When a person from an "advanced" country calls their own homeland a Bannana Republic, it's satirical. When the same person refers to a "backward" country as a Bannana Republic, it's patronizing.
Your attitude towards technology is simplistic. Do you think people can have clean water without technology? That stuff that comes out of your kitchen tap doesn't appear by magic.
The problem with introducing technology into the underdeveloped countries is not the technology itself, but the way it's applied. Typically, it comes from some industrial-world aid agency that simply doesn't understand local conditions. They'll invent complicated systems that attempt to duplicate features of Western infrastructre, without considering prerequisites that a less developed country doesn't have.
Some years back, there was a big push to build factories in Africa to process Sunflower seeds into oil. This would have connected a resource (lots of African farmers grow sunflowers) with an unmet need (lots of Africans needs to consume more vegetable fat). All the money was essentially wasted: the factories couldn't sustain themselves without huge subsidies. It cost too much to transport the seeds to the factories and the oil to the consumers, especially in areas with bad roads, corrupt local officials, etc.
A better solution came from an inventor in Vermont: a cheap sunflower seed press. Sell them to farmers so they can process the seeds themselves, and sell the oil to their neighbors. The whole process is economically self-sustaining: farmers pay for the presses with profits from their oil, and profits from the presses pay for more presses. The only problem they had starting up was getting a grant to develop the press. It seems that nobody was prepared to fund a development effort that only ran to $30,000...
The bottom line is that technology can solve third-world problems. It just has to be the right technology.
Can we drop phrases like "Banana Republic"? It's pretty patronizing.
I suspect Lem was being satrical. But it's not news that countries with no infrastructure often leapfrog more developed nations. I'm told that Indonesia never built an earth-based telephone infrastructure, because by the time they could afford to do it, it was cheaper to get their own comsats. And we've all seen the way the Third World has embraced cell phones and text messaging.
Well, I am stupid, or at least geographically challenged, and I often wish I had a handy pocket device that would tell me where I am and how to get where I need to go. But I've found affordable GPS devices pretty impractical. Perhaps if I'd spent more I could have gotten one that can quickly and reliably acquire its satellites. But inexpensive ones just don't work that well. You basically have to pull over and stand next to your car for 5 minutes. Easier to look at street signs and consult a map.
I'm particularly suspicious of cheap GPS that claim to be motorist friendsly. (This new Garmin falls into this category despite its hefty price tag: most of what you're paying for is a very fancy PDA.) It's nice to have audio prompts for when you need to make a turn -- but if the gadget can't acquire a satellite in a moving car, that feature is pretty useless!
Flames welcome here: if you've used a cheap urban GPS that works better than what I've described, I want to know about it!
In case it got lost in my screwed up HTML, let me reiterate my basic point: most people are better off with just a simple cheap router. The ones I've used isolate your home network from the internet (using network 10), which is far more effective than any kind of packet filtering. Not for everybody, of course, but for the typical home user who just wants to isolate their systems from malicious intrusion, it's ideal. It doesn't matter how simple-minded the route is -- in fact, the simpler the better, since that minimizes the possibility of security holes.
Anyway, the last internet sharing gadget I bought was (a) the same $50 price previously mentioned and (b) a true router. There was no mistaking this: by default, all the systems you plugged into it got assigned 10.*.*.* addresses.
And I really think this is a better approach than the one you use. At least it is for most people. Is there better way to prevent a system from being attacked than making it inaccessible from outside your local network? Of course, this means you can't "dial in" to your network -- but most people don't need to do that, and especially don't need the extra headache such a capability implies.
Incidentally, hubs seem to be disappearing. When you can buy a router or bridge for $50, a hub no longer makes economic sense.
It's not just the cost of the insurance. If Jolie had been hurt, there'd have been no movie, and that's a disaster no matter how much insurance you have. When they were filming LOTR in New Zealand, the producers forbad the actors from participating in dangerous sports. But hang-gliding and skydiving are big there (what better way to see the famouse NZ landscape?!), and this rule was widely ignored. Which made for a lot of hair-tearing. If they'd had to cancel production, they might have gotten most of their production costs back from insurance, but it'd have been a big setback in a bunch of careers, not to mention a couple years out of the lives of a lot of people.
That's correct. Though a better way of thinking of it is 1/256th of the address space.
The grotesque thing is that they probably go through a lot of hassle to prevent external access to these same IP numbers, thus defeating the whole purpose of having a public IP space in the first place.
Here's something kinda ironic. Presumably they don't move to network 10 because of the cost of reconfiguring every single system in their network. But when they go to IPv6 (it's gonna happen eventually), they'll have to do this anyway, and that would be the right time to go to a private network space. The same logic applies to all the companies that hang on to big chunks of the address space even though having it is a headache. So even as IPv6 eliminates the address space problem, it will free up big gobs of address space!
...what I want to know is, what IPv6 applications are people developing? What are the new capabilities? All that most of us know about IPv6 is that it increases the address space.
What about users who are two lazy to configure their browsers? Konqueror allows you to configure the user agent string on a per-website basis.
Anyway, it's not just a matter of making your site standards compliant. No browser supports everything in HTML 4.0 or CSS1 (never mind CSS2 or CSS3). So even if you code to a standard, you still have to test your code on the browsers you think users are likely to use. Small wonder that most web developers just skip the second step and code to the browser, not the standard.
I do agree that sites that say "go away and don't come back until you have a browser we support" are lame.
Sure, there are degrees of portability. And no laptop is as portable as a USB Key. But the kind that don't come with a floppy are pretty portable. So the question is, how much do you need a little extra portability? This guy doesn't seem to need it very much, since he's talking about getting data from one device to another, not having data on his key ring when all his devices are somewhere else.
As for floppies and CDs: I never said they were portable. You did read the part of my post where I suggested splitting the problem in two?
Then again, I suppose you could argue that most people would rather hanve one device that does two jobs, even if that device is little more expensive and a little less convenient. Most of us have too many gadgets already.
As usual with an Ask Slashdot, you've jumped to the technology you want to solve your problem, without fully considering the problem.
There are two things you want to do here. You want to be able to boot your laptop from a removable medium, and you want to transfer data to other systems. I don't see why you have to have a single solution for both. Maybe it's kewl to have a bootable USB key or SD card, but is it practical? Booting from external media is not something you have to do very often, but when you do have to do it, you really have to do it. So you need something reliable. Almost all recent systems can boot from the CD, so why not just burn all the boot images you might need onto CD? Or if you just have to have a read-write bootable device, get a USB floppy. (You'll probably have to buy one from the manufacturer of your laptop to get one that's bootable.) It's old-fashioned, and it isn't good for any serious data transfer, but it's very reliable. And you need reliable.
The second problem is data transfer. Now, the main merit of a USB key is portability. But if your data is already on a laptop, you already have portability. If you want to transfer data between your laptop and another system, why spend a lot of money on a USB key, which requires multiple steps to accomplish the transfer? It's faster and cheaper just to connect the two USB ports directly.
Sure, there are a lot of bad managers who worry about employees wasting their time on the Internet, and implement all kinds of technical restrictions: what web sites you can access, what programs you can use, etc. etc. I agree, it's stupid: if managers are worried about people not using their time productively, they should be out talking to them about it, making them understand that they're only hurting themselves. These kindergarten games are worse than useless.
In college I worked as a projectionist. We had a stupid, paternalistic boss who worried that we were watching the movie when we should be keeping an eye on the equipment. His solution: disable the speaker in the projection booth! Of course that made things even worse, since projectionists kept running between the booth and the auditorium. The real problem was that some projectionists just had a bad work attitude, but the boss had no idea how to address that.
None of which really matters. I had no hope of changing the stupid speaker policy, and Steve has no chance of changing the stupid MSN policy. No it's no use arguing over it.
Incidentally, there is a legitimate reason to forbid MSN, AIM, etc. They're not secure. Some companies don't forbid IMing, but insist that you use special software and servers. Probably not the issue here, but worth mentioning.
Talk about simplistic! Oracle and MySQL have a lot of translation problems, but at least they both follow the same general model of DBMS. And even so, transistioning from one to the other is damned difficult. The inconsistencies between MS Word, Excel, Exchange, IIS, etc. and their open-source equivalents are a thousand times worse.
You can argue that this is because MS apps are full of obfucatory conventions and endless design kludges. I'd actually agree, but that doesn't change the basic problem. Migration on that scale is complicated and expensive, and isn't going to happen just because various open-source advocates think it's a good idea.
What I find most interesting about it is that the head seems to be way too small for the body, and some have speculated that it originally actually had a lion's head in correct proportion to the size of the body,
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the head's been recarved several times. I like to think it was originally the face of a cat. Which have always been sacred thereabouts, and which goes with the overall shape. Besides, I like cats.
West is demonstrably an asshole (just read his web site) but that's neither here nor there. I can't get away from the fact that he has actual physical evidence. It's not a matter of nobody checking it out, it's a matter of the academic establishment not wanting to give up their painfully constructed theories and chronologies. I see lots of criticisms of West, but they all seem to be content just to state that he's just another pyramid crank (God knows there are enough of those) without coming to grips with his evidence.
I have to mention another archaeological asshole, Von Schleiman. Who managed to demonstrate that all established theories about Troy were BS and that it was a real place. Not before seriously damaging the site through inept excavation, alas.
I don't really know that much about archaeology, but I've never been happy with the accepted wisdom that there was nobody on the planet but hunter-gatherers until 10,000 years ago. And I know there are a few archaeologists, some of them with better credentials than West's, who agree.
You're almost right. "If you never fail...", is a proverb, not a cliche. A cliche is something that people say often enough to for it to become trite. You hardly every hear people praising failure, especially in business. The fact is, most businesses are very risk averse, even the ones that claim otherwise. The result is profitable mediocrity. Watched any TV lately?
All of which is neither here nor there. People don't laugh at Microsoft's failures because they're failures. People laugh at Microsoft's failures because they're so lame. And they never seem to learn from them. In my mind, education is the most important function of failure!
Yeah, I've always found it more satisfying to believe that the pyramids were put up by human ingenuity, rather than by the whimsy of some God from Space.
But here's another disturbing thought. John Anthony West argues that water erosion on the Sphynx indicates that the thing was built before Egypt was an arid country. That's about 10,000 years ago. Of course this runs totally against accepted archaeological thought -- but you still have to wonder if Egyptian civilization isn't a tad older than currently accepted.
As long as a host of applications run under Linux that satisfy the requirements of the user then there's nothing to complain about.
Here's a requirement: most users need to interface with the exiting Microsoft infrastructure. Which is not going to go away, no matter how much we whine about it's shortcomings.
Now the question should be, do you want 80% of your IT environment to depend on a product from a company that behaves this way?
Obviously not. But that's not the question you should be asking. The question is, how do eliminate our dependency on these "monopolistc" systems? Simply reciting the "Windows is fucked up" mantra does not seem to be an effective strategy. The fact that the mantra states an obvious truth is beside the point.
Get real. You can't just say, "All our current infrastructure is broken, and we have to replace it." If you try to tell your IS people that they have to convert all their Windows servers to Linux, they'll laugh you out of the office. Between chuckles, they may ask, "And we're going to pay for this big changeover how?"
On the other hand, if Linux proves itself as a cost saver in a predominately Windows environment, it's likely to change a few opinions, and create pressure to gradually convert over.
I do agree with you about Windows gawdawful lack of standards conformance. It's not even a matter of them ignoring industry standards: they don't pay attention to their own proprietary standards. But even if your IS people agree with you that this is a problem, you're not going to get them to change over on a matter of principle. People just don't work that way in the real world.
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What magical "keep track of everything", "Murphy's law doesn't apply to me" thing do you use? Marzipan in pie plate?
When a person from an "advanced" country calls their own homeland a Bannana Republic, it's satirical. When the same person refers to a "backward" country as a Bannana Republic, it's patronizing.
The problem with introducing technology into the underdeveloped countries is not the technology itself, but the way it's applied. Typically, it comes from some industrial-world aid agency that simply doesn't understand local conditions. They'll invent complicated systems that attempt to duplicate features of Western infrastructre, without considering prerequisites that a less developed country doesn't have.
Some years back, there was a big push to build factories in Africa to process Sunflower seeds into oil. This would have connected a resource (lots of African farmers grow sunflowers) with an unmet need (lots of Africans needs to consume more vegetable fat). All the money was essentially wasted: the factories couldn't sustain themselves without huge subsidies. It cost too much to transport the seeds to the factories and the oil to the consumers, especially in areas with bad roads, corrupt local officials, etc.
A better solution came from an inventor in Vermont: a cheap sunflower seed press. Sell them to farmers so they can process the seeds themselves, and sell the oil to their neighbors. The whole process is economically self-sustaining: farmers pay for the presses with profits from their oil, and profits from the presses pay for more presses. The only problem they had starting up was getting a grant to develop the press. It seems that nobody was prepared to fund a development effort that only ran to $30,000...
The bottom line is that technology can solve third-world problems. It just has to be the right technology.
I suspect Lem was being satrical. But it's not news that countries with no infrastructure often leapfrog more developed nations. I'm told that Indonesia never built an earth-based telephone infrastructure, because by the time they could afford to do it, it was cheaper to get their own comsats. And we've all seen the way the Third World has embraced cell phones and text messaging.
Well, if this technique becomes popular, the IS people will proably go around disable boot-from-cd, then password-protecting the BIOS configuration!
I'm particularly suspicious of cheap GPS that claim to be motorist friendsly. (This new Garmin falls into this category despite its hefty price tag: most of what you're paying for is a very fancy PDA.) It's nice to have audio prompts for when you need to make a turn -- but if the gadget can't acquire a satellite in a moving car, that feature is pretty useless!
Flames welcome here: if you've used a cheap urban GPS that works better than what I've described, I want to know about it!
In case it got lost in my screwed up HTML, let me reiterate my basic point: most people are better off with just a simple cheap router. The ones I've used isolate your home network from the internet (using network 10), which is far more effective than any kind of packet filtering. Not for everybody, of course, but for the typical home user who just wants to isolate their systems from malicious intrusion, it's ideal. It doesn't matter how simple-minded the route is -- in fact, the simpler the better, since that minimizes the possibility of security holes.
Anyway, the last internet sharing gadget I bought was (a) the same $50 price previously mentioned and (b) a true router. There was no mistaking this: by default, all the systems you plugged into it got assigned 10.*.*.* addresses.
And I really think this is a better approach than the one you use. At least it is for most people. Is there better way to prevent a system from being attacked than making it inaccessible from outside your local network? Of course, this means you can't "dial in" to your network -- but most people don't need to do that, and especially don't need the extra headache such a capability implies.
Incidentally, hubs seem to be disappearing. When you can buy a router or bridge for $50, a hub no longer makes economic sense.
They also own all these other address spaces.
It's not just the cost of the insurance. If Jolie had been hurt, there'd have been no movie, and that's a disaster no matter how much insurance you have. When they were filming LOTR in New Zealand, the producers forbad the actors from participating in dangerous sports. But hang-gliding and skydiving are big there (what better way to see the famouse NZ landscape?!), and this rule was widely ignored. Which made for a lot of hair-tearing. If they'd had to cancel production, they might have gotten most of their production costs back from insurance, but it'd have been a big setback in a bunch of careers, not to mention a couple years out of the lives of a lot of people.
The grotesque thing is that they probably go through a lot of hassle to prevent external access to these same IP numbers, thus defeating the whole purpose of having a public IP space in the first place.
Here's something kinda ironic. Presumably they don't move to network 10 because of the cost of reconfiguring every single system in their network. But when they go to IPv6 (it's gonna happen eventually), they'll have to do this anyway, and that would be the right time to go to a private network space. The same logic applies to all the companies that hang on to big chunks of the address space even though having it is a headache. So even as IPv6 eliminates the address space problem, it will free up big gobs of address space!
...what I want to know is, what IPv6 applications are people developing? What are the new capabilities? All that most of us know about IPv6 is that it increases the address space.
Anyway, it's not just a matter of making your site standards compliant. No browser supports everything in HTML 4.0 or CSS1 (never mind CSS2 or CSS3). So even if you code to a standard, you still have to test your code on the browsers you think users are likely to use. Small wonder that most web developers just skip the second step and code to the browser, not the standard.
I do agree that sites that say "go away and don't come back until you have a browser we support" are lame.
As for floppies and CDs: I never said they were portable. You did read the part of my post where I suggested splitting the problem in two?
Then again, I suppose you could argue that most people would rather hanve one device that does two jobs, even if that device is little more expensive and a little less convenient. Most of us have too many gadgets already.
There are two things you want to do here. You want to be able to boot your laptop from a removable medium, and you want to transfer data to other systems. I don't see why you have to have a single solution for both. Maybe it's kewl to have a bootable USB key or SD card, but is it practical? Booting from external media is not something you have to do very often, but when you do have to do it, you really have to do it. So you need something reliable. Almost all recent systems can boot from the CD, so why not just burn all the boot images you might need onto CD? Or if you just have to have a read-write bootable device, get a USB floppy. (You'll probably have to buy one from the manufacturer of your laptop to get one that's bootable.) It's old-fashioned, and it isn't good for any serious data transfer, but it's very reliable. And you need reliable.
The second problem is data transfer. Now, the main merit of a USB key is portability. But if your data is already on a laptop, you already have portability. If you want to transfer data between your laptop and another system, why spend a lot of money on a USB key, which requires multiple steps to accomplish the transfer? It's faster and cheaper just to connect the two USB ports directly.
Hey, you think that's latency, consider people forced to use this protocol.
In college I worked as a projectionist. We had a stupid, paternalistic boss who worried that we were watching the movie when we should be keeping an eye on the equipment. His solution: disable the speaker in the projection booth! Of course that made things even worse, since projectionists kept running between the booth and the auditorium. The real problem was that some projectionists just had a bad work attitude, but the boss had no idea how to address that.
None of which really matters. I had no hope of changing the stupid speaker policy, and Steve has no chance of changing the stupid MSN policy. No it's no use arguing over it.
Incidentally, there is a legitimate reason to forbid MSN, AIM, etc. They're not secure. Some companies don't forbid IMing, but insist that you use special software and servers. Probably not the issue here, but worth mentioning.
You can argue that this is because MS apps are full of obfucatory conventions and endless design kludges. I'd actually agree, but that doesn't change the basic problem. Migration on that scale is complicated and expensive, and isn't going to happen just because various open-source advocates think it's a good idea.
West is demonstrably an asshole (just read his web site) but that's neither here nor there. I can't get away from the fact that he has actual physical evidence. It's not a matter of nobody checking it out, it's a matter of the academic establishment not wanting to give up their painfully constructed theories and chronologies. I see lots of criticisms of West, but they all seem to be content just to state that he's just another pyramid crank (God knows there are enough of those) without coming to grips with his evidence.
I have to mention another archaeological asshole, Von Schleiman. Who managed to demonstrate that all established theories about Troy were BS and that it was a real place. Not before seriously damaging the site through inept excavation, alas.
I don't really know that much about archaeology, but I've never been happy with the accepted wisdom that there was nobody on the planet but hunter-gatherers until 10,000 years ago. And I know there are a few archaeologists, some of them with better credentials than West's, who agree.
So tell me why West is all wet.
All of which is neither here nor there. People don't laugh at Microsoft's failures because they're failures. People laugh at Microsoft's failures because they're so lame. And they never seem to learn from them. In my mind, education is the most important function of failure!
But here's another disturbing thought. John Anthony West argues that water erosion on the Sphynx indicates that the thing was built before Egypt was an arid country. That's about 10,000 years ago. Of course this runs totally against accepted archaeological thought -- but you still have to wonder if Egyptian civilization isn't a tad older than currently accepted.
On the other hand, if Linux proves itself as a cost saver in a predominately Windows environment, it's likely to change a few opinions, and create pressure to gradually convert over.
I do agree with you about Windows gawdawful lack of standards conformance. It's not even a matter of them ignoring industry standards: they don't pay attention to their own proprietary standards. But even if your IS people agree with you that this is a problem, you're not going to get them to change over on a matter of principle. People just don't work that way in the real world.