This is the real downside to using open source code in government applications --
The reality is something quite the opposite and very different. Any flaw in open source can be found in proprietary software. There are many flaws in proprietary software that are NOT found in open source software.
I find that most open source exploits, not all of them, require the cracker to have ID/Password access and/or local (behind the firewall) access. Not much of an exploit if you do not have secure ID/Passwords. And if the exploit requires local access to the machine and/or network...that is a non issue for almost everyone. With the White house and/or its data center, good luck with getting local access....
Open source is an excellent choice for all government applications. I appreciate when less of my tax dollars go towards software and hardware thanks to a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for open source and FOSS software.
You need and must have Fiber, anything else is a waste of your time.
I have basic cable, a promise of up to 8Mbps. I am throttled and restricted back to less than 100Kbps downstream and less than 40Kbps upstream. Its not the limit or the promise, its what they will guarantee you. The cable companies, neither Comcast nor TWC will promise anything. In fact quite frequently a friend of mine and I are both shaped back to 0Kbps upstream. Our upstream bandwidth bounces up to 40Kbps and back to 0Kbps, up and down, up and down, just enough to prevent you from watching any decent IP TV or video content. My friend went for their "burst" service, however he is still throttled the same as he was with basic service. While he is still trying to work with them, I am just about to give up.
I am thinking two DSL providers, even though they promise less on the upside, either 1.5 Mbps or 3Mbps upstream, you are not sharing that pipe. And if you get either 384Kbps or 758Kbps upstream consistently you will be able to watch any rich content, even high definition. The upstream bandwidth is the true limiter of service based on what he and I have seen. It sucks.
You MUST have fiber, not just to the neighborhood, but into your house and to a fiber modem. This is what gave Japanese customers 100Mb/100Mb in 2000 and 1Gb/1Gb in 2006. They have the bandwidth to create jobs, develop rich content widgets and apps that require more bandwidth than a mere 100Kbps. Americans do not.
FYI Here is what the current American market is worth in billions;
1GB/1GB Fiber ($52/mth) 40% of 307,212,123 would be 122,884,849 subscribers or Revenue of $6,390,012,148 per month ($6.3B)
1GB/1GB Fiber ($52/mth) Sales Rev $6,390,012,148 / mth; for a year: $76,680,145,776; a $76.6 Billion Company, Want to go into business?
As they say on Survivor, worth playing for?
Americans best and ONLY hopes are the following four:
1) New competitor not related to any of the current telcos, going it alone, only with fiber. 40% of the Internet Market in the US would be worth over $30Billion per month when charging customers rates of $52 per month for 1 Gbps / 1Gbps.
2) Greenlight, the local politicians of Wilson N.C. invited them to come into town and run fiber to homes. They did. They charge $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous) bandwidth. I think 95% of Americans would love for Greenlight to come to their town. BTW: the Cable Cos and telcos are working the North Carolina legislature hard to stop Greenlight and prevent either them or other companies from offering service to other North Carolina communities. See last legislative session and upcoming legislative session for details. Probably what we can expect in D.C. They are not spending over $1.8Million per week in DC to lay Fiber!
3) Google, same reason as number 1, but Google, leveraging their data centers, undersea cables and running Fiber. Please oh please this would be a dream come true. I am not aware of any plans for Google to enter the consumer marketplace, but it would be a public relations coupe!
4) Our politicians to stop accepting bribes and de-regulate the telco / cable / wireless / wireline monopolies and oligopolies. It was successful in Japan. They actually have working competitive markets thanks to politicians deregulating NTT (tel co) and their Fiber. By 2000, they had 100Mb / 100Mb for less than $55; in 2006 companies introduced 1GB / 1GB bandwidth for less than $52 per month. Prices actually went down due to a thriving competitive marketplace. Both historical Republicans and historical Democrats would jump at this for different reasons, but neither party is like they use to be. They both fail us. I blame the Republicans more based on their bail out of the bands/financial institutions. I will never, ever vote Republican again because of what they started and did via Bush. The Democrats are
I would suggest that when a corporation purchases another corporation, it purchases it assets and liabilities. I would be shocked if you did not agree with that simple premise.
Since those companies made promises to Americans via elected officials; any company that purchases them shall be held responsible for those promises. When a company purchases another company, their due diligence should expose these obligations. They are responsible for them regardless.
There is not a single area of the county where promises of fiber for tax dollars have NOT taken place. I suggest to you, prove that the company has NOT promised fiber.
How much fiber could they have already installed for $200 billion?
How much fiber could they install for the $1.8 million per week they spend lobbying our elected officials against net neutrality, competition and free/open markets?
the Canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded
Same here in the USA. Since the 1990s, it has been estimated that the Telcos (& Cable Companies) have received in excess of $200 Billion dollars, specifically for laying Fiber to yours and my home. None of which was done. The telcos made promises, in order to receive money + additional taxes on bills + additional fees on bills (many of which, if not all fees & taxes are still being collected) that they would put fiber to our homes.
Worth repeating, The telcos received American tax revenue to put fiber to our homes and apartments. They have been receiving this money since the 1990s. They still receive money today.
Where's the Fiber? (Think 80s Wendy's commercial, Where's the Beef? and you have the right idea)
In addition, they spend in excess of $1.8 million per week to lobby our elected officials against net neutrality, to prevent being forced to run fiber to our homes, to prevent losing their monopoly/oligopoly tiered pricing system, to prevent being forced to provide enough upstream bandwidth so that Americans can watch IP TV, Videos and "rich" content via the Internet. All because they want to force to you pay for content via their Cable system ONLY.
This has been going on for over 20+ years.
The telcos were asked to provide fiber to homes in Wilson N.C., but refused. Based on their refusal the local politicians decided to get fiber for their community and invited Greenlight into the community. Greenlight put fiber to people's homes and charged $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous, not throttled) service to their customers.
The Cable Company / telco response was to lobby the state legislature in North Carolina in order to prevent Greenlight from doing business and to prevent other communities from providing decent fiber service to themselves. The public record is there for all to see. It started last session and will continue next session. Citizens of North Carolina, do something before its too late, let your politicians know that they need to force open the market and invite businesses in to put fiber all the way to people's homes. Nothing less is acceptable.
It's been 20+ years if American providers wanted you to have fiber you would have had it by now. Stop defending the FUD and them. They do not deserve anything but your contempt.
FIOS charges $119 for 50MB/5MB. At least its Fiber.
In Japan, they have had 100Mbps/100Mbps for less than $55 per month as of 2000, thanks to government deregulation of NTT and fiber to homes. (Americans would have had this had the telcos been prevented from watering down and making un enforceable, The "Telecommunications Act of 1996". The telcos lobbyists were very effective. One can only imagine the parties held at Cable Company / Telco boardrooms all across the country at putting one over on American citizens.)
In Japan, by 2006, those same consumers were getting 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps (again synchronous service, not throttled or shaped) for less than $52 per month. Unlike in America where politicians (primarily Republicans) keep touting Market competition, it actually exists in Japan, not here in America. In America corporate monopolies and oligopolies prevent competition.
If the market would or could work, it would have. Face facts Americans, the market is NOT working. We have a 20 year proof and history. Other markets that are not working are obvious as well...wake up Americans, its already too late!
One might ask how the Japanese could give more bandwidth to consumers while lowering prices at the same time.
Very good question as here in America, the telcos/cable companies try to lie and tell Americans that bandwidth is scarce. It is not. This is a lie, it is FUD. Just look at the conversations they have with investors to get the truth of the
This is "user experience", it might not worth anything to you, but many people are willing to pay for it.
I understand all too well that Marketing most certainly works, which your example points out very well. I also understand that many people value their time more than their money. Though many might argue that point, I understand where you are coming from.
The fact is that today there are Linux options in every category that just work. Right out of the box, without the need to configure or change anything, they just work. Its just not advertised and marketed very well.
Of course if you prefer the Apple monopoly, they can turn off your phone or an app (Apple can deny you the use of an app) whether you like it or not. I have read multiple articles where they have done just that, the one that stood out was a very expensive app that pretty much did not do anything productive, yet people wanted it, bought it until Apple said No. I personally would not care for that no matter how much time or money I had. I can censor myself, thank you very much.
Or you can chose a platform like Symbian, but the apps have to be "signed" before you can use them and that pretty much limits choice doesn't it. That's no good either. Their BS excuse viruses, what a joke. If someone's usage habits invites viruses than its their problem, not mine as my usage habits (beginning with Linux, which can get viruses if users have sloppy usage habits) prevent them, making it a non-issue for me. Yet I am being limited, supposedly, (can you say FUD, I do), for other peoples poor choices. I don't like that either.
Let's see, if my options are tethering/limited via a Proprietary OS (Symbian, Apple or other Microsoft derivative (CE/Mobile) vs untethered/unlimited via Android/Maemo (Linux based OS) on an embedded device, well the decision is easy. I like having options. I also think that if you have either more money or more time; you should not be ashamed to buy a product that gives you more options, not less.
If you have money you can purchase/hire the expertise you need. So that argument is lame IMO.
If you have time you can research out the things you need and apply them (assuming the platform (hw/sw) allows you too! Oh that's right only a Linux derivative like Android/Mameo allows for that. Guess your decision will be the same as mine, but wait...
lol, that was a typo, I had to search for 0K to find it, comes from my first post, should have read 40Kbps as like me, he wants to be conservative in his estimate, the reality is worse than 40Kbps 85% - 95% of the time.
It should have read
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100Kbps down and 40Kbps up 85 - 95% of the time.
Since the other related quotes all have either 30K or 40K and state that the bandwidth is "shaped" to less than 0Kbps on a regular basis, I will assume that you are having some fun with me at my expense. Good catch and I have a great sense of humor. Thanks for allowing me to correct it.
Hopefully my point was well understood in spite of that typo...at least I hope so. The simple point is that both my friend and I are prevented from getting acceptable bandwidths to surf the Internet, with one Cable provider specifically, approximately 80% -95% of the time. In reality it is something higher than 95% of the time, but by stating either 80% to 95% or 85% to 95% of the time, we both are being conservative.
These quotes are from the two posts, related to the percentage of time (restricted, filtered, throttled, prevented, censored, , shaping, etc...) in addition to the one above:
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, the videos sputter, gMail, twitter, Facebook and MySpace will not load because of the little extra bandwidth required for the skins and CSS markup language.
Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
However he is getting less than 100K down and less than 40K up well over 85% of the time.
We suspect that every cable providing Internet access does this same thing and that most people do not have a firewall/router with software capable of showing them their bandwidth in real time; so in reality most people do NOT know.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth.
Tell me about it, it sucks! However let me clarify...
Since our service is throttled back most of the time to either 4Kbps or 0Kbps. And you are correct at that level of restriction hardly anything will load. I certainly can not use Digg, stumbleupon, hootsuite and a couple of other social media websites that load more CSS style stuff than other sites...those sites are unusable at upstream bandwidths less than 20Kbps in my personal experience. Whenever a website does not load or loads very, very slowly, I just switch to one of my other Linux windows where the bandwidth monitoring status is being graphed and I typically see bandwidths less than 20Kbps. Its shocking how often its only 4Kbps or 0Kbps. Its disgusting, especially considering its costing me more than $50 per month for cable modem access. That is too much for too little service. DSL at less than $30 per month, sustained bandwidths of 1.5Mbps down and 384Kbps or higher up, is looking very enticing! Thus this slashdot story, putting two DSL providers on your network starts to make allot of sense!
I think most of us would agree that only getting 20Kbps upstream is unacceptable for cable modem access to the Internet advertised as high speed broadband!
With the DD-WRT software you see a continuous graph for both your downstream and upstream bandwidth 24X7. (You do not have to let this bandwidth status graphing run if you do not want to.) With the upstream line bouncing between 0Kbps and 40Kbps. And a second downstream line bouncing between 4kbps and 100Kbps most of the time, however you will see higher spikes upstream...up to 300Kbps, 700Kbps, 1Mbps, occasionally 2Mbps and even rarer 3Mbps downstream.
The higher spikes upstream are fewer and farther in between, and rarely rise above 100Kbps. It becomes pretty obvious that the bandwidth shaping software is controlling users ability to watch any streams (IP TV, Video, Movies, etc...) by throttling (limiting) the upstream bandwidth. My guess is that if you had a sustained 300Kbps (even slower DSL services offer this) upstream you would be able to watch multiple video / TV streams without sputters and/or interruptions. You might need a bit more if those streams are high definition. Since most users are limited upstream to less than 40Kbps (dropping down constantly to 0Kbps) this is what prevents you from watching video via the web.
The FCC and our politicians could break this effectively by decreeing any bandwidth less than 786Kbps can not be considered high speed broadband. Make it FRAUD to declare otherwise. Quite frankly that is a very old standard, even though it was recently set. The 2000 broadband standard should have been 100MB/100MB. The 2006 standard should have been 1GB/1GB. If the telcos/cable companies had given us fiber for our tax dollars as they promised(1990s), that would be the standard today! Do you have respect for promise breakers?
Back to reality,... With the DD-WRT software showing you your actual bandwidth, you see those lines drop to 0Kbps around 50% or more of the time. In other words, you spend much more time at between (0Kbps and 4Kbps) upstream than you do at 40Kbps or higher.
As far as equipment being damaged, that is the kind of FUD that even the Cable company will try to throw out at an unknowing and less knowledgeable public. Since the Speed tests show you that given that few seconds in time your equipment (firewall/router running DD-WRT + Ethernet network + optional hubs + more Ethernet + Cable Modem) works just fine, but ONLY during that moment in time. Thus the very speed test they tout as proving you have great service (even when you do not) also proves that your equipment is functioning just fine. (They artificially prevent it from working as well at other times.)
trying to defeat this problem by 'obscurity' will not work. that has been proven many times before. Just secure your port 22 properly like everyone else, and the problem will go away over time.
Amen brother. Security by obscurity is way too widely used. Most of the attack vectors require an account ID and password, if they get that, you game is almost over. If they get a root user or root capability, it is game over.
They are scanning ports now, Linux popularity is growing, duh moment here. Either you can secure it or your can't, if you can't learn fast and figure it out, nothing short of that will keep you secure.
Great answer. Many do not want to think about this (time consuming) but in reality you do NOT KNOW if you are being compromised unless you monitor your upstream packets as well as downstream packets. Thus if a root kit gets put on any machine on your network; AND you do some baselines to see what your normal traffic looks like, you will immediately notice that something extra is there.
Very few people monitor their outgoing packets for unusual activity. We all should, however it is time consuming.
Even system admins at many large corporations are not allowed the time to effectively monitor their network, unless they are in a Security group designed for that specific purpose.
Hey boss, I need to spend a couple of hours each day looking over are packet traffic checking for anything unusual. Yes this is in addition to the time I need to scan the server logs. Yea right, that would get approved, NOT.
Checked out the image online, that is a very cool phone. At first I searched for the N90, that screen size is too small. Then I realized that you put E90, duh moment for me. Its pretty cool that you can close it up and use it as a phone also.
Those keyboards IMO are just a little too small for many adult fingers/thumbs. And to be honest I do not like using my thumbs to type/text like that anyway, so thats my problem. Of course, I do not care for the keyboard on the screen either and that applies to the Nokia Nxxx series that I prefer. I like a little bigger keyboard, so the bluetooth fold out keyboards that you can get for the Nokia Nxxx line works great.
For the future, until they have an expandable screen or a virtual 3D screen that displays in the Air in front of you, this is the smallest size screen I would want on a Linux hand held / Linux computer. I like being able to use a full size browser, sure you might have to move the image left and right and up and down, if you do not use the + and - buttons to shrink/expand the screen.
Having moved from a 6M camera to a 10 Megapixel camera, I would like to see the next Nokia have no less than 10 Megapixels in the camera, And I would like them to give the next Nokia to flip the image around from filming you, to filming a person in front of you the way the Nokia N800 and N880s could do.
Have not checked out the Nokia N900's Micro SSD slots yet, but if it does not have two of them, I would like to see that return as well. This way you can use the internal one to grow the file system and add memory (albeit a little slower). I have seen 32GB Micro SD cards for less than $16 US. I picked up two 4GB cards for mine for FREE last Christmas, they were $5,00, free after a rebate...too good to pass up from Frys. (They made their money from me too as I bought some other things while I was there...a smart loss leader) The second external SSD can be for data, programs (non permanent) and more.
I love that the Nokia N900 has a USB port, much needed. Will be interesting to see if it works well with the Maemo Linux software. Granted I put my Micro SSD cards in a USB adapter now and use them that way.
I would love to see an Ethernet 10/100/1000 port (do they make mini ethernet ports?) on a device this size. I just do not trust WiFi to install binaries on a device and I am not sure if you can purchase one of those boards to assist in burning in the operating system. My guess is they are internal Nokia use only.
That E90 was interesting, however, anymore if the device will NOT run one or more Linux distros, I simply will NOT purchase it. So that probably knocks me out for the E90. I do not care what it does. Its not about free as in beer (free beer where, squirrel) for me, it is about options and choice. I will gladly pay for innovation, but I do not want to be led down any more blind alleys because some corporation wants to lock me in.
No Linux, the device is not smart! Smartphone, only if it runs one or more Linux Distros.
That is one reason I put the subject as Pering and not Peering.
Yes we Americans are throttled back that severely, of course the Cable Company/Telco oligopoly (monopoly in many areas) will NOT call it throttling, they flat out deny that they restrict usage. And when they are caught red handed (Both Comcast and TWC have been in the past on numerous related issues, can you stay TCP/IP Stop Packets to interrupt an Internet users surfing of the Internet? Even Sprint one time blocked an entire range of IP addresses, I have forgotten and no longer care what their excuse was, as it was WRONG) they pull out the following BS excuses: pornography, child welfare, pedophilia, spammers, etc, etc, Ad nauseam. Like you are not smart enough to censor yourself and your family, please stop the FUD.
I, and many Americans, believe each family unit are the only ones who can independently determine if they want to self censor or not. It really is a freedom issue (net neutrality, bandwidth caps, bandwidth shaping, deep packet inspection and other bandwidth limiting strategies), a privacy issue, a simple Respect your customer issue.
As for bandwidth, it is a form of censorship, but much, much worse. It literally determines what content you and your family are able to get to, see and view. Hit the cap, you better pay up more or else you will be cut off.
As for bandwidth, less than 1% of the American population get the FCC definition of Broadband, which is 768K. Note my friend's speed test showed over 9000 Kbps down and over 900Kbps upstream. Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
He is regularly throttled to 0Kbps upstream and it bounces from 0Kbps to 4Kbps or from 0Kpbs to 13Kbps, ocassionally up to 30Kbps. Not only can you not watch TV or video, but forget about using sites with allot of CSS or skins, for instance Digg and stumbleupon are not usable at that level of bandwidth throttling.
There are few if any off-the-shelf residential firewall/routers (DSL or Cable modem does not matter), typically costing less than $80 dollars per, that will show the home user actual logging information about what packets are and are not going through their firewall/router. Companies like Cisco/Linksys use the software as a product differentiating / limiting device to get users to spend more for more capability. However to get true TCP/IP and UDP packet information none of the Residential routers give you this information. Even the Linksys / Cisco firewall/routers costing in the $60 to $80 range vary greatly. I have a BEFSX41 (older non WiFi router) that would give me the outgoing and incoming IP addresses, but not packet information. When I purchased a newer (now old too) WRT54G WiFi (DD-WRT capable) firewall/router I expected even better logging. Yet the logging was even more limited. It did not make sense until you saw how they differentiated their products. Logical from a business pricing / marketing strategy, but still impractical to give home/residential users the opportunity to control and view their actual packet information. (Thus why I harp on the DD-WRT routers, so does my friend, once you have this capability and see what it does for you; the data/information that you now can use; you will not settle for anything less, I know I would not.)
In a "nut"shell many Americans take the speed test as gospel...what a crock, it is NOT. All it tells you is the devices between your PC and the ISP (DD-WRT enabled Firewall/Router and DSL/Cable Modem) will allow you to get that maximum speed at that specific moment. In the next moment all best are OFF. If you did a bell curve with my friends 9000 Kbps down / 900Kbps up. It would mean that he should expect to get the f
Its long, at least read about Greenlight in N.C. and learn!
I am 100% positive you could do this with hardware that will run the DD-WRT, here is a list of DD-WRT supported devices, they have a search link, but I find that it does not work very well if you do not know the name of the router / firewall that you are looking for. So use the list and find a supported device.
You would need two of them and two different providers. You could even get a third one and do some special VLAN stuff to put some ports on all three on the same virtual network., many options.
These devices are very light weight, therefore shipping is next to nothing. The Linksys WRT54Gs' were great routers for the DD-WRT software. Costing over $75 when they first came out, dropping to $69 for years and finally hitting $15 or $30 when the stores were unloading them to bring in the new Linksys routers (none of which will support the DD-WRT software, except one that runs Linux). NOTE: there are BETTER routers than the WRT54G to run this software. The WRT54G will ONLY run the Micro version of the software. Do yourself a favor and get one that will run the Mega version of the software! (They cost less than $100 per and well worth the price.)
Linksys (Cisco) begin removing DD-WRT compatible firewall/routers from store shelves, replacing them with devices that are NOT compatible with the DD-WRT software in 2007/2008.
Get two DSL lines ($13 - $19 each), add in a NAT and a couple of these routers, probably need to do some secure tunneling to avoid the DNS of the Cable / DSL Companies and voila you are good to go. Your DSL speed will vary based on distance, but even far away you can get 1.5MB down and 384Kbps up. If closer you can get 3Mb down and 768Kbps up. (That is faster than 98% of Americans with Cable Modems because of throttling of service by Cable providers.)
Could you run the second DSL upstream over the first one? Thus saving the cost of a second telephone line, you would lose the redundancy that two telephones would provide, but save around $13 per month on a second phone line...probably better just to get the two lines, you total cost of ownership (TCO) will still be less than $60 per month and you will have redundancy. If one service gets stupid and starts throttling, drop them and get a different one. Politicians help us if they all throttle!
Solves allot of problems related to Cable companies throttling back service if you can create a secure VPN that their Deep Packet Inspection and/or Bandwidth shaping (throttling) service might have a harder time restricting (throttling). Granted they would still throttle you back by your IP address or MAC address of Cable Modem. Again, they do that now anyway.
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100K down and 0K up 85 - 95% of the time. He went on and paid his cable company the $10 burst / protection racket money / "give me a little more of what I am already paying for money" extra fee. Keep in mind that they were promising up to 8MP and delivering less from day one. He said he got a letter in the mail that they would be rolling out a new service in his area, the day after they started using that service, his bandwidth was throttled to next to nothing. (0 Kbps upstream, consistently less than 20Kbps). (There were 1 GB, 2GB and 3 GB ~ 1 second spikes ONLY, unless he was downloading a Linux distro, then he got 3GB - 4GB sustained with a 1 sec 6GB spike) He is convinced that they throttle him back because he uses Skype VoIP service (uses P2P packets) in a vain attempt to get him to switch to the Cable companies VoIP service. At less than $100 per year, Skype blows away any telco/Cable company offering.
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, t
7 year CLOCK restart is simple, following the KISS principle. If a company, in this case Microsoft, does anything in a customer no service manner to anyone, not just me, I will reset the clock. Until I see that many years of that company being a decent corporate citizen, I will re frame from doing business with them. The 7 year clock is because they have been abusing their monopoly power for more than 10 years, over 20 years in my personal experience. For newer companies, a 3 year clock would suffice. Anything less than 3 years does not allow for enough time to see if a company has changed based solely on their ACTIONS. Nothing else matters, but their actions.
Over a three year period, an innovative company will have either 9 (3 releases per year) or 12 major releases of their product (software/hardware/both). If they are practicing Agile/SCRUM with a livable, sustainable velocity (this is absolutely critical, otherwise your company becomes a miserable place to work and turnover will eventually impact their product quality), than they might actually have more than that number of releases. The point is not the number of releases, but a track record where their actions can be measured with 100% accuracy.
Mathinker pretty much covered much of what I would have said. Thanks Mathinker. However I still see some of your comments as misrepresenting Linux and spreading FUD. For instance.
Third one first, as it is the most critical to Linux success without hassles:
As for hardware vendors, frankly, the Linux community is still too small to matter...The effort to get that last 1%....
Why people throw out that the desktop market is only 1% Linux, its been larger than that for years. This is more of the same ole FUD! The only reason it is not even larger is that Microsoft has the big box stores where most noobs shop pretty well locked up. This is where the Linux hardware vendors, who know what not to put in a PC, are especially critical. It is not surprising that those same computers, with proprietary hardware (i.e. designed not to work with Linux) give fits to users when they attempt to install Linux.
Note to all: run Linux from Disk (assuming your computer has a CD/DVD) first. Verify everything works: Video, Audio, USB, Keyboard, Mouse, WiFi, 10/100 Ethernet NIC, etc... Anything that you use every day, make sure it will work with that hardware and that version of Linux or DO NOT INSTALL LINUX. This will avoid most FUD issues related to Linux not working on your proprietary hardware. Never forget, if you are not purchasing from a Linux Vendor (I do not include Dell among them, they only barely qualifies; check out ZaReason or System 76. I always emphasize ZaReason because I have met the family who runs the company and I know first hand that they care. Heck their daughter (under 10 I believe) has no problems with Linux or Windows. She told me she prefers Linux, its all about what you get use to.)
If you purchase hardware with Linux in mind, even if you want to run Windows, you have the best of all worlds. You can still run Windows, if you want. And when Microsoft end of lifes that version of Windows, and eventually they will. No one can debate that fact, eventually they are going to drop support for the version of Windows that you are running on that PC. At that point and time you can use this now older PC for something useful, anything. Since it was built and purchased running Linux, you know it will run Linux 10 years form now. That too is fact. I currently run Linux with a slow processor and 128MB of RAM. I prefer a minimum of 512MB of RAM, even better if there is at least 1 GB of RAM. Future Linux computers will have either 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM as I want to manipulate high definition video/audio using the H.264 codec. While doable with Linux and 2 GB, probably easier with 4 GB of RAM. With Linux ONLY, the extra memory will not be used up by the operating system (as it is with Windows
IE only policies are very common in many government organizations. Guess where most of the browser stats come from? You guessed it. Even with this obvious misleading slant in the statistics the IE Browser share is steadily dropping.
Microsoft still markets IE as superior even though anyone with half a brain knows better.
In web dev I learned years ago that if I developed in Netscape (even after their demise) the website always worked in every other browser. If I developed in IE, there were always issues. You learn fast. Even if a shop was.NET (shame really, but there are many) having your development work on Linux desktops guarantees interoperability with all operating systems, even Windows. The converse is most certainly not true.
As a Director, I bring in the tools needed to get the job done. period. That even means getting a user/developer a Windows desktop if that is what they are most effective on, however their data will always be in a non proprietary open source data format. I have learned that lesson the hard way.
If I were the CIO, CTO or VP of IT and the IT Director tried to convince me that their was a lower cost of ownership with Microsoft versus Linux it would be an interesting conversation. Since I already know the numbers, they would be changing their tune or looking for a new job. Even if Microsoft donated everything free, I know there is a huge hidden cost down the road. The numbers and math do not lie, anyone responsible for an IT budget that is not using open source and Linux is not using company funds wisely. Note I did not say that you could not have any windows desktops. Though I would not have any Windows servers, when compared to Linux there is no contest.
Quite frankly I am surprised more shareholders are not looking at the use of Microsoft products within IT for a company when making stock purchasing decisions. No matter how you slice it, it simply is not less expensive.
I think you are right, he was probably serious. Could have been a troll, but I too believe he was serious.
Its even harder for the old school Waterfall/RUP guys. I remember seeing how much better a software product's user interface (and manual) were after a talented technical writer got hold of it. Yet some developers still honestly believe their code is self documenting. What a joke.
You can not pad your project with Agile/SCRUM, though I admit I have yet to see a company do Agile/SCRUM correctly. Does any company employ Project Owners, as I have never seen that job posted on line and I have looked. The role is definitely critical to successful Agile/SCRUM.
My guess is that most companies take whatever role they have for Product Management and they are responsibility for the Product Owner role.
Of course you have to hope you have an intelligent management structure that does not increase the velocity to a burn-out rate. Probably asking too much.
Publicly recanting the Halloween Documents, and particularly "embrace, extend, and extinguish" would be a start, if only a start.
Institute a 7 year clock.
Watch Microsoft actions over a seven year period, only start purchasing their products again if their actions over the last seven years show that they have honestly changed.
Anytime they spread FUD or Embrace or Extend or Extinguish or do anything, any action, to harm open source, FOSS and/or Linux RESTART THE CLOCK!
Your base your purchase decision based on their business decisions and actions, period. Let me say that again, based on ACTIONS, not WORDS or marketing FUD. Their words often lie, history is rife with examples. To not acknowledge this reveals you to be either a shill, working for Microsoft or ignorant of the factual history. Do not be part of the problem. Their actions often take 2 or 3 years before they can extinguish, thus a longer period is smart.
The added plus side is that if they KNOW that a business decision is going to cost them 7 years business from a significant segment of the market (they will try to tell you that it is not a significant part of the market, do not buy into that FUD) ; they are more likely to NOT be stupid.
All one has to do is look at the statistics in the browser wars; operating system wars, office wars, server wars, active directory wars, etc... to see that they win a battle here or there but they are slowly, very slowly losing the war. (It is not lost on the author that they started these wars, not anyone else) Do not let them spread more FUD that the numbers of users upset with their past business practices is small. Not now, not thanks to Vista and the Economic downturn.
Microsoft new campaign, "make web, not war", too funny. Is that the pot calling the kettle black or what!
I am waiting 7 years before I purchase again. If they behave badly I will reset the clock from that day. I reset the clock this month and will probably reset it again next month. Thats okay with me, its not like I need their products anyway there are ample options in every vertical. My guess is they will not be able to change their behavior, innovate and entice me to purchase. Only time will tell. It is up to them now, give me 7 years of good behavior and we can talk! Regardless they will not be able to harm me or the businesses for which I make purchasing decisions any more.
Keep it simple!
On a positive note, I am guaranteed not to waste another dollar on vendor lock-in and proprietary BS. That makes me smile...all the way to the bank. My TCO (total cost of ownership) is already the cost of Vista and Windows 7 cheaper per desktop than any Windows user that bought into Vista. (I have multiple desktops and servers at home)
Why are you Vista users putting up with this crap, give Beryl a try, you will not want to go back. They should have given a cheap ($20 - $30) upgrade or free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Yet another mistake and any Vista user is right to be upset over it. Makes Microsoft look desperate to me.
On full disclosure, I saw a $300 netbook that triple boots (Macintosh, Windows and Linux) so I might waste $300 for a testing platform only. While I use Microsoft desktops at various companies when I have no other options; at home I have been free of Windows for over two years now. Linux is a smarter development platform also, as you can develop for all platforms, even Windows. The converse is often NOT true. Helps you to avoid functionality that is dependent on Windows operating systems as well. Very smart to avoid those traps.
Why 7 years, glad you asked? They have been doing what they do, harming alternatives for well over two decades, 20 years plus, 7 years seems like enough time to know if they have changed or not. (I was in IT before DOS 1.0; I have lived it first hand. I do not need anyone to verify what I have experienced.)
No its not, stop spreading FUD! You obviously have not purchased a Linux computer from a Linux vendor (i.e ZaReason, System 76) and run Beryl on it. Vista is lame by comparisons. Windows 7 still is lackluster in comparison.
Smooth, lmao, Any Linux distro (there are many) running Beryl on hardware designed to be open (not proprietary) is real smooth. Looks more professional also. Hey another plus, all that extra memory that Vista (and Windows 7 is just Vista +) operating system eats up; is left available for the applications running on the desktop.
Hint to all: Purchase your hardware from a vendor that knows and builds Linux; you can always run Windows if you want too and down the road when Microsoft stops supporting your operating system and/or Windows applications; you are 100% sure that that hardware will run the next version of Linux; and the next; and the next.
The truth is you do not need Windows or Microsoft anymore, if you want to use them fine, but make sure your hardware is 100% Linux compatible and sleep well at night!
Thank you for pointing that out Cyberax, I have heard of sys admins supporting in excess of 10,000 user and 100,000 users using Samba and not Active Directory. They know AD is a trap to be avoided, but at the same time they have groups with Windows Desktops to support in addition to Unix, Linux and Macintosh desktops. Samba has long been the preferred choice for truly open mixed environments. It always rubs me the wrong way when someone either does not know (possible) or is a shill (more likely) for Microsoft and states things like that. As an intelligent IT Director I would never put in AD in my environment. Of course I would not waste money on IIs licenses either when Linux and Unix servers do more better for less. Total Cost of Ownership will always be lower with Linux.
Samba based AD servers work just fine and have for years. To say otherwise is a prime example of FUD!
American consumers MUST have fiber to their homes.
The FCC should at least update their definition of high speed Internet from 768Kbps to 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps, based on Japanese success since 2000, 9 years ago.
Given the current US market, only the following four things give American consumers any hope of freedom, bandwidth and Net Neutrality, but especially true and honest high speed bandwidth.
Government Deregulation. (This is how Japan got first 100 Mbps / 100Mbps and now get 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps for less per month)
Google via laying undersea cables, http://bit.ly/y8Ra7, they may be the only company large enough in America currently to pull this off. And they have the need from a bandwidth perspective with their business.
Greenlight, http://bit.ly/JKiSo, assuming the Cable Companies and Telcos have not paid off your elected officials already to prevent them from coming into your town, city and/or county. As many have already posted around the net, this has happened in their areas, politicians are bought and paid for. Also assumes that peering agreements can be reached. (Net Neutrality also) The American Telco / Cable Co / Wireline / Wireless Co oligopoly is lobbying D.C. at the rate of $1.5 million per week to protect their tiered pricing. Imagine if they put this plus the estimated $300 Billion they have received in government money + taxes + fees since the 1990s into new Fiber, we would already have Fiber to our home. When you think about it, it is criminal!
A new telco / fiber company enters the American market without peering agreements with any American telco and thus Cable Companies, Wireless companies, etc.... And is able to successfully put their own fiber in the ground or purchase dark fiber and light it up across the country.
Those are the ONLY solutions to the telco - cable company - wireless oligopoly and political lobbying that has been hurting Americans since 1990, preventing innovation. There was a reason AT&T was broken up, remember that, if the problems were not addressed and fixed, blame your elected officials. (Especially if they are in the committees changing the bills and laws for the lobbyists) The buck MUST stop with them. If American companies wanted to give Americans 100Mbps / 100Mbps for $55 or less per month (as in Japan since 2000, 9 years ago) or 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps for $52 or less per month (since 2006, 3 years ago) it would have already happened. It has not. The only logical reason for this not to have already occurred is the oligopoly greed of tiered pricing. This fact alone speaks volumes, all bad, the industry screams regulate me or I will continue to screw you, based on their actions. Their words are lies and FUD. History is loud and clear.
Remember the technology to increase bandwidth on a single strand of fiber from X1 to X1024 has existed since before 2000! As of 2006, the Japanese are using this technological innovation to increase bandwidth from 100Mbps / 100Mbps up to 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps. They can go higher still with the same fiber that was put into the ground way back in 2000 and before. Bandwidth scarcity is a MYTH!
You have to love this quote, we can hope but we should not leave it to hope alone, we must act:
upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time.
You mean a fight over pro-anything-consumer has not won against the over $1.5 million spent every week lobbying our elected officials has not been won after two fights and we are going for a third attempt and expect a different outcome, why? Seems crazy to me also, to do the same thing and expect a different resul
For those of us living in bigger cities, like LA or New York, especially with larger immigrant populations and homelessness. They are still peeing outside, on the sidewalk and on buildings.
And yes I have used an outhouse on a family farm. Get out of my pig slop!
maybe because people will continue buying WinMobile handsets for the same reason they continue to buy Windows PCs?
Happily stopped purchasing Windows products over a year and a half ago, should have done it sooner. I am finding that in every category, even Graphics editing, Movie playing and mail / office apps, my FREEDOM with #Linux is superior than the limitations forced on me via vendor-lockin.
Remember, buy Linux PCs from a Vendor like ZaReason that builds the PC, laptop, netbook, multi-media machine from the ground up with Linux in mind, thus no issues with anything, their Linux machines just work right out of the box.
When my friends could no longer reformat their PCs hard drive + reinstall their purchased Microsoft OS in order to clean out bloat and remove viruses, adware, etc, I just shook my head and reminded them why Microsoft lost my over 20+ years of TRUST. Never mind that it does not help as the first FORCED update/upgrade puts most, if not all, of the bloat back on your PC. Does Microsoft even sell a CD or DVD with the purchase of either Vista or Windows 7, as I would never purchase an operating system without one. Depend on the internet connection always being up and my bandwidth un-capped, I do not think so.
I often have to remind them more than a few times, before they get frustrated enough with Microsoft to find a guaranteed solution that is 100% in their control and will work. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view point, Microsoft gives me plenty of opportunities to remind my friends. Especially since Vista was released. Heck every FORCED auto update / upgrade is one more opportunity for Microsoft to shine, NOT.
No tethering issues with an open Linux mobile handset. Any many more software applications options, especially games.
As for Mobile handsets, stick with a Linux based OS, like Maemo.org, yes I know Android is Linux based, but I have not checked to see if I can install it on my Nokia N800. I have no need to purchase a handset just to run another OS, when Maemo does everything I need it to do. At least with a fully functioning Linux based handheld their are NO tethering issues or any bogus reasons for you not to be able to use the software of your choice. Anyone with a proprietary OS from one of the cellular providers knows what a pain in the butt that is. And for one reason ONLY: vendor lock-in!
No text messaging caps, I would think this would be huge for every family with teenagers. No additional fees and all they can eat text messaging. Besides text messaging should be free if you understand the engineering behind how communications with the towers works. Why chance that you will be raped for an additional inflated FEE.
As more and more people get frustrated with limitations to their handhelds proprietary software operating system, options like Android and Maemo will look much more promising.
While I still use MacIntosh computers and Microsoft computers for some work related contracts, hey I have over 20+ years of experience that comes in handy. At home it is Linux or nothing. I just got tired of the crap. I want my computer to just work, no hassles, just work. I upgrade when I choose to upgrade ONLY. And that is after others have tried and posted the problems with the new update or upgrade. I do not have time for the interruptions to my life that auto update and auto upgrade cause. I have NEVER been hit with a Virus because I browse safely without Java, JavaScript and/or Action X automatically enabled by default. I recommend using a sandboxed PC when you turn on features that can introduce cross scripting issues via websites. It works. Oh yes, I never use IE for anything but testing my own development. If you use Internet Explorer, designed open by default without the a
Thanks for posting the link to that site, I always knew that some companies changed their stats, but did not have any proof. It would not surprise me that a company like Microsoft was trying to prevent negative public perceptions (they call it perception, I call it reality) that their browser share for Internet Explorer (IE) is dropping. And quite frankly it comes as NO SURPRISE, I just did not expect it this soon!.
I was aware that many of the companies get most of their usage from North America as opposed to Europe were there is a quantifiable drop in IE browser market-share. That has been occurring for years and is NOT a new trend. So obviously a company that monitors more North American sites than the rest of the world, especially Europe, you expect to artificially inflate the IE browser statistics. (I assumed the artificial inflation was between 15% - 30%) Its nice to start seeing numbers that are more and more difficult to pad and hide. It is even better that the companies that have been doing this are starting to get publicly outed as their skewed and artificially inflated IE browser stats thrust them into the light of day.
Sure I knew a few stats companies inflated IE numbers. I even expect that some of these companies have unofficial agreements with Microsoft or are out and out Shills for the company. This has been going on for years. Its not new. What is new is that the drop in IE stats is so much that their efforts are causing the light to be shined back on them. New, but hardly unexpected.
it was only a matter of when, not of if IE market share would drop.
Back when some sites were still posting above 85% or 95% browser share for all IE browsers; other sites with a more world view, not North America centric, were reporting IE browser shares in the 60% - 69% range. That was two to three years ago.
A year and a few months ago I predicted that IE browser share would drop below 50% within 2 to 3 years. It appears that it has happened faster than I expected. So that is a welcome and pleasant surprise.
I stopped doing special scripting for websites related to IE back when they refused to support open web standards and took their IE browser implementation in a less standardized direction. All for the hope of future vendor lock-in, call it what it is. A Mistake!
They made the choice, no need to feel sorry for them. Granted they were not banking on the backlash due to all the exploits and viruses attacking only IE and Active X.
This is a very good sign! I take it as a sign that the general computer user, while still predominantly using a Windows PC for their desktop, are becoming more aware of the issues and probably more frustrated with the attacks and problems related to IE. Thus they are switching to browsers that will not force them to re-install their operating system (OS), just because they clicked on a link and the ActiveX and IE combo does additional things without their permission. Sadly they can not protect themselves from this terrible behavior.
The only prevention to these exploits is to NOT use IE and to limit your use of Active X, period. Looks like people are noticing and using browsers other than IE.
Will this carry over into frustration with Active X and.NET in general, I honestly hope so as I detest vendor lock-in and the limiting of options for me computer wise. Sure.NET is not as bad as Active X with viruses and exploits, but it does run on a proprietary Windows platform, thus exploits are still an issue. With.NET the vendor lock-in is certain based on Microsoft actions, not their words, but their actions over the last 20+ years.
The sole reason for my prediction of the collapse of IE browser share of all kinds was primarily due to viruses, cross script injections and other cracks (hackers do not crack) that would result in a consumer s desktop, la
I still have to use IE occasionally -- but I only do so for sites I know are safe (some at work, and a company I do business with) and only because they *ONLY* support ASP. (which may be costing them more and more business if these trends hold-- all for a flashy shimmery ASP button at one site).
One can only hope you are correct, but based on reading other posts to your comment, my guess is there are other issues also.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the real downside to using open source code in government applications --
The reality is something quite the opposite and very different. Any flaw in open source can be found in proprietary software. There are many flaws in proprietary software that are NOT found in open source software.
I find that most open source exploits, not all of them, require the cracker to have ID/Password access and/or local (behind the firewall) access. Not much of an exploit if you do not have secure ID/Passwords. And if the exploit requires local access to the machine and/or network...that is a non issue for almost everyone. With the White house and/or its data center, good luck with getting local access....
Open source is an excellent choice for all government applications. I appreciate when less of my tax dollars go towards software and hardware thanks to a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for open source and FOSS software.
Please stop spreading FUD.
...is limited to 500Kbps upstream.
You need and must have Fiber, anything else is a waste of your time.
I have basic cable, a promise of up to 8Mbps. I am throttled and restricted back to less than 100Kbps downstream and less than 40Kbps upstream. Its not the limit or the promise, its what they will guarantee you. The cable companies, neither Comcast nor TWC will promise anything. In fact quite frequently a friend of mine and I are both shaped back to 0Kbps upstream. Our upstream bandwidth bounces up to 40Kbps and back to 0Kbps, up and down, up and down, just enough to prevent you from watching any decent IP TV or video content. My friend went for their "burst" service, however he is still throttled the same as he was with basic service. While he is still trying to work with them, I am just about to give up.
I am thinking two DSL providers, even though they promise less on the upside, either 1.5 Mbps or 3Mbps upstream, you are not sharing that pipe. And if you get either 384Kbps or 758Kbps upstream consistently you will be able to watch any rich content, even high definition. The upstream bandwidth is the true limiter of service based on what he and I have seen. It sucks.
You MUST have fiber, not just to the neighborhood, but into your house and to a fiber modem. This is what gave Japanese customers 100Mb/100Mb in 2000 and 1Gb/1Gb in 2006. They have the bandwidth to create jobs, develop rich content widgets and apps that require more bandwidth than a mere 100Kbps. Americans do not.
FYI Here is what the current American market is worth in billions;
1GB/1GB Fiber ($52/mth) 40% of 307,212,123 would be 122,884,849 subscribers or Revenue of $6,390,012,148 per month ($6.3B)
1GB/1GB Fiber ($52/mth) Sales Rev $6,390,012,148 / mth; for a year: $76,680,145,776; a $76.6 Billion Company, Want to go into business?
As they say on Survivor, worth playing for?
Americans best and ONLY hopes are the following four:
1) New competitor not related to any of the current telcos, going it alone, only with fiber. 40% of the Internet Market in the US would be worth over $30Billion per month when charging customers rates of $52 per month for 1 Gbps / 1Gbps.
2) Greenlight, the local politicians of Wilson N.C. invited them to come into town and run fiber to homes. They did. They charge $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous) bandwidth. I think 95% of Americans would love for Greenlight to come to their town. BTW: the Cable Cos and telcos are working the North Carolina legislature hard to stop Greenlight and prevent either them or other companies from offering service to other North Carolina communities. See last legislative session and upcoming legislative session for details. Probably what we can expect in D.C. They are not spending over $1.8Million per week in DC to lay Fiber!
3) Google, same reason as number 1, but Google, leveraging their data centers, undersea cables and running Fiber. Please oh please this would be a dream come true. I am not aware of any plans for Google to enter the consumer marketplace, but it would be a public relations coupe!
4) Our politicians to stop accepting bribes and de-regulate the telco / cable / wireless / wireline monopolies and oligopolies. It was successful in Japan. They actually have working competitive markets thanks to politicians deregulating NTT (tel co) and their Fiber. By 2000, they had 100Mb / 100Mb for less than $55; in 2006 companies introduced 1GB / 1GB bandwidth for less than $52 per month. Prices actually went down due to a thriving competitive marketplace. Both historical Republicans and historical Democrats would jump at this for different reasons, but neither party is like they use to be. They both fail us. I blame the Republicans more based on their bail out of the bands/financial institutions. I will never, ever vote Republican again because of what they started and did via Bush. The Democrats are
Very well written, to the point and factual! Sadly factual
prove it
Not a problem...to get you started...
- $200 Billion of tax payer money given to telcos for promises never kept.
Where's the fiber?
Why have U.S. customers paid an estimated $200 billion in higher services rates and tax breaks for fiber-optic networks they never received?
I would suggest that when a corporation purchases another corporation, it purchases it assets and liabilities. I would be shocked if you did not agree with that simple premise.
Since those companies made promises to Americans via elected officials; any company that purchases them shall be held responsible for those promises. When a company purchases another company, their due diligence should expose these obligations. They are responsible for them regardless.
There is not a single area of the county where promises of fiber for tax dollars have NOT taken place. I suggest to you, prove that the company has NOT promised fiber.
How much fiber could they have already installed for $200 billion?
How much fiber could they install for the $1.8 million per week they spend lobbying our elected officials against net neutrality, competition and free/open markets?
Even pre-Clinton, as far back as 1991, the Bell companies made very promising statements about their commitment to fiber-optic networks.
the Canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded
Same here in the USA. Since the 1990s, it has been estimated that the Telcos (& Cable Companies) have received in excess of $200 Billion dollars, specifically for laying Fiber to yours and my home. None of which was done. The telcos made promises, in order to receive money + additional taxes on bills + additional fees on bills (many of which, if not all fees & taxes are still being collected) that they would put fiber to our homes.
Worth repeating, The telcos received American tax revenue to put fiber to our homes and apartments. They have been receiving this money since the 1990s. They still receive money today.
Where's the Fiber? (Think 80s Wendy's commercial, Where's the Beef? and you have the right idea)
In addition, they spend in excess of $1.8 million per week to lobby our elected officials against net neutrality, to prevent being forced to run fiber to our homes, to prevent losing their monopoly/oligopoly tiered pricing system, to prevent being forced to provide enough upstream bandwidth so that Americans can watch IP TV, Videos and "rich" content via the Internet. All because they want to force to you pay for content via their Cable system ONLY.
This has been going on for over 20+ years.
The telcos were asked to provide fiber to homes in Wilson N.C., but refused. Based on their refusal the local politicians decided to get fiber for their community and invited Greenlight into the community. Greenlight put fiber to people's homes and charged $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous, not throttled) service to their customers.
The Cable Company / telco response was to lobby the state legislature in North Carolina in order to prevent Greenlight from doing business and to prevent other communities from providing decent fiber service to themselves. The public record is there for all to see. It started last session and will continue next session. Citizens of North Carolina, do something before its too late, let your politicians know that they need to force open the market and invite businesses in to put fiber all the way to people's homes. Nothing less is acceptable.
It's been 20+ years if American providers wanted you to have fiber you would have had it by now. Stop defending the FUD and them. They do not deserve anything but your contempt.
FIOS charges $119 for 50MB/5MB. At least its Fiber.
In Japan, they have had 100Mbps/100Mbps for less than $55 per month as of 2000, thanks to government deregulation of NTT and fiber to homes. (Americans would have had this had the telcos been prevented from watering down and making un enforceable, The "Telecommunications Act of 1996". The telcos lobbyists were very effective. One can only imagine the parties held at Cable Company / Telco boardrooms all across the country at putting one over on American citizens.)
In Japan, by 2006, those same consumers were getting 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps (again synchronous service, not throttled or shaped) for less than $52 per month. Unlike in America where politicians (primarily Republicans) keep touting Market competition, it actually exists in Japan, not here in America. In America corporate monopolies and oligopolies prevent competition.
If the market would or could work, it would have. Face facts Americans, the market is NOT working. We have a 20 year proof and history. Other markets that are not working are obvious as well...wake up Americans, its already too late!
One might ask how the Japanese could give more bandwidth to consumers while lowering prices at the same time.
Very good question as here in America, the telcos/cable companies try to lie and tell Americans that bandwidth is scarce. It is not. This is a lie, it is FUD. Just look at the conversations they have with investors to get the truth of the
This is "user experience", it might not worth anything to you, but many people are willing to pay for it.
I understand all too well that Marketing most certainly works, which your example points out very well. I also understand that many people value their time more than their money. Though many might argue that point, I understand where you are coming from.
The fact is that today there are Linux options in every category that just work. Right out of the box, without the need to configure or change anything, they just work. Its just not advertised and marketed very well.
Of course if you prefer the Apple monopoly, they can turn off your phone or an app (Apple can deny you the use of an app) whether you like it or not. I have read multiple articles where they have done just that, the one that stood out was a very expensive app that pretty much did not do anything productive, yet people wanted it, bought it until Apple said No. I personally would not care for that no matter how much time or money I had. I can censor myself, thank you very much.
Or you can chose a platform like Symbian, but the apps have to be "signed" before you can use them and that pretty much limits choice doesn't it. That's no good either. Their BS excuse viruses, what a joke. If someone's usage habits invites viruses than its their problem, not mine as my usage habits (beginning with Linux, which can get viruses if users have sloppy usage habits) prevent them, making it a non-issue for me. Yet I am being limited, supposedly, (can you say FUD, I do), for other peoples poor choices. I don't like that either.
Let's see, if my options are tethering/limited via a Proprietary OS (Symbian, Apple or other Microsoft derivative (CE/Mobile) vs untethered/unlimited via Android/Maemo (Linux based OS) on an embedded device, well the decision is easy. I like having options. I also think that if you have either more money or more time; you should not be ashamed to buy a product that gives you more options, not less.
If you have money you can purchase/hire the expertise you need. So that argument is lame IMO.
If you have time you can research out the things you need and apply them (assuming the platform (hw/sw) allows you too! Oh that's right only a Linux derivative like Android/Mameo allows for that. Guess your decision will be the same as mine, but wait...
Marketing works....(very true!)
lol, that was a typo, I had to search for 0K to find it, comes from my first post, should have read 40Kbps as like me, he wants to be conservative in his estimate, the reality is worse than 40Kbps 85% - 95% of the time.
It should have read
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100Kbps down and 40Kbps up 85 - 95% of the time.
Since the other related quotes all have either 30K or 40K and state that the bandwidth is "shaped" to less than 0Kbps on a regular basis, I will assume that you are having some fun with me at my expense. Good catch and I have a great sense of humor. Thanks for allowing me to correct it.
Hopefully my point was well understood in spite of that typo...at least I hope so. The simple point is that both my friend and I are prevented from getting acceptable bandwidths to surf the Internet, with one Cable provider specifically, approximately 80% -95% of the time. In reality it is something higher than 95% of the time, but by stating either 80% to 95% or 85% to 95% of the time, we both are being conservative.
These quotes are from the two posts, related to the percentage of time (restricted, filtered, throttled, prevented, censored, , shaping, etc...) in addition to the one above:
From the first post, #29766339
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, the videos sputter, gMail, twitter, Facebook and MySpace will not load because of the little extra bandwidth required for the skins and CSS markup language.
From the second post, #29766339
Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
However he is getting less than 100K down and less than 40K up well over 85% of the time.
We suspect that every cable providing Internet access does this same thing and that most people do not have a firewall/router with software capable of showing them their bandwidth in real time; so in reality most people do NOT know.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth.
Tell me about it, it sucks! However let me clarify...
Since our service is throttled back most of the time to either 4Kbps or 0Kbps. And you are correct at that level of restriction hardly anything will load. I certainly can not use Digg, stumbleupon, hootsuite and a couple of other social media websites that load more CSS style stuff than other sites...those sites are unusable at upstream bandwidths less than 20Kbps in my personal experience. Whenever a website does not load or loads very, very slowly, I just switch to one of my other Linux windows where the bandwidth monitoring status is being graphed and I typically see bandwidths less than 20Kbps. Its shocking how often its only 4Kbps or 0Kbps. Its disgusting, especially considering its costing me more than $50 per month for cable modem access. That is too much for too little service. DSL at less than $30 per month, sustained bandwidths of 1.5Mbps down and 384Kbps or higher up, is looking very enticing! Thus this slashdot story, putting two DSL providers on your network starts to make allot of sense!
I think most of us would agree that only getting 20Kbps upstream is unacceptable for cable modem access to the Internet advertised as high speed broadband!
With the DD-WRT software you see a continuous graph for both your downstream and upstream bandwidth 24X7. (You do not have to let this bandwidth status graphing run if you do not want to.) With the upstream line bouncing between 0Kbps and 40Kbps. And a second downstream line bouncing between 4kbps and 100Kbps most of the time, however you will see higher spikes upstream...up to 300Kbps, 700Kbps, 1Mbps, occasionally 2Mbps and even rarer 3Mbps downstream.
The higher spikes upstream are fewer and farther in between, and rarely rise above 100Kbps. It becomes pretty obvious that the bandwidth shaping software is controlling users ability to watch any streams (IP TV, Video, Movies, etc...) by throttling (limiting) the upstream bandwidth. My guess is that if you had a sustained 300Kbps (even slower DSL services offer this) upstream you would be able to watch multiple video / TV streams without sputters and/or interruptions. You might need a bit more if those streams are high definition. Since most users are limited upstream to less than 40Kbps (dropping down constantly to 0Kbps) this is what prevents you from watching video via the web.
The FCC and our politicians could break this effectively by decreeing any bandwidth less than 786Kbps can not be considered high speed broadband. Make it FRAUD to declare otherwise. Quite frankly that is a very old standard, even though it was recently set. The 2000 broadband standard should have been 100MB/100MB. The 2006 standard should have been 1GB/1GB. If the telcos/cable companies had given us fiber for our tax dollars as they promised(1990s), that would be the standard today! Do you have respect for promise breakers?
Back to reality, ... With the DD-WRT software showing you your actual bandwidth, you see those lines drop to 0Kbps around 50% or more of the time. In other words, you spend much more time at between (0Kbps and 4Kbps) upstream than you do at 40Kbps or higher.
As far as equipment being damaged, that is the kind of FUD that even the Cable company will try to throw out at an unknowing and less knowledgeable public. Since the Speed tests show you that given that few seconds in time your equipment (firewall/router running DD-WRT + Ethernet network + optional hubs + more Ethernet + Cable Modem) works just fine, but ONLY during that moment in time. Thus the very speed test they tout as proving you have great service (even when you do not) also proves that your equipment is functioning just fine. (They artificially prevent it from working as well at other times.)
In fact if you have DSL or Cable
trying to defeat this problem by 'obscurity' will not work. that has been proven many times before. Just secure your port 22 properly like everyone else, and the problem will go away over time.
Amen brother. Security by obscurity is way too widely used. Most of the attack vectors require an account ID and password, if they get that, you game is almost over. If they get a root user or root capability, it is game over.
They are scanning ports now, Linux popularity is growing, duh moment here. Either you can secure it or your can't, if you can't learn fast and figure it out, nothing short of that will keep you secure.
Very few people monitor their outgoing packets for unusual activity. We all should, however it is time consuming.
Even system admins at many large corporations are not allowed the time to effectively monitor their network, unless they are in a Security group designed for that specific purpose.
Hey boss, I need to spend a couple of hours each day looking over are packet traffic checking for anything unusual. Yes this is in addition to the time I need to scan the server logs. Yea right, that would get approved, NOT.
I'd kill for a N900 in E90 form factor.
Checked out the image online, that is a very cool phone. At first I searched for the N90, that screen size is too small. Then I realized that you put E90, duh moment for me. Its pretty cool that you can close it up and use it as a phone also.
Those keyboards IMO are just a little too small for many adult fingers/thumbs. And to be honest I do not like using my thumbs to type/text like that anyway, so thats my problem. Of course, I do not care for the keyboard on the screen either and that applies to the Nokia Nxxx series that I prefer. I like a little bigger keyboard, so the bluetooth fold out keyboards that you can get for the Nokia Nxxx line works great.
For the future, until they have an expandable screen or a virtual 3D screen that displays in the Air in front of you, this is the smallest size screen I would want on a Linux hand held / Linux computer. I like being able to use a full size browser, sure you might have to move the image left and right and up and down, if you do not use the + and - buttons to shrink/expand the screen.
Having moved from a 6M camera to a 10 Megapixel camera, I would like to see the next Nokia have no less than 10 Megapixels in the camera, And I would like them to give the next Nokia to flip the image around from filming you, to filming a person in front of you the way the Nokia N800 and N880s could do.
Have not checked out the Nokia N900's Micro SSD slots yet, but if it does not have two of them, I would like to see that return as well. This way you can use the internal one to grow the file system and add memory (albeit a little slower). I have seen 32GB Micro SD cards for less than $16 US. I picked up two 4GB cards for mine for FREE last Christmas, they were $5,00, free after a rebate...too good to pass up from Frys. (They made their money from me too as I bought some other things while I was there...a smart loss leader) The second external SSD can be for data, programs (non permanent) and more.
I love that the Nokia N900 has a USB port, much needed. Will be interesting to see if it works well with the Maemo Linux software. Granted I put my Micro SSD cards in a USB adapter now and use them that way.
I would love to see an Ethernet 10/100/1000 port (do they make mini ethernet ports?) on a device this size. I just do not trust WiFi to install binaries on a device and I am not sure if you can purchase one of those boards to assist in burning in the operating system. My guess is they are internal Nokia use only.
That E90 was interesting, however, anymore if the device will NOT run one or more Linux distros, I simply will NOT purchase it. So that probably knocks me out for the E90. I do not care what it does. Its not about free as in beer (free beer where, squirrel) for me, it is about options and choice. I will gladly pay for innovation, but I do not want to be led down any more blind alleys because some corporation wants to lock me in.
No Linux, the device is not smart! Smartphone, only if it runs one or more Linux Distros.
That is one reason I put the subject as Pering and not Peering.
Yes we Americans are throttled back that severely, of course the Cable Company/Telco oligopoly (monopoly in many areas) will NOT call it throttling, they flat out deny that they restrict usage. And when they are caught red handed (Both Comcast and TWC have been in the past on numerous related issues, can you stay TCP/IP Stop Packets to interrupt an Internet users surfing of the Internet? Even Sprint one time blocked an entire range of IP addresses, I have forgotten and no longer care what their excuse was, as it was WRONG) they pull out the following BS excuses: pornography, child welfare, pedophilia, spammers, etc, etc, Ad nauseam. Like you are not smart enough to censor yourself and your family, please stop the FUD.
I, and many Americans, believe each family unit are the only ones who can independently determine if they want to self censor or not. It really is a freedom issue (net neutrality, bandwidth caps, bandwidth shaping, deep packet inspection and other bandwidth limiting strategies), a privacy issue, a simple Respect your customer issue.
As for bandwidth, it is a form of censorship, but much, much worse. It literally determines what content you and your family are able to get to, see and view. Hit the cap, you better pay up more or else you will be cut off.
As for bandwidth, less than 1% of the American population get the FCC definition of Broadband, which is 768K. Note my friend's speed test showed over 9000 Kbps down and over 900Kbps upstream. Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
He is regularly throttled to 0Kbps upstream and it bounces from 0Kbps to 4Kbps or from 0Kpbs to 13Kbps, ocassionally up to 30Kbps. Not only can you not watch TV or video, but forget about using sites with allot of CSS or skins, for instance Digg and stumbleupon are not usable at that level of bandwidth throttling.
There are few if any off-the-shelf residential firewall/routers (DSL or Cable modem does not matter), typically costing less than $80 dollars per, that will show the home user actual logging information about what packets are and are not going through their firewall/router. Companies like Cisco/Linksys use the software as a product differentiating / limiting device to get users to spend more for more capability. However to get true TCP/IP and UDP packet information none of the Residential routers give you this information. Even the Linksys / Cisco firewall/routers costing in the $60 to $80 range vary greatly. I have a BEFSX41 (older non WiFi router) that would give me the outgoing and incoming IP addresses, but not packet information. When I purchased a newer (now old too) WRT54G WiFi (DD-WRT capable) firewall/router I expected even better logging. Yet the logging was even more limited. It did not make sense until you saw how they differentiated their products. Logical from a business pricing / marketing strategy, but still impractical to give home/residential users the opportunity to control and view their actual packet information. (Thus why I harp on the DD-WRT routers, so does my friend, once you have this capability and see what it does for you; the data/information that you now can use; you will not settle for anything less, I know I would not.)
In a "nut"shell many Americans take the speed test as gospel...what a crock, it is NOT. All it tells you is the devices between your PC and the ISP (DD-WRT enabled Firewall/Router and DSL/Cable Modem) will allow you to get that maximum speed at that specific moment. In the next moment all best are OFF. If you did a bell curve with my friends 9000 Kbps down / 900Kbps up. It would mean that he should expect to get the f
Its long, at least read about Greenlight in N.C. and learn!
I am 100% positive you could do this with hardware that will run the DD-WRT, here is a list of DD-WRT supported devices, they have a search link, but I find that it does not work very well if you do not know the name of the router / firewall that you are looking for. So use the list and find a supported device.
You would need two of them and two different providers. You could even get a third one and do some special VLAN stuff to put some ports on all three on the same virtual network., many options.
These devices are very light weight, therefore shipping is next to nothing. The Linksys WRT54Gs' were great routers for the DD-WRT software. Costing over $75 when they first came out, dropping to $69 for years and finally hitting $15 or $30 when the stores were unloading them to bring in the new Linksys routers (none of which will support the DD-WRT software, except one that runs Linux). NOTE: there are BETTER routers than the WRT54G to run this software. The WRT54G will ONLY run the Micro version of the software. Do yourself a favor and get one that will run the Mega version of the software! (They cost less than $100 per and well worth the price.)
Linksys (Cisco) begin removing DD-WRT compatible firewall/routers from store shelves, replacing them with devices that are NOT compatible with the DD-WRT software in 2007/2008.
Get two DSL lines ($13 - $19 each), add in a NAT and a couple of these routers, probably need to do some secure tunneling to avoid the DNS of the Cable / DSL Companies and voila you are good to go. Your DSL speed will vary based on distance, but even far away you can get 1.5MB down and 384Kbps up. If closer you can get 3Mb down and 768Kbps up. (That is faster than 98% of Americans with Cable Modems because of throttling of service by Cable providers.)
Could you run the second DSL upstream over the first one? Thus saving the cost of a second telephone line, you would lose the redundancy that two telephones would provide, but save around $13 per month on a second phone line...probably better just to get the two lines, you total cost of ownership (TCO) will still be less than $60 per month and you will have redundancy. If one service gets stupid and starts throttling, drop them and get a different one. Politicians help us if they all throttle!
Solves allot of problems related to Cable companies throttling back service if you can create a secure VPN that their Deep Packet Inspection and/or Bandwidth shaping (throttling) service might have a harder time restricting (throttling). Granted they would still throttle you back by your IP address or MAC address of Cable Modem. Again, they do that now anyway.
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100K down and 0K up 85 - 95% of the time. He went on and paid his cable company the $10 burst / protection racket money / "give me a little more of what I am already paying for money" extra fee. Keep in mind that they were promising up to 8MP and delivering less from day one. He said he got a letter in the mail that they would be rolling out a new service in his area, the day after they started using that service, his bandwidth was throttled to next to nothing. (0 Kbps upstream, consistently less than 20Kbps). (There were 1 GB, 2GB and 3 GB ~ 1 second spikes ONLY, unless he was downloading a Linux distro, then he got 3GB - 4GB sustained with a 1 sec 6GB spike) He is convinced that they throttle him back because he uses Skype VoIP service (uses P2P packets) in a vain attempt to get him to switch to the Cable companies VoIP service. At less than $100 per year, Skype blows away any telco/Cable company offering.
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, t
7 year CLOCK restart is simple, following the KISS principle. If a company, in this case Microsoft, does anything in a customer no service manner to anyone, not just me, I will reset the clock. Until I see that many years of that company being a decent corporate citizen, I will re frame from doing business with them. The 7 year clock is because they have been abusing their monopoly power for more than 10 years, over 20 years in my personal experience. For newer companies, a 3 year clock would suffice. Anything less than 3 years does not allow for enough time to see if a company has changed based solely on their ACTIONS. Nothing else matters, but their actions.
Over a three year period, an innovative company will have either 9 (3 releases per year) or 12 major releases of their product (software/hardware/both). If they are practicing Agile/SCRUM with a livable, sustainable velocity (this is absolutely critical, otherwise your company becomes a miserable place to work and turnover will eventually impact their product quality), than they might actually have more than that number of releases. The point is not the number of releases, but a track record where their actions can be measured with 100% accuracy.
Mathinker pretty much covered much of what I would have said. Thanks Mathinker. However I still see some of your comments as misrepresenting Linux and spreading FUD. For instance.
Third one first, as it is the most critical to Linux success without hassles:
As for hardware vendors, frankly, the Linux community is still too small to matter...The effort to get that last 1%....
Why people throw out that the desktop market is only 1% Linux, its been larger than that for years. This is more of the same ole FUD! The only reason it is not even larger is that Microsoft has the big box stores where most noobs shop pretty well locked up. This is where the Linux hardware vendors, who know what not to put in a PC, are especially critical. It is not surprising that those same computers, with proprietary hardware (i.e. designed not to work with Linux) give fits to users when they attempt to install Linux.
Note to all: run Linux from Disk (assuming your computer has a CD/DVD) first. Verify everything works: Video, Audio, USB, Keyboard, Mouse, WiFi, 10/100 Ethernet NIC, etc... Anything that you use every day, make sure it will work with that hardware and that version of Linux or DO NOT INSTALL LINUX. This will avoid most FUD issues related to Linux not working on your proprietary hardware. Never forget, if you are not purchasing from a Linux Vendor (I do not include Dell among them, they only barely qualifies; check out ZaReason or System 76. I always emphasize ZaReason because I have met the family who runs the company and I know first hand that they care. Heck their daughter (under 10 I believe) has no problems with Linux or Windows. She told me she prefers Linux, its all about what you get use to.)
If you purchase hardware with Linux in mind, even if you want to run Windows, you have the best of all worlds. You can still run Windows, if you want. And when Microsoft end of lifes that version of Windows, and eventually they will. No one can debate that fact, eventually they are going to drop support for the version of Windows that you are running on that PC. At that point and time you can use this now older PC for something useful, anything. Since it was built and purchased running Linux, you know it will run Linux 10 years form now. That too is fact. I currently run Linux with a slow processor and 128MB of RAM. I prefer a minimum of 512MB of RAM, even better if there is at least 1 GB of RAM. Future Linux computers will have either 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM as I want to manipulate high definition video/audio using the H.264 codec. While doable with Linux and 2 GB, probably easier with 4 GB of RAM. With Linux ONLY, the extra memory will not be used up by the operating system (as it is with Windows
0.4 milliseconds vs 2.7 milliseconds is not even close to 1 ms vs 2 ms. Nice try, however.
IE only policies are very common in many government organizations. Guess where most of the browser stats come from? You guessed it. Even with this obvious misleading slant in the statistics the IE Browser share is steadily dropping.
Microsoft still markets IE as superior even though anyone with half a brain knows better.
In web dev I learned years ago that if I developed in Netscape (even after their demise) the website always worked in every other browser. If I developed in IE, there were always issues. You learn fast. Even if a shop was .NET (shame really, but there are many) having your development work on Linux desktops guarantees interoperability with all operating systems, even Windows. The converse is most certainly not true.
As a Director, I bring in the tools needed to get the job done. period. That even means getting a user/developer a Windows desktop if that is what they are most effective on, however their data will always be in a non proprietary open source data format. I have learned that lesson the hard way.
If I were the CIO, CTO or VP of IT and the IT Director tried to convince me that their was a lower cost of ownership with Microsoft versus Linux it would be an interesting conversation. Since I already know the numbers, they would be changing their tune or looking for a new job. Even if Microsoft donated everything free, I know there is a huge hidden cost down the road. The numbers and math do not lie, anyone responsible for an IT budget that is not using open source and Linux is not using company funds wisely. Note I did not say that you could not have any windows desktops. Though I would not have any Windows servers, when compared to Linux there is no contest.
Quite frankly I am surprised more shareholders are not looking at the use of Microsoft products within IT for a company when making stock purchasing decisions. No matter how you slice it, it simply is not less expensive.
Its even harder for the old school Waterfall/RUP guys. I remember seeing how much better a software product's user interface (and manual) were after a talented technical writer got hold of it. Yet some developers still honestly believe their code is self documenting. What a joke.
You can not pad your project with Agile/SCRUM, though I admit I have yet to see a company do Agile/SCRUM correctly. Does any company employ Project Owners, as I have never seen that job posted on line and I have looked. The role is definitely critical to successful Agile/SCRUM.
My guess is that most companies take whatever role they have for Product Management and they are responsibility for the Product Owner role.
Of course you have to hope you have an intelligent management structure that does not increase the velocity to a burn-out rate. Probably asking too much.
Publicly recanting the Halloween Documents, and particularly "embrace, extend, and extinguish" would be a start, if only a start.
Institute a 7 year clock.
Watch Microsoft actions over a seven year period, only start purchasing their products again if their actions over the last seven years show that they have honestly changed.
Anytime they spread FUD or Embrace or Extend or Extinguish or do anything, any action, to harm open source, FOSS and/or Linux RESTART THE CLOCK!
Your base your purchase decision based on their business decisions and actions, period. Let me say that again, based on ACTIONS, not WORDS or marketing FUD. Their words often lie, history is rife with examples. To not acknowledge this reveals you to be either a shill, working for Microsoft or ignorant of the factual history. Do not be part of the problem. Their actions often take 2 or 3 years before they can extinguish, thus a longer period is smart.
The added plus side is that if they KNOW that a business decision is going to cost them 7 years business from a significant segment of the market (they will try to tell you that it is not a significant part of the market, do not buy into that FUD) ; they are more likely to NOT be stupid.
All one has to do is look at the statistics in the browser wars; operating system wars, office wars, server wars, active directory wars, etc... to see that they win a battle here or there but they are slowly, very slowly losing the war. (It is not lost on the author that they started these wars, not anyone else) Do not let them spread more FUD that the numbers of users upset with their past business practices is small. Not now, not thanks to Vista and the Economic downturn.
Microsoft new campaign, "make web, not war", too funny. Is that the pot calling the kettle black or what!
I am waiting 7 years before I purchase again. If they behave badly I will reset the clock from that day. I reset the clock this month and will probably reset it again next month. Thats okay with me, its not like I need their products anyway there are ample options in every vertical. My guess is they will not be able to change their behavior, innovate and entice me to purchase. Only time will tell. It is up to them now, give me 7 years of good behavior and we can talk! Regardless they will not be able to harm me or the businesses for which I make purchasing decisions any more.
Keep it simple!
On a positive note, I am guaranteed not to waste another dollar on vendor lock-in and proprietary BS. That makes me smile...all the way to the bank. My TCO (total cost of ownership) is already the cost of Vista and Windows 7 cheaper per desktop than any Windows user that bought into Vista. (I have multiple desktops and servers at home)
Why are you Vista users putting up with this crap, give Beryl a try, you will not want to go back. They should have given a cheap ($20 - $30) upgrade or free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Yet another mistake and any Vista user is right to be upset over it. Makes Microsoft look desperate to me.
On full disclosure, I saw a $300 netbook that triple boots (Macintosh, Windows and Linux) so I might waste $300 for a testing platform only. While I use Microsoft desktops at various companies when I have no other options; at home I have been free of Windows for over two years now. Linux is a smarter development platform also, as you can develop for all platforms, even Windows. The converse is often NOT true. Helps you to avoid functionality that is dependent on Windows operating systems as well. Very smart to avoid those traps.
Why 7 years, glad you asked? They have been doing what they do, harming alternatives for well over two decades, 20 years plus, 7 years seems like enough time to know if they have changed or not. (I was in IT before DOS 1.0; I have lived it first hand. I do not need anyone to verify what I have experienced.)
For newer
Smooth, lmao, Any Linux distro (there are many) running Beryl on hardware designed to be open (not proprietary) is real smooth. Looks more professional also. Hey another plus, all that extra memory that Vista (and Windows 7 is just Vista +) operating system eats up; is left available for the applications running on the desktop.
Hint to all: Purchase your hardware from a vendor that knows and builds Linux; you can always run Windows if you want too and down the road when Microsoft stops supporting your operating system and/or Windows applications; you are 100% sure that that hardware will run the next version of Linux; and the next; and the next.
The truth is you do not need Windows or Microsoft anymore, if you want to use them fine, but make sure your hardware is 100% Linux compatible and sleep well at night!
Thank you for pointing that out Cyberax, I have heard of sys admins supporting in excess of 10,000 user and 100,000 users using Samba and not Active Directory. They know AD is a trap to be avoided, but at the same time they have groups with Windows Desktops to support in addition to Unix, Linux and Macintosh desktops. Samba has long been the preferred choice for truly open mixed environments. It always rubs me the wrong way when someone either does not know (possible) or is a shill (more likely) for Microsoft and states things like that. As an intelligent IT Director I would never put in AD in my environment. Of course I would not waste money on IIs licenses either when Linux and Unix servers do more better for less. Total Cost of Ownership will always be lower with Linux. Samba based AD servers work just fine and have for years. To say otherwise is a prime example of FUD!
American consumers MUST have fiber to their homes.
The FCC should at least update their definition of high speed Internet from 768Kbps to 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps, based on Japanese success since 2000, 9 years ago.
Given the current US market, only the following four things give American consumers any hope of freedom, bandwidth and Net Neutrality, but especially true and honest high speed bandwidth.
Those are the ONLY solutions to the telco - cable company - wireless oligopoly and political lobbying that has been hurting Americans since 1990, preventing innovation. There was a reason AT&T was broken up, remember that, if the problems were not addressed and fixed, blame your elected officials. (Especially if they are in the committees changing the bills and laws for the lobbyists) The buck MUST stop with them. If American companies wanted to give Americans 100Mbps / 100Mbps for $55 or less per month (as in Japan since 2000, 9 years ago) or 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps for $52 or less per month (since 2006, 3 years ago) it would have already happened. It has not. The only logical reason for this not to have already occurred is the oligopoly greed of tiered pricing. This fact alone speaks volumes, all bad, the industry screams regulate me or I will continue to screw you, based on their actions. Their words are lies and FUD. History is loud and clear.
Remember the technology to increase bandwidth on a single strand of fiber from X1 to X1024 has existed since before 2000! As of 2006, the Japanese are using this technological innovation to increase bandwidth from 100Mbps / 100Mbps up to 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps. They can go higher still with the same fiber that was put into the ground way back in 2000 and before. Bandwidth scarcity is a MYTH!
You have to love this quote, we can hope but we should not leave it to hope alone, we must act:
upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time.
You mean a fight over pro-anything-consumer has not won against the over $1.5 million spent every week lobbying our elected officials has not been won after two fights and we are going for a third attempt and expect a different outcome, why? Seems crazy to me also, to do the same thing and expect a different resul
For those of us living in bigger cities, like LA or New York, especially with larger immigrant populations and homelessness. They are still peeing outside, on the sidewalk and on buildings. And yes I have used an outhouse on a family farm. Get out of my pig slop!
maybe because people will continue buying WinMobile handsets for the same reason they continue to buy Windows PCs?
Happily stopped purchasing Windows products over a year and a half ago, should have done it sooner. I am finding that in every category, even Graphics editing, Movie playing and mail / office apps, my FREEDOM with #Linux is superior than the limitations forced on me via vendor-lockin.
Remember, buy Linux PCs from a Vendor like ZaReason that builds the PC, laptop, netbook, multi-media machine from the ground up with Linux in mind, thus no issues with anything, their Linux machines just work right out of the box.
When my friends could no longer reformat their PCs hard drive + reinstall their purchased Microsoft OS in order to clean out bloat and remove viruses, adware, etc, I just shook my head and reminded them why Microsoft lost my over 20+ years of TRUST. Never mind that it does not help as the first FORCED update/upgrade puts most, if not all, of the bloat back on your PC. Does Microsoft even sell a CD or DVD with the purchase of either Vista or Windows 7, as I would never purchase an operating system without one. Depend on the internet connection always being up and my bandwidth un-capped, I do not think so.
I often have to remind them more than a few times, before they get frustrated enough with Microsoft to find a guaranteed solution that is 100% in their control and will work. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view point, Microsoft gives me plenty of opportunities to remind my friends. Especially since Vista was released. Heck every FORCED auto update / upgrade is one more opportunity for Microsoft to shine, NOT.
No tethering issues with an open Linux mobile handset. Any many more software applications options, especially games.
As for Mobile handsets, stick with a Linux based OS, like Maemo.org, yes I know Android is Linux based, but I have not checked to see if I can install it on my Nokia N800. I have no need to purchase a handset just to run another OS, when Maemo does everything I need it to do. At least with a fully functioning Linux based handheld their are NO tethering issues or any bogus reasons for you not to be able to use the software of your choice. Anyone with a proprietary OS from one of the cellular providers knows what a pain in the butt that is. And for one reason ONLY: vendor lock-in!
No text messaging caps, I would think this would be huge for every family with teenagers. No additional fees and all they can eat text messaging. Besides text messaging should be free if you understand the engineering behind how communications with the towers works. Why chance that you will be raped for an additional inflated FEE.
As more and more people get frustrated with limitations to their handhelds proprietary software operating system, options like Android and Maemo will look much more promising.
While I still use MacIntosh computers and Microsoft computers for some work related contracts, hey I have over 20+ years of experience that comes in handy. At home it is Linux or nothing. I just got tired of the crap. I want my computer to just work, no hassles, just work. I upgrade when I choose to upgrade ONLY. And that is after others have tried and posted the problems with the new update or upgrade. I do not have time for the interruptions to my life that auto update and auto upgrade cause. I have NEVER been hit with a Virus because I browse safely without Java, JavaScript and/or Action X automatically enabled by default. I recommend using a sandboxed PC when you turn on features that can introduce cross scripting issues via websites. It works. Oh yes, I never use IE for anything but testing my own development. If you use Internet Explorer, designed open by default without the a
Thanks for posting the link to that site, I always knew that some companies changed their stats, but did not have any proof. It would not surprise me that a company like Microsoft was trying to prevent negative public perceptions (they call it perception, I call it reality) that their browser share for Internet Explorer (IE) is dropping. And quite frankly it comes as NO SURPRISE, I just did not expect it this soon!.
I was aware that many of the companies get most of their usage from North America as opposed to Europe were there is a quantifiable drop in IE browser market-share. That has been occurring for years and is NOT a new trend. So obviously a company that monitors more North American sites than the rest of the world, especially Europe, you expect to artificially inflate the IE browser statistics. (I assumed the artificial inflation was between 15% - 30%) Its nice to start seeing numbers that are more and more difficult to pad and hide. It is even better that the companies that have been doing this are starting to get publicly outed as their skewed and artificially inflated IE browser stats thrust them into the light of day.
Sure I knew a few stats companies inflated IE numbers. I even expect that some of these companies have unofficial agreements with Microsoft or are out and out Shills for the company. This has been going on for years. Its not new. What is new is that the drop in IE stats is so much that their efforts are causing the light to be shined back on them. New, but hardly unexpected.
it was only a matter of when, not of if IE market share would drop.
Back when some sites were still posting above 85% or 95% browser share for all IE browsers; other sites with a more world view, not North America centric, were reporting IE browser shares in the 60% - 69% range. That was two to three years ago.
A year and a few months ago I predicted that IE browser share would drop below 50% within 2 to 3 years. It appears that it has happened faster than I expected. So that is a welcome and pleasant surprise.
I stopped doing special scripting for websites related to IE back when they refused to support open web standards and took their IE browser implementation in a less standardized direction. All for the hope of future vendor lock-in, call it what it is. A Mistake!
They made the choice, no need to feel sorry for them. Granted they were not banking on the backlash due to all the exploits and viruses attacking only IE and Active X.
This is a very good sign! I take it as a sign that the general computer user, while still predominantly using a Windows PC for their desktop, are becoming more aware of the issues and probably more frustrated with the attacks and problems related to IE. Thus they are switching to browsers that will not force them to re-install their operating system (OS), just because they clicked on a link and the ActiveX and IE combo does additional things without their permission. Sadly they can not protect themselves from this terrible behavior.
The only prevention to these exploits is to NOT use IE and to limit your use of Active X, period. Looks like people are noticing and using browsers other than IE.
Will this carry over into frustration with Active X and .NET in general, I honestly hope so as I detest vendor lock-in and the limiting of options for me computer wise. Sure .NET is not as bad as Active X with viruses and exploits, but it does run on a proprietary Windows platform, thus exploits are still an issue. With .NET the vendor lock-in is certain based on Microsoft actions, not their words, but their actions over the last 20+ years.
The sole reason for my prediction of the collapse of IE browser share of all kinds was primarily due to viruses, cross script injections and other cracks (hackers do not crack) that would result in a consumer s desktop, la
I still have to use IE occasionally -- but I only do so for sites I know are safe (some at work, and a company I do business with) and only because they *ONLY* support ASP. (which may be costing them more and more business if these trends hold-- all for a flashy shimmery ASP button at one site).
One can only hope you are correct, but based on reading other posts to your comment, my guess is there are other issues also.