I'm not saying IP-based geographic detection is perfect (and I'm not sure about the exact algorithms Mozilla used to determine country), but Middle East's connections certainly don't go through Iran. Indeed, Iran has significant problems connecting to the rest of the world's backbones (due to all the political sanctions and embargos) and pays hefty fees to Turkey and Kuwait for its backbones' connection. The best analogy to describe Iran's Internet connection is a "dead-end alley"; no one connects through Iran.
Firefox is extremely popular in Iran, and a huge part of that, as the GP rightly pointed out, is due to the very tech-savvy nature of its very young population. You'd be surprised to find the number of Iranian Linux distros on distrowatch (and unlike China, these are real homebrew efforts and not government subsidised).
The ACCC has only so many eyes. If you listen to House question time, you'll see that its hands are full with watching petrol, grocery and child care prices (which the public care much more than say, ASUS Eee PC).
Nevertheless, the ACCC says: "think a business may be breaking the consumer protection and fair trading laws, you should contact our Infocentre on 1300 302 502 or lodge an electronic complaint or inquiry form http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/54217#h2_38
There is a tribe in Vanuatu which worshipsPrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and considers him their God. Apparently the tribe's legend indicated a pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit who according to ancient tales travelled over the seas to a distant land, married a powerful lady and would in time return. The villagers had observed the respect accorded to Queen Elizabeth by colonial officials and came to the conclusion that her husband, Prince Philip, must be the son from their legends.
Friendly adivce to CmdrTaco
on
I Will Derive
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Listen CmdrTaco
I love slashdot. I was a teen when I found it, and to this day I've told countless number of people that I've learned more from slashdot and its community than from all my 6 years and 2 so-called prestigious academic degrees combined.
I am hugely in debt to you for creating slashdot.
I understand the motivation behind this post, but thinking of the longer term, I'm sure you realise that this really will put a dent in./'s readership. We are not here to watch youtube videos. Slashdot is not, and should not bring itself down to the level of any jackass blog out there. After all, you existed long before the word 'blog' was conceived.
PLEASE do not ruin slashdot. Keep idle out of front page, and make it an opt-in option for anyone who wants to view it on their front page.
I trust you will act according to your instincts and convince your overlords to heed this advice.
Temporary GUI recycle bins or trash cans or whatever you want to call them today completely miss the point. I do not always delete my files through Dolphin or Konqueror, I run scripts, I use the shell, and I also interact with my computer through various non-KDE programmes.
Actually one of the initial goals of freedesktop.org was to harmonise this so that Gnome and KDE would use the same trash. I don't know how successful that was since it's been a while since I last ran Gnome.
The GP is right. I remember Windows 98 and that Norton Protected Recycle Bin, and from a usability point of view, it was awesome. Easy to use, fast with no user-detectable performance hit, and very convenient. I can't think why 10 years on, we don't have the equivalent of that in the open source world even with advanced filesystems such as JFS and XFS.
Am I the only one who is fascinated by the irony that nowadays, the main selling point of the toolkit that was developed first and foremost as an open source equivalent to Qt, is that it can be used to develop closed source applications?
I wonder how the open source purists who deplored Qt when it was clsoed source and issued jihad against the KDE community and the likes of SuSE and Mandrake for bringing closed source creep into the open source world, feel about the fact that their beloved toolkit is licensed under the "lesser" of the GPL lincences, while Qt is now GPL through and through.
As part time Asterisk developer let me second the parent.
Not only VoIP, but any real-time application is useless on nearly all current implementations of 802.x due to two major reseason:
* Response time is too high irrespective of bandwidth. Lag is not acceptable in situations where you can't buffer. Your YouTube playback will not suffer because even a tiny buffer can eliminate the problem, but you can't buffer RT applications.
* Most importantly, the concept of QoS, while theoretically feasible on 802.x, is completely absent from the current implementation. I have heard but I'm yet to see a real Wifi device with QoS. Without QoS, VoIP sucks.
And then, there is also the issue of enhanced emergency services compliance, or what's in US called E911. In Australia where I live, most VoIP providers either completely block calling '000' (our emergency service number) or require you to submit a physical address for your static IP and REMAIN in that location.
To sum it all up, if you're holding your breath for VoIP on Wifi, dream on. I've tested various VoIP clients (from the top of the market Siemens and Snom IP phones with Wifi to softphones like Counter path, etc) using various VoIP servers (Asterisk, Cisco, Nortel, etc.) using various UDP protocols (SIP, AIX2, H.323, Skinny etc.) and it DOESN'T WORK(TM).
Until we have full end-to-end QoS support on wireless networks, or something like WiMAX which promises to drastically lower response time and lag, VoIP on wireless will remain a toy for geeks to play with and nothing more.
Well it's not like there is low demand for F22 worldwide...
Australians are literally begging the US to sell them some F22 and they are willing to pay handsomely for it (U$200 million) but US refuses to do so. The RAAF still operates some 19 F-111 because it can't get its hands on any better striker. The US DoD's reply? Wait for the vaporware F-35 which no one knows should be called a fighter or a bomber or a support aircraft... or perhaps none.
This at a time when we are surrounded by countries such as North Korea, China, Indonesia and Burma --note that none can be considered strictly democratic-- who are using MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft with documented superior capabilities to our F-111 and F/A-18.
Australia has served alongside the US in every major warfare of the 20th and 21st century. Since its federation in 1900, Australians have served in the Great War, WWII, Korea, Vietnam... to Iraq and Afghanistan side by side America, being and ally at times when some of these wars have been less than popular at home. It has been in formal military alliance with the US since 1951 in the form of ANZUS. The Pine Gap base, the largest and most important US satellite ground station outside mainland USA is in Australia.
I sometimes wonder what it takes for US politicians to see an ally and recognise one...
Interesting reading this story's comments. Seems like slashdot is finally ready to move on... Have people realised it's time to stop whinging about Novel and MS deal, and talk about Suse instead. I mean seriously folks, this is Suse we are talking about, one of the original distros.
Not long ago, there were 3 distros for people who wanted to use Linux on the desktop: Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE. Debian was for servers and slackware was for those who hadn't realised that this is not 1995 anymore. There was still no need for Gentoo as people didn't need to show off their processor speed by comparing their compile times...
Mandrake was the super kool distro that no one took seriously. It was RedHat but with KDE at a time when Gnome was nowhere complete and Red Hat refused to ship the non-free Qt. Red Hat itself was solid and was THE linux distro, they added KDE later on and in Red Hat 7.x, KDE was even usable in Red Hat (before the process of GTK-ifying KDE started in Red Hat 8).
SuSE was the professional distro for people who had money. You could download the packages over the net but not the iso files and not the complete package. Those who did have money said it was good, those who didn't complained that Yast was not free (it wasn't...)
Yast 2 was a huge improvement. The original Yast used to mess up your config files to such a degree that you couldn't edit them with your text editor anymore. Things were not much better in the *drake land. Debian didn't even bother with graphical administrative tools (it still mostly doesn't...)
There were some more user friendly distros as well: Lycoris modified KDE 2.x to such an extent that when KDE 3.x came along, they couldn't port their changes to KDE 3.x and were shipping a modified KDE 2.2 when everyone else was using KDE 3.1 There was Xandros, which tried to resurect Corel Linux by adding Wine to it, only that 70% of the people couldn't install in the first place, there was Lindows and Michael Robertson and the whole running as root fiasco (this was before sudo) and Microsoft suing them and they nearly won, and even before these there was this little startup called OE One which tried to do away with KDE and Gnome by developing a UI based on XUL (yes, the Mozilla XUL) running on Red Hat and Mandrake. Boy was it buggy...
Then Red Hat discontinued its desktop line and lost its prominent position among the community (Ubuntu came along later). Mandrake lost control to its VCs and they effectively fucked the company twice over. It lost focus, momentum and user base and never quite recovered. SuSE was bought by Novel (yes, the NetWare company) and we all know what happend...
Office 2007's ribbon interface has a very steep learning curve. I completely understand how someone moving from Office 2003/OOo.org can initially get lost in it. It looks overwhelming, and so different to what we are used to.
Give it some time, however and you'll soon be won over. After a week of using it, there was no way I could go back to previous versions of office. How many times have you looked at a menu item in Office 2003/OOo and not know exactly what it's supposed to do until you click on it? Well, that would never happen with ribbon. The interface is so intuitive, so easy to comprehend.... it's a major advancement in productivity suite UI design in my opinion.
My main qualm with Office 2007 (and Office for Mac 2008) is that they are not 100% compatible with previous versions of office even in compatibility mode. Even when you try your best not to use any of the newer features that can not be saved using the old formats, the resulting file always has some minor incompatibility when it is opened in Office 2003 (and Office for Mac 2004). I was working with a group on a presentation last week, and we were using these 4 different versions of office, and we had a hard time interchanging the documents...
Dude, chill out. The word has entered the OED, as well as all respectable dictionaries. Indeed, I find Webster's definition quite apt:
a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet
As you can see, there's no mention of 'iPod' in the definition of the word; nor has there ever been. Now, the etymology of a word is very different to its definition, and I'll grant you that etymologically speaking, podcast wasn't the most correct word to describe this technology, but if you look at the etymology of most of the words we are now using in the English language, you'll see that we are using many of our words in a very convoluted manner. Quite often, the definition we now associate to our words vastly differs with what etymologically the word should mean.
Reading today's news articles, I'm sure when we read: Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis, we don't think that they are systematically killing one out of ten wildlife species in Zimbabwe, even though that's what etymologically, decimate should mean. Now, why should it be any different for podcast?
Languages are living creatures, they evolve and change. At the end of the day, language is a means of communication, and if by saying podcast, both me and you are referring to the same thing and communicating effetively, not only is podcasting not wrong, it is quite an apt and unambiguous word.
Mate, I would soooo love to pay your mortgage/rent for that huge mansion you live in in the outback, but I decided to pay the price and live in the city to use the amenities and services available here, including DSL.
You made your choice by living outside the 60 km zone of any of the 5 big cities (ADSL is now available in CBD and Zone 1 areas in all 5 major cities). Please don't ask us to subsedise your last-mile infrastructure when you expect a telco to invest hundereds of thousands of dollars to support all 3 families living in your area.
Besides, Optus now offers 2Mbps SHDSL ANYWHERE in Australia, it only costs about $4,000.00 per month though. Add that to your mortgate, and you're probably still paying less than what I'm paying to live in the city...
I passionately despise Telstra as much as the next Aussie here (and as a VoIP service provider, we have our daily confrontations with them), but seriously:
where do you get that 200 MB download limit from? Telstra's plans start from 600 MB per month.
You are a fool if you are going with BigPond anyway. It is horrendously expensive (for the same $70 which BigPond gives you 600 MB, you can get a TPG ADSL2+ account with 150 GB monthly download limit or look for Internode or iiNet if you want quality service). BigPond is vastly inferior to anything under the sun. Contention ratios of 500:1 are quite common on their residential plans.
Yes, most other ISPs do use Telstra gear in the background (well, they own 90%+ of the exchanges anyway), but Telstra Wholesale and Telstra Retail are quite distinct beasts, and the former is heavily regulated to allow other ISP to use Telstra's infrasturcutre. Their Retail division is a shambles.
No they did not. Telstra's decision to drop their vaporware Linux drive had nothing do to with SCO, and IIRC was made public a couple of months before the Sco fiasco. Telstra only threatened to move to Linux once it didn't get the deal it wanted from MS. The plan worked and Microsoft promptly came back to them (this was a time when XP's adoption was in doubt) with a much better offer, which killed the Linux process.
Even assuming that Telstra might have had better intentions... is wierd for a fellow Aussie! You should know Telstra better than that!
All correct observations, and my compliments on such detailed knowledge of the era.
It should however be noted that Germans knew of their inferiority to the British Navy and Air Force when WWII began. They did not however expect Britain to enter the war. Britain itself had been caught off-guard. The war, though a certainty in 1939, was not expected until a couple of years later. The British believed that 1939 Germany would not be in a position to wage war across Europe, and would not do so.
Hitler, who himself put no value on the treaties he had himself signed, thought as much of Britain's pledge to defend Poland and the Little Entente. He was also misinformed of the British public opinion and thought a democracy would not take the chance of turning against its public opinion, which even in 1939 was still in appeasement mood. He underestimated the effect of his attack on Poland on the British public opinion. Morover, Hitler had succeeded in misrepresenting his power. Britons at the time were mislead into believing that the German Army and Navy were superior, a belief which as you pointed out, was wrong. However what you can observe with the benefit of hindsight that the German basic machinery was inferior and their gadgets had no real effect, was not so obvious to the British generals of the time.
Your comparison of German vs. Russian, American and even British defence force are thus, a bit misleading. In 1939, Russia and USA were not among the allied forces, and Hitler assumed that it would be himself and Italy vs. an already captured Austria, some german speaking central European areas, the Little Entente, Poland (all of whom had no significant military power) and a France that was deeply in crisis. Comparing Allied machinery at the end of the war, with what Hitler believed he was against in 1939 is a bit misleading.
But Britain out-producing Germany in the run up and during the war cannot be totally attributed to Democracy vs. Dictatorship. Fact is, Britain at the time was the Empire of the world. Its battleships had been patrolling the world seas virtually uncontended since Trafalgar, for more than a century. The technical know-how of the British Naval Engineers can not be compared to that of Germans who had lost all their colonies after the Great War, and had no real experience of warfare prior to WWII. Britain's officers had seen action dozens of times during the 20th century, from India to South Africa and Sudan and thus had first hand experience in warfare. During the Boer War and also fighting Cuban nationalist, they had come into contact and learned the tactics of guerilla warfare, tactics they successfuly taught the French to be used during resistance. The German officers in comparison had been totally isolated from war experience in the intermittent years.
Obviously it also helped that the British government consisted of men like Attlee, Eden and Churchil, against nutcases like Himmler, Goering and Hitler. But that's perhaps a validation of your argument in itself: that in democracies, great men will eventually come to power at the times of need.
Like you, I also still have faith in freedom and democracy. One should not forget the hard-learned lessons of history. I'm sure democracy will catch up with China, but I shudder at the thought of how ugly it can get before we reach there.
The GP's post is still valid. Whether the end of the Great War, the way it ended, is something to be celebrated and remembered is debatable. My utmost respect to the veterans of the war, and all credit to the brave men and women who fought for what they believed was the right thing, but historically speaking, one wonders whether we should really celebrate the Armistice day.
Note the word "Armistice" means cessation of hostilitie or truce. It does not denote surrender, or anything near that. When the Compiègne agreement was signed, Germany was not a "defeated" party though it was worst off than the start of the war. German revolution and the ineptitude of the Habsburg dynasty coupled with the Greek invasion of Smyrna however put the Central Powers in such a position that by the time of the Versailles Treaty, the feeble 19th-century minded Orlando and Clemenceau could force such a shameful treaty on the "losers" of the war. It didn't help that the American Congress had gone into such an isolationist mood that Wilson didn't have any real bargaining power.
The Versailles Treaty directly lead to the Turkish War of Independence, the amateurish division of the Ottoman Emprire by the British (whose signs are vividly apparent in 21st century Middle East conflicts), the creation of a common country, Yugoslavia, among among 7 very different racial lines (which lead to Croatioan-Bosnian-Serbo wars and later the Kosovo conflict), the creation of another country between the Czechs and the Slovaks who had nothing in comon together, not to mention the rise of nationalis feelings in the Weimer Republic which eventually lead to WWII. The Versailles Treaty, is without a doubt the most shameful treaty of the 20th century, and while I understand its difference with the Compiègne agreement, the latter is certainly the predecessor to the former, and its glorification is very tactless, to say the least.
I'm sure we can find some other common day to commemorate our veterans without glorifying this dark episode of human history. It would be much better if we can find a universally agreed upon day, so that the people of Turkey, Hungry, Austria, Germany and all other nations defeated in the Great War don't have to feel humiliated on this day.
What utter piece of crap that can come out of someone's mouth who has never seen a good public transportation in action. Move on dude, modern public transport can do much more than transport from Central Business District (what you call downtown in the US) to outer suburbs (which is the point your whole argument is based on). In Melbourne, Australia, you can get from virtually any outer suburb to any other outer suburb without going anywhere near the CBD. The combination of trams and trains works wonders, you have tram stations every 200-300 meters so you are bound to be within easy walking distance of one wherever you are, and you have trains to get you to far-away suburbs fast (and Melbouren is one of the world's most geographically distributed cities) Apartments do not exists here outside of the CBD, everyone likes and lives the "Australian Dream" of having quarter of an acre for their backyard garden, and yet everyone still uses the public transport. I am too familiar with the confused looks of shock, awe and hidden admiration whenever an American collegue or friend comes down here for a visit and realise how well a public trnasport system can work.
And this is the best part for you Libertarian slashdotters: we don't pay any taxes for it as it has been privatised for 8-9 years now. We used to subsedise it heavily but it has been self sustaining for the past couple of years and is actually turning a modest profit recently. Beat that!
And guess who is defending the public transport system here...a self proclaimed petrolhead. I have 3 cars and I absolutely love'em. A track-biased M3 beemer for my track days (soon to be replaced by an R8), a Megane R26 F1 hot hatch for my general use, and a super-hungry comfy V8 Holden (with the Corvette engine) for when I just want to enjoy the sound of that huge engine. But for me, cars are for Sunday mornings and track days and especial occassions, public transport is much more easier, cheaper and more comfortable for daily commute. If a public transportation system is built correctly, it can be so comfortable (short wait time, Air Condition in all trams, quiet and peaceful where I can read the newspaper or listen to my podcasts, never overcrowded) that you would loath having to take out your car and deal with the morning and afternoon traffic, just to get to work.
Get over your stereotypical notions of what a public transport system is and how it works. The world has moved on.
After Fiorina left HP, they were able to get their sh!t together and suprassed Dell as the No. 1 PC manufacturer. Dell realised that their online-only "direct" distribution channel had reached market saturation and that, combined with their wintel-only policy was leaving Dell out of certain segments of the market (read: Wallmart).
They noticed that their stock is taking a beating, and are slowly reversing some 2-decade-old company policies. They are now embracing brick and mortar retail distribution channels very very slowly, and recently committed to it in places such as china.
I remember reading a book back in late 90s by Michael Dell called "Direct from Dell" where he boasted on and on about the value of only doing "direct" sales, and about the advantages of settling on established suppliers. Wonder what his take on the book is now that both policies seem to be in the process of getting slowly overturned.
_ Myth: The prize is awarded to recognize efforts for peace, human rights and democracy only after they have proven successful.
More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments in a process.
Read the rest of this very interesting article here.
And when I think about all the recent Nobel peace prize laureates, I can see that the above holds true. No one knew the 2005 winner, the Iranian Women and Children rights activist, Shirin Ebadi, before the Nobel prize was handed out to her (and I am saying this as an Iranian), but the prize did bring months of media attention and world focus to the issue (the issue of human rights in Iran).
How can SIP have a lower call quality than Skype when SIP is only a signalling protocol and doesn't even carry the data streams? (RTP does). Seriously, your sound quality depends on many factors (cheap Grandstream handsets/headsets or ATAs using ultra compressed G.729a codec running on a cheap ADSL connection with high contention ratio and no QoS don't help, you know) but SIP itself, the signalling protocol, isn't one of them.
Any decent VoIP provider will offer you a quality which can never be matched by PSTN, and can only be rivalled by node-to-node ISDN/PRI. If your experience with VoIP has been so bad that you consider Skype to be high quality (and I do use Skype myself daily) then I strongly suggest you consider changing your provider.
It's sad to see that all these MCSA and CCNA people who have no telco background and don't know shit about the fundamentals of networking are installing Asterisk without understanding what they are doing, and are hence ruining the reputation of a fine, neat, simple, clean IETF standard called Session Initiation Protocol.
I work in an Asterisk company which also does SIP/AIX call termination.
Seriously, one of our main issues is when customers ask about a good wireless handset. There really aren't any. Sure, there are lot of products on the market, from the brandless "dual phone" to Linksys and the vaporware which is Siemens Gigaset. The reality is that WiFi wasn't really designed for real-time applications like VoIP. QoS on WiFi sucks, big time.
If you really need to get a wireless handset though, go for the Linksys WIP 330. It's not cheap (we sell it for A$330 here in the Aussie market) but atleast it works. Mostly;-)
For call termination in the US, have a look at voxbone http://www.voxbone.com/ in the UK try voiceglobe http://www.voiceglobe.net/ and in Australia try Mytel http://www.mytel.net.au/ (Disclaimer: I work for Mytel but have no affiliation with Voiceglobe or Voxbone other than hearing good things about them from some of our customers who use them for call termination in those markets).
Thinking about setting up Asterisk? It's not really that difficult, play with it a bit and by the end of the day you'll have a system which will put Nortel and Avaya to shame, feature-wise. If you feel intimidated at the start, buy an Asterisk GUI tool such as Druid http://www.voiceroute.net/site/index.php or Switchvox www.switchvox.com it makes the job so much easier for a non-PBX person. They are not free (in niether sense of the world) but their prices are easily justifiable for any SME.
It's not that simple. The WTO takes IP very seriously and holds it dear in his heart; and it does have the power (and the precedence) to put heavy fines or sanctions (not that we are going to put US on embargo anytime soon) in cases of non conformance with its rules. You can't just ignor international IP, unless you want to ignore international trade all together
Besides, why should you want to ignore the issue here? This is not a patent-mongering Eolas-like VC-funded private company or a 1-click patent we are talking about. CSIRO put serious effort in early 90s and came up with genuine inventions for wireless data communications; technologies used by nearly all variants of the 802.11 family. CSIRO has tried to play fair, they have not resorted to lawsuits regarding 802.11b and 802.11g (hats-off to them); but they are yet to receive any sort of return from wireless device manufacturers. Why is it so hard for Cisco, D-Link, HP, and other manufacturers who have made billions selling wireless technologies to actually pay a reasonable fee and buy the patents from CSIRO?
It is sad to see that software related and other ludicrous patents filed in the US every day are making slashdot hostile to genuine inventions of technologies with reasonable royalty demands.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying IP-based geographic detection is perfect (and I'm not sure about the exact algorithms Mozilla used to determine country), but Middle East's connections certainly don't go through Iran. Indeed, Iran has significant problems connecting to the rest of the world's backbones (due to all the political sanctions and embargos) and pays hefty fees to Turkey and Kuwait for its backbones' connection. The best analogy to describe Iran's Internet connection is a "dead-end alley"; no one connects through Iran.
Firefox is extremely popular in Iran, and a huge part of that, as the GP rightly pointed out, is due to the very tech-savvy nature of its very young population. You'd be surprised to find the number of Iranian Linux distros on distrowatch (and unlike China, these are real homebrew efforts and not government subsidised).
The ACCC has only so many eyes. If you listen to House question time, you'll see that its hands are full with watching petrol, grocery and child care prices (which the public care much more than say, ASUS Eee PC).
Nevertheless, the ACCC says: "think a business may be breaking the consumer protection and fair trading laws, you should contact our Infocentre on 1300 302 502 or lodge an electronic complaint or inquiry form
http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/54217#h2_38
stupid lame filter.
There is a tribe in Vanuatu which worships Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and considers him their God. Apparently the tribe's legend indicated a pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit who according to ancient tales travelled over the seas to a distant land, married a powerful lady and would in time return. The villagers had observed the respect accorded to Queen Elizabeth by colonial officials and came to the conclusion that her husband, Prince Philip, must be the son from their legends.
Listen CmdrTaco
./'s readership. We are not here to watch youtube videos. Slashdot is not, and should not bring itself down to the level of any jackass blog out there. After all, you existed long before the word 'blog' was conceived.
I love slashdot. I was a teen when I found it, and to this day I've told countless number of people that I've learned more from slashdot and its community than from all my 6 years and 2 so-called prestigious academic degrees combined.
I am hugely in debt to you for creating slashdot.
I understand the motivation behind this post, but thinking of the longer term, I'm sure you realise that this really will put a dent in
PLEASE do not ruin slashdot. Keep idle out of front page, and make it an opt-in option for anyone who wants to view it on their front page.
I trust you will act according to your instincts and convince your overlords to heed this advice.
Temporary GUI recycle bins or trash cans or whatever you want to call them today completely miss the point. I do not always delete my files through Dolphin or Konqueror, I run scripts, I use the shell, and I also interact with my computer through various non-KDE programmes.
Actually one of the initial goals of freedesktop.org was to harmonise this so that Gnome and KDE would use the same trash. I don't know how successful that was since it's been a while since I last ran Gnome.
The GP is right. I remember Windows 98 and that Norton Protected Recycle Bin, and from a usability point of view, it was awesome. Easy to use, fast with no user-detectable performance hit, and very convenient. I can't think why 10 years on, we don't have the equivalent of that in the open source world even with advanced filesystems such as JFS and XFS.
Am I the only one who is fascinated by the irony that nowadays, the main selling point of the toolkit that was developed first and foremost as an open source equivalent to Qt, is that it can be used to develop closed source applications?
I wonder how the open source purists who deplored Qt when it was clsoed source and issued jihad against the KDE community and the likes of SuSE and Mandrake for bringing closed source creep into the open source world, feel about the fact that their beloved toolkit is licensed under the "lesser" of the GPL lincences, while Qt is now GPL through and through.
The irony of history...
As part time Asterisk developer let me second the parent.
Not only VoIP, but any real-time application is useless on nearly all current implementations of 802.x due to two major reseason:
* Response time is too high irrespective of bandwidth. Lag is not acceptable in situations where you can't buffer. Your YouTube playback will not suffer because even a tiny buffer can eliminate the problem, but you can't buffer RT applications.
* Most importantly, the concept of QoS, while theoretically feasible on 802.x, is completely absent from the current implementation. I have heard but I'm yet to see a real Wifi device with QoS. Without QoS, VoIP sucks.
And then, there is also the issue of enhanced emergency services compliance, or what's in US called E911. In Australia where I live, most VoIP providers either completely block calling '000' (our emergency service number) or require you to submit a physical address for your static IP and REMAIN in that location.
To sum it all up, if you're holding your breath for VoIP on Wifi, dream on. I've tested various VoIP clients (from the top of the market Siemens and Snom IP phones with Wifi to softphones like Counter path, etc) using various VoIP servers (Asterisk, Cisco, Nortel, etc.) using various UDP protocols (SIP, AIX2, H.323, Skinny etc.) and it DOESN'T WORK(TM).
Until we have full end-to-end QoS support on wireless networks, or something like WiMAX which promises to drastically lower response time and lag, VoIP on wireless will remain a toy for geeks to play with and nothing more.
Well it's not like there is low demand for F22 worldwide...
Australians are literally begging the US to sell them some F22 and they are willing to pay handsomely for it (U$200 million) but US refuses to do so. The RAAF still operates some 19 F-111 because it can't get its hands on any better striker. The US DoD's reply? Wait for the vaporware F-35 which no one knows should be called a fighter or a bomber or a support aircraft... or perhaps none.
This at a time when we are surrounded by countries such as North Korea, China, Indonesia and Burma --note that none can be considered strictly democratic-- who are using MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft with documented superior capabilities to our F-111 and F/A-18.
Australia has served alongside the US in every major warfare of the 20th and 21st century. Since its federation in 1900, Australians have served in the Great War, WWII, Korea, Vietnam... to Iraq and Afghanistan side by side America, being and ally at times when some of these wars have been less than popular at home. It has been in formal military alliance with the US since 1951 in the form of ANZUS. The Pine Gap base, the largest and most important US satellite ground station outside mainland USA is in Australia.
I sometimes wonder what it takes for US politicians to see an ally and recognise one...
Interesting reading this story's comments. Seems like slashdot is finally ready to move on... Have people realised it's time to stop whinging about Novel and MS deal, and talk about Suse instead. I mean seriously folks, this is Suse we are talking about, one of the original distros.
Not long ago, there were 3 distros for people who wanted to use Linux on the desktop: Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE. Debian was for servers and slackware was for those who hadn't realised that this is not 1995 anymore. There was still no need for Gentoo as people didn't need to show off their processor speed by comparing their compile times...
Mandrake was the super kool distro that no one took seriously. It was RedHat but with KDE at a time when Gnome was nowhere complete and Red Hat refused to ship the non-free Qt. Red Hat itself was solid and was THE linux distro, they added KDE later on and in Red Hat 7.x, KDE was even usable in Red Hat (before the process of GTK-ifying KDE started in Red Hat 8).
SuSE was the professional distro for people who had money. You could download the packages over the net but not the iso files and not the complete package. Those who did have money said it was good, those who didn't complained that Yast was not free (it wasn't...)
Yast 2 was a huge improvement. The original Yast used to mess up your config files to such a degree that you couldn't edit them with your text editor anymore. Things were not much better in the *drake land. Debian didn't even bother with graphical administrative tools (it still mostly doesn't...)
There were some more user friendly distros as well: Lycoris modified KDE 2.x to such an extent that when KDE 3.x came along, they couldn't port their changes to KDE 3.x and were shipping a modified KDE 2.2 when everyone else was using KDE 3.1 There was Xandros, which tried to resurect Corel Linux by adding Wine to it, only that 70% of the people couldn't install in the first place, there was Lindows and Michael Robertson and the whole running as root fiasco (this was before sudo) and Microsoft suing them and they nearly won, and even before these there was this little startup called OE One which tried to do away with KDE and Gnome by developing a UI based on XUL (yes, the Mozilla XUL) running on Red Hat and Mandrake. Boy was it buggy...
Then Red Hat discontinued its desktop line and lost its prominent position among the community (Ubuntu came along later). Mandrake lost control to its VCs and they effectively fucked the company twice over. It lost focus, momentum and user base and never quite recovered. SuSE was bought by Novel (yes, the NetWare company) and we all know what happend...
Ah, those were the days...
Office 2007's ribbon interface has a very steep learning curve. I completely understand how someone moving from Office 2003/OOo.org can initially get lost in it. It looks overwhelming, and so different to what we are used to.
Give it some time, however and you'll soon be won over. After a week of using it, there was no way I could go back to previous versions of office. How many times have you looked at a menu item in Office 2003/OOo and not know exactly what it's supposed to do until you click on it? Well, that would never happen with ribbon. The interface is so intuitive, so easy to comprehend.... it's a major advancement in productivity suite UI design in my opinion.
My main qualm with Office 2007 (and Office for Mac 2008) is that they are not 100% compatible with previous versions of office even in compatibility mode. Even when you try your best not to use any of the newer features that can not be saved using the old formats, the resulting file always has some minor incompatibility when it is opened in Office 2003 (and Office for Mac 2004). I was working with a group on a presentation last week, and we were using these 4 different versions of office, and we had a hard time interchanging the documents...
Dude, chill out. The word has entered the OED, as well as all respectable dictionaries. Indeed, I find Webster's definition quite apt:
a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet
As you can see, there's no mention of 'iPod' in the definition of the word; nor has there ever been. Now, the etymology of a word is very different to its definition, and I'll grant you that etymologically speaking, podcast wasn't the most correct word to describe this technology, but if you look at the etymology of most of the words we are now using in the English language, you'll see that we are using many of our words in a very convoluted manner. Quite often, the definition we now associate to our words vastly differs with what etymologically the word should mean.
Reading today's news articles, I'm sure when we read: Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis, we don't think that they are systematically killing one out of ten wildlife species in Zimbabwe, even though that's what etymologically, decimate should mean. Now, why should it be any different for podcast?
Languages are living creatures, they evolve and change. At the end of the day, language is a means of communication, and if by saying podcast, both me and you are referring to the same thing and communicating effetively, not only is podcasting not wrong, it is quite an apt and unambiguous word.
Mate, I would soooo love to pay your mortgage/rent for that huge mansion you live in in the outback, but I decided to pay the price and live in the city to use the amenities and services available here, including DSL.
You made your choice by living outside the 60 km zone of any of the 5 big cities (ADSL is now available in CBD and Zone 1 areas in all 5 major cities). Please don't ask us to subsedise your last-mile infrastructure when you expect a telco to invest hundereds of thousands of dollars to support all 3 families living in your area.
Besides, Optus now offers 2Mbps SHDSL ANYWHERE in Australia, it only costs about $4,000.00 per month though. Add that to your mortgate, and you're probably still paying less than what I'm paying to live in the city...
No they did not. Telstra's decision to drop their vaporware Linux drive had nothing do to with SCO, and IIRC was made public a couple of months before the Sco fiasco. Telstra only threatened to move to Linux once it didn't get the deal it wanted from MS. The plan worked and Microsoft promptly came back to them (this was a time when XP's adoption was in doubt) with a much better offer, which killed the Linux process.
Even assuming that Telstra might have had better intentions... is wierd for a fellow Aussie! You should know Telstra better than that!
All correct observations, and my compliments on such detailed knowledge of the era.
It should however be noted that Germans knew of their inferiority to the British Navy and Air Force when WWII began. They did not however expect Britain to enter the war. Britain itself had been caught off-guard. The war, though a certainty in 1939, was not expected until a couple of years later. The British believed that 1939 Germany would not be in a position to wage war across Europe, and would not do so.
Hitler, who himself put no value on the treaties he had himself signed, thought as much of Britain's pledge to defend Poland and the Little Entente. He was also misinformed of the British public opinion and thought a democracy would not take the chance of turning against its public opinion, which even in 1939 was still in appeasement mood. He underestimated the effect of his attack on Poland on the British public opinion. Morover, Hitler had succeeded in misrepresenting his power. Britons at the time were mislead into believing that the German Army and Navy were superior, a belief which as you pointed out, was wrong. However what you can observe with the benefit of hindsight that the German basic machinery was inferior and their gadgets had no real effect, was not so obvious to the British generals of the time.
Your comparison of German vs. Russian, American and even British defence force are thus, a bit misleading. In 1939, Russia and USA were not among the allied forces, and Hitler assumed that it would be himself and Italy vs. an already captured Austria, some german speaking central European areas, the Little Entente, Poland (all of whom had no significant military power) and a France that was deeply in crisis. Comparing Allied machinery at the end of the war, with what Hitler believed he was against in 1939 is a bit misleading.
How I sincerely hope you are right.
But Britain out-producing Germany in the run up and during the war cannot be totally attributed to Democracy vs. Dictatorship. Fact is, Britain at the time was the Empire of the world. Its battleships had been patrolling the world seas virtually uncontended since Trafalgar, for more than a century. The technical know-how of the British Naval Engineers can not be compared to that of Germans who had lost all their colonies after the Great War, and had no real experience of warfare prior to WWII. Britain's officers had seen action dozens of times during the 20th century, from India to South Africa and Sudan and thus had first hand experience in warfare. During the Boer War and also fighting Cuban nationalist, they had come into contact and learned the tactics of guerilla warfare, tactics they successfuly taught the French to be used during resistance. The German officers in comparison had been totally isolated from war experience in the intermittent years.
Obviously it also helped that the British government consisted of men like Attlee, Eden and Churchil, against nutcases like Himmler, Goering and Hitler. But that's perhaps a validation of your argument in itself: that in democracies, great men will eventually come to power at the times of need.
Like you, I also still have faith in freedom and democracy. One should not forget the hard-learned lessons of history. I'm sure democracy will catch up with China, but I shudder at the thought of how ugly it can get before we reach there.
The GP's post is still valid. Whether the end of the Great War, the way it ended, is something to be celebrated and remembered is debatable. My utmost respect to the veterans of the war, and all credit to the brave men and women who fought for what they believed was the right thing, but historically speaking, one wonders whether we should really celebrate the Armistice day.
Note the word "Armistice" means cessation of hostilitie or truce. It does not denote surrender, or anything near that. When the Compiègne agreement was signed, Germany was not a "defeated" party though it was worst off than the start of the war. German revolution and the ineptitude of the Habsburg dynasty coupled with the Greek invasion of Smyrna however put the Central Powers in such a position that by the time of the Versailles Treaty, the feeble 19th-century minded Orlando and Clemenceau could force such a shameful treaty on the "losers" of the war. It didn't help that the American Congress had gone into such an isolationist mood that Wilson didn't have any real bargaining power.
The Versailles Treaty directly lead to the Turkish War of Independence, the amateurish division of the Ottoman Emprire by the British (whose signs are vividly apparent in 21st century Middle East conflicts), the creation of a common country, Yugoslavia, among among 7 very different racial lines (which lead to Croatioan-Bosnian-Serbo wars and later the Kosovo conflict), the creation of another country between the Czechs and the Slovaks who had nothing in comon together, not to mention the rise of nationalis feelings in the Weimer Republic which eventually lead to WWII. The Versailles Treaty, is without a doubt the most shameful treaty of the 20th century, and while I understand its difference with the Compiègne agreement, the latter is certainly the predecessor to the former, and its glorification is very tactless, to say the least.
I'm sure we can find some other common day to commemorate our veterans without glorifying this dark episode of human history. It would be much better if we can find a universally agreed upon day, so that the people of Turkey, Hungry, Austria, Germany and all other nations defeated in the Great War don't have to feel humiliated on this day.
Ah! but isn't it of Celtic origin?
and also deeply entrenched within many European myths, such as Catalan ones?Note: Admittedly it has become very Americanised furing recent decades, but not everything adopted by Americans, is American.
What utter piece of crap that can come out of someone's mouth who has never seen a good public transportation in action. Move on dude, modern public transport can do much more than transport from Central Business District (what you call downtown in the US) to outer suburbs (which is the point your whole argument is based on). In Melbourne, Australia, you can get from virtually any outer suburb to any other outer suburb without going anywhere near the CBD. The combination of trams and trains works wonders, you have tram stations every 200-300 meters so you are bound to be within easy walking distance of one wherever you are, and you have trains to get you to far-away suburbs fast (and Melbouren is one of the world's most geographically distributed cities) Apartments do not exists here outside of the CBD, everyone likes and lives the "Australian Dream" of having quarter of an acre for their backyard garden, and yet everyone still uses the public transport. I am too familiar with the confused looks of shock, awe and hidden admiration whenever an American collegue or friend comes down here for a visit and realise how well a public trnasport system can work.
And this is the best part for you Libertarian slashdotters: we don't pay any taxes for it as it has been privatised for 8-9 years now. We used to subsedise it heavily but it has been self sustaining for the past couple of years and is actually turning a modest profit recently. Beat that!
And guess who is defending the public transport system here...a self proclaimed petrolhead. I have 3 cars and I absolutely love'em. A track-biased M3 beemer for my track days (soon to be replaced by an R8), a Megane R26 F1 hot hatch for my general use, and a super-hungry comfy V8 Holden (with the Corvette engine) for when I just want to enjoy the sound of that huge engine. But for me, cars are for Sunday mornings and track days and especial occassions, public transport is much more easier, cheaper and more comfortable for daily commute. If a public transportation system is built correctly, it can be so comfortable (short wait time, Air Condition in all trams, quiet and peaceful where I can read the newspaper or listen to my podcasts, never overcrowded) that you would loath having to take out your car and deal with the morning and afternoon traffic, just to get to work.
Get over your stereotypical notions of what a public transport system is and how it works. The world has moved on.
What happened? HP happened.
After Fiorina left HP, they were able to get their sh!t together and suprassed Dell as the No. 1 PC manufacturer. Dell realised that their online-only "direct" distribution channel had reached market saturation and that, combined with their wintel-only policy was leaving Dell out of certain segments of the market (read: Wallmart).
They noticed that their stock is taking a beating, and are slowly reversing some 2-decade-old company policies. They are now embracing brick and mortar retail distribution channels very very slowly, and recently committed to it in places such as china.
I remember reading a book back in late 90s by Michael Dell called "Direct from Dell" where he boasted on and on about the value of only doing "direct" sales, and about the advantages of settling on established suppliers. Wonder what his take on the book is now that both policies seem to be in the process of getting slowly overturned.
_ Myth: The prize is awarded to recognize efforts for peace, human rights and democracy only after they have proven successful.
More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments in a process.
Read the rest of this very interesting article here.
And when I think about all the recent Nobel peace prize laureates, I can see that the above holds true. No one knew the 2005 winner, the Iranian Women and Children rights activist, Shirin Ebadi, before the Nobel prize was handed out to her (and I am saying this as an Iranian), but the prize did bring months of media attention and world focus to the issue (the issue of human rights in Iran).
If your business model views 20 year old obsolete software as its core property, it's time to revisit that business model.
How can SIP have a lower call quality than Skype when SIP is only a signalling protocol and doesn't even carry the data streams? (RTP does). Seriously, your sound quality depends on many factors (cheap Grandstream handsets/headsets or ATAs using ultra compressed G.729a codec running on a cheap ADSL connection with high contention ratio and no QoS don't help, you know) but SIP itself, the signalling protocol, isn't one of them.
Any decent VoIP provider will offer you a quality which can never be matched by PSTN, and can only be rivalled by node-to-node ISDN/PRI. If your experience with VoIP has been so bad that you consider Skype to be high quality (and I do use Skype myself daily) then I strongly suggest you consider changing your provider.
It's sad to see that all these MCSA and CCNA people who have no telco background and don't know shit about the fundamentals of networking are installing Asterisk without understanding what they are doing, and are hence ruining the reputation of a fine, neat, simple, clean IETF standard called Session Initiation Protocol.
I work in an Asterisk company which also does SIP/AIX call termination.
;-)
Seriously, one of our main issues is when customers ask about a good wireless handset. There really aren't any. Sure, there are lot of products on the market, from the brandless "dual phone" to Linksys and the vaporware which is Siemens Gigaset. The reality is that WiFi wasn't really designed for real-time applications like VoIP. QoS on WiFi sucks, big time.
If you really need to get a wireless handset though, go for the Linksys WIP 330. It's not cheap (we sell it for A$330 here in the Aussie market) but atleast it works. Mostly
For call termination in the US, have a look at voxbone http://www.voxbone.com/ in the UK try voiceglobe http://www.voiceglobe.net/ and in Australia try Mytel http://www.mytel.net.au/ (Disclaimer: I work for Mytel but have no affiliation with Voiceglobe or Voxbone other than hearing good things about them from some of our customers who use them for call termination in those markets).
Thinking about setting up Asterisk? It's not really that difficult, play with it a bit and by the end of the day you'll have a system which will put Nortel and Avaya to shame, feature-wise. If you feel intimidated at the start, buy an Asterisk GUI tool such as Druid http://www.voiceroute.net/site/index.php or Switchvox www.switchvox.com it makes the job so much easier for a non-PBX person. They are not free (in niether sense of the world) but their prices are easily justifiable for any SME.
It's not that simple. The WTO takes IP very seriously and holds it dear in his heart; and it does have the power (and the precedence) to put heavy fines or sanctions (not that we are going to put US on embargo anytime soon) in cases of non conformance with its rules. You can't just ignor international IP, unless you want to ignore international trade all together
Besides, why should you want to ignore the issue here? This is not a patent-mongering Eolas-like VC-funded private company or a 1-click patent we are talking about. CSIRO put serious effort in early 90s and came up with genuine inventions for wireless data communications; technologies used by nearly all variants of the 802.11 family. CSIRO has tried to play fair, they have not resorted to lawsuits regarding 802.11b and 802.11g (hats-off to them); but they are yet to receive any sort of return from wireless device manufacturers. Why is it so hard for Cisco, D-Link, HP, and other manufacturers who have made billions selling wireless technologies to actually pay a reasonable fee and buy the patents from CSIRO?
It is sad to see that software related and other ludicrous patents filed in the US every day are making slashdot hostile to genuine inventions of technologies with reasonable royalty demands.