Slashdot Mirror
From "Happy Hacking" to "Screw You"
tquid writes "Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."
Wasn't this was originally developed as an open source project at MIT? I imagine their original agreement with MIT probably precluded this very thing (locking it down). If not, I would be very disappointed with MIT.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So why not talk to Meraki and see if you can work something out rather than whining about it on your blog?
that seem to run many big companies these days .... personally, what I don't understand is why people can't see that's it's not only just bad engineering, but, in essence, inhumane mismanagement.
What did they expect? Seriously. The company is taking a loss on each box at $50. They were probably hoping to make some profit off of the software service side, but these hackers come along and provide the service for free on the same hardware. So Meraki goes and raises HW prices to overcome their losses and the hackers get whiny about the high cost of the new HW. So Meraki then does all it can do at that point, force the HW to only run the special software and try to get back into the market.
The hackers (especially those who put some kind of trust in "openness") are the ones who ruined the municipal network for everyone. They showed a clear lack of political savvy and it ended up turning what could have been a boon for both the city and Meraki into a political morass which ends up with no one at all happy.
I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.
In 2006 a spin-off company named Meraki was formed to develop and commercialize the MIT Roofnet technology. At the time I was on the board of the Vancouver Community Network and had been championing more development of wireless technology. We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. We decided that this cost was prohibitive for our purposes and the Merakis were shelved.
In September of 2007 I heard about a group of Vancouver community wifi enthusiasts who were getting together with the goal of setting up community wifi in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. I came out to a meeting and invited along some people whom I know are interested in any project that is about bridging the digital divide. The technology that was trumpeted at that meeting was Meraki. Since my previous brush with them they had changed their pricing structure and now they would let you run a free network (with free access to their dashboard) or a subscription (paid) network for 10% of your charges. We (the group, which came to call itself " FreeTheNet ") were unanimous that the free option was what we wanted to do and we quickly began building out a public network.
In October Meraki announced that they were changing their pricing model (yet again) and that they would be vastly raising the costs of their hardware (tripling, in fact). I remember going to their website to learn more about what they were doing and their new marketing slogan was something like "Build your business using exciting new technology where the rules of the game keep changing " How ironic; I wish I'd kept a screenshot of that! Under their new system there was no way that we could build out the network we envisioned. At roughly that point, one of our most experienced hackers said "forget Meraki", we're going to write our own firmware and dashboard and promptly started researching that. By late Novermber he was able to demostrate an open routing firmware called B.A.T.M.A.N. running with a mesh helper inside called Robin, that provided the same functionality as the Meraki firmware. This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging "happy hacking" when you logged into it via the console.
Over December and January he worked on adding features that we wanted to our network to have (and that we had previously been encouraging Meraki to build to improve their system - things like per node custom splash screen, enhancements to the dashboard to improve scalability, etc.) All of this was being tested on Meraki hardware because this is what we had spent our money on back when they supported and encouraged the kind of work we were doing.
Then in February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on t
Community and city-wide wifi projects everywhere are failing. In general they turned out to be more expensive, more cumbersome, and difficult to manage than originally promised. The county-wide wifi program where I lived stopped development last year because the vendor's pricing model proved unworkable (give away low-speed, sell high speed). Other communities are having similar problems.
To think that's *not* going to affect the cost of the remaining projects is just silly. Without the volume, the costs are going to go up for the projects that are still out there left undone.
The rules of the game are *ALWAYS* changing. That's life. We can tell you're upset, but quit your whining.
Get off my lawn.
The post above yours.
Their wiki article has no Controversy section. It needs one. I strongly suggest that someone who was abused by them edit the wiki article setting out the case. Given their hippie like idealistic looking web site, I would have to accuse them of hypocrisy at least.
Blame MIT... blame MIT...
I talked to Meraki about using their mesh network fro a resort I wanted to equip, but when I asked what would happen to our investment if they went belly up, they told me it the network hardware would be unusable if that happened. I said thanks but that's not acceptable.
Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash.
I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it.
Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
IANAL, but it sounds like time for them to find a nice CDN lawyer who would do some pro-bono work to see if they have grounds for legal action. It would seem to me tha a "Tortuous interference" claim might be valid; given the actions appear to interfere with the owners of the hardware's ability to provide services as a result of the update.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How does a EULA apply to hardware? Unless they're leasing the hardware there's no license involved.
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
until I read this article. My building is going condo and I am considering bringing up the concept of a building wide wireless network at our first board meeting. I am even toying with the idea of sharing with the neighboring buildings. The only commercial product I have been able to find is Meraki. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
Please forgive my English, it's Monday.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
No, you don't get it. They purchased a piece of equpipment, and the manufacturer has made the equipment no longer function the way it originaly did. They did this without permission, and in a way that makes it impossible for them to exersize their rights under the original licence of the firmware on the hardware. This has nothing to do with a website, it has to do with the routers.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
This decline was something people have foreseen for a while. There is a rapidly maturing collection of open source projects to create a real open source Meraki replacement (disclaimer: I am helping develop one of these).
ROBIN is an open source mesh firmware that can run on reflashed Meraki nodes (well, I don't think it's "allowed" by Meraki anymore, since they've changed their license agreement to forbid 3rd party firmware and have made it really difficult to access the bootloader).
Open-Mesh is the dashboard management service that ROBIN nodes are configured to use. The guy who develops this actually started working on this dashboard when Meraki was still Roofnet - compare the Open-Mesh dashboard to the Meraki dashboard, the similarity is obvious. Also, you can buy pre-flashed, fully featured ROBIN nodes from Open-Mesh.com for $50 each, the same price that Meraki sells their crippled "standard version" of their nodes.
OrangeMesh, is an open-source version of the dashboard being developed that will allow you to host your own dashboard server, completely freeing you from reliance on any third party. You can check out it's progress here.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
What's so hard about typing "poorest neighborhood" instead? That phrase seriously threw me when i read it.
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
If you want to use a loss leader, you really have to make sure you have a good follow-through that almost everyone who buys your loss-leader will want.
Who's child is going to do better in school, the one with home internet or the one who had to wait for terminal time at a public site away from home?
Bringing connectivity to an area increases economic activity in that area. By giving people a tool to communicate like internet access, they can start up everything from community-based discussion forums to small businesses online. They will think up uses for the connectivity no one else thought of first.
There is a big and growing Digital Divide in this country coming from unequal access to high speed networking. The price point for high speed is too high for low income people, low income people tend to live in under-serviced areas, and the whole "Screw-you-I-got-mine" attitude should have died with Reagan but it is still with us today like a carcinoma.
I've worked on a neighborhood wireless project to bring low price high speed connectivity to the poor and it is not easy to do. Hardware issues, stability issues, open source wifi drivers suck ass, NDISwrapper with wifi drivers is less stable than mercury fulminate at high heat but with all that, there are dedicated people working to try and improve the lot of others, something your precious Ayn Rand and her uber-klassen seem to blank on. Isn't there a McCain convention for you to be at?
Are you seriously suggesting that improved communications technology *wouldn't* improve the local economy? Did you miss the last 100 years of human existence?
If these people were starving in the street you're right, soup kitchens would be more useful. But that's not the case here -- the intent is to improve the local economy to be on-par with the rest of the nation. The people this project is intended to help aren't homeless, and many aren't even unemployed, they're just poor.
Having things like, the ability to use their Internet connection to be a work-at-home call-center rep, cheaper residential telephone service, the ability to easily search for jobs outside their immediate geographic area, or even just general access to the web and email, could all make practical improvements in the lives people who did not previously have access to cheap, moderate-speed Internet services.
I'll grant you that the goal of the do-gooders was a little ephemeral compared to giving the poor food, but if your goal is sustainable improvement of the lives of the economically downtrodden, you need to do more than simply give them something to eat. Also, it's pretty damn insulting to a poor person to imply that their biggest problem is putting food on the table. Maybe their biggest problem, now that they've solved the food and housing issue, is helping their kids to a better life. You know what might help with that? Access to a computer and the internet at home.
One of the most difficult barriers to entry for folks from low-income backgrounds trying to gain some upward mobility is the lack of access to technological services/devices that those of us raised in a middle-class environment consider basic tools of life. How can you move from slinging burgers or picking strawberries (definitive low class jobs) to secretarial or temp office work (entry level middle class jobs) if you don't have a computer, or access to the internet, or excel, or MS word, etc? These guys were setting out to help bridge the "digital divide" -- explicitly trying to provide access to the online resources the middle and upper classes have to people who don't normally have access to them.
The poor have a variety of needs, don't patronize them by assuming the only need you see is the only need they have.
Meraki holds all the cards. They control the firmware, and they've acted in a fairly predatory manner here.
They'll ask "why should we let you?" And they'll be (from their POV) right. Why SHOULD they let them. They're not making money off it. They don't give a shit.
If you want to use their hardware at all, you have to give (and keep giving) them money. Either directly in payments, or indirectly by serving adds on their free tier.
Fuck that noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
summary I have seen on /. to date!"
"Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."I guess our beloved Cmd Taco has bever heard of the basic Who, What, Where, When of writing an article.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Community Wireless Communications is working on its second city-wide wifi project, the first being a major success in Lawrence, Kansas.
Step 2 is getting people to donate old wireless devices and/or buy eepcs or XOs.
Step 3 is always profit, but this time, it's profit for the folks in the neighborhood.
I understand your confusion since step 2 is often listed as "???"
In this case, this country would be Canada. I don't recall a Prime Minister Reagan. And I'm not sure our Digital Divide is that bad. Unless you live in a shack in the far north, most people have similar access for similar prices as someone who lives in downtown Toronto. If you do live in that shack, you'll still have the access, but you'll be looking at about twice the cost. Still, not bad, really, when you consider how large the country is and how few people we have.
Last 100 years? Hell, pretty much the entirety of human history supports that statement. As an example, why did countries like Spain, England, France, the Netherlands and so on develop world empires when they did? Shipbuilding improvements and good access to the Atlantic. That is, better communications. Oh yes, guns and finance and stuff helped, but if that were the case, why didn't any big central European powers get any world empires at the time?
Communications, trade and prosperity are all very closely linked.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Did anyone read TFA?
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.
You're replying to the wrong news article. You'll need to go back one or two to find the one about Google ads within ads :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Anyone who went to school back 20 years ago would remember that the kids who had a complete home encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, biographies on famous historical people, or had parents who were members of book clubs, found it much easier to write essays or coursework assignments and get good grades than any kid who did not. If you were in luck, you might have a friend or neighbour who had relevant literature. You could try going with an adult to the library (which was probably on the other side of town and only opened late one evening), but you were still taking the chance that someone else had already been there and already taken out the related books. Another chance was a second hand bookstore or the magazine racks of the local shop. Otherwise, you had exhausted all your options. Even the local bookstore would take two weeks to have an order come through.
Even if it weren't a school project or coursework, if you were a kid curious about some piece of technology, you would be lucky if one of the documentary series had an article on that item, or if you found a science magazine in the local shop.
These days, anyone can do a Google search, look for online published research papers, visit online magazine articles, look at online secondhand bookstores or Amazon. All before even having to leave home. That is, if you do have a home computer, internet connection and are familiar with the various applications (desktop, login process, web browser, search engines, touch typing).
That is, if your family can afford a computer and internet access. Many employers complain that their applicants don't have basic computer literacy skills: knowing how connect a system together, keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail, database packages (Maybe because anyone who does have those skills can find a better job, but it's sad that people don't already have those skills in the first place).
Just by having a computer with internet access is going to allow you to learn many more basic skills in your own time, as well as keep in touch with the rest of the community (forums, job search pages, community college courses).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And 'tow the line', 'queue xxxx'...
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Indeed. I've seen most of those atrocious examples of stupidity as well. Describing modern car construction techniques as 'monocot' made me laugh. 'Per say' really gets under my skin for some reason. I need to start a wiki where people can add abuses they've seen. Humm.....
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Yeah, but what if you're rilly rilly good at spelling? I guess the dictionary couldn't hurt.
It's always interesting to see people criticize other's for hurdles that they've already surpassed in life. If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
The article suggests that a Meraki software upgrade has made it impossible to reflash them.
/storage/config.local file with whatever you want; in my case: /storage/config.local"
Actually, you can still easily make them revert to an earlier version which can be reflashed.
As described here:
http://robin.forumup.it/about99-15-robin.html
"you can ssh into the Meraki and create edit the
Code:
echo "firmware.mips.version 6-9163" >
And they'll update themselves to an earlier version.
The founders of Meraki have made huge contributions to open source software and it is good to see that others are taking advantage of their great work and making further improvements.
I'm in Canada though I used American references speaking to an American audience who would probably not get a Mulroney reference but would get a Reagan reference, as would everyone in Canada as well. The Digital Divide is a big problem in both Canada and the US and a $50 a month price point is too high for a lot of people. Also, there are a lot of places within an hour's drive of the city where I'm at who are dialup access only - no other choice.
I like the valley girl spelling: "Rully, rully kewl. Gag me with a backhoe!"
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This has nothing to do with helping out poor people. The only other businesses in the area that would benefit from connectivity would be all the pot/seed dealers.
If you can afford a condo for half a million, you can pay your internet bill. Unfortunately, we have lots of entitlement b!tches here.
Sorry dude, looks like you posted to the wrong discussion.
Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I remember the pre-internet days, and what was neat was that just before the internet-at-home explosion, there were some encyclopedias on computer disk. We owned a computer, and I used the e-ncyclopedia for a lot of research without having to go to the library. Before that, I had to fend for myself at the library like everyone else (and did lose out on occasion).
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
This is what I thought. Although the author of the article mentioned that they couldn't find an alternative, I would certainly be curious to see if anyone can provide a working alternative, commercial or otherwise. I am sure while 'Meraki' might be larger arse-holes than g**tse.cx, I am sure they would change their approach if there was good competition.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Blame MIT... blame MIT... ... to the tune of Blame Canada.
;-)
(Hey, someone had to post it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
/.. It's the best, and possibly the only effective, way to increase your vocabulary and improve your spelling. If you are well-read there are many, many other benefits, such as actually knowing what you are talking about. These benefits aren't just good things to have, they are necessary to be an educated person, which most people on places like /. purport to be. Despite the wealth of information around us, I get the impression people, as a whole, are becoming more ignorant, not less, and the spelling skills of the average person seem to show it.
Well, my post is an implicit suggestion to read more, which is the best help there is. The only real way to help your spelling is to read books. I read one or two books a month on a slow month, sometimes a couple a week, including literature, science, math, politics, and plenty of fun stuff too, despite the fact that I spend time at places like
While some people just don't have brains that adapt well to good spelling*, almost everyone will benefit from actually reading well-written material, especially material that was written fifty or more years ago. Language is very precise and if you misuse it, you are prone to being misunderstood. Effective communication requires proper use of the tools, namely language.
* One of the most well-read persons, and possibly the smartest person, I've ever met spells like a remedial fourth-grader, but people like him are uncommon, and he specifically blames his lack of ability to not being taught phonics as a kid.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It's "Gag me with a spoon"... err.. you insensitive clod...
It was like, totally "Gag me with a backhoe", cause, like spoons were so last week! OMG! Seriously, there seems to have been at least some collective consciousness re: the backhoe - google it; it isn't just me. It was either in a song or a joke that floated around back in the 'dark times'.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
A little one-sided there, methinks. After all, the money you would have given them would still work just fine. This business deserves to fail in the marketplace.
Breakfast served all day!
I have the opposite problem to this "Tiller's Law": I read way more than I converse, so quite often pronounce words incorrectly! I was going to give examples but it's just too embarrassing. If I'm talking to someone I always know I've done this because their face freezes and then smile ever so slightly.
As a side-note to this off-topic post, interesting that you mention books written 50+ years ago as the most worthwhile. In my experience this is largely true and my mind floods with cynical reasons why this may be so.
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then having a bad product is what makes your business plan bad, not having a bad strategy.
Nobody in his right mind would buy network equipment where the vendor has demonstrated willingness to push a firmware update without customer permission -- period. Much less if they claim that this allows them to unilaterally change the license and lock the customer out of his own equipment. Granted, in the razor blade model, you have a kind of proprietary feeling about all those razors you lost money in, but you can't go fishing through people's medicine cabinets without people concluding you're dangerously off your rocker.
I can understand how it happens. There are two reasons that businesses fail. They either run out of cash, or somebody with a note or something steps in and pulls the plug (which seldom happens if the cash situation is healthy and on track). I've seen plenty of companies that had a reasonably good product with a plausible strategy, but they just had a fatal cash hiccup; either outgo that was a bit faster than anticipated, or incoming that was a little of schedule.
It's like somebody who ingests poison in a murder mystery; after a while, your recognize that tic as the first of what will eventually become agonizing death throes. The problem with a start up even trying to reposition its products that all their existing customers who bought the old story, and now are unlikely to buy from you ever again. Anybody with any sense knows its easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one, so it probably means one of two things: either they suddenly tripped over a pile of cash that's going to allow them to bootstrap a new business plan, or they've run out of cash to make the old one work. Everybody knows you don't make much money off of early adopters, but you can't use your privileged position with them to mess with their systems, but it doesn't mean you can afford to alienate them unless your original business plan is a total write-off.
Mind you I'm just talking about drastic repositioning of the products that leave customer's future plans messed up. I'm not talking about trying to extort new business out of your customers by exploiting your access to their property. That's either extremely desperate, or extremely, sleazily stupid. I don't know anything about this company, but desperate is much more common than utterly sleazy, although sometimes they go hand in hand.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's interesting. I was extremely good at spelling from reading books a lot. However, i did not know how to pronounce anything. My brothers laughed for years because i pronounced ogre as og-Ree. Granted, i was 6 years old reading Piers Anthony novels. After speech therapy (i was autistic) and learning phonics (which took me decades), my spelling went out the door. :) Thank god for spell check!
Ah, referencing this...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
"gold dablooms"
I wasn't listening 100% carefully, but I think something very close to this pronunciation was used in "Treasure Planet" to give it a "spacey" feel. Yes, blame Disney.
Yeah, but don't 85% of Canadians live within 50 miles of the southern border?
This is why I never feel comfortable with 'updates', unless I've vetted them first.
FTA and the linked blog, it appears the firmware update was pushed by the manufacturer, therefore didn't have to happen. I'm not blaming the people affected here as in principle, you may want to receive security updates etc. as a matter of course.
But personally I'm finding more and more that 'updates' often regress the performance of a product due to unnecessary flash new features and political modifications you'd never want or benefit from (such as this).
If the affected users had automatic updates turned off would they be able to legally continue as they were? Would reversing the upgrade somehow implicate them? Is there a legal issue at all?
So yeah, I like to avoid updates whenever I can. That's why I'm still running Win 98 First Edition.
(j/k about Windows 98)
One of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada and has tens of thousands of junkies is climate: one can survive most weather most of the year. Another is its status as Terminal City (no pun, really), since if you keep going west (or south) you wind up there. It's a regional sink, for British Columbia (and the prairies too), a vast vast area.
The sudden surge in crystal meth use (speed, to you old timers) across the country contributes hugely to the problem. Recently I was travelling through a small town called Cache Creek, and chatting with a young clerk about life there. She complained "it's ruined... all my friends are getting into meth and crack or other stuff like "K" and they're whacked out all the time and lying, they just aren't friends anymore, it's just in the last five years, the place sucks now." I checked in other small towns and it's happening there, too. Many of these partiers go too far, fall too low, run off and they wind up junkies in Vancouver.
But I have to say I didn't used to feel any threat there when it was mainly a heroin-and-rice-wine kind of mess. Now with speed and crack all over the place it's much more aggressive, the desperation's dangerous.
It was always the case that parking your car down there was just a question of when, not if, you got a broken window for your loose change.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps the Dashboard software is the critical element and OpenWRT does not have a multi-node administration feature.
It sounds like the group in the article has an open source alternative already. Perhaps they just need to adapt to it the linksys hardware? I'd think having the code in hand for a project like OpenWRT would make that massively easier. All the hooks are nicely exposed in OpenWRT. It is one of the most impressive firmware replacement projects out there.
I often have that problem myself - though as often as not, it turns out that conversational partners don't know the words
Then he should have been more carefull about the article he posted to. I can't be expected to magically know every story on everyone's slashdot that they could be responding to. Especially with a silly title like that comment has.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
No need to start your own - not an open wiki, but most abuses are already here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And "wahla", "waa la", "valar" etc (for "voila"). I've even seen it spelled that way by supposedly professional journalists.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Actually, almost every english word is spelled the way is was pronounced. Try on words like knight and through and food. (think two vowels go walking on that last one...)
Language changes, standardized spelling can't keep up.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...?
These are all the possessive plural ("the fault of the hackers"), so they need a trailing apostrophe. Is it the hackers' fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it this hacker's fault that he or she finds grammar has rules hard? It's tough that English is complicated, but its contraction and possessive rules aren't so hard, they just overload the apostrophe and 's'. Try this guide, cheers.=S
YES! That was a great example I couldn't think of. The person who said "valar" must have been from Bahstahn... or maybe is a Tolkien fan.
;-)
And for those of you that are unfamiliar with the term, "voila" is French for "Ta da!" (at least according to "The Simpsons").
Not to be confused with "voici" which is French for "Check me out!"
As they say in Latin, "E Pluribus Uranium"
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Somehow, Spanish has managed to solve the problem. It's a completely phonetic language with no exceptions. I'd really like to know how that came about.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Hmmm. It could be worse. They could have said, "Peace is of hate."
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I used to have that problem too. I think every young reader does.
/. insists on running between allowing comments? Sorry /., I'm not some kind of retard, it's possible for me to read a comment and compose a thoughtful response in less than 120 seconds. 60 seconds would make so much more sense.)
(Is it just me or do a lot of people waste an awful lot of time waiting for the stupid two-minute timer that
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There is nothing in the GPL or any open source license I know of that says you get access to the hardware. The GPL says nothing about the hardware. If they weren't strictly following the GPL they can get sued. If they didn't provide a written offer to provide the source code they are in violation. I didn't read about any violations in the article. Keep in mind that just because the system uses GPL binaries doesn't mean they can't run proprietary stuff on the system. You can run proprietary code on your Linux box at home can't you?
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
Books of a like quality written today must complete with the slew of blogs, mindless novels, and other "pulp media" that, well, doesn't last 50 years.
Well, that and elitism is a self-fulfilling perspective.
Yeah, i detest it as well. Sometimes being slow is a blessing.
Some time with google gave some hints. I bet a linguist could enlighten you better, But the long and short of it seems to be that Spanish spelling keeps changing to match the pronunciation, where the middle english (pre 1600AD!!!) spellings have been kept.
Do note that ~1600AD is when England rose to prominence while Spain declined. I bet this is the root cause of the difference.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
"Queue" is a correct and acceptable variation of "cue". It is not usually found in US English, however, so maybe this is why you think it's wrong.
You may also see it meaning "to line up for" as in "queue up for", again usually in British English (and in places like Australia that were/are part of the British Empire).
i am a soviet space shuttle
This platform is based on el-cheapo 802.11 b/g which is a highly competitive, low margin market.
Basically, all the HW is in the ASICs, and the ASICs and reference SW are not open. In your example, a couple of grad students will do the work of an experienced PCB designer, which in this case will probably be OK since they will just be copying the reference design layout and handing it off to the PCB fab house.
Unfortunately, the only way to get the chips is to deal directly with the manufacturer. If you ever want to get any chips, you will need to convince the chip company that you are worth their bother. They would rather push all their chips to their top 10 customers, which are companies like Cisco, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, etc. At low volume, all you represent is one more company that they have to spend money supporting.
If they decide to deal with you, you will get fed their standard reference drivers. Since this project is something special, you may need register maps, the API to customize the reference drivers, and more support to get up to speed. You are now acting like a key customer instead of yet another OEM slapping some plastic around a reference design.
I think that it would be tough to do a better job making cheap HW than some overseas OEM, and that's not the real problem anyway. The real trick is getting the Chips and SW you will need from the chip manufacturer when you are attempting to take control of things that they prefer to control. Basically, you are at odds with their sales and marketing strategy, and you do not offer large volume.
Only a fool is more interested in a person's spelling than in their communication. If you understand, you understand. All of us knew more words than we could spell at some point of our lives.
The practical reason being that-- especially in extreme cases-- misspelling and misuse of words can interrupt the flow of reading, as the reader "hangs" for a moment, having to evaluate the misspelling and re-integrate the proper meaning into the thought. Also, it can call undue attention to the minor point of the misuse, voluntarily or involuntarily overshadowing the actual content. Perhaps it's a petty reaction, but for a person who is sensitive to such problems, it can interfere nonetheless.
Personally, and more ideologically, I see it like this (Actually, this is more my rant against txt-speakers who can't manage to spell words like "you", but it applies here...): We're on the Internet. The potential is heaped high for a person to display the finest points of their character. It is a place beyond all the useless standards of race, physical appearance, visible wealth or poverty... you can even smell as bad as I do right now and be regarded with equal standing. The only thing keeping a person's ideas from being evaluated on the equitable grounds is their expression of those ideas. (Granted, people writing in a second language have a setback, but I'll overlook that.) In a forum like this, people even have the time to compose and check their writing before they submit. A criticism or ribbing for a reasonable and common grammar problem should be taken in stride, and learned from. On the Internet, there's nothing between you and not being an idiot... except a little diligence, perhaps. The tolerance train has to stop somewhere, and the expression of someone's ideas, when that person has such a favorable platform, is a perfectly understandable place.
It's always interesting to see people criticize other's for hurdles that they've already surpassed in life. If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
That's what criticism is. It's the "tough love" kind of help (or at least as "tough" as getting harangued on the Internet can be).
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Violin!
Huh?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
> "Queue" is a correct and acceptable variation of "cue".
> It is not usually found in US English, however, so maybe this is why you think it's wrong.
no, it's not. 'cue' and 'queue' are two completely different words.
> You may also see it meaning "to line up for" as in "queue up for", again usually
> in British English (and in places like Australia that were/are part of the British Empire).
yes, that's the meaning of 'queue'. it's used in US English too, possibly after transformation into weird american spelling. IIRC, i've seen some americans spell it as 'que' - not sure if that's standard USian or if it's a mis-spelling even in the US. in geek circles, the British spelling seems to be common.
'cue', on the other hand, refers to a prompt or reminder (as in an actor's cue), or sometimes a clue, or even a 'cue stick' (as in pool or billiards).
Despite the wealth of information around us, I get the impression people, as a whole, are becoming more ignorant, not less, and the spelling skills of the average person seem to show it.
I think the big problem-- perhaps more generally speaking to "information" as opposed to "education"-- is that there's so much readily available "junk" information. Even avoiding elitist "high culture/low culture" separation and speaking practically, there's a heaping feed of information readily available to us every day, jumping, flashing, and disguised as IMPORTANT! to our evolutionarily-lagged brain parts, a large part of which has no long-term or formative value at all.
There could also be something to be said for the effects of an advanced society that can provide the necessities of life to even its least motivated members, allowing practiced ignorance to prosper as well or better than practiced intelligence. Although it doesn't lead directly to an ignorance-loving culture, such provision certainly allows cultures that celebrate the shiftless and ignorant over the studious and intelligent to grow. It's like the middle/high school problem-- with no real challenges, the metrics a person is judged by can become warped to weight toward useless or harmful traits.
(Okay, reality check: I'm not sure if this last perception is just a trend gathered from a rose-tinted view of a yesteryear that was just as dumb as today... I'm talking out my ass, sans actual statistics, so take with salt as necessary.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Man, I wish I had the mod points, but hopefully others will step in and give them to you.
I grew up in a mill town in Connecticut, and my family was not very wealthy -- they never owned a home, and because my parents had decided early on to put me through college, they decided to forego home ownership indefinitely because (at that time) colleges considered home equity when deciding who got financial aid, and how much.
The town library was converted from an old mansion, previously owned by one of the textile mill owners. It wasn't large, and so I frequently had issues finding sufficient resources to write papers or do adequate research for a project. Typically, I'd go to neighboring towns to get superior research materials from their superior libraries; sometimes, I'd go to Hartford, because no other town had what I needed. I was in constant competition with my other classmates, and with students at other grammar- and high schools. In at least one case, a book I wanted to use as a source went missing for over a year.
For a kid in all honors classes, it was simply understood and expected that this was "the way things were," and if I wanted good grades, I had to be fast and I had to be ruthless. But it definitely was not the way I preferred to work. The system was definitely unfair. Not every kid had parents willing to drive them two towns over to go look up some obscure book that our own library didn't have. And my parents were far better off than many of those living in my town, because my dad had a (relatively) good job working for Pratt and Whitney.
If the Internet and the Web had existed then as they do now, I imagine some of that drudgery would have been alleviated, and far less fuel would have been burned. (I am reminded of one instance where a reference librarian got testy with me on the phone because I asked if her library had a resource -- she got on my case because she thought I was trying to get her to do my research for me. "No, ma'am, I just don't want to ask my father to drive me there this late at night unless you have what I need.") I could have focused more on the subject matter and less on doing the leg work.
So yeah, I look at what these kind-hearted hackers are trying to do for a poor community, and think it's wonderful. Just because you have enough food on your plate and a roof over your head doesn't mean you have everything you need to be successful. My parents were stingy -- they didn't splurge on luxuries like cable TV or a CompuServe subscription. Today, a cable subscription may be necessary for you to have credibly usable network access, or else you'll be stuck in the slow lane with dial-up. Today, you need an ISP subscription if you want to have any sort of home network access. Otherwise, you're stuck going to the local library -- assuming that your library has computers with Internet access. Even so, you then have to deal with long wait times for a limited resource, along with any network filtering barriers. Any kind of low-cost or no-cost network access for poor students and their families would be a huge help.
Incidentally, all the textile mills where I grew up were all shut down by the time I got to college. Most of those mills have either sat unused, gutted, or they've been converted into apartments and condos. I'm so glad I was able to move away and make something of myself... there were others who never made it, for whatever reason. My parents sacrificed a lot to give me an education and make a better life for myself, but many more either didn't have the resources to begin with, or refused to make those sacrifices. A project such as described in TFA would have helped a lot of kids where I grew up.
Because they've altered computer equipment that they didn't own, which could be a felony in some places.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's funny, as the colloquial definition of criticism has moved away from 'critique' the less critiquing actually seems to be going on. I attribute it to the masses using words that their mental abilities cannot quite grasp. I wonder if anybody has studied the disintegration of words with specific, but broad meanings, i.e., interpretable as both positive or negative, into the colloquial usage, which tends to be only negative?
I wonder though, how do you tell if someone is writing in a second language? While English is my second language, i'm pretty sure that my syntax, grammar, and punctuation mistakes can't be blamed on that :)
Oh, and believe me, we all know you stink, and therefore give your arguments no credence. ;P
Our schooling system doesn't help, we cram words and ideas that are disconnected from reality into the young minds of tomorrow and then wonder why they don't understand.
It's the whole calculator debacle on a societal level.
Perhaps it's just different strokes for different folks. I could say that i was rather proud of the fact that i never used a calculator all the way through to university. I was able to solve complex equations in my head. On the other side of the coin, i never actually could figure out how to use a calculator. Took me two decades to figure out analog clocks as well :)
I'm sure we're coming to a convergence point where the brains of society and the brawn of society will meld into one. Until then, the brains are always going to be the smaller population.
"Somehow, Spanish has managed to solve the problem."
I claim bullshit on this. That was Juan Ramón Jimenez's dream (1956 literature Nobel Prize), but we are not quite there.
While it's true you know for certain how to pronounce a word as soon as you see it written down, the reverse it's not: you can't always know how to write a word you heared (as it was the point from the previous poster): 'baca' and 'vaca' sound exactly the same as would do 'hueso' and 'ueso' (if the latter existed, which is not). You would write (relevant word remarked) "*tu* madre" but "*tú* eres", again same sound, different graphs.
Even then, there is an exception on the "phonetic rule": letter "x" changed its sound somewhere in between XVI and XVII centuries (I don't know when), so you have some "oldish" proper nouns written down with "x" (like México, Texas or Xavier) that are to be pronounced as "Méjico", "Tejas" or "Javier" instead (well, I don't know but these three exceptions).
"I'd really like to know how that came about."
Not too difficult: Spanish is a latin-based language, and the cute symbols you use to write down ideas are not called "latin alphabet" for nothing.
The phonetic problems come from the fact that there are "too many letters". Letter "b" and "v" became the same sound about the XVII century; letter "h" lost its sound (it's mute) about a century before. There are letters that have different sounds depending on context ("c" on "casa" sounds like "k"ilo, while on "cerilla" it sounds like in "c"entennial). To make things worse, two letters may overlap sounds ("z" always sounds like "c" on "cerilla", while "c" may sound different. Again, "j" has always a hard sound, non-existant in English -more or less like "aghhh" -listen to a mexican saying his country's name; remember that "x" became "j" afterwards), while "g" may sound like previous "j" i.e.: "gemido" or softer like in "guapo", more or less like "gas"). Then you have so-called diacritic rules about accents ('tu' is possesive while "tú" is a pronoun, but they both just sound the same).
And then, some syntactic sugar regarding irregular verbs (while past participle from "comer" -"to eat" is regular and comes as "comido", "poner" -"to put" is irregular and its participle forms as "puesto" instead of "ponido").
Of course every English-spoken people would find verbal forms quite cumbersome (six diferent persons -three singular and three plural, five modes and about four tenses per each mode, with simple and complex ways all of them... oh! and three regular conjugations depending on the verb ending on -ar, -er or -ir, and a plethora of irregular and defective verbs); not as bad as German, but quite there.
Yes, I'm Spanish.
(Is it just me or do a lot of people waste an awful lot of time waiting for the stupid two-minute timer that /. insists on running between allowing comments? Sorry /., I'm not some kind of retard, it's possible for me to read a comment and compose a thoughtful response in less than 120 seconds. 60 seconds would make so much more sense.)
Actually I think the delay has more to do with saving resources, bandwidth and storage. Those who don't have a paid subscription have the delay between posts but I don't think those who have paid do.
FalconShould there be a Law?
up
Neither can definitions.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Agreed, the meaning of the message is more important than the manner in which it was delivered.
WTF? Which dictionary are you getting that from?
... and then they built the supercollider.
"* One of the most well-read persons, and possibly the smartest person, I've ever met spells like a remedial fourth-grader, but people like him are uncommon, and he specifically blames his lack of ability to not being taught phonics as a kid. " ---- that describes me to a "tea"
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
The cycle of gentrification is underway, with artists/creative types moving there (and doing things like rolling out a wimax network), and people renovating properties.
If you think gentrification in Vancouver is bad wait until the 2010 Olympics. I've heard there are groups in Vancouver who are trying to get the city to do what the government in Greece did, once the Olympics there ended a lottery for the housing was held for the low income.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They, Meraki, changed the hardware's firmware without permission.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Perhaps some mod had a little trouble parsing it, just like I did:
"Wiki? What wiki?" I'm guessing wikipedia, but that's just guessing. GP doesn't indicate.
Because I'm in a nitpicking mood:
voila is French for "There it is" or literally "See There"
voici is French for "Here it is" or literally "See Here"
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
: 'baca' and 'vaca' sound exactly the same as would
Well, maybe they sound the same to you, but the first thing they teach us in schools in Mexico is that B is called "B-labial" (lip-based B) while V is the "V-laviodental" (lip+teeth based V). As such, the difference between the B and the V is that when pronouoncing the later you put your lower lip slightly between your teeth (as with doing the sound of an F).
Now, in the case of Spanish from Spain (as oposed to Spanish from Mexico and other Latin countries) you do have a specific difference in the S, C and Z sound. For us, that difference is what makes your accent sound funny. However, in Spanish from Mexico, is difficult to know if a word has S or C, like "Hacer", you in Spain pronounce something like "Hafer", which is the root of the word, but in Mexico, the pronunciation would be similar to "haser".
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What utter crap - come back when you've learned to speak English.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Yeah, too many open tabs... Sorry.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Thanks for all the detail. I was deliberately being silly, since I took a year of French in high school I do know the difference. I guess it's a dangerous combination, being a spelling/grammar nazi but always wanting to have fun, and then
vee-oh-lah
I look like an idiot too.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Because time is an excellent filter. There were tons of horrible books written 50+ years ago, but nobody remembers them. 99% of everything is garbage - you're seeing the 1% that was worthwhile.
Looking back on the books of the 90s in 2040 you'll have the same impression that it was a golden age of literacy.
What utter crap -- come back when you've learned not to insult people you disagree with.
i am a soviet space shuttle
It's not a disagreement - it's just plain facts. 'Cue' and 'queue' are totally different words, fucktard.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
totally missed the point. The part that they cannot install the different firmware is the proprietary part that is based on the open source MIT work, isn't it? That's the part they should create themselves from the MIT open source part if they don't want to be locked into someone else's proprietary model.