Who cares about EOL, when the firmware of your device includes a fixed kernel image which won't be updated, ever?
I mean, my current Android phone (using Marshmallow) employs a kernel 3.4.42, released on April 2013. The current version of the 3.4 branch is 3.4.113 (source), released on October 2016. I don't know if there are any critical (security, performance) improvements from 3.4.42 to 3.4.113, but I simply don't care becase I know the manufacturer won't publish an updated version of the firmware with a recent kernel. If a serious kernel security bug appears and it is solved in a new kernel version, it won't be solved in my device. The situation is way better when you consider Linux desktop distributions, but still...
What I mean is that for at least 99% of the people, the kernel is an atomic part of the firmware of their device (phone) and they won't bother about updating it. With this in mind, there should be no recommendations to the final users ("yelling very loudly" because your Android phone employs a given kernel version, haha), EOL is only significant for upgradeable systems. Not even phone designers need to worry about using LTS: they know they will never update their kernel.
Yes, aggregate usage is a meaningful metric, if you know what it defines. MTBF can be tricky, in many cases it is converted to Annualized failure rate (AFR) to obtain a meaningful metric.
However, it makes no sense to employ metrics based on an exponential distribution model (which does not have memory) to compare different sets of disks. In particular, the summary says 13.6 percent of one older model of Seagate 4TB disk failed in 2016... If such drives are older (and thus present a longer uptime) their age induces a higher failure rate, which is not observed in the model since it only considers the uptime hours in the given year but not the previous ones.
I do not work for Galileo, but I know some people involved in the Project.
Interestingly (and unfortunately) the entities most interested in a failure and subsequent delay are neither millitary enemies nor allies (for whatever "ally" means, when you consider hacking your allies). The largest interest in a project delay comes from the many corporations directly involved in its development. This project has been feeding many millios of taxpayer euros during many years to a lot of European tech companies, and the cost uprising has been actually benefitial for them because there were no substantial economic sanctions from these delays (probably an example of a wrongly managed project). Successfully completing the project would kill this guaranteed job & income. I do not claim that delays and increased costs have been intentional, but they have been definitely benefitial for them.
I attended a course by Yale Patt from U. Austin, who is one of the "popes" of Computer Architecture research (see this ranking, for example), where he discussed Moore's Law.
He argued how Moore's Law was not a physical law, nor a technological or market-driven law. But it was a real law and had a very large impact.
Instead, he argued very accurately that Moore's Law was actually a psychological Law: given that it provided the baseline for the expected performance (or transistor count) increase, every company would struggle to get to that point, knowing that otherwise the others would get it and make a much better product. Therefore, Moore's Law became somehow a self-fulfilled prophecy. Note how the ITRS still provides yearly predictions for the (still exponential, in some cases) improvements in semiconductor technology fabrication.
So definitely you are right in that it was a mere observation -- but this observation drove the evolution of electronics for more than 50 years (enough to be labelled as "Law", isn't it?)
Most of us know THX as the logo that comes up when we hear that zooming sound at the start of a film...
Don't you see the problem with the current Slashdot? Summaries do not target nerds, or anyone minimally interested in technology. Some years ago, most of us would have known THX, many of us would have known the intricacies of multichannel digital sound encoding, and some of us would have indeed worked in the field, possibly in THX itself. Comments on the news would come in first person. But right know, news target a general audience, so there is not enough detail for people interested in the very details of the topics.
Any advice on alternatives to find news for nerds, with a good commenting and moderation system?
This new standard is very interesting: it employs the same coding and spectral density as 10GBase-T (6.25 bps/Hz), but it employs the available bandwidth (Hz) depending on the cable category: Cat.5e (100 MHz) can provide 2.5Gbps and Cat.6 (250 MHz) can provide 5 Gbps.
Interestingly, before this standard there was no practical use for Cat.6 cabling: any speed you could obtain using Cat.6 cable (1Gbps) could be also obtained using cat.5e, and if you wanted something faster (10Gbps) you needed Cat. 6A (500 MHz BW). This newly ratified standard finally gets some use from those extra MHz you have in Cat. 6, if you have installed it. It will be interesting to know if 802.3bz ports will be able to measure link bandwidth to adapt speed accordingly to 2.5/5Gbps.
Rather than implementing a complex technology in every single car, there exist countries that have started to implement countdown traffic lights. I have found them while driving and understood it immediately without any explanation. Much simpler, really easy and intuitive, much cheaper globally. I do not understand the approach from Audi.
But not only that. The flash controller could be running a background process, such as offline deduplication or data block movement for static wear levelling. These processes are *not* triggered by reads or writes from the OS, so even when you are not actively writing to the disk, simply removing it without ejecting *might* cause data corruption and data loss.
Make summaries interesting for your target readers.
If you want to shift your target to people who, within the context of a wireless protocol, consider "advertisements" as something bad and intrusive and not some type of broadcast service announcement, that's ok. But please, in that case tell us clearly, so we can find an alternative site.
If you want to recover the old nerdies who have long left the page, please consider that your audience has some technical background when writing the summaries. You could have highlighted many interesting points from the Ars Technica text (or even have found a deeper one), such as current size of advertising packets or the discussion on hardware compatibility via software upgrade.
But instead, you highlighted the only part which has no interest -- the clarification about what are *not* advertising packets. Seriously, is the focus of the summary targeting your target?
I doubt it. The binary could be unsigned, and the (fake) website provide some instructions on ignoring the UAC notification but validating the SHA-1 hash, which would be a sensible way to do when you do not have (or pay) a code signing certificate. More info, for example: http://www.excelsiorjet.com/kb...
When the website is compromised with a MITM attack, the attacker can provide a (fake) download link which downloads a compromised binary from the compromised website, instead of the original binary from Sourceforge. In such case, the user does not know that the file should be digitally signed by a certain author. Instead, the attacker can modify the site to provide (fake) MD5 and SHA-1 hashes which validate the (fake) binary, or provide a self-signed binary. In particular, the problem is that the URL to the download binary and the binary validation instructions also need to be validated, as well as the binary itself. This would be solved using HTTPS.
Note that this attack does not particularly target recurrent users (looking for updates; they probably know how the program security works and where it is hosted), but particularly first-time users who don't know how it works.
When you notice that your career is poor, and that everyone else is having success while you are stagnant, sometimes it is a problem of over-inflated expectations and false perception of other people's success. There is a very, very nice discussion about the frustration of people based on their career in this post. Presenting a list of both successes and failures helps other people ignore the idealized view of your career, and avoid frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obviously a body transplant, not a head transplant. The donor donates the body, not the head.
Who cares about EOL, when the firmware of your device includes a fixed kernel image which won't be updated, ever?
I mean, my current Android phone (using Marshmallow) employs a kernel 3.4.42, released on April 2013. The current version of the 3.4 branch is 3.4.113 (source), released on October 2016. I don't know if there are any critical (security, performance) improvements from 3.4.42 to 3.4.113, but I simply don't care becase I know the manufacturer won't publish an updated version of the firmware with a recent kernel. If a serious kernel security bug appears and it is solved in a new kernel version, it won't be solved in my device. The situation is way better when you consider Linux desktop distributions, but still...
What I mean is that for at least 99% of the people, the kernel is an atomic part of the firmware of their device (phone) and they won't bother about updating it. With this in mind, there should be no recommendations to the final users ("yelling very loudly" because your Android phone employs a given kernel version, haha), EOL is only significant for upgradeable systems. Not even phone designers need to worry about using LTS: they know they will never update their kernel.
Yes, aggregate usage is a meaningful metric, if you know what it defines. MTBF can be tricky, in many cases it is converted to Annualized failure rate (AFR) to obtain a meaningful metric.
However, it makes no sense to employ metrics based on an exponential distribution model (which does not have memory) to compare different sets of disks. In particular, the summary says 13.6 percent of one older model of Seagate 4TB disk failed in 2016... If such drives are older (and thus present a longer uptime) their age induces a higher failure rate, which is not observed in the model since it only considers the uptime hours in the given year but not the previous ones.
I do not work for Galileo, but I know some people involved in the Project.
Interestingly (and unfortunately) the entities most interested in a failure and subsequent delay are neither millitary enemies nor allies (for whatever "ally" means, when you consider hacking your allies). The largest interest in a project delay comes from the many corporations directly involved in its development. This project has been feeding many millios of taxpayer euros during many years to a lot of European tech companies, and the cost uprising has been actually benefitial for them because there were no substantial economic sanctions from these delays (probably an example of a wrongly managed project). Successfully completing the project would kill this guaranteed job & income. I do not claim that delays and increased costs have been intentional, but they have been definitely benefitial for them.
Prior art in humans.
I attended a course by Yale Patt from U. Austin, who is one of the "popes" of Computer Architecture research (see this ranking, for example), where he discussed Moore's Law.
He argued how Moore's Law was not a physical law, nor a technological or market-driven law. But it was a real law and had a very large impact.
Instead, he argued very accurately that Moore's Law was actually a psychological Law: given that it provided the baseline for the expected performance (or transistor count) increase, every company would struggle to get to that point, knowing that otherwise the others would get it and make a much better product. Therefore, Moore's Law became somehow a self-fulfilled prophecy. Note how the ITRS still provides yearly predictions for the (still exponential, in some cases) improvements in semiconductor technology fabrication.
So definitely you are right in that it was a mere observation -- but this observation drove the evolution of electronics for more than 50 years (enough to be labelled as "Law", isn't it?)
It was the battery! Nothing to see here, move along...
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world they are aware of countdown traffic lights, which provide a much simpler solution to this problem.
So, since you do not trust Microsoft... Why do you use Win7 at all?
Most of us know THX as the logo that comes up when we hear that zooming sound at the start of a film...
Don't you see the problem with the current Slashdot? Summaries do not target nerds, or anyone minimally interested in technology. Some years ago, most of us would have known THX, many of us would have known the intricacies of multichannel digital sound encoding, and some of us would have indeed worked in the field, possibly in THX itself. Comments on the news would come in first person. But right know, news target a general audience, so there is not enough detail for people interested in the very details of the topics.
Any advice on alternatives to find news for nerds, with a good commenting and moderation system?
It can work over cat 5e for 2.5Gbps and over cat 6 for 5 Gbps. There is a nice description in the Wikipedia entry
This new standard is very interesting: it employs the same coding and spectral density as 10GBase-T (6.25 bps/Hz), but it employs the available bandwidth (Hz) depending on the cable category: Cat.5e (100 MHz) can provide 2.5Gbps and Cat.6 (250 MHz) can provide 5 Gbps.
Interestingly, before this standard there was no practical use for Cat.6 cabling: any speed you could obtain using Cat.6 cable (1Gbps) could be also obtained using cat.5e, and if you wanted something faster (10Gbps) you needed Cat. 6A (500 MHz BW). This newly ratified standard finally gets some use from those extra MHz you have in Cat. 6, if you have installed it. It will be interesting to know if 802.3bz ports will be able to measure link bandwidth to adapt speed accordingly to 2.5/5Gbps.
Thanks for the link! (no modpoints, sorry). It sounds similar to an POTS traditional phone to me, though.
Broadcast used to mean Broadcast in te olde Slashdot!
Rather than implementing a complex technology in every single car, there exist countries that have started to implement countdown traffic lights. I have found them while driving and understood it immediately without any explanation. Much simpler, really easy and intuitive, much cheaper globally. I do not understand the approach from Audi.
So... It's a bad thing for the Xbox that if you don't have a 4k TV set, you cannot enjoy 4k resolution... So bad for the Xbox... :/
(Who wrote such review?)
The parent is right.
But not only that. The flash controller could be running a background process, such as offline deduplication or data block movement for static wear levelling. These processes are *not* triggered by reads or writes from the OS, so even when you are not actively writing to the disk, simply removing it without ejecting *might* cause data corruption and data loss.
Please Slashdot editors,
Make summaries interesting for your target readers.
If you want to shift your target to people who, within the context of a wireless protocol, consider "advertisements" as something bad and intrusive and not some type of broadcast service announcement, that's ok. But please, in that case tell us clearly, so we can find an alternative site.
If you want to recover the old nerdies who have long left the page, please consider that your audience has some technical background when writing the summaries. You could have highlighted many interesting points from the Ars Technica text (or even have found a deeper one), such as current size of advertising packets or the discussion on hardware compatibility via software upgrade.
But instead, you highlighted the only part which has no interest -- the clarification about what are *not* advertising packets. Seriously, is the focus of the summary targeting your target?
I doubt it. The binary could be unsigned, and the (fake) website provide some instructions on ignoring the UAC notification but validating the SHA-1 hash, which would be a sensible way to do when you do not have (or pay) a code signing certificate. More info, for example: http://www.excelsiorjet.com/kb...
When the website is compromised with a MITM attack, the attacker can provide a (fake) download link which downloads a compromised binary from the compromised website, instead of the original binary from Sourceforge. In such case, the user does not know that the file should be digitally signed by a certain author. Instead, the attacker can modify the site to provide (fake) MD5 and SHA-1 hashes which validate the (fake) binary, or provide a self-signed binary. In particular, the problem is that the URL to the download binary and the binary validation instructions also need to be validated, as well as the binary itself. This would be solved using HTTPS.
Note that this attack does not particularly target recurrent users (looking for updates; they probably know how the program security works and where it is hosted), but particularly first-time users who don't know how it works.
When you notice that your career is poor, and that everyone else is having success while you are stagnant, sometimes it is a problem of over-inflated expectations and false perception of other people's success. There is a very, very nice discussion about the frustration of people based on their career in this post. Presenting a list of both successes and failures helps other people ignore the idealized view of your career, and avoid frustration.
Thank you!
Seriously... Harder?
Even after reading TFA, this example DOES NOT illustrate how important it is to avoid third-party stores.
They have developed a way to—literally—write text by looking at letters. Great advance!!
Add a link to the summary.