Understandable that the GPL goggles would render your internet vision totally useless.
You are right about many slashdotters, but not all. Some of us are older geeks with families and jobs, and yes brains as well:-)
This is not unlike Juno, FreeDSL, FreePC, any free email, free dial up internet, free[anything].
The real issue with NameZero is ownership. Say you have asite that you toiled to build, advertize and maintain. It becomes a success, only to discover that they took it back from you and capitalized on your blood, sweat and tears? Not nice is it?
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine who had a great idea for a web site. He was web illeterate (only a user) and gave the job to someone, who turned out to be a crook. That crook made himself the contact for the domain (technical, zone, admin, billing) although the registrant is still my friend's company). The crook asked for an exorbitant amount of money or he will pull the site down. When my friend refused to pay, he shut down the site and disappeared (even fled to another country!). Network Solutions, being the dinosaur they are, are not reacting at all to change the details on the domain to allow a different hosting company,...etc....etc. ad nauseum! See what can happen?
You become a pawn in the direct market game. Not new, and not surprising. You just can't get something for nothing, not now, not ever.
I have used Free dialup ISPs in Canada. I have a friend and a relative using them in USA. They are great! You get a lot for nothing! I wish they are available here in the Middle East and we do not have to pay thru the nose!
I am not on the net when I blink. How do I give my eyelids an IP address?
Of course there is a solution! Use the Embedded Eye Lid DHCP (EEL-DHCP). It only supports DHCP, so you cannot run a mail/web server of it, but until we release Full Embedded Eye Lid Server (FEELS) it should do the job.
By the way, what do you do when you sleep? Brain implants is the answer!
No one has mentioned this at all so far, and it has been overnight (overhere!).
A company called Silicon Film makes a digital back that fits many pro-ish SLRs. The resolution is not the best, but think about all the lenses and features that you can use on an SLR!
They sell an all in one package that consists of he back, a storage "container" and something that you can download the images to, while you are on the go! Very interesting.
Now make it the same resolution as the Nikon CoolPix 990 and you have a winner!
Sorry, but the newer pro-sumer digital cameras (e.g. Nikon CoolPix 990 and Sony DSC-F505) are very advanced and flexible in terms of exposure control, and all the things you talk about.
Also the web is much more prevalent these days than 3 years ago.
I used to own high end 35mm SLRs, and enjoyed it (I used to own a "pro" Nikon F2A, then a Minolta Maxxum), and I am thinking of doing only digital now. There are no processing cost, no time to wait, can retouche and manipulate as much as I like, can e-mail/publish on web,...etc.
Maybe they will not totally replace file now, but they will eventually (soon!)
Well, I happen to be researching the same subject these days.
I was about to buy the Nikon CoolPix 950, but the 990 came out, and it is far better (more resolution, USB connection and more).
That said, the 950 is a bargain these days with 100$US rebate (for those in the USA, here in Saudi Arabia, it just hit the shelf for 4,700 SR ~ 1,250$US for the older 950!).
The Sony DSC-F505 is also a super camera, with perhaps the best lens (Carl Zeiss) you can get for a ~ 1,000$ price range.
You can read extensive reviews of all the above at Phil Askey's wonderful Digital Photography Review web site. You will find a photo gallery of sample pictures for each camera.
Another way of doing it, if you also want a camcorder, is to get one of the new Digital Video camcorder (or Sony's Digital8 format) and a FireWire/IEEE1364 card. The quality is lower than the Nikon above, but still acceptable for most web publishing.
Well, this is not the forum to discuss religion, nor to discuss Islam, however, I have to disagree with you on wealth being a detriment in Islam.
It is more of a social responsibility, and like many things in life (technology, speech,...etc.), used correctly, can be a blessing. Misuse it (as often is the case) and it becomes a curse.
Yes, I agree that the DNS is a mess. There should not be global.net/.com/.org. Or if they remain (just for backward compatibility with the status quo), then no new top level domains should be created.
My own personal domain is baheyeldin.com, while it should have been a.org, since it is not commercial. However, I have to explain to people what.org is and spell it out for them. That is why I decided it should be a.com.
Moreover, some site just use.net as Network suffix (e.g. islamweb.net,....etc.), even though they are not ISPs. Everyone puts their pwn interpretation.
I hate it when I listen to ICANN adding more.web,.firm,.shop,.store,...etc. These are so confusing. What is the difference between a firm and a company (.com) for us non-Americans? How is.web different from.net? What is the friggin difference between.shop and.store?
I think one solution (as painful and incomplete as it is) is to add.us to all the.com,.net,.edu,.mil,.gov domains and end the confusion. Then no more TLDs should be create. Congested or not, it will be confusing to all of us.
One of the sad parts is that the island of Tuvalu gets 50,000,000$ over the next 10 years! not as a lump sum here and now!
I feel bad about internet enterpreneurs taking advantage of low tech countries and islands.
Wet Platinum pairs are THE BEST
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 1
In Alexandria, Egypt, we are upgrading from dry copper to wet platinum;-)
Well, had to follow the pun!
Being done in Egypt! For years!
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 2
Well, this is not your typical "has been done before SlashDot troll", but yes, Egypt has been doing this for a long time.
I am talking here about Alexandria, Egypt (4.5 Million) and Cairo as well (16 Million), which are not rural at all, and the forces at play are not the same as those mentioned in the article.
A little bit of background: Egypt has undergone massive telecom infrastructure upgrades in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. The old wiring was almost totally replaced with new wiring, and the switches were replaced from mechanical to electronic.
This left the old wiring in place, doing nothing. That is until the internet came in the mid 1990s.
Let me say that Cable TV does not exist in the Middle East (maybe only Qatar), and therefore it is not an option for high speed connections. Also, the phone company in Egypt is a government monopoly (but this may change soon).
An Internet Cafe approaches the ISP for a leased line connection, and they ask the telco to provide the . The ISP provides the rest (modems,...etc). ISPs are concerned about bandwidth and normally limit this to 33.6Kbps, unless you pay heavily for more.
Companies having branch offices do the same (but put xDSL technology in place) so they can exchange documents, graphics and more.
I am glad to say that the internet is improving in Egypt year after year, as compared to other places in the region (read about it in Speed in Jeddah vs. Alexandria page).
I agree with you that Europe is at a disadvantage (over North America) when it comes to telephone cost.
It is because of this cost (and sharing revenue from it), that the UK allows the so called Free Internet providers.
Now look at the Middle East and you find a worse picture, where we pay per minute, plus very high ISP monthly subscription.
It ends up 5 times costing as much a fast broadband Cable connection in Canada (40$Cdn), but for a measly slow 31,000 bps connection with busy signals, disconnects,...etc.
He said: "I would like to know what services states I don't live in are going to offer me.
He has a point. What is worse, is with global e-commerce, the issue is not states anymore, but rather COUNTRIES! This makes the whole issue more complicated.
I pay close to 133$ US per month and that is for lousy 31,200bps access, and have to suffer thru busy lines, and disconnections.
This is in Saudi Arabia, and half that amount is a monthly subscription fee (233 SR), and the rest is per minute charges from the telephone company (0.075 SR per minute).
The article raises very good points about the issue of software localization / internationalization.
Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface,...etc.)
Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.
Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).
In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.
When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.
When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!
Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.
So, where does this leave Linux? There are:
No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!
I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!
I have some links on Arabic on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.
Hmm...Interesting analysis, but Earthweb seems to be biased against free ISPs?
Any way, there is a different way of doing it, which is used by companies such as iFreedom which has a patent pending software and business model, and cover USA and Canada.
I use them in the Greater Toronto Area, and they are good, except that they suffer busy signals at times.
They give you Windows software (just like any other Free ISP), but the differences are:
They force you to click thru every 20 minutes of surfing, otherwise the connection gets dropped. By this, they guarantee that ever user will generate a click thru and not just an ad view.
They will not eat up a big portion of real estate during your surfing. They only pop up a screen every 20 minutes for you to click thru. I have used AltaVista's Free ISP and they really waste a big portion of the screen, and mess up the icons on the desktop and the windows coordinates. Much of the same applies to Juno and others.
Of course, there is no Linux version (and nothing for any other operating system except Windows).
Of course, most would think that VA Linux and Red Hat are better companies, but if you look deeper, Linux Care has a better business model.
Red Hat owns no intellectual property due to the nature of the GPL. Its work can be legally plagiarized by anyone (Mandrake,...etc.) and Red Hat will just be watching and do nothing. This is why they went on an acquisition spree.
VA Linux is just another commodity hardware manufacturer, with some Linux expertise. There is nothing to prevent Dell and Compaq to do the same thing it does, and maybe even better.
Linux Care is different in that it capitalizes on the service portion of things, and have no commodity hardware or GPL handicap.
They have the makings of a long run winner company.
I got interested in Corel when caught the Linux bandwagon, both as a stock investment as well as a potential employer.
However, after reading more about the under performance of its stock, as well as some (ahem!) extravagance of management, I was taken aback and decided not to pursue either one (investment and employment).
After the stock sky rocketed and then fell back again, I still have my doubts, some of which were sounded here on slashdot a few months ago.
I would like to ask you: How is Corel as a company to work for and to own as a stock? Is Linux all your direction, or is it riding the Linux wave, just as the Java Office suite?
They offer you stuff that others charge for, like mailing lists, lots of POP accounts, MySQL, PHP,...etc. They charge extra for SSH access (there is no Telnet due to security reasons).
I think about it this way: at 180$ for lifetime hosting, this comes up to 15$ a month for a year, which is about what you pay for others or even less. Anything after that is a free bonus for me...
Downsides:
The Apache log sometimes doesn't get written to at all for a whole day. It has been a few weeks since I reported the problem and they haven't solved it (well it was the holiday season in the USA,...etc., so may be that is it...)
They have a few minutes of downtime every few days for some reason, but I can live with that...
After about a year of searching for a cheap tape, I got the above, which works flawlessly with Red Hat (5.1).
It is actually a 2.5GB, and the 5GB is after compression.
I got it faily cheap (700 Saudi Riyals March 1999 ~ 187$). I saw it cheaper on some internet sites (can't remember which, but try www.shopper.com).
Worked straight out the box on the first try. Did not need to do any kernel recompilation, nor download any drivers...
The only drawback so far, is that it seems the media is a bit hard to find (at times) in the local market (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
Good luck.
Creating Life != Playing God (Mycoplasma)
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
One thing about the public debate on creating a new life form in the lab from the genes of Mycoplasma:
I am all for it, and don't see this as treading into the realm of God.
Science should be free to experiment, explore and discover.
The evil comes when the non-scientists (Government, Politics, Business) take those inventions/discoveries and turn them into the monstrosities that has become Colonialism, A-Bomb,...etc.
We should not limit science, thougt,...etc. for the sake of those beings...
Well, I have to share some points that I feel will be useful to (at least) some of you.
I travel a lot, and I use mainly a laptop (company issued) with Windows 98 on it (yeah, yeah, but I have to use it for Arabic support, as well as exchanging documents with colleagues and customers - so it will stay for a while). I also use a Palm Pilot, and have my home computer (dual boot on Linux).
Moving the data back and forth on these three platforms is a royal pain (in all places!)
My dream would be a web service that allows ALL of the following to be done:
Access and Reply e-mail from whatever host(s) you access our e-mail from
Sync my Pilot remotely, so as to have all my e-mails, addresses, appointments both on the Pilot and on that virtual desk top
Upload and sync all my bookmarks
Visto Briefcase has most of this, but the sync doesn't work well. Netscape Netcenter also has some of this functionality, but the bookmarks do not upload all of them. The same happens to synching my address book. Not all addresses are uploaded (truncation). It has Portfolio, Weather, News which are all nice, but still not the one true desktop Other sites I am looking at are WorkSpot.Net are a Linux deskop over the net, and was featured in a Slashdot article a few hours ago.
So, I am yet to find an ideal web site that I can use as a one stop shopping for all this.
Security you say? Who cares? I just have to be aware that there is a potential security issue, and not to put sensitive data there? Same goes for ICQ,...etc. Regards.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right about many slashdotters, but not all. Some of us are older geeks with families and jobs, and yes brains as well :-)
This is not unlike Juno, FreeDSL, FreePC, any free email, free dial up internet, free[anything].
The real issue with NameZero is ownership. Say you have asite that you toiled to build, advertize and maintain. It becomes a success, only to discover that they took it back from you and capitalized on your blood, sweat and tears? Not nice is it?
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine who had a great idea for a web site. He was web illeterate (only a user) and gave the job to someone, who turned out to be a crook. That crook made himself the contact for the domain (technical, zone, admin, billing) although the registrant is still my friend's company). The crook asked for an exorbitant amount of money or he will pull the site down. When my friend refused to pay, he shut down the site and disappeared (even fled to another country!). Network Solutions, being the dinosaur they are, are not reacting at all to change the details on the domain to allow a different hosting company, ...etc....etc. ad nauseum! See what can happen?
You become a pawn in the direct market game. Not new, and not surprising. You just can't get something for nothing, not now, not ever.
I have used Free dialup ISPs in Canada. I have a friend and a relative using them in USA. They are great! You get a lot for nothing! I wish they are available here in the Middle East and we do not have to pay thru the nose!
Of course there is a solution! Use the Embedded Eye Lid DHCP (EEL-DHCP) . It only supports DHCP, so you cannot run a mail/web server of it, but until we release Full Embedded Eye Lid Server (FEELS) it should do the job.
By the way, what do you do when you sleep? Brain implants is the answer!
No one has mentioned this at all so far, and it has been overnight (overhere!).
A company called Silicon Film makes a digital back that fits many pro-ish SLRs. The resolution is not the best, but think about all the lenses and features that you can use on an SLR!
They sell an all in one package that consists of he back, a storage "container" and something that you can download the images to, while you are on the go! Very interesting.
Now make it the same resolution as the Nikon CoolPix 990 and you have a winner!
Sorry, but the newer pro-sumer digital cameras (e.g. Nikon CoolPix 990 and Sony DSC-F505) are very advanced and flexible in terms of exposure control, and all the things you talk about.
Also the web is much more prevalent these days than 3 years ago.
I used to own high end 35mm SLRs, and enjoyed it (I used to own a "pro" Nikon F2A, then a Minolta Maxxum), and I am thinking of doing only digital now. There are no processing cost, no time to wait, can retouche and manipulate as much as I like, can e-mail/publish on web, ...etc.
Maybe they will not totally replace file now, but they will eventually (soon!)
I was about to buy the Nikon CoolPix 950, but the 990 came out, and it is far better (more resolution, USB connection and more).
That said, the 950 is a bargain these days with 100$US rebate (for those in the USA, here in Saudi Arabia, it just hit the shelf for 4,700 SR ~ 1,250$US for the older 950!).
The Sony DSC-F505 is also a super camera, with perhaps the best lens (Carl Zeiss) you can get for a ~ 1,000$ price range.
You can read extensive reviews of all the above at Phil Askey's wonderful Digital Photography Review web site. You will find a photo gallery of sample pictures for each camera.
Another way of doing it, if you also want a camcorder, is to get one of the new Digital Video camcorder (or Sony's Digital8 format) and a FireWire/IEEE1364 card. The quality is lower than the Nikon above, but still acceptable for most web publishing.
Already exists in the form of the Moldova country TLD (.md).
It is used by heavy weights, like Web.MD, as if www.webMD.com was not enough.
Since the site uses frames, the previous posters, didn't get it quite right.
A brochure is available here as well (large graphic).
Well, this is not the forum to discuss religion, nor to discuss Islam, however, I have to disagree with you on wealth being a detriment in Islam.
It is more of a social responsibility, and like many things in life (technology, speech, ...etc.), used correctly, can be a blessing. Misuse it (as often is the case) and it becomes a curse.
Wealth in Islam on the Muslim Investor web site .
It was supposed to be funny, not serious.
My original comment was serious, why does it get only a 1?
Moderators, read it again and JUDGE FOR YOURSELF!
Small correction: .to is Tonga not Togo.
Yes, I agree that the DNS is a mess. There should not be global .net/.com/.org. Or if they remain (just for backward compatibility with the status quo), then no new top level domains should be created.
My own personal domain is baheyeldin.com, while it should have been a .org, since it is not commercial. However, I have to explain to people what .org is and spell it out for them. That is why I decided it should be a .com.
Moreover, some site just use .net as Network suffix (e.g. islamweb.net, ....etc.), even though they are not ISPs. Everyone puts their pwn interpretation.
I hate it when I listen to ICANN adding more .web, .firm, .shop, .store, ...etc. These are so confusing. What is the difference between a firm and a company (.com) for us non-Americans? How is .web different from .net? What is the friggin difference between .shop and .store?
I think one solution (as painful and incomplete as it is) is to add .us to all the .com, .net, .edu, .mil, .gov domains and end the confusion. Then no more TLDs should be create. Congested or not, it will be confusing to all of us.
May I point the distinguished honorable readers that the practice of countries selling their top level domain name has been around for a while?
Small Island nations (as well as non-islands as well) has been doing it. Here is a list:
One of the sad parts is that the island of Tuvalu gets 50,000,000$ over the next 10 years! not as a lump sum here and now!
I feel bad about internet enterpreneurs taking advantage of low tech countries and islands.
In Alexandria, Egypt, we are upgrading from dry copper to wet platinum ;-)
Well, had to follow the pun!
Well, this is not your typical "has been done before SlashDot troll", but yes, Egypt has been doing this for a long time.
I am talking here about Alexandria, Egypt (4.5 Million) and Cairo as well (16 Million), which are not rural at all, and the forces at play are not the same as those mentioned in the article.
A little bit of background: Egypt has undergone massive telecom infrastructure upgrades in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. The old wiring was almost totally replaced with new wiring, and the switches were replaced from mechanical to electronic.
This left the old wiring in place, doing nothing. That is until the internet came in the mid 1990s.
Let me say that Cable TV does not exist in the Middle East (maybe only Qatar), and therefore it is not an option for high speed connections. Also, the phone company in Egypt is a government monopoly (but this may change soon).
Internet Cafes are very popular in Egypt, since not everyone has a computer, and per-minute charges get to be expensive (read more about it in the Cost of the Net in the Middle East comparison page).
An Internet Cafe approaches the ISP for a leased line connection, and they ask the telco to provide the . The ISP provides the rest (modems, ...etc). ISPs are concerned about bandwidth and normally limit this to 33.6Kbps, unless you pay heavily for more.
Companies having branch offices do the same (but put xDSL technology in place) so they can exchange documents, graphics and more.
I am glad to say that the internet is improving in Egypt year after year, as compared to other places in the region (read about it in Speed in Jeddah vs. Alexandria page).
Anyway, I like the W2K review, because:
- Linux has no Arabic, and I am using Windows 98 for that.
- I have to upgrade at some point (Win 98 is so buggy).
- The review is from someone's own experience, and not from a Microsoft sponsored magazine or web site.
- The reviewer is Slashdot-mentality-aware.
- If you are so anti-MS, then it is useful to know what the enemy is up to!
So we have to keep an open mind about this, and make the most out of it.It is because of this cost (and sharing revenue from it), that the UK allows the so called Free Internet providers.
Now look at the Middle East and you find a worse picture, where we pay per minute, plus very high ISP monthly subscription.
It ends up 5 times costing as much a fast broadband Cable connection in Canada (40$Cdn), but for a measly slow 31,000 bps connection with busy signals, disconnects, ...etc.
Check this page for further analysis.
He has a point. What is worse, is with global e-commerce, the issue is not states anymore, but rather COUNTRIES! This makes the whole issue more complicated.
I pay close to 133$ US per month and that is for lousy 31,200bps access, and have to suffer thru busy lines, and disconnections.
This is in Saudi Arabia, and half that amount is a monthly subscription fee (233 SR), and the rest is per minute charges from the telephone company (0.075 SR per minute).
You can read more about it in Cost of Access in the Middle East vs. other places on my Saudi ISPs Comparison web site, and also Middle East Internet Statistics site.
You guys in North America have it really easy, with free access providers popping up, and free local calls as well.
Sigh! If this sounds like a complaint, it probably is!
Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface, ...etc.)
Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.
Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).
In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.
When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.
When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!
Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.
So, where does this leave Linux? There are:
- No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
- No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
- Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!
I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!I have some links on Arabic on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.
--
Have you checked out Muslim Investor?
Any way, there is a different way of doing it, which is used by companies such as iFreedom which has a patent pending software and business model, and cover USA and Canada.
I use them in the Greater Toronto Area, and they are good, except that they suffer busy signals at times.
They give you Windows software (just like any other Free ISP), but the differences are:
Of course, there is no Linux version (and nothing for any other operating system except Windows).
Red Hat owns no intellectual property due to the nature of the GPL. Its work can be legally plagiarized by anyone (Mandrake, ...etc.) and Red Hat will just be watching and do nothing. This is why they went on an acquisition spree.
VA Linux is just another commodity hardware manufacturer, with some Linux expertise. There is nothing to prevent Dell and Compaq to do the same thing it does, and maybe even better.
Linux Care is different in that it capitalizes on the service portion of things, and have no commodity hardware or GPL handicap.
They have the makings of a long run winner company.
But after all, it is execution that matters.
However, after reading more about the under performance of its stock, as well as some (ahem!) extravagance of management, I was taken aback and decided not to pursue either one (investment and employment).
After the stock sky rocketed and then fell back again, I still have my doubts, some of which were sounded here on slashdot a few months ago.
I would like to ask you: How is Corel as a company to work for and to own as a stock? Is Linux all your direction, or is it riding the Linux wave, just as the Java Office suite?
I am with them now for about 2 months, and they seem OK (not exceptionaly great, but good value for money).
They use Red Hat Linux on Intel servers from a larger (and more expensive) hosting company called Alabanza.com
They have a lot of nice features, including free parking of extra domains (I host Baheyeldin.com, as well as 2BITS and Muslim Investor all out of one account on NoMonthlyFees.com. Also, a few subdomains as well, including Saudi Arabia Internet Service Providers and Middle East Internet Statistics, and my own personal site khalid.baheyeldin.com.
They offer you stuff that others charge for, like mailing lists, lots of POP accounts, MySQL, PHP, ...etc. They charge extra for SSH access (there is no Telnet due to security reasons).
I think about it this way: at 180$ for lifetime hosting, this comes up to 15$ a month for a year, which is about what you pay for others or even less. Anything after that is a free bonus for me...
Downsides:
- The Apache log sometimes doesn't get written to at all for a whole day. It has been a few weeks since I reported the problem and they haven't solved it (well it was the holiday season in the USA,
...etc., so may be that is it...) - They have a few minutes of downtime every few days for some reason, but I can live with that...
E-Mail me if you have specific questions...It is actually a 2.5GB, and the 5GB is after compression.
I got it faily cheap (700 Saudi Riyals March 1999 ~ 187$). I saw it cheaper on some internet sites (can't remember which, but try www.shopper.com).
Worked straight out the box on the first try. Did not need to do any kernel recompilation, nor download any drivers...
The only drawback so far, is that it seems the media is a bit hard to find (at times) in the local market (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
Good luck.
I am all for it, and don't see this as treading into the realm of God.
Science should be free to experiment, explore and discover.
The evil comes when the non-scientists (Government, Politics, Business) take those inventions/discoveries and turn them into the monstrosities that has become Colonialism, A-Bomb, ...etc.
We should not limit science, thougt, ...etc. for the sake of those beings...
I travel a lot, and I use mainly a laptop (company issued) with Windows 98 on it (yeah, yeah, but I have to use it for Arabic support, as well as exchanging documents with colleagues and customers - so it will stay for a while). I also use a Palm Pilot, and have my home computer (dual boot on Linux).
Moving the data back and forth on these three platforms is a royal pain (in all places!)
My dream would be a web service that allows ALL of the following to be done:
Visto Briefcase has most of this, but the sync doesn't work well.
Netscape Netcenter also has some of this functionality, but the bookmarks do not upload all of them. The same happens to synching my address book. Not all addresses are uploaded (truncation). It has Portfolio, Weather, News which are all nice, but still not the one true desktop
Other sites I am looking at are
WorkSpot.Net are a Linux deskop over the net, and was featured in a Slashdot article a few hours ago.
So, I am yet to find an ideal web site that I can use as a one stop shopping for all this.
Security you say? Who cares? I just have to be aware that there is a potential security issue, and not to put sensitive data there? Same goes for ICQ, ...etc. Regards.
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