I work in Morocco and travel around Africa, where I have seen a small base of Linux installations being put to good work. It helps leverage more power per server per dollar spent, and keeps any of the money from going to Microsoft. I am, in my own small way, trying to champion that issue here. All that needs to be paid is labour costs, and this can usually be kept within the local market, benefitting local companies. Of course, European and sometimes American gurus also get paid to come out here, but are more likely to be Cisco engineers and commercial firewall types.
Have you been involved in any "Linux for development" type issues?
I would have linked to another post I made in more depth about this but I can't get at it, it's more than 25 posts ago:-(
Yeah cool. Where I am, we have to content ourselves with hacking smart cards to get European digital satellite transmissions, but at least I can program my parent's Tivo from the comfort of my African office.
Linux on a Mac is harder than that. I got up and running on an old old mac with 32M ram, harder than what that guy did (boot red hat installer and leave overnight). If he'd got it running with just 4M, that would have been cooler.
The article is not without a cool edge though :
She yoinked the RAM
figuring I could use it. She's my main lady, and I can't extoll the virtues of marrying a geek grrrl
enough. The new RAM works and Tracy r0x0rs.
Credit where credit is due too: quality photos, good description, up in HTML. Doing cool stuff is one thing, writing a reasonable report quite another. Kudos still goes to this dude.
Yeah well there's top end and then there's very specific hardware for broadcast quality type applications.
Linux video capture is developing apace; I know some consumer grade stuff is working OK and that support for higher end stuff is probably not too far away.
In general, the support for hardware can be guesstimated:-
If the hardware is top end, and likely to be owned by Linux people (gaming graphics cards, hotrod modems, cool peripherals) then they are fairly likely to work, with obvious super-high end exceptions. Top end hardware also usually follows specs for standard stuff (like standard SVGA, etc)
If hardware is low end, forget it. Most of it is manufactured in bulk for Windows only, may have some proprietary code where standards would have done, and is less likely to be owned by a Linuxer anyway. Exceptions below*
Latest products : unlikely to work because drivers won't have had time to get integrated into kernel development, however modules may be available. Again, if it follows standards then it may work (with performance hit) with generic drivers anyway
I have seen 3Com mentioned, well there's a case in point where they are industry standard network card people. Loads of people have 3Com cards. Loads of people having certain hardware means it's likely to be supported, however....
* Very popular shitty low end hardware may work due to good hacks by lots of owners, however reverse engineering isn't an exact science and strange hardware stuff means only hardware which is technically acceptable in it's I/O style will work.
Manufacturers who only develop for Windows are most likely to be found having market share in low end products. The top class lot are much more likely to work. Peripherals that are little more than I/O ports which are instruction driven from host processing (huge binary drivers required) won't work with Linux unless the manufacturer releases all the specs.
I would say that manufacturers make regular business judgements on all their support: because Linux doesn't have market share enough to make it a sales point to support "end user" hardware and they won't release code (because competitors making low end shit will steal it and obfuscate it as a Windows locked binary) but server hardware is supported rather more quickly, because the server market share for Linux is substantial enough.
All VoIP termination is illegal in Morocco. You are forced in as many ways as possible to not use VoIP over your Internet connection. H323 I think is blocked already, or has been and was removed afterwards.
VoIP termination is certainly illegal. Even though the phone company, who also have a monopoly on bandwidth, make money whatever you do. They're getting local call rates (Billed at $2 an hour inc taxes), bandwidth money from the ISP, and they still don't want to lose the international telephony deals, where they make ridiculous amounts of money.
All over Europe, telcos don't want to lose lucrative internation traffic. Real third world countries (rather than emerging economies) have neither enough bandwidth nor the latency required to provide adequate VoIP anyway.
However bandwidth in Morocco is pretty good. Check out www.tiboo.com for a site hosted in Morocco with high visits and reasonable serving of pages.
You are indeed correct. I was kinda being facetious by then:)
The conclusion is the same: traffic shaping is the way to go, not blocking ports and services, because you can just run on other ports or via proxies until the cows come home.
And further the restaurant doesn't in fact guarantee all you can eat in the first place; they only guarantee all I can eat upto a low limit 1/50 of the plate size; generally they'll try to fill my plate, particularly if no one else is eating, but they only guarantee 1/50 of the plate.
Well, if they get their traffic shaping right of course. The problem is that the greedy client in the restaurant generally takes all the shortcuts necessary to get more food, including
cajoling the waiter
pretending to be someone else
going to the kitchen direct
saying his plate is really someone else's plate
running plates out of the restaurant to his friends and coming back with an empty plate much faster than the others who are eating at their normal pace
Ooops! You accidentally made an argument that weakens your own claim. ISP's have to pay for their dedicated circuits anyways . Why does it matter whether the pipe is.40 or.60 full?
The problem with ISPs only happens when the pipe is 100% full. They wouldn't limit if the pipe was only 40% full. They don't want to upgrade bandwidth on a pipe that's 100% full to support low-cost DSL subscribers.
As an ISP employee, I understand the business model of buy in bulk, sell in pieces. But don't think that I'm making money in this market... I bet I earn less than you by a large margin. Even relative to the price of living.
That way the customer still gets to choose exactly what they want to do with the bandwidth they have paid for
That's exactly the problem. The customer hasn't paid for the whole meal, so any champagne they drink (above 1/10 of the bottle) is not paid for by them.
I work at an ISP in Morocco. We don't limit anything but then we don't provide high speed access at low cost. We don't do home DSL because the market isn't ready, and the first uptake will always be high-bandwidth users which will kill us if we did try to launch such a service as the first provider to do so.
For those of you more fortunate than I, that already live in an xDSL enabled area,
I would like to draw an analogy.
You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each.
Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?
That's the bandwidth issue. ISPs pool 2mbps or so for a circuit of n DSL subscribers. Those with the highest appetite still only pay 1/n of the bill.
Blame their business model if you like, but it's the market that is crying out for flat-rate high speed access. Flat-rate means, IMHO, making certain sacrifices. If you want hardcore fast, then pay the real price for the dedicated circuit. ISPs do not promise you a dedicated circuit for your low monthly fee. And ISPs pay full price for their dedicated circuits.
Because if I create a new account with the username "Kraft Cheese" then I can post and look like I was you, because everything after the space is ignored in the posting quoteline:-
by Kraft on Tuesday April 16, @22:21 (#3354188)
However, I should change my sig, and indeed will, to be clearer about that.
Two different docking stations will also be released with the device. One will allow the PC to be used like a desktop. A second will look like a notebook with a 14-inch screen. However, except for an extra battery and a CD or DVD drive, it will be empty.
Sounds to me like the second is just a battery and DVD drive - I assume it also has a regular keyboard, and a larger screen, and therefore won't be so "empty" as implied.
On Photoshop-faked child porn (I hope GIMP isn't used for this): The law was an expansion of existing bans on the usual sort of child pornography. Congress justified the wider ban on grounds that while no real children were harmed in creating the material, real children could be harmed by feeding the prurient appetites of pedophiles or child molesters.
Pedophiles (sic) thus have their appetite fed by faked kiddie porn? Well all those fakes of Anna Kournikova never wet my whistle for real porn... desire for real porn is just there:)
On the act: prohibiting the possession and viewing of child pornography will
encourage the possessors of such material to rid themselves of or des
troy the
material, thereby helping to protect the victims of child pornography
and to
eliminate the market for the sexual exploitative use of children;
Sorry? Because it's against the law to abuse children, I don't believe that stops them. Even less a law against pornography. After all, banning alcohol just increased consumption, and in countries where porn is illegal (like the one I happen to inhabit) it just raises the price for crap porn which really exploits the subjects.
I do totally agree, however, that Kiddie porn should be banned, it should never exists, it is repugnant and vile. But the law is not going to help sick people who abuse children...
Incidentally, where I live (Morocco) it is socially acceptable (for the natives) in some villages to offer young girls for sex to tourists. Young boys too. The law can't do squat in remote places anyway.
We can imagine a hell of a lot, but the authors are right, and we KNOW Earth-like life exists. Let's just start looking for the boring (bi-pedal humanoid), before looking for the fantastic (silicon/energy based, whatever you can dream).
You're obviously not an epistemologist. How can you know that I exist, let alone another world capable of supporting intelligent life. And how do we define intelligence?
DebateUSA writes "If you ever played the game M.U.L.E. on the Atari or Commodore computer systems in the early 1980's, there's a company producing a new version for
the PC.
From where do you go from "new version" to port? The article doesn't say it will be a port either...
Re:In places where Internet is still expensive
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 1
Because they are ignorant that is why, so they fall back to Windoze defaults. This is the problem.
Re:In places where Internet is still expensive
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, but ISDN isn't all that popular. Most people who have per-minute connections are modem users who definately WOULD notice if their machine was trying to connect in the background.
Where are you from to generalise like that? ISDN is very popular here, where DSL is not available at all, and regular phone lines suck.
IMHO, internet integration is a good thing. I like the net integration with KDE for instance. However, the type of "internet integration" Microsoft practices is not normally to the benefit of the user. This doesn't invalidate the whole concept though.
Only if Internet is not expensive (my whole point).
Better get a flat rate connection then. Per-minute connections are good for low-level users, the type that check their email once every couple of days etc.
I don't live in Europe. I am giving Europe as an example. I live in Morocco. There is NO SUCH THING as a flat rate connection buddy. That's why it costs me $2/hour whatever I do, unless I can kick down $400/month for a 64kbps leased line. Yes, that's four hundred bucks.
The difference is that Bash is completely configurable and doesn't have to keep track. Is the same true of Windows, I ask.
I mean, my bash history might have stuff in it that is NOT to be posted to the Internet. Maybe even passwords, or iptables rules, or something similarly private.
In places where Internet is still expensive
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
But when we run an application for some local business like a file search, we don't expect it to connect silently to the Net, even for a good reason. When we discover something like this, it feels like someone else is in control of our computer, and that is definitely not a good feeling.
In the USA, Internet access is usually a monthly subscription and that's it. No phone charges, no charge per minute, just a certain amount of bandwidth per dollar spent.
In Europe, some people have now got access to 2 types of "free" Internet (neither is free).
Free, in the sense that there is no subscription, but you pay local call charges. This is possible because the phone company pays a percentage to the ISP for call traffic generated
Free calls, in the sense that local calls are to a no-charge phone number, so you can stay online as long as you like without a per-minute charge, but you have to pay a monthly fee of at least $20 US or more.
Which brings me to my point. If Internet connections are configured in such a way (as often they are) that the connection happens transparently because the username and password are stored, then people are going to pay call charges to search their local disk. If they don't realise this (especially in the case of ISDN connections) then they may run up quite a bill when they do an extensive search every time they lose a file.
I don't like this Internet-integration with the desktop in the OS. Sure, if I want it to happen, I can download some software helper. No doubt by hacking the registry or something equally scary for any novice user, you may be able to switch this off. But it reeks of abuse of my phone line.
It's interesting, no, that Microsoft do not necessarily take account of the European market when it comes to actual Internet access. Sure, they do multi language support but what about this particular Internet case?
I have clients who have been caught with huge bills due to shit like this before. Like transparent connections happening when they are not surfing when connected to an ISDN router which connects when any packet that is non-local causes a router to connect. I know that this can (and is) fixed on the router with better access lists, but the packets themselves come from crappy Microsoft things like MSN Messenger trying to auto-connect at boot and various SMB packets.
It's time that the Internet was a separate part of the desktop. Plenty of people embrace the Internet, but many others will not, especially in countries where it is still expensive just to stay online an hour costs me $2. That's right, a crappy 33.6K connection costs me $2 due solely to phone connection charges.
Short replies take me too much time. Arrgh. Third time that I try to submit and always getting complaints about 20 seconds, one minute, etc. And even when I fuck up I have to wait another minute to try again.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that your current sig (defend to the death) was said by Voltaire if you would like to quote the source.
Have you been involved in any "Linux for development" type issues?
I would have linked to another post I made in more depth about this but I can't get at it, it's more than 25 posts ago :-(
Yeah cool. Where I am, we have to content ourselves with hacking smart cards to get European digital satellite transmissions, but at least I can program my parent's Tivo from the comfort of my African office.
Be careful. Employing 2 year olds is illegal in many states.
Framebuffer support, thankfully, is much better now, and Yellow Dog is coming up with friendlier installs even for OldWorld boot rom pieces of junk.
The article is not without a cool edge though :
She yoinked the RAM figuring I could use it. She's my main lady, and I can't extoll the virtues of marrying a geek grrrl enough. The new RAM works and Tracy r0x0rs.
Credit where credit is due too: quality photos, good description, up in HTML. Doing cool stuff is one thing, writing a reasonable report quite another. Kudos still goes to this dude.
Yeah well there's top end and then there's very specific hardware for broadcast quality type applications.
Linux video capture is developing apace; I know some consumer grade stuff is working OK and that support for higher end stuff is probably not too far away.
-
If the hardware is top end, and likely to be owned by Linux people (gaming graphics cards, hotrod modems, cool peripherals) then they are fairly likely to work, with obvious super-high end exceptions. Top end hardware also usually follows specs for standard stuff (like standard SVGA, etc)
-
If hardware is low end, forget it. Most of it is manufactured in bulk for Windows only, may have some proprietary code where standards would have done, and is less likely to be owned by a Linuxer anyway. Exceptions below*
-
Latest products : unlikely to work because drivers won't have had time to get integrated into kernel development, however modules may be available. Again, if it follows standards then it may work (with performance hit) with generic drivers anyway
I have seen 3Com mentioned, well there's a case in point where they are industry standard network card people. Loads of people have 3Com cards. Loads of people having certain hardware means it's likely to be supported, however....* Very popular shitty low end hardware may work due to good hacks by lots of owners, however reverse engineering isn't an exact science and strange hardware stuff means only hardware which is technically acceptable in it's I/O style will work.
Manufacturers who only develop for Windows are most likely to be found having market share in low end products. The top class lot are much more likely to work. Peripherals that are little more than I/O ports which are instruction driven from host processing (huge binary drivers required) won't work with Linux unless the manufacturer releases all the specs.
I would say that manufacturers make regular business judgements on all their support: because Linux doesn't have market share enough to make it a sales point to support "end user" hardware and they won't release code (because competitors making low end shit will steal it and obfuscate it as a Windows locked binary) but server hardware is supported rather more quickly, because the server market share for Linux is substantial enough.
VoIP termination is certainly illegal. Even though the phone company, who also have a monopoly on bandwidth, make money whatever you do. They're getting local call rates (Billed at $2 an hour inc taxes), bandwidth money from the ISP, and they still don't want to lose the international telephony deals, where they make ridiculous amounts of money.
All over Europe, telcos don't want to lose lucrative internation traffic. Real third world countries (rather than emerging economies) have neither enough bandwidth nor the latency required to provide adequate VoIP anyway.
However bandwidth in Morocco is pretty good. Check out www.tiboo.com for a site hosted in Morocco with high visits and reasonable serving of pages.
The conclusion is the same: traffic shaping is the way to go, not blocking ports and services, because you can just run on other ports or via proxies until the cows come home.
Well, if they get their traffic shaping right of course. The problem is that the greedy client in the restaurant generally takes all the shortcuts necessary to get more food, including
:-) etc etc
The problem with ISPs only happens when the pipe is 100% full. They wouldn't limit if the pipe was only 40% full. They don't want to upgrade bandwidth on a pipe that's 100% full to support low-cost DSL subscribers.
As an ISP employee, I understand the business model of buy in bulk, sell in pieces. But don't think that I'm making money in this market... I bet I earn less than you by a large margin. Even relative to the price of living.
That's exactly the problem. The customer hasn't paid for the whole meal, so any champagne they drink (above 1/10 of the bottle) is not paid for by them.
For those of you more fortunate than I, that already live in an xDSL enabled area, I would like to draw an analogy.
You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each.
Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?
That's the bandwidth issue. ISPs pool 2mbps or so for a circuit of n DSL subscribers. Those with the highest appetite still only pay 1/n of the bill.
Blame their business model if you like, but it's the market that is crying out for flat-rate high speed access. Flat-rate means, IMHO, making certain sacrifices. If you want hardcore fast, then pay the real price for the dedicated circuit. ISPs do not promise you a dedicated circuit for your low monthly fee. And ISPs pay full price for their dedicated circuits.
by Kraft on Tuesday April 16, @22:21 (#3354188)
However, I should change my sig, and indeed will, to be clearer about that.
Sounds to me like the second is just a battery and DVD drive - I assume it also has a regular keyboard, and a larger screen, and therefore won't be so "empty" as implied.
On Photoshop-faked child porn (I hope GIMP isn't used for this):
The law was an expansion of existing bans on the usual sort of child pornography. Congress justified the wider ban on grounds that while no real children were harmed in creating the material, real children could be harmed by feeding the prurient appetites of pedophiles or child molesters.
Pedophiles (sic) thus have their appetite fed by faked kiddie porn? Well all those fakes of Anna Kournikova never wet my whistle for real porn... desire for real porn is just there :)
On the act:
prohibiting the possession and viewing of child pornography will encourage the possessors of such material to rid themselves of or des troy the material, thereby helping to protect the victims of child pornography and to eliminate the market for the sexual exploitative use of children;
Sorry? Because it's against the law to abuse children, I don't believe that stops them. Even less a law against pornography. After all, banning alcohol just increased consumption, and in countries where porn is illegal (like the one I happen to inhabit) it just raises the price for crap porn which really exploits the subjects.
I do totally agree, however, that Kiddie porn should be banned, it should never exists, it is repugnant and vile. But the law is not going to help sick people who abuse children...
Incidentally, where I live (Morocco) it is socially acceptable (for the natives) in some villages to offer young girls for sex to tourists. Young boys too. The law can't do squat in remote places anyway.
You're obviously not an epistemologist. How can you know that I exist, let alone another world capable of supporting intelligent life. And how do we define intelligence?
oops...
/dev/null /.
if (nocoffee) then
cat slashdot post >
elif (coffee) then
cat slashdot post >
fi
hehe
From where do you go from "new version" to port? The article doesn't say it will be a port either...
Because they are ignorant that is why, so they fall back to Windoze defaults. This is the problem.
Where are you from to generalise like that? ISDN is very popular here, where DSL is not available at all, and regular phone lines suck.
IMHO, internet integration is a good thing. I like the net integration with KDE for instance. However, the type of "internet integration" Microsoft practices is not normally to the benefit of the user. This doesn't invalidate the whole concept though.
Only if Internet is not expensive (my whole point).
Better get a flat rate connection then. Per-minute connections are good for low-level users, the type that check their email once every couple of days etc.
I don't live in Europe. I am giving Europe as an example. I live in Morocco. There is NO SUCH THING as a flat rate connection buddy. That's why it costs me $2/hour whatever I do, unless I can kick down $400/month for a 64kbps leased line. Yes, that's four hundred bucks.
I mean, my bash history might have stuff in it that is NOT to be posted to the Internet. Maybe even passwords, or iptables rules, or something similarly private.
In the USA, Internet access is usually a monthly subscription and that's it. No phone charges, no charge per minute, just a certain amount of bandwidth per dollar spent.
In Europe, some people have now got access to 2 types of "free" Internet (neither is free).
Which brings me to my point. If Internet connections are configured in such a way (as often they are) that the connection happens transparently because the username and password are stored, then people are going to pay call charges to search their local disk. If they don't realise this (especially in the case of ISDN connections) then they may run up quite a bill when they do an extensive search every time they lose a file.
I don't like this Internet-integration with the desktop in the OS. Sure, if I want it to happen, I can download some software helper. No doubt by hacking the registry or something equally scary for any novice user, you may be able to switch this off. But it reeks of abuse of my phone line.
It's interesting, no, that Microsoft do not necessarily take account of the European market when it comes to actual Internet access. Sure, they do multi language support but what about this particular Internet case?
I have clients who have been caught with huge bills due to shit like this before. Like transparent connections happening when they are not surfing when connected to an ISDN router which connects when any packet that is non-local causes a router to connect. I know that this can (and is) fixed on the router with better access lists, but the packets themselves come from crappy Microsoft things like MSN Messenger trying to auto-connect at boot and various SMB packets.
It's time that the Internet was a separate part of the desktop. Plenty of people embrace the Internet, but many others will not, especially in countries where it is still expensive just to stay online an hour costs me $2. That's right, a crappy 33.6K connection costs me $2 due solely to phone connection charges.
Short replies take me too much time. Arrgh. Third time that I try to submit and always getting complaints about 20 seconds, one minute, etc. And even when I fuck up I have to wait another minute to try again.