Very true. But even if it did two blind queries, DNS uses almost no bandwidth. I'm fairly certain a DNS query and response each only use a single UDP packet. That's NOTHING. Our DNS bandwidth accounts for less than 1% total usage. Even if it were to double, we'd still be at less than 1% bandwidth usage.
You are 100% correct. The issue isn't that home backups are difficult or expensive in 2006, it's that he's got a 2003 way of looking at things. By far the best backup technology for home users is the USB hard drive. They even come bundled with backup software. Can't get much better than that.
I think the issue really comes down to most users can't be bothered to do the bare minimum for their computers. I remember in the days of mice with balls, I'd go to people's houses to fix their computers and many would have almost unusuable mice. VERY few people would ever clean them. Even after I'd show them how, they never would. It can be done (literally) in under a minute and only needs to be done every few months. And even THAT was aparently too much.
So the masses won't backup their data until it is forced down their throats by Dell. When Dell starts bundling all their systems with pull out USB hard drives and backup software that has reasonable defaults in case it is never configured, then we'll see users backup data. Basically, if consumers have to put forth _any_ effort at all, it isn't going to happen.
It is a pretty interesting read. I can give you my experience with NetBSD over the past couple of years...
Outside of my regular job we were developing an embedded system. The first thing I thought of was NetBSD. Downloaded it, tested it, critiqued it, and couldn't find enough benefit to use it. The big gotcha was there was no filesystem at the time for running on flash devices. Well, almost every embedded project is going to run on a flash device. Mind you this was a couple of years ago, but according to the post not much has changed. There were a couple of other small gotchas, but in comparing it to Linux, there just wasn't enough reason to use NetBSD.
And therein lies much of the problem. I don't think NetBSD is bad. It's not. However, a lot more people are using Linux for advanced embedded devices than NetBSD and are solving real world problems so you don't have to. NetBSD may run on a plethora of hardware pretty well. But 90% of the embedded world really needs it to run on is i386, arm, and mips. So there is really good linux support for those arches because so many people are developing systems with the linux/uclibc/arm combo. It's the new lamp. NetBSD may have the shock factor of running on things like toasters, but Linux is running on real world things like my phone.
On top of that, the term "embedded" is becoming looser and looser. There was a time when "embedded" meant a 12mhz processor and everything was in assembly and C. Today, I can get a 400mhz gumstix and do all my development in python. I would consider it embedded by today's standards, but in reality that was a normal desktop development machine 5 years ago.
Again, NetBSD isn't bad. If I had to really run something on a 12mhz CPU I doubt I'd be able to use linux/uclibc/arm and NetBSD might be my answer. However, in a world where embedded hardware is the desktop hardware of 5 years ago, there just isn't any benefit to trying to use the same embedded tools of 5 years ago.
The best way I can think of getting firefox into the hands of the masses is to have OEM's bundle it and put an icon on the desktop labeled "Internet".
I'm sure many OEM's would jump at the chance to stick it to MS. The same bundling bullshit that has hurt them can be thrown in their face. Not even the Dells and HPs of the world, but the Emachines and small systems builders.
The reality is, many people have their PC's on 24/7, not just 4 hours a day. Power users running desktop webservers, downloads of movies (which sometimes can take a few days depending peer upload speeds), maybe some collaborative photo albums going on, etc, etc. The more that can be done at the router/appliance level, the less reason there is to keep a PC on 24/7.
I've never seen so many people mis-understand a product in my life!
First of all, it's probably going to use a fraction of power your computer uses. Your computer probably uses at the very least 100 watts to do basic tasks (not even including your monitor). Devices like this usually use less than 20. That's a pretty significant savings in power. Not only that, you don't have a big ass computer heating up your house. Just my basic desktop will heat the room 4-5 degrees. That's more power wasted cranking up the A/C.
Basically, very few on slashdot seem to understand why anyone would buy a product like this. There seems to be this attitude that rolling your own solution using a 7 year old fire hazard with triple the moving parts and loads more power is somehow superior. There is a market of millions of customers who would disagree with you. Most people want something that runs low power, cool, small, few moving parts, and most importantly, just works.
Then again, you aren't the target audience of this product. As much as everyone on slashdot complains about this, I bet they sell tens of thousands and it's a huge sucess.
I really don't understand why that got modded so high. Basically, you've got your geeks and your average consumers. Of course the geeks have been able to roll their own solution for years. Do you think the average person is going to? Probably not. This is an end user consumer friendly product. Its got smooth edges so children don't poke their eye out. It can be recalled. It has probably been in front of some sort of focus group to see if average people can use it. There's a huge difference. I see this as news because this is one of the first mass production consumer products like this. That's why it's news.
If they wait too long, linksys' pre-ratification equipment could become a defacto standard. They've got high throughput equipment on the shelf today. I can go to staples right now and buy pretty darn good close to 802.11n speed equipment. By the time the standard is finalized I could have gotten a good 2 years out of their equipment. It may or may not work with competitor cards, but with such a lead my guess is any competitor is going to try and make it work with linksys' equipment rather than try to play catch up in market share.
I hate the lowest bidder system. It seems like the root of all screwups in the government. It's not as black and white as you are competeing for model number 00120 of product X. All but the simplest of cases shouldn't have to go through the whole lowest bidder system. Quality is extremely important and low bids don't take that into account. This story didn't really mention whether this was a low bid deal or not, keep in mind.
Look at pretty much any government building that was built on the lowest bidder system. I can pretty much guarantee it has mold or leaking issues.
Jebus, I usually don't respond to idiots like you, but jeez you are a fuckin idiot. I said a code rewrite. As in they scrap the current code base and rewrite huge portions of it. Sendmail has done this at least once in the past few years and so did the mach kernel project. Never once did I say amanda wasn't currently being developed.
I find the AMANDA results interesting because AFAIK it hasn't recieved a code rewrite since the early 90's. I think an interesting study would be the to compare older projects with ones that have been rewritten from the ground up. Comparing the rate of new bugs introduced as opposed to those hidden in legacy code.
I was reading the death of red hat support slashdot comments from a few years ago. I think it's interesting that so many people thought that would be the death of red hat. In fact, they are stronger than ever. Even with strong competition from large corporate entities that weren't in the linux game a few years ago, red hat remains the market leader.
I understand the point, but 802.11b just was never meant for this task. If you want to spread something today, get municpal EVDO at 2-Mbit/s. At least that would be maintainable. 802.11b is the tin can and string of the 19th century. EVDO would be the telegraph.
Thgey are not using consumer grade crap like you are suggesting
Funny, I read my post again and I never suggested they are using consumer grade equipment. The difference between commercial equipment and home equipment is generally the management anyway. Things like WDS and global configuration, and for outdoor equipment being able to survive those conditions. Range isn't one of them. A 100 milliwatt cisco AP is going to have almost the same exact range as an Asus 100 milliwatt AP.
According to wikipedia, 802.11b was designed for indoor use at about 100 feet. That doesn't sound like it was ever designed for municipal use to me. Yes, some dirty hacks can be achieved, but it wasn't designed from the ground up for that use. WiMax was designed for 30 miles. Sounds like that one is. At 600 bucks per AP for 6,000 AP's, that's over 3 million dollars. Try maintaining 6,000 AP's across the county. How expensive is that maintaince? Try maintaining less than 100 with better coverage. Sounds more like it to me.
I remember Orlando pulled out their hotspots because they weren't economically viable. If you can't make a hotspot viable, how can you ever expect county wide access to be viable.
So you are saying in 1998 it would have been better to try and get the nations homes on ISDN for internet access rather than wait 3 years for DSL? The point being 802.11 a/b/g wasn't designed for municipal use and WiMax is. The "Wait three years and then the technology will be perfect for situation X" can apply to certain situations.
City/countywide 802.11 a/b/g is POINTLESS!!!! I really don't understand why all this money and resources is being spent on it. They have horrible range and were never meant to cover an area this big, so you have to buy an insane amount of AP's to get decent coverage. I bet when all is said and done they end up with 8,000 AP's and the project ends up costing a few hundred thousand dollars. On top of that, constant maintaince that ends up not making it economically viable.
Calm down with the citywide wireless. I know WiMax have been dragging their feet, but my guess is by 2009 we'll have usable WiMax that is ready for city wide deployment. You are going to waste all this time and money now, so that in 3 years you are superceeded by WiMax (which will do the job better and have less maintaince). Hot spots are fine. If you want to drop 200 access points around the county to get some coverage for popular places, that's ok. 200 access points would probably be viable. 6,000 (or in reality 8,000) aren't.
There's basically three ways to solve internet in schools. The first way (which my high school did) is the lamest and doesn't work. Proxy servers that look for keywords and stop people from going to certain websites. However, these are completely ineffective beceause there are always sites which can get by the filter (website proxy, google cache, etc, etc). The second way is to block everything except 20-30 approved sites. Such as maybe paid encyclopedia sites. The third way is just to let everything in and watch the damn kids. I think this is the best way. Have "internet times" where the teacher is strictly watching the kids and where they go. If they get caught looking at a site they shouldn't, bye bye internet access.
I think that comment was really stupid whoever made it. Fact is, when the comment about no linux was made, they were already in talks with Novell about preloading linux. That's why it seems weird. I think that was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. The left hand was ignorant of Linux and gave the normal "we don't support linux" answer that most hardware vendors like to belt out. All the while the right hand was working out the deal with Novell.
I remember Kevin Rose's other ventures. He was lame on screen savers. He had that lame psuedo hacker web show (of which I cracked his site and figured out how to get free t-shirts). It seems odd that he was a founder of digg. His other projects were pretty crappy.
Drop it. If something non-essential is stretching your resources too thin and there isn't enough interest to maintain it, it isn't worth it. I think it's really typical for programs like this to use a fully open source stack anyway. It would have been a different story if you were dropping postgres support for oracle. But in this case I think it is perfectly acceptable.
People always want lots of features. But sometimes you just have to decide what you have resources for.
I've dealt with a lot of the new 200-500 mhz generation of embedded devices coming out. Smart phones, game systems, PDA's, control systems, etc, etc. Both programming for and using. By far, the worst I've dealt with has been Windows mobile. It's a joke. My work pocket PC "smartphone" freezes up 3-4 times a month (completely unacceptable for that sort of thing). My personal cell phone with a specialized OS has never frozen in 2 years. I've never even loaded 3rd party apps on my smartphone. Windows mobile's interface is horrible and inconsistant. Nothing is ever kept in a logical place. Basically, it feels to me like they took a full version of windows and stripped it. On the other hand, when I use embedded devices with a true specialized OS it feels like it was built from the ground up correctly.
I won't get into the Blackberry, Symbian, Linux debate. They each have their merits. However, all three are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows Mobile. It's the biggest piece of garbage embedded OS I've ever seen.
I have no problem with the people taking these jobs. They don't care about political battles, they just want food on their tables. I do have a problem however with rich people making even more money because of their suffering. With money comes social responsibility. Is it right for me to pay my employees dirt cheap and continue their suffering even if I can afford to pay them more? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That's what I have a problem with. This is the same bullshit that went on during the industrial revolution. The only difference is I don't see unions arising...
Rich countries and corporations are capitalizing on the poor. I think that is wrong. If they were paying these people a wage that might get them to levels of modernized countries I would have no problem with that. They make the argument "but 1 dollar a day wage is good for country X". Why? So they can sleep in straw rather than a pile of cow shit? Justifying continious opression with a standard of living that is slightly better is no argument.
I'm not mad at the residents of these poor countries. They just want food on their table. However, I'm furious at the modernized companies that capitalize on their suffering and then justify it to themselves.
How is the rest of the world supposed to compete with what is essentially slave labor?
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. But even if it did two blind queries, DNS uses almost no bandwidth. I'm fairly certain a DNS query and response each only use a single UDP packet. That's NOTHING. Our DNS bandwidth accounts for less than 1% total usage. Even if it were to double, we'd still be at less than 1% bandwidth usage.
You are 100% correct. The issue isn't that home backups are difficult or expensive in 2006, it's that he's got a 2003 way of looking at things. By far the best backup technology for home users is the USB hard drive. They even come bundled with backup software. Can't get much better than that.
I think the issue really comes down to most users can't be bothered to do the bare minimum for their computers. I remember in the days of mice with balls, I'd go to people's houses to fix their computers and many would have almost unusuable mice. VERY few people would ever clean them. Even after I'd show them how, they never would. It can be done (literally) in under a minute and only needs to be done every few months. And even THAT was aparently too much.
So the masses won't backup their data until it is forced down their throats by Dell. When Dell starts bundling all their systems with pull out USB hard drives and backup software that has reasonable defaults in case it is never configured, then we'll see users backup data. Basically, if consumers have to put forth _any_ effort at all, it isn't going to happen.
It is a pretty interesting read. I can give you my experience with NetBSD over the past couple of years...
Outside of my regular job we were developing an embedded system. The first thing I thought of was NetBSD. Downloaded it, tested it, critiqued it, and couldn't find enough benefit to use it. The big gotcha was there was no filesystem at the time for running on flash devices. Well, almost every embedded project is going to run on a flash device. Mind you this was a couple of years ago, but according to the post not much has changed. There were a couple of other small gotchas, but in comparing it to Linux, there just wasn't enough reason to use NetBSD.
And therein lies much of the problem. I don't think NetBSD is bad. It's not. However, a lot more people are using Linux for advanced embedded devices than NetBSD and are solving real world problems so you don't have to. NetBSD may run on a plethora of hardware pretty well. But 90% of the embedded world really needs it to run on is i386, arm, and mips. So there is really good linux support for those arches because so many people are developing systems with the linux/uclibc/arm combo. It's the new lamp. NetBSD may have the shock factor of running on things like toasters, but Linux is running on real world things like my phone.
On top of that, the term "embedded" is becoming looser and looser. There was a time when "embedded" meant a 12mhz processor and everything was in assembly and C. Today, I can get a 400mhz gumstix and do all my development in python. I would consider it embedded by today's standards, but in reality that was a normal desktop development machine 5 years ago.
Again, NetBSD isn't bad. If I had to really run something on a 12mhz CPU I doubt I'd be able to use linux/uclibc/arm and NetBSD might be my answer. However, in a world where embedded hardware is the desktop hardware of 5 years ago, there just isn't any benefit to trying to use the same embedded tools of 5 years ago.
The best way I can think of getting firefox into the hands of the masses is to have OEM's bundle it and put an icon on the desktop labeled "Internet".
I'm sure many OEM's would jump at the chance to stick it to MS. The same bundling bullshit that has hurt them can be thrown in their face. Not even the Dells and HPs of the world, but the Emachines and small systems builders.
The reality is, many people have their PC's on 24/7, not just 4 hours a day. Power users running desktop webservers, downloads of movies (which sometimes can take a few days depending peer upload speeds), maybe some collaborative photo albums going on, etc, etc. The more that can be done at the router/appliance level, the less reason there is to keep a PC on 24/7.
I've never seen so many people mis-understand a product in my life!
First of all, it's probably going to use a fraction of power your computer uses. Your computer probably uses at the very least 100 watts to do basic tasks (not even including your monitor). Devices like this usually use less than 20. That's a pretty significant savings in power. Not only that, you don't have a big ass computer heating up your house. Just my basic desktop will heat the room 4-5 degrees. That's more power wasted cranking up the A/C.
Basically, very few on slashdot seem to understand why anyone would buy a product like this. There seems to be this attitude that rolling your own solution using a 7 year old fire hazard with triple the moving parts and loads more power is somehow superior. There is a market of millions of customers who would disagree with you. Most people want something that runs low power, cool, small, few moving parts, and most importantly, just works.
Then again, you aren't the target audience of this product. As much as everyone on slashdot complains about this, I bet they sell tens of thousands and it's a huge sucess.
I really don't understand why that got modded so high. Basically, you've got your geeks and your average consumers. Of course the geeks have been able to roll their own solution for years. Do you think the average person is going to? Probably not. This is an end user consumer friendly product. Its got smooth edges so children don't poke their eye out. It can be recalled. It has probably been in front of some sort of focus group to see if average people can use it. There's a huge difference. I see this as news because this is one of the first mass production consumer products like this. That's why it's news.
If they wait too long, linksys' pre-ratification equipment could become a defacto standard. They've got high throughput equipment on the shelf today. I can go to staples right now and buy pretty darn good close to 802.11n speed equipment. By the time the standard is finalized I could have gotten a good 2 years out of their equipment. It may or may not work with competitor cards, but with such a lead my guess is any competitor is going to try and make it work with linksys' equipment rather than try to play catch up in market share.
I hate the lowest bidder system. It seems like the root of all screwups in the government. It's not as black and white as you are competeing for model number 00120 of product X. All but the simplest of cases shouldn't have to go through the whole lowest bidder system. Quality is extremely important and low bids don't take that into account. This story didn't really mention whether this was a low bid deal or not, keep in mind.
Look at pretty much any government building that was built on the lowest bidder system. I can pretty much guarantee it has mold or leaking issues.
Jebus, I usually don't respond to idiots like you, but jeez you are a fuckin idiot. I said a code rewrite. As in they scrap the current code base and rewrite huge portions of it. Sendmail has done this at least once in the past few years and so did the mach kernel project. Never once did I say amanda wasn't currently being developed.
I find the AMANDA results interesting because AFAIK it hasn't recieved a code rewrite since the early 90's. I think an interesting study would be the to compare older projects with ones that have been rewritten from the ground up. Comparing the rate of new bugs introduced as opposed to those hidden in legacy code.
A woman lied? You don't say...
I was reading the death of red hat support slashdot comments from a few years ago. I think it's interesting that so many people thought that would be the death of red hat. In fact, they are stronger than ever. Even with strong competition from large corporate entities that weren't in the linux game a few years ago, red hat remains the market leader.
Jerk city troll is just that, a troll. This is like the 7th time I've seen this exact post from him regarding adsense stories.
I understand the point, but 802.11b just was never meant for this task. If you want to spread something today, get municpal EVDO at 2-Mbit/s. At least that would be maintainable. 802.11b is the tin can and string of the 19th century. EVDO would be the telegraph.
Thgey are not using consumer grade crap like you are suggesting
Funny, I read my post again and I never suggested they are using consumer grade equipment. The difference between commercial equipment and home equipment is generally the management anyway. Things like WDS and global configuration, and for outdoor equipment being able to survive those conditions. Range isn't one of them. A 100 milliwatt cisco AP is going to have almost the same exact range as an Asus 100 milliwatt AP.
According to wikipedia, 802.11b was designed for indoor use at about 100 feet. That doesn't sound like it was ever designed for municipal use to me. Yes, some dirty hacks can be achieved, but it wasn't designed from the ground up for that use. WiMax was designed for 30 miles. Sounds like that one is. At 600 bucks per AP for 6,000 AP's, that's over 3 million dollars. Try maintaining 6,000 AP's across the county. How expensive is that maintaince? Try maintaining less than 100 with better coverage. Sounds more like it to me.
I remember Orlando pulled out their hotspots because they weren't economically viable. If you can't make a hotspot viable, how can you ever expect county wide access to be viable.
So you are saying in 1998 it would have been better to try and get the nations homes on ISDN for internet access rather than wait 3 years for DSL? The point being 802.11 a/b/g wasn't designed for municipal use and WiMax is. The "Wait three years and then the technology will be perfect for situation X" can apply to certain situations.
City/countywide 802.11 a/b/g is POINTLESS!!!! I really don't understand why all this money and resources is being spent on it. They have horrible range and were never meant to cover an area this big, so you have to buy an insane amount of AP's to get decent coverage. I bet when all is said and done they end up with 8,000 AP's and the project ends up costing a few hundred thousand dollars. On top of that, constant maintaince that ends up not making it economically viable.
Calm down with the citywide wireless. I know WiMax have been dragging their feet, but my guess is by 2009 we'll have usable WiMax that is ready for city wide deployment. You are going to waste all this time and money now, so that in 3 years you are superceeded by WiMax (which will do the job better and have less maintaince). Hot spots are fine. If you want to drop 200 access points around the county to get some coverage for popular places, that's ok. 200 access points would probably be viable. 6,000 (or in reality 8,000) aren't.
There's basically three ways to solve internet in schools. The first way (which my high school did) is the lamest and doesn't work. Proxy servers that look for keywords and stop people from going to certain websites. However, these are completely ineffective beceause there are always sites which can get by the filter (website proxy, google cache, etc, etc). The second way is to block everything except 20-30 approved sites. Such as maybe paid encyclopedia sites. The third way is just to let everything in and watch the damn kids. I think this is the best way. Have "internet times" where the teacher is strictly watching the kids and where they go. If they get caught looking at a site they shouldn't, bye bye internet access.
I think that comment was really stupid whoever made it. Fact is, when the comment about no linux was made, they were already in talks with Novell about preloading linux. That's why it seems weird. I think that was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. The left hand was ignorant of Linux and gave the normal "we don't support linux" answer that most hardware vendors like to belt out. All the while the right hand was working out the deal with Novell.
I remember Kevin Rose's other ventures. He was lame on screen savers. He had that lame psuedo hacker web show (of which I cracked his site and figured out how to get free t-shirts). It seems odd that he was a founder of digg. His other projects were pretty crappy.
Drop it. If something non-essential is stretching your resources too thin and there isn't enough interest to maintain it, it isn't worth it. I think it's really typical for programs like this to use a fully open source stack anyway. It would have been a different story if you were dropping postgres support for oracle. But in this case I think it is perfectly acceptable.
People always want lots of features. But sometimes you just have to decide what you have resources for.
I've dealt with a lot of the new 200-500 mhz generation of embedded devices coming out. Smart phones, game systems, PDA's, control systems, etc, etc. Both programming for and using. By far, the worst I've dealt with has been Windows mobile. It's a joke. My work pocket PC "smartphone" freezes up 3-4 times a month (completely unacceptable for that sort of thing). My personal cell phone with a specialized OS has never frozen in 2 years. I've never even loaded 3rd party apps on my smartphone. Windows mobile's interface is horrible and inconsistant. Nothing is ever kept in a logical place. Basically, it feels to me like they took a full version of windows and stripped it. On the other hand, when I use embedded devices with a true specialized OS it feels like it was built from the ground up correctly.
I won't get into the Blackberry, Symbian, Linux debate. They each have their merits. However, all three are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows Mobile. It's the biggest piece of garbage embedded OS I've ever seen.
I have no problem with the people taking these jobs. They don't care about political battles, they just want food on their tables. I do have a problem however with rich people making even more money because of their suffering. With money comes social responsibility. Is it right for me to pay my employees dirt cheap and continue their suffering even if I can afford to pay them more? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That's what I have a problem with. This is the same bullshit that went on during the industrial revolution. The only difference is I don't see unions arising...
Rich countries and corporations are capitalizing on the poor. I think that is wrong. If they were paying these people a wage that might get them to levels of modernized countries I would have no problem with that. They make the argument "but 1 dollar a day wage is good for country X". Why? So they can sleep in straw rather than a pile of cow shit? Justifying continious opression with a standard of living that is slightly better is no argument.
I'm not mad at the residents of these poor countries. They just want food on their table. However, I'm furious at the modernized companies that capitalize on their suffering and then justify it to themselves.
How is the rest of the world supposed to compete with what is essentially slave labor?