You got the point accross to Microsoft, right. I don't think they care too much, FWIW. Maybe even to Dell itself. But you didn't make your point heard by the various hardware vendors - Is your winmodem supported by Linux? I know, maybe you don't even care about the winmodem, but the fact is your computer probably shipped with a worthless piece of hardware you could have spared. Was your webcam easy to set up? My Dell (XPS m1210 - bought, yes, with Windows, before Dell had a choice) has a worthless winmodem and a Logitech webcam that was, back then, barely supported on Linux and costed me several hours of frustration. Anyway... Of course I chose Dell and not, heaven forbid, Sony - Same choice I did four years before, and same choice I am expected to do next time. They are _way_ more Linux-friendly that most other makers.
We are going to have you taken away on the basis of disclosing... Wait, wasn't he disclosing? No, no, this post is in no way an acknowledgement that we might or might not have thought about pursuing a course of action against QuantumG for allegedly attempting to coerce us into disclosing what could or could not have been seen as information on our Secret Proceedings, in case they exist.
Is that ${random_neighbour} plants Monsanto seeds (say, non-terminator Monsanto seeds), they grow and have their own seeds, the descendent seeds fly as they have done for a couple million years and land in my yard. They grow. Now I am a criminal and must pay Monsanto.
That sort of reasoning makes me, as a Mexican, want to go and grab some acres at downtown Los Angeles. After all, it was taken by force from my kin, right? But then again, as a Mexican Jew, it also allows me to kick an Arab out from his property in current Israel, right? After all, a very wise and fair God granted me (well, my forefathers, but explicitly with inalineable, irrenouncable hereditary rights) all fo Canaan (which is allegedly quite larger than current-day Israel) That's the evil of _every_ property based system, be it communitary or private. The State believes it has right to do whatever it pleases with what it administers, no matter its history. Go ask Sitting Bull and his friends... BTW, most (I don't know if all) Communist regimes _do_ honor private property (i.e. my house, my belongings) as far as it is a "fair" (for an arbitrary definition of fairness, of course, bah...) share, not much above what everybody has.
I chose as my ISP in Mexico City E-go, co-owned by Alestra, the Mexican AT&T subsidiary. It started offering WiMax connection in 2003 in limited areas of Mexico City (I understand nowadays it covers most of the Central, Western and Southern parts), before even WiMax was standardized. Clients get a NextNetRSU unit, which is basically a network bridge. The latency complaints you state are simply not true - I get consistent ping response times of 100ms in average (with minimum response times of around 50ms) to hosts in Mexico City, 200ms to hosts in the USA. Yes, this is about 80ms higher than wired equivalents - but it's not so much of a killer. What I do get, of course, is way higher packet loss - About 5% when things are optimal, and it sometimes gets up to 50%. But yes, I'm located at a relatively poor reception area, at one of the lower-income (this means, no incentive to place many antennas nearby) neighbourhoods in the South of the city, where the mostly flat valley where most of the city is located begins to become quite hilly. The RSU unit does not provide any means (for the client) for monitoring connection, to help choose the best possible location. It only has five LEDs (and no, they are not blue, just an unfashionable old green. Bummer.) indicating signal strength, and I always get one or two of them. I have seen signal quality significantly better when at a five-leds connection. Prices and speed are more or less in-par with Mexico's near-monopoly TelMex; I'm paying about US$40 for a nominal 1Mbps/128Kbps connection (512K guaranteed, whatever that means). The upstream data flow _is_ shaped to 128k, but the downstream speed is not - when the network smiles on me, I get up to 2Mbps. It is not common, though. I understand E-go (back then called I-go, don't ask me why) was praised as the world-first massive WiMax deployment - Even before the standard was finalized. There are several aspects of the installed network that show clearly the gear is pre-standard (i.e. extreme sensibility to position changes - If I move my RSU over two centimeters, it has to resynchronize with the antenna. This process takes around two seconds, so no big deal). To me, clearly, the reason it hasn't got more popular is because it is owned by a relatively small company, and has not had the muscle to stand in front of Telmex's publicity machine. Of course, we benefit more than DSL users from having a low client density:) E-go owns 20MHz of spectrum, which allows it to give a theoretical maximum of 70Mbps to a given area. If many too people were to subscribe, each client would have much less effectibe bandwidth alloted.
Have you been to anywhere in Latin America?
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 1
Maybe not anywhere, of course... But have you visited Mexico's border cities? Guatemalan medium- or small-sized cities? Bolivia? Peru? I've been to the places I tell you. And I know I have not seen the worst places. What you describe can be seen in countries that suffered from poverty and isolationism also due to mostly right-winged, army- and US- backed governments. It's not related to communism at all - it is related to relegating the population, it is related to having a too strong governing class.
Of course, if you mean the occasional CGI, I agree with you. But some time ago, I wrote a quite large conference management system in Perl, using mod_perl. And... Well, I'm starting a complete rewrite in Rails. Why? Because, while it works, adoption was practically nonexistant. And I do want more people to use it. It is far simpler to install a Rails application on Mongrel and redirect/proxy to it from Apache (or even to use FCGI, which I don't really like) than to set up a mod_perl app.
Oh, and regarding foobarf00's reply: All the distributions strive to do exactly the same. Why would you want to keep track of versioning at two different upstream repositories (or... Do you use Gems? Well, s/two/many/ if you please) when you can keep all of your system's versions synchronized with The One True Source?
The Free Software community in Mexico has strongly rejected Enciclomedia since its announcement (around 1.5 years ago) as it is simply a grant to Microsoft to provide contents and get licensing for nothing too useful. It employs, yes, very cool high-tech gadgets as the electronic blackboard - But it is, after all, just an expensive, useless gadget (believe me, there was one 10m away from my office at the National Pedagogic University that was very seldom used - and far more seldomly taken advantage. We could just have had a white board and be merrier). But even if we Free Software pushers were all wrong, Enciclomedia has become one of the most exemplar and laughable exhibits of Vicente Fox's administration - Full of what we want to clean our country's image of: Corruption, broken promises, not delivered goods, etc. Take as an example the following news that surfaced during the last few weeks (and this comes just from a brief search at news.google.com): MX$60 million (around US$5.5 million) missing from Enciclomedia Gigantic frauds found in Enciclomedia and in the Megalibrary (of course, the José Vasconcelos megalibrary is another aborted PR stunt from Vicente Fox's administration) Fears arise that a full audit might shut down Enciclomedia so... Please tell me if we should be cheering about this. Of course, Vicente Fox's term has ended, but while six years ago we were all hopeful that Mexico was heading out of its antidemocratic past and the perfect dictatorship of a single-party rule, our new president came from one of our nation's history's most spectacular electoral frauds. And he seems committed to continue on Fox's line.
Gerardo Santana worked on a project implementing binary patches for OpenBSD at least since 2001. His code is quite reliable, IIRC he basically lacked the needed machines to create the patches for all the OBSD officially supported architectures.
10.70 an hour? Even if it were in pesos (would mean ~US$1 an hour), it would be an extremely good deal. The minimum wage is about US$4 a day - working, of course, 8 hours. I have a quite decent income, and make about US$1500 a month - Of course, our living expenses are also way below yours:)
...Having a good checkout from a couple of days ago: mv cvs_repo old_cvs_repo export CVSROOT=:ext:user@cvs.debian.org:/cvsroot/cvs_repo cvs co cvs_repo #and take care to checkout the same revisions... not too hard diff -ru cvs_repo old_cvs_repo|grep -v CVS
I can comment on this... Once I worked at a school, and I had a recurring problem in my computers: Heathsinks falling off the CPU. This is quite serious - This not only leads to CPU overheating, but a metal heathsink hanging loose inside a PC's case can be VERY dangerous to the system! Fortunately none of my machines fried, but I was expecting it anytime...
This was when the hottest (no pun...) chips were still Pentium MMX 200 or similar... Fortunately now most heathsinks clamp to the socket (and real tight), not just to the sides of the CPU...
Not at all... Sun is among the few Unix makers that still supports (i.e. patches) its old versions. We used to run (don't ask why) a Solaris 2.4 server until a couple of months ago... It was always patched and up to date. Which other vendor has ever offered something like it?
You sure do go a long way in painting all corporations as being evil. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the US, with it's many large corporations also has one of the highest stardards of living on the planet. I don't know too many other countries where people are literally killing themselves to try to get into.
I am a Mexican. 1 out of each 10 Mexicans live in the USA. This is, however, only because of the money - I have a good salary in my country. I get about US$15,000 a year... And I am highly-qualified. If I was a gardener, I would make -tops- about 300 dollars a month - And if I am supposed to feed a family... Going to the USA is very tempting. <I>However</I>, most of the Mexicans that cross the border <I>don't</I> take the families with them. Few people actually want to stay there, most only want to make some money.
It's about ego more than anything else... Do you think that Mattias will give his 'leader' hat to Miguel, or that Miguel will give his to Mattias? No way! And sharing a throne has always been too difficult...
The kind of rant we saw here is all too typical. Right now, the spotlight is over GNOME and the KDE team is defending their position. A few months ago it was the exact opposite... I think the projects are too advanced to decide and cooperate with each other.
As for your question, yes, they are terribly different beasts. GNOME's guts are a highly modular component system called Corba, and Bonobo is (I don't understand exactly how) a framework set on top of it. KDE uses also components, but to a lesser level. The implementations of Corba/Bonobo/GTK and QT are too different to merge them transparently - a re-coding of all the programs would have to happen were we to integrate both projects into one.
From 1981 and until 1997 everybody was perfectly happy with AT cases. No one had the necessity to get a different case because they switched computers.
What a strange coincidence - Intel announced the Pentium II and suddenly ATX boxes and motherboards appeared everywhere. There are some AT motherboards for Pentium II, but most of them are ATX.
I am not denying that ATX is a pretty good enhancement over AT, and the enhancement was well due after almost 20 years... But it was a forced upgrade. I still prefer AT boxes for some purposes - Both my home computer and one of my servers do not have a BIOS option to power up the system when it is physically connected or turned on. I want my servers to be always up, so... Well, I would have sticked with AT for servers, ATX for workstations.
There are many posts in this discussion arguing that no one has Ethernet at home... I agree, that is the situation today. But everyday more and more Internet appliances are created, and yes, I would definitively like to have more than one of them online at once... In Mexico there is no high-speed Internet access for public use (the highest offering is 128K ISDN), but many people do buy a secon phone line to be online as much time as possible. Well, if I'm online... I think I would like to share my connection between my main computer and all my little appliances!
Once again, think about the future - You *will* want to know how many cans of soda are there at the fridge before moving from your TV-watching couch!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Smelly yuppies?
I originally read "Three ISPs agree to blAck child porn"
$ perl -e 'print "Nyah-nyah\n" if undef == 0'
Nyah-nyah
You got the point accross to Microsoft, right. I don't think they care too much, FWIW. Maybe even to Dell itself. But you didn't make your point heard by the various hardware vendors - Is your winmodem supported by Linux? I know, maybe you don't even care about the winmodem, but the fact is your computer probably shipped with a worthless piece of hardware you could have spared.
Was your webcam easy to set up? My Dell (XPS m1210 - bought, yes, with Windows, before Dell had a choice) has a worthless winmodem and a Logitech webcam that was, back then, barely supported on Linux and costed me several hours of frustration.
Anyway... Of course I chose Dell and not, heaven forbid, Sony - Same choice I did four years before, and same choice I am expected to do next time. They are _way_ more Linux-friendly that most other makers.
We are going to have you taken away on the basis of disclosing...
Wait, wasn't he disclosing?
No, no, this post is in no way an acknowledgement that we might or might not have thought about pursuing a course of action against QuantumG for allegedly attempting to coerce us into disclosing what could or could not have been seen as information on our Secret Proceedings, in case they exist.
Is that ${random_neighbour} plants Monsanto seeds (say, non-terminator Monsanto seeds), they grow and have their own seeds, the descendent seeds fly as they have done for a couple million years and land in my yard. They grow. Now I am a criminal and must pay Monsanto.
That sort of reasoning makes me, as a Mexican, want to go and grab some acres at downtown Los Angeles. After all, it was taken by force from my kin, right?
But then again, as a Mexican Jew, it also allows me to kick an Arab out from his property in current Israel, right? After all, a very wise and fair God granted me (well, my forefathers, but explicitly with inalineable, irrenouncable hereditary rights) all fo Canaan (which is allegedly quite larger than current-day Israel)
That's the evil of _every_ property based system, be it communitary or private. The State believes it has right to do whatever it pleases with what it administers, no matter its history. Go ask Sitting Bull and his friends...
BTW, most (I don't know if all) Communist regimes _do_ honor private property (i.e. my house, my belongings) as far as it is a "fair" (for an arbitrary definition of fairness, of course, bah...) share, not much above what everybody has.
I chose as my ISP in Mexico City E-go, co-owned by Alestra, the Mexican AT&T subsidiary. It started offering WiMax connection in 2003 in limited areas of Mexico City (I understand nowadays it covers most of the Central, Western and Southern parts), before even WiMax was standardized. Clients get a NextNet RSU unit, which is basically a network bridge. :) E-go owns 20MHz of spectrum, which allows it to give a theoretical maximum of 70Mbps to a given area. If many too people were to subscribe, each client would have much less effectibe bandwidth alloted.
The latency complaints you state are simply not true - I get consistent ping response times of 100ms in average (with minimum response times of around 50ms) to hosts in Mexico City, 200ms to hosts in the USA. Yes, this is about 80ms higher than wired equivalents - but it's not so much of a killer. What I do get, of course, is way higher packet loss - About 5% when things are optimal, and it sometimes gets up to 50%. But yes, I'm located at a relatively poor reception area, at one of the lower-income (this means, no incentive to place many antennas nearby) neighbourhoods in the South of the city, where the mostly flat valley where most of the city is located begins to become quite hilly. The RSU unit does not provide any means (for the client) for monitoring connection, to help choose the best possible location. It only has five LEDs (and no, they are not blue, just an unfashionable old green. Bummer.) indicating signal strength, and I always get one or two of them. I have seen signal quality significantly better when at a five-leds connection.
Prices and speed are more or less in-par with Mexico's near-monopoly TelMex; I'm paying about US$40 for a nominal 1Mbps/128Kbps connection (512K guaranteed, whatever that means). The upstream data flow _is_ shaped to 128k, but the downstream speed is not - when the network smiles on me, I get up to 2Mbps. It is not common, though.
I understand E-go (back then called I-go, don't ask me why) was praised as the world-first massive WiMax deployment - Even before the standard was finalized. There are several aspects of the installed network that show clearly the gear is pre-standard (i.e. extreme sensibility to position changes - If I move my RSU over two centimeters, it has to resynchronize with the antenna. This process takes around two seconds, so no big deal).
To me, clearly, the reason it hasn't got more popular is because it is owned by a relatively small company, and has not had the muscle to stand in front of Telmex's publicity machine.
Of course, we benefit more than DSL users from having a low client density
Maybe not anywhere, of course... But have you visited Mexico's border cities? Guatemalan medium- or small-sized cities? Bolivia? Peru?
I've been to the places I tell you. And I know I have not seen the worst places.
What you describe can be seen in countries that suffered from poverty and isolationism also due to mostly right-winged, army- and US- backed governments. It's not related to communism at all - it is related to relegating the population, it is related to having a too strong governing class.
Oh, you mean you were talking about the rest of the island?
Ok... Well, no comments.
It's been less than 30 minutes since the story was published... And all we can now get is a "403 Forbidden" :(
Of course, if you mean the occasional CGI, I agree with you. But some time ago, I wrote a quite large conference management system in Perl, using mod_perl. And... Well, I'm starting a complete rewrite in Rails. Why? Because, while it works, adoption was practically nonexistant. And I do want more people to use it.
It is far simpler to install a Rails application on Mongrel and redirect/proxy to it from Apache (or even to use FCGI, which I don't really like) than to set up a mod_perl app.
sudo aptitude install rails
Any questions?
Oh, and regarding foobarf00's reply: All the distributions strive to do exactly the same. Why would you want to keep track of versioning at two different upstream repositories (or... Do you use Gems? Well, s/two/many/ if you please) when you can keep all of your system's versions synchronized with The One True Source?
The Free Software community in Mexico has strongly rejected Enciclomedia since its announcement (around 1.5 years ago) as it is simply a grant to Microsoft to provide contents and get licensing for nothing too useful. It employs, yes, very cool high-tech gadgets as the electronic blackboard - But it is, after all, just an expensive, useless gadget (believe me, there was one 10m away from my office at the National Pedagogic University that was very seldom used - and far more seldomly taken advantage. We could just have had a white board and be merrier).
But even if we Free Software pushers were all wrong, Enciclomedia has become one of the most exemplar and laughable exhibits of Vicente Fox's administration - Full of what we want to clean our country's image of: Corruption, broken promises, not delivered goods, etc. Take as an example the following news that surfaced during the last few weeks (and this comes just from a brief search at news.google.com):
MX$60 million (around US$5.5 million) missing from Enciclomedia
Gigantic frauds found in Enciclomedia and in the Megalibrary (of course, the José Vasconcelos megalibrary is another aborted PR stunt from Vicente Fox's administration)
Fears arise that a full audit might shut down Enciclomedia
so... Please tell me if we should be cheering about this. Of course, Vicente Fox's term has ended, but while six years ago we were all hopeful that Mexico was heading out of its antidemocratic past and the perfect dictatorship of a single-party rule, our new president came from one of our nation's history's most spectacular electoral frauds. And he seems committed to continue on Fox's line.
Gerardo Santana worked on a project implementing binary patches for OpenBSD at least since 2001. His code is quite reliable, IIRC he basically lacked the needed machines to create the patches for all the OBSD officially supported architectures.
10.70 an hour? Even if it were in pesos (would mean ~US$1 an hour), it would be an extremely good deal. The minimum wage is about US$4 a day - working, of course, 8 hours. I have a quite decent income, and make about US$1500 a month - Of course, our living expenses are also way below yours :)
...Having a good checkout from a couple of days ago:o
mv cvs_repo old_cvs_repo
export CVSROOT=:ext:user@cvs.debian.org:/cvsroot/cvs_rep
cvs co cvs_repo #and take care to checkout the same revisions... not too hard
diff -ru cvs_repo old_cvs_repo|grep -v CVS
I can comment on this... Once I worked at a school, and I had a recurring problem in my computers: Heathsinks falling off the CPU. This is quite serious - This not only leads to CPU overheating, but a metal heathsink hanging loose inside a PC's case can be VERY dangerous to the system! Fortunately none of my machines fried, but I was expecting it anytime...
This was when the hottest (no pun...) chips were still Pentium MMX 200 or similar... Fortunately now most heathsinks clamp to the socket (and real tight), not just to the sides of the CPU...
Not at all... Sun is among the few Unix makers that still supports (i.e. patches) its old versions. We used to run (don't ask why) a Solaris 2.4 server until a couple of months ago... It was always patched and up to date. Which other vendor has ever offered something like it?
You sure do go a long way in painting all corporations as being evil. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the US, with it's many large corporations also has one of the highest stardards of living on the planet. I don't know too many other countries where people are literally killing themselves to try to get into.
I am a Mexican. 1 out of each 10 Mexicans live in the USA. This is, however, only because of the money - I have a good salary in my country. I get about US$15,000 a year... And I am highly-qualified. If I was a gardener, I would make -tops- about 300 dollars a month - And if I am supposed to feed a family... Going to the USA is very tempting. <I>However</I>, most of the Mexicans that cross the border <I>don't</I> take the families with them. Few people actually want to stay there, most only want to make some money.
A strange side effect of the GPL license is that it apparently discourages or disallows writing documentation.
It's about ego more than anything else... Do you think that Mattias will give his 'leader' hat to Miguel, or that Miguel will give his to Mattias? No way! And sharing a throne has always been too difficult...
The kind of rant we saw here is all too typical. Right now, the spotlight is over GNOME and the KDE team is defending their position. A few months ago it was the exact opposite... I think the projects are too advanced to decide and cooperate with each other.
As for your question, yes, they are terribly different beasts. GNOME's guts are a highly modular component system called Corba, and Bonobo is (I don't understand exactly how) a framework set on top of it. KDE uses also components, but to a lesser level. The implementations of Corba/Bonobo/GTK and QT are too different to merge them transparently - a re-coding of all the programs would have to happen were we to integrate both projects into one.
It never happened?!
From 1981 and until 1997 everybody was perfectly happy with AT cases. No one had the necessity to get a different case because they switched computers.
What a strange coincidence - Intel announced the Pentium II and suddenly ATX boxes and motherboards appeared everywhere. There are some AT motherboards for Pentium II, but most of them are ATX.
I am not denying that ATX is a pretty good enhancement over AT, and the enhancement was well due after almost 20 years... But it was a forced upgrade. I still prefer AT boxes for some purposes - Both my home computer and one of my servers do not have a BIOS option to power up the system when it is physically connected or turned on. I want my servers to be always up, so... Well, I would have sticked with AT for servers, ATX for workstations.
We are the 'dot' in 'dotdotdot Why doesn't this f*cking .com site load?'
There are many posts in this discussion arguing that no one has Ethernet at home... I agree, that is the situation today. But everyday more and more Internet appliances are created, and yes, I would definitively like to have more than one of them online at once... In Mexico there is no high-speed Internet access for public use (the highest offering is 128K ISDN), but many people do buy a secon phone line to be online as much time as possible. Well, if I'm online... I think I would like to share my connection between my main computer and all my little appliances!
:)
Once again, think about the future - You *will* want to know how many cans of soda are there at the fridge before moving from your TV-watching couch!