Well, I quit buying _any_ American or UK computer magazine after Byte died because the rest is filled with ads (read: like 90% of pages in a darn magazine) of no relevance or interest - when I buy computer stuff I go online to find the best prise and order there. I couldn't care less for mail-order companies in obscure locations in the US or UK.
TV ads are different story - I've tried to play around with screen blanking detection to skip over ads (as at least in Finland they don't send any "ads begin" or "ads stop" PDC-signals to automate ad skipping) and unfortunately the best way of ignoring ads is to run off to the fridge when they begin and try not to miss too much of the show you're watching before getting back. And the worst thing is that the TV companies here raise the volume level with ads trying to make sure that you will _atleast_ hear them from the fridge... Argh!
Website ads I block because a) I can b) I don't _want_ to win anything by punching a monkey c) I get migrane from those irritating blinking squares d) I hate when Flash/JScript ads enlargen to cover half of the article I'm just reading and won't go away in Firefox e) The relevance of ads lim -> 0
Well, I for one use OpenBSD for all daily needs at work and that's what really counts. It doesn't matter moneywise if I use all the Linux ISO-image distros at home for free vs. that my company buys every single OpenBSD release for money and I put it on n+1 servers running everything from firewalls to DNS to desktop systems.
I still use a home rolled Linux system for home use because of the much larger number of multimedia applications and support for SB Live! and SMP in Linux which OpenBSD lack currently.
Other than that I have no reasons what so ever to run Linux on production systems at work whereas I can't think of putting any Linux system on the line to become cracked next to no time once exposed to the Internet.
Our local telco (2nd largest in Finland) has this "kotiportti" (=homegate) service where the telco brings a 1Gbps fiber directly to the cellar switch and from thereon it is distributed as switched 10/100Mbps ethernet to flats.
It costs $45/month, which is cheap by our standards.
I would recon that the main possibilities are along the lines of
PCCard/PCMCIA Hard Drives
-Large Capacity (upto hundreds of MB)
-Widely usable as virtually every laptop has PCCard readers integrated and these readers can be obtained in 3½" form factor.
-The Drive itself isn't too expensive
-The PCCard HD is expensive
IOMega Jaz/Zip/Clik
-Large capacity (2GB/250MB/40MB)
-Drives are common (atleast Zip)
-Clik is small and beeing used in cameras
-Disks are relatively cheap
-Readers aren't too expansive (except Jaz) and available in 3½" form factor for IDE/SCSI/USB.
Castlewood ORB
-Large capacity (2.2GB)
-Drives are cheap and available for IDE/SCSI/USB
-The media is cheap
-New machine - no hard info on reliability yet
SmartMedia
-Memory card is smallish and available
-Memory is expensive/MB
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
-Used in cameras & mp3-players so multiusable
Sony Memory Stick
-MemoryStick is expensive
-Not yet in any other than Sony products
-Might be multiusable later on though
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
Compact Flash
-Memory Expensive
-Drives available for PCs
-I have no idea on reader prise though
-Small sized and presumably rugged design
-Small memory size
Well that sums up what I recall are the market players today. I deliberately left LS-120 disks and old SyQuest drives out because they seem quite dead today.
The main problem with all of these are relatively high cost of media and quite limited supply at normal shops (except Zip-disks). I Would prefer the ORB-drives as they have a good prise/performance and prise/capacity ratio. My only gripe about them is the ruggedness of its design - does it last hard use like in public access settings?
Which one would you pick if you had the choise of taking a Palm Pilot with the 33MHz Dragonball in it or the same machine with a 500MHz Crusoe in it for the same CPU power consumption? I'd bet that Crusoe will out-perform any PDA cpu anytime with the same power consuption.
The products Crusoe is really ment for are entirely different from traditional laptops. The Crusoe chip is technically near ideal for WebPAD and PDA-like machines that do not need excessive amounts of computing power, but more like reasonable amounts of it with as low power consumption as possible.
The equipment Crusoe is ideal for is, say a WebPad which has enough of CPU power to play MP3's & MPEG2 (DVD) and perhaps runs a web browser & an office suite at the same time and is using solid state memory for storage, it's housed in an A4 size enclosure with an 13" 16:9 TFT screen and accesses the Net via WLAN.
Here we can see the scenario where the power saving features of Crusoe (and the rest of the design naturally has to support similar unified power saving features) can make a big difference.
In equipment like this the difference of operating 3 hours / battery or operating 8 hour / battery makes all the difference. I'd kill if my Toshiba Tecra laptop would stay alive on one battery more than 2h45m. Say 8-12h ago would be sweet indeed.
What I see most important in the short term is the complete lack of a standard installer (the likes of InstallShield) and a standard GUI for it in X and curses.
1. It should be a binary installed on the local system and so separated from the packages it will be installing. (for security reasons as stated elsewhere in this thread)
2. All packages should be digitally signed and this signature has to be validated before installation can commence. (be vary about M$ signatures;-) Distribution maintainers should include trusted signer's keys in the distribution for convenience.
3. Within the installation GUI it should be possible to get a clear view of what-goes-where in terms of files contained in the package
3.1 For this sort of a major installation system overhaul to become reality there must be very good tools to create these new packages and utilies for converting existing.rpm/.dep/.tgz packages to whatever this new system will be.
4. Also installation paths should be configurable and there should be a button for checking and updating the system path setup if needed -automatically. Also post copying/installation configuration should be available through the same GUI, so that one is able to install and configure software easily through a "wizard" in the beginning and then get down to 'vi' if tweaking is needed at a later time.
5. The installer should have a decent help on LSB directory meanings and a FAQ of known best practices of software installation. (I use/opt for just about everything)
6. The packaging format should be something like the.tgz package format *BSD's ports collection with automake/autoconf Makefiles for dependency checking and a way of automatically fullfilling these dependencies if needed á la the ports collection (It really works wonders - it is something we should adapt from our *BSD kinders)
6.1 The packaging format should also support source compilation i.e. instead of being an "only binary" package the SW could be distributed in source form and the installation system will give the local machine optimisation flags to the Makefiles of the package to be compiled. Flag override should be also available in the package if the SW is known to malfunction with some optimisation flags i.e. it's not SMP safe or breaks with high optimisation parameters.
6.2 There should also be a proper uninstall scripting in the installer and another handy feature would be the possibility of making an orphan check in the installer i.e. when a software is uninstalled no shared libraries should be removed (this semantics will leave orphaned libs hanging arround, but retain other SW operational if it hasn't been registered with the package system as using this library) Now with orphan detection root has direct control over what libs are to be removed as surplus and if something then breaks he will be able to reinstall what ever he just removed, instead of being left guessing what essential part was removed with software package ZYX.
7. A new binary fileformat of the.jar like would be helpfull if one strives to minimize the directory count of the box, but at the same time it compromises control of individual files in a given software (think icons in KDE as part of a kde2.package - how can those be updated easily and conveniently?) Perhaps some kind of a hybrid system with a hierarhy of
8. At the same time we should try to rationalise the current confusing directory hierarchy system of/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/local/sbin,/usr/share/bin, etc. as this becomes entirely uncontrollable after a while of mixing packages and/or source compilations from various sources on any given system.
Nowadays it is complicated to get a grasp of what's installed on a system just after installation if using something like RH/Mandrake that stick every SW beneath the sun and their friends in a default installation. (even with the minimum/expert installation =(
Hopefully someone with enough programming expertise to actually do something about these suggestions sees this post and finds some of it rational enough to try to implement a system like this on Linux/BSD.
I'm looking forward to see the day it works,
++ Raymond
Already last year some major construction companies here in Finland announced, that all new houses they build will be fitted with permanent Internet connections to every flat.
As in the philosophy of taking the fiber to the cornerstone, the telcos are more than eager to offer their fiber & ISP-services to these new houses as a way of getting new customers easily and also getting an imago boost by beeing "on the bleeding edge" of the Internet society.
As a sidenote, all the Helsinki area student appartments are to be wired also, afterwards.
Well, doing batch-updating in the middle of the night sure is convenient IF you are not charged 5 cents/minute for connection time as it happens to be in most European countries (as far as I know, living in Finland). And of course there is the ISP's charge on top of that ranging from $10/month/no bandwidth cost on top of that to the other end of ISP-service of charging 20 cents/MiB + local call charges of 5 cents/minute.
So with a connection cost structure like this it is not quite cost-effective to do any large updates with modems of upto max 56kbps(usually 33.6kbps or slower). With ISDN (2x64kbps) the connection time can be reduces, but *supprise* the telcos also bill double for using two channels and a double basic monthly rate on top of that.
I recall this winner "hack" from my university's prank competition some years ago:
Some years ago the students of the Helsinki University of Technology (teekkarit) did this "hack" of buying a single park bench from the City of Helsinki and subsequently carrying it arround Helsinki on 1st May evening among the festivities.
They were stopped multiple times by the police, but every time they showed the receipt for owning the bench and eventually the police circulated the information of the "prank" the students of HUT are doing by carrying their own bench arround the town.
Now this radio broadcast was monitored by the students and right after it a crowd of them was assembled and every bench in Helsinki's parks were carried away into a giant pile in the middle of the central park of Helsinki.
Correct me if I messed some detail up, as I wasn't there at the time.
Well, sorry to shatter your illusion about Finland's backwaterness in information tech. As it was noted in the article we have an GSM (digital mobile phone) penetration of over 65% overall population and what this means is that most people under the age 65 has one or more mobile terminals at their disposal. Also internet access in more common here than anywhere else (excluding the US nowadays). Virtually most of our banking has been availabel/used via the net/BBS's for atleast 5 years for the people and for tens of years for corporate customers. E-commerce has been slow to come up in our market, but that has changed in the past 5-10 months quite radically. These "internet kiosks" are beeing deployed at the moment for the benefit of people, who can't afford to buy their own computers & leased lines and other people who just don't want to buy ones. most of these booths are built as public services and they cost either nothing or an token amount money e.g. 25 FIM = roughly $5 = one pint of real beer =). It's this public deployment that brings these new things into our society so that one day when I happen to need instant internet access on the bus from Helsinki to Espoo (next city 5 miles away) I'll just grab my cellphone/terminal (e.g. Nokia Communicator at the moment - WAP terminals in the near future (we have an WAP-network active we're just short of terminal equipment) - and someting else like UMTS-based multimedia phone/PDA's in 2002/3) and get cracking. It's not just Helsinki which is wired but more of the idea of the whole country beeing wired with wiredless access. I can use my cellphone just as well at home in Espoo as in the wilderness at my summer cottage out some 500km in the middle of nowhere. And what's more important I have access for the entire country with just one tehnology & operator -> no need for having different operator at different sides of the country as you have in the US. This was the way you got your CC's in the first place - there was a need in the corporate world for them, so the telco's made it happen 10 years ago. Then you came along 5 years later and CC's seemed to have existed forever. I'm not saying Finland is great in every instance, but we do have our good points from time to time. I do acknowledge that the US is by far the leader in computer technology in general, but you have the needed population on your home market to support companies as large as IBM, Intel and Compaq, where Finland with a mere 5 Million inhabitants can't support this size companies here. This is the reason finnish start-up's have to begin with a great idea and usually build the damn thing on their own before they can even think of getting any venture capital out of our over cautios banks & investors. And then they have to get themselves some fame and sales in Finland and before they even break even they have to engage in the horribly costly international markets to grow. There are very few success stories about finnish companies growing to international sizes, but some like Nokia, Datafellows (SSH, F-Prot Antivirus) and Okmetik (something like 20% of the worlds silicon circuits are refined here) have been able to do it. All these begun with an niché product that could be merketed overseas and eventually they grew to their current size. There is potential here in knowhow, but our culture seems to be of one that dislikes taking risks - both people and financial institutions. Another point is also the economical situation here - it was quite bad for a few years, but we've seen great growth for the past couple of years and atleast in the south of Finland the recession of our market can't be seen anymore. FYI: I recall, that we preceed the global recession wave by some 1-3 years all the time as our economy differs from Europes and the US's in some major ways I don't know much about. It's actually quite funny to see these negative reactions to articles about foreign accomplishments and the simple acceptance of hi-tech things beeing introduced as US findings and services as facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I quit buying _any_ American or UK computer magazine after Byte died because the rest is filled with ads (read: like 90% of pages in a darn magazine) of no relevance or interest - when I buy computer stuff I go online to find the best prise and order there. I couldn't care less for mail-order companies in obscure locations in the US or UK.
TV ads are different story - I've tried to play around with screen blanking detection to skip over ads (as at least in Finland they don't send any "ads begin" or "ads stop" PDC-signals to automate ad skipping) and unfortunately the best way of ignoring ads is to run off to the fridge when they begin and try not to miss too much of the show you're watching before getting back. And the worst thing is that the TV companies here raise the volume level with ads trying to make sure that you will _atleast_ hear them from the fridge... Argh!
Website ads I block because
a) I can
b) I don't _want_ to win anything by punching a monkey
c) I get migrane from those irritating blinking squares
d) I hate when Flash/JScript ads enlargen to cover half of the article I'm just reading and won't go away in Firefox
e) The relevance of ads lim -> 0
Cheers, Ray
Well, I for one use OpenBSD for all daily needs at work and that's what really counts. It doesn't matter moneywise if I use all the Linux ISO-image distros at home for free vs. that my company buys every single OpenBSD release for money and I put it on n+1 servers running everything from firewalls to DNS to desktop systems.
I still use a home rolled Linux system for home use because of the much larger number of multimedia applications and support for SB Live! and SMP in Linux which OpenBSD lack currently.
Other than that I have no reasons what so ever to run Linux on production systems at work whereas I can't think of putting any Linux system on the line to become cracked next to no time once exposed to the Internet.
++ Ray
Our local telco (2nd largest in Finland) has this "kotiportti" (=homegate) service where the telco brings a 1Gbps fiber directly to the cellar switch and from thereon it is distributed as switched 10/100Mbps ethernet to flats.
It costs $45/month, which is cheap by our standards.
I would recon that the main possibilities are along the lines of
PCCard/PCMCIA Hard Drives
-Large Capacity (upto hundreds of MB)
-Widely usable as virtually every laptop has PCCard readers integrated and these readers can be obtained in 3½" form factor.
-The Drive itself isn't too expensive
-The PCCard HD is expensive
IOMega Jaz/Zip/Clik
-Large capacity (2GB/250MB/40MB)
-Drives are common (atleast Zip)
-Clik is small and beeing used in cameras
-Disks are relatively cheap
-Readers aren't too expansive (except Jaz) and available in 3½" form factor for IDE/SCSI/USB.
Castlewood ORB
-Large capacity (2.2GB)
-Drives are cheap and available for IDE/SCSI/USB
-The media is cheap
-New machine - no hard info on reliability yet
SmartMedia /MB
-Memory card is smallish and available
-Memory is expensive
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
-Used in cameras & mp3-players so multiusable
Sony Memory Stick
-MemoryStick is expensive
-Not yet in any other than Sony products
-Might be multiusable later on though
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
Compact Flash
-Memory Expensive
-Drives available for PCs
-I have no idea on reader prise though
-Small sized and presumably rugged design
-Small memory size
Well that sums up what I recall are the market players today. I deliberately left LS-120 disks and old SyQuest drives out because they seem quite dead today.
The main problem with all of these are relatively high cost of media and quite limited supply at normal shops (except Zip-disks). I Would prefer the ORB-drives as they have a good prise/performance and prise/capacity ratio. My only gripe about them is the ruggedness of its design - does it last hard use like in public access settings?
++ Raymond
Which one would you pick if you had the choise of taking a Palm Pilot with the 33MHz Dragonball in it or the same machine with a 500MHz Crusoe in it for the same CPU power consumption? I'd bet that Crusoe will out-perform any PDA cpu anytime with the same power consuption.
The products Crusoe is really ment for are entirely different from traditional laptops. The Crusoe chip is technically near ideal for WebPAD and PDA-like machines that do not need excessive amounts of computing power, but more like reasonable amounts of it with as low power consumption as possible.
The equipment Crusoe is ideal for is, say a WebPad which has enough of CPU power to play MP3's & MPEG2 (DVD) and perhaps runs a web browser & an office suite at the same time and is using solid state memory for storage, it's housed in an A4 size enclosure with an 13" 16:9 TFT screen and accesses the Net via WLAN.
Here we can see the scenario where the power saving features of Crusoe (and the rest of the design naturally has to support similar unified power saving features) can make a big difference.
In equipment like this the difference of operating 3 hours / battery or operating 8 hour / battery makes all the difference. I'd kill if my Toshiba Tecra laptop would stay alive on one battery more than 2h45m. Say 8-12h ago would be sweet indeed.
Raymond
What I see most important in the short term is the complete lack of a standard installer (the likes of InstallShield) and a standard GUI for it in X and curses.
1. It should be a binary installed on the local system and so separated from the packages it will be installing. (for security reasons as stated elsewhere in this thread)
2. All packages should be digitally signed and this signature has to be validated before installation can commence. (be vary about M$ signatures ;-) Distribution maintainers should include trusted signer's keys in the distribution for convenience.
3. Within the installation GUI it should be possible to get a clear view of what-goes-where in terms of files contained in the package
3.1 For this sort of a major installation system overhaul to become reality there must be very good tools to create these new packages and utilies for converting existing .rpm/.dep/.tgz packages to whatever this new system will be.
4. Also installation paths should be configurable and there should be a button for checking and updating the system path setup if needed -automatically. Also post copying/installation configuration should be available through the same GUI, so that one is able to install and configure software easily through a "wizard" in the beginning and then get down to 'vi' if tweaking is needed at a later time.
5. The installer should have a decent help on LSB directory meanings and a FAQ of known best practices of software installation. (I use /opt for just about everything)
6. The packaging format should be something like the .tgz package format *BSD's ports collection with automake/autoconf Makefiles for dependency checking and a way of automatically fullfilling these dependencies if needed á la the ports collection (It really works wonders - it is something we should adapt from our *BSD kinders)
6.1 The packaging format should also support source compilation i.e. instead of being an "only binary" package the SW could be distributed in source form and the installation system will give the local machine optimisation flags to the Makefiles of the package to be compiled. Flag override should be also available in the package if the SW is known to malfunction with some optimisation flags i.e. it's not SMP safe or breaks with high optimisation parameters.
6.2 There should also be a proper uninstall scripting in the installer and another handy feature would be the possibility of making an orphan check in the installer i.e. when a software is uninstalled no shared libraries should be removed (this semantics will leave orphaned libs hanging arround, but retain other SW operational if it hasn't been registered with the package system as using this library) Now with orphan detection root has direct control over what libs are to be removed as surplus and if something then breaks he will be able to reinstall what ever he just removed, instead of being left guessing what essential part was removed with software package ZYX.
7. A new binary fileformat of the .jar like would be helpfull if one strives to minimize the directory count of the box, but at the same time it compromises control of individual files in a given software (think icons in KDE as part of a kde2.package - how can those be updated easily and conveniently?) Perhaps some kind of a hybrid system with a hierarhy of
/opt/kde2/kde2.package /opt/kde2/conf/(config files) /opt/kde2/icons/(icon files)
say
and
and
8. At the same time we should try to rationalise the current confusing directory hierarchy system of /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /usr/share/bin, etc. as this becomes entirely uncontrollable after a while of mixing packages and/or source compilations from various sources on any given system.
Nowadays it is complicated to get a grasp of what's installed on a system just after installation if using something like RH/Mandrake that stick every SW beneath the sun and their friends in a default installation. (even with the minimum/expert installation =(
Hopefully someone with enough programming expertise to actually do something about these suggestions sees this post and finds some of it rational enough to try to implement a system like this on Linux/BSD.
I'm looking forward to see the day it works,
++ Raymond
Already last year some major construction companies here in Finland announced, that all new houses they build will be fitted with permanent Internet connections to every flat.
As in the philosophy of taking the fiber to the cornerstone, the telcos are more than eager to offer their fiber & ISP-services to these new houses as a way of getting new customers easily and also getting an imago boost by beeing "on the bleeding edge" of the Internet society.
As a sidenote, all the Helsinki area student appartments are to be wired also, afterwards.
My 2c =)
Well, doing batch-updating in the middle of the night sure is convenient IF you are not charged 5 cents/minute for connection time as it happens to be in most European countries (as far as I know, living in Finland). And of course there is the ISP's charge on top of that ranging from $10/month/no bandwidth cost on top of that to the other end of ISP-service of charging 20 cents/MiB + local call charges of 5 cents/minute.
So with a connection cost structure like this it is not quite cost-effective to do any large updates with modems of upto max 56kbps(usually 33.6kbps or slower). With ISDN (2x64kbps) the connection time can be reduces, but *supprise* the telcos also bill double for using two channels and a double basic monthly rate on top of that.
Some years ago the students of the Helsinki University of Technology (teekkarit) did this "hack" of buying a single park bench from the City of Helsinki and subsequently carrying it arround Helsinki on 1st May evening among the festivities.
They were stopped multiple times by the police, but every time they showed the receipt for owning the bench and eventually the police circulated the information of the "prank" the students of HUT are doing by carrying their own bench arround the town.
Now this radio broadcast was monitored by the students and right after it a crowd of them was assembled and every bench in Helsinki's parks were carried away into a giant pile in the middle of the central park of Helsinki.
Correct me if I messed some detail up, as I wasn't there at the time.
Well, sorry to shatter your illusion about Finland's backwaterness in information tech. As it was noted in the article we have an GSM (digital mobile phone) penetration of over 65% overall population and what this means is that most people under the age 65 has one or more mobile terminals at their disposal. Also internet access in more common here than anywhere else (excluding the US nowadays). Virtually most of our banking has been availabel/used via the net/BBS's for atleast 5 years for the people and for tens of years for corporate customers. E-commerce has been slow to come up in our market, but that has changed in the past 5-10 months quite radically. These "internet kiosks" are beeing deployed at the moment for the benefit of people, who can't afford to buy their own computers & leased lines and other people who just don't want to buy ones. most of these booths are built as public services and they cost either nothing or an token amount money e.g. 25 FIM = roughly $5 = one pint of real beer =). It's this public deployment that brings these new things into our society so that one day when I happen to need instant internet access on the bus from Helsinki to Espoo (next city 5 miles away) I'll just grab my cellphone/terminal (e.g. Nokia Communicator at the moment - WAP terminals in the near future (we have an WAP-network active we're just short of terminal equipment) - and someting else like UMTS-based multimedia phone/PDA's in 2002/3) and get cracking. It's not just Helsinki which is wired but more of the idea of the whole country beeing wired with wiredless access. I can use my cellphone just as well at home in Espoo as in the wilderness at my summer cottage out some 500km in the middle of nowhere. And what's more important I have access for the entire country with just one tehnology & operator -> no need for having different operator at different sides of the country as you have in the US. This was the way you got your CC's in the first place - there was a need in the corporate world for them, so the telco's made it happen 10 years ago. Then you came along 5 years later and CC's seemed to have existed forever. I'm not saying Finland is great in every instance, but we do have our good points from time to time. I do acknowledge that the US is by far the leader in computer technology in general, but you have the needed population on your home market to support companies as large as IBM, Intel and Compaq, where Finland with a mere 5 Million inhabitants can't support this size companies here. This is the reason finnish start-up's have to begin with a great idea and usually build the damn thing on their own before they can even think of getting any venture capital out of our over cautios banks & investors. And then they have to get themselves some fame and sales in Finland and before they even break even they have to engage in the horribly costly international markets to grow. There are very few success stories about finnish companies growing to international sizes, but some like Nokia, Datafellows (SSH, F-Prot Antivirus) and Okmetik (something like 20% of the worlds silicon circuits are refined here) have been able to do it. All these begun with an niché product that could be merketed overseas and eventually they grew to their current size. There is potential here in knowhow, but our culture seems to be of one that dislikes taking risks - both people and financial institutions. Another point is also the economical situation here - it was quite bad for a few years, but we've seen great growth for the past couple of years and atleast in the south of Finland the recession of our market can't be seen anymore. FYI: I recall, that we preceed the global recession wave by some 1-3 years all the time as our economy differs from Europes and the US's in some major ways I don't know much about. It's actually quite funny to see these negative reactions to articles about foreign accomplishments and the simple acceptance of hi-tech things beeing introduced as US findings and services as facts.