Here is a slightly modified text of an email I sent to the author of the news.com article on AOL's patent on IM.
FYI, with regards to this article, I don't know how strong this patent is because of existing prior art. If you look at this article in MIT's
Technology Review, you will see that a form of IM called zephyr with buddy
lists as well as chat-room style broadcasts existed since 1988. It would
be great if you could also post this information in a future update to let
everyone know.
Zephyr exists till today (and we here at Carnegie Mellon as well
as students at MIT) use it on a daily basis. Even emacs supports zephyr:)
Indian reprints (am talking official reprints from Publishers) are cheaper than the US counterpart by a factor of 2x-10x. For example, with computer books like O Reilly, Knuth, Stevens, etc, something costing $70 here will cost $7 there (Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated for example). Binding and paper quality is not that great but not those many people can pay Rs. 4500 for a good text book and so this is the route all publishers choose.
Of course these books are meant for the South East Asia market only so don't think about trying to get them imported here unless you have a friend there. Of course I carry a suitcase of them every time I go *grin*.
Why? Because I have found that I can never read a book on a screen or for that matter any document more than a couple of pages. A document deserves a printout and if I find that any book is worth reading, I will go out and buy it. After all the ones available free do no cost a king's ransom in print.
Sadly, it also seems that none of the current thin clients for reading books seem to cut it. They are too iconvenient, sometimes too dim, expensive, limited battery, etc, etc.... I just do not see myself curling up in my easy chair with one of these anytime soon. And I must admit that I am very partial to having lots of books on my bookshelf instead of one electronic reader:) It can be an excellent conversation starter about your tastes, interests, etc.
I use KVM switches at work and wish I had one at home. The ones I use are fairly expensive (Blackbox... they make lots of server products) and still leave something to be desired. On high resolutions, it takes a couple of seconds to switch between machines and even after paying so much, you can make out that the image is a little blurred on a 21 inch LCD (from Dell). And most of them dont work too well with laptops.
That said and done, I have to add that they are indespensible. Its amazing how much time it saves especially with keyboard shortcuts (you press Control-Control to get to the KVM and then a letter for the computer you want to switch two). Plus its essential in server rooms where these boxes can be cascaded to 64 or 128 machines. Now if only the good ones were a little bit more affordable for the rest of us....
So just how does Coda support High Availability? While yes, that are its features and it does support server replication, disconnected operation, low bandwith connections, etc, it is technically STILL in developement and can thus have crashes and buggy behavior in many instances. I know.... I have worked with Coda, developed software (CodaVis) for it and am at Carnegie Mellon right now.
Now that said, Coda is GREAT! IT supports a number of features that no other Open FS does and it works pretty well for the research purposes I need it for (look up Internet Suspend/Resume here).
What I think this person is really aiming at is something that is being actively pursued in the research arena in colleges all over the US. For example, Carnegie Mellon together with Intel is pursuing a project called Internet Suspend and Resume. To quote:
...the user is able to suspend execution on a workstation in New York and resume execution on another workstation in San Francisco without carrying any hardware. This OS-independent capability is realized through the combination of virtual machine technology and distributed file systems.
Not sure too many people would be interested in this, but the Kerberos authentication clients used by CMU to verify the ID of people also breaks with this update. We were provided with detailed instructions on how to remove the IE 5.5 update until modifications to the plugins (called KClient) were made.
Before everyone (esp in the USA) start talking about how the Congo government should do more to stop this and how the Congonese people should care about the environment, give a thought to the actual condition of the country.
Rocked by internal problems (civil war in this case), these countries simply don't have money! Neither the people or the government. Before you blast them, think about WHICH countries in the western hemisphere are driving this. Its going to take some time for third world countries to rise. Change doesn't happen overnight so give these people a chance.
I honest to God wouldn't mind paying a small fee every month for the songs I want to listen. As long as I get good quality complete files, I would be happy. However I think there are quite a few things that are going to prevent this from happening.. in no particular order, they are
(a) Given the current mindset of the record labels, I am sure that they will not get anywhere near what I (and you) think is a reasonable price.
(b) I doubt we are going to see a wide variety of songs out there anytime soon... everything from Paul Oakenfold to Mandalay to Ademius to .
(c) I want to be able to transfer all my songs to portable players. I want to hear it at my convenience and not where the record companies dictate. Everything I read seems like they want their way.
If these problemscould be overcome, I would be amongst the first to sign up.
You make excellent points. However look at it this way. What if this device helps in actually putting food in the stomachs of us Indians ?
We need to get out of the mindsets of computers being expensive. These cheap gadgets might just bring about changes in ways we haven't even dreamed about. You need to seed projects to find out if they will flourish. This computing device is not there to play Quake but to use to mine information. Information that might make a difference such as protection against common pests that destroy crops or extended weather forecasts. Information we take for granted is very hard to find in remote and economically poor areas.
And as far as specific things in your message go, for example, The Government of India gives free lunch to all children who attend free public school in the poor areas. The sad part is that people are so poor more children are sent to work in farms and shops than to school.
Right, I know this is not free/OSS but its a good product nevertheless. Has anyone tried Rational Clearcase. Its great for really large projects and comes with its own FS to preserve space (Files can be in your view but if they arent checked out they are Read-only and only in the repository).
meaning that a private
directory under/tmp is not possible without manually changing the permissions (or having all your applications be AFS aware.)
Not true at all... as afs is a Network file system,/tmp is NOT a part of AFS. You would need to be a part of the/afs heirchachy./tmp is actually a part of whatever local fs the workstation is running.
This is a networked file system, but OpenAFS has excellent support for ACLs. I am personally using it at Carnegie Mellon and its used at a host of other places like MIT. And its not a patch but simply a module you compile for the kernel. I got it running on my linux system in 15 minutes. Also has excellent support for security (see Kerberos).
Everyone.. please note that it is NOT the Indian Government doing the hiring here. It is actually a private organization called NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) that is doing the "hiring".
Check out either this article or
this one to find out that its not "India" doing the recruitment but an independant association
Coincidence... but I was just hunting for this when the article came up. I am looking to build a new computer with with an AMD athlon chip but all the reviews about motherboards on Toms Hardware and Anandtech seem to have a MS Windows centric view.
I hope they do come out with a review for linux but that just might take time. SO what have your experiences been under linux ? Anything people like me should be keeping an eye out for ? Or something you would definitely recommend ?
Okay... Linux only distributions are already out. I just picked one up and compiled it yesterday night. Let me know if you need to get your hands on it (plus it has a simplified make file).
I dont think money is an important factor here. If people wanted to make money just for an appearance the probably wouldn't be involved with Open Source/Free Software.
However I guess its just courtsey to not make those people pay for lodging/transportation costs as lets face it... not everyone made money in the.com rush. So I guess just the minimum amount of money would be needed and I am sure there are plenty of people who would love to have the opportunity to talk to college students. After all students are the future and are going to decide where we go tomorrow (unlike MS which decides where we want to go today;).
Finally, many people noted that you should call 1-800-888-3999, and select option 7. No really.
Okay.. I have the feeling this is going to be slashdotted (a first for a phone number ?;) But well.. the option says "Press 7 to hear a duck quack" and you ACTUALLY hear a duck quack before the automatic voice message system hangs up on you. Enjoy!
I feel that companies should not care / take any action as long as installing linux does not put any more stress on critical resources (such as Tech Support/Bandwith/etc). After all whats more important for a company.. productivity or selling their soul to NT;) ? Its just true that somepeople are more comfortable with linux than NT (and it should be noted.. vice versa) so give people the chance.
I personally am happy as all my computers at work are dual boot and am free to use whatever I want. Just hope more companies move out to supporting linux and you can have standarized maintainance (look at CMU's depot with automatic upgrades/changes/patches every night. Just my two cents
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a slightly modified text of an email I sent to the author of the news.com article on AOL's patent on IM.
FYI, with regards to this article, I don't know how strong this patent is because of existing prior art. If you look at this article in MIT's Technology Review, you will see that a form of IM called zephyr with buddy lists as well as chat-room style broadcasts existed since 1988. It would be great if you could also post this information in a future update to let everyone know.
Zephyr exists till today (and we here at Carnegie Mellon as well as students at MIT) use it on a daily basis. Even emacs supports zephyr
Check out their overlay tree here. It shows how the current peer-to-peer tree of everyone viewing anything at that given point in time. Pretty cool.
Indian reprints (am talking official reprints from Publishers) are cheaper than the US counterpart by a factor of 2x-10x. For example, with computer books like O Reilly, Knuth, Stevens, etc, something costing $70 here will cost $7 there (Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated for example). Binding and paper quality is not that great but not those many people can pay Rs. 4500 for a good text book and so this is the route all publishers choose.
Of course these books are meant for the South East Asia market only so don't think about trying to get them imported here unless you have a friend there. Of course I carry a suitcase of them every time I go *grin*.
Why? Because I have found that I can never read a book on a screen or for that matter any document more than a couple of pages. A document deserves a printout and if I find that any book is worth reading, I will go out and buy it. After all the ones available free do no cost a king's ransom in print.
Sadly, it also seems that none of the current thin clients for reading books seem to cut it. They are too iconvenient, sometimes too dim, expensive, limited battery, etc, etc.... I just do not see myself curling up in my easy chair with one of these anytime soon. And I must admit that I am very partial to having lots of books on my bookshelf instead of one electronic reader
After all... nothing beats paper's refresh rate.
I use KVM switches at work and wish I had one at home. The ones I use are fairly expensive (Blackbox... they make lots of server products) and still leave something to be desired. On high resolutions, it takes a couple of seconds to switch between machines and even after paying so much, you can make out that the image is a little blurred on a 21 inch LCD (from Dell). And most of them dont work too well with laptops.
That said and done, I have to add that they are indespensible. Its amazing how much time it saves especially with keyboard shortcuts (you press Control-Control to get to the KVM and then a letter for the computer you want to switch two). Plus its essential in server rooms where these boxes can be cascaded to 64 or 128 machines. Now if only the good ones were a little bit more affordable for the rest of us....
you mean "there was a demo server running on a Commodore 64....
So just how does Coda support High Availability? While yes, that are its features and it does support server replication, disconnected operation, low bandwith connections, etc, it is technically STILL in developement and can thus have crashes and buggy behavior in many instances. I know.... I have worked with Coda, developed software (CodaVis) for it and am at Carnegie Mellon right now.
Now that said, Coda is GREAT! IT supports a number of features that no other Open FS does and it works pretty well for the research purposes I need it for (look up Internet Suspend/Resume here).
What I think this person is really aiming at is something that is being actively pursued in the research arena in colleges all over the US. For example, Carnegie Mellon together with Intel is pursuing a project called Internet Suspend and Resume. To quote:
Not sure too many people would be interested in this, but the Kerberos authentication clients used by CMU to verify the ID of people also breaks with this update. We were provided with detailed instructions on how to remove the IE 5.5 update until modifications to the plugins (called KClient) were made.
Before everyone (esp in the USA) start talking about how the Congo government should do more to stop this and how the Congonese people should care about the environment, give a thought to the actual condition of the country.
Rocked by internal problems (civil war in this case), these countries simply don't have money! Neither the people or the government. Before you blast them, think about WHICH countries in the western hemisphere are driving this. Its going to take some time for third world countries to rise. Change doesn't happen overnight so give these people a chance.
I honest to God wouldn't mind paying a small fee every month for the songs I want to listen. As long as I get good quality complete files, I would be happy. However I think there are quite a few things that are going to prevent this from happening.. in no particular order, they are
(a) Given the current mindset of the record labels, I am sure that they will not get anywhere near what I (and you) think is a reasonable price.
(b) I doubt we are going to see a wide variety of songs out there anytime soon... everything from Paul Oakenfold to Mandalay to Ademius to .
(c) I want to be able to transfer all my songs to portable players. I want to hear it at my convenience and not where the record companies dictate. Everything I read seems like they want their way.
If these problemscould be overcome, I would be amongst the first to sign up.
You make excellent points. However look at it this way. What if this device helps in actually putting food in the stomachs of us Indians ?
We need to get out of the mindsets of computers being expensive. These cheap gadgets might just bring about changes in ways we haven't even dreamed about. You need to seed projects to find out if they will flourish. This computing device is not there to play Quake but to use to mine information. Information that might make a difference such as protection against common pests that destroy crops or extended weather forecasts. Information we take for granted is very hard to find in remote and economically poor areas.
And as far as specific things in your message go, for example, The Government of India gives free lunch to all children who attend free public school in the poor areas. The sad part is that people are so poor more children are sent to work in farms and shops than to school.
This one took the cake
/.er; in which you know the answer!
10.Can I create a Beowulf cluster using many Simputers?
You must be a
Right, I know this is not free/OSS but its a good product nevertheless. Has anyone tried Rational Clearcase. Its great for really large projects and comes with its own FS to preserve space (Files can be in your view but if they arent checked out they are Read-only and only in the repository).
meaning that a private directory under /tmp is not possible without manually changing the permissions (or having all your applications be AFS aware.)
/tmp is NOT a part of AFS. You would need to be a part of the /afs heirchachy. /tmp is actually a part of whatever local fs the workstation is running.
Not true at all... as afs is a Network file system,
This is a networked file system, but OpenAFS has excellent support for ACLs. I am personally using it at Carnegie Mellon and its used at a host of other places like MIT. And its not a patch but simply a module you compile for the kernel. I got it running on my linux system in 15 minutes. Also has excellent support for security (see Kerberos).
Everyone.. please note that it is NOT the Indian Government doing the hiring here. It is actually a private organization called NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) that is doing the "hiring".
Check out either this article or this one to find out that its not "India" doing the recruitment but an independant association
Coincidence
I hope they do come out with a review for linux but that just might take time. SO what have your experiences been under linux ? Anything people like me should be keeping an eye out for ? Or something you would definitely recommend ?
Go look at this earlier article on slashdot -Handheld Atari 2600 VCSp and you will see that this was posted on Sept 22nd by Hemos.
I really wish duplicate posting wouldn't happen but I guess with Slashdot's current size, its hard to avoid.
Okay... Linux only distributions are already out. I just picked one up and compiled it yesterday night. Let me know if you need to get your hands on it (plus it has a simplified make file).
I dont think money is an important factor here. If people wanted to make money just for an appearance the probably wouldn't be involved with Open Source/Free Software. .com rush. So I guess just the minimum amount of money would be needed and I am sure there are plenty of people who would love to have the opportunity to talk to college students. After all students are the future and are going to decide where we go tomorrow (unlike MS which decides where we want to go today;).
However I guess its just courtsey to not make those people pay for lodging/transportation costs as lets face it... not everyone made money in the
Finally, many people noted that you should call 1-800-888-3999, and select option 7. No really.
Okay.. I have the feeling this is going to be slashdotted (a first for a phone number ?
I feel that companies should not care / take any action as long as installing linux does not put any more stress on critical resources (such as Tech Support/Bandwith/etc). After all whats more important for a company .. productivity or selling their soul to NT ;) ? Its just true that somepeople are more comfortable with linux than NT (and it should be noted.. vice versa) so give people the chance.
I personally am happy as all my computers at work are dual boot and am free to use whatever I want. Just hope more companies move out to supporting linux and you can have standarized maintainance (look at CMU's depot with automatic upgrades/changes/patches every night. Just my two cents
How reliable do you guys think this is ? From the web-site...
Site last updated:
Nov 29, 1999
The site also seems to be a part of the normal user accounts provided to an ISP user.
Actually transarc has released linux binaries for 2.2.16 (though I have to admit its been a considerable delay).