But people like me wanting to roll out a database cluster, getting a cpu with four cores could save me $75,000 per CPU running M$ SQL Server. Oh the dream of running 16 cores on 4 CPU's
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
Or do you think they're going to sacrifice all that potential revenue?
I have been phasing out the hotchpotch of laptops that my org uses, and replacing them with Thinkpads. Except for the CEO, who wants only Sony.
I agree that the T40 onwards, including the LeNovo T43, aren't as good as the old T20s. I still use a couple of old T20s that I bought from the office for peanuts at home - they're rock solid. The later Tseries have had the odd hardware failure requiring warranty service - which has been prompt and knowledgeable.
As part of our software install process, we reformat the hard disk to remove the recovery partition, and install XP Pro with our own installer CD that has the IBM drivers on it (and our required software packages). And XP absolutely doesn't "black" screen on install.
Maybe all that, but I'd strongly advise any non-Hungarians not to attempt visiting Hungary. Their embassy caused twelve of us to waste a lot of money.
We applied for visas for a holiday about 45 days before we planned to travel. They asked us to submit confirmed _original_ flight tickets, as well as hotel bookings and travel insurance and original bank statements. They then sat on it till _four_ days before we travelled, and then denied us our visas. Without any explanation. Obviously, we lost a fourth of our airfare in cancellations, as well as the travel insurance premiums and hotel booking advances. On top of that, they "misplaced" our applications, and so could not return our original bank statements.
Oh, and all of us are well travelled, with several Schengen and US visas, and we do not fit any "terrorist" profile - travelling with kids and so on.
And since we all wanted to go on a holiday _somewhere_, we applied for and got UK visas in a single day. And spent our money there.
Sorry, but it is. A friend works for Omnix here in Dubai, and they have just started reselling these systems to hotels here. Their primary sales pitch is that all Las Vegas hotels use these systems, and they have references to back this up.
These things are expensive, and apparently a hotel installs a single system for its multiple bars.
This is the kind of coincidence that scares the hell out of me. Earlier tonight I was watching an episode of "Connections" on Discovery Science - the first time I have come across that serial.
Then, unable to sleep, I started reading slashdot, saw this story, downloaded and read the first few pages, though that the book resembled "Connections", then came across this comment.
I am now going back to my bedroom. What are the chances that I'll find myself already there?
I live in a country in the Middle East that blocks all kinds of internet access, and I used to get around that by tunnelling out through SSH.
Till I upgraded to SP2.
Now my machine can't connect to loopback addresses (the entire 127.0.x.x space), not can it connect to localhost. I can't uninstall SP2 either. I'm seriously considering reinstalling XP (No, I can't use Linux. My company's product requires Windows)
Also, I have a Wi-Fi network at home that uses a USR9106 ADSL Gateway & Router and a Linksys WRT54G as a repeater. Since SP2, I have difficulty logging into the network when both are active. If I switch off the Linksys, it works. Weird.
Why don't you start off the project, and I'll chip in with documents and stuff? I evaluate business plans for a living, so this should be right up my alley.
These stories have been on BusinessWeek for a couple of weeks - one is dated December 8 and the other December 15. These have also been discussed to death on lists and online forums.
I am an Indian, too. Where do you guys get these stats?
1. Wealth distribution. 90% of the _world's_ wealth is in the hands of 10% of its population. It applies for the US, too. What led to this irrelevant stat - oh, poverty. Yes poverty is a problem. But if you look at recent economic indicators, the proportion living below the poverty line has fallen from 36 per cent ten years ago to 27 per cent. That's economic empowerment for you, 90 million people (one-third of the USA population) coming over the poverty line in a decade.
2. Illiteracy: Yes, it is a problem. The sheer numbers of people to be educated, with the resources of a developing country. But the CIA World Factbook lists literacy rates as 59.5% (not illereracy, literacy rates). Your assumption of 75% is not based on any estimate I've ever seen or experienced in real life.
3. Corruption: Are you saying India's unique in this? Check out India's corruption ranking in Transparency International's report. India is 83 of 133. But media and public awareness of corruption is high, and occassionally something does happen to corrupt people.
4. Infrastructure: Where do you stay? In Bangalore, I can see the visible improvements in infrastructure over the last 8 years. Granted, there is room for improvement, but there have been dramatic improvements in power, telephony, bandwidth and lifestyle infrastructure.
5. Public Transport is a mess. May I refer you to LA? And from where do you get stats that say Road and Rail accidents cause most deaths in the country? There is absolutely no basis for this. More Indians die from heart attacks than die in all accidents.
6. Disaster Recovery: National and State Disaster Recovery Management Centres are being built / some are operational already.
Again, how is this relevant to the topic? Would you be able to qualtify the spinoffs that space programs generate? I've visited the ISRO Sriharikota Space Launch Centre. You'd be amazed at the way they operate - without much investments and out of pretty poor facilities, these guys have built a highly competitive launch programme. The spinoffs that have already been commercialised range from food-preservation techniques to accurate weather prediction and wait for it - disaster recovery-.
I get extremely irritated by those wiseacres who _humbly_ point out what India's priorities should be. Any country as large and complex as India has a lot of dynamics that need to be managed in development. It is naive and simplistic to expect problems like poverty and illiteracy (which are symptoms, not illnesses, by the way), to be tackled before space research / high technology / computerization / whatever.
At least the Russian has the courtesy to warn all their phone users that this was going on
No courtesy or warning is needed. GSM handsets automatically display the no-encryption icon when OTA (Over The Air) security is turned off by the operator.
Many of the assumptions in posts above are incorrect. I installed Acrobat 6 a month ago, and can verify these features.
1. Acrobat has a read aloud function for the visually impaired. It's not perfect, a rather tinny voice, but it is functional. I, err, listened to a chapter or so of the latest Potter book (don't ask!) while driving, and could make perfect sense of the text to speech. This function is available when read access is given to the document.
2. Adobe does warn people in the manual that pdfs are not very secure. They don't admit that Acrobat can be cracked, but the say something to the effect of "other pdf readers may not implement the pdf security features properly, and your secure document may not retain security with those readers." Of course, you can remove any pdf security with GhostScript, using a cracked dll.
Vend Ekkai
Looks deadly
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Saw the screenshots, it looks great. Let's just hope that it's low on resources, as well.
Yes, I agree with your thesis - circuit switching is on it's way out. But it's still going to last a good long time.
Here's what I'd like to see replace it. Forget VoIP over WiFi, you still need a carrier. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a mesh radio network, with a suitable self-discovering routing protocol, that would allow calls to be made from any handset to any other handset? Combined with decent encryption, this would put the privacy back in communications.
While this adds an extra level of protection, how about a case where the user password is picked up by a keypress logger? In that case, the timings can be logged too, and it would be a simple matter of repeating those timings with a program to log in.
Further, I am not sure how widely applicable this is. Whenever I change a password to a new, cryptic one, I type it in slowly for the first few times till my fingers start "remembering" the sequence.
Do what those guys did to Poindexter - collect all available information about this woman, and post it on a web site.
Teach her to call us Luddites!
We already have them...
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...they're called first-posters. On the other hand, maybe a Beowulf cluster of sentient machines would achieve...
Re:Slashdotted?
on
Server In A Fly
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Doesn't ANYONE read the article? It clearly says at the top "Installation Date: June 1 to September 3rd, 2001" That means that this art exhibit was displayed between the above dates. It was taken down more than a year ago. So the IP displayed will not respond.
My advice? Run OpenLDAP locally, and replicate the entire LDAP directory locally. Use OpenSSH tunneling (using port forwarding) to encrypt the connections between the master LDAP server and the local slave.
This way, your replication process can be over the slow SSH tunnel, but your transactions can be fast as they are local.
It's 2003 AD, and all the Internet is occupied by the powerful IP empire. All? No, a little village of indomitable freedom fighters still hold out, assisted by their druid Getafix's magic potion, freenet.
The IBM middleware family, formerly known as MQSeries, now called IBM WebSphere MQ family, has ports for Linux. More info on the IBM site
Vinci is a SOA for Linux. The site describes it as "a local area service-oriented architecture designed for rapid development and management of robust web applications"
I have attended presentations on MQ series, and found it interesting, but never had any opportunity to use it. I found the Vinci paper by googling.
The reason many open source projects copy proprietary software, and copy it well, is because there is a clear roadmap. All the developers can see what it is that they need to create, and that overcomes the lack of elaborate design documents.
To create innovative open source software, some experienced designers have to actually create _documentation_ first, so that the developers understand what they are doing. Somehow, this doesn't seem to be happening. There are exceptions, of course. But, in the majority, no clear design documentation.
Will this approach help? I doubt it. This is more like some script kiddie in IRC demanding the keygen for Photoshop 7.
But 5000 GPRS customers in one whole year -- if true, that sounds bad. What kind of rates are they charging?
Not bad, really. The rates vary between Rs 299 per month and Rs 800 per month, depending on your tariff plan. No usage charges, which is really good. However, there aren't that many people in India who'll pay for always-on mobile access. 20% of the subs are individuals, early adopters. The rest are corporates, ATMS, Playwin, and the like.
I fear that for a lot of in-the-red operators, GPRS will be a low priority. And this means we'll be stuck in 9.6kbps-land for ages.
You don't know how they operate:-). If they're in the red, all the more reason to launch a new service to encourage people to stay on and pay more. And as voice tariffs drop, data is the next cash cow.
Hey, I just looked up your bio. For a guy on india-gii, how come you didn't know about BPL Mobile's GPRS service? Granted, it's only in Mumbai, but it's been available from Dec 2001, and MMS from October 2002.
And BPL Mobile's rolling out GPRS in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharastra by Feb 2003.
Slashdot Mirror
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
Or do you think they're going to sacrifice all that potential revenue?
V.
Well, my mileage varies.
I have been phasing out the hotchpotch of laptops that my org uses, and replacing them with Thinkpads. Except for the CEO, who wants only Sony.
I agree that the T40 onwards, including the LeNovo T43, aren't as good as the old T20s. I still use a couple of old T20s that I bought from the office for peanuts at home - they're rock solid. The later Tseries have had the odd hardware failure requiring warranty service - which has been prompt and knowledgeable.
As part of our software install process, we reformat the hard disk to remove the recovery partition, and install XP Pro with our own installer CD that has the IBM drivers on it (and our required software packages). And XP absolutely doesn't "black" screen on install.
V
Maybe all that, but I'd strongly advise any non-Hungarians not to attempt visiting Hungary. Their embassy caused twelve of us to waste a lot of money.
We applied for visas for a holiday about 45 days before we planned to travel. They asked us to submit confirmed _original_ flight tickets, as well as hotel bookings and travel insurance and original bank statements. They then sat on it till _four_ days before we travelled, and then denied us our visas. Without any explanation. Obviously, we lost a fourth of our airfare in cancellations, as well as the travel insurance premiums and hotel booking advances. On top of that, they "misplaced" our applications, and so could not return our original bank statements.
Oh, and all of us are well travelled, with several Schengen and US visas, and we do not fit any "terrorist" profile - travelling with kids and so on.
And since we all wanted to go on a holiday _somewhere_, we applied for and got UK visas in a single day. And spent our money there.
So beware, if you plan to travel to Hungary.
Sorry, but it is. A friend works for Omnix here in Dubai, and they have just started reselling these systems to hotels here. Their primary sales pitch is that all Las Vegas hotels use these systems, and they have references to back this up.
These things are expensive, and apparently a hotel installs a single system for its multiple bars.
V
This is the kind of coincidence that scares the hell out of me. Earlier tonight I was watching an episode of "Connections" on Discovery Science - the first time I have come across that serial.
Then, unable to sleep, I started reading slashdot, saw this story, downloaded and read the first few pages, though that the book resembled "Connections", then came across this comment.
I am now going back to my bedroom. What are the chances that I'll find myself already there?
V
I live in a country in the Middle East that blocks all kinds of internet access, and I used to get around that by tunnelling out through SSH.
Till I upgraded to SP2.
Now my machine can't connect to loopback addresses (the entire 127.0.x.x space), not can it connect to localhost. I can't uninstall SP2 either. I'm seriously considering reinstalling XP (No, I can't use Linux. My company's product requires Windows)
Also, I have a Wi-Fi network at home that uses a USR9106 ADSL Gateway & Router and a Linksys WRT54G as a repeater. Since SP2, I have difficulty logging into the network when both are active. If I switch off the Linksys, it works. Weird.
Hi. Sounds like a fun thing to do.
Why don't you start off the project, and I'll chip in with documents and stuff? I evaluate business plans for a living, so this should be right up my alley.
V.
These stories have been on BusinessWeek for a couple of weeks - one is dated December 8 and the other December 15. These have also been discussed to death on lists and online forums.
How is this news?
V
I am an Indian, too. Where do you guys get these stats?
1. Wealth distribution. 90% of the _world's_ wealth is in the hands of 10% of its population. It applies for the US, too. What led to this irrelevant stat - oh, poverty. Yes poverty is a problem. But if you look at recent economic indicators, the proportion living below the poverty line has fallen from 36 per cent ten years ago to 27 per cent. That's economic empowerment for you, 90 million people (one-third of the USA population) coming over the poverty line in a decade.
2. Illiteracy: Yes, it is a problem. The sheer numbers of people to be educated, with the resources of a developing country. But the CIA World Factbook lists literacy rates as 59.5% (not illereracy, literacy rates). Your assumption of 75% is not based on any estimate I've ever seen or experienced in real life.
3. Corruption: Are you saying India's unique in this? Check out India's corruption ranking in Transparency International's report. India is 83 of 133. But media and public awareness of corruption is high, and occassionally something does happen to corrupt people.
4. Infrastructure: Where do you stay? In Bangalore, I can see the visible improvements in infrastructure over the last 8 years. Granted, there is room for improvement, but there have been dramatic improvements in power, telephony, bandwidth and lifestyle infrastructure.
5. Public Transport is a mess. May I refer you to LA? And from where do you get stats that say Road and Rail accidents cause most deaths in the country? There is absolutely no basis for this. More Indians die from heart attacks than die in all accidents.
6. Disaster Recovery: National and State Disaster Recovery Management Centres are being built / some are operational already.
Again, how is this relevant to the topic? Would you be able to qualtify the spinoffs that space programs generate? I've visited the ISRO Sriharikota Space Launch Centre. You'd be amazed at the way they operate - without much investments and out of pretty poor facilities, these guys have built a highly competitive launch programme. The spinoffs that have already been commercialised range from food-preservation techniques to accurate weather prediction and wait for it - disaster recovery-.
I get extremely irritated by those wiseacres who _humbly_ point out what India's priorities should be. Any country as large and complex as India has a lot of dynamics that need to be managed in development. It is naive and simplistic to expect problems like poverty and illiteracy (which are symptoms, not illnesses, by the way), to be tackled before space research / high technology / computerization / whatever.
At least the Russian has the courtesy to warn all their phone users that this was going on
No courtesy or warning is needed. GSM handsets automatically display the no-encryption icon when OTA (Over The Air) security is turned off by the operator.
V
Many of the assumptions in posts above are incorrect. I installed Acrobat 6 a month ago, and can verify these features.
1. Acrobat has a read aloud function for the visually impaired. It's not perfect, a rather tinny voice, but it is functional. I, err, listened to a chapter or so of the latest Potter book (don't ask!) while driving, and could make perfect sense of the text to speech. This function is available when read access is given to the document.
2. Adobe does warn people in the manual that pdfs are not very secure. They don't admit that Acrobat can be cracked, but the say something to the effect of "other pdf readers may not implement the pdf security features properly, and your secure document may not retain security with those readers." Of course, you can remove any pdf security with GhostScript, using a cracked dll.
Vend Ekkai
Saw the screenshots, it looks great. Let's just hope that it's low on resources, as well.
Here's what I'd like to see replace it. Forget VoIP over WiFi, you still need a carrier. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a mesh radio network, with a suitable self-discovering routing protocol, that would allow calls to be made from any handset to any other handset? Combined with decent encryption, this would put the privacy back in communications.
While this adds an extra level of protection, how about a case where the user password is picked up by a keypress logger? In that case, the timings can be logged too, and it would be a simple matter of repeating those timings with a program to log in.
Further, I am not sure how widely applicable this is. Whenever I change a password to a new, cryptic one, I type it in slowly for the first few times till my fingers start "remembering" the sequence.
which reported 'those interested in viewing it directly were advised to watch through black tinted glasses.'"
Yeah, and then they don't need black glasses no more. Or any glasses, for that matter. Or even light.
This has to be stopped, before Murdoch manages to get more eyeballs for his conservative propaganda outlets.
Do what those guys did to Poindexter - collect all available information about this woman, and post it on a web site.
Teach her to call us Luddites!
...they're called first-posters. On the other hand, maybe a Beowulf cluster of sentient machines would achieve...
Doesn't ANYONE read the article? It clearly says at the top
"Installation Date: June 1 to September 3rd, 2001"
That means that this art exhibit was displayed between the above dates. It was taken down more than a year ago. So the IP displayed will not respond.
My advice? Run OpenLDAP locally, and replicate the entire LDAP directory locally. Use OpenSSH tunneling (using port forwarding) to encrypt the connections between the master LDAP server and the local slave.
This way, your replication process can be over the slow SSH tunnel, but your transactions can be fast as they are local.
It's 2003 AD, and all the Internet is occupied by the powerful IP empire. All? No, a little village of indomitable freedom fighters still hold out, assisted by their druid Getafix's magic potion, freenet.
The IBM middleware family, formerly known as MQSeries, now called IBM WebSphere MQ family, has ports for Linux. More info on the IBM site
Vinci is a SOA for Linux. The site describes it as "a local area service-oriented architecture designed for rapid development and management of robust web applications"
I have attended presentations on MQ series, and found it interesting, but never had any opportunity to use it. I found the Vinci paper by googling.
I think the problem is _conceptualization_.
The reason many open source projects copy proprietary software, and copy it well, is because there is a clear roadmap. All the developers can see what it is that they need to create, and that overcomes the lack of elaborate design documents.
To create innovative open source software, some experienced designers have to actually create _documentation_ first, so that the developers understand what they are doing. Somehow, this doesn't seem to be happening. There are exceptions, of course. But, in the majority, no clear design documentation.
Will this approach help? I doubt it. This is more like some script kiddie in IRC demanding the keygen for Photoshop 7.
But 5000 GPRS customers in one whole year -- if true, that sounds bad. What kind of rates are they charging?
:-). If they're in the red, all the more reason to launch a new service to encourage people to stay on and pay more. And as voice tariffs drop, data is the next cash cow.
Not bad, really. The rates vary between Rs 299 per month and Rs 800 per month, depending on your tariff plan. No usage charges, which is really good. However, there aren't that many people in India who'll pay for always-on mobile access. 20% of the subs are individuals, early adopters. The rest are corporates, ATMS, Playwin, and the like.
I fear that for a lot of in-the-red operators, GPRS will be a low priority. And this means we'll be stuck in 9.6kbps-land for ages.
You don't know how they operate
Hey, I just looked up your bio. For a guy on india-gii, how come you didn't know about BPL Mobile's GPRS service? Granted, it's only in Mumbai, but it's been available from Dec 2001, and MMS from October 2002.
And BPL Mobile's rolling out GPRS in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharastra by Feb 2003.