Give Draytek a try when you're next looking for a SOHO router replacement. In terms of performance, reliability and configuration options, I haven't found anything to touch them (and no, I don't work for them!).
And that ladies and gentlemen is why I prefer the GPL. It might not be as "free" as a BSD derived license but it's much more pragmatic when you're up against arseholes like this.
I don't have cable subscription and rarely go to the movies so I guess I am not the target demographic. I do eat food - but I don't rent it from a shop. I buy it and eat it. I could of course buy it and give it to someone else (a tramp maybe) - the point is I own the food and do whatever i want with it.
I don't think Spotify's premium service is cheap. The users provide the bulk of the bandwidth to make the system work, Spotify gets advertising revenue anyway (from all the free users) and 99% of their backend stack is built on free software for which they haven't paid a thing (including the actual music data itself which is encoded in ogg format). It's akin to me using the town hall for free and charging people a monthly subscription to come and watch movies, only you have to bring your own chairs.
Until you stop paying your subscription and then you lose it all... The free, ad-supported version of Spotify makes sense to me, definitely useful (and since it's free you can't complain you don't get to keep the music). But surely, if you're handing over money you want to keep what you're buying (or do you just plan to be a life long subscriber)?
Obviously, you don't want to keep everything you listen to but that's what the free version of spotify is for (and the radio).
Fair enough I guess. Maybe I'm just cheap/out of touch - to me the notion of paying £8/month to rent my music just seems a bit crazy. I'd rather pay £16/month and be able to keep everything I consume and access it on my own terms.
Definitely agree with all your points with respect to the free version but none of those points really help defend the case for the premium version... and it's the premium version that I don't really get. I mean why would you pay for something over which you have so little control and suffer artificially restrained choice (not to mention the insult that your own hardware is helping them power the network and thus maximise their profit margin)?
I understand the point of the free version because, like you say, it's a quick and easy way to check out new music (assuming they have it in their catalogue).
My confusion is with the premium subscription - I just seems to me that for the price you pay every month, you don't really come away with much.
How is it cheap? At £8.73 per month that equates to roughly £105 a year. The BBC license fee is only £35 more than that a year.... !
If you could keep what you listened to and were able to play it outside of the DRM laden spotify client, I think £8.75 / month might be acceptable. But as it stands, if you're a premium user you get nothing much more than their "gracious" removal of ads and a slightly higher bit rate (which frankly isn't worth all the much more imho).
or does anyone else not get the whole "spotify" thing? I mean I can sort of appreciate the utility of the free, ad supported version but why in the hell would you pay a monthly subscription for access to music when:
a). you can only play it through spotify and lose access as and when you stop renewing your monthly subscription (as I understand it) b). you have to surrender your bandwidth not only for streaming songs (although I think it does make use of a local cache) but also as a node in the spotify p2p network c). you don't get access to some mega bands (e.g. Metallica, ACDC, Pink Floyd etc.)
Basically, it seems to me that the Spotify guys are the only one's laughing all the way to the bank. I mean, their music is encoded in ogg (presumably mainly to avoid paying any licensing fees), users themselves provide a large chunk of bandwidth to make the system work (through the p2p nature of the spotify client), the spotify infrastructure (according to their own site) runs primarily on open source/free software yet they (afaik) contribute nothing back. Their client is closed source, they don't let you keep the music you stream, they make use of your bandwidth and hard drive space in order to help power the network.
Can someone enlighten me?
Disclaimer: i haven't used spotify so if some of my points are totally wrong, please tell me.
If you're considering getting one of these (and I certainly am), why not go to the N900 mini-site and submit your email address to get an alert when the phone goes on general sale. If nothing else it will show Nokia that there is legitimate, widespread interest in this phone and hopefully help them keep their resolve against the evil telcos!
N900 site is here: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ (scroll all the way to the bottom for the form that lets you submit your email addy).
Where's the problem? If you're a geek you don't use windows (unless work imposes philistine policies). If you're not a geek, you don't choose windows either; the choice is made for you and you get on with living your (probably much more fulfilling) life!
Where I work, our users are all happily using Office 2003 with no immediate desire to change. However, if Outlook 2010 gets proper IMAP support and Samba 4 is a bit more mature by then we'll move our whole user base over in flash as we'll finally be able to move to postfix/Samba4/LDAP and dump Exchange/AD thereby realising our dream of transitioning all of our back end to an open-source stack.
I have to disagree. I have no problem connecting from behind NAT to a my FTP daemon on the public internet. I run vsftpd with forced TLS encryption for both control and data channels.
AFAIK, my ISP (France Telecom) have no plans to implement DNS redirection but they already quite happily throttle and profile my traffic and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to go the DNS redirection route sometime in the future.
So last month I took the decision to simply stop trusting my ISP. I now rent a virtual linux box for £15/month (I used bytemark but there are many others) and have installed OpenVPN on it. The virtual box acts as my network's gateway through which all non-LAN traffic now flows. My ISP has been relegated to essentially a dumb carrier whose only function is to provide a DSL link that allows me to create an encrypted tunnel to the linux box. Stick djb's dnscache (or any other resolver) on as well and you're done.
Added bonus? I can now watch all the BBC iplayer content (I am a UK national recently moved to France and have paid my TV license in the past so I figure, why not?)
Our work mail server gets hit by about 2 spam emails/second on average. Among other defences, we use the zen DNS blocklist from Spamhaus which does a great job of mitigating this deluge but some still manage to find their way through to user's mailboxes.
I also have a personal gmail account which gets a lot of spam but I can't remember the last time Google's filter missed one and let it get through to my inbox - their filter is amazingly accurate. Wouldn't it be great if they made a public blocklist available along the lines of Spamhaus? If I could integrate our work mail server with Goggle's anti-spam filter, my users would love me. Google could make it free for personal/low volume use and charge for enterprise use - I'm sure they'd have loads of takers.
There was a fantastic documentary on the BBC about a month ago called "Farm of the Future" which centred around a farm in Devon and introduced the concepts and ideas behind Permaculture and ecological farming. I found it really inspiring and someone has actually written a write up of the documentary here: http://transitionculture.org/2009/02/23/a-farm-for-the-future-essential-viewing/
Because I found it so interesting and wanted to be able to watch the documentary again in the future, I ripped a copy from iPlayer. If you'd like a copy ping me an email: gpukATdasserverDOTcom
No idea if this is how he does it but i'd guess one way you could go about it would be to install Kannel (http://www.kannel.org/) on your asterisk box and plug in a cheap mobile via serial or usb (older Nokia phones apparently work well).
While I agree with your sentiments, actually iSCSI is viable for SOHOs.
I recently re-evaluated our backup strategy and came to the same conclusion as you i.e. generally speaking "enterprise" backup is in a very sorry state. The only modern approach that I liked was iSCSI but of course the Sun, IBM and Dell solutions all cost upwards of $3K.
The cheap (and almost as good) solution I found was to build your own. All you need is another box and http://www.openfiler.com/ - works like a dream.
Slashdot Mirror
Give Draytek a try when you're next looking for a SOHO router replacement. In terms of performance, reliability and configuration options, I haven't found anything to touch them (and no, I don't work for them!).
"Yet, we tend to take the blogger we follow as a respectful and serious source...". You've got to be kidding?
And that ladies and gentlemen is why I prefer the GPL. It might not be as "free" as a BSD derived license but it's much more pragmatic when you're up against arseholes like this.
I don't have cable subscription and rarely go to the movies so I guess I am not the target demographic. I do eat food - but I don't rent it from a shop. I buy it and eat it. I could of course buy it and give it to someone else (a tramp maybe) - the point is I own the food and do whatever i want with it.
I don't think Spotify's premium service is cheap. The users provide the bulk of the bandwidth to make the system work, Spotify gets advertising revenue anyway (from all the free users) and 99% of their backend stack is built on free software for which they haven't paid a thing (including the actual music data itself which is encoded in ogg format). It's akin to me using the town hall for free and charging people a monthly subscription to come and watch movies, only you have to bring your own chairs.
Bad form to reply to one's own post I know, but judging from the other replies - maybe it really is just me and I'm out of touch...
[/me goes to pester a friend for a spotify invite to find out what all the fuss is about]
Until you stop paying your subscription and then you lose it all... The free, ad-supported version of Spotify makes sense to me, definitely useful (and since it's free you can't complain you don't get to keep the music). But surely, if you're handing over money you want to keep what you're buying (or do you just plan to be a life long subscriber)?
Obviously, you don't want to keep everything you listen to but that's what the free version of spotify is for (and the radio).
Yeah but that's on top of the premium charge you are already paying every month.
Fair enough I guess. Maybe I'm just cheap/out of touch - to me the notion of paying £8/month to rent my music just seems a bit crazy. I'd rather pay £16/month and be able to keep everything I consume and access it on my own terms.
Definitely agree with all your points with respect to the free version but none of those points really help defend the case for the premium version... and it's the premium version that I don't really get. I mean why would you pay for something over which you have so little control and suffer artificially restrained choice (not to mention the insult that your own hardware is helping them power the network and thus maximise their profit margin)?
I understand the point of the free version because, like you say, it's a quick and easy way to check out new music (assuming they have it in their catalogue).
My confusion is with the premium subscription - I just seems to me that for the price you pay every month, you don't really come away with much.
How is it cheap? At £8.73 per month that equates to roughly £105 a year. The BBC license fee is only £35 more than that a year.... !
If you could keep what you listened to and were able to play it outside of the DRM laden spotify client, I think £8.75 / month might be acceptable. But as it stands, if you're a premium user you get nothing much more than their "gracious" removal of ads and a slightly higher bit rate (which frankly isn't worth all the much more imho).
Seriously, I don't get it.
or does anyone else not get the whole "spotify" thing? I mean I can sort of appreciate the utility of the free, ad supported version but why in the hell would you pay a monthly subscription for access to music when:
a). you can only play it through spotify and lose access as and when you stop renewing your monthly subscription (as I understand it)
b). you have to surrender your bandwidth not only for streaming songs (although I think it does make use of a local cache) but also as a node in the spotify p2p network
c). you don't get access to some mega bands (e.g. Metallica, ACDC, Pink Floyd etc.)
Basically, it seems to me that the Spotify guys are the only one's laughing all the way to the bank. I mean, their music is encoded in ogg (presumably mainly to avoid paying any licensing fees), users themselves provide a large chunk of bandwidth to make the system work (through the p2p nature of the spotify client), the spotify infrastructure (according to their own site) runs primarily on open source/free software yet they (afaik) contribute nothing back. Their client is closed source, they don't let you keep the music you stream, they make use of your bandwidth and hard drive space in order to help power the network.
Can someone enlighten me?
Disclaimer: i haven't used spotify so if some of my points are totally wrong, please tell me.
If you're considering getting one of these (and I certainly am), why not go to the N900 mini-site and submit your email address to get an alert when the phone goes on general sale. If nothing else it will show Nokia that there is legitimate, widespread interest in this phone and hopefully help them keep their resolve against the evil telcos!
N900 site is here: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ (scroll all the way to the bottom for the form that lets you submit your email addy).
Also, to whet your appetite of what's likely to come, check out this forum post over on the maemo boards: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=24272
Where's the problem? If you're a geek you don't use windows (unless work imposes philistine policies). If you're not a geek, you don't choose windows either; the choice is made for you and you get on with living your (probably much more fulfilling) life!
I haven't played games in years but if they rebooted Syndicate I'd be on board with a snazy new gaming rig within a day of the official launch!
Where I work, our users are all happily using Office 2003 with no immediate desire to change. However, if Outlook 2010 gets proper IMAP support and Samba 4 is a bit more mature by then we'll move our whole user base over in flash as we'll finally be able to move to postfix/Samba4/LDAP and dump Exchange/AD thereby realising our dream of transitioning all of our back end to an open-source stack.
I have to disagree. I have no problem connecting from behind NAT to a my FTP daemon on the public internet. I run vsftpd with forced TLS encryption for both control and data channels.
AFAIK, my ISP (France Telecom) have no plans to implement DNS redirection but they already quite happily throttle and profile my traffic and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to go the DNS redirection route sometime in the future.
So last month I took the decision to simply stop trusting my ISP. I now rent a virtual linux box for £15/month (I used bytemark but there are many others) and have installed OpenVPN on it. The virtual box acts as my network's gateway through which all non-LAN traffic now flows. My ISP has been relegated to essentially a dumb carrier whose only function is to provide a DSL link that allows me to create an encrypted tunnel to the linux box. Stick djb's dnscache (or any other resolver) on as well and you're done.
Added bonus? I can now watch all the BBC iplayer content (I am a UK national recently moved to France and have paid my TV license in the past so I figure, why not?)
FWIW, Linux Format has actually been available in-store at WHSmiths & larger supermarkets for almost a decade now...
Our work mail server gets hit by about 2 spam emails/second on average. Among other defences, we use the zen DNS blocklist from Spamhaus which does a great job of mitigating this deluge but some still manage to find their way through to user's mailboxes.
I also have a personal gmail account which gets a lot of spam but I can't remember the last time Google's filter missed one and let it get through to my inbox - their filter is amazingly accurate. Wouldn't it be great if they made a public blocklist available along the lines of Spamhaus? If I could integrate our work mail server with Goggle's anti-spam filter, my users would love me. Google could make it free for personal/low volume use and charge for enterprise use - I'm sure they'd have loads of takers.
I think the poster was describing Permaculture (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture).
There was a fantastic documentary on the BBC about a month ago called "Farm of the Future" which centred around a farm in Devon and introduced the concepts and ideas behind Permaculture and ecological farming. I found it really inspiring and someone has actually written a write up of the documentary here: http://transitionculture.org/2009/02/23/a-farm-for-the-future-essential-viewing/
Because I found it so interesting and wanted to be able to watch the documentary again in the future, I ripped a copy from iPlayer. If you'd like a copy ping me an email: gpukATdasserverDOTcom
No idea if this is how he does it but i'd guess one way you could go about it would be to install Kannel (http://www.kannel.org/) on your asterisk box and plug in a cheap mobile via serial or usb (older Nokia phones apparently work well).
Well said. If I had points left, I'd mod you up.
And while I'm at it, duplicity is great for file & directory backup from a linux box to your iSCSI host.
While I agree with your sentiments, actually iSCSI is viable for SOHOs.
I recently re-evaluated our backup strategy and came to the same conclusion as you i.e. generally speaking "enterprise" backup is in a very sorry state. The only modern approach that I liked was iSCSI but of course the Sun, IBM and Dell solutions all cost upwards of $3K.
The cheap (and almost as good) solution I found was to build your own. All you need is another box and http://www.openfiler.com/ - works like a dream.