While that is the case for Gentoo, it is intended to be for hardcore Linux geeks. Apt or RPM based distros such as Redhat, Mandriva, or Ubuntu make it nice and easy to install - go to your package manager, search for "firefox", select "Firefox 3", and click "Install" (or "Apply") and when it's finished, the software has been installed.
That's nicer and more consistent (only one place to look) compared to finding and installing some Windows software. I'm not going to try to pretend that everything is easier using Linux, but it is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, and some Distros are concentrating very much on ensuring that they are as user-friendly and "plug and play"-esq as possible...
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. It seems to be a wide issue though - it's recently been discussed on the news how many UK banks have trillions of pounds of exposure via "Credit Default swaps", which like you mentioned being the case in Switzerland, is also in excess of our GDP...
The UK has NO basis to ever criticize China or any other 3rd world despot or totalitarian state ever again for any abuse of press freedom or censorship or human rights [snip]
Ok, I agree that the UK is chipping away at our freedoms, but we're definitely nowhere near China's level of state control and punishment.
What is bad though, is how most people here are unaware of this erosion of freedoms - in China you know that pretty much everything you say and do is likely to be observed and reported.
As a businessman, I also don't like the idea that if I travel to the UK all my commercial-in-confidence business communications will be recorded by the UK Govt and possibly used to benefit UK companies who may be my competitors. Grrr.
Like the way the US customs officials can inspect anything on your laptop, seize it, or make a copy of the disk? And how emails (or any internet traffic flowing through the US) can be intercepted by Carnivore? As IBBoard said in their reply, if it's secret, encrypt it. Plain text emails always have been an open book to any of the servers or routers between you and the recipient...
That's a very good point. I'd not trust external email providers, regardless of country, not to roll over and supply the information, but I hold all my emails on my own server (along with a handful of clients) and use TLS by default. They'd have to ask me to give them access to my own emails, or find a way to hack that or my (Linux) desktop.
Although I'm sure if they did ask for access they'd be saying "if you've got nothing to hide..."
...of why we shouldn't be outsourcing critical/sensitive data handling. Yes, Government departments can cock-up enough without external help, but so many of these data loss issues at the moment seem to be the fault of a private company they've outsourced to.
Also, I worry about the outsourcing of anything relating to our Country's security. When you give the job to the lowest bidder, what can you expect but a barely adequate service?
Not an error, but I once had to explain to a member of staff that the PC wasn't being rude when Scandisk (or I think it was CHKDSK back then) said the disk type was "FAT".:-D
How about using it to teach students about virtuali[s|z]ation? That seems to be a growing trend among businesses and could certainly prove to be useful, as well as giving them experience with a range of virtualisation offerings.
It would also (at least on certain virtual server products) allow them to work with a variety of different operating systems, without risking messing up critical servers, and possibly learning about snapshot and roll-back options using virtual servers.
In addition, they could learn how to secure different operating systems, and be shown an example of how a server might be hacked, and what to do to lock out the attacker, perform forensics, and repair the damage done (admittedly reputation is harder to repair than an OS/app), and when it's best to wipe everything and start again (or roll-back to a known good server image).
On a completely different track, you could try to start up a University-wide social networking site, and allow the Alumni to join it too. Use it for sharing events, knowledge, ideas, fun, jokes, etc, maybe even have an API so students can extend it like with Facebook.
Obviously this would require some management to ensure that students don't use it to break University rules, intimidate other students, allow copying of others coursework, sharing of copyright materials, etc, but it some of this could be delegated to responsible students, and give them experience and hopefully make them feel valued.
"Many people carry knives for self-defence, despite Youth Justice Board research indicating that 65% of young people carrying knives have had them used against them."
I'm guessing they have an SDSL/SHDSL line (synchronous DSL, so same speed each way) - that's the only way you'll get a decent upstream rate (and if they haven't got that, then they should look at it).
Colocation is indeed another feasible option, but then you have the headache of managing the security and integrity of a system that is outside your corporate firewall, and not under your physical control (See theseincidents of data centre server theft).
Here in the UK we generally already have caps. The package I have with my ISP (£15/month ~= $27) has a 15GB limit for daytime (8am - midnight) usage and they provide tools to allow you to check your remaining bandwidth allowance. This is plenty for mine and my girlfriend's usage (and she often uploads over a thousand photos (admittedly with a fair amount of compression) a week [generally ice hockey games, before people's imagination gets the better of them]).
I have only exceeded that limit once, and that was downloading a Linux distro and then all it's updates and several gigs of backups when setting up a new server, on top of the normal monthly usage.
Generally, if I want to download something large, I now schedule it to download after midnight so it doesn't count towards my allowance. When I was trying out Linux distros on my laptop my total usage reached about 25GB, but billed usage was still well within the limits.
If I was given a limit of 250GB, then I might download more Linux distros to try out more regularly, but I doubt my usage would be that much higher, and I certainly would find it hard to hit that limit...
It's still better than the lifetime of most other electronic storage media. Obviously conservation efforts (i.e. duplication) would have to be made (at it's half life of 50 years I'd guess), but the same applies to film, paper, etc.
The advantage of digital media though is that multiple identical copies can be made, without any loss that can occur when duplicating analogue materials, and the cost of multiple digital copies over an extended period is almost certainly going to be considerably less than the cost of performing restoration and preservation on, for instance, a several hundred year old manuscript.
Cool - combine that with the previous article on SSD hard disks, and I think half of the reviewer's complaints would be resolved... Definitely something to look forward to when it reaches the mass market.:-)
Damn, and for a moment I thought they were going to crack down on the water based, ship raiding pirates.
What they (the submitter and linked article) should have said was "The G8 will be discussing new laws relating to copyright infringement"... Is that really more important than world hunger/poverty/climate change though?
Time for Google and anyone else wanting to protect their user's privacy to move the logs to another jurisdiction where wholesale handing over of logs would not be permitted...
Obviously it's too late for this judgement, but for someone not covered by this court's jurisdiction, and AFAIK never having watched any Viacom owned material on Youtube, I protest at having my viewing habits handed over in this fashion (yes, I know that quite possibly this has been done commercially by Youtube/Google - but it's generally indirect through their advertiser links or javascript, which I can block or disable).
Slashdot Mirror
While that is the case for Gentoo, it is intended to be for hardcore Linux geeks. Apt or RPM based distros such as Redhat, Mandriva, or Ubuntu make it nice and easy to install - go to your package manager, search for "firefox", select "Firefox 3", and click "Install" (or "Apply") and when it's finished, the software has been installed.
That's nicer and more consistent (only one place to look) compared to finding and installing some Windows software. I'm not going to try to pretend that everything is easier using Linux, but it is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, and some Distros are concentrating very much on ensuring that they are as user-friendly and "plug and play"-esq as possible...
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. It seems to be a wide issue though - it's recently been discussed on the news how many UK banks have trillions of pounds of exposure via "Credit Default swaps", which like you mentioned being the case in Switzerland, is also in excess of our GDP...
The UK has NO basis to ever criticize China or any other 3rd world despot or totalitarian state ever again for any abuse of press freedom or censorship or human rights [snip]
Ok, I agree that the UK is chipping away at our freedoms, but we're definitely nowhere near China's level of state control and punishment.
What is bad though, is how most people here are unaware of this erosion of freedoms - in China you know that pretty much everything you say and do is likely to be observed and reported.
As a businessman, I also don't like the idea that if I travel to the UK all my commercial-in-confidence business communications will be recorded by the UK Govt and possibly used to benefit UK companies who may be my competitors. Grrr.
Like the way the US customs officials can inspect anything on your laptop, seize it, or make a copy of the disk? And how emails (or any internet traffic flowing through the US) can be intercepted by Carnivore? As IBBoard said in their reply, if it's secret, encrypt it. Plain text emails always have been an open book to any of the servers or routers between you and the recipient...
I watched that. And I must admit I was concerned by how not that far out some of it was, and how we seem to be moving more in that direction...
I think he was making a joke. :-p
"bunny"?
Ditto here - I'm not aware of any major political problems in Switzerland. Belgium on the other hand...
That's a very good point. I'd not trust external email providers, regardless of country, not to roll over and supply the information, but I hold all my emails on my own server (along with a handful of clients) and use TLS by default. They'd have to ask me to give them access to my own emails, or find a way to hack that or my (Linux) desktop.
Although I'm sure if they did ask for access they'd be saying "if you've got nothing to hide..."
...of why we shouldn't be outsourcing critical/sensitive data handling. Yes, Government departments can cock-up enough without external help, but so many of these data loss issues at the moment seem to be the fault of a private company they've outsourced to.
Also, I worry about the outsourcing of anything relating to our Country's security. When you give the job to the lowest bidder, what can you expect but a barely adequate service?
Not an error, but I once had to explain to a member of staff that the PC wasn't being rude when Scandisk (or I think it was CHKDSK back then) said the disk type was "FAT". :-D
They've had a takedown notice, as it seems did YouTube:
http://www.thinknext.net/archives/2281
How about using it to teach students about virtuali[s|z]ation? That seems to be a growing trend among businesses and could certainly prove to be useful, as well as giving them experience with a range of virtualisation offerings.
It would also (at least on certain virtual server products) allow them to work with a variety of different operating systems, without risking messing up critical servers, and possibly learning about snapshot and roll-back options using virtual servers.
In addition, they could learn how to secure different operating systems, and be shown an example of how a server might be hacked, and what to do to lock out the attacker, perform forensics, and repair the damage done (admittedly reputation is harder to repair than an OS/app), and when it's best to wipe everything and start again (or roll-back to a known good server image).
On a completely different track, you could try to start up a University-wide social networking site, and allow the Alumni to join it too. Use it for sharing events, knowledge, ideas, fun, jokes, etc, maybe even have an API so students can extend it like with Facebook.
Obviously this would require some management to ensure that students don't use it to break University rules, intimidate other students, allow copying of others coursework, sharing of copyright materials, etc, but it some of this could be delegated to responsible students, and give them experience and hopefully make them feel valued.
So, carrying as knife makes you safer?
Not according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jun/06/qanda.ukcrime :
"Many people carry knives for self-defence, despite Youth Justice Board research indicating that 65% of young people carrying knives have had them used against them."
I'm guessing they have an SDSL/SHDSL line (synchronous DSL, so same speed each way) - that's the only way you'll get a decent upstream rate (and if they haven't got that, then they should look at it).
Colocation is indeed another feasible option, but then you have the headache of managing the security and integrity of a system that is outside your corporate firewall, and not under your physical control (See these incidents of data centre server theft).
Must... Not... Laugh...
Sides they are hurtink, ouch!!! [/Pitr impression]
Here in the UK we generally already have caps. The package I have with my ISP (£15/month ~= $27) has a 15GB limit for daytime (8am - midnight) usage and they provide tools to allow you to check your remaining bandwidth allowance. This is plenty for mine and my girlfriend's usage (and she often uploads over a thousand photos (admittedly with a fair amount of compression) a week [generally ice hockey games, before people's imagination gets the better of them]).
I have only exceeded that limit once, and that was downloading a Linux distro and then all it's updates and several gigs of backups when setting up a new server, on top of the normal monthly usage.
Generally, if I want to download something large, I now schedule it to download after midnight so it doesn't count towards my allowance. When I was trying out Linux distros on my laptop my total usage reached about 25GB, but billed usage was still well within the limits.
If I was given a limit of 250GB, then I might download more Linux distros to try out more regularly, but I doubt my usage would be that much higher, and I certainly would find it hard to hit that limit...
It's also on the BBC News site:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7574255.stm
It's still better than the lifetime of most other electronic storage media. Obviously conservation efforts (i.e. duplication) would have to be made (at it's half life of 50 years I'd guess), but the same applies to film, paper, etc.
The advantage of digital media though is that multiple identical copies can be made, without any loss that can occur when duplicating analogue materials, and the cost of multiple digital copies over an extended period is almost certainly going to be considerably less than the cost of performing restoration and preservation on, for instance, a several hundred year old manuscript.
Cool - combine that with the previous article on SSD hard disks, and I think half of the reviewer's complaints would be resolved... Definitely something to look forward to when it reaches the mass market. :-)
...and then drop a line to the RIAA. ;-)
Damn, and for a moment I thought they were going to crack down on the water based, ship raiding pirates.
What they (the submitter and linked article) should have said was "The G8 will be discussing new laws relating to copyright infringement"... Is that really more important than world hunger/poverty/climate change though?
Time for Google and anyone else wanting to protect their user's privacy to move the logs to another jurisdiction where wholesale handing over of logs would not be permitted...
Obviously it's too late for this judgement, but for someone not covered by this court's jurisdiction, and AFAIK never having watched any Viacom owned material on Youtube, I protest at having my viewing habits handed over in this fashion (yes, I know that quite possibly this has been done commercially by Youtube/Google - but it's generally indirect through their advertiser links or javascript, which I can block or disable).
Sorry to reply to myself, but replace "do" with "get caught doing" - that's what I meant to say...
Well, it does give us more politicians and therefore more opportunity to watch them falling on their sword when they do something like this...
Please state your sources and/or calculations to back this up.