Pricing here is a joke, if we are fair in our comparisons internet access here is even higher than it should be. 10MB ADSL here (which is mostly the best you get) for an uncapped connection will cost you around ZAR 3 500.00 or USD 258.76. For a 20MB Fibre connection to our office we were just quoted USD 2 217.90 for installation and USD 701.62 per month. This is for a 1:1 Uncapped Fibre 20MB with five dedicated IPv4 addresses. Taking into consideration that an average household income here is only about USD 700 per month (And even those figures are unrepresentative) you begin to get a picture of how extremely expensive connectivity is here. Home use internet with extremely stupid shaping and so-called "soft-capping" at about 300GB you are paying about USD 67 per month for an 8MB ADSL connection.
I am browsing slashdot while waiting for my installation of F18 right this minute. I have to admit that in most areas the installer is not that bad. Simple to use and free from clutter, forsaking the wizard for a central control console is quite appealing, especially given that it unifies all the options in a single place. I will, however, agree that there exists two or three glaring flaws in the installer to my mind, nl. the fact that you cannot easily choose the partitioning method of your selected installation drive, the fact that you are tied to seemingly arbitrary package selections instead of a more dynamic, 'choose which apps you want to install' option and the fact that you can only configure root password during the copy process. Other than these concerns I am finding the installer to be a joy to work with.
I originally began experimenting with Linux while still in school. Due to my lack of broadband at the time, I got Mandrake 7.2 because of all the software which came bundled on the cd set. I found it unusable for my purposes at the time and completely abandoned Linux for several years. Two years ago I tried Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu virtual machines on my Windows host, playing around but not really finding one that worked. At one point during last year I began using ubuntu on an old laptop I had at home, and finally found linux to be usable for some non critical aspects of my life. I began developing a Latency issue on my audio in Windows 7 and could not resolve the problem. After weeks of diagnostics and troubleshooting I determined that it was due to shared IRQ issues in WIndows, and since I could not manually manage IRQ's to fix the issue, I figured that it cannot be fixed. I then wanted to confirm my diagnosis and completely isolate the problem as windows driver specific, so I figured I would dual boot into another OS. A quick twenty minute recce into the abyss of google lead me to consider ubuntu and fedora, and having installation media for both at hand, I read a comparrison stating that Fedora was more techincal than Ubuntu, my need for geek cred lead me to Fedora as the choice. And I installed a second boot to Fedora 15.
I began installing various apps and found the yum interface quite attractive. Eventually I switched entirely to Fedora, currently on Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle and use it as my only OS on my desktop at home. My work laptop dual boots Fedora 17 and Windows 7. I also had a spare server at work and four spare IPv4 addresses on my ISP account. I wanted to learn more about linux now and since I had spare resources I built a Fedora web server as a lab environment to see if I can;t switch our entire business away from Windows. After some messing about I decided to try CentOS for that server, but ran into problems installing from USB (The Server I have is a retired XENON system from three years ago but lacks an optical media drive).
From there I then switched over to ubuntu server for that server which is now running three domains (mail and web) as well as the ISPConfig 3 control interface. My next idea is to add services to the server and see if it is in-fact plausible to perform all our corporate funcions from a Linux system. If that succeeds I would most likely opt for a CentOS server and Fedora workstations.
Firstly, despite all outwards appearances, I am not crazy...
I live in South Africa (a politically charged nation at the best of times) and live in a small mining town (Population 60 000, predominantly coal mining). The nature of my job not only means that I am often placed in threatening situations (Senior Labour Consultant, former head of IT for a national company), but also that I have started keeping a ready bag at my house (A backpack which contains basic toiletries, first aid kit, survival kit and a weeks change of clothes for cold weather and warm weather and about R 2000.00 cash which is aprox $ 260.00). I will admit that the survival kit sounds overkill, but I have paramilitary training which becomes even harder to explain, and have always believed in the old adage that over-preparedness is better than failure.
The ready kit is stocked and maintained because I often have to leave town to attend to strikes or other labour matters across the country within minutes.
1. Since I have taken an hour to realize that I am being followed, it is obvious that I have given them sufficient time to tap my iPhone and my internet connection. Lets assume that I am at home at the time of this realization, so I simply run inside, grab my ready bag, my laptop bag and head to the car.
2. I stop at the ATM and draw what cash I can, then I give my cellphone and my atm card to the nearest bum, tell him to do the same every day until my limit is exhausted and provide him with my PIN. (Misdirection is the key).
3. Drive to a mates house who lives just outside of town and has very lax security, change cars (Leaving mine with the keys will ensure that he is not worried).
4. Drive out to one of the local mines I know where the security doesn't check when a valid access card is used at the gate and get inside the premises that way.
5. Park my mates car there and grab one of the LDV's that are always reverse parked with their keys in the ignition (Mine Safety Policy) and head out of the mine again.
6. Go to the airfield where my mates keep their planes (Mostly Cessnas, FAMB is a very quiet airfield) and park my stolen LDV inside one of the hangers, grab one of the ATV's that are kept there and head accross runway 14 into the game farm next door.
7. Disappear into the 'kloof' for about 3 months, camping, roughing it and living off the land while writing up everything that I know and saw.
8. Anonymously mail my report to all media sources, attorneys and other public figures that I know (I do know quite a few due to the nature of my work).
9. Wait for the public outcry and then surface as a revolutionary.
10. Take over the country and retire.
The scary thing is, the above plan will work, even scarier, that is only my third backup contingency in such a situation...
Well said... This is a worrisome developement, especially if, like me, you live in South Africa, where our government will attempt to implement these half-baked ideas in an even more half-arsed way... Haven't our governments seen the Terminator movies, combined with the all knowing data repository that is google, when machines become self-aware, we will be in some serious trouble, at least in Terminator there were only military systems to worry about... Now we have civil robots that could make the machine's domination of our race that much easier...
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Pricing here is a joke, if we are fair in our comparisons internet access here is even higher than it should be. 10MB ADSL here (which is mostly the best you get) for an uncapped connection will cost you around ZAR 3 500.00 or USD 258.76. For a 20MB Fibre connection to our office we were just quoted USD 2 217.90 for installation and USD 701.62 per month. This is for a 1:1 Uncapped Fibre 20MB with five dedicated IPv4 addresses. Taking into consideration that an average household income here is only about USD 700 per month (And even those figures are unrepresentative) you begin to get a picture of how extremely expensive connectivity is here. Home use internet with extremely stupid shaping and so-called "soft-capping" at about 300GB you are paying about USD 67 per month for an 8MB ADSL connection.
I am browsing slashdot while waiting for my installation of F18 right this minute. I have to admit that in most areas the installer is not that bad. Simple to use and free from clutter, forsaking the wizard for a central control console is quite appealing, especially given that it unifies all the options in a single place. I will, however, agree that there exists two or three glaring flaws in the installer to my mind, nl. the fact that you cannot easily choose the partitioning method of your selected installation drive, the fact that you are tied to seemingly arbitrary package selections instead of a more dynamic, 'choose which apps you want to install' option and the fact that you can only configure root password during the copy process. Other than these concerns I am finding the installer to be a joy to work with.
I originally began experimenting with Linux while still in school. Due to my lack of broadband at the time, I got Mandrake 7.2 because of all the software which came bundled on the cd set. I found it unusable for my purposes at the time and completely abandoned Linux for several years. Two years ago I tried Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu virtual machines on my Windows host, playing around but not really finding one that worked. At one point during last year I began using ubuntu on an old laptop I had at home, and finally found linux to be usable for some non critical aspects of my life. I began developing a Latency issue on my audio in Windows 7 and could not resolve the problem. After weeks of diagnostics and troubleshooting I determined that it was due to shared IRQ issues in WIndows, and since I could not manually manage IRQ's to fix the issue, I figured that it cannot be fixed. I then wanted to confirm my diagnosis and completely isolate the problem as windows driver specific, so I figured I would dual boot into another OS. A quick twenty minute recce into the abyss of google lead me to consider ubuntu and fedora, and having installation media for both at hand, I read a comparrison stating that Fedora was more techincal than Ubuntu, my need for geek cred lead me to Fedora as the choice. And I installed a second boot to Fedora 15. I began installing various apps and found the yum interface quite attractive. Eventually I switched entirely to Fedora, currently on Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle and use it as my only OS on my desktop at home. My work laptop dual boots Fedora 17 and Windows 7. I also had a spare server at work and four spare IPv4 addresses on my ISP account. I wanted to learn more about linux now and since I had spare resources I built a Fedora web server as a lab environment to see if I can;t switch our entire business away from Windows. After some messing about I decided to try CentOS for that server, but ran into problems installing from USB (The Server I have is a retired XENON system from three years ago but lacks an optical media drive). From there I then switched over to ubuntu server for that server which is now running three domains (mail and web) as well as the ISPConfig 3 control interface. My next idea is to add services to the server and see if it is in-fact plausible to perform all our corporate funcions from a Linux system. If that succeeds I would most likely opt for a CentOS server and Fedora workstations.
Firstly, despite all outwards appearances, I am not crazy... I live in South Africa (a politically charged nation at the best of times) and live in a small mining town (Population 60 000, predominantly coal mining). The nature of my job not only means that I am often placed in threatening situations (Senior Labour Consultant, former head of IT for a national company), but also that I have started keeping a ready bag at my house (A backpack which contains basic toiletries, first aid kit, survival kit and a weeks change of clothes for cold weather and warm weather and about R 2000.00 cash which is aprox $ 260.00). I will admit that the survival kit sounds overkill, but I have paramilitary training which becomes even harder to explain, and have always believed in the old adage that over-preparedness is better than failure. The ready kit is stocked and maintained because I often have to leave town to attend to strikes or other labour matters across the country within minutes. 1. Since I have taken an hour to realize that I am being followed, it is obvious that I have given them sufficient time to tap my iPhone and my internet connection. Lets assume that I am at home at the time of this realization, so I simply run inside, grab my ready bag, my laptop bag and head to the car. 2. I stop at the ATM and draw what cash I can, then I give my cellphone and my atm card to the nearest bum, tell him to do the same every day until my limit is exhausted and provide him with my PIN. (Misdirection is the key). 3. Drive to a mates house who lives just outside of town and has very lax security, change cars (Leaving mine with the keys will ensure that he is not worried). 4. Drive out to one of the local mines I know where the security doesn't check when a valid access card is used at the gate and get inside the premises that way. 5. Park my mates car there and grab one of the LDV's that are always reverse parked with their keys in the ignition (Mine Safety Policy) and head out of the mine again. 6. Go to the airfield where my mates keep their planes (Mostly Cessnas, FAMB is a very quiet airfield) and park my stolen LDV inside one of the hangers, grab one of the ATV's that are kept there and head accross runway 14 into the game farm next door. 7. Disappear into the 'kloof' for about 3 months, camping, roughing it and living off the land while writing up everything that I know and saw. 8. Anonymously mail my report to all media sources, attorneys and other public figures that I know (I do know quite a few due to the nature of my work). 9. Wait for the public outcry and then surface as a revolutionary. 10. Take over the country and retire. The scary thing is, the above plan will work, even scarier, that is only my third backup contingency in such a situation...
Well said... This is a worrisome developement, especially if, like me, you live in South Africa, where our government will attempt to implement these half-baked ideas in an even more half-arsed way... Haven't our governments seen the Terminator movies, combined with the all knowing data repository that is google, when machines become self-aware, we will be in some serious trouble, at least in Terminator there were only military systems to worry about... Now we have civil robots that could make the machine's domination of our race that much easier...