Since when is it cheaper to use wireless than to plug in a wire? Price is very important in 3rd world countries, and I don't think they are willing to pay for the luxury of not having to put a cable into the computer.
Besides most laptop come with a wired ethernet adaptor, but not with WiFi. Therefore, a wire-based system makes a lot more sense.
Spamkillers like this one are also based on whitelisting e-mail addresses (although with built-in mechanisms to enable automatic whitelisting of non-spammers):
http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/
Since this method works much better than spamassassin, RBL and similar methods, we better get used to whitelisting. Telstra simply has to get onto the whitelist fast.
What about this compromise: Mozilla switches to become Firebird, and the Firebird project moves to Mozilla.org. The browser gets the name, and the database gets a lot of hits:-)
Renaming Phoenix to Firebird would be like renaming MySQL to Konqueror. This makes no sense at all, and seems very destructive to a fellow Open Source project.
I sincerely hope that the Phoenix team finds another name than Firebird.
A craftsman learned some skills and knows how to use them on similar tasks.
An Engineer is able to scale into unknown territory.
So basically, if you are a programmer and you are able to scale into a project that is 100 times bigger than what you have ever done before, successfully, you're an engineer. If you can't scale that much, you're not.
There is one thing you cannot use http for: Specifying the filename on the client computer. The URL does not specify the file extension (a php file can output a png file, for instance), only the mime type can give a hint.
But if you want to serve a firmware file, for instance, you might use an uncommon file extension like ".fir". This filename extension cannot be served correctly via http, only via ftp. Check out how it works on a Macintosh if you don't believe it:-)
Copenhagen (Denmark) has that already, but I don't know anybody that uses it. Your plan for the day is made the day before - when you set your alarm clock. When you've eaten breakfast you drive to work. You don't turn on your PC to check the traffic - that wouldn't get you faster to work.
Once you're on the road, traffic radio takes care of redirections in case of special problems, and even though they use sensors today instead of helicopter - who cares?
Last week the sensor system was down btw, so they asked people to phone in with their mobile phones, and the information given in the radio based on those phoners was very good - if not better than when they use the sensors, simply because the cause for problems was included in the messages.
This was introduced in Denmark a couple of years ago, but it failed to get broad appeal.
If you want to see how to bring down the amount of cash that people have, you should have a look at the Danish "Dankort" system. It is because of that system that Denmark has the lowest amount of cash in circulation compared to the size of the economy. Personally I almost never carry any cash around.
http://www.dankort.dk/ (Danish)
The Dankort system is an online system with identity, but it has been constructed in a way that makes almost anybody able to get it. Of a population of 5 million, there are 3.3 million Dankort. If you subtract the children and the very old people, you'll find that almost anybody uses it.
Within a couple of years, non-democratic governments will have a copy of the source code of Windows, and some governments, that have been cooperating with local companies to do industrial espionage, will also have it.
The old argument that Linux is less secure because evil hackers can see the source code now also applies to Windows. Except that the good guys can't see the Windows source code. I wonder what they're hiding.
Having been a Borland tool user since Borland was invented, I'm sure that Delphi could become the JBuilder of.net. This makes a lot of companies interested in buying Borland - for each their reasons: IBM, Sun, Microsoft. One thing is sure: Fuller's own future looks bright, no matter who he sells to.
I started to say "I only support Linux" a year ago, but now everybody seems to use Linux on the desktop. So even though Linux requires less support, the amount of Linux users makes me spend more and more time supporting family and stuff...
Most I've heard that tried to upgrade Red Hat 7.3 computers to 8.0, have failed. My own only runs windowmaker, but KDE and Gnome fail to launch. Some people say I should be happy:-)
The kernel only changed from 2.4.18-10 to 2.4.18-14, but my uhci usb wasn't detected automatically, so it removed my mouse, "rpm --rebuild" didn't work on the source rpms I downloaded from Nvidia (--rebuild is no longer an rpm option), Xconfigurator is gone, but the kernel seems to detect other hardware on my motherboard better because everything runs much faster now.
The discussion we had lately about bluecurve is much better understood when you try Red Hat 8.0. KDE and Gnome look so much the same that most people would probably want to choose the default (Gnome), and then they don't find all the neat stuff built into KDE (like the KDE file system with sftp support, KDE printing etc.).
Bluecurve is not good for experienced users, but seems to be a gift to new Linux users. They will feel welcome. Since only a small percentage of desktop users use Linux now, I think this is a good step on the road to make GNU/Linux the dominant desktop operating system.
I have provided Linux desktops to several dumb Windows users in companies, and I typically tell them:
- Where the start menu is (click on the K-button). - Where their e-mail program is (the icon with the E and a letter, kmail) - Where the desktop office suite is (StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0)
Only very few users I told more information, like showing them konqueror and explaining them about not to worry about viruses etc. All users managed to use it successfully and effectively.
The result was, that the Linux desktop TCO, including user education and productivity stuff is far lower than Windows.
In the long run it even improves: Windows users typically call their hotline if they receive pdf files or zip files because they don't have software to display it. And if they want to create pdf files they have to buy extra software.
When users have to find their own files, Linux is a great thing for system administrators. The concept of home directory actually works on Linux, and with symbolic links, their home directory is all they have to care about.
And then there are crashes and users getting a new PC. On Windows, your laptop registry is deleted, which severely impacts user productivity after getting the new PC. On Linux, you just restore the configuration files from the backup after you reinstalled on a new harddisk, and the user is fully productive from day 1 with the new PC.
This increases the user productivity stability. So the real reason to switch to Linux is to lower cost and increase the availability of user productivity.
This problem is very real - if you got 2 satellite dishes and 10 television sets, you need 20 satellite receivers and potentially more than 1 kilometer antenna cable to make it all work. Most people I know that have satellite dishes, are not able to watch satellite TV on all their television sets, simply because that would require too much cabling.
If you instead put up 2 ethernet devices at the satellite dish and 1 ethernet video receiver at each television, you have reduced the number of devices by almost 50%, and instead of doing expensive and complicated antenna cabling with 3dB loss for each split, you just use your existing ethernet cables. So you have reduced the problem from something that involves a specialist to something everybody can set up themselves.
If a TV transmission takes 2Mbps, and you have 100Mbps, there is plenty of bandwidth. If you compress it less to save hardware costs, there is still lots of bandwidth, especially if you don't use all your TV sets at the same time.
The only problem is that this technology makes it possible to transmit pay-per-view transmissions via 802.11 wireless to your neighbors - and that's not legal.
I see no reason to have satellite receivers, decoders, PVRs etc. at the television. To me, it's much more logical to put those into the cellar and then only have ethernet in the TV or in a single set-top box. Why not be able to view your recorded TV shows anywhere in your house instead of connecting the PVR to a single TV set?
A lot of people focus on Personal Video Recording, but what we really lack is the possibility to transmit video via ethernet cable (TCP/IP), so that we can have 10-20 televisions without having tons of coax cable around.
It's very simple: One box located at the satellite dish (or TV-cable where it enters the building) receives the TV-signal and provides it via ethernet in full quality, and another box at the TV receives that signal and provides the ability to remote control the receiver via a remote control and ethernet.
Since Denmark is one of the countries with the smallest amount of cash around, because we all use electronic cards when shopping in supermarket, paying for parking the car etc., there is actually information about what products we buy, stored electronically.
If all the databases in Denmark were linked together, they could find out, how many people that bought a specific toothbrush in 1992, bought hearth attack medicine in 1996. The CPR-number uniquely identifies the population and immigrants. We store:
- Acquisition of strong medicine is registered centrally with your CPR-number. - General shopping is registered at the shopping centers with timestamp and location. Your payment is stored at the banks with timestamp and location, hooked up to your CPR-number. - Family trouble that involves social authorities are registered at their place with CPR-number. If your child's institution get a suspicion that you have family problems, this is also stored here. - All the address you have lived a couple of years back. - Your family relations. - Insurances. - Health expenses at doctors, hospitals (if they apply - normally visiting doctors and hospitals is free around here) is stored centrally. - Your relationship with army etc. is stored at the army, with your cpr-number. - Your workplace is registered with cpr. The company tells the authorities how much you earn, and then the authorities can do things like holding back your wage if you owe money to the state. The state also tells the employers how much tax they should hold back from the employee (in Denmark, the employee does the tax declaration - not the employer) - All your tax information is stored centrally. - A few video rent chains once required you to give them their cpr-number. This is no longer the case. - The police stores everything based on CPR-number. - Your cars license plate is stored with your CPR-number.
So - everything is digital and automatic. This reduces costs a lot. Going this way is inevitable if you want an effective society. Denying digitalization of public administration is like not wanting cars on the roads. The trick is to handle it well - and I believe that this is the case here.
Denmark has had this since the 1970's, which is also the reason why the Danish population is very popular amongst researchers. All health care information is available through this central computer system, and this makes researchers able to find correlations quickly. All tax information is provided this way, too. You cannot open a bank account without telling your 10-digit identification number, which the bank will use to report to the state.
It is extremely convenient - when moving, you only have to tell it once, and then all banks, insurance companies, the army (if you are reserve), your doctor etc. know your new address.
There are some security concerns and there is a very strict legislation about how to handle this system, but the economical benefits are huge and it does benefit society a lot.
Having lived in both in Denmark where everybody has an ID-number (but no ID-cards), and in Germany, where everybody has an ID-card (but no ID-number), I clearly prefer the Danish system.
Most wars since the invention of the Geneva Convention have used that convention somehow. Gas wasn't used much in WW2, and there were taken a lot of prisoners during WW2, too (instead of just killing them).
Wars are about showing power. It only escalates if the loosing part really believes that it might win the war by escalating it.
This new weapon can make a war keep very "clean" if the one using it will win no matter what. Like USA vs. Iraq.
An exhibition is not only about showing products - it's often more about making contacts. Being placed in front of codeweavers, they can see all the people visiting codeweavers. I wouldn't be too happy if I were codeweavers.
1) Provide tools for increasing productivity in archiving digital photos, both scanned and those taken by digital cameras, together with descriptions and other information about the photo (-> use as little time per photo as possible). 2) Provides a well defined and easy readable file format that makes it easy to preserve photos (like family photos) for many decades (and still be compatible with future computer equipment). 3) Provides tools to publish photos (and associated textual information).
Today, there are Win32 tools, php tools, Linux commandline tools and java-based tools available from this project.
Currently, we seek java developers that are willing to help our java-based GUI productivity tool to reach a state where it can be released for the average end-user.
There was a petition out where you could sign up for demanding a Linux version of the upcoming patch, and I'm sure this has been one of the reasons why they will support it.
The Tribes 2 community has proven very, very strong, and even long after Dynamix (the creator) was closed by Sierra, Tribes 2 still lives on.
Tribes 2 is a game that is VERY different from most other 3D shooting games - it's almost closer to football than Quake once you've learned to play it right. Teamwork is everything, and it's almost unsuitable for playing without a clan membership.
There is a lot of information that is mandatory to put on food today. In EU, this includes an expiration date and list of ingredients (and batch number in some countries), but none of this information can be scanned automatically by the barcode reader in these new fridges.
What we need is a new legislation that makes all food carry this kind of information in machine-readable forms, so that these possibilities become reality:
- When you open the fridge in the morning, the fridge tells you that the milk is too old. - Visually impaired users can scan the food they take out and get the list of ingredients displayed with large fonts. - The batch number of the products can be checked via the internet, so that if a company needs to withdraw some food from the market, all fridges that contain that food will issue a warning to the user. - Users with food allergies can make the fridge warn if the product they scan contains ingredients that the user cannot eat.
The ingredients list can be retrieved via the internet, but that would make correct fridge operation dependent on a stable internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when is it cheaper to use wireless than to plug in a wire? Price is very important in 3rd world countries, and I don't think they are willing to pay for the luxury of not having to put a cable into the computer.
Besides most laptop come with a wired ethernet adaptor, but not with WiFi. Therefore, a wire-based system makes a lot more sense.
I wonder if they're using Active Spam Killer:
http://a-s-k.sf.net/
Spamkillers like this one are also based on whitelisting e-mail addresses (although with built-in mechanisms to enable automatic whitelisting of non-spammers):
http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/
Since this method works much better than spamassassin, RBL and similar methods, we better get used to whitelisting. Telstra simply has to get onto the whitelist fast.
What about this compromise: Mozilla switches to become Firebird, and the Firebird project moves to Mozilla.org. The browser gets the name, and the database gets a lot of hits :-)
Renaming Phoenix to Firebird would be like renaming MySQL to Konqueror. This makes no sense at all, and seems very destructive to a fellow Open Source project.
I sincerely hope that the Phoenix team finds another name than Firebird.
Lars Dybdahl
A craftsman learned some skills and knows how to use them on similar tasks.
An Engineer is able to scale into unknown territory.
So basically, if you are a programmer and you are able to scale into a project that is 100 times bigger than what you have ever done before, successfully, you're an engineer. If you can't scale that much, you're not.
There is one thing you cannot use http for: Specifying the filename on the client computer. The URL does not specify the file extension (a php file can output a png file, for instance), only the mime type can give a hint.
:-)
But if you want to serve a firmware file, for instance, you might use an uncommon file extension like ".fir". This filename extension cannot be served correctly via http, only via ftp. Check out how it works on a Macintosh if you don't believe it
Dybdahl.
Copenhagen (Denmark) has that already, but I don't know anybody that uses it. Your plan for the day is made the day before - when you set your alarm clock. When you've eaten breakfast you drive to work. You don't turn on your PC to check the traffic - that wouldn't get you faster to work.
Once you're on the road, traffic radio takes care of redirections in case of special problems, and even though they use sensors today instead of helicopter - who cares?
Last week the sensor system was down btw, so they asked people to phone in with their mobile phones, and the information given in the radio based on those phoners was very good - if not better than when they use the sensors, simply because the cause for problems was included in the messages.
Dybdahl.
This was introduced in Denmark a couple of years ago, but it failed to get broad appeal.
If you want to see how to bring down the amount of cash that people have, you should have a look at the Danish "Dankort" system. It is because of that system that Denmark has the lowest amount of cash in circulation compared to the size of the economy. Personally I almost never carry any cash around.
http://www.dankort.dk/ (Danish)
The Dankort system is an online system with identity, but it has been constructed in a way that makes almost anybody able to get it. Of a population of 5 million, there are 3.3 million Dankort. If you subtract the children and the very old people, you'll find that almost anybody uses it.
Lars Dybdahl.
Within a couple of years, non-democratic governments will have a copy of the source code of Windows, and some governments, that have been cooperating with local companies to do industrial espionage, will also have it.
The old argument that Linux is less secure because evil hackers can see the source code now also applies to Windows. Except that the good guys can't see the Windows source code. I wonder what they're hiding.
Lars Dybdahl.
Having been a Borland tool user since Borland was invented, I'm sure that Delphi could become the JBuilder of .net. This makes a lot of companies interested in buying Borland - for each their reasons: IBM, Sun, Microsoft. One thing is sure: Fuller's own future looks bright, no matter who he sells to.
I started to say "I only support Linux" a year ago, but now everybody seems to use Linux on the desktop. So even though Linux requires less support, the amount of Linux users makes me spend more and more time supporting family and stuff...
I wonder if this means the end to Cat-Photo... although Cat-Photo still has some advantages to MPV - especially simplicity.
http://cat-photo.sourceforge.net/
Dybdahl.
Most I've heard that tried to upgrade Red Hat 7.3 computers to 8.0, have failed. My own only runs windowmaker, but KDE and Gnome fail to launch. Some people say I should be happy :-)
The kernel only changed from 2.4.18-10 to 2.4.18-14, but my uhci usb wasn't detected automatically, so it removed my mouse, "rpm --rebuild" didn't work on the source rpms I downloaded from Nvidia (--rebuild is no longer an rpm option), Xconfigurator is gone, but the kernel seems to detect other hardware on my motherboard better because everything runs much faster now.
The discussion we had lately about bluecurve is much better understood when you try Red Hat 8.0. KDE and Gnome look so much the same that most people would probably want to choose the default (Gnome), and then they don't find all the neat stuff built into KDE (like the KDE file system with sftp support, KDE printing etc.).
Bluecurve is not good for experienced users, but seems to be a gift to new Linux users. They will feel welcome. Since only a small percentage of desktop users use Linux now, I think this is a good step on the road to make GNU/Linux the dominant desktop operating system.
Dybdahl.
I have provided Linux desktops to several dumb Windows users in companies, and I typically tell them:
- Where the start menu is (click on the K-button).
- Where their e-mail program is (the icon with the E and a letter, kmail)
- Where the desktop office suite is (StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0)
Only very few users I told more information, like showing them konqueror and explaining them about not to worry about viruses etc. All users managed to use it successfully and effectively.
The result was, that the Linux desktop TCO, including user education and productivity stuff is far lower than Windows.
In the long run it even improves: Windows users typically call their hotline if they receive pdf files or zip files because they don't have software to display it. And if they want to create pdf files they have to buy extra software.
When users have to find their own files, Linux is a great thing for system administrators. The concept of home directory actually works on Linux, and with symbolic links, their home directory is all they have to care about.
And then there are crashes and users getting a new PC. On Windows, your laptop registry is deleted, which severely impacts user productivity after getting the new PC. On Linux, you just restore the configuration files from the backup after you reinstalled on a new harddisk, and the user is fully productive from day 1 with the new PC.
This increases the user productivity stability. So the real reason to switch to Linux is to lower cost and increase the availability of user productivity.
This problem is very real - if you got 2 satellite dishes and 10 television sets, you need 20 satellite receivers and potentially more than 1 kilometer antenna cable to make it all work. Most people I know that have satellite dishes, are not able to watch satellite TV on all their television sets, simply because that would require too much cabling.
If you instead put up 2 ethernet devices at the satellite dish and 1 ethernet video receiver at each television, you have reduced the number of devices by almost 50%, and instead of doing expensive and complicated antenna cabling with 3dB loss for each split, you just use your existing ethernet cables. So you have reduced the problem from something that involves a specialist to something everybody can set up themselves.
If a TV transmission takes 2Mbps, and you have 100Mbps, there is plenty of bandwidth. If you compress it less to save hardware costs, there is still lots of bandwidth, especially if you don't use all your TV sets at the same time.
The only problem is that this technology makes it possible to transmit pay-per-view transmissions via 802.11 wireless to your neighbors - and that's not legal.
I see no reason to have satellite receivers, decoders, PVRs etc. at the television. To me, it's much more logical to put those into the cellar and then only have ethernet in the TV or in a single set-top box. Why not be able to view your recorded TV shows anywhere in your house instead of connecting the PVR to a single TV set?
A lot of people focus on Personal Video Recording, but what we really lack is the possibility to transmit video via ethernet cable (TCP/IP), so that we can have 10-20 televisions without having tons of coax cable around.
It's very simple: One box located at the satellite dish (or TV-cable where it enters the building) receives the TV-signal and provides it via ethernet in full quality, and another box at the TV receives that signal and provides the ability to remote control the receiver via a remote control and ethernet.
But I guess this violates the DMCA?
Dybdahl.
Since Denmark is one of the countries with the smallest amount of cash around, because we all use electronic cards when shopping in supermarket, paying for parking the car etc., there is actually information about what products we buy, stored electronically.
If all the databases in Denmark were linked together, they could find out, how many people that bought a specific toothbrush in 1992, bought hearth attack medicine in 1996. The CPR-number uniquely identifies the population and immigrants. We store:
- Acquisition of strong medicine is registered centrally with your CPR-number.
- General shopping is registered at the shopping centers with timestamp and location. Your payment is stored at the banks with timestamp and location, hooked up to your CPR-number.
- Family trouble that involves social authorities are registered at their place with CPR-number. If your child's institution get a suspicion that you have family problems, this is also stored here.
- All the address you have lived a couple of years back.
- Your family relations.
- Insurances.
- Health expenses at doctors, hospitals (if they apply - normally visiting doctors and hospitals is free around here) is stored centrally.
- Your relationship with army etc. is stored at the army, with your cpr-number.
- Your workplace is registered with cpr. The company tells the authorities how much you earn, and then the authorities can do things like holding back your wage if you owe money to the state. The state also tells the employers how much tax they should hold back from the employee (in Denmark, the employee does the tax declaration - not the employer)
- All your tax information is stored centrally.
- A few video rent chains once required you to give them their cpr-number. This is no longer the case.
- The police stores everything based on CPR-number.
- Your cars license plate is stored with your CPR-number.
So - everything is digital and automatic. This reduces costs a lot. Going this way is inevitable if you want an effective society. Denying digitalization of public administration is like not wanting cars on the roads. The trick is to handle it well - and I believe that this is the case here.
Denmark has had this since the 1970's, which is also the reason why the Danish population is very popular amongst researchers. All health care information is available through this central computer system, and this makes researchers able to find correlations quickly. All tax information is provided this way, too. You cannot open a bank account without telling your 10-digit identification number, which the bank will use to report to the state.
It is extremely convenient - when moving, you only have to tell it once, and then all banks, insurance companies, the army (if you are reserve), your doctor etc. know your new address.
There are some security concerns and there is a very strict legislation about how to handle this system, but the economical benefits are huge and it does benefit society a lot.
Having lived in both in Denmark where everybody has an ID-number (but no ID-cards), and in Germany, where everybody has an ID-card (but no ID-number), I clearly prefer the Danish system.
Dybdahl.
Most wars since the invention of the Geneva Convention have used that convention somehow. Gas wasn't used much in WW2, and there were taken a lot of prisoners during WW2, too (instead of just killing them).
Wars are about showing power. It only escalates if the loosing part really believes that it might win the war by escalating it.
This new weapon can make a war keep very "clean" if the one using it will win no matter what. Like USA vs. Iraq.
Dybdahl.
An exhibition is not only about showing products - it's often more about making contacts. Being placed in front of codeweavers, they can see all the people visiting codeweavers. I wouldn't be too happy if I were codeweavers.
The http://cat-photo.com/ project aims to:
1) Provide tools for increasing productivity in archiving digital photos, both scanned and those taken by digital cameras, together with descriptions and other information about the photo (-> use as little time per photo as possible).
2) Provides a well defined and easy readable file format that makes it easy to preserve photos (like family photos) for many decades (and still be compatible with future computer equipment).
3) Provides tools to publish photos (and associated textual information).
Today, there are Win32 tools, php tools, Linux commandline tools and java-based tools available from this project.
Currently, we seek java developers that are willing to help our java-based GUI productivity tool to reach a state where it can be released for the average end-user.
Dybdahl.
It's a beta patch, so it won't show up when you update normally. In fact, do not install it unless you know what you are doing.
Dybdahl.
-=EEF=-Offence leader
http://www.euroeliteforce.net/
There was a petition out where you could sign up for demanding a Linux version of the upcoming patch, and I'm sure this has been one of the reasons why they will support it.
The Tribes 2 community has proven very, very strong, and even long after Dynamix (the creator) was closed by Sierra, Tribes 2 still lives on.
Tribes 2 is a game that is VERY different from most other 3D shooting games - it's almost closer to football than Quake once you've learned to play it right. Teamwork is everything, and it's almost unsuitable for playing without a clan membership.
Dybdahl
-=EEF=-Offence leader
http://www.euroeliteforce.net/
There is a lot of information that is mandatory to put on food today. In EU, this includes an expiration date and list of ingredients (and batch number in some countries), but none of this information can be scanned automatically by the barcode reader in these new fridges.
What we need is a new legislation that makes all food carry this kind of information in machine-readable forms, so that these possibilities become reality:
- When you open the fridge in the morning, the fridge tells you that the milk is too old.
- Visually impaired users can scan the food they take out and get the list of ingredients displayed with large fonts.
- The batch number of the products can be checked via the internet, so that if a company needs to withdraw some food from the market, all fridges that contain that food will issue a warning to the user.
- Users with food allergies can make the fridge warn if the product they scan contains ingredients that the user cannot eat.
The ingredients list can be retrieved via the internet, but that would make correct fridge operation dependent on a stable internet connection.