of the project makes it into the project. Projects which do not develop this sort of leadership hierarchy fail -- they devolve into squabbles, or their architecture degenerates into such a mess that the project can't be successfully completed without a total re-write from scratch and a reboot. And if the quality of the people who make it into positions of being in charge is low, the project fails too, because the code base turns into a mess of buffer overflows, memory leaks, and unreadable/unfixable spaghetti code and the Object Hierarchy From Heck (the one that has 20 different levels of inheritance to do the simplest tasks, each of which reaches into the internals of its parent class to tweak something or another that it shouldn't be tweaking).

Whether you call these people "managers", "gatekeepers", "leaders", whatever, software development is software development and leadership is leadership. If you have good leadership, your project succeeds. If you don't, it fails, or is so late to market and such a low-performing mess that you might as well don't bother. That's how it's always been, whether Open Source or commercial is irrelevant. The only real difference is that Open Source contributors won't put up with pure BS as is typical in huge corporations. But that sort of BS is not typical in the small startup environment either, which shares a lot in common with Open Source.

-ELG

And now for a photo of the Linux Penguin Command and Control Center...

Where have all the legends gone?

Back in the early days of the Linux industry, it was pretty easy to know everybody who was everybody. I remember going to the Linux Expo in North Carolina in May 1998, the last year it was run by Red Hat. It was in a small upstairs part of the Student Union of one of the local universities, if I recall correctly, and there were a small handful of vendors selling software and science fiction books. Ted Tso and Linus and Alan Cox and a few others were sitting on a hassock in the lobby outside the conference rooms talking about the ext3 filesystem and how to improve the block cache for the Linux 2.2 kernel, which was scheduled for release shortly, and Richard Stallman... ah, Richard Stallman. He was... RMS. Complete with his saint outfit -- sandals, robe, and halo. Everybody avoided him as if he had fleas in his beard or something. For all I know, he may very well have. Then there was the final keynote, in an auditorium-style classroom (or is that a classroom-style auditorium?), where Linus walks out onto the stage and announced, "I am Linus Torvalds, and I am your god." The audience applauded wildly. Because we were all geeks there, and we got the joke. Today... today, I suspect Linus would get boos from humorless boobs if he tried something like that. Things change, and sometimes not for the better.

Of the vendors who were there -- The Linux Mall (I have one of the very first plush penguins!), Linux Hardware Solutions, Enhanced Software Technologies, VA Linux, DEC, etc. -- very few are still around. That fall Linux was discovered by the big guys -- IBM, Oracle, and so forth -- and everything changed forever. The Atlanta Linux Showcase in October 1998 was a zoo. Comdex in November 1998 was even more of a zoo. The big guys were moving in, and the small cottage industry that was the Linux industry was about to change forever. A few of the little guys survived, but most didn't -- they didn't have the mentality to do what it took to go big, and going big -- going for venture capital, going for IPO, going for a big business model that would have competed with the big guys -- was the only way they could survive without running into a cashflow crunch or into a hard ceiling on what they could do. It simply was not in the skill set of the small cottage industry guys, that wasn't what they did, they ran a conservatively managed business out of a small office-warehouse somewhere, they didn't try to build a huge empire. Unfortunately, cottage industry could not compete. By the end of 2001, most of them were gone, memories the only thing left.

I know what happened to a lot of the people, they have largely moved into other industries or are serving as consultants, marketing managers, or similar for other businesses -- but of the technical people, it's interesting that most of us are still around somewhere hacking on Linux. As for me, I talked to the owner of Linux Hardware Solutions there at Linux Expo and decided to move to North Carolina to work for them. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble that produced enough connections that when LHS folded I could move on elsewhere in the Linux industry into a software engineering role that eventually resulted in my first team leadership role. I spent some time as a nomadic Linux penguin. Now I'm not so nomadic -- I've lived in the same apartment for close to six years, for cryin' out loud -- but sometimes I think back to those early days of the Linux industry, and wonder if we haven't lost something since then, some excitement, some energy, some sheer exuberance that made it a joy to get it up in the morning to create something new and unheard of that had never before existed in the world. Today we're all stuffy professionals, spending our time writing design documents and doing design reviews and managing engineering teams. Then... then we were changing the world. And we did.

-ELG

iPad insanity

I suppose that, like every other geek on the planet, I have to talk about the iPad. Okay. I'm underwhelmed. Good enough?

The iPad has two problems: 1) It's too big, I can't fit it into the side pouch of my laptop case or of my carry-on bag. 2) The 10" LCD uses too much power. My little Sony PRS-300 uses e-Ink, which uses power only when you're flipping from one page to the next and allows a 2-week nominal battery life (1 week in actual heavy use). The iPad nominally has a 10 hour battery life, but my experience with my Macbook Pro, which nominally has a 7 hour battery life, says that the iPad will actually have a 7 hour battery life in real-life use -- the nominal battery life is if you have the backlighting turned down to pretty much unreadable levels, and I'm not as young as I was 14 years ago when I was releasing my first Linux product, I can't read things that are so dim anymore.

So the iPad, to me, is like the Apple TV -- a so-so product that might at some point in the future become useful, but right now is a "so what?". I normally carry my Macbook Pro and my iPhone with me when I travel, and maybe the Sony Reader tucked in the side pocket of my laptop case if it's going to be a long trip just so that I don't run out of books to read (hauling that many paper books can get problematic). I just can't see the point of the iPad, at least for me. Maybe if it were an iTampon, a smaller handier more convenient device similar in size to the Kindle, I could "get it", but for now? Too big, too power hungry, too inconvenient.

--ELG

Convicted monopolist wants RealID for Internet

Yes indeed, Craig Mundie, head of Microsoft Research, wants a "driver's license" for the Internet.

This is the craziest thing I ever heard of. It's estimated that 20% of drivers here in the state of California don't have a driver's license. Despite that, they still drive, even though if they're caught it means their car would be impounded and they'd face possible jail time. But people who are here illegally, have had driving rights removed for legal reasons such as DWI, or whatever, a lot of them choose to drive anyhow despite those risks.

There are no traffic cops on the Internet to stop you and seize your computer if you don't have the proper Internet driver's license, so how the heck would any such thing be enforced? I mean, it's as if Craig Mundie never heard of the fact that Social Security cards, birth certificates, and driver's licenses are regularly forged.

There are a lot of things that can be done to improve Internet security, such as cutting off any ISP that refuses to deal with spam or DOS attacks emanating from its IP addresses. But this? This is a non-starter. Apparently Mr. Mundie still hasn't figured out that not everybody is a law-abiding Microsoftie like he is, and that people will violate the law if they feel that it is in their best interests to do so. I mean, all he has to do is look at his own employer, for cryin' out loud! Where there is a will, there is a way -- even if it requires forgery. If Mr. Mundie's proposal were adopted, the only people who would comply would be law-abiding people, which sort of renders the whole thing useless, don't you think?

-ELG