When you want two or three alternative connections, or want to bundle two lines, the small ones often are unusable because of their hardware inflexibility.
The problem with Cisco is that they don't offer low-end models with a sufficient number of interface slots (NM, WIC). E.g. when you want a router that bundles two ADSL lines and has capability for dial backup (ISDN), you quickly leave the low-end range and end up with a box that is way above what you need w.r.t. performance.
With a PC you have much less of that problem, as systems with 6 PCI slots are easy to get, even in the price category you mention. (PCI cards are also less expensive than NM or WIC modules of similar functionality)
After seeing all the enthousiasm I read the referring page and their FAQ. It seems to be yet another 0.1 release of something that could be done. This is not something you could actually use and the n maybe refine a bit...
Also, from the FAQ it seems they are on a fundamentally wrong track:
A: Linux Quality of Service only looks at outgoing packets (once a packet is in your computer why would you want to slow it down?)
First, there really is a point in slowing down incoming traffic, namely to throttle down the other side and avoid excessive queues to build up on a slow connection. It seems they did not get that.
But worse, it is a fundamental flaw to only look at outgoing traffic, and it also seems to be inferred that there is no state kept for a connection (they say it "classifies packets", not that it "classiefies connections"). This makes it useless. E.g. when the incoming packet says "HELO domain" you may not want to slow that down but you may want to put that CONNECTION in the SMTP category. What can you do once the connection is transferring the SMTP data?
What you need for any packetshaping to be successfull is a state kept per connection that allows further shaping based on earlier matches.
When I asked for an IPv6 address at my provider, they assigned me a/48 block. It does not seem I will need NAT with that. And this is just with a consumer account, nothing business or special.
(in fact I think that such an assignment is a little over the top, but well there are still 2^16 more of these blocks than there are IPv4 addresses...)
That is right. What isn't right is that they assign small blocks sequentially to countries all over their area. What they should do is keep the assignments to China, Korea etc together in blocks, and put New Zealand, Australia etc in other blocks.
That would management of blocking tables much easier. We could just block things like 218.0.0.0/8
Another (more important) reason was that Linux is a cute name for an operating system, and BSD isn't. And of course, some people recognized early-on that you need a friendly installer program that quickly puts the system on a PC and allows some configuration of important parameters.
This made Linux win over BSD, and RedHat win over Debian.
You seem not to get it. Just like your president. More and more Europeans no longer think the American views on politics, economics, law enforcment etc are compatible with their way of life. That is only the first step. Next will be that the governments will have the same worries. In some countries that already happened.
The problem is that the Americans cannot see this as a motivation to re-think their position and maybe change some things, but only as a threat.
Finally, Europe has the right to develop things even when America considers that unnecessary. Developing megaton-sized nuclear weapons was a very expensive operation and was not at all necessary. Why was that money not spent on useful things?
I do have the same problem, but these bounces are not reaching me as they are sent to all kinds of different mail addresses at my domain. I do note that most bounces come from Russian mailservers.
I cut 95% of all spam by some simple rules. Things like refusing all mail from yahoo, looking up sender and relay IP addresses in China/Korea blocklists, and verifying that the sender address is mailable before accepting mail. The remainder is caught by Mozilla's Junk mail filter.
The common point made by these "distributed" software authors is that there are "wasted" CPU cycles in your computer that you could donate to a project for free. However, that is not true at all! CPU cycles are not wasted. When the CPU has nothing to do, it sleeps. At least in a modern operating system (i.e. about everything after Windows 95).
By "donating your wasted CPU cycles" you will actually increase the power consumption of your computer. This will be very noticable in a laptop, but when you watch the CPU temperature in your home system you will also see a noticable increase in temperature between an idle system and a system running a computationally intensive background task.
Probably the effect will be worse for things like keysearches, prime number searches, SETI etc than for this GRUB bot, because that probably also spends time waiting for the network (and thus returns the CPU to idle).
So before you "donate your wasted CPU cycles", please realize that this will actually cost you money.
Yep. To fix this we need to change the laws of physics.;-)
No. Not at all. The second is defined by humans, and has a completely arbitrary length. You can define any length for the second without changing any law of physics.
The "only" thing affected is the SI system of measurements (time, distance, weight, energy etc etc). Of course this is not affecting other voters in the universe, as they will not be using that system. It will not even affect the average American very much, as they largely use non-SI units.
Are you sure that any of the APRS problems are related to the message format? If not, it is very unwise to create a new, incompatible, message format "just because this one is nicer". The average ham radio operator considers something like a PIC or a TNC an "investment for life" and will not be prepared to build or construct something new to do essentially the same as what he already has, even if it does it in a better or cleaner way! This probably is because many hams are just trying out different things, and that of course is the main purpose of the hobby. So, many people will go on APRS just to see what it brings them, not to follow the state of the art or to keep improving things "because it can be done better".
I think that you will find that even when Opentrac is 20 times better than APRS (which I have not yet seen from any of the documents on the site), in 10 years time still most people use APRS. It was there first, it has been implemented on many platforms, and it is in use by a large group of people that have no urge to change. It is like IP version 4. Sure, IP version 6 is nicer but nobody is going to use it as version 4 does the job fine.
Of course you are right about little open hardware and software being available for APRS. But as long as there are no legal problems with that (are there?) it would seem to be better to just work on solving THAT problem (i.e. design and publish an open source APRS device), rather than re-invent the wheel and find yourself largely ignored by the userbase.
Well, on Windows it seems to be the norm to have several installations of Java VM (the same or different versions) on the same machine... the one you downloaded from Sun, and one for every application that the maker wrote in Java and for which he included a copy of Java VM and installed it in a subdirectory of his Program Files entry.
"buy numbers"? apparently it has been commercialized there. this is a recipe for trouble. there should be a separate body that provides numbers to telcos as they show the need, not because they show the cash. so, when you have unused blocks in an area, there should be no way to get new blocks until those are used.
It seems like in the USA they are afraid you would port your home phone number to your cellphone. That would not be possible here, and from the above posting it would not be possible in Hong Kong either.
So the answer is easy: make sure there are clear and effective rules for porting numbers. No porting between categories, no porting outside of charge areas, etc. It works that way here, and it seems to work OK.
BTW, to solve the charge problem there is a toll-free number here that you can call to determine what a call to a certain number would cost you. This is just an extra service.
:-) Do they still have operators in the USA? When I went on holidays there I always was amazed you would get an operator on the line when making a call, e.g. from a public phone. That was 20 years after the last operators disappeared here. Even for very complicated services, the closest you get to an operator is a system of recorded voice clips that you control using the DTMF keys on your phone.
Is there any indication that spammers are actually looking at what is happening to their mail? It does not seem like they care. 95% of spam is sent in ways that is easily bitbucketed, yet it continues to be sent.
Actually, not even ESA is involved in this. Ok, they are involved in the design of the rocket, but not in the launch.
Ariane launches are sold and managed by Arianespace (http://www.arianespace.com/), a commercial company.
I have had my FT-290R and FT-790R (allmode portables, not really handhelds but about the size of the FT-817) since the early eighties. I think they have been available since about 1982.
Before that, the IC-202 and IC-402 SSB-only portables existed.
About handhelds: when I visited Japan in 1983 I saw a 2 meter SSB handheld of the typical size at that time, i.e. not a carry-on type.
It is only "open source" if you define "open source" as "done by enthousiasts in their spare time".
I don't think the "open source" folks will accept that definition...
While some design information, like block diagrams, is available in various scattered papers submitted to amateur satellite conferences, there is no complete documentation available to the world.
No circuit diagrams, technical drawings, let alone sourcecode of the software running on the IHUs (the onboard computers).
Some people already indicated it would have been good if that was the case (because of peer review possibility).
The reason for not doing it seems to primarily the extra work it would be for the core design, construction & control team to document everything well enough to put it on a website.
(probably this could be solved by finding a volunteer who can do most of this task without too much involvement from heavily burdened people)
Amateurs have communicated with space shuttles, with MIR, will communicate with the International space station, have built and launched about 50 small satellites.
Why would you think a repeater on the moon would yield so much better PR than the above feats?
IMHO (just as in Phil's) it would just be a gigantic waste of effort to build that repeater, and see that it is useless in practice. As everyone can see, it is already taking lots of resources to construct Phase 3D and get in launched, so much that even a geostationary satellite (let alone a cluster of 3) is widely seen as impossible to realize.
It is better to stay with both feet on the ground, and attempt only realistic projects. There have been enough proposals that cost a lot of effort and never became realized.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, there we have one clueless idiot again who cannot even SPELL the name of the thing and already knows it better!
>or get 2 machines for every developer - which is also not an option. So looks like I will have to stick with developing on Windows XP. LUCKY ME! :(
Checkout VMware (http://www.vmware.com/).
When you want two or three alternative connections, or want to bundle two lines, the small ones often are unusable because of their hardware inflexibility.
The problem with Cisco is that they don't offer low-end models with a sufficient number of interface slots (NM, WIC). E.g. when you want a router that bundles two ADSL lines and has capability for dial backup (ISDN), you quickly leave the low-end range and end up with a box that is way above what you need w.r.t. performance.
With a PC you have much less of that problem, as systems with 6 PCI slots are easy to get, even in the price category you mention.
(PCI cards are also less expensive than NM or WIC modules of similar functionality)
After seeing all the enthousiasm I read the referring page and their FAQ. It seems to be yet another 0.1 release of something that could be done. This is not something you could actually use and the n maybe refine a bit...
Also, from the FAQ it seems they are on a fundamentally wrong track:
A: Linux Quality of Service only looks at outgoing packets (once a
packet is in your computer why would you want to slow it down?)
First, there really is a point in slowing down incoming traffic, namely to throttle down the other side and avoid excessive queues to build up on a slow connection. It seems they did not get that.
But worse, it is a fundamental flaw to only look at outgoing traffic, and it also seems to be inferred that there is no state kept for a connection (they say it "classifies packets", not that it "classiefies connections"). This makes it useless.
E.g. when the incoming packet says "HELO domain" you may not want to slow that down but you may want to put that CONNECTION in the SMTP category. What can you do once the connection is transferring the SMTP data?
What you need for any packetshaping to be successfull is a state kept per connection that allows further shaping based on earlier matches.
No, that is not true!
/48. I am sure. That means I have
They gave me a
65536 networks of 64 bits each!
When I asked for an IPv6 address at my provider, they assigned me a /48 block. It does not seem I will need NAT with that.
And this is just with a consumer account, nothing business or special.
(in fact I think that such an assignment is a little over the top, but well there are still 2^16 more of these blocks than there are IPv4 addresses...)
That is right.
What isn't right is that they assign small blocks sequentially to countries all over their area.
What they should do is keep the assignments to China, Korea etc together in blocks, and put New Zealand, Australia etc in other blocks.
That would management of blocking tables much easier. We could just block things like 218.0.0.0/8
Another (more important) reason was that Linux is a cute name for an operating system, and BSD isn't.
And of course, some people recognized early-on that you need a friendly installer program that quickly puts the system on a PC and allows some configuration of important parameters.
This made Linux win over BSD, and RedHat win over Debian.
You have old tools that require all options to be in front of filenames. SCO crap maybe?
You seem not to get it. Just like your president.
More and more Europeans no longer think the American views on politics, economics, law enforcment etc are compatible with their way of life.
That is only the first step. Next will be that the governments will have the same worries. In some countries that already happened.
The problem is that the Americans cannot see this as a motivation to re-think their position and maybe change some things, but only as a threat.
Finally, Europe has the right to develop things even when America considers that unnecessary.
Developing megaton-sized nuclear weapons was a very expensive operation and was not at all necessary. Why was that money not spent on useful things?
I do have the same problem, but these bounces are not reaching me as they are sent to all kinds of different mail addresses at my domain.
I do note that most bounces come from Russian mailservers.
I cut 95% of all spam by some simple rules. Things like refusing all mail from yahoo, looking up sender and relay IP addresses in China/Korea blocklists, and verifying that the sender address is mailable before accepting mail.
The remainder is caught by Mozilla's Junk mail filter.
The common point made by these "distributed" software authors is that there are "wasted" CPU cycles in your computer that you could donate to a project for free.
However, that is not true at all! CPU cycles are not wasted. When the CPU has nothing to do, it sleeps. At least in a modern operating system (i.e. about everything after Windows 95).
By "donating your wasted CPU cycles" you will actually increase the power consumption of your computer. This will be very noticable in a laptop, but when you watch the CPU temperature in your home system you will also see a noticable increase in temperature between an idle system and a system running a computationally intensive background task.
Probably the effect will be worse for things like keysearches, prime number searches, SETI etc than for this GRUB bot, because that probably also spends time waiting for the network (and thus returns the CPU to idle).
So before you "donate your wasted CPU cycles", please realize that this will actually cost you money.
Yep. To fix this we need to change the laws of physics.;-)
No. Not at all.
The second is defined by humans, and has a completely arbitrary length. You can define any length for the second without changing any law of physics.
The "only" thing affected is the SI system of measurements (time, distance, weight, energy etc etc). Of course this is not affecting other voters in the universe, as they will not be using that system. It will not even affect the average American very much, as they largely use non-SI units.
Are you sure that any of the APRS problems are related to the message format?
If not, it is very unwise to create a new, incompatible, message format "just because this one is nicer".
The average ham radio operator considers something like a PIC or a TNC an "investment for life" and will not be prepared to build or construct something new to do essentially the same as what he already has, even if it does it in a better or cleaner way!
This probably is because many hams are just trying out different things, and that of course is the main purpose of the hobby. So, many people will go on APRS just to see what it brings them, not to follow the state of the art or to keep improving things "because it can be done better".
I think that you will find that even when Opentrac is 20 times better than APRS (which I have not yet seen from any of the documents on the site), in 10 years time still most people use APRS. It was there first, it has been implemented on many platforms, and it is in use by a large group of people that have no urge to change. It is like IP version 4. Sure, IP version 6 is nicer but nobody is going to use it as version 4 does the job fine.
Of course you are right about little open hardware and software being available for APRS. But as long as there are no legal problems with that (are there?) it would seem to be better to just work on solving THAT problem (i.e. design and publish an open source APRS device), rather than re-invent the wheel and find yourself largely ignored by the userbase.
Rob
Well, on Windows it seems to be the norm to have several installations of Java VM (the same or different versions) on the same machine... the one you downloaded from Sun, and one for every application that the maker wrote in Java and for which he included a copy of Java VM and installed it in a subdirectory of his Program Files entry.
Looks like windowsupdate is heavily slashdotted :-)
"buy numbers"?
apparently it has been commercialized there. this is a recipe for trouble.
there should be a separate body that provides numbers to telcos as they show the need, not because they show the cash.
so, when you have unused blocks in an area, there should be no way to get new blocks until those are used.
It seems like in the USA they are afraid you would port your home phone number to your cellphone.
That would not be possible here, and from the above posting it would not be possible in Hong Kong either.
So the answer is easy: make sure there are clear and effective rules for porting numbers. No porting between categories, no porting outside of charge areas, etc. It works that way here, and it seems to work OK.
BTW, to solve the charge problem there is a toll-free number here that you can call to determine what a call to a certain number would cost you. This is just an extra service.
:-)
Do they still have operators in the USA?
When I went on holidays there I always was amazed you would get an operator on the line when making a call, e.g. from a public phone. That was 20 years after the last operators disappeared here.
Even for very complicated services, the closest you get to an operator is a system of recorded voice clips that you control using the DTMF keys on your phone.
Is there any indication that spammers are actually looking at what is happening to their mail?
It does not seem like they care. 95% of spam is sent in ways that is easily bitbucketed, yet it continues to be sent.
Actually, not even ESA is involved in this. Ok, they are involved in the design of the rocket, but not in the launch. Ariane launches are sold and managed by Arianespace (http://www.arianespace.com/), a commercial company.
I have had my FT-290R and FT-790R (allmode portables, not really handhelds but about the size of the FT-817) since the early eighties. I think they have been available since about 1982. Before that, the IC-202 and IC-402 SSB-only portables existed. About handhelds: when I visited Japan in 1983 I saw a 2 meter SSB handheld of the typical size at that time, i.e. not a carry-on type.
It is only "open source" if you define "open source" as "done by enthousiasts in their spare time". I don't think the "open source" folks will accept that definition... While some design information, like block diagrams, is available in various scattered papers submitted to amateur satellite conferences, there is no complete documentation available to the world. No circuit diagrams, technical drawings, let alone sourcecode of the software running on the IHUs (the onboard computers). Some people already indicated it would have been good if that was the case (because of peer review possibility). The reason for not doing it seems to primarily the extra work it would be for the core design, construction & control team to document everything well enough to put it on a website. (probably this could be solved by finding a volunteer who can do most of this task without too much involvement from heavily burdened people)
Phase 3D's orbit isn't LEO, it is a MOLNYA orbit.
Amateurs have communicated with space shuttles, with MIR, will communicate with the International space station, have built and launched about 50 small satellites.
Why would you think a repeater on the moon would yield so much better PR than the above feats?
IMHO (just as in Phil's) it would just be a gigantic waste of effort to build that repeater, and see that it is useless in practice. As everyone can see, it is already taking lots of resources to construct Phase 3D and get in launched, so much that even a geostationary satellite (let alone a cluster of 3) is widely seen as impossible to realize.
It is better to stay with both feet on the ground, and attempt only realistic projects. There have been enough proposals that cost a lot of effort and never became realized.
Rob