as i clicked on the/. link to http://blogs.msdn.com/ this is what i got in return:
.Text - Application Error! Details SqlException Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
on "All Software Should be Free" neil gets it wrong because he confuses Open Source with Free Software. Only Free Software, as embodied in the GPL and the goals of the FSF, have a political goal of insisting that all software should be free for the common good. a majority of the other open source licenses do not make this assertion. Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software.
Open Source has always been about choice, and in this regard, having a plethora of UIs and desktop environments to choose from is excellent. however, the problem lies in that a lot of work is duplicated between gnome (goneME??) and kde. perhaps, and is this too much to hope for, the projects could converge on a unified API of sorts which would make things a whole lot easier. free and open source software needs to be seen as meeting the needs of Joe Q. User before it can become dominant on the desktop.
Malaysia only has ADSL as broadband, we don't have any legacy cable infraastructure to deliver anything on. the dominant provider is the incumbent former PTT and they used to paint the town red with their pricing. last october however, the government got a clue, and forced the incumbent to lower prices for ADSL broadband to
US$18 for 384/128kbps US$23 for 512/128kbps US$179 for 2Mbps/128kbps
the other smaller providers are slightly (10%) higher than the incumbent, but the incumbent by far leads in subscriber base. however, the problem here is not pricing, but the incumbent's inability to deploy the service. some are on waiting lists for over 3 months, and some places, due to the fibre infrastructure, cannot get DSL.
i shouldn't be replying to an obvious troll, but i think your grasp of world leaders is truly out of whack. you seem to be mistaking the current prime minister for someone else. he's definitely not extermist religious. google for mahathir mohamad if you will.
I asked myself, why this fervent clutch on free, open, uncompiled software? I mean do you make your own clothes? Obviously, no matter where you shop, it's much cheaper to make your own clothes (excluding your time, which open source doesn't take into account anyway), so who here makes their own clothes? I certainly don't. Who here built their own car? Cars are definitely closed. It would definitely be cheaper to build your own, because labor is 60% of a car, remove marketing, factory costs, overhead, you could build probably a nice car for a few thousand dollars. Has anyone constructed their own car? We, as a society, accept closed source in 99.999 percent of our lives: drugs (the legal kind), mail, electricity, phone, highways, pornography (bad example).
Making a comparison betweencars and drugs with software isnt a correct. While i do agree that for clothes it has a certain parallel, cars and drugs require an investment in infrastructure and manufacturing (read: R&D for drugs) before moving on into production. While the costs of production are low enough that it does make economic sense to produce it yourself, it however does not make any sense when you factor in the cost of the logistics in setting up either a car assembly mechanism or a drug lab.
Software holds a slightly different model because the cost of development tools and the personal computers they run on are relatively cheap compared to the economic benefits derived from selling licenses or services based on the software.
and if you're looking at small/lightweight installations, like what the slashdot article was mentioning, you'd do good too check out PicoBSD. It's been used on 486 boxes with as low as 4MB RAM, though 8MB is recommended.
one of the better easter eggs, if you can call it that, which i've ever seen and which still brings a smile to my face lies on the tunefs man page of BSD-based unixen. it was there on the SunOS 4.x and it's there in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD the last time i checked.
the easter egg sits at the bottom of the man page, in the BUGS section.
Umm, so why not just pull down the latest nightly build for FreeBSD? [mozilla.org]
that's good advice. didnt know they did nightly builds for freebsd though. in fact, this is the only sensible answer to this thread, the rest being mindless flamebait which should be moderated as so.
sadly, they dont yet have a freebsd binary download, as they did for 0.9.6.
with something which changes so much, downloading binaries makes a lot more sense than building from source each time. would sure help in the beta-testing and bug-fix process. additionally, the binary tarballs are smaller than the source distros, so that saves on some internet traffic.
wonder if anyone in the freebsd community would do this soon for 0.9.7 ?
They sound like they have a good deal, and paying for CPU isnt too bad, considering that if it's just mail or simple CGIs, then CPU time is going to be minimal. I also like their pro-rated package, in that you could be paying as low as US$0.50/month if you're a light user.
However, requiring paypal for payment isnt the best way to go. Paypal doesnt recognize us folk here in Malaysia, and we're pretty much hosed with bsdwebhosting.com because of this. I for one would love to be their customer, but have no option for it.
Nevertheless, since they're dealing not with microtransactions, but with a prepaid model, I think they should abandon their concerns with credit cards and allow that mode of payment. It sure would help us folk down here.
although the NSA use Free software, the need for an expensive government audit prevents the government from saving money and improving security.
I find this statement terribly interesting. This implies that opensource software is more heavily auditted by the US government than closed source software.
Does anyone else find this ludicrous ?
One of the basic tenets of opensource software is that its bugs/vulnerabilities are presented for worldwide review. Any holes, trojans or vulnerabilities are caught faster and fixed almost immediately. Eric Raymond's find-fix-release cycle has been pretty much implemented in all active opensource projects. I find it interesting that the government, even if it is the NSA, is suspicious of opensource software, yet will trust the closed source products they buy. Isnt this placing your bets in the wrong basket ?
I wont got into the benefit of using opensource in detail, for it is bound to be flogged like a dead horse in the ensuing/. discussion below, but surely to suggest increased audit spending on opensource is FUD.
Additionally, it peeves me a little when everytime opensource is mentioned, the immediate line is drawn to Linux. I think the existence of other top notch operating systems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD should also play a role in government procurement. The mindshare which Linux has managed to garner in this space is eclipsing decision makers away from proper evaluation and just jumping on to the Linux bandwagon.
After all, one of the basic tenets of opensource is choice. We dont want the lack of choice we have replaced with another lack of choice in operating systems, Linux only.
Isnt that what Arnold/Terminator said in one of the movies ? Guess you didnt take him literally, huh ?
Either ways, it'd be interesting to see what the new improved Terminatrix sports as a feature. The last liquifying capability of the earlier Terminator sent back was way cool, and they need to surpass themselves here.
Also, with a name like Terminatrix, I'm expecting so see some parodies/spoof on indie movie sites on the Terminatrix/Dominatrix theme. Should be fun, eh ?
These shoshwhatevers are shockwave flash based, and clicking on the link provided by the/. article, only suceeded in popping up a bunch of more windows requesting me to download the flash player from macromedia.
Frankly, I have flash turned off in konqueror on FreeBSD, and hitting sites which make extensive use of flash would only guarantee that i never return again. If you can't create an ad which draws my attention and my interest with just the facts, then so long and thanks for all the fish.
I'm willing to bet that we'd start seeing initiatives within the opensource community to include filters within the opensource browsers (mozilla, konqueror) which automatically blocks 468x60 and 125x125 sized images, replacing them with either an interesting graphic or perhaps a random image from the user's disk. I'd much rather be looking at something I like over something which pops up and hits me right in the face, literally.
Without advertising, the truth is a lot of the free content we get will just not exist. This is a fact of the matter, and for this I tolerate banner ads over the page. However to take it one step further and thrust it into my nose is a little too much. Sites like these will hear the whooshing sound of my browser giving them the pass.
OK, maybe I wasnt clear, but I was expecting the usual disclaimers about 3rd party et al to already be there. But you're right in clarifying that this is important.
The way I read it, and IANAL, is that if you're not into editting the text of the posts but are displaying them verbatim, then you cannot be responsible for them. You're just a carrier of the message.
Filtering out whole posts based on some ranking (think/. moderation) is just as alright as it's a method of ranking entire posts and not within a particular post.
However, if you are in the habit of editting or posting snippets of postings, then you are exerting editorial control and perhaps are liable.
Usually, as long as the posting mechanism is automated without passing thru a human being, you can claim to being a common carrier. Newspapers and dead tree editions dont have this benefit as they pick and choose which stories they carry as they have limited print space. An online forum doesnt do this, and acccepts everything.
Once again, IANAL, so take all of this with a pinch of salt.
It's the scarcity of IP addresses (then) and the growth of the routing tables which forced the situation we are in today. You're not alone in New Zealand suffering from it, most of us in Asia outside of Japan are too.
These methods and models of doling out IP addresses leave some of our internet data centres hopelessly inadequate at providing something as trivial as fault-tolerant links thru two or more ISPs within the same country as each ISP would refuse to route blocks belonging to other ISPs.
However, I dont think that arguing the increased RAM capacities of routers being capable of storing the huge routing tables is the answer.
CIDR and its ilk was developed to partly address huge routing tables, but the key point it addresses is propogation of new route changes which need to be sent to more routers and thus generating more traffic instead of being confined to just the edge (in context) routers as used now.
If the propogation of new and changed routes could be addressed without generating additional traffic, and believe me when I say bandwidth isnt cheap in Asia, then I would agree with utilizing larger RAM in routers to store these tables.
Incidentally, I was a couple of minutes short of FP.:)
that is a very interesting experience. an idea such as this has surfaced in my mind, and i am not alone. wireless last mile providers are not new here in malaysia, and some of them are even using 802.11b.
my concern is keeping the costs down for the customer without having to subsidize his technology acquisition costs. as such, expecting the customer to buy a high-gain antenna is out of the question.
so, my actual query is if it would be possible for us to use a high-gain omni at our base stations, and have the customer use the stock antennas which come with the PCMCIA and PCI cards ?
your reply would greatly assist me. you could email me at the address listed above, by removing the anti-spam physicist's name.
though a native bsdmodem [sic] driver doesnt exist, the very kind mr watanabe kiyoshi has made a shim which allows the linux lucent lt linmodem drivers to work with freebsd.
been using it the past 6 months without any problems whatsoever. you could find it at the end of this link on daniel o'connor's website.
nevertheless, i echo the call for a bsd native software modem driver. there should be such an animal.
this project is an excellent proof of concept to people who would otherwise display incredulity that something like tempest is possible. well done to the author.
a better, and perhaps much awaited POC, would be to have the code read a given text file on the box, then with a text-to-speech convertor, convert it into speech and the flash the speech as a series of monitor images.
then walk by with an AM radio, and listen to the file being read to you. a demo of this capability would definitely freak out some people who routinely scoff at tempest-type initiatives as being too science fiction and undoable in the real world.
something as simple as this, downloadable over the net and requiring nothing more than an AM radio would prove that not only is government capable of doing it, but lil joe next door could be reading your emails without even breaking into your machine.
now, wouldn't that cause em to sit up and take notice.
Slashdot Mirror
The HiTB Security Conference in KL website is at http://conference.hackinthebox.org./ see you chaps in KL !
as i clicked on the
Details
SqlException
Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
hmm, oddly the HTML title and title bar both say "Benchmarks for HPUX". :)
see the link above at http://www.cisecurity.org/bench_freebsd.html
on "All Software Should be Free" neil gets it wrong because he confuses Open Source with Free Software. Only Free Software, as embodied in the GPL and the goals of the FSF, have a political goal of insisting that all software should be free for the common good. a majority of the other open source licenses do not make this assertion. Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software.
Open Source has always been about choice, and in this regard, having a plethora of UIs and desktop environments to choose from is excellent. however, the problem lies in that a lot of work is duplicated between gnome (goneME??) and kde. perhaps, and is this too much to hope for, the projects could converge on a unified API of sorts which would make things a whole lot easier. free and open source software needs to be seen as meeting the needs of Joe Q. User before it can become dominant on the desktop.
Malaysia only has ADSL as broadband, we don't have any legacy cable infraastructure to deliver anything on. the dominant provider is the incumbent former PTT and they used to paint the town red with their pricing. last october however, the government got a clue, and forced the incumbent to lower prices for ADSL broadband to
US$18 for 384/128kbps
US$23 for 512/128kbps
US$179 for 2Mbps/128kbps
the other smaller providers are slightly (10%) higher than the incumbent, but the incumbent by far leads in subscriber base. however, the problem here is not pricing, but the incumbent's inability to deploy the service. some are on waiting lists for over 3 months, and some places, due to the fibre infrastructure, cannot get DSL.
i shouldn't be replying to an obvious troll, but i think your grasp of world leaders is truly out of whack. you seem to be mistaking the current prime minister for someone else. he's definitely not extermist religious. google for mahathir mohamad if you will.
"How can any Malaysians have prior space exploration experience, if no Malaysian has ever gone to space?"
:)
welcome to the wonderful world of malaysian bureaucrat speak.
Making a comparison betweencars and drugs with software isnt a correct. While i do agree that for clothes it has a certain parallel, cars and drugs require an investment in infrastructure and manufacturing (read: R&D for drugs) before moving on into production. While the costs of production are low enough that it does make economic sense to produce it yourself, it however does not make any sense when you factor in the cost of the logistics in setting up either a car assembly mechanism or a drug lab.
Software holds a slightly different model because the cost of development tools and the personal computers they run on are relatively cheap compared to the economic benefits derived from selling licenses or services based on the software.
It probably would, but then most users pick the same password for all their sign ons anyways, so it ain't much different, no ?
and if you're looking at small/lightweight installations, like what the slashdot article was mentioning, you'd do good too check out PicoBSD. It's been used on 486 boxes with as low as 4MB RAM, though 8MB is recommended.
one of the better easter eggs, if you can call it that, which i've ever seen and which still brings a smile to my face lies on the tunefs man page of BSD-based unixen. it was there on the SunOS 4.x and it's there in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD the last time i checked.
the easter egg sits at the bottom of the man page, in the BUGS section.
that's good advice. didnt know they did nightly builds for freebsd though. in fact, this is the only sensible answer to this thread, the rest being mindless flamebait which should be moderated as so.
thanx.
with something which changes so much, downloading binaries makes a lot more sense than building from source each time. would sure help in the beta-testing and bug-fix process. additionally, the binary tarballs are smaller than the source distros, so that saves on some internet traffic.
wonder if anyone in the freebsd community would do this soon for 0.9.7 ?
However, requiring paypal for payment isnt the best way to go. Paypal doesnt recognize us folk here in Malaysia, and we're pretty much hosed with bsdwebhosting.com because of this. I for one would love to be their customer, but have no option for it.
Nevertheless, since they're dealing not with microtransactions, but with a prepaid model, I think they should abandon their concerns with credit cards and allow that mode of payment. It sure would help us folk down here.
I find this statement terribly interesting. This implies that opensource software is more heavily auditted by the US government than closed source software.
Does anyone else find this ludicrous ?
One of the basic tenets of opensource software is that its bugs/vulnerabilities are presented for worldwide review. Any holes, trojans or vulnerabilities are caught faster and fixed almost immediately. Eric Raymond's find-fix-release cycle has been pretty much implemented in all active opensource projects. I find it interesting that the government, even if it is the NSA, is suspicious of opensource software, yet will trust the closed source products they buy. Isnt this placing your bets in the wrong basket ?
I wont got into the benefit of using opensource in detail, for it is bound to be flogged like a dead horse in the ensuing /. discussion below, but surely to suggest increased audit spending on opensource is FUD.
Additionally, it peeves me a little when everytime opensource is mentioned, the immediate line is drawn to Linux. I think the existence of other top notch operating systems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD should also play a role in government procurement. The mindshare which Linux has managed to garner in this space is eclipsing decision makers away from proper evaluation and just jumping on to the Linux bandwagon.
After all, one of the basic tenets of opensource is choice. We dont want the lack of choice we have replaced with another lack of choice in operating systems, Linux only.
Either ways, it'd be interesting to see what the new improved Terminatrix sports as a feature. The last liquifying capability of the earlier Terminator sent back was way cool, and they need to surpass themselves here.
Also, with a name like Terminatrix, I'm expecting so see some parodies/spoof on indie movie sites on the Terminatrix/Dominatrix theme. Should be fun, eh ?
Frankly, I have flash turned off in konqueror on FreeBSD, and hitting sites which make extensive use of flash would only guarantee that i never return again. If you can't create an ad which draws my attention and my interest with just the facts, then so long and thanks for all the fish.
I'm willing to bet that we'd start seeing initiatives within the opensource community to include filters within the opensource browsers (mozilla, konqueror) which automatically blocks 468x60 and 125x125 sized images, replacing them with either an interesting graphic or perhaps a random image from the user's disk. I'd much rather be looking at something I like over something which pops up and hits me right in the face, literally.
Without advertising, the truth is a lot of the free content we get will just not exist. This is a fact of the matter, and for this I tolerate banner ads over the page. However to take it one step further and thrust it into my nose is a little too much. Sites like these will hear the whooshing sound of my browser giving them the pass.
OK, maybe I wasnt clear, but I was expecting the usual disclaimers about 3rd party et al to already be there. But you're right in clarifying that this is important.
Filtering out whole posts based on some ranking (think /. moderation) is just as alright as it's a method of ranking entire posts and not within a particular post.
However, if you are in the habit of editting or posting snippets of postings, then you are exerting editorial control and perhaps are liable.
Usually, as long as the posting mechanism is automated without passing thru a human being, you can claim to being a common carrier. Newspapers and dead tree editions dont have this benefit as they pick and choose which stories they carry as they have limited print space. An online forum doesnt do this, and acccepts everything.
Once again, IANAL, so take all of this with a pinch of salt.
Let the games begin !
These methods and models of doling out IP addresses leave some of our internet data centres hopelessly inadequate at providing something as trivial as fault-tolerant links thru two or more ISPs within the same country as each ISP would refuse to route blocks belonging to other ISPs.
However, I dont think that arguing the increased RAM capacities of routers being capable of storing the huge routing tables is the answer.
CIDR and its ilk was developed to partly address huge routing tables, but the key point it addresses is propogation of new route changes which need to be sent to more routers and thus generating more traffic instead of being confined to just the edge (in context) routers as used now.
If the propogation of new and changed routes could be addressed without generating additional traffic, and believe me when I say bandwidth isnt cheap in Asia, then I would agree with utilizing larger RAM in routers to store these tables.
Incidentally, I was a couple of minutes short of FP. :)
my concern is keeping the costs down for the customer without having to subsidize his technology acquisition costs. as such, expecting the customer to buy a high-gain antenna is out of the question.
so, my actual query is if it would be possible for us to use a high-gain omni at our base stations, and have the customer use the stock antennas which come with the PCMCIA and PCI cards ?
your reply would greatly assist me. you could email me at the address listed above, by removing the anti-spam physicist's name.
been using it the past 6 months without any problems whatsoever. you could find it at the end of this link on daniel o'connor's website.
nevertheless, i echo the call for a bsd native software modem driver. there should be such an animal.
a better, and perhaps much awaited POC, would be to have the code read a given text file on the box, then with a text-to-speech convertor, convert it into speech and the flash the speech as a series of monitor images.
then walk by with an AM radio, and listen to the file being read to you. a demo of this capability would definitely freak out some people who routinely scoff at tempest-type initiatives as being too science fiction and undoable in the real world.
something as simple as this, downloadable over the net and requiring nothing more than an AM radio would prove that not only is government capable of doing it, but lil joe next door could be reading your emails without even breaking into your machine.
now, wouldn't that cause em to sit up and take notice.