Well, I suppose all I can say is I've never had any of my dependants lose information they stored online, but I have had several cases of data lost from their PCs. What's your experience?
Many posters have responded along the lines of "I'd never trust my data to an online servce!". But there's a case to be made that for the average user online data is safer than having it on their PC.
Before you shoot me down, think about all the viruses, trojans, spyware you've cleaned off friends PCs, and about the number of times you've asked "When did you last backup?" with a sinking feeling. Wouldn't it be great to be able do a quick Ubuntu install and be totally confident they'll be working on their docs again within the hour? I'm sure all you uber-geeks run machines with mirrored drives and sound OSs, and backup every night - but the average user doesn't. So to them a well-designed and run (not making any judgements on this particular service!) online system is likely to be a lot safer.
And here's some proof - geek that I am, running my own Postfix mailserver, I bless the day I migrated to Gmail. And as many of my IT dependants too - compared to managing all those Outlook/Thunderbird apps, the possibility that Larry and Sergey might be browsing my email is of absolutely no consequence. Yes, Gmail has gone down occassionally, but the downtime has been an order of magnitude less than it would have been while I was moving my mail data to my new laptop, or rebuilding friend's PCs to get rid of the nasties.
Back when I was young (and you probably weren't born), the idea of most families having the technology to reproduce any printed material in full colour might have seemed cool but useless. Now we merrily print out photos, calendars, party invitations, assignments, sales brochures, banknotes...
So I'm very excited at these first attempts at being able to make anything we want at home. Just for starters, imagine the warehouses of odd plastic parts scattered around the world being replaced by a searchable database of files that you just google for, and "print" out. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and am constantly frustrated by having to get some simple lump of plastic sent from a bigger town several days later.
Real example - a few weeks ago the plastic button broke on our toaster. Rather than ditching it and buying a new one, I googled for the part and got it sent from overseas - three weeks and $10 for a 10c bit of plastic.
I very much doubt if war game figures are going to be the killer app for this technology - sit down with some friends and some beers, and in half an hour you'll have come up with a lot more exciting ideas.
You're probably right that we are more homogeneous than (some) countries, but Quakers are also probably one of the least homogeneous churches around. We don't have priests pushing any particular agenda, and the onus is on each individual to develop their own beliefs. Which might explain why we're so small - pre-packed beliefs are so much easier, and popular...
After some thought I also agree that total unanimity is too hard, but a 90% consensus seems like a good target. I'd be a lot happier to accept my views being dismissed if 90% of the population disagreed with me, than if 50.1% did.
I'm a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), in which all decisions require consensus. This makes for longer meetings, but results in better outcomes - it's better to spend longer thrashing out something we can all agree with than to force a worse solution on a minority.
And believe you me, we have some very obstructionist people in our organisation, so please don't argue that consensus only works when everyone is working together. I'd be very interested to see unanimocracy given a spin.
I don't like moving SSH to a non-standard port because I want to make it as easy as possible for users to use SCP to reduce the pressure to install FTP.
I also dislike the processing and bandwidth resources that denyhosts and their ilk require. Iptables gives me a great low-level solution that prevents more than two brute-force attempts:
# SSH daemon - tcp Port 22 - drop any more than 3 new connections from one address every 5 mins $IPTABLES -I INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set $IPTABLES -I INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 300 --hitcount 3 -j DROP $IPTABLES -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
If you added links to independently verifiable sources for your claims, (some) people might actually listen. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from the paranoid conspiracy nuts, at least until 911 scene 2 happens in a day or two...
I challenge you, right now, to Google your country's ISO organisation contact details, or the global ISO details, or both. Then send them an email/phone call/letter telling them how the ISO is about to lose a lot of credibility if they don't halt the fast-track process while they carry out a review of the tactics Microsoft have used to subvert their standards.
It will take you ten minutes, and WILL make a difference. Unlike the ten minutes you'll otherwise spend reading more outraged comments on Slashdot.
Do as I do, AND as I say - I just sent my email. Go for it!
In my view, open source software shifts the market in favour of the local developer - and customers. The MS ecosystem is (currently) larger, but MS gets most of the money - a few developers also make a living, but if they make too much, MS buys them out or brings out a competing product that kills them. Most customers have to use off-the-shelf MS software, because they can't change it and it costs too much to get custom applications written from scratch.
In the smaller OSS ecosystem, the OS and tools (web servers, databases etc.) are a commodity that cost little if anything. Customers pay less, and can get local developers to provide exactly what they want. Local developers get most of the money.
I prefer the OSS ecosystem. My customers can afford applications customised to how they think and work, and I actually DO make a good living developing my own code. And it's far more fulfilling than earning a margin on MS software that I've shoe-horned the customer's requirements into.
And then think for another second... GPS by itself is no use for tracking things remotely - it is a passive system that allows the receiver to know exactly where it is. The satellites have no idea where the receivers are, or even if they exist.
To monitor a device remotely, you then have to add a transmitter which sends the device's location - easy enough to do for a limited number of receivers, but doing it on a whole population scale (as some are suggesting) would be nigh impossible.
Care to comment on the other mail servers? Sendmail at only 13% is a big suprise. Hopefully this statistic will help pursuade our dinosaur sysadmin that we should switch to postfix.
Building and maintaining a reactor (or anything else) on a barge has got to cost far more than doing it on land. Assuming this project is viable, that extra cost must be balanced out by some advantages.
Availablitly of cooling water? Not much different to any coastal site.
Cost of coastal real estate? Nope, or we'd already see lots of luxury estates floating off the Russian coast.
Not In My Back Yard - NIMBY.
So this project provides an interesting perspective on what NIMBY costs our society. And as we get more environmentally aware, the cost of NIMBY is only going to increase - will we end up with our coastlines studded with power stations, sewerage works, factories, prisons, and mental hospitals?
I always believed the "...but the only reason I don't switch is games" argument, until I installed Ubuntu on my son's computer (dual-boot). He's twelve, likes games, but doesn't have a huge budget for the big-name games - loves Runescape. He soon discovered synaptic had screed of games that he could download and install, any time he liked, for free.
It's now a couple of months since he last booted up Windows, and we have a steady stream of his friends coming round asking me to "upgrade" their computers.
I use greylisting (gld to be specific) which works wonderfully. A couple of customers wanted even better filtering...
First I tried DSPAM, but they refused to train it so the results weren't good. Then I tried Spam Assasin, which also let through a suprising amount of spam - a lot more than my personal account on Gmail.
So I set up accounts on Gmail for them, and forwarded their mail to those accounts (after greylisting - don't want to burden GMail too much!). Gmail lets you set up forwarding, so I simply forwarded all the filtered mail back to a second account on my mailserver for the customer to pick up. Finally I wrote a python script that logs in to Gmail once a week to prevent the account being closed due to non-use.
A tad involved, but it works like a dream. Yet again Google comes out on top, this time in a market it doesn't even know it's in!
I should have qualified that the joke is not amusing to the Blackberry users - they grimace while the rest of us smirk.
And you're right that my preference should not stop you getting a phone with a cappucino maker built in, if you want one. But that isn't what I'm suggesting - I posed the question to see if anyone else felt the same way, and if maybe the phone companies were missing a market.
Am I alone in not being attracted by all these bells and whistles phones have these days? I want a phone to be a phone - I already have a digital camera to take pictures, and a music player to play music. Why try to cram all these features into a mobile phone, which just complicates the user interface and adds cost?
And don't get me started on email on phones - several of our managers have Blackberries, and despite their bigger keypads, it is still painfully obvious a message was created on one. Plus they tend to be sent at 10:30pm...
We have a new joke going around the office - have you heard about the new crime wave of Blackberry muggings? Crazed people accost you, force their Blackberry on you, and scarper.
Oh cool - wait till we hack these things like the WRT54G to make wireless routers. Then imagine the Beowolf cluster! We'll be able to play Duke Nukem on a box of actual ammo!
The obvious answer to this (and all the "I'd never use this 'cos anyone could access my data" tripe) is to encrypt it yourself before you upload it. AES is secure enough that it becomes a serious inconvenience to the bad guys to decrypt things - it'd be easier to break into your home and read it directly.
I predict a new file system for Linux weeks after Gdrive is announced - which includes client-side encryption as standard. And if MS was smart, it'd do the same with Vista.
# No easy install/uninstall - if you're comfortable with partitioning etc then you can get Fedora installed without too much bother, but Ubuntu doesn't even have a graphical installer, and as far as I'm aware no distro today offers an easy way to remove it and put Windows back to 100% disk usage. Who in their right mind would try a program that ate 10gigs of disk space and didn't come with a way to uninstall it?
It is true that the Ubuntu installer is not graphical, but it is still one of the best - Linux On Laptops is overflowing with stories of Ubuntu "Just Working", detecting wireless networking, displays etc flawlessly. Personally I'm not phased by the fact that the install is character based - I can still see exactly what is going on.
And you forget one of the major aids to Linux migration - live disks. You CAN try out Ubuntu on your Windows machine without even touching your hard disk. It's a bit rich to be complaining about Linux not cleaning up after itself when Windows refuses to play at all!
I'd really recommend you try the latest Ubuntu live disk. I think you'll be suprised how easy it is, and it is entirely risk free - just pop out the CD and reboot back to good old familiar Windows.
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Well, I suppose all I can say is I've never had any of my dependants lose information they stored online, but I have had several cases of data lost from their PCs. What's your experience?
Many posters have responded along the lines of "I'd never trust my data to an online servce!". But there's a case to be made that for the average user online data is safer than having it on their PC.
Before you shoot me down, think about all the viruses, trojans, spyware you've cleaned off friends PCs, and about the number of times you've asked "When did you last backup?" with a sinking feeling. Wouldn't it be great to be able do a quick Ubuntu install and be totally confident they'll be working on their docs again within the hour? I'm sure all you uber-geeks run machines with mirrored drives and sound OSs, and backup every night - but the average user doesn't. So to them a well-designed and run (not making any judgements on this particular service!) online system is likely to be a lot safer.
And here's some proof - geek that I am, running my own Postfix mailserver, I bless the day I migrated to Gmail. And as many of my IT dependants too - compared to managing all those Outlook/Thunderbird apps, the possibility that Larry and Sergey might be browsing my email is of absolutely no consequence. Yes, Gmail has gone down occassionally, but the downtime has been an order of magnitude less than it would have been while I was moving my mail data to my new laptop, or rebuilding friend's PCs to get rid of the nasties.
Back when I was young (and you probably weren't born), the idea of most families having the technology to reproduce any printed material in full colour might have seemed cool but useless. Now we merrily print out photos, calendars, party invitations, assignments, sales brochures, banknotes...
So I'm very excited at these first attempts at being able to make anything we want at home. Just for starters, imagine the warehouses of odd plastic parts scattered around the world being replaced by a searchable database of files that you just google for, and "print" out. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and am constantly frustrated by having to get some simple lump of plastic sent from a bigger town several days later.
Real example - a few weeks ago the plastic button broke on our toaster. Rather than ditching it and buying a new one, I googled for the part and got it sent from overseas - three weeks and $10 for a 10c bit of plastic.
I very much doubt if war game figures are going to be the killer app for this technology - sit down with some friends and some beers, and in half an hour you'll have come up with a lot more exciting ideas.
You're probably right that we are more homogeneous than (some) countries, but Quakers are also probably one of the least homogeneous churches around. We don't have priests pushing any particular agenda, and the onus is on each individual to develop their own beliefs. Which might explain why we're so small - pre-packed beliefs are so much easier, and popular...
After some thought I also agree that total unanimity is too hard, but a 90% consensus seems like a good target. I'd be a lot happier to accept my views being dismissed if 90% of the population disagreed with me, than if 50.1% did.
I'm a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), in which all decisions require consensus. This makes for longer meetings, but results in better outcomes - it's better to spend longer thrashing out something we can all agree with than to force a worse solution on a minority.
And believe you me, we have some very obstructionist people in our organisation, so please don't argue that consensus only works when everyone is working together. I'd be very interested to see unanimocracy given a spin.
I don't like moving SSH to a non-standard port because I want to make it as easy as possible for users to use SCP to reduce the pressure to install FTP.
I also dislike the processing and bandwidth resources that denyhosts and their ilk require. Iptables gives me a great low-level solution that prevents more than two brute-force attempts:
# SSH daemon - tcp Port 22 - drop any more than 3 new connections from one address every 5 mins
$IPTABLES -I INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set
$IPTABLES -I INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 300 --hitcount 3 -j DROP
$IPTABLES -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
If you added links to independently verifiable sources for your claims, (some) people might actually listen. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from the paranoid conspiracy nuts, at least until 911 scene 2 happens in a day or two...
I challenge you, right now, to Google your country's ISO organisation contact details, or the global ISO details, or both. Then send them an email/phone call/letter telling them how the ISO is about to lose a lot of credibility if they don't halt the fast-track process while they carry out a review of the tactics Microsoft have used to subvert their standards.
It will take you ten minutes, and WILL make a difference. Unlike the ten minutes you'll otherwise spend reading more outraged comments on Slashdot.
Do as I do, AND as I say - I just sent my email. Go for it!
In my view, open source software shifts the market in favour of the local developer - and customers. The MS ecosystem is (currently) larger, but MS gets most of the money - a few developers also make a living, but if they make too much, MS buys them out or brings out a competing product that kills them. Most customers have to use off-the-shelf MS software, because they can't change it and it costs too much to get custom applications written from scratch.
In the smaller OSS ecosystem, the OS and tools (web servers, databases etc.) are a commodity that cost little if anything. Customers pay less, and can get local developers to provide exactly what they want. Local developers get most of the money.
I prefer the OSS ecosystem. My customers can afford applications customised to how they think and work, and I actually DO make a good living developing my own code. And it's far more fulfilling than earning a margin on MS software that I've shoe-horned the customer's requirements into.
And then think for another second... GPS by itself is no use for tracking things remotely - it is a passive system that allows the receiver to know exactly where it is. The satellites have no idea where the receivers are, or even if they exist.
To monitor a device remotely, you then have to add a transmitter which sends the device's location - easy enough to do for a limited number of receivers, but doing it on a whole population scale (as some are suggesting) would be nigh impossible.
Care to comment on the other mail servers? Sendmail at only 13% is a big suprise. Hopefully this statistic will help pursuade our dinosaur sysadmin that we should switch to postfix.
Building and maintaining a reactor (or anything else) on a barge has got to cost far more than doing it on land. Assuming this project is viable, that extra cost must be balanced out by some advantages.
So this project provides an interesting perspective on what NIMBY costs our society. And as we get more environmentally aware, the cost of NIMBY is only going to increase - will we end up with our coastlines studded with power stations, sewerage works, factories, prisons, and mental hospitals?
I always believed the "...but the only reason I don't switch is games" argument, until I installed Ubuntu on my son's computer (dual-boot). He's twelve, likes games, but doesn't have a huge budget for the big-name games - loves Runescape. He soon discovered synaptic had screed of games that he could download and install, any time he liked, for free. It's now a couple of months since he last booted up Windows, and we have a steady stream of his friends coming round asking me to "upgrade" their computers.
I use greylisting (gld to be specific) which works wonderfully. A couple of customers wanted even better filtering...
First I tried DSPAM, but they refused to train it so the results weren't good. Then I tried Spam Assasin, which also let through a suprising amount of spam - a lot more than my personal account on Gmail.
So I set up accounts on Gmail for them, and forwarded their mail to those accounts (after greylisting - don't want to burden GMail too much!). Gmail lets you set up forwarding, so I simply forwarded all the filtered mail back to a second account on my mailserver for the customer to pick up. Finally I wrote a python script that logs in to Gmail once a week to prevent the account being closed due to non-use.
A tad involved, but it works like a dream. Yet again Google comes out on top, this time in a market it doesn't even know it's in!
I should have qualified that the joke is not amusing to the Blackberry users - they grimace while the rest of us smirk.
And you're right that my preference should not stop you getting a phone with a cappucino maker built in, if you want one. But that isn't what I'm suggesting - I posed the question to see if anyone else felt the same way, and if maybe the phone companies were missing a market.
Am I alone in not being attracted by all these bells and whistles phones have these days? I want a phone to be a phone - I already have a digital camera to take pictures, and a music player to play music. Why try to cram all these features into a mobile phone, which just complicates the user interface and adds cost?
And don't get me started on email on phones - several of our managers have Blackberries, and despite their bigger keypads, it is still painfully obvious a message was created on one. Plus they tend to be sent at 10:30pm...
We have a new joke going around the office - have you heard about the new crime wave of Blackberry muggings? Crazed people accost you, force their Blackberry on you, and scarper.
Oh cool - wait till we hack these things like the WRT54G to make wireless routers. Then imagine the Beowolf cluster! We'll be able to play Duke Nukem on a box of actual ammo!
The obvious answer to this (and all the "I'd never use this 'cos anyone could access my data" tripe) is to encrypt it yourself before you upload it. AES is secure enough that it becomes a serious inconvenience to the bad guys to decrypt things - it'd be easier to break into your home and read it directly.
I predict a new file system for Linux weeks after Gdrive is announced - which includes client-side encryption as standard. And if MS was smart, it'd do the same with Vista.
# No easy install/uninstall - if you're comfortable with partitioning etc then you can get Fedora installed without too much bother, but Ubuntu doesn't even have a graphical installer, and as far as I'm aware no distro today offers an easy way to remove it and put Windows back to 100% disk usage. Who in their right mind would try a program that ate 10gigs of disk space and didn't come with a way to uninstall it?
It is true that the Ubuntu installer is not graphical, but it is still one of the best - Linux On Laptops is overflowing with stories of Ubuntu "Just Working", detecting wireless networking, displays etc flawlessly. Personally I'm not phased by the fact that the install is character based - I can still see exactly what is going on.
And you forget one of the major aids to Linux migration - live disks. You CAN try out Ubuntu on your Windows machine without even touching your hard disk. It's a bit rich to be complaining about Linux not cleaning up after itself when Windows refuses to play at all!
I'd really recommend you try the latest Ubuntu live disk. I think you'll be suprised how easy it is, and it is entirely risk free - just pop out the CD and reboot back to good old familiar Windows.