When I was wandering around the Bargohil area last year (on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a good two days walk from the nearest roadhead), there was no Coke to be found. But one of my fellow travellers brought a laptop with him, running guess what?
The next time I'm building a web site that will get 12 000 hits a second, this kind of benchmarking will be really useful. Until then... I'm sticking with Linux because of its flexibility and freedom.
I've got a 66Mhz 486 running GNU/Linux, 450 days uptime serving up to 10 000 hits a day...
Google could implement an algorithm like that used by advogato.org, that gurantees the system can't be subverted by any number of sites set up just to get high relevance.
The Google version of the Open Directory is great because it ranks the entries using the Google PageRank rather than alphabetically. I hope they do this at Yahoo too - Yahoo would be greatly improved if the entries in each category were ranked by "importance" rather than just alphabetically.
"Not much use to the starving" is a common response to suggestions that information is critical to the poorest people. There are two key points here:
1. Development isn't just about handing out food.
In humanitarian emergencies aid/development agencies often just provide water, food, medicines, and so forth. Information matters here, but perhaps not so much.
But development agencies also do work to try and address the longer-term causes of poverty. In this work, handouts are avoided - the idea is to provide tools, education, skills, connections, and knowledge that will still be useful when the aid agency disappears after a year's funding. There's a famous saying along the lines of "give someone a fish and you feed him for a day; give them a net and you give them a tool they can use for a year; teach them a new fishing method and they have something they can use for life - or until a multinational steals or poisons their fishing grounds or fishes out the area...." In this kind of work, information is absolutely critical - and if you're trying to avoid creating dependencies, a central core of public free information is really important.
2. Even if broader information (and computers) are only of minimal use to (say) illiterate women organising in an Indian village, such things would be of great benefit to the local organisations trying to help them.
For example, I visited one project in India where an organisation called SWAPNA was setting up micro-credit saving circles in Indian villages in southern Maharashtra. They were organising women would organise in groups of twenty and each try to save 20 rupee -- maybe 50c -- a month, which would then be pooled to give them a resource to draw on in medical emergencies, ceremonies, etc. (Based on the idea pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.) The organised saving circles were also used as a way of providing sanitation and health information.
Now computers might be useless to the individual women, but SWAPNA, the organisation running the project, could really have used one. Given that their budget was maybe US$6000/year (to employ a dozen staff working in maybe fifty villages, with maybe 1500 women), old hardware running DOS or Linux and doing UUCP to connect to the Net and to other such organisations... that has real potential.
When I was in Pakistan, at Peshawar Uni, each department had individual modems, and I was told they weren't allowed to get satellite access because internal security couldn't monitor it...
I'm involved with attempts to get development NGOs to take a stronger interest in information and communication technologies. Some web pages that might be of interest:
Indeed. Senator Alston is just as conservative a Catholic as Harradine: he is just more constrained by his party membership. Basically the entire Coalition (Liberal and National parties) has a hard core of ultra-conservative wowsers who can swing the rest of the party behind them. (A bit like the Republicans in the US, I guess.)
Our old server was called thor, so when we replaced it with a new machine we named it after Thor's daughter, Thrud. There are a lot of machines called thor, but afaik ours is the only thrud out there.
Action against the Bill continues - as a Senate Bill, it has yet to go before the House. That is expected to happen on Monday.
Meanwhile, join in protest actions around the nation on May 28. If you can ring your local member this week to express your concerns about the Bill, that may also be effective.
But hey, Australia is about to acquire the Western world's most draconian Net censorship regime - one worse than that of Malaysia or Singapore, in fact.
Meanwhile, in Australia, our government is pushing ahead with totally ridiculous legislation, the only effects of which will be damaging industry and restricting freedom to read and freedom of speech. rRead more.
Unfortunately the moral conservatives in power think restricting free speech is a good thing in itself.
Danny.
Australia to "Shut Up" all citizens
on
ShutUp Software
·
· Score: 1
The Australian minister for communications, senator Alston, has proposed that filtering systems be used on national backbones as part of a censorship regime.
I'm hoping the Redhat 6.0 install will have a window which asks "check the desktop environments you would like to install", allowing you to install either, neither, or both KDE and GNOME.
I have a 486DX-66 with 16MB of RAM, which boots Linux and runs Apache just fine. It's currently serving up to 1000 users a day, without pushing the load average over 0.05...
I'm a Unix system administrator, and the first thing I've always done with a new Unix system is to install all the GNU stuff - gcc, of course, but also the other utilities.
But I've just replaced my Digital Unix server with a GNU/Linux box, where I didn't have to worry about this!
I had this problem when I ran netatalk on an EtherExpress Pro 100 network card. I fixed it by changing the line max_multicast_filter = 64 (in drivers/net/eepro100.c), to max_multicast_filter = 3 (as suggested by someone on netatalk-admin) Now it works fine! (Apparently you can also do this by passing an argument max_multicast_filter=3 when you load the driver module.
Slashdot Mirror
Danny.
Danny.
I've got a 66Mhz 486 running GNU/Linux, 450 days uptime serving up to 10 000 hits a day...
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny - http://www.google.com/search?q=danny
1. Development isn't just about handing out food.
In humanitarian emergencies aid/development agencies often just provide water, food, medicines, and so forth. Information matters here, but perhaps not so much.
But development agencies also do work to try and address the longer-term causes of poverty. In this work, handouts are avoided - the idea is to provide tools, education, skills, connections, and knowledge that will still be useful when the aid agency disappears after a year's funding. There's a famous saying along the lines of "give someone a fish and you feed him for a day; give them a net and you give them a tool they can use for a year; teach them a new fishing method and they have something they can use for life - or until a multinational steals or poisons their fishing grounds or fishes out the area...." In this kind of work, information is absolutely critical - and if you're trying to avoid creating dependencies, a central core of public free information is really important.
2. Even if broader information (and computers) are only of minimal use to (say) illiterate women organising in an Indian village, such things would be of great benefit to the local organisations trying to help them.
For example, I visited one project in India where an organisation called SWAPNA was setting up micro-credit saving circles in Indian villages in southern Maharashtra. They were organising women would organise in groups of twenty and each try to save 20 rupee -- maybe 50c -- a month, which would then be pooled to give them a resource to draw on in medical emergencies, ceremonies, etc. (Based on the idea pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.) The organised saving circles were also used as a way of providing sanitation and health information.
Now computers might be useless to the individual women, but SWAPNA, the organisation running the project, could really have used one. Given that their budget was maybe US$6000/year (to employ a dozen staff working in maybe fifty villages, with maybe 1500 women), old hardware running DOS or Linux and doing UUCP to connect to the Net and to other such organisations... that has real potential.
A write up of my trip to India (with some notes on IT possibilities).
Danny.
Danny.
I'm involved with attempts to get development NGOs to take a stronger interest in information and communication technologies. Some web pages that might be of interest:
Danny.
Danny.
Indeed. Senator Alston is just as conservative
a Catholic as Harradine: he is just more
constrained by his party membership. Basically
the entire Coalition (Liberal and National
parties) has a hard core of ultra-conservative
wowsers who can swing the rest of the party
behind them. (A bit like the Republicans in
the US, I guess.)
Danny.
Our old server was called thor, so when
we replaced it with a new machine we named it
after Thor's daughter, Thrud. There are a lot
of machines called thor, but afaik ours is the
only thrud out there.
Danny
Read more!
Danny.
Meanwhile, join in protest actions around the nation on May 28. If you can ring your local member this week to express your concerns about the Bill, that may also be effective.
Danny.
Details here - and protest rallies this Friday! (May 28th)
Danny.
Unfortunately the moral conservatives in power think restricting free speech is a good thing in itself.
Danny.
You can read more about this here.
Danny.
I'm hoping the Redhat 6.0 install will have a
window which asks "check the desktop environments
you would like to install", allowing you to install either, neither, or both KDE and GNOME.
Danny.
I don't mind Redhat "playing the standards
game" - just as long as the standards are
open.
Danny.
I have a 486DX-66 with 16MB of RAM, which
boots Linux and runs Apache just fine.
It's currently serving up to 1000 users a day,
without pushing the load average over 0.05...
Danny
I'm a Unix system administrator, and the first
thing I've always done with a new Unix system
is to install all the GNU stuff - gcc, of course,
but also the other utilities.
But I've just replaced my Digital Unix server
with a GNU/Linux box, where I didn't have to
worry about this!
Danny.
I had this problem when I ran netatalk on
an EtherExpress Pro 100 network card.
I fixed it by changing the line
max_multicast_filter = 64
(in drivers/net/eepro100.c), to
max_multicast_filter = 3
(as suggested by someone on netatalk-admin)
Now it works fine!
(Apparently you can also do this by passing
an argument max_multicast_filter=3 when you
load the driver module.
Danny.
I have a long term goal. If I'm still in my
current job (sysadmin for a university department)
in 20 years, I'll have moved everyone to free
software.
I figure it will take that long.
Danny.