Are there other ways of doing things? Yes - well thought out words and ideas will do far more toward changing things than street protests ever will. Government is not going to lose a street fight - that is the one thing it is designed to win.
I think this is the answer. I've been scratching my head about this, ever since the Toronto riot of a couple of weeks ago, and the wave of political arrests in recent days. Nevertheless, thinking of people like Vaclav Havel and even my own relatives, just good writing can land you behind bars for a long time too.
Have you ever seen a Cobra gun ship in action? I have. Trust me, civil disobedience won't last 10 seconds against a single Cobra gunship, and the National Guard has thousands of them. All that you will wind up with is lots of dead people, and no one to tell their side of things. History is written by the survivors - not by the people lying dead in the streets.
The whole of Veteran's post should be read by the Toronto Left. There's no way to beat the cavalry, sticks and guns of Bromell and Fantino; that's not the way to defeat Harris and Co.
These papers are definitely useful, and free. If I need a disk drive NOW, I stroll down College Street, go to the first store and pick up a paper. Then I scan the ads, and compare. We have a wonderfully competitive street computer market in Toronto. If we want to buy "mail-order", (I don't, but my colleagues do), well, the University has a deal with Dell, and we order over the Web. If I want to explore the market further, I have a conversation with Google. Old-style magazines have absolutely no role, unless it's something esoteric, when "Linux Journal" or the new "Computing in Science" merged magazine is worth consulting. Such magazines are also useful for didactic articles and other pieces which have some shelf life and one would like to read over coffee or lunch. The PC magazines don't cut it.
The truly powerful sources are the portal-like "Linux Weekly News", "Linux Today", and of course this place. I'm sure that the acceptance of Linux and open source in general is strongly linked to the development of such Web sites.
I totally agree with the statement that Solaris as shipped is bare, whereas any Linux distribution comes with nearly all the goodies. A year ago, I set up two Ultra 10's; it took me and the two students using the Ultras a weeks just to download and install all the software they needed. Furthermore, we discovered that large packages for which we had source required the Sun compilers, not GNU; had the students' supervisor bought them P III's, we would have been up and fully configured in a day instead of a week, and the environment would have been a lot richer as well.
Solaris is solid and proven on big servers, but it is much poorer than typical Linux distros on individual desktops administered in onesies and twosies. Sun is geared to serve a shop of hundreds of boxes centrally administered under NIS.
If it's under GPL, it certainly CAN be sold! Since Windows does not have a C compiler bundled with it, MS can sell the binaries along with the rest of Windows; the source code must go with it, but it won't do anybody any good unless they buy a C compiler (or install DJGPP). How man MS users would do that?
1. DHCP -- they give you an IP address. I would argue that DHCP will go away as IPv6 becomes more prominent.
Yup. But DNS will have to be efficient.
2. Mail server -- why can't this be just any company on the internet that you want to contract?
There is no need for a mail server if you run SMTP and your computer stays up a lot. E-mail is such a light load on a local network that bandwidth issues are insignificant. The permanent name is important here.
3. News server -- ditto. 4. Web hosting -- ditto.
Yup. These two are heavy traffic generators, and most providers probably won't let you host them at home; also, there is a lot of difference in what different ISP's provide for these services. I can just imagine the "censorship" very large cable providers would indulge in if they were your only source for Usenet, etc. We need freedom to choose.
> OK give me one reason why your hostname being xx.xx.xx.xx.region.wave.home.com affects anything. It doesn't. (snip,snip)
First, it's bogus. Periods are not allowed in hostnames. On the other hand, xx-xx-xx-xx... is OK. Other ISP's replace the dots with dashes, so why not @Home?
RFC 1101 is quite explicit about the bogosity of the prepended dotted IP form:
"The new syntax expands the set of names to allow leading digits, so long as the resulting representations do not conflict with IP addresses in decimal octet form. For example, 3Com.COM and 3M.COM are now legal, although 26.0.0.73.COM is not. See [HR] for details."
Second, it breaks sendmail and other things. The trouble is that to use multiple mail accounts on @Home, with reasonable usernames, you have to use a Windoze or Mac binary Netscape plugin. I use Linux, with multiple accounts on it, a concept which @Home seem to be unable to conceive of. However, I prefer to use SMPT directly rather than POP3 or IMAP, since after all it comes up running by default after a typical Linux install. Sendmail wants a proper name in/etc/HOSTNAME.
Anonymous Coward further muttered:
"Static hostnames are also something that is definitely not needed. The service isn't for running your little servers. This is the only reason why you would want such a thing. Wasting their time on something as trivial as that would truly be stupid."
What crap! Why should I want to use a dumb server when my Linux box is perfectly capable of handling everything without cumbersome client-server protocols? I don't want my kids' e-mail residing on some distant server. A permanent IP and name would solve all the problems.
Anonymous Coward further whines:
"Oh yeah, in case you hadn't noticed, your comment has nothing to do with what the previous person was articulating. I'm sorry, I'm just tired of people setting up their little home and small business IP networks and deciding they should tell nationwide providers how they should run their networks."
The arrogance is so breathtaking it hardly deserves a response. Troll stuff. The point is that the cable service comes to a home, and all that I want is access to the Internet, just like I've had in my office for a dozen years. All I want is DNS and routing. I want no server or portal foisted on me by the local monopoly, especially when that monopoly wants to force me into using a proprietary architecture. That's not what the Internet is about.
>I don't think this is the issue. I don't think >the would-be competitive ISP's want a wire all >the way to your house anymore than they do today >with your phone line.
>What appears to be at issue here is that the >data/video cable service is bundled with the ISP >service the way that local/long distance service >used to be.
This would be no problem if the local ACCESS provider did addressing, routing and DNS properly. My shaw@home service doesn't even follow the RFC's when it comes to forming host names out of DHCP-generated IP numbers. Just IP numbers with routing are enough, and please either produce proper names or don't do any DNS at all...
Permanent IP numbers are much to be preferred, but long-lease DHCP isn't provided the names are static or at least RFC-compliant. Seems to me outfits like @home don't hire knowledgeable netadmins...
> It's hard to imagine that 30 or so people can > review the entire internet. And think of all the > movies they have to review when they're not > surfing. Poor sods:-)
Don't you ever use a search engine? Look at Google... A Web site trying to attract visitors must advertise itself, which means it must be accessible by context. I argue that it would be easy for Web crawlers and search engines to quickly find sites with specified content, and for those sites to be rather quickly added to the "verboten" database.
This proposed law is very dangerous because its success will prompt other jurisdictions to try the same thing.
> Or have SSL proxies in other nations? Running on port 25/21/20/anything else innocuous?
It's easy for ISP's to block ports. For example, in Canada The Bell Canada Sympatico *DSL service prevents home subscribers from running HTTP servers. A more expensive business line is required for that.
If this law passes and is promulgated, it will be "successful". While some people will be able to work around it, the vast majority of users will be fully censored.
Why should any site open itself up to a flood of traffic from Australia? This costs money.
Unfortunately, this Australian censorship law will be quite successful if passed, and will give other jurisdictions bad ideas. Such laws must me nipped in the bud before they spread their evil foliage.
I've been using mgetty+sendfax/vgetty for about three years. There has been a flurry of new code recently; the new version of vgetty is highly scriptable, and I've haven't even scratched its potential. Look up:
I've been using 1.1.20, with the ZyXel 1496E+ . I use it for voicemail, incoming logins (i.e. data) and faxes (in and out). Since I work at two locations connected at T1 speed, I like being able to hear my voice messages at each place. And I can also dial it up like a standard answering machine to hear my messages (that I have to re-configure). I have a number of users who dial in to read their e-mail and do some (slow...) surfing; ppp works well. The current vgetty appears to be quite stable, and doesn't slip into recording white noise instead of voice as much. My PII-350 box runs Slackware 3.6.
What I would REALLY like to see is a voice-mail system which can connect a voice channel over the LAN to another CPU selected according to the tones punched in by a caller. That sort of thing has been developed for MS...
Slashdot Mirror
These papers are definitely useful, and free. If I need a disk drive NOW, I stroll down College Street, go to the first store and pick up a paper. Then I scan the ads, and compare. We have a wonderfully competitive street computer market in Toronto. If we want to buy "mail-order", (I don't, but my colleagues do), well, the University has a deal with Dell, and we order over the Web. If I want to explore the market further, I have a conversation with Google. Old-style magazines have absolutely no role, unless it's something esoteric, when "Linux Journal" or the new "Computing in Science" merged magazine is worth consulting. Such magazines are also useful for didactic articles and other pieces which have some shelf life and one would like to read over coffee or lunch. The PC magazines don't cut it.
The truly powerful sources are the portal-like "Linux Weekly News", "Linux Today", and of course this place. I'm sure that the acceptance of Linux and open source in general is strongly linked to the development of such Web sites.
I totally agree with the statement that Solaris as shipped is bare, whereas any Linux distribution comes with nearly all the goodies. A year ago, I set up two Ultra 10's; it took me and the two students using the Ultras a weeks just to download and install all the software they needed. Furthermore, we discovered that large packages for which we had source required the Sun compilers, not GNU; had the students' supervisor bought them P III's, we would have been up and fully configured in a day instead of a week, and the environment would have been a lot richer as well.
Solaris is solid and proven on big servers, but it is much poorer than typical Linux distros on individual desktops administered in onesies and twosies. Sun is geared to serve a shop of hundreds of boxes centrally administered under NIS.
If it's under GPL, it certainly CAN be sold! Since Windows does not have a C compiler bundled with it, MS can sell the binaries along with the rest of Windows; the source code must go with it, but it won't do anybody any good unless they buy a C compiler (or install DJGPP). How man MS users would do that?
I personally feel that ISPs are dinosaurs ...
1. DHCP -- they give you an IP address. I would argue that DHCP will go away as IPv6 becomes more prominent.
Yup. But DNS will have to be efficient.
2. Mail server -- why can't this be just any company on the internet that you want to contract?
There is no need for a mail server if you run SMTP and your computer stays up a lot. E-mail is such a light load on a local network that bandwidth issues are insignificant. The permanent name is important here.
3. News server -- ditto.
4. Web hosting -- ditto.
Yup. These two are heavy traffic generators, and most providers probably won't let you host them at home; also, there is a lot of difference in what different ISP's provide for these services. I can just imagine the "censorship" very large cable providers would indulge in if they were your only source for Usenet, etc. We need freedom to choose.
A ruling like this makes it possible to select a high speed provider that will humbly give me a dynamic IP and NO OTHER CRAP.
Exactly. Too bad the @Home service around here screws up the hostname contrary to the RFC's,
as I explained in the "Boy, what a mess" thread.
A valid static name would be highly desirable to make SMTP work properly. None of this cumbersome host-client POP/IMAP stuff for me.
Anonymous Coward spluttered:
/etc/HOSTNAME.
> OK give me one reason why your hostname being xx.xx.xx.xx.region.wave.home.com affects anything. It doesn't. (snip,snip)
First, it's bogus. Periods are not allowed in hostnames. On the other hand, xx-xx-xx-xx...
is OK. Other ISP's replace the dots with dashes, so why not @Home?
RFC 1101 is quite explicit about the bogosity of the prepended dotted IP form:
"The new syntax expands the set of names to allow leading digits, so long as the resulting representations do not conflict with IP addresses in decimal octet form. For example, 3Com.COM and 3M.COM are now legal, although 26.0.0.73.COM is not. See [HR] for details."
Second, it breaks sendmail and other things.
The trouble is that to use multiple mail accounts on @Home, with reasonable usernames, you have to use a Windoze or Mac binary Netscape plugin. I use Linux, with multiple accounts on it, a concept which @Home seem to be unable to conceive of. However, I prefer to use SMPT directly rather than POP3 or IMAP, since after all it comes up running by default after a typical Linux install. Sendmail wants a proper name in
Anonymous Coward further muttered:
"Static hostnames are also something that is definitely not needed. The service isn't for running your little servers. This is the only reason why you would want such a thing. Wasting their time on something as trivial as that would truly be stupid."
What crap! Why should I want to use a dumb server when my Linux box is perfectly capable of handling everything without cumbersome client-server protocols? I don't want my kids' e-mail residing on some distant server. A permanent IP and name would solve all the problems.
Anonymous Coward further whines:
"Oh yeah, in case you hadn't noticed, your comment has nothing to do with what the previous person was articulating. I'm sorry, I'm just tired of people setting up their little home and small business IP networks and deciding they should tell nationwide providers how they should run their networks."
The arrogance is so breathtaking it hardly deserves a response. Troll stuff. The point is that the cable service comes to a home, and all that I want is access to the Internet, just like I've had in my office for a dozen years. All I want is DNS and routing. I want no server or portal foisted on me by the local monopoly, especially when that monopoly wants to force me into using a proprietary architecture. That's not what the Internet is about.
This Anonymous Coward is just a corporate troll.
>I don't think this is the issue. I don't think >the would-be competitive ISP's want a wire all >the way to your house anymore than they do today >with your phone line.
>What appears to be at issue here is that the >data/video cable service is bundled with the ISP >service the way that local/long distance service >used to be.
This would be no problem if the local ACCESS provider did addressing, routing and DNS properly. My shaw@home service doesn't even follow the RFC's when it comes to forming host names out of DHCP-generated IP numbers. Just IP numbers with routing are enough, and please either produce proper names or don't do any DNS at all...
Permanent IP numbers are much to be preferred, but long-lease DHCP isn't provided the names are static or at least RFC-compliant. Seems to me outfits like @home don't hire knowledgeable netadmins...
> It's hard to imagine that 30 or so people can :-)
> review the entire internet. And think of all the
> movies they have to review when they're not
> surfing. Poor sods
Don't you ever use a search engine? Look at Google... A Web site trying to attract visitors must advertise itself, which means it must be accessible by context. I argue that it would be easy for Web crawlers and search engines to quickly find sites with specified content, and for those sites to be rather quickly added to the "verboten" database.
This proposed law is very dangerous because its success will prompt other jurisdictions to try the same thing.
> Or have SSL proxies in other nations? Running on port 25/21/20/anything else innocuous?
It's easy for ISP's to block ports. For example, in Canada The Bell Canada Sympatico *DSL service prevents home subscribers from running HTTP servers. A more expensive business line is required for that.
If this law passes and is promulgated, it will be "successful". While some people will be able to work around it, the vast majority of users will be fully censored.
A very good observation! Tons of money to be made in this new industry ...
Why should any site open itself up to a flood of traffic from Australia? This costs money.
Unfortunately, this Australian censorship law will be quite successful if passed, and will give other jurisdictions bad ideas. Such laws must me nipped in the bud before they spread their evil foliage.
I've been using mgetty+sendfax/vgetty for about three years. There has been a flurry of new code recently; the new version of vgetty is highly scriptable, and I've haven't even scratched its potential. Look up:
...
http://alpha.greenie.net/mgetty/index.html
http://www.leo.org/~doering/mgetty/index.html
I've been using 1.1.20, with the ZyXel 1496E+ .
I use it for voicemail, incoming logins (i.e. data) and faxes (in and out). Since I work at two locations connected at T1 speed, I like being able to hear my voice messages at each place. And I can also dial it up like a standard answering machine to hear my messages (that I have to re-configure).
I have a number of users who dial in to read their e-mail and do some (slow...) surfing; ppp works
well. The current vgetty appears to be quite stable, and doesn't slip into recording white noise instead of voice as much. My PII-350 box runs Slackware 3.6.
What I would REALLY like to see is a voice-mail system which can connect a voice channel over the LAN to another CPU selected according to the tones punched in by a caller. That sort of thing has been developed for MS