I cancelled the Kiosk project.
The Church isn't thrilled, but that's too darned bad.
What finally killed it wasn't the underpowered workstations or tech issues but an infantile attitude concerning web filtering.

The Pastor and the Church council decided that they wanted all Iraq war infomation blocked.

I said fine, your choice, but you'll have to pay someone to do it, I'm not going to provide that kind of service for free.
I had no problem blocking sexually explicit material, and had implimented that along with image blocking. But if they want to help folks pretend that people are not being killed every day they can carry the full burden.

I've been working on and off for months now on a Kiosk system for a local church.

In the last few weeks I've made fantastic forward progress, and in some areas, reverse progress in others.
I've got the filtering end and wireless issues cleared up (http://www.censornet.com/) was a breeze once I gave up on using just one Network card and went to two.

The problem now centers on the Kiosk itself, an NCR pentium II 233mhz with 3GB hard drive and 64MB RAM.
Yes it's a bantam weight machine but they got a fair number of them for free, and based on thin client objectives it really should be enough.

The problem I am having is the Kiosk part of the machine. I only want to provide access to Communicator and absolutely nothing else, there are solutions out on the web that use Navigator but Navigator does not work very well in the contemporary web page environment.

KDE3+ is supposed to have a Kiosk mode/features but documentation is poor and or non-existent.

I'll struggle on, but at some point I fear I'll have to punt and put up NT4WS with Communicator as the shell (yuck!!). Anybody have any ideas?

I haven't taken the time to post this -anywhere- until now.
AT&T and I parted ways in November and I'm busy searching for the next thing, this time the right thing.

I've worked for Big companies (AT&T, Corning) and small companies of 3 to 15.
For the most part they have all been messed up, for much the same reason.
I'm not supposed to be a follower, I was carved as an independent or a 'reluctant' leader.
So that's where I go now, whatever the next thing is...
It's going to be mine, not somebody else's.

One thing I've noticed in checking Journal's, Blogs, and discussion posts over the last few weeks...
People seem to have trouble forming complete thoughts through thier words.
There are a multitude of entries out there where I'm certain the writer was on the way to somewhere but didn't move the thoughts from head to keyboard.
They re-read what they have written filling in the blanks on the screen, we can't see it but they can.
It's harder than it looks without practice and I was never one to keep anything like a journal.
But I was nearly born talking and back in the dark ages before computers had screens, and occupied buildings I read Samuel Clemens and decided to write the way I talked.

Move it up, whatever's next is next, I'm looking forward to now.

So? Where did this thing go, not that it really matters much anymore.
Back on the original SunOne, SunDay conference I attended, it seemed exciting to Sun... and to myself, and to most of the people in attendence.

They(Sun), did announce this back in 1997. Sun Unveils Its First Java Processor

But back in 1996 they(Sun) were talking as if the chip was going to find it's way into every MoBo as a Java coprocessor.
of course they(Sun) also praised to Alpha Centuri that Java was small, portable, and fast.

Yawn, coulda woulda shoulda, Java just became another overbloated C.

From http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html

SCO's complaint, in all its brazen mendacity, is the last gasp of proprietary Unix.
The open-source community (and its allies) are more than competent to carry forward the Unix tradition they founded so many years ago.
We pray that all assertions of exclusive corporate ownership over this tradition be given a swift and merciful end.

This is in line with my slashdot post of January 13 2003, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50531&cid=5072012 , that of course was moderated down to a 1 (ok user moderation isn't perfect... Just felt I'd grumble a bit).
I'm not sure about the legal suit in Germany by a kernal code contributor against SCO, although on the surface it sounds reasonable, and I have been waiting for years for somebody to put some teeth in GPL enforcement.
I just hope it doesn't come back and bite us in the tush.

What do I think the outcome should be after all the dust has settled in the SCO vs. The World fiasco?

I know you didn't ask, but I've got to tell.

*nix should be freed. All IP rights should be shovelled into the public domain, where they belong. Unix has not been the creation of any one body, or even a small group of bodies.
In whole Unix (as it is today) was created by such a large number of authors, in such diverse circumstances, that no entity should be able to control the property of the whole.
Better yet, rather that simply shovel it into the PD, I think it should be certified as GPL.
Making the GPL an official decision would clear many IP issues that could take decades to resolve otherwise.

Found this : http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2003/tc20030523_2790_tc121.htm

Darl McBride, CEO of SCO Group had this exchange with BusinessWeek Online Technology editor Alex Salkever.

Q: What does this mean for the future of SCO and its involvement in the Linux community?
A: We would be happy to sit down and get a resolution on this so we can all live together peacefully. But when we file a legal claim and then someone does a denial-of-service attack on our Web site to try to shut us down, it creates concerns for us as to how can you work with this community.

Apparently this moron dosn't know the difference between the Linux Community and a bunch of script kiddies. In fact, I'm willing to bet he does, but simply never had any intent of working with the community, and this is his version of an excuse.

As Bruce Perens has intimated on a recent interview on Tech TV's 'The Screen Savers', there is every chance that SCO itself inserted this code into the Linux Community, and distributed it in it's own Distro (oddly pulled shortly after starting this mess). Even if they did not insert it, there's every chance they redistributed it under the GPL.

SCO, show us the code.
Then complete your spiral into irrelevance and go out of business.