So the TacBSR and WanderPod are actual implementations of a lot of the early ARPAnet diagrams, which showed all sorts of equipment (including trucks, tanks, and jet fighters) talking wirelessly as they move across the landscape.
And, as back in the 1960s and 70s, the government and military are actually implementing it, while the corporate world continues to drag its feet -- "locking" equipment so it can only talk to one vendor, blocking VoIP, etc.
I wonder how many decades it'll take before we civilians will be permitted access to a wireless network that our own equipment can use, no matter who we bought it from?
So China and other governments block access to wikipedia and other such sites. With the growing importance of information, and the rapid migration of most of the world's information (and most of its foolishness;-) onto the Internet, what those governments are doing is shooting their own economies in the feet.
It's all the better for those of us who (still) have uncensored access to the Net. People who are kept ignorant can't compete with us effectively.
Actually, I had an interesting case of this some years back, here in the US. I was working on a project (an SNMP agent) for a company that was subcontracting on a government project. Due to the "security" concerns, they wouldn't allow us to use the Internet from work. In my case, there was a very useful free test suite available online. But I wasn't permitted to download it or use it. The management was especially fearful of "free" software.
So when the first versions were delivered to customers, they all immediately fed it to the public test suite - and it failed miserably. Oops! Funny thing was, even this didn't convince them that I should download the test suite and use it. They eventually lost the entire contract, in great part due to failures just like this. But by then, I'd found another job.
Similar fates await anyone who is denied access to information for political reasons. I feel sorry for them, but so far it's (mostly) to my advantage. I've learned to avoid American employers that impose such limits on their own people.
Pirate Office or suffer the minor inconviences of OO.o [...] almost nobody who pirates is a heavy user most would find OO.o more than adequate for their needs
I have at least one case where this is not true. My wife is working on her masters thesis. OO.o is simply not compatible enough with MS office to be usable.
Maybe what you should do is take this situation to her department head and the school's administration. What they're doing by imposing a requirement that students pay for a particular vendor's software, and this is obviously a burden on the less-wealthy students. Maybe you could find a few other poor students at the school to join in and complain about this unnecessary extra expense.
This sort of thing is what has helped convince a lot of government agencies to switch to "open" document standards. Lots of governments currently provide documents only in MS Word format, making them unreadable by people who can't afford Microsoft Office software (and are unwilling to break the law by using a pirated copy). It also incidentally tends to make the documents unreadable by the government agency a decade later, but that's something that they're only starting to stumble across.
For a government or educational organization to put stumbling blocks like this in the way of poorer people is rather shameful. For them to impose a requirement that benefits just one big corporation is especially shameful. People shouldn't be meekly going along with such impositions; they should be objecting.
Maybe you could suggest that, if a department requires a proprietary format, the department should be required to buy the necessary software for their students. That might get them thinking about what they're doing.
Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner.
Nah; programming is easy. It's only hard for those geeks that insist that the code should work right. Most people aren't geeks, and hold contempt for the things that geeks value, such as precision. If you don't care about precision, programming is one of the easiest things in the world.
No, it doesn't make sense. How can make sense having a defined quota, but being bullied away if I'm using it?
It makes perfect sense, and there's even a legal term for it: "consumer fraud".
Of course, delivering something other than what the customer paid for is really only fraud if there's a danger of being convicted. At present, at least in the US, there's little danger that an ISP will be prosecuted for fraud if they get a customer to agree to a contract and then don't deliver what the contract specifies. Instead of "fraud", that's called "business as usual". Almost any company that thinks they can get away with it will do it.
Free / open source software is a completely voluntary system, not mandated by any government. That is one of the major reasons it works so well. It is not socialism nor communism.
Quite the contrary, it is Communism in its true form. The original idea was for a grassroots socialist system,...
Hmmm... This doesn't match much of anything I've ever read about the origins of the idea. A much better political label would be "libertarian".
Thus, rms's explanation of his motives for pushing the "free software" idea was his frustration at not being able to get at the inner workings of some software and add features that he needed.
Similarly, both Andrew Tanenbaum (minix) and Linus Torvalds (linux) described their motives as wanting an OS that they (and students) could experiment with at will, without restrictions imposed by any organization.
These are all cases of "I want to do the job myself, without interference by others". This is not at all socialism or communism; it's rugged indiividualism.
Part of the confusion here is that so few people under stand how individualism in reality leads not so much vicious competition, but rather cooperation with others who have similar wants and needs. This doesn't fit well with any of the popular political labels. The closest is probably libertarianism, but of course that's such a complex theory that it doesn't seem to match the free/open software movement too well.
Maybe the problem is that none of our political labels acknowledge the possibility of people cooperating voluntarily, without some powerful force imposing the cooperation. But that's what seems to be happening.
Indeed. One example I discovered soon after installing it: The Daily Show's web site at comedycentral.com is pretty much unusable on any computer I've tried it on. The main reason is the flock of flash ads that compete with the video clip. Somehow, they've arranged things so that the ads have priority over the video, meaning that the video often can't run at all. Flashblock lets you select only the video clip, and the ads are blank, so the video clip runs normally.
There are a number of other web sites like this, that supply flash ads that compete with their actual content, often slowing it down to unusability. Killing the flash ads makes these sites usable.
I heard a rumor that someone was working on a plugin that would save a video (or audio?) file to disk. I wonder if it's possible yet? I've seen some horrible kludges to do the job, mostly things that work on only a few sites and fail with others. A general tool saying "Write this one to this disk file" would be really useful at times, if you want to watch/hear something more than once (or wait until it's fully downloaded before viewing it so as to avoid those long pauses when the net's congested).
Law enforcement was trying to overstep their authority in the name of anti-terrorism, but the oversight in place caught on and the FBI got nailed.
This is exactly how our system is supposed to work. This is good news.
It can only be considered to work if the perps are punished for their actions.
It's more likely that a few "tsk, tsk" words will be spoken, and the issue will be quietly tabled. The incident will become a topic in various histories, but will otherwise have no impact.
Anybody who thinks the FBI adheres to ANY form of "rule of law" is living in a dream world.... need to look back at the 1960's...
Or even better, look back to the 1920's, and the founding of the FBI. A good start is to google for "Palmer raids", for an explanation of how and why the FBI came into existence.
The FBI started as a political agency, and it has remained one throughout its history. The idea that it's a law-enforcement investigative agency comes mostly from Hollywood.
The fun thing is that none of this is hidden. People who read actual history rather than watch TV and movies tend to be quite aware of this history. But there's no need to hide it from the general population, since most Americans don't read any history at all.
Well, we seem to have a moderator without a sense of humor. My wise-ass comment about my relatives got a flamebait moderation. Ya never know around here...
Maybe we could save some of that money spent on establishing military control of nations on the other side of the globe and use it to fund our educational system.
But then where would we get our next generation of soldiers?
Heh. All very funny. But wouldn't it be fun if we pushed this as a new meme? Imagine if everyone being tortured by the "need" to use Web 2.0 stuff were to start telling their bosses variants of "Well, Web 2.0 is a good idea, but you know it won't really work well until we upgrade to IPv6 (or Internet 2 if you prefer)". People who insist on Web 2.0 stuff without properly studying it first are highly likely to accept such a claim without giving it any study, either.
This would have two benefits: It gives you (the developer) a permanent excuse for why your Web 2.0 stuff doesn't work worth a damn. It's because it's running on that inferior IPv4 junk, y'know. And it puts subtle (if bogus) pressure on your employers to start the IPv6 migration.
And by the time they figure out they've been duped, you (and the current project) will be long gone. Actually, if they fell for your argument (or Web 2.0), they probably never will realize that they've been duped.
So everyone remember the mantra: Web 2.0 won't really work without IPv6. Sneak it in at meetings and discussions with management at every opportunity.
I don't think that anyone is realistically advocating free internet service for anyone. If they are, then I'll join you in calling them a bunch of twits.
You're responding to a common rhetorical technique called a Strawman argument. It basically consists of attacking an extreme or distorted misrepresentation of your opponent's views. It's a standard part of most political arguments. It's useful to know that there's a traditional name for it, so you can recognize it when you see it.
Few people are suggesting municipal wi-fi that's totally free (in the "without cost" sense), and the municipalities that have it also generally charge a low subscription fee.
It's really not materially different from other public utilities such as roads, water, sewage, etc. Of course, the extreme privateers would have those also privatized, but few people with any knowledge of history take such suggestions seriously.
The past couple decades of corporate bumbling with the internet, cell phones, and that vast wasteland that's cable television are starting to convince a lot of us that the only way to get it done right is to force governments to do it. The corporations have had an open playing field for a while now, and we can see what a good job they've done of it. So it's not surprising that people are considering alternatives that might actually work.
Not that we expect any government to do a good job, either. But if they can do as good a job as they do with roads and sewage, that'll probably be good enough for the internet. We'll just have to call the fibre links "tubes" to get the politicians to sign on.
Yeah, but how reliable is that reliability study? I mean, c'mon, news.com.com? Their domain name doesn't even make sense, and we're supposed to trust their data?
Interesting comment, considering that you posted it on a site called "slashdot.org".;-)
Well, yeah, but that's after the bill has passed. Before the vote, such things are supposed to be difficult to find, so that no public opposition arises.
And they don't always brag about such things publicly. The recipients who've paid for them know about them, and that's what's important to keep the funding flowing.
I'm curious about this, too. I have a server and workstation running a somewhat oldish RH, and I'm considering upgrading. However, I'm getting to more and more need good UTF-8 support, for a number of multi-language projects. I'm trying to figure out which release does this best. It seems that, given the emphasis on supplying the "rest of the world" with linux, ubuntu might be a better way to go than RH. But I've been having difficulties getting really good information on the topic.
Anyone with useful information on this topic? If I want random files to be in arbitrary languages, and I also want the file names to be in those languages, what distros should I be looking at, and why?
Is there some good reading on this somewhere? If so, I haven't been able to guess the right google keywords to find it.
That would make "earmarks" and "pork" very difficult to insert in bills without leaving evidence of who did it. Congress would never allow such things to be audited.
FreeBSD is for hippies and Linux is for commies. It's a subtle distinction, I know.;-)
And Macs are like "Hey, our stuff is so much more stylish that those other systems." That's why they tell us that Macs are for gays, I guess.
Lessee; I'm typing this on a Mac laptop. On my desktop are the display/kb/mouse attached to my linux box. On its screen are some windows ssh'd to a remote FreeBSD system that I use for part of my development and portability testing, and as a mirror for my web site.
I guess this all must make me a gay, communist hippie.
Please don't tell my wife or employer (or George Bush)...
Actually it's nobody's oil when it's sitting uselessly underground. It doesn't belong to some Arab simply by virtue of the fact that he was born nearby. It belongs to whoever produces it from the "raw materials" of its current state.
Well, history would imply rather that oil belongs to whoever has the might to claim it, pump it out of the ground, and ship it home (or wherever they may own refineries). But you're right; it hardly ever seems to belong to the people with the misfortune to live on the ground above it.
Is it not Dell's right to remove anything that they feel is negative coverage on their own website?
Yes, of course they have the right to suppress whatever they want on their own stuff. In fact, we should expect this from most organizations run by humans.
But many of us would really like to know when this is happening. It tells us a lot about the trustworthiness of their information. If an organization (corporation, government, whatever) wants our trust, they should make their information handling "transparent" and visible to us. Otherwise, we'll just infer that they have something to hide from us.
Nobody with a grain of sense ever trusts any organization that hides or suppresses information about their inner workings. (And yes, this does mean that I don't trust very many organizations. We have words for someone who does. Words like "naïve" and "sucker".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Lbh zrna 'rot13.com', evtug?
... I tried that site, but got "unknown host ebg13.pbz".
Hmmm
What am I doing wrong?
So the TacBSR and WanderPod are actual implementations of a lot of the early ARPAnet diagrams, which showed all sorts of equipment (including trucks, tanks, and jet fighters) talking wirelessly as they move across the landscape.
And, as back in the 1960s and 70s, the government and military are actually implementing it, while the corporate world continues to drag its feet -- "locking" equipment so it can only talk to one vendor, blocking VoIP, etc.
I wonder how many decades it'll take before we civilians will be permitted access to a wireless network that our own equipment can use, no matter who we bought it from?
So China and other governments block access to wikipedia and other such sites. With the growing importance of information, and the rapid migration of most of the world's information (and most of its foolishness ;-) onto the Internet, what those governments are doing is shooting their own economies in the feet.
It's all the better for those of us who (still) have uncensored access to the Net. People who are kept ignorant can't compete with us effectively.
Actually, I had an interesting case of this some years back, here in the US. I was working on a project (an SNMP agent) for a company that was subcontracting on a government project. Due to the "security" concerns, they wouldn't allow us to use the Internet from work. In my case, there was a very useful free test suite available online. But I wasn't permitted to download it or use it. The management was especially fearful of "free" software.
So when the first versions were delivered to customers, they all immediately fed it to the public test suite - and it failed miserably. Oops! Funny thing was, even this didn't convince them that I should download the test suite and use it. They eventually lost the entire contract, in great part due to failures just like this. But by then, I'd found another job.
Similar fates await anyone who is denied access to information for political reasons. I feel sorry for them, but so far it's (mostly) to my advantage. I've learned to avoid American employers that impose such limits on their own people.
Pirate Office or suffer the minor inconviences of OO.o [...] almost nobody who pirates is a heavy user most would find OO.o more than adequate for their needs
I have at least one case where this is not true.
My wife is working on her masters thesis. OO.o is simply not compatible enough with MS office to be usable.
Maybe what you should do is take this situation to her department head and the school's administration. What they're doing by imposing a requirement that students pay for a particular vendor's software, and this is obviously a burden on the less-wealthy students. Maybe you could find a few other poor students at the school to join in and complain about this unnecessary extra expense.
This sort of thing is what has helped convince a lot of government agencies to switch to "open" document standards. Lots of governments currently provide documents only in MS Word format, making them unreadable by people who can't afford Microsoft Office software (and are unwilling to break the law by using a pirated copy). It also incidentally tends to make the documents unreadable by the government agency a decade later, but that's something that they're only starting to stumble across.
For a government or educational organization to put stumbling blocks like this in the way of poorer people is rather shameful. For them to impose a requirement that benefits just one big corporation is especially shameful. People shouldn't be meekly going along with such impositions; they should be objecting.
Maybe you could suggest that, if a department requires a proprietary format, the department should be required to buy the necessary software for their students. That might get them thinking about what they're doing.
Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner.
Nah; programming is easy. It's only hard for those geeks that insist that the code should work right. Most people aren't geeks, and hold contempt for the things that geeks value, such as precision. If you don't care about precision, programming is one of the easiest things in the world.
No, it doesn't make sense. How can make sense having a defined quota, but being bullied away if I'm using it?
It makes perfect sense, and there's even a legal term for it: "consumer fraud".
Of course, delivering something other than what the customer paid for is really only fraud if there's a danger of being convicted. At present, at least in the US, there's little danger that an ISP will be prosecuted for fraud if they get a customer to agree to a contract and then don't deliver what the contract specifies. Instead of "fraud", that's called "business as usual". Almost any company that thinks they can get away with it will do it.
Free / open source software is a completely voluntary system, not mandated by any government. That is one of the major reasons it works so well. It is not socialism nor communism.
...
... This doesn't match much of anything I've ever read about the origins of the idea. A much better political label would be "libertarian".
Quite the contrary, it is Communism in its true form. The original idea was for a grassroots socialist system,
Hmmm
Thus, rms's explanation of his motives for pushing the "free software" idea was his frustration at not being able to get at the inner workings of some software and add features that he needed.
Similarly, both Andrew Tanenbaum (minix) and Linus Torvalds (linux) described their motives as wanting an OS that they (and students) could experiment with at will, without restrictions imposed by any organization.
These are all cases of "I want to do the job myself, without interference by others". This is not at all socialism or communism; it's rugged indiividualism.
Part of the confusion here is that so few people under stand how individualism in reality leads not so much vicious competition, but rather cooperation with others who have similar wants and needs. This doesn't fit well with any of the popular political labels. The closest is probably libertarianism, but of course that's such a complex theory that it doesn't seem to match the free/open software movement too well.
Maybe the problem is that none of our political labels acknowledge the possibility of people cooperating voluntarily, without some powerful force imposing the cooperation. But that's what seems to be happening.
Flashblock makes sites browsable again.
Indeed. One example I discovered soon after installing it: The Daily Show's web site at comedycentral.com is pretty much unusable on any computer I've tried it on. The main reason is the flock of flash ads that compete with the video clip. Somehow, they've arranged things so that the ads have priority over the video, meaning that the video often can't run at all. Flashblock lets you select only the video clip, and the ads are blank, so the video clip runs normally.
There are a number of other web sites like this, that supply flash ads that compete with their actual content, often slowing it down to unusability. Killing the flash ads makes these sites usable.
I heard a rumor that someone was working on a plugin that would save a video (or audio?) file to disk. I wonder if it's possible yet? I've seen some horrible kludges to do the job, mostly things that work on only a few sites and fail with others. A general tool saying "Write this one to this disk file" would be really useful at times, if you want to watch/hear something more than once (or wait until it's fully downloaded before viewing it so as to avoid those long pauses when the net's congested).
Law enforcement was trying to overstep their authority in the name of anti-terrorism, but the oversight in place caught on and the FBI got nailed.
This is exactly how our system is supposed to work. This is good news.
It can only be considered to work if the perps are punished for their actions.
It's more likely that a few "tsk, tsk" words will be spoken, and the issue will be quietly tabled. The incident will become a topic in various histories, but will otherwise have no impact.
Anybody who thinks the FBI adheres to ANY form of "rule of law" is living in a dream world. ... need to look back at the 1960's ...
Or even better, look back to the 1920's, and the founding of the FBI. A good start is to google for "Palmer raids", for an explanation of how and why the FBI came into existence.
The FBI started as a political agency, and it has remained one throughout its history. The idea that it's a law-enforcement investigative agency comes mostly from Hollywood.
The fun thing is that none of this is hidden. People who read actual history rather than watch TV and movies tend to be quite aware of this history. But there's no need to hide it from the general population, since most Americans don't read any history at all.
Well, we seem to have a moderator without a sense of humor. My wise-ass comment about my relatives got a flamebait moderation. Ya never know around here ...
Maybe we could save some of that money spent on establishing military control of nations on the other side of the globe and use it to fund our educational system.
But then where would we get our next generation of soldiers?
Hey, I have relatives who are morons, and they live in Arizona. Not all morons are from Utah.
(And they use the same bit of word play themselves. They even laugh at it, which I consider proof.)
Heh. All very funny. But wouldn't it be fun if we pushed this as a new meme? Imagine if everyone being tortured by the "need" to use Web 2.0 stuff were to start telling their bosses variants of "Well, Web 2.0 is a good idea, but you know it won't really work well until we upgrade to IPv6 (or Internet 2 if you prefer)". People who insist on Web 2.0 stuff without properly studying it first are highly likely to accept such a claim without giving it any study, either.
This would have two benefits: It gives you (the developer) a permanent excuse for why your Web 2.0 stuff doesn't work worth a damn. It's because it's running on that inferior IPv4 junk, y'know. And it puts subtle (if bogus) pressure on your employers to start the IPv6 migration.
And by the time they figure out they've been duped, you (and the current project) will be long gone. Actually, if they fell for your argument (or Web 2.0), they probably never will realize that they've been duped.
So everyone remember the mantra: Web 2.0 won't really work without IPv6. Sneak it in at meetings and discussions with management at every opportunity.
I don't think that anyone is realistically advocating free internet service for anyone. If they are, then I'll join you in calling them a bunch of twits.
You're responding to a common rhetorical technique called a Strawman argument. It basically consists of attacking an extreme or distorted misrepresentation of your opponent's views. It's a standard part of most political arguments. It's useful to know that there's a traditional name for it, so you can recognize it when you see it.
Few people are suggesting municipal wi-fi that's totally free (in the "without cost" sense), and the municipalities that have it also generally charge a low subscription fee.
It's really not materially different from other public utilities such as roads, water, sewage, etc. Of course, the extreme privateers would have those also privatized, but few people with any knowledge of history take such suggestions seriously.
The past couple decades of corporate bumbling with the internet, cell phones, and that vast wasteland that's cable television are starting to convince a lot of us that the only way to get it done right is to force governments to do it. The corporations have had an open playing field for a while now, and we can see what a good job they've done of it. So it's not surprising that people are considering alternatives that might actually work.
Not that we expect any government to do a good job, either. But if they can do as good a job as they do with roads and sewage, that'll probably be good enough for the internet. We'll just have to call the fibre links "tubes" to get the politicians to sign on.
Yeah, but how reliable is that reliability study? I mean, c'mon, news.com.com? Their domain name doesn't even make sense, and we're supposed to trust their data?
;-)
Interesting comment, considering that you posted it on a site called "slashdot.org".
Well, yeah, but that's after the bill has passed. Before the vote, such things are supposed to be difficult to find, so that no public opposition arises.
And they don't always brag about such things publicly. The recipients who've paid for them know about them, and that's what's important to keep the funding flowing.
I'm curious about this, too. I have a server and workstation running a somewhat oldish RH, and I'm considering upgrading. However, I'm getting to more and more need good UTF-8 support, for a number of multi-language projects. I'm trying to figure out which release does this best. It seems that, given the emphasis on supplying the "rest of the world" with linux, ubuntu might be a better way to go than RH. But I've been having difficulties getting really good information on the topic.
Anyone with useful information on this topic? If I want random files to be in arbitrary languages, and I also want the file names to be in those languages, what distros should I be looking at, and why?
Is there some good reading on this somewhere? If so, I haven't been able to guess the right google keywords to find it.
That would make "earmarks" and "pork" very difficult to insert in bills without leaving evidence of who did it. Congress would never allow such things to be audited.
It will start 10 minutes after the clouds arrive.
Here in the Boston area, the clouds arrived 15 to 20 minutes before the eclipse.
Damn!
FreeBSD is for hippies and Linux is for commies. It's a subtle distinction, I know. ;-)
...
And Macs are like "Hey, our stuff is so much more stylish that those other systems." That's why they tell us that Macs are for gays, I guess.
Lessee; I'm typing this on a Mac laptop. On my desktop are the display/kb/mouse attached to my linux box. On its screen are some windows ssh'd to a remote FreeBSD system that I use for part of my development and portability testing, and as a mirror for my web site.
I guess this all must make me a gay, communist hippie.
Please don't tell my wife or employer (or George Bush)
... if you keep fighting, eventually justice can work for "the little guy."
Well, maybe, but what I always find interesting in cases like this is: How much money did it cost?
All too often, when the "little guy" wins, he's also bankrupt.
Anyone know what the bill was for all this legal action?
Actually it's nobody's oil when it's sitting uselessly underground. It doesn't belong to some Arab simply by virtue of the fact that he was born nearby. It belongs to whoever produces it from the "raw materials" of its current state.
Well, history would imply rather that oil belongs to whoever has the might to claim it, pump it out of the ground, and ship it home (or wherever they may own refineries). But you're right; it hardly ever seems to belong to the people with the misfortune to live on the ground above it.
The red juice from a steak is not blood.
Uh, yeah it is. What the hell do you think it is?
Probably the red dye that a lot of supermarkets add to meat to make it look fresh.
Is it not Dell's right to remove anything that they feel is negative coverage on their own website?
;-)
Yes, of course they have the right to suppress whatever they want on their own stuff. In fact, we should expect this from most organizations run by humans.
But many of us would really like to know when this is happening. It tells us a lot about the trustworthiness of their information. If an organization (corporation, government, whatever) wants our trust, they should make their information handling "transparent" and visible to us. Otherwise, we'll just infer that they have something to hide from us.
Nobody with a grain of sense ever trusts any organization that hides or suppresses information about their inner workings. (And yes, this does mean that I don't trust very many organizations. We have words for someone who does. Words like "naïve" and "sucker".