If you are in central london, there are *many* free points. Just walk down Oxford street, and you will find tons of open networks. There is a really good one outside Selfridges.
Edgware Road is the same. Ditto goes for the Kings Cross area.
The biggest problem you will encounter is how to use your laptop without getting soaked.
I have indeed. In fact, I have written a couple myself.
What I was alluding to was that 1. most people read slashdot for a digest of the news for geeks. 2. Most people want to respond/discuss the article before it moves off the front page 3. There is a history on these boards of people posting on the boards before actually reading the article. aka early worm ahem ahem early bird syndrome.
Now given the above, how many people would take the more than 10 minutes required to digest the very long interview before posting response.
Perfectly valid question if you ask me??
It really would make an interesting academic study. i. people would read short articles and then post ii. people will skim through longish articles and still post iii. people will not read extremely long articles and will not post.(only 54 posts a day later!)
With the everincreasing range of wireless, especially over the *free* spectrum, will we see the end of ip over telephony.
Taken to the extreme, if each 'neighbourhood' is running high speed ip over wireless, and is peering with its neighbours, then the world becomes a true web. Why connect via maBell and pay $$$ lots, when these local wireless networks grow and peer to a level where xx% of your ip traffic can be routed without ever going via the major backbone providers?
The music industry is really dumb. They shoot their foot one one hand and complain about it with another.
I think their biggest problem, is that they would like to control the entire industry from production to sales. Payola means they cede some of that control to the radio stations.
If they were really against payola, and appreciated that airplay is good, they would not be trying to shaft internet radio stations with ridiculous per song charges.
1. They know that they are unlikely to be able to dictate to Joe Indie what to play on his station, unless they are charging him silly money for the privilege of promoting their songs, and can use these exhorbitant fees as a bargaining tool.
2. With CC, they are finally faced with a bully as big as they are, who can tell them to pay up if they want their song played, or shut up and fsck off.
If the music was good, the whole issue would be moot. At the end of the day, its all about who controls what the public hear and subsequently buy (hard to buy something you haven't heard)
When they lose this control, they lose their ability to extort terms from musicians. In the past, Radio Dons (mafia style) would have been able to make or break a musician. Now Clear_C has that power.
If you are a musician, who do you sign your soul away to huh??
Its not only the phone-home capability of this software that's scary, its also the ability of any l337 h@x0r to compromise your system and discover scary shit about you.
And wait till the G starts to ask for records of what you have been up to on your computer.
To quote the release....
"The application is a service for tourists visiting the historic city of Bath (in the UK). It guides users around the city and towards major attractions. At the same time they are involved in a 'Treasure Hunt' answering questions related to historic sites, requiring users to visit them. Prizes can be won and sponsorhsip opportunities exist for businesses located on the trail."
If I recall correctly, the backend tying openACS to the SMS gateway has also been opensourced. Check it out.
This thread has quickly become a shameless plug for everyone and their dog who is involved with a CMS. Still, I will throw in my £0.02 worth.
Look at openACS. Its a fast evolving toolkit, with a lot of features out of the box. The current project website is not the best looking, but the toolkit has been used to develop a lot of interesting sites.
Methodology If I were you, I would stay away from the Vignettes and other off-the-shelf CMSs. To paraphrase Phil Greenspun, these guys pricing works along the lines of... shake the customer by his feet and see how much money falls out, then charge another $50 000k for support.
I would also not be in a rush to implement a totally custom solution. Building from scratch is usually a dumb idea(tm). No point in reinventing the wheel. Having said that there is a slight difference between a Michelin-clad Ferrari wheel and a 0BC Roman chariot's wheel...
I agree with you, do not go for the slashdot look. That virtually rules out most of the nukes (phpnuke, postnuke, drupal, slashcode etc). It is
so boring
so overused
suitable for weblogs and news sites but not for more mainstream content sites.
oss is good The beauty of using OSS toolkits is that you get a head start. If any consultant (read salesman) tells you that their product fits your needs perfectly, then a. shoot them, b. chop them into little pieces c.feed them to the snakes d. shoot the snake..... just for good measure.
The best that you can hope for is to have a basic and solid foundation that you can build on.
decisions Some of the things to look for include the following:
ability to handle workflow.
ability to deal with permissions
ability to deal with authentication
ability to handle more than just plain text
ability to version... rollbacks... track changes
ability to handle templates,... proper templates, not just color changes.
level of developer support
level of developer competence
pace of changes
For each toolkit, look at sites that have implemented it. If they *all* look the same, steer clear. Its a sure sign that templating was poorly implemented, or that the toolkit is difficult to customise.
Post a couple of questions on the boards. If the tone is friendly, then you know that if you did pay these guys to do work for you, the service would be great.
If you are building a proper CMS, its going to be painful.
and you win an all expenses paid tour
of some of the sites built using openACS and its cousin ACS classic.
I might agree that african's have proved an inability to self govern, but that is more a result of the leaders' moral dispositions than their intellect.
Most of our leaders were educated in the west while in exile. A lot at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge... in short all the top western universities. Mr Mugabe has about seven degrees some acquired while he was in exile, some while he was in prison as a political detainee.
As for literacy, Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate, certainly in sub-saharan africa, and possibly in the entire continent.
Being a Zimbo myself, I would argue that tech exposure aside, (there are more computers per capita in the west) our standard of education is miles ahead of what you will find in the west. I went to high school in Zim, university in SA, and am now in the UK.
In SA the Zimbos were miles ahead of the the locals, our A levels being of a higher standard than their matric.
With my honours in Finance from a third world university, I am always amazed by the calibre of some graduates from local (UK) universities I meet.
And after the Dubya fiasco, America does not really have a leg to stand on when it comes to preaching democracy to the rest of the world.
The judge also prohibited him from possessing any software not commercially available and banned him from using the Internet to talk with other hackers and hacking into any other Websites.
What is commercially available software?? Do GPL products only available for free download count?
Also, how do you ban someone from talking with hackers??? I think the true definition of what a hacker is was lost on the judge.
Lastly, why ban someone from doing something which is illegal anyway... hacking into other websites? The ruling should be modded down to -5 reduntant.:-)
OK, one password for life might be a bit extreme, but if a user is on to a good thing, do not get them to change.
I have never understood why people think that passwords suffer from wear and tear. I have never seen evidence to convince me that the longer one uses a password, the more vulnerable it becomes.
I remember in university, one of my courses had a module in something about maintenance/replacement of machinery, from a managerial perspective. One thing I recall is that with a lot of mechanical equipment, the older it got, the shorter the mean time between failure.
Digital equipment was almost the opposite. New equipment had a high chance of failure. If it survived the first couple of weeks, then it became almost impossible to predict failure rates. It was entirely random. Hence replacing aging mechanical equipment made absolutely no sense, whereas replacing digital equipment actually introduced a danger of failure.... ok I have oversimplified things a bit but you get the point right?
Well, passwords are like that. If you force users to change their passwords, and they change it from John, to Luke, to Mark to Peter, you have not really done much.
If you get really funky, and force them to change from adf0708 to 1433lkh to kh432lk to 23HGLY9 then you are beginning to get somewhere. The problem with these is that users then tend to write them down, because just as soon as they remember them off by heart, they are force to change them. As long as a password is written down somewhere, it is not secure!
A more thorough plan is to get users to choose one password, and set rules on numberics, caps, etc.. (or better yet issue passwords). At the same time, run a basic brute force dictionary cracker on the password file(s) and force *all* users with simple passwords to change them. Keep forcing them until they choose something sufficiently hard (or issue them with one that they can't change for the first 3 months or something).
Once users have a robust password, allow them to use it indefinitely!
Add all the other services you can leverage off this. Its about interactive entertainment, which at the moment translates to online gaming, but in the future....
Think music downloads. Think movies. Think. Just Think.
The stakes these companies are playing for are quite huge.
Whoever wins will be the FIFA/IOC (substitute world governing body of your choice) of the gaming industry.
win2k, linux... who cares. What will emerge is an online gaming platform (think direct x or OS of your choice) that games will eventually standardise on.
Whoever controls those servers, that platform will make the windoze licence to print money look like a game of monopoly. We are talking big bucks (tm) here.
My take, keep the OS/gaming platform open. !!go bnetd go!!
The first article talks about the constitutions limitations on taxes and what they should be spent on.
The second one says that just because you have a grand idea(tm) does not mean that others (via taxes) should be forced to pay for it. If it is such a grand idea, people will pay for it anyway (via commerce).
Slashdot Mirror
If you are in central london, there are *many* free points. Just walk down Oxford street, and you will find tons of open networks. There is a really good one outside Selfridges.
Edgware Road is the same. Ditto goes for the Kings Cross area.
The biggest problem you will encounter is how to use your laptop without getting soaked.
Request top_secret_nuclear_codes.doc
Ok, a bit far fetched, but you do get the idea ?
I have indeed. In fact, I have written a couple myself.
What I was alluding to was that
1. most people read slashdot for a digest of the news for geeks.
2. Most people want to respond/discuss the article before it moves off the front page
3. There is a history on these boards of people posting on the boards before actually reading the article. aka early worm ahem ahem early bird syndrome.
Now given the above, how many people would take the more than 10 minutes required to digest the very long interview before posting response.
Perfectly valid question if you ask me??
It really would make an interesting academic study.
i. people would read short articles and then post
ii. people will skim through longish articles and still post
iii. people will not read extremely long articles and will not post.(only 54 posts a day later!)
Is he like that because he got promoted to management, or did he get promoted because he is like that?
the editors should know better than to post to an article this long.
It is bad enough trying to get posters to read 1 page news.yahoo.com articles before responging.
This interview is long... have read half and am tired now.
how many people have actually read the entire article.
UK local authorites, via the Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Websites.
This is a web toolkit based on the Arsdigita (of Phil Greenspun fame) Community system.
Their setup is *nix, Apache, Tomcat/Resin and Oracle.
You have wifi, you hang around the cafe surfing the net. You hang around the cafe, you drink cups of $$ coffee and eat on their ££ munches.
Its amazing how many people (in the UK at least) treat the local Starbucks as their company's extra meeting room.
sorry, couldn't resist
one Xenon is bad spelling....
two is gross negligence on the part of the editors.
Taken to the extreme, if each 'neighbourhood' is running high speed ip over wireless, and is peering with its neighbours, then the world becomes a true web. Why connect via maBell and pay $$$ lots, when these local wireless networks grow and peer to a level where xx% of your ip traffic can be routed without ever going via the major backbone providers?
The music industry is really dumb. They shoot their foot one one hand and complain about it with another.
I think their biggest problem, is that they would like to control the entire industry from production to sales. Payola means they cede some of that control to the radio stations.
If they were really against payola, and appreciated that airplay is good, they would not be trying to shaft internet radio stations with ridiculous per song charges.
1. They know that they are unlikely to be able to dictate to Joe Indie what to play on his station, unless they are charging him silly money for the privilege of promoting their songs, and can use these exhorbitant fees as a bargaining tool.
2. With CC, they are finally faced with a bully as big as they are, who can tell them to pay up if they want their song played, or shut up and fsck off.
If the music was good, the whole issue would be moot. At the end of the day, its all about who controls what the public hear and subsequently buy (hard to buy something you haven't heard)
When they lose this control, they lose their ability to extort terms from musicians. In the past, Radio Dons (mafia style) would have been able to make or break a musician. Now Clear_C has that power.
If you are a musician, who do you sign your soul away to huh??
Its not only the phone-home capability of this software that's scary, its also the ability of any l337 h@x0r to compromise your system and discover scary shit about you.
And wait till the G starts to ask for records of what you have been up to on your computer.
George Orwell warned us about this
To quote the release.... "The application is a service for tourists visiting the historic city of Bath (in the UK). It guides users around the city and towards major attractions. At the same time they are involved in a 'Treasure Hunt' answering questions related to historic sites, requiring users to visit them. Prizes can be won and sponsorhsip opportunities exist for businesses located on the trail."
If I recall correctly, the backend tying openACS to the SMS gateway has also been opensourced. Check it out.
Look at openACS. Its a fast evolving toolkit, with a lot of features out of the box. The current project website is not the best looking, but the toolkit has been used to develop a lot of interesting sites.
Methodology ... shake the customer by his feet and see how much money falls out, then charge another $50 000k for support.
If I were you, I would stay away from the Vignettes and other off-the-shelf CMSs. To paraphrase Phil Greenspun, these guys pricing works along the lines of
I would also not be in a rush to implement a totally custom solution. Building from scratch is usually a dumb idea(tm). No point in reinventing the wheel. Having said that there is a slight difference between a Michelin-clad Ferrari wheel and a 0BC Roman chariot's wheel...
I agree with you, do not go for the slashdot look. That virtually rules out most of the nukes (phpnuke, postnuke, drupal, slashcode etc). It is
so boring
so overused
suitable for weblogs and news sites but not for more mainstream content sites.
oss is good ..... just for good measure.
The beauty of using OSS toolkits is that you get a head start. If any consultant (read salesman) tells you that their product fits your needs perfectly, then a. shoot them, b. chop them into little pieces c.feed them to the snakes d. shoot the snake
The best that you can hope for is to have a basic and solid foundation that you can build on.
decisions
Some of the things to look for include the following:
For each toolkit, look at sites that have implemented it. If they *all* look the same, steer clear. Its a sure sign that templating was poorly implemented, or that the toolkit is difficult to customise.
Post a couple of questions on the boards. If the tone is friendly, then you know that if you did pay these guys to do work for you, the service would be great.
If you are building a proper CMS, its going to be painful.
and you win an all expenses paid tour of some of the sites built using openACS and its cousin ACS classic.
This is so silly...
You propose this and yet the US continues to imprison citizens of other countries??
OK, I'll bite.
I might agree that african's have proved an inability to self govern, but that is more a result of the leaders' moral dispositions than their intellect.
Most of our leaders were educated in the west while in exile. A lot at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge... in short all the top western universities. Mr Mugabe has about seven degrees some acquired while he was in exile, some while he was in prison as a political detainee.
As for literacy, Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate, certainly in sub-saharan africa, and possibly in the entire continent.
Being a Zimbo myself, I would argue that tech exposure aside, (there are more computers per capita in the west) our standard of education is miles ahead of what you will find in the west. I went to high school in Zim, university in SA, and am now in the UK.
In SA the Zimbos were miles ahead of the the locals, our A levels being of a higher standard than their matric.
With my honours in Finance from a third world university, I am always amazed by the calibre of some graduates from local (UK) universities I meet.
And after the Dubya fiasco, America does not really have a leg to stand on when it comes to preaching democracy to the rest of the world.
What is commercially available software?? Do GPL products only available for free download count?
Also, how do you ban someone from talking with hackers??? I think the true definition of what a hacker is was lost on the judge.
Lastly, why ban someone from doing something which is illegal anyway... hacking into other websites? The ruling should be modded down to -5 reduntant. :-)
OK, one password for life might be a bit extreme, but if a user is on to a good thing, do not get them to change.
.. .. ok I have oversimplified things a bit but you get the point right?
I have never understood why people think that passwords suffer from wear and tear. I have never seen evidence to convince me that the longer one uses a password, the more vulnerable it becomes.
I remember in university, one of my courses had a module in something about maintenance/replacement of machinery, from a managerial perspective. One thing I recall is that with a lot of mechanical equipment, the older it got, the shorter the mean time between failure.
Digital equipment was almost the opposite. New equipment had a high chance of failure. If it survived the first couple of weeks, then it became almost impossible to predict failure rates. It was entirely random. Hence replacing aging mechanical equipment made absolutely no sense, whereas replacing digital equipment actually introduced a danger of failure
Well, passwords are like that. If you force users to change their passwords, and they change it from John, to Luke, to Mark to Peter, you have not really done much.
If you get really funky, and force them to change from adf0708 to 1433lkh to kh432lk to 23HGLY9 then you are beginning to get somewhere. The problem with these is that users then tend to write them down, because just as soon as they remember them off by heart, they are force to change them. As long as a password is written down somewhere, it is not secure!
A more thorough plan is to get users to choose one password, and set rules on numberics, caps, etc.. (or better yet issue passwords). At the same time, run a basic brute force dictionary cracker on the password file(s) and force *all* users with simple passwords to change them. Keep forcing them until they choose something sufficiently hard (or issue them with one that they can't change for the first 3 months or something).
Once users have a robust password, allow them to use it indefinitely!
think $9.99 per month
Multiply this by number of users out there.
Add all the other services you can leverage off this. Its about interactive entertainment, which at the moment translates to online gaming, but in the future....
Think music downloads. Think movies. Think. Just Think.
This about more than gaming.
The stakes these companies are playing for are quite huge.
Whoever wins will be the FIFA/IOC (substitute world governing body of your choice) of the gaming industry.
win2k, linux... who cares. What will emerge is an online gaming platform (think direct x or OS of your choice) that games will eventually standardise on.
Whoever controls those servers, that platform will make the windoze licence to print money look like a game of monopoly. We are talking big bucks (tm) here.
My take, keep the OS/gaming platform open.
!!go bnetd go!!
Here is a link to the entire letter on slashdot.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
Its not even an obsure processor.
It a Pentium MMX 233Mhz
I agree
I checked out the site, and it seems that not only is the chip a PENTIUM MMX 233.
He changed the graphics card
He could not get it to run with 4Mb ram and so threw in a 32Mb stick.
Really not much of a hack there if you ask me. Only the LED is impressive.
The first article talks about the constitutions limitations on taxes and what they should be spent on.
The second one says that just because you have a grand idea (tm) does not mean that others (via taxes) should be forced to pay for it. If it is such a grand idea, people will pay for it anyway (via commerce).