We brought you a first look into Singapore’s Next Generation Broad-band Network (NGNBN) a few years back, slated for 2015 as the official completion date. At this point in time, a substantial number of Singaporean houses are already equipped with the optical fiber point. These fibre terminal points residing in the houses are being rolled out progressively since 2009. The NGNBN is said to be able to deliver Gigabit speeds to every household in Singapore.
Yesterday, roughly five years before the official completion date, three Retail Service Providers (RSPs) in Singapore rolled out price plans for houses with fiber points. Singtel, Singapore largest Telecommunication & Internet provider was the first to release their NGNBN price plans. An hour later, M1 followed suit. However, at this point in time, the last Telco & ISP, Starhub, has yet to release their packages.
We are also seeing a few new players providing home/business internet services like Super Internet. This is aligned with the NGNBN agreement where the backbone cables are actually owned by the Singapore’s government and will be leased to any players in the market who wants a share in the growing Internet community.
Here are the NGNBN price plans as of this post (*** updated @ 12.40 p.m.).
** click to enlarge.
Of all the current price plans, only Singtel has openly stated their limitation/capped international download speeds. For their cheapest plan (exPress 150), their international speed is capped at 15Mbps while all the other plans are capped at 25Mbps. The higher pricing for Singtel plans could be due to their promise of international upstream/downstream speed. Starhub and Singtel are providing guaranteed international speed (refer to price plan above). This speed promise maybe a result of caching frequent overseas pages in local datacenters.
As of now, only M1 is providing both Starhub and M1 are offering 1 Gbps speed for home based internet. And as a move to get more people into their NGNBN services, M1 had a wild marketing spree yesterday. M1 provided a three month free trial of their 100Mbps price plans. And as a typical eager Singaporean, yours sincerely waited 2 hours to get a hold of their free trial pack which includes a Huawei GH256 wireless gateway. This is such a positive marketing move by M1 who are new to providing internet services in Singapore.
However, eager early adopters are waiting with much anticipation for Starhub’s price plans which will be released several hours from now. Starhub has been known to provide very competitive pricing plans/deals that could attract many customers. Their NGNBN price plans should be available during COMEX 2010 (Suntec Convention Hall) which will start @ 11 a.m. Singapore time.
Looking at all the internet price plans available at the moment, overlaps occur in terms of price vs. bandwidths. For example, a 6Mbps ADSL2+ Singnet connection is priced at $39.90 while an M1 25Mbps is going at the same price (as of the time of this post). I could only guess the drop of internet pricings across the board for most ADSL plans and older cable price plans. Hence, for those who aren’t looking for larger bandwidths, this might come as a treat for you.
Lastly, come mid-September, I will be providing you with the insights of the performance of the NGNBN services (by M1 and probably one other RSP). So stay tuned!
Many of us who have tried Fedora 13 are facing the issue of not having unrar (a basic program to untar your .tar file) because of the “free software” issue of Fedora’s repos. Hence, we get messages like:
failed to locate unrar in path
when trying to untar a file using Ark. The easiest way to solve this issue is to add a repo with the necessary unrar files. All you need is to get root access first and paste this in your console. Or you can add this entry in your repo list manually.
After the recent spade of Apple’s bad publicity - specifically, the pointing of fingers to their direct competitors to defend themselves from an engineering fault - many of these companies that were brought into the circle of shame retaliated. And between all of those ‘come backs’, Motorola has the best of em all.
As of July 28th, Motorola is running a full page advertorial on their flagship smartphone - Droid X. The content of the ad is brutal and obviously directed towards Apple (or maybe they are just defending themselves from Apple’s defamatory talks). The caption read,
”At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly. That’s why the DROID X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it’s just one of those things that comes as a given when you’ve been making mobile phones for over 30 years.”
This newer advertorial was a successor of the ad which ran last June that read,
“And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls.”
Well things there are just getting warmed up. But for Jobs, bad publicity is still publicity.
If you’re a veteran system administrator, you might remember an era of extremely expensive hard disk storage, when any serious network would have a beefy central file server (probably accessed using the Network File System, NFS) that formed the lifeblood of its operations. It was a well-loved feature as early as Linux kernel 2.0 that you could actually boot your machine with a root filesystem in NFS and have no local disk at all. Hardware costs went down, similar machines could share large parts of their system binaries, upgrades could be done without touching anything but the central server—sysadmins loved this.
But that was then. Diskless booting these days seems a lot less common, even though the technology still exists. You hear about supercomputer clusters using it, but not the “typical” IT department. What happened?
Part of it, I’m sure, is that hard disks became speedier and cheaper more quickly than consumer network technology gained performance. With local disks, it’s still difficult to roll out updates to a hundred or a thousand computers simultaneously, but many groups don’t start with a hundred or a thousand computers, and multicast system re-imaging software like Norton Ghost prevents the hassle from being unbearable enough to force a switch.
More important, though, is that after a few years of real innovation, the de facto standard in network booting has been stagnant for over a decade. Back in 1993, when the fastest Ethernet anyone could use transferred a little over a megabyte of data per second and IDE hard drives didn’t go much faster, network card managers were already including boot ROMs on their expansion cards, each following its own proprietary protocol for loading and executing a bootstrap program. A first effort at standardization, Jamie Honan’s “Net Boot Image Proposal”, was informally published that year, and soon enough two open-source projects, Etherboot (1995) and Netboot (1996), were providing generic ROM images with pluggable driver support. (Full disclosure: I’m an Etherboot Project developer.) They took care of downloading and executing a boot file, but that file would have no way of going back to the network for more data unless it had a network card driver built in. These tools thus became rather popular for booting Linux, and largely useless for booting simpler system management utilities that couldn’t afford the maintenance cost of their own network stack and drivers.
Around this time, Intel was looking at diskless booting from a more commercial point of view: it made management easier, consolidated resources, avoided leaving sysadmins at the mercy of users who broke their systems thinking themselves experts. They published a specification for the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE), as part of a larger initiative called Wired for Management. Network cards started replacing their proprietary boot ROMs with PXE, and things looked pretty good; the venerable SYSLINUX bootloader grew a PXELINUX variant for PXE-booting Linux, and a number of enterprise system management utilities became available in PXE-bootable form.
But, for whatever reason, the standard hasn’t been updated since 1999. It still operates in terms of the ancient x86 real mode, only supports UDP and a “slow, simple, and stupid” file transfer protocol called TFTP, and officially limits boot program size to 32kB. For modern-day applications, this is less than ideal.
Luckily for us, the Etherboot Project still exists, and Etherboot’s successor gPXE has been picking up where Intel left off, and supports a number of more modern protocols. Between that, excellent support in recent Linux kernels for both accessing and serving SAN disks with high performance, and the flexibility gained by booting with an initial ramdisk, diskless booting is making a big comeback. Read on . . . .
Wireless networking has changed the way we are able to access data in our homes and offices. Today we can move around the home while downloading documents and file without interrupting access to the internet. In the past, an internet connection meant using wires.
Like most things in the technology world, wireless networking is always looking to gain speed and while the 802.11n specification was only ratified this year there are already new specifications in the works. One of the specs in the works from the Wi-Fi Alliance is 802.11ad. This specification is in the very early stages of development, but promises much higher bandwidth than current specifications and will operate on the 60 GHz spectrum.
The Wireless Gigabit Alliance has completed the specifications for its WiGig technology that promises to deliver enough bandwidth for wireless connections up to 7Gbps. The standard is written but is undergoing editing and IP review before it is made available to partner companies.
The specification is designed to operate on the 60 GHz frequency band, which is unlicensed. The spec will allow the transfer of high bandwidth content such as HD video. The technology is designed to be complementary to WiFi and while no formal ties to the WiFi Alliance are in place, the WiFi Alliance has said that the two specifications should be complementary to each other.
WiGig will come to market in 2011 if all goes well with technologies like HomePNA, HomePlug, Multimedia over Coax, Ultrawideband, and Wireless Home Digital Interface. Originally, the WiGig specification was to be available to members this quarter, but the alliance has not yet set out requirements for Adopter memberships for those who only want integrate the technology into their gear. The specs are already available to member companies who helped develop the specification.
WiGig was originally envisioned as a technology that would allow the transmission of video and other content within the same room for use in streaming video wirelessly from a computer to a display and other uses. The specification was expanded with the use of beam forming technology to be able to operate around a home. WiGig will be backwards compatible with WiFi. Many of the designing companies who worked on WiGig are WiFi firms as well.
Ali Sardi from WiGig Alliance said, “The majority of silicon makers in the WiGig group are Wi-Fi developers, so you can bet when they designed this new spec they were not going to throw out everything they did in the past.”
I’ve got an e-mail lately from a reader which reads,
“Hey dude, I’ve been looking for a solution to copy files from a remote Windows PC to a Linux PC without installing any free programs. My company only has PuTTY on Windows XP and I can’t seem to use scp like how we usually use it on unix consoles. Thanks a mil! — Ramesh”
Wow. I’ve got readers. LOL.
Anyway Ramesh, a big HI from me and thank you for the question (can’t seem to find good articles to blog these days). You can try Google-ing for the answer but seems like not many have the right answer.
Nonetheless, yours truely have a simple solution. You won’t need PuTTY for this but you’d probably need firewall permissions to allow a similar program (which is just an executable - hence no installation) through to the network. This program is called PSCP. Download the executable (.exe) from the link and launch your command line. Get to the working directory where you have saved your PSCP executable.
To copy a file from Windows to Linux, type in your command line:
pscp <windows directory where the file exists> username@linuxMachineAddress:<path>
The command line will ask for your password and just watch your files get transfered.
The other way around will be much easier. You’ll need PuTTY (or any Windows SSH client) for this. Log into your SSH account and let the magic begin. To copy files to your Window machine just type:
There you go! There are other options for transferring data over SSH but it requires installation at the host machine (which you may not have access to). Using PSCP just simplifies this matter.
Windows 7 comes with an option that allows an Administrator to easily allow/prevent other users (with no admin rights) to run executable programs. This works well especially if you share your PC with guests and you would not want them to run unnecessary programs. Or it could be just to prevent your less tech-savvy Dad from accidentally running tons of applications.
By disabling access to programs, users will need to input an admin password whenever they try to run these programs. Therefore, you’ll have a generally “safe” computing environment. For example, if you are not keen in letting guest users to access the web, you can limit the guest’s account access to FireFox or Internet Explorer. And that is it!
Here is how you go about setting up a protected environment using Windows 7 ‘parental controls.’ Make sure you have a normal user account without administrator rights. This account will be the one that has restricted programs. Next, setup parental control on the created account (you will need to log into an admin account for this).
Go to: Control Panel -> User Account and Family Safety -> Parental Controls -> ‘Created Guest User Account’ .
Under the heading Parental Controls, check the option‘On, enforce current settings.’ Click on‘Allow and Block Specific Programs‘
After clicking the link, you’ll be brought to a screen where most of the installed programs can be located. Deselect the programs that you don’t want your guest users to run. Be sure to know the relationship between programs (some applications may invoke another, causing unwanted conflicts). And when you’re done, just click OK! It is as simple as that. Now you can be assured that your guest users will not misuse the programs in your PC.
With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala, there have been posts on problems getting the Huawei USB dongles to work. After doing a simple search, it seems that this problem lies with a bug in the kernel and bug fixes are on the way. For the meantime, here are two ways to get the Huawei USB dongles to work.
The first way is the easiest: Let the kernel recognise the USB device on system start-up. This is done by attaching the USB dongle before the boot-up of the OS. The network manager should be able to detect the USB device thereafter.
The second work around, as taken from here involves removing the conflicting device drivers that comes with the dongle - the USB storage drivers. Firstly, you have to remove the USB storage device drivers,
sudo rmmod usb-storage
** If rmmod vomits you this error message,
ERROR: Module usb_storage is in use
unmount the storage device from your desktop first before running the rmmod program. That should circumvent the error messages.
The vendor ID and product ID can be found by typing lsusb into command shell which gives you a list of USB device IDs in a format of xxxx:yyyy (where xxxx is your vendor ID and yyyy is your product id). The USB device should be available at the network manager now. However, there are some reports that the second method may only work for some USB modem only.
As of the time of writing, a release has been committed but not yet released. Let’s hope that it’ll come out soon enough. Cheers!
P.S. I am using Huawei E169 USB modem. I have tried the first method and it seems that it consistently works (several times now). The second method works for E220.
I noticed something fishy on Facebook a couple minutes ago. A few of my friends posted this message on their profile update on Facebook, via their mobile phone.
I’m 8 1/2 pounds lighter thanks to the FREE trial pack of this new colon cleanser that I got! visit ExpressColon.net to get yours! efO
There are variants of this message. The bulk of the message, including the site’s name, is the same, except the last three letters. A Google search of the site does not return any results. A simple search on the popular online social network site returns several hits. And these profile updates were made within the past 2 hours or so. My conclusion would be that this update were done without the author’s knowledge and could be a potential virus on the mobile phone.
Looking at the profiles, it seems that the mobile phone affected is an iPhone. Well, I’ll need to double confirm this as soon as I manage to contact them. Could this be the first iPhone viral infection?
Looking through the list, some of these gadgets brought back bitter-sweet memories. Remember those days when it was unbearably funny to see your friends talking on their cool “N-Gage”? No doubt the concept of a portable gaming mobile phone was plausabile but what’s with placing the phone’s microphone at the side of the device? What a concept engineering blunder!
Click here to view the list of the top 25 tech flops of the decade taken from zdnet.com.
In my opinion, Microsoft Windows Vista should be in that list. And if it was a Singapore version, SingtelMioTV has to be in that list too! The programs aired are just so - sucky.
