Thursday, June 11, 2009
Jeenay do Geo !!!
Please clear your mind and think. I think you are not aware of GEO... Its been funded by USA government. justthink, what Jew / Indian/ American lobby want ......... the basic idea isto promote frustration, and despondence in a nation so they start todemoralize the nation. And the future can be mapped as they want toproject in the minds of 50 percent Illiterate population.. ...that areborn Muslim & can't read ..But can see Why on earth is USA is concern with only GEO, why CNN, BBC andBush quote GEO? Why not other TV channels in china, Japan , CUBA ,Indianchannel, Arab , France ..... ?why only Pakistan ?????? o Why Geo showed peoples body without head, only finger parts, peopledying after bomb blast? Does any other channel show these things???? o Just think...... o Why Voice of America (an American Propaganda channel) was allowed to showits program on GEO, on the other hand, VOA(TV & Radio) is not shown orheard anywhere in USA. why the hell on GEO then ???????? o In India more than 2000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat for threemonths!!!! any 36 hours live coverage of these killing , have any one seenon ZEE or star or Sony etc , any Indian channels???? Babri Masjid wasdestroyed by Hindus any live coverage???? Nuns in Tamil ado of India wereburned alive in a church and for next 6 hours the church was burning , didany Indian channel or CNN or BBC showed d that????? in France 700 carswere burnt in one day !!!!! o There are 89 separatist movements in India in 2007 ...from Bihar toKashmir, Assam etc.... o Do you see on any Indian channel showing... 250 million peoplesleeping on footpath???? ? o Zee India never showed killing of Kashmiri's and the attack on GOLDENTEMPLE , killing of Sikhs in Indian soil. o How many Israeli channel shows killing by Israeli soldiers???? Whenthey kill Palestinians? ???? o Have you ever seen Indian president or politician been given GALEE onTV channel during live coverage???? o Any killing by Irish republican army??? o 30,000 rape cases in USA do you see on TV???? but you see MuktaranMaee on GEO, CNN, BCC o Why Geo was not concerned with Benazir wealth and property?? AndNawaz Sharif property?? Ø WHO is GEO???? Just think???? They telecast false news aboutemergency and stock market crashed in Pakistan ... o Do you know Kamran Khan was getting RS 25 lakh per month, o ; Do you know DR Shahid Masood, was a member of NSF student party (apolitical left wing) student party against Pakistan and Islamic forces....with RS 22 lakh per month and home in Dubai and Karachi. multiple visa ... o Same amount been paid to Hamid Meer editor ausaf......even Nadia Khanwith Rs 6 lakh per month.... Such huge amount just for free??????? o When they were not able to broadcast the 8 hour cricket match theysaid they lost 1 billion rupee and just imagine without any money justfor free they were broadcasting judge activity for free, Nawaz Sharif forfree and Benazir for free...... all... 36 hour coverage just forfree???????? ????????? By a private channel!!!!! !!!!!!!! o 50 percent Indian dramas on Geo and 25 percent with mix cast (Indianand Pakistani) and Indian films (which are ban in Pakistani cinema arebeen broadcast by Geo) Geo did not showed any good news like Islamabad, Peshawar Motorway butinstead it showed dead people in Karachi.... they never discuss 5.1billion dollar of oil refinery in Pakistan instead they showed beheadingof Pakistani people... never discuss why America is telling Musharraf totake off his uniform ????Why USA only emphasizing on reopening GEO where Aaj and ARY also banned????How come Hamid Meer came on BBC and said openly Musharraf killed GEO????Why USA is interfering in our business..!! !!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! A COUNTRY WHERE 60 percent of population cannot read and neverbeen to school media must not be free...... because the y can just tamperwith the minds of the people.. and shape the nations view the way theywant.. Such people don't have the right to be called PAKISTANIS! Pass this message to all Pakistanis GEENAY DO GEO!!!
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Bin Laden Sighted In Karachi
Reports of Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts took a new turn this week when a Pakistani woman reported sighting a tall man in a white robe with matching turban hit his head on a low doorway.
The woman's suspicions about the identity of the man were further aroused when she noticed the entrance led to a recording studio.
So as not to create suspicion, she approached him without revealing who she thought he might be.
“Are you all right?” she asked, with demur innocence.
“No,” he said. “How can I be all right? Besides just cracking my head on this low doorway, I’m Osama Bin Laden.”
“Really?” she replied, thinking of the $25-million reward for turning him in, as well as her opportunity to contribute to the triumph of justice.
“Yes” he went on. “I haven’t been all right since I fled Tora Bora, because it’s even hard for me to get out long enough to make my audiotapes.”
“My, oh, my,” the woman commiserated, “Everybody thinks you’re in the remote regions near the Afghan border.”
“You’d think they’d know better,” he confided. “How could a spoiled rich boy like me live this long without some of the comforts only a city can provide, like a dialysis machine to keep me alive, and takeout food.”
“That makes sense,” she agreed.
“Yes, it does, but there’s no danger the authorities will figure out where I am, because every time I record a tape, we filter out the sounds of the city, like horns and sirens.”
“That’s very clever,” she said. “You’d think that when they see the tapes are filtered they might guess you’re in a place where there are background sounds.”
“Let’s just hope they don’t catch on. I don’t want them to take away from my next surprise move.”
“Oh, a surprise move,” she exclaimed. “Want to tell me about it?”
“No,” he told her, “because then it won’t be a surprise anymore. But just watch. I’m not going to slink around Karachi forever. I long for metropolitan delights in the more developed capitals of the world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my recording session is due to start.”
Then he waved goodbye and reentered the doorway, this time remembering to duck.
The woman, excited to shortness of breath, went straight to the nearest police station and reported her astonishing interaction.
Police immediately launched a Karachi-wide search for Bin Laden, vowing to pursue him as part of their apparently somewhat porous terrorist dragnet.
They were, however, shocked when the very next day, Bin Laden called police headquarters and offered to turn himself in.
When asked why he had made the decision, when the police, many of whom are devout Muslims, were doing their utmost to help him evade capture, he replied, “I can’t stand it any longer. Hiding out every day, afraid to go outside for fear of getting into a conversation with a stranger who might report me, and having to spend all my time with my four wives, when I could be sitting in a topless club in America, like the martyrs I sent to fly planes into American buildings were doing shortly before their great sacrifice. Worse yet, one of my wives told me I may have misinterpreted The Koran, because, she reminded me, 'Islam' means peace. Praise be to God I didn't, or I'll have to turn myself in. ”
“Well, if you insist,” the police told him.
“I’ll let you know for sure in a day or two,” Osama replied, “I don’t want to do it and then regret it later, especially at the moment I’m being hanged.”
“That’s very understandable, revered sheik,” the Pakistani police officer replied. Then he added a reassurance that would undoubtedly have infuriated Pakistani President Musharaff, his much wiser leader and devoted American ally in the war on terror. “We must scour the city for you. Before you hang up, tell us your address, so we make sure to avoid it.”
The woman's suspicions about the identity of the man were further aroused when she noticed the entrance led to a recording studio.
So as not to create suspicion, she approached him without revealing who she thought he might be.
“Are you all right?” she asked, with demur innocence.
“No,” he said. “How can I be all right? Besides just cracking my head on this low doorway, I’m Osama Bin Laden.”
“Really?” she replied, thinking of the $25-million reward for turning him in, as well as her opportunity to contribute to the triumph of justice.
“Yes” he went on. “I haven’t been all right since I fled Tora Bora, because it’s even hard for me to get out long enough to make my audiotapes.”
“My, oh, my,” the woman commiserated, “Everybody thinks you’re in the remote regions near the Afghan border.”
“You’d think they’d know better,” he confided. “How could a spoiled rich boy like me live this long without some of the comforts only a city can provide, like a dialysis machine to keep me alive, and takeout food.”
“That makes sense,” she agreed.
“Yes, it does, but there’s no danger the authorities will figure out where I am, because every time I record a tape, we filter out the sounds of the city, like horns and sirens.”
“That’s very clever,” she said. “You’d think that when they see the tapes are filtered they might guess you’re in a place where there are background sounds.”
“Let’s just hope they don’t catch on. I don’t want them to take away from my next surprise move.”
“Oh, a surprise move,” she exclaimed. “Want to tell me about it?”
“No,” he told her, “because then it won’t be a surprise anymore. But just watch. I’m not going to slink around Karachi forever. I long for metropolitan delights in the more developed capitals of the world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my recording session is due to start.”
Then he waved goodbye and reentered the doorway, this time remembering to duck.
The woman, excited to shortness of breath, went straight to the nearest police station and reported her astonishing interaction.
Police immediately launched a Karachi-wide search for Bin Laden, vowing to pursue him as part of their apparently somewhat porous terrorist dragnet.
They were, however, shocked when the very next day, Bin Laden called police headquarters and offered to turn himself in.
When asked why he had made the decision, when the police, many of whom are devout Muslims, were doing their utmost to help him evade capture, he replied, “I can’t stand it any longer. Hiding out every day, afraid to go outside for fear of getting into a conversation with a stranger who might report me, and having to spend all my time with my four wives, when I could be sitting in a topless club in America, like the martyrs I sent to fly planes into American buildings were doing shortly before their great sacrifice. Worse yet, one of my wives told me I may have misinterpreted The Koran, because, she reminded me, 'Islam' means peace. Praise be to God I didn't, or I'll have to turn myself in. ”
“Well, if you insist,” the police told him.
“I’ll let you know for sure in a day or two,” Osama replied, “I don’t want to do it and then regret it later, especially at the moment I’m being hanged.”
“That’s very understandable, revered sheik,” the Pakistani police officer replied. Then he added a reassurance that would undoubtedly have infuriated Pakistani President Musharaff, his much wiser leader and devoted American ally in the war on terror. “We must scour the city for you. Before you hang up, tell us your address, so we make sure to avoid it.”
Saturday, June 6, 2009
I am a Muslim
Kill me and call me it a MISTAKE
Imprison me and call it SECURITY MEASURE
Exile my students and call it PROGRESS IN WAR
Rob my rights, invade my land, declare me as terrorist and call it A VICTORY
But listen i am a MUSLIM
I will defend my land, honour and my beloved islam and i will remain muslim forever INSHA ALLLAH
Long live islam, muslims and PAKISTAN
Imprison me and call it SECURITY MEASURE
Exile my students and call it PROGRESS IN WAR
Rob my rights, invade my land, declare me as terrorist and call it A VICTORY
But listen i am a MUSLIM
I will defend my land, honour and my beloved islam and i will remain muslim forever INSHA ALLLAH
Long live islam, muslims and PAKISTAN
Thursday, May 21, 2009
PAKISTAN TELECOM TO INSTALL 900KM OPTIC FIBER IN BALOCHISTAN
The Universal Service Fund, Wateen Telecom and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTCL) signed on Sunday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to install 900km of optic fiber in Balochistan and provide basic services in Larkana, Sindh province.
Under the agreement 900 Km optic fiber cable will be provided to five un-served Tehsils in Balochistan, (Dasht, Noshki, Dalbandin, Mashkhel and Taftan), touching also the cities of Dringar Ahmedwal, Nokundi and Chaghi and 335,000 people.
The second project would provide basic telephone data services in the un-served areas of Larkana and Shikarpur (Sindh) benefiting 165,000 people.
Under the agreement 900 Km optic fiber cable will be provided to five un-served Tehsils in Balochistan, (Dasht, Noshki, Dalbandin, Mashkhel and Taftan), touching also the cities of Dringar Ahmedwal, Nokundi and Chaghi and 335,000 people.
The second project would provide basic telephone data services in the un-served areas of Larkana and Shikarpur (Sindh) benefiting 165,000 people.
How To Become Hacker
What Is a Hacker ?!
The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.
There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.
The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.
Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.
But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.r.
So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:
The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved :
Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece — and so on, until you're done.
No problem should ever have to be solved twice :
Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.
(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.
Boredom and drudgery are evil :
Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).
(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them
Freedom is good :
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like ‘cooperation’ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.
Attitude is no substitute for competence :
To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won't make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won't let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.
If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself — the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery.
The hacker attitude :
The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.
Learn how to program :
This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.
I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.
If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.
C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it's smarter to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.
Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.
LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.)
It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways
But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages.
I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here — it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.
Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His "recipe for programming success" is worth careful attention.
Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models.
Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic...
Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it :
I'll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on a personal machine, and run it.
Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary — you can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.
Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple's proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things.
Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn't always true, and some old-time hackers still aren't happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsoft's muscle doesn't seem able to seriously dent it.)
So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You'll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you'll have fun, and you'll soak up more knowledge than you realize you're learning until you look back on it as a master hacker.
For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.
To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.
During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.
You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.
A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but it's a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML :
Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; here's one.)
But just having a home page isn't anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page).
To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic...
If you don't have functional English, learn it :
As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.
Status in the Hacker Culture
1. Write open-source software
2. Help test and debug open-source software
3. Publish useful information
4. Help keep the infrastructure working
5. Serve the hacker culture itself
Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers
Write open-source software :
The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too many people who weren't sure exactly what “free” was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term “open-source” software).
Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
But there's a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our community's hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, "the hacker community" and "open-source developers" are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was not always so
Help test and debug open-source software :
They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That's why any open-source author who's thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that's a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that's merely a salutary nuisance.
If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on
Publish useful information :
Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.
Help keep the infrastructure workin
The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication
Serve the hacker culture itself :
Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.
The Hacker/Nerd Connection :
Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — it's a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's OK too — at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe you'll get a life later on.
Points For Style :
Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking.
Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.
Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).
Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where it's legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness.
Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesn't require you to believe crazy things.
Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.
Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay L
The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they're connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment's notice.
Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills — system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who's a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.
Finally, a few things not to do :
Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.
Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).
Don't call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and don't waste your time on anybody who does.
Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errors and bad grammar.
The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.
The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser..
The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.
There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.
The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.
Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.
But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.r.
So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:
The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved :
Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece — and so on, until you're done.
No problem should ever have to be solved twice :
Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.
(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.
Boredom and drudgery are evil :
Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do — solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).
(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them
Freedom is good :
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like ‘cooperation’ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.
Attitude is no substitute for competence :
To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won't make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won't let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.
If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself — the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery.
The hacker attitude :
The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.
Learn how to program :
This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.
I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.
If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.
C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it's smarter to use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.
Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.
LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.)
It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways
But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages.
I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here — it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.
Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His "recipe for programming success" is worth careful attention.
Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models.
Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic...
Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it :
I'll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on a personal machine, and run it.
Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they're distributed in binary — you can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.
Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple's proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things.
Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can't be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn't always true, and some old-time hackers still aren't happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsoft's muscle doesn't seem able to seriously dent it.)
So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You'll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you'll have fun, and you'll soak up more knowledge than you realize you're learning until you look back on it as a master hacker.
For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.
To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.
During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.
You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.
A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but it's a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.
Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML :
Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.
This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; here's one.)
But just having a home page isn't anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page).
To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic...
If you don't have functional English, learn it :
As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.
Status in the Hacker Culture
1. Write open-source software
2. Help test and debug open-source software
3. Publish useful information
4. Help keep the infrastructure working
5. Serve the hacker culture itself
Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers
Write open-source software :
The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too many people who weren't sure exactly what “free” was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term “open-source” software).
Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
But there's a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our community's hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, "the hacker community" and "open-source developers" are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was not always so
Help test and debug open-source software :
They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That's why any open-source author who's thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that's a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that's merely a salutary nuisance.
If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on
Publish useful information :
Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.
Help keep the infrastructure workin
The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication
Serve the hacker culture itself :
Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.
The Hacker/Nerd Connection :
Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — it's a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's OK too — at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe you'll get a life later on.
Points For Style :
Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking.
Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.
Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).
Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where it's legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness.
Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesn't require you to believe crazy things.
Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.
Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay L
The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they're connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment's notice.
Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills — system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who's a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers don't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.
Finally, a few things not to do :
Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.
Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).
Don't call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and don't waste your time on anybody who does.
Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errors and bad grammar.
The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.
The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser..
PTA launching 3G Service shortly
Chairman Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) Dr Muhammad Yaseen has said the authority is launching 3G service, rural telephony, consumer protection cell, strategy, development division, mobile virtual network operators, and broadband.
He said this while chairing a high-level meeting here Thursday.
"Consultation regarding 3G service with the stakeholders had been carried out through Industry Fora and Seminars from time to time. It is expected that 3G spectrum auction will be held late this year and modalities are being finalised in this regard. Ministry of IT is also being consulted in procedure of 3G auction," he said.
"The PTA is now focusing on improvement of telephone services in far-flung areas of the country and number of steps is being taken to increase rural telephony. Basically this issue is being tackled through Universal Service Fund (USF)," he said.
However, PTA has also initiated Rural Telephony Projects through the Rabta Ghar Scheme aimed at the proliferation of telecom facilities in the rural and far-flung un-served and undeserved areas of Pakistan to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural areas, he added.
"It also provides employment opportunities to graduates of remote and rural areas," he added.
"The growth of broadband services could not take fast pace in view of its high costs. PTA has now focused on this area and with the launch of some recent services like Wimax penetration of broadband across the country would increase resulting in enhanced data and voice services available to a common Pakistani. More than 100 percent growth of broadband was recorded in the last year. 3G will also increase mobile broadband services," he said.
"In view of prompt redressal of consumer complaints a dedicated consumer protection cell has recently been established at PTA. This Cell would work in close coordination with mobile, fixed, internet and other operators to solve consumers' complaints regarding their services. Consumer regulations are also being formed which would help in dealing with consumer related issues. Other measures in this regard would also be taken," he added. He said a new division namely strategy and development has been formed in PTA which would work as a think tank and would advise the authority on future telecom policies.
Taking into account the increasing scope of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) in world cellular market, Government of Pakistan took a principal decision to allow MVNO services in Pakistan and included it as a clause in mobile cellular policy 2004.
The same was added in new cellular mobile licenses," he said and added that in compliance with the policy, PTA issued a Framework for MVNO services in Pakistan in March 2006.
He said this while chairing a high-level meeting here Thursday.
"Consultation regarding 3G service with the stakeholders had been carried out through Industry Fora and Seminars from time to time. It is expected that 3G spectrum auction will be held late this year and modalities are being finalised in this regard. Ministry of IT is also being consulted in procedure of 3G auction," he said.
"The PTA is now focusing on improvement of telephone services in far-flung areas of the country and number of steps is being taken to increase rural telephony. Basically this issue is being tackled through Universal Service Fund (USF)," he said.
However, PTA has also initiated Rural Telephony Projects through the Rabta Ghar Scheme aimed at the proliferation of telecom facilities in the rural and far-flung un-served and undeserved areas of Pakistan to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural areas, he added.
"It also provides employment opportunities to graduates of remote and rural areas," he added.
"The growth of broadband services could not take fast pace in view of its high costs. PTA has now focused on this area and with the launch of some recent services like Wimax penetration of broadband across the country would increase resulting in enhanced data and voice services available to a common Pakistani. More than 100 percent growth of broadband was recorded in the last year. 3G will also increase mobile broadband services," he said.
"In view of prompt redressal of consumer complaints a dedicated consumer protection cell has recently been established at PTA. This Cell would work in close coordination with mobile, fixed, internet and other operators to solve consumers' complaints regarding their services. Consumer regulations are also being formed which would help in dealing with consumer related issues. Other measures in this regard would also be taken," he added. He said a new division namely strategy and development has been formed in PTA which would work as a think tank and would advise the authority on future telecom policies.
Taking into account the increasing scope of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) in world cellular market, Government of Pakistan took a principal decision to allow MVNO services in Pakistan and included it as a clause in mobile cellular policy 2004.
The same was added in new cellular mobile licenses," he said and added that in compliance with the policy, PTA issued a Framework for MVNO services in Pakistan in March 2006.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Nokia introduces affordable mobile devices for Pakistan
Global handsets market leader announces 4 new mobile devices for the low income segment
Nokia today introduced a range of affordable mobile devices specifically for people in Pakistan which will help in bridging the digital divide. In addition to Nokia's lowest cost handset to date, as well as its first handset for Pakistan market with an integrated digital music player.
Speaking at the occasion, Marko Keskinen, Director of Strategy, Business Development and Industry Marketing at Nokia said "Nokia is well aware of the needs of emerging markets and we are executing a strategy to provide exceptional quality products and services to our consumers. Wider industry collaboration among vendors, service providers and regulators enables affordable mobile communication. In the past five years we have been creating efficiencies to bring the cost of mobile devices lower but due to taxation and duties we have not been able to bring the total cost of ownership to a level affordable for lower income consumers."
Nokia Pakistan Affordable Cellphones
"In 2002, Nokia unveiled a strategy to lower the cost of owning and operating a mobile phone and to bring the benefits of mobile telephony to people in emerging markets. Today, we are expanding that vision by introducing a number of devices that aim to bring the power of the Internet to these markets as well," says Imran Khalid Mahmood, Country GM Pakistan, Nokia "we believe that our entry portfolio is for everyone who wish to get connected via basic voice communication while on the go. The mobile device and the Internet are a powerful combination in connecting people with each other, accessing information, news, entertainment and sharing. By introducing products that are affordable, relevant and easy-to-use, we believe Nokia can fuel the growth of the Internet in Pakistan through mobility."
Nokia announced four new mobile devices which will come in Pakistan in early 2009. These devices offer a range of features, styles and price points to support Pakistani consumers to connect with convenience. These products include:
With dedicated music keys, a digital music player, FM radio and a standard 3.5 mm connector for headphones, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is Nokia’s most affordable music phone to date. Equipped with an integrated 2 mega pixel camera, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic also supports image sharing through Share on Ovi, as well as the Mail on Ovi email service. The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2009
Style and fun coupled together in the Nokia 5030 XpressMusic device, equipped with radio design with fun colors and internal FM antenna, Instant access with one-touch radio, key and +/- channel selection keys, excellent loudspeaker audio quality. It comes with the exciting feature to wake up to your favorite radio programme, Large 1.8" 128X160 TFT Colour display, EGSM 900/1800 and GSM850/1900. Other features include, long playing time with long-life battery, 500 phonebook contacts, picture messaging, concatenated SMS for long text messages.
The Nokia 1202 and Nokia 1661 offer exceptional value from a brand that represents quality and trust. The Nokia 1202 is Nokia’s lowest cost mobile device to date. Developed specifically for people in rural areas, the Nokia 1202 includes standard features like a flashlight, extended battery life, loud ring tones and a phone book for up to five users. The Nokia 1661 is Nokia’s lowest cost color phone including an FM radio and a large color screen. The Nokia 1661 also supports flashlight, loud ring tones and multiple phonebooks.
Nokia today introduced a range of affordable mobile devices specifically for people in Pakistan which will help in bridging the digital divide. In addition to Nokia's lowest cost handset to date, as well as its first handset for Pakistan market with an integrated digital music player.
Speaking at the occasion, Marko Keskinen, Director of Strategy, Business Development and Industry Marketing at Nokia said "Nokia is well aware of the needs of emerging markets and we are executing a strategy to provide exceptional quality products and services to our consumers. Wider industry collaboration among vendors, service providers and regulators enables affordable mobile communication. In the past five years we have been creating efficiencies to bring the cost of mobile devices lower but due to taxation and duties we have not been able to bring the total cost of ownership to a level affordable for lower income consumers."
Nokia Pakistan Affordable Cellphones
"In 2002, Nokia unveiled a strategy to lower the cost of owning and operating a mobile phone and to bring the benefits of mobile telephony to people in emerging markets. Today, we are expanding that vision by introducing a number of devices that aim to bring the power of the Internet to these markets as well," says Imran Khalid Mahmood, Country GM Pakistan, Nokia "we believe that our entry portfolio is for everyone who wish to get connected via basic voice communication while on the go. The mobile device and the Internet are a powerful combination in connecting people with each other, accessing information, news, entertainment and sharing. By introducing products that are affordable, relevant and easy-to-use, we believe Nokia can fuel the growth of the Internet in Pakistan through mobility."
Nokia announced four new mobile devices which will come in Pakistan in early 2009. These devices offer a range of features, styles and price points to support Pakistani consumers to connect with convenience. These products include:
With dedicated music keys, a digital music player, FM radio and a standard 3.5 mm connector for headphones, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is Nokia’s most affordable music phone to date. Equipped with an integrated 2 mega pixel camera, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic also supports image sharing through Share on Ovi, as well as the Mail on Ovi email service. The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2009
Style and fun coupled together in the Nokia 5030 XpressMusic device, equipped with radio design with fun colors and internal FM antenna, Instant access with one-touch radio, key and +/- channel selection keys, excellent loudspeaker audio quality. It comes with the exciting feature to wake up to your favorite radio programme, Large 1.8" 128X160 TFT Colour display, EGSM 900/1800 and GSM850/1900. Other features include, long playing time with long-life battery, 500 phonebook contacts, picture messaging, concatenated SMS for long text messages.
The Nokia 1202 and Nokia 1661 offer exceptional value from a brand that represents quality and trust. The Nokia 1202 is Nokia’s lowest cost mobile device to date. Developed specifically for people in rural areas, the Nokia 1202 includes standard features like a flashlight, extended battery life, loud ring tones and a phone book for up to five users. The Nokia 1661 is Nokia’s lowest cost color phone including an FM radio and a large color screen. The Nokia 1661 also supports flashlight, loud ring tones and multiple phonebooks.
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