I have a Nokia 770. Gizmo (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) works fine on it which means that the microhone and speaskers will do. I plan to geat a real SIP-phone on it (preferably Twinkle) so I can use other PSTN than SipPhone.
I have a Zyxel P2000W. The main attraction of a SIP-phone on the 770 (apart from carriens one thing less) is that the 770 have a prowser that can be used to accept stupid disclaimers that cafe and hotels put up. It feels very stupid when the Zyxel phone is not working because it cannot press the "ok" or "promise not to send spam" button.
Maybe we should not blame the courts for letting the police doing this, given probably cause.
But sneaking bugging devices into the pockets of millions of unsuspecting citizens is just wrong.
We do not know who is responsible for this invasion of privacy. But if people could choose between a phone that would let you be bugged and one that would not, most would probably choose that latter. In a free marked you would expect phones to be sold as bug-free, with big yellow stickers saying "this phone will not let you be bugged".
Well, here in Denmark you could buy a GSM phone that you could use in the US. Ask for a tri-band. You will just have to pay extra for it not be locked to an operator.
But danish phones might be bugged too. If their software can be updated remotely, it can probably do the same tricks. If you buy a phone that is not locket to an operator, you would think that only the manufacturer could change its software (with the help of the current network). Most if not all manufacturers operate on the US marked so they might coorperate.
Maybe you should try a PDA running Linux with a GSM card.
I use a WiFi SIP phone. For all I know it could be bugged in the same way, but SIP is an open standard, so it would be possible to build a bug-free phone.
Well, we have seen the slippery slope in other countries.
Here in Denmark we have had such a system for more than a year. The police get secret blacklists from the "Save The Children" organization. The polices have signed contracts with all Danish ISP's. There are government reports talking about blocking hate speech, racism, and threats of violence. Last month a danish ISP was ordered to block allofmp3.com by a court ruling, referring to the these filters. http://itpol.dk/sager/nyheder/Allofmp3En
In Italy they are blocking foreign gambling sites.
Having a system where the police are supplieng list of sites for ISP's to block is not a good thing.
For the same reason you care about other programs being open. E.g.
- Fixing bug. Eg hibernate problems.
- Checking for bugs and backdoord.
- Improving it to your needs. E.g., I would like to be able to boot from USB-disks or a CFlash card in a PCI-adaptor. Or I could remove unnecessary stuff and put in a shell. Or an SSH server i the BIOS.
- Performance. My BIOS is slow. It does a lot of unnecessary things.
- Consistency. Next time I get a new computer, it would be nice to have the same bios. A company might prefer to use the same BIOS on all computers.
The US does not control the internet. They control some root servers that most people prefer to use (I do not use them). Just run you own root servers. Which could happen if the US did something really stupid.
Speakfreely http://www.speakfreely.org/ is from 1991 and have Look Who's Listening servers. (although I do not know if it had the servers right from the start)
Yes, physical space is less of an issue for books you only read at home.
But I read a lot of books when travelling or waiting: On planes, busses, trains, ferries, hotels, waiting for appointments, etc. I just hate it when I miss a few chapters in a book, bring it when travelling, the plane is delayed and I have finished the book before the plane takes off.
So now I always keep a handful of book on an 8MByte CF card from an old camera, so I can read them on my Yopy. I also put books on my own website (http://www.digitalfrihed.dk/library/) so I can read on any computer, I pass.
== So anyway, in a limited way I'm agreeing with you. Joe Blow the 3D gamer probably isn't going to give a crap about microkernels, and isn't going to find their advantages convincing. But someone running any kind of production server might, and certainly anyone building high-reliability or embedded equipment should. ==
Yes, I was talking about home users because the parent talked about viruses and FPS in quake. If you play Quake and your computer get viruses, Linux is the obvious way to go.
Viruses is not a problem on decent real-time embedded systems, microkernel based or not.
> Likewise, just because you've never seen a Linux box go down doesn't mean they're immune No, just as microkernel bases systems are also not immune.
== The question then becomes: which group of people is Linux being built for? Where, on the performance versus stability continuum does it reside? ==
>Precisely. All the arguments to date focus on performance issues, whereas with today's >high-performance multi-core machines I'd be more than happy to lose a bit of performance if it >means processes and systems have better isolation and protection from one another.
When people go and by a new computer, many are willing to spend hundreds of dollars more to get a little extra performance. They will not like to have that taking away from them just so that they can run a microkernel.
>Gaining a couple of extra FPS's in Quake doesn't do much good if the entire system is down with a virus...
It is just a false premise, just because some monolithic (or hybrid) kernels are unreliable does not mean that it is necessary or better to use microkernels to get reliability.
I have used many Linux computers the last 10 years. They never went down with a virus, and I have not had problems with lack of protection between kernel drivers.
So I do not feel very motivated to give up performance.
My wife bought a Sub300 laptop with Linspire (Lindows then) a few years ago. By now there is no Linspire left on it, it is all plain Debian. There were a few dependency problems but no worse than when you go from say Knoppix or Ubuntu to Debian. I havent tried, but I imagine you would have similar issues transforming eg. a RHEL into a FC5.
The laptop did not have a CD- or floppydrive, otherwise it would probably have been easyer to install a Debian from scratch. The great thing about a computer preinstalled with Linspire or any other Linux-distribution is that you have the choise to run another distribution on it. Binary-only drivers is a problem here, but it seems to mostly about 3D graphics.
== is that in order to truly spread the "philosophy" the product must succeed on its own without the "philosophy" attached. ==
But in order to take off the product must often base its survival on philosophy.
== This is analagous to all those people who bought American cars in teh 70-80's even though they were crap because they philosophically thought it was important to buy American cars. ==
Except that your American car will only get worse. But if more of us use and contribute to Kaffe, GCJ, Python instead of Sun Java, we will end up faster with a with a better product without any upgrade cost.
>Of course, you could write stuff "optimised" for every user agent in existence, and those which don't exist >yet.
You also need to optimize for "limitations" of the user. I.e. when I am using my laptop in my sofa, I need bigger fonts. I do not like too much animation, so i use the "only-once" setting.
== You will save money if you order a Dell with no OS (well, FreeDOS is usually shipped with the system) versus one shipped with XP. You just can't order every system that way. ==
Yes, that is exactly the point. Why can't you order every system that way?
Is it too much effort for too little business? Dell is good at custumizing PC's if they can upgrade the harddisk, they can also put in a blank harddisk.
Besides, you would think that it would make most sense to offer the _best selling_ PC's with freedos instead of more expensive servers.
Maybe MS and Dell did not talk about Linux, but they probably talked about the Windows license prices.
I have a Nokia 770.
Gizmo (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) works fine on it which means that the microhone and speaskers will do.
I plan to geat a real SIP-phone on it (preferably Twinkle)
so I can use other PSTN than SipPhone.
I have a Zyxel P2000W. The main attraction of a SIP-phone on the 770 (apart from carriens one thing
less) is that the 770 have a prowser that can be used to accept stupid disclaimers that cafe and hotels put up.
It feels very stupid when the Zyxel phone is not working because it cannot press the "ok" or "promise not to send spam" button.
They have the right to go back home if they are not charged with anything.
Which is a usefull option if e.g., you are entering a foreign country with a laptop full of your employers trade secrets.
Read the artice.
She is not worried about what her employer do, but what the government do.
It can handle some workflow, invitations, etc.
More like phpgroupware
Also the majority of documents are not in the MS OXML format.
Maybe not desks or phones.
But for example medicine is not that far away.
Instead of buying pills at the pharmacy we could download recipes from a secure site and produce it at home.
Enforcing patents and controlling access to medicine recipes, could make RIAA look innocent.
> Would not something like IPTables be the same thing?
ip-tables and some way of managing and monitoring it.
I use http://www.adsl-optimizer.dk/
Which works great, i.e. it makes my VoIP phone usable.
Maybe we should not blame the courts for letting the police doing this, given probably cause.
But sneaking bugging devices into the pockets of millions of unsuspecting citizens is just wrong.
We do not know who is responsible for this invasion of privacy. But if people could choose between a phone that would let you be bugged and one that would not, most would probably choose that latter. In a free marked you would expect phones to be sold as bug-free, with big yellow stickers saying "this phone will not let you be bugged".
So why are we not seeing those stickers?
Well, here in Denmark you could buy a GSM phone that you could use in the US.
Ask for a tri-band. You will just have to pay extra for it not be locked to an operator.
But danish phones might be bugged too. If their software can be updated remotely, it can probably do the same tricks.
If you buy a phone that is not locket to an operator, you would think that only the manufacturer could change its software (with the help of the current network). Most if not all manufacturers operate on the US marked so they might coorperate.
Maybe you should try a PDA running Linux with a GSM card.
I use a WiFi SIP phone. For all I know it could be bugged in the same way, but SIP is an open standard,
so it would be possible to build a bug-free phone.
Well, we have seen the slippery slope in other countries.
Here in Denmark we have had such a system for more than a year.
The police get secret blacklists from the "Save The Children" organization. The polices have signed contracts with all Danish ISP's.
There are government reports talking about blocking hate speech, racism, and threats of violence.
Last month a danish ISP was ordered to block allofmp3.com by a court ruling, referring to the these filters. http://itpol.dk/sager/nyheder/Allofmp3En
In Italy they are blocking foreign gambling sites.
Having a system where the police are supplieng list of sites for ISP's to block is not a good thing.
> Why would I care about the BIOS?
For the same reason you care about other programs being open. E.g.
- Fixing bug. Eg hibernate problems.
- Checking for bugs and backdoord.
- Improving it to your needs. E.g., I would like to be able to boot from USB-disks or a CFlash card in a PCI-adaptor.
Or I could remove unnecessary stuff and put in a shell. Or an SSH server i the BIOS.
- Performance. My BIOS is slow. It does a lot of unnecessary things.
- Consistency. Next time I get a new computer, it would be nice to have the same bios. A company might prefer to use the same BIOS on all computers.
Certainly, but that is what you get when you boil everything down to one person.
Apartheit produced more heroes than Mandela and communism more
than Solzhenitsyn and Havel (many of them mentioned in Solzhenitsyn books).
> Without costing consumers and taxpayers any more than today
But it would cost me more than today because I do not listen to music from the "big IP-industies". And I never buy CD's.
I do buy some music from e.g. Magnatune, but then I want to know which artist get my money.
I am writing this from IGF Athens.
The US does not control the internet. They control some root servers that most people prefer to use (I do not use them).
Just run you own root servers. Which could happen if the US did something really stupid.
You should't even have to crack it. You should be able to just read the patent application.
In theory that is.
Of course the service in itself is bad.
But this will teach generations of kids the value of privacy and how to protect their own private life.
And that knowledge kan be used not only against their parents but also big brother.
Speakfreely http://www.speakfreely.org/ is from 1991 and have Look Who's Listening servers.
(although I do not know if it had the servers right from the start)
> takes up physical space,
Yes, physical space is less of an issue for books you only read at home.
But I read a lot of books when travelling or waiting: On planes, busses, trains, ferries, hotels, waiting for appointments, etc. I just hate it when I miss a few chapters in a book, bring it when travelling, the plane is delayed and I have finished the book before the plane takes off.
So now I always keep a handful of book on an 8MByte CF card from an old camera, so I can read them on my Yopy.
I also put books on my own website (http://www.digitalfrihed.dk/library/) so I can read on any computer, I pass.
==
So anyway, in a limited way I'm agreeing with you. Joe Blow the 3D gamer probably isn't going to give a crap about microkernels, and isn't going to find their advantages convincing. But someone running any kind of production server might, and certainly anyone building high-reliability or embedded equipment should.
==
Yes, I was talking about home users because the parent talked about viruses and FPS in quake. If you play Quake and your computer get viruses, Linux is the obvious way to go.
Viruses is not a problem on decent real-time embedded systems, microkernel based or not.
> Likewise, just because you've never seen a Linux box go down doesn't mean they're immune
No, just as microkernel bases systems are also not immune.
==
The question then becomes: which group of people is Linux being built for? Where, on the performance versus stability continuum does it reside?
==
If it is a continuum.
>Precisely. All the arguments to date focus on performance issues, whereas with today's
>high-performance multi-core machines I'd be more than happy to lose a bit of performance if it
>means processes and systems have better isolation and protection from one another.
When people go and by a new computer, many are willing to spend hundreds of dollars more to get a little extra performance. They will not like to have that taking away from them just so that they can run a microkernel.
>Gaining a couple of extra FPS's in Quake doesn't do much good if the entire system is down with a virus...
It is just a false premise, just because some monolithic (or hybrid) kernels are unreliable does not mean that it is necessary or better to use microkernels to get reliability.
I have used many Linux computers the last 10 years. They never went down with a virus, and I have not had problems with lack of protection between kernel drivers.
So I do not feel very motivated to give up performance.
My wife bought a Sub300 laptop with Linspire (Lindows then) a few years ago. By now there is no Linspire left on it, it is all plain Debian. There were a few dependency problems but no worse than when you go from say Knoppix or Ubuntu to Debian. I havent tried, but I imagine you would have similar issues transforming eg. a RHEL into a FC5.
The laptop did not have a CD- or floppydrive, otherwise it would probably have been easyer to install a Debian from scratch. The great thing about a computer preinstalled with Linspire or any other Linux-distribution is that you have the choise to run another distribution on it. Binary-only drivers is a problem here, but it seems to mostly about 3D graphics.
==
is that in order to truly spread the "philosophy" the product must succeed on its own without the "philosophy" attached.
==
But in order to take off the product must often base its survival on philosophy.
==
This is analagous to all those people who bought American cars in teh 70-80's even though they were crap because they philosophically thought it was important to buy American cars.
==
Except that your American car will only get worse. But if more of us use and contribute to Kaffe, GCJ, Python instead of Sun Java, we will end up faster with a with a better product without any upgrade cost.
Kword does a good job of reading PDF files and turning them into documents.
For DVD's I prefer Mplayer, Ogle, or Xine. With dvdcss installed they will play any DVD's, I.e. both region 1 and 2.
>Of course, you could write stuff "optimised" for every user agent in existence, and those which don't exist
>yet.
You also need to optimize for "limitations" of the user. I.e. when I am using my laptop in my sofa, I need bigger fonts. I do not like too much animation, so i use the "only-once" setting.
==
You will save money if you order a Dell with no OS (well, FreeDOS is usually shipped with the system) versus one shipped with XP. You just can't order every system that way.
==
Yes, that is exactly the point.
Why can't you order every system that way?
Is it too much effort for too little business? Dell is good at custumizing PC's if they can upgrade the harddisk, they can also put in a blank harddisk.
Besides, you would think that it would make most sense to offer the _best selling_ PC's with freedos instead of more expensive servers.
Maybe MS and Dell did not talk about Linux, but they probably talked about the Windows license prices.