I wonder what the "even more heavily accented Indian" thought when he heard your probably heavily accented whereeveryoucomefrom accent eh?
It's a great shame to me about the prejudice on accents, I was reading that review with some semblance of interest, but when the person goes on about the heavy Scottish accent or the even heavier Indian accent is reaks of prejudism and if I may say so borders on racism and devalues the entire review.
You can stuff your non-working Sun Java Desktop 2 or whatever it's called and your four machines firmly up the place where the sun doesn't shine. No pun intended.
I understand that SPAM is a problem and that measures like this seem to be necessary, but it's a ridiculous over-reaction, blocking the largest ISP in Spain (Telefónica is the national phone company). This would be the equivalent of blocking out I suppose AT&T in the US (though I'm not that up on US ISPs). The upshot is that anyone dealing in Spain and wishing to receive email will have to stop using the database, which isn't the intended result.
One point though, there is a law that came into effect about a year ago in Spain, the LSSI-CE, which amongst other rather omnimous things (such as government powers to close down any web site that feel is dangerous to the state), some good stuff about protecting consumers making only purchase, also makes it illegal to send spam. Not that that is particularly enforceable. But Telefónica as a major ISP has to do something about the situation by law.
In the end, the problem is the SMTP protocol and the way mail is handled. No-one ever perceived it would be used in our current Free Market Internet Economy. To blame? No-one really, I guess if someone had forseen the Net explosion and noticed that email would become a problem early on, we could have switched to something better before it because too much of problem to deal with easily - but there you go.
At the end of the day, we need a new mail protocol, an open one, like SMTP, and we need to prevent companies like Microsoft coming up with a solution. What with Hotmail, MSN, Outlook macro viruses etc, they are more part of the problem and shouldn't be trusted to be responsible enough to provide a solution....
Man haven't you got it yet? We bash Micro$oft because THEY ARE EVIL INCARNATE. They are Beelzebub my friend and they couldn't give a shit about you, me or anyone else in this world. More money for the man is all they're interested in.
This is NOT charity it's MANIPULATION. They are using their position to close up a little hole in the market called "using Open Source alternatives becuase you can't get legitimate Window$ licences", that is all. They could have done this years ago, but they didn't and they never would if it wasn't for the threat of Linux and *BSD.
Think about it. As an example, I've been involved in a community project to give low-income people computers so they can learn a bit about the Internet and IT and perhaps gain some higher-paid skills or just use their minds a bit more than having them jellified by that other great evil the television. Anyway, we get donations given to us by universities, companies and other organisations, with their discs wiped (or to be wiped) to comply with data protection laws. The Window$ licences aren't transferrable and therefore we use Debian on them all. Some of them need to write in Hindu, some in Arabic and a plethora of other languages. All this is achievable BECUASE we use Linux and it doesn't cost us a penny, except our time, which we are willing to give up.
Now the problem for Micro$oft is that these people then get to learn about computing by using Linux - imagine that eh? leaning about computing using an OS that isn't Micro$haft's - hasn't happened for years that. This is dangerous for them and it's all about potential or future markets and consumers, just the same as giving cheap software to schools is - hook them young, get them drinking Coke, wearing Levis, eating Big Mac$ using M$, they'll never know any different and they'll never leave you.
On your point about languages, it's got absolutely nothing to do with being NICE enough to give versions in different languages, it's because Linux is available in around 60 and non-English speakers will NOT ACCEPT anything else - it pisses me off enough if I don't have a spell-checker that understands British English.
Stop bashing Micro$haft you say?? I won't, I've been bashing them for 15 years now and I'll continue to do so until they are relegated to the history books as one of those bad periods in our history, like the Third Reich, the Crusades, the Bubonic Plague.....
They're doing this just to combat the use of Linux and *BSD etc, because they know that up until now they've never provided any of older copies of their OS free of charge for use in older machines because they are in CAHOOTS WITH INTEL AND OTHERS in the great and evil CULT OF THE UPGRADE.
The ONLY reason they're doing this is to try to undermine what has become one of the key uses of Linux and *BSD, installing legally in refurbished, recycled machines. It's even more dispicable than that because it's no even the an action taken in the free market, it's normally for charitable reasons that machines are refurbished, so they are doing this just to flex their corporate muscles NOT for any alturistic reason.
REMEBER. MICROSOFT IS NOT NICE, IT IS EVIL, THEY ARE GREEDY, SELFISH BASTARDS AND THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT. They run MSNBC, they give money to the Republicans. Don't trust them, wipe your hard drive of that horrible, despicable, evil virus that is their joke of an OS. FREE YOURSELF. Go on you know you can!
Upgrade your life.
Ban on non-proliferation?
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Putting weapons in earth orbit is not forbidden by any treaty or law."
Well it damn well should be an quickly. We need a World moratorium on this to declare that the development of any form of weapons in space is illegal under international law and for it to take effect sooner rather than later. If not, we'll end up with the same situation as for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, where they've already proliferated an awful lot with or without any treaty, leaving us with a few countries, like the US, France, UK, Russia that all happily using nuclear complaining about other countries developing it or having it.
Weapons and war are not the answer, dialogue is the only way to peace. Or do we really believe that you can only bring reconciliation by pointing guns at people. Mr Bush and his cronies certainly seem to think so....
Surely we could start a fund and if every Linux user, supporter, developer etc world-wide put somewhere between 1 and 10 dollars into it we'd have enough cash to simply buy-out SCO, own UNIX, sack McBride, make all rights to anything SCO has public domain, drop all law suits and then put the forlorn company out of its and our misery?
all of those have fairly amounts of window furniture, especially twm and olvwm (olwm). also they're all low on demands on the processors, so run quicker than gnome or kde etc.
Man don't forget that civilisation as we know it largely came from Africa and the middle east. The wheel for example, we use the arabic system for counting - imagine if we'd stayed with the Roman system, modern writing, the Bible...
An interesting read here on the WSIS by a chap called Alan Toner. There's a fair bit of hyperbole used to get the point across but it's a sound one and covers a lot to do with the problems of intellectual property amongst other things.
I wondering, and especially so following their ridiculous bounty on the head of virus writers propaganda stunt, if we (all users, but especially mail server administrators, network admins, ISPs) could all get together and sue M$ for gross negligence and deception, hell! even fraud for the allowing programmes that facilitate the spread of viruses via email and dodgy mail servers that have hole that propagate span.
Only a small ISP but it's cost us quite a bit already in terms of wasted bandwidth through SPAM and customer support for these viruses?
I been doing this for a few years, managing between 10-15 Internet servers, so it's all done via either ssh or webmin, which makes like both easy and low bandwidth.
I have a PowerBook G4 these days that works very well and connects via a multitude of ways, so options are:
1. Use the modem! 2. Use the wireless card to connect in airports, libraries, war drive, etc. 3. Use Ethernet to dock in to someone's ADSL line, an office, an Internet cafe. 4. Go to an Internet cafe and use a web browser to use something like Webmin. 5. Dial-up via mobile phone using anything from serial/USB cable, infrared or Bluetooth. A 45 Bluetooth adapter does the trick for me, not fast (19.2K!) when not subscribed to high-speed (GPRS) services, but just able enough to grab an email or use a console in an emergency. You can subscribe to GPRS data services, but you'll need to speak to the operators. If you're moving country this can be tricky. Get a mobile without contract, and I can recommend the Nokia 6310i for this, though there's probably better ones around now. 6. Employ someone else less transient and phone/text them with instructions!
Having a web based admin system is good plan (like Webmin) and web based email (check out Imp/Hoarde if you want to try your own).
Grab your bag, your laptop and your mobile etc and leave the house and go sys admining on the go.
Questions for me are, w.r.t. software and music piracy:
1. Are restrictive copyrights good? 2. Are patents good? 3. Is control over free distribution of knowledge, information and deeds by large faceless corporates and non-elected, non-governmental organisations good? 4. Is the extortionate price of CDs, videos and software good? 5. Is the exploitation of developing and third-world workers in the production of consumer media goods for the West a good thing? 6. Is the fact that a large percentage of the price of software/music actually goes towards marketing, packaging and generally profiteering, rather than the actual product in question a good thing? 7. Is the fact that the actual people who do the work (programmers and artists, or just artists if you see programmers that way) get a relatively small proportion of the finanical benefit from the sale in comparison to the monolithic behemoths that punt the stuff out to the ever willing consumer good?
Then I ask myself whether piracy is a good or bad thing and I would answer that it is all bad.
A friend of mine had this problem once, so what he did was to take a plain piece of paper and write something like 'Call xxxxxxxxx to make this stop', then faxed this to the number that was spamming him and as the top came out, he quickly cellotaped it to the bottom of the paper, making a continuous loop - note this would only work using a cheapish fax machine that works with rolls of fax paper.
After about 10 minutes or so, he received a call from a pretty hysterical person, who seemed to have the idea that they were dealing with a lunatic. The fax DOSing stopped and he never received a fax from them again.
I always thought that Kokotoni Wilf, from the game that I can't remember the name of, but I think was made by Elite in the mid eighties for Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64, was a little odd. I think it was some kind of bizzare play on Jet Set Willy. Not sure.
I reckon this was one of the best responses to the article, at least the comments arising from it were some of the most enlightening, better than simply calling people tree-hugging hippies etc.
Funnily enough we were asked by Glastonbury to do live streaming from the main stage. Freeserve was apparently to provide the distribution capacity (as they were also going to do for the Stop the War demonstrations in London). On both instances, they flaked out on the deal.
We ended up doing Glastonbury, but not with the main stage, as their were too many people taking their cuts to actually page for a 36 hour continuous 200Kb/s video stream (which is what they wanted). Funnily enough the company that were involved (Tornado) seemed to still manage to claim they had a satellite terminal to do it, when in reality they were using a load of BT ISDN lines.
"Unfortunately the rocket that put the sattellites in orbit was a tad less than "earth-friendly""
While a good point, if you read the text, it refers to 'Conventional distributed mains and fossil fuel generated power', so we are discussing sources of power here, not communications equipment. It's true that it's not at all perfect, whilst it's generally agreed that BP make the best solar panels, they are also a petrochemical company that a party to the industry that is ruining the environment and heating up our planet.
I guess the answer is, if you are not preaching, and this article is not preaching I hope, then any little you do to help, helps. Better to do something in the right direction than nothing at all I reckon.
Interestingly enough, one of the manufacturers of satellite internet terminals is Rayceon. Yes the very same whose missiles the US military used to kill innocent people in a Bahgdad market earlier this year and the same whose military vehicle appeared on the front of September's Linux Journal as an example of how great Linux is. It's a really strange world out there full of contrasts and contradictions.
Incidentally, I shall be cancelling my LJ subscription.
Anyone interested in seeing what the stats look like for a page being slashdotted can visit this URL: http://mirror.us.psand.net/cgi-bin/awstats.p l?conf ig=mirror.us.psand.net
It's interesting to see what browsers and platforms/.'ers use as well as where they come from.
I know that there have been taxis with Internet access in them for a while. I presume that if they are popular, then why not the greener, peddal-powered variety? Do you know how they are powered (the terminal and connexion I mean) and how they achieve their connexion? Do you have a link to some information about them?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the "even more heavily accented Indian" thought when he heard your probably heavily accented whereeveryoucomefrom accent eh?
It's a great shame to me about the prejudice on accents, I was reading that review with some semblance of interest, but when the person goes on about the heavy Scottish accent or the even heavier Indian accent is reaks of prejudism and if I may say so borders on racism and devalues the entire review.
You can stuff your non-working Sun Java Desktop 2 or whatever it's called and your four machines firmly up the place where the sun doesn't shine. No pun intended.
Plenty of decent Somerset cider to be had if I remember rightly, beats Ice Cream anyday ....
I understand that SPAM is a problem and that measures like this seem to be necessary, but it's a ridiculous over-reaction, blocking the largest ISP in Spain (Telefónica is the national phone company). This would be the equivalent of blocking out I suppose AT&T in the US (though I'm not that up on US ISPs). The upshot is that anyone dealing in Spain and wishing to receive email will have to stop using the database, which isn't the intended result.
One point though, there is a law that came into effect about a year ago in Spain, the LSSI-CE, which amongst other rather omnimous things (such as government powers to close down any web site that feel is dangerous to the state), some good stuff about protecting consumers making only purchase, also makes it illegal to send spam. Not that that is particularly enforceable. But Telefónica as a major ISP has to do something about the situation by law.
In the end, the problem is the SMTP protocol and the way mail is handled. No-one ever perceived it would be used in our current Free Market Internet Economy. To blame? No-one really, I guess if someone had forseen the Net explosion and noticed that email would become a problem early on, we could have switched to something better before it because too much of problem to deal with easily - but there you go.
At the end of the day, we need a new mail protocol, an open one, like SMTP, and we need to prevent companies like Microsoft coming up with a solution. What with Hotmail, MSN, Outlook macro viruses etc, they are more part of the problem and shouldn't be trusted to be responsible enough to provide a solution....
Man haven't you got it yet? We bash Micro$oft because THEY ARE EVIL INCARNATE. They are Beelzebub my friend and they couldn't give a shit about you, me or anyone else in this world. More money for the man is all they're interested in.
.....
This is NOT charity it's MANIPULATION. They are using their position to close up a little hole in the market called "using Open Source alternatives becuase you can't get legitimate Window$ licences", that is all. They could have done this years ago, but they didn't and they never would if it wasn't for the threat of Linux and *BSD.
Think about it. As an example, I've been involved in a community project to give low-income people computers so they can learn a bit about the Internet and IT and perhaps gain some higher-paid skills or just use their minds a bit more than having them jellified by that other great evil the television. Anyway, we get donations given to us by universities, companies and other organisations, with their discs wiped (or to be wiped) to comply with data protection laws. The Window$ licences aren't transferrable and therefore we use Debian on them all. Some of them need to write in Hindu, some in Arabic and a plethora of other languages. All this is achievable BECUASE we use Linux and it doesn't cost us a penny, except our time, which we are willing to give up.
Now the problem for Micro$oft is that these people then get to learn about computing by using Linux - imagine that eh? leaning about computing using an OS that isn't Micro$haft's - hasn't happened for years that. This is dangerous for them and it's all about potential or future markets and consumers, just the same as giving cheap software to schools is - hook them young, get them drinking Coke, wearing Levis, eating Big Mac$ using M$, they'll never know any different and they'll never leave you.
On your point about languages, it's got absolutely nothing to do with being NICE enough to give versions in different languages, it's because Linux is available in around 60 and non-English speakers will NOT ACCEPT anything else - it pisses me off enough if I don't have a spell-checker that understands British English.
Stop bashing Micro$haft you say?? I won't, I've been bashing them for 15 years now and I'll continue to do so until they are relegated to the history books as one of those bad periods in our history, like the Third Reich, the Crusades, the Bubonic Plague
Upgrade Your Life at www.computertorture.com
They're doing this just to combat the use of Linux and *BSD etc, because they know that up until now they've never provided any of older copies of their OS free of charge for use in older machines because they are in CAHOOTS WITH INTEL AND OTHERS in the great and evil CULT OF THE UPGRADE.
The ONLY reason they're doing this is to try to undermine what has become one of the key uses of Linux and *BSD, installing legally in refurbished, recycled machines. It's even more dispicable than that because it's no even the an action taken in the free market, it's normally for charitable reasons that machines are refurbished, so they are doing this just to flex their corporate muscles NOT for any alturistic reason.
REMEBER. MICROSOFT IS NOT NICE, IT IS EVIL, THEY ARE GREEDY, SELFISH BASTARDS AND THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT. They run MSNBC, they give money to the Republicans. Don't trust them, wipe your hard drive of that horrible, despicable, evil virus that is their joke of an OS. FREE YOURSELF. Go on you know you can!
Upgrade your life.
"Putting weapons in earth orbit is not forbidden by any treaty or law."
....
Well it damn well should be an quickly. We need a World moratorium on this to declare that the development of any form of weapons in space is illegal under international law and for it to take effect sooner rather than later. If not, we'll end up with the same situation as for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, where they've already proliferated an awful lot with or without any treaty, leaving us with a few countries, like the US, France, UK, Russia that all happily using nuclear complaining about other countries developing it or having it.
Weapons and war are not the answer, dialogue is the only way to peace. Or do we really believe that you can only bring reconciliation by pointing guns at people. Mr Bush and his cronies certainly seem to think so
A good friend of mine's Internet cafe was closed down a year and a half ago by RailTrack in the UK: http://www.hyperactive-cafe.co.uk/.
Surely we could start a fund and if every Linux user, supporter, developer etc world-wide put somewhere between 1 and 10 dollars into it we'd have enough cash to simply buy-out SCO, own UNIX, sack McBride, make all rights to anything SCO has public domain, drop all law suits and then put the forlorn company out of its and our misery?
all of those have fairly amounts of window furniture, especially twm and olvwm (olwm). also they're all low on demands on the processors, so run quicker than gnome or kde etc.
Man don't forget that civilisation as we know it largely came from Africa and the middle east. The wheel for example, we use the arabic system for counting - imagine if we'd stayed with the Roman system, modern writing, the Bible...
An interesting read here on the WSIS by a chap called Alan Toner. There's a fair bit of hyperbole used to get the point across but it's a sound one and covers a lot to do with the problems of intellectual property amongst other things.
I wondering, and especially so following their ridiculous bounty on the head of virus writers propaganda stunt, if we (all users, but especially mail server administrators, network admins, ISPs) could all get together and sue M$ for gross negligence and deception, hell! even fraud for the allowing programmes that facilitate the spread of viruses via email and dodgy mail servers that have hole that propagate span.
Only a small ISP but it's cost us quite a bit already in terms of wasted bandwidth through SPAM and customer support for these viruses?
Is it possible?
I been doing this for a few years, managing between 10-15 Internet servers, so it's all done via either ssh or webmin, which makes like both easy and low bandwidth.
I have a PowerBook G4 these days that works very well and connects via a multitude of ways, so options are:
1. Use the modem!
2. Use the wireless card to connect in airports, libraries, war drive, etc.
3. Use Ethernet to dock in to someone's ADSL line, an office, an Internet cafe.
4. Go to an Internet cafe and use a web browser to use something like Webmin.
5. Dial-up via mobile phone using anything from serial/USB cable, infrared or Bluetooth. A 45 Bluetooth adapter does the trick for me, not fast (19.2K!) when not subscribed to high-speed (GPRS) services, but just able enough to grab an email or use a console in an emergency. You can subscribe to GPRS data services, but you'll need to speak to the operators. If you're moving country this can be tricky. Get a mobile without contract, and I can recommend the Nokia 6310i for this, though there's probably better ones around now.
6. Employ someone else less transient and phone/text them with instructions!
Having a web based admin system is good plan (like Webmin) and web based email (check out Imp/Hoarde if you want to try your own).
Grab your bag, your laptop and your mobile etc and leave the house and go sys admining on the go.
For 3 did you mean to say "GWB 'believes' OBL was behind 11/9" ?
Apologies for putting the day before the month, it's a peculiar affliction called being English! We just can't help oneself.
Questions for me are, w.r.t. software and music piracy:
1. Are restrictive copyrights good?
2. Are patents good?
3. Is control over free distribution of knowledge, information and deeds by large faceless corporates and non-elected, non-governmental organisations good?
4. Is the extortionate price of CDs, videos and software good?
5. Is the exploitation of developing and third-world workers in the production of consumer media goods for the West a good thing?
6. Is the fact that a large percentage of the price of software/music actually goes towards marketing, packaging and generally profiteering, rather than the actual product in question a good thing?
7. Is the fact that the actual people who do the work (programmers and artists, or just artists if you see programmers that way) get a relatively small proportion of the finanical benefit from the sale in comparison to the monolithic behemoths that punt the stuff out to the ever willing consumer good?
Then I ask myself whether piracy is a good or bad thing and I would answer that it is all bad.
A friend of mine had this problem once, so what he did was to take a plain piece of paper and write something like 'Call xxxxxxxxx to make this stop', then faxed this to the number that was spamming him and as the top came out, he quickly cellotaped it to the bottom of the paper, making a continuous loop - note this would only work using a cheapish fax machine that works with rolls of fax paper.
After about 10 minutes or so, he received a call from a pretty hysterical person, who seemed to have the idea that they were dealing with a lunatic. The fax DOSing stopped and he never received a fax from them again.
I always thought that Kokotoni Wilf, from the game that I can't remember the name of, but I think was made by Elite in the mid eighties for Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64, was a little odd. I think it was some kind of bizzare play on Jet Set Willy. Not sure.
Erm how about 10.3 as in the tenth month of the 3rd year of the third millenium?
I reckon this was one of the best responses to the article, at least the comments arising from it were some of the most enlightening, better than simply calling people tree-hugging hippies etc.
Shame it got moderated to -1
http://www.computertorture.com/portaloo/
Funnily enough we were asked by Glastonbury to do live streaming from the main stage. Freeserve was apparently to provide the distribution capacity (as they were also going to do for the Stop the War demonstrations in London). On both instances, they flaked out on the deal.
We ended up doing Glastonbury, but not with the main stage, as their were too many people taking their cuts to actually page for a 36 hour continuous 200Kb/s video stream (which is what they wanted). Funnily enough the company that were involved (Tornado) seemed to still manage to claim they had a satellite terminal to do it, when in reality they were using a load of BT ISDN lines.
On the cutting edge.
"Unfortunately the rocket that put the sattellites in orbit was a tad less than "earth-friendly""
While a good point, if you read the text, it refers to 'Conventional distributed mains and fossil fuel generated power', so we are discussing sources of power here, not communications equipment. It's true that it's not at all perfect, whilst it's generally agreed that BP make the best solar panels, they are also a petrochemical company that a party to the industry that is ruining the environment and heating up our planet.
I guess the answer is, if you are not preaching, and this article is not preaching I hope, then any little you do to help, helps. Better to do something in the right direction than nothing at all I reckon.
Interestingly enough, one of the manufacturers of satellite internet terminals is Rayceon. Yes the very same whose missiles the US military used to kill innocent people in a Bahgdad market earlier this year and the same whose military vehicle appeared on the front of September's Linux Journal as an example of how great Linux is. It's a really strange world out there full of contrasts and contradictions.
Incidentally, I shall be cancelling my LJ subscription.
Anyone interested in seeing what the stats look like for a page being slashdotted can visit this URL:p l?conf ig=mirror.us.psand.net
/.'ers use as well as where they come from.
http://mirror.us.psand.net/cgi-bin/awstats.
It's interesting to see what browsers and platforms
I know that there have been taxis with Internet access in them for a while. I presume that if they are popular, then why not the greener, peddal-powered variety? Do you know how they are powered (the terminal and connexion I mean) and how they achieve their connexion? Do you have a link to some information about them?
Conservatives (read Republicans)
;)
I would say for our US readers, Conversatives (read somewhat left of Democrats).