<rant>I just read this article iPhone Coders Miffed Muzzled By Apple s NDA - Webmonkey. Steve Jobs. You can kiss my ass. There is nothing insanely great about Apple, who uses BSD under the hood of their OS for God's sake, and then has draconian and stupid NDA's like the iPhone app developer one. I hope Linux phones bury your iPhone. You can believe me when I say that will never ever use an iPhone. In fact... I'm thinking of selling my iPod classic (not that it has ever been sullied by any DRM iTunes) now too.

What an assualt on our freedoms to have something so potentially cool also be so horribly corrupted by control and fear. If you think your product is best then put your access to it where your mouth is. Open everything up so that it can be freely enjoyed.  Apple frustrates me so much, because the potential is so great. But the constant over-control and fear that is clearly there behind almost every product is just maddening to me. 

My father-in-law, a United Methodist pastor, was just appointed to a new church. He wanted to get wireless setup to work with his HP laptop that I helped him purchase a while back along with a wireless network that I setup in his house.

Of course, being a church pastor, he is always trying to make sure they don't have to spend a lot of money. I happened to have an extra Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 wireless router that I knew would be perfect for his church, especially if I loaded the excellent dd-wrt firmware replacement.

Then I'd be able to use all the amazing functionality that isn't provided with the default firmware from Buffalo. I'd be able to get in remotely with vpn to help him for anything if needed. I could setup local DNS for other network devices if needed. I could also attach securely via ssh if needed. Who wouldn't want to do that? For the life of me I can't figure out why Buffalo or any of the other vendors that use Linux on their routers don't allow people to use the full power of it. I guess it would make their other over priced versions of that equipment totally useless and obsolete if you could do everything a $400 dollar router does by paying $40.