Who was the moron who design serial?, about 200 different combinations just to be able to console something.
Sure everything these days is ( usually ) 8N1 (bad luck if it isn't) but then you just have to play with the speed ( 1200, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600) and actual connector ( 9 pin, 25 pin, rj45) , the gender ( male or female) and the magic sauce ( straight through, null modem, rollover) .
Seriously great fun when your machine has died, a few thousand customers are offline and you are trying to just login and fix it.
Please tell me there is some USB console standard that is just plug and play.
The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation--for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were replaced by X +, / --, = and all the standard mathematical functions.
Shame on Apple for trying to claim they invented the idea.
Lets see. itunes lists 2 million songs. Assume average song size is 2 kilobytes and no compression then lyrics to every song should take about 4 gigabytes. Less assuming instrumentals and cover versions.
It should be easy enough to distribute them as a torrent and search a local copy. I'm sure people can send out updates for new songs every few weeks.
I would hope that some of the lyrics sites who reallyarn't in it for the money make their databases available for download...
1. Digital Camera 2. USB cable for camera 3. Work ID and RSA Securid 4. Credit card sized LED light (Juniper gaveaway) 5. Two sheets of paper with phone numbers for suppliers, team members and helpdesks at work 6. 4 Pens 7. 1 GB USB Pen drive 8. 256MB USB pen drive 9. 20 of my business cards 10. Today's mail I picked up earlier 11. Very small bag of peppermints 12. 2 paper based notebooks (approx A5 sized) 13. Small can of mints 14. Box of headache pills 15.Glasses cleaning clothes (unused) 16. Small pink elephant (giveaway from pinkelephant.com training) 17. Reading book ("The Road to Mecca" by Muhammad Asad) 18. ITIL's training books from training last week. 19. 120GB USB Hard drive. 20. $60 in $US dollars from trip 6 months ago that I forgot about!. (Thanks slashdot!)
No laptop, I don't own one
Re:Larry Niven strikes again; Ringworld sunflowers
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
I remember reading a Sci-Fi story ( at least 30 years old) where a guy goes to a soccer game in a South American country.
He notices the program for the game (given to everyone who attends) has a very shiny white back to it.
Into the game the referee makes a decission against the home team. In reply the crowd all hold up their programs, focus the sun onto the ref and vaporize him.
While the current network doesn't seem to be going out of it's way to attract the usual p2p (read copyright avoiding) crowd it would seem to be pretty easy to use this for bittorrent distribution.
Setting up a "Hidden service" ( see: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#hidden -service ) as a website listing torrents and (assuming bittorent itself is easy to get working with this) even running connections to trackers over it seems to be straightforward.
The amount of bandwidth consumed by trackers is fairly small and should easily be able to be handled by the system.
As a bogus using the current backbone will both provide more servers for existing traffic to use and also insure the network as a whole isn't just a file trading network.
You also need the trackers. You can't distribute those
A possible way aroudn this would be to have trackers behind some sort of VPN (or perhaps even serioes of VPNs).
So somebody could host the IP and port (pointed to via some dynamic-dns providers) which would just forward (possibly via several hops) to the actual person hosting the tracker. Automaticly erase logs etc to prevent this being all traced.
It should provide an additional couple of levels of indirection until the technology leaps another generation.
According to this article in the (New Zealand) National Business Review the Niue Government doesn't like the competition from the Niue Internet Users Society and is using strongarm tactics to protect it's phone monopoly.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I would not be happy to give up remote display. Not going to happen.
There is no reason why you can't run a X server over the top of a directFB desktop. This would enable applications that support the new system to run fast locally while X based Apps (remote and local) can take to the X server.
There are plenty of X servers for Windows and MacOS that plenty of people use already.
The book covers everything about buildings after they are built from leaks, technological changes to changing styles. Have a look at the Amazon link for the samples pages to get an idea of the content and especially the pictures. The book covers modern homes, office buildings, castles, farm houses. small shacks and everything in between. It is definately the place to start if you want to build something that will be around and used in 50 or 500 years.
It's not a howto or builders guide except in the general sense. However it covers the general picture of the things you need to think about and provides links to other sources with more specific information. Overall it is one of my favourate books.
The author is president of the Long Now Foundation which is building the 10,000 year clock so he's very much into thinking about the longer term.
I work for an Australian ISP. Filtering of p0rn is a pain since it involves ISPs supplying to customers and supporting software which is (as the reports says) unreliable and not very effective. Not to mention that it can be very expensive. The current regulation is fairly simple in that the ISP just has to provide a link to download filtering software and customers can decide if they want to use it.
However the suggestion that porn would only be available to customers who were over 18 and opted out is pretty easy to handle.
Due to credit laws most ISPs only accept customers if they are 18 years or older so all an ISP has to do is make sure every customer opts to have unblocked Internet.
To get around this rule an ISP could just have as part of their signup a couple of boxes that say:
[ ] - I am 18 years old or over [ ] - I wish to have unfiltered access to the Internet
People who don't accept the unfiltered part will have no access to the Internet at large. Instead when they login they would be presented with a online version of the above form which would convert their account to normal.
Existing users can be handled the same way, their Internet access is completely blocked until they fill out the option.
Obviously this is a bit of work for the ISP and will cause some expense but it's 100 times easier than implimenting real filteing for all customers, let alone dealing with the flack when some "filtered" custome r manages to access porn or is unable to get to a site they like.
In the short run the Somali immigrants will be hurt, but in the long run they are better off getting rid of Hawallas and getting a real banking system. If this encourages them to do that, it will, in the long run, be seen as one of the best things we could do for them. Why? Because the Hawalla charges ridiculous cuts just for transferring the money. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to as much as 15% according to an article I read in the Washington Post.
Western Union doesn't list prices for Somalia but they charge $22 for moving $200 from New York to Yemen. An article in this week's Economist Magazine says charges are more commonly less that 5% by systems.
Hawala systems exist between countries where banks and western Union already operate because they are cheaper and easier for poor people to use to transfer small sums of money.
If banks really were more effecient for Somali then they would have been established ages ago. Argueing that overcharging Hawala transfer is keeping out a "real banking system" is just dumb. Obviously the combination of lawlessness in Somali and better services offered by Hawala is the real reason.
Saying that children learning on Linux systems will be at a disadvantage in an all-Microsoft world is totally wrong.
First the pace of computers is such that any system you learn on now will be out of date by the time you leave school. When I was at school (late 80s) I used Apple IIs, When I was at University (early 90s) I used Windows 2 and Macs. These days I use Linux or Recent Windows versions.
Current Linux software like Redhat are offering will cover the Word processing, Spreadsheets, Email and Web browsing that is what 95% of students need. The other 5% will have the option of learning web design, System administration and the like. Using Microsoft software on the machines will just cost more money without adding any functionability.
Even if the Students are graduating into a 100% Microsoft based workplace they will be able to quickly (minutes/hours/days) convert to using what their job requires. Most likely any company they are working for will be using the latest software anyway rather than whatever version of Windows they the school would have had 5 years previously.
Last year the cooling fan failed on the CPU of one of my (Linux) servers and it died.
After a bit of work I managed to boot up on another drive to take a look. I found just about every directory under root was now in lost+found and they were all intact.
Result was I got a new machine and then spent about an hour moving all the directories back to their correct places. No data lost at all.
I work with a larger Australian ISP so I talk with a lot of customers who run smaller Australian ISPs. Many of them are one or two empolyees, a couple of hundred customers and only around 128k/b of bandwidth. Most of them are never going to make money.
Points to watch for:
Work out how much income you need. Normal dialup customers are only going to make you a couple of dollars per month each ( if you are lucky) so you need a couple of thousand just to pay wages for one or two people.
From the start decide how you are going to handle helpdesk. Even a small number of calls can quickly tie you up. If you are paying yourself $20 per hour and only making $2/month from each dialup customer then a 30 minute phonecall will use up 5 months profit from that customer. Others have suggested no-helpdesk ISPs.
Talk to other ISP people in your area about what costs and problems they are having with Telstra etc. You say the existing ISP in the area is bad for disconnections. Is this because of their equipment or because of the bad lines in your area.
Watch out for freeloaders if you have limited resources and cheap accounts. Think about what will happen if 5 of 10 percent of your customers stay logged in 24x7 running Napster type programs. This is a realistic number right now and only likely to get higher. Can your provisioning and revenue model support this? If you then you may need to structure accounts to avoid these customers or make them pay extra.
Make sure you provision realisticly. Don't think you can get away with a 128K/b upstream circuit and 20 dialup lines. If people can go to one of the bigger National providers and get decent download speeds then they won't touch you.
Plan for growth. Make sure you have aliases for all you servers (smtp , pop etc). Get your own AS number and own networks early. Make sure customers use server-assigned dns servers and dynamic IPs.
Don't even think of using modems. Get Ascend or Cisco NAS boxes or similar. A cisco router might be overkill at the start so use a dedicated PC running zebra and you upstream circuit until it is worth buying it. Get a switch for your LAN, hubs are not worth the trouble.
Shop around the different providers (telstra, optus, connect.com etc) for the best deal. Don't forget to check out the satellite providers. Look at getting a link into a local Ausbone node and perhaps buying bandwidth off someone there.
Run a transparant proxy server from the start. It'll say you huge amounts of bandwidth.
Don't overdo things. Buy 3 or 4 PCs to handle everything. Run indentical Linux installs on each ( Debian is good for this and easy to automate updates) and then divide your services between them. If you keep growing you can buy a new PCs every few months and split off services. When possible have multiple or backup smtp/mx/proxy/news servers. Make sure you backup regularly, with debian servers I just tar up/etc , grab the list of packages and copy them to another machine. Once a week I backup those to CDROM.
Take care with you advertising. It's easy to spend thousands of dollars on radio or Newspaper ads and having nothing to show for it. Target the people you are after, encourage customers to sign up others. Make sure that when people login to irc, chatgroups or usenet your domain shows up on their reverse.
Be careful with monthly bills. Don't give people credit. If they are not paying you then lock their account. Try and setup your system so people are paying in advance.
Keep your accounts simple. You shouldn't have more than 3 or 4 different types of home accounts (1 or 2 is better). Make sure each type of account is going to make money. Consider an offpeak account that only lets people login during the night or when usage is low.
MAke sure you terms and conditions allow you to close accounts for spamming, hacking and IMPORTANTLY for no reason at all.
If a customer is giving you grief and taking up huge amounts of your time then just close their account and refund their money. You should NEVER spend hours per week on someone that pays you $20-$30 per month. To make money you have to spend well under 1 hour per YEAR per customer.
Make sure you monitor your network. Something like bigbrother hooked up to a pager is a good start. Get the after hours numbers for your suppliers, get the cellphone number for your account manager etc. Look at going with multiple providers for backup. A flat rate main circuit and a $-per-megabyte backup is a good combination. Run you own BGP and you can make fallover automatic.
Have a backup computer or two ready. If one of your machines dies completely at 10pm on a Friday you want to be back up quickly. Even if you don't have multiple machines for everything a single machine you can convert to anything should be enough.
Keep your servers tidy. Get a rack and consider rack mounted PCs. Don't buy 1 or 2 RU machines unless you are paying for the space but full size rackmount cases are tidy and easy to maintain.
Make sure you have money to survive. You will need at least $100k to get yourself setup and surviving for the first year. There is no way you will be profitable during that time and more than minimal wages are unlikely.
Don't waste money. You don't need a fancy office, high end laptops etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at Linux.conf.au and saw the talk by the company that deployed the system
1. The school is projected to grow to 1500 pupils over the next few years
2. The server room thing was the standard said they needed 8 racks of servers, instead they just needed 4 servers taking up less than half a rack.
There were a bunch of articles a few months ago about the same sort of thing:
Like this one which includes a link to a paper from 2005 with the same idea.
Who was the moron who design serial?, about 200 different combinations just to be able to console something.
Sure everything these days is ( usually ) 8N1 (bad luck if it isn't) but then you just have to play with the speed ( 1200, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600) and actual connector ( 9 pin, 25 pin, rj45) , the gender ( male or female) and the magic sauce ( straight through, null modem, rollover) .
Seriously great fun when your machine has died, a few thousand customers are offline and you are trying to just login and fix it.
Please tell me there is some USB console standard that is just plug and play.
The book Imperial Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Earth by Arthur C. Clarke from 1976 featured something similar:
The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation--for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were replaced by X +, / --, = and all the standard mathematical functions.
Shame on Apple for trying to claim they invented the idea.
The cartoon "Everybody loves Eric Raymond" had a take on the affair:
i ed-a-kernel-programmer
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/so-i-marr
Lets see. itunes lists 2 million songs. Assume average song size is 2 kilobytes and no compression
then lyrics to every song should take about 4 gigabytes. Less assuming instrumentals and cover versions.
It should be easy enough to distribute them as a torrent and search a local copy. I'm sure people can send out updates for new songs every few weeks.
I would hope that some of the lyrics sites who really arn't in it for the money make their databases available for download...
1. Digital Camera
2. USB cable for camera
3. Work ID and RSA Securid
4. Credit card sized LED light (Juniper gaveaway)
5. Two sheets of paper with phone numbers for suppliers, team members and helpdesks at work
6. 4 Pens
7. 1 GB USB Pen drive
8. 256MB USB pen drive
9. 20 of my business cards
10. Today's mail I picked up earlier
11. Very small bag of peppermints
12. 2 paper based notebooks (approx A5 sized)
13. Small can of mints
14. Box of headache pills
15
16. Small pink elephant (giveaway from pinkelephant.com training)
17. Reading book ("The Road to Mecca" by Muhammad Asad)
18. ITIL's training books from training last week.
19. 120GB USB Hard drive.
20. $60 in $US dollars from trip 6 months ago that I forgot about!. (Thanks slashdot!)
No laptop, I don't own one
I remember reading a Sci-Fi story ( at least 30 years old) where a guy goes to a soccer game in a South American country.
He notices the program for the game (given to everyone who attends) has a very shiny white back to it.
Into the game the referee makes a decission against the home team. In reply the crowd all hold up their programs, focus the sun onto the ref and vaporize him.
While the current network doesn't seem to be going out of it's way to attract the usual p2p (read copyright avoiding) crowd it would seem to be pretty easy to use this for bittorrent distribution.
n -service ) as a website listing torrents and (assuming bittorent itself is easy to get working with this) even running connections to trackers over it seems to be straightforward.
Setting up a "Hidden service" ( see: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#hidde
The amount of bandwidth consumed by trackers is fairly small and should easily be able to be handled by the system.
As a bogus using the current backbone will both provide more servers for existing traffic to use and also insure the network as a whole isn't just a file trading network.
You also need the trackers. You can't distribute those
A possible way aroudn this would be to have trackers behind some sort of VPN (or perhaps even serioes of VPNs).
So somebody could host the IP and port (pointed to via some dynamic-dns providers) which would just forward (possibly via several hops) to the actual person hosting the tracker. Automaticly erase logs etc to prevent this being all traced.
It should provide an additional couple of levels of indirection until the technology leaps another generation.
According to this article in the (New Zealand) National Business Review the Niue Government doesn't like the competition from the Niue Internet Users Society and is using strongarm tactics to protect it's phone monopoly.
I would not be happy to give up remote display. Not going to happen.
There is no reason why you can't run a X server over the top of a directFB desktop. This would enable applications that support the new system to run fast locally while X based Apps (remote and local) can take to the X server.
There are plenty of X servers for Windows and MacOS that plenty of people use already.
on building to last for a long time is How Buldings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. by Stewart Brand (See also here, here and here
,000 year clock so he's very much into thinking about the longer term.
The book covers everything about buildings after they are built from leaks, technological changes to changing styles. Have a look at the Amazon link for the samples pages to get an idea of the content and especially the pictures. The book covers modern homes, office buildings, castles, farm houses. small shacks and everything in between. It is definately the place to start if you want to build something that will be around and used in 50 or 500 years.
It's not a howto or builders guide except in the general sense. However it covers the general picture of the things you need to think about and provides links to other sources with more specific information. Overall it is one of my favourate books.
The author is president of the Long Now Foundation which is building the 10
I work for an Australian ISP. Filtering of p0rn is a pain since it involves ISPs supplying to customers and supporting software which is (as the reports says) unreliable and not very effective. Not to mention that it can be very expensive. The current regulation is fairly simple in that the ISP just has to provide a link to download filtering software and customers can decide if they want to use it.
However the suggestion that porn would only be available to customers who were over 18 and opted out is pretty easy to handle.
Due to credit laws most ISPs only accept customers if they are 18 years or older so all an ISP has to do is make sure every customer opts to have unblocked Internet.
To get around this rule an ISP could just have as part of their signup a couple of boxes that say:
[ ] - I am 18 years old or over
[ ] - I wish to have unfiltered access to the Internet
People who don't accept the unfiltered part will have no access to the Internet at large. Instead when they login they would be presented with a online version of the above form which would convert their account to normal.
Existing users can be handled the same way, their Internet access is completely blocked until they fill out the option.
Obviously this is a bit of work for the ISP and will cause some expense but it's 100 times easier than implimenting real filteing for all customers, let alone dealing with the flack when some "filtered" custome r manages to access porn or is unable to get to a site they like.
In the short run the Somali immigrants will be hurt, but in the long run they are better off getting rid of Hawallas and getting a real banking system. If this encourages them to do that, it will, in the long run, be seen as one of the best things we could do for them. Why? Because the Hawalla charges ridiculous cuts just for transferring the money. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to as much as 15% according to an article I read in the Washington Post.
Western Union doesn't list prices for Somalia but they charge $22 for moving $200 from New York to Yemen. An article in this week's Economist Magazine says charges are more commonly less that 5% by systems.
Hawala systems exist between countries where banks and western Union already operate because they are cheaper and easier for poor people to use to transfer small sums of money.
If banks really were more effecient for Somali then they would have been established ages ago. Argueing that overcharging Hawala transfer is keeping out a "real banking system" is just dumb. Obviously the combination of lawlessness in Somali and better services offered by Hawala is the real reason.
Saying that children learning on Linux systems will be at a disadvantage in an all-Microsoft world is totally wrong.
First the pace of computers is such that any system you learn on now will be out of date by the time you leave school. When I was at school (late 80s) I used Apple IIs, When I was at University (early 90s) I used Windows 2 and Macs. These days I use Linux or Recent Windows versions.
Current Linux software like Redhat are offering will cover the Word processing, Spreadsheets, Email and Web browsing that is what 95% of students need. The other 5% will have the option of learning web design, System administration and the like. Using Microsoft software on the machines will just cost more money without adding any functionability.
Even if the Students are graduating into a 100% Microsoft based workplace they will be able to quickly (minutes/hours/days) convert to using what their job requires. Most likely any company they are working for will be using the latest software anyway rather than whatever version of Windows they the school would have had 5 years previously.
Last year the cooling fan failed on the CPU of one of my (Linux) servers and it died.
After a bit of work I managed to boot up on another drive to take a look. I found just about every directory under root was now in lost+found and they were all intact.
Result was I got a new machine and then spent about an hour moving all the directories back to their correct places. No data lost at all.