1. I don't know who these Nasuni people are and am not sure why I should care. 2. My experience of Microsoft over 2 decades is of a company that seems to be mostly stumbling along and not quite getting things right, occasionally hitting the target seemingly by accident, engaging in questionable business practices to ensure their market position and generally being a company many avoid doing business with if they can. 3. Amazon, by contrast has been a pleasure to do business with from my first day as a customer, continually improves it's services in a way that most people seem happy with, occasionally surprises me with things like AutoRip and is a company that most of my family (extended too) is happy to do business with. Dealing with Amazon as a partner may leave something to be desired, but dealing with Amazon as a customer is almost always a pleasure.
Given that MIcrosoft is a company that thrives by forcing customers to accept what *it* wants, while Amazon seems to be a company that thrives on giving customers what they want, my initial reaction to this report is:
Meh. So what? It's a little bit faster now - but... Microsoft. Amazon will probably narrow and exceed that performance gap in a reasonable time frame if that's what their customers find important. So jumping over to Azure based on this report might make short-term sense, but doesn't make sense to the long-term thinker.
Addendum: What all of the above really says is that any genuine talent or ability Microsoft may have is undermined by how it chooses to do business and the resulting reputation it has earned. Which is a damned shame, particularly for all the people that work there and believe in what they do.
You can't be serious. How exactly would one determine this "ability to pay"? How much would *that* kind of policing cost? That cost is not justified when the fee to publish is as reasonable as this. You just argued that meaningful research can be done with almost no overhead cost (pencil and paper is cheap, but a piece of charcoal and the concrete embankment of the bridge you're living under costs even less). If the research is that meaningful, it should be possible to convince enough sponsors to raise the money for the fee. But if you're living under a bridge, maybe there are bigger problems to solve?
As is often the case when closed code is made free, it may become clear why they decided to switch rather than clean up their own. Proprietary codebases are often a mess compared to a high quality open codebase. Seems to be most common with games, given the extreme deadline pressures they are subject to, but not unheard of in other areas. The value of opening the code is countered by the effort required to clean it up. And if there are gaps left by proprietary bits that can't be opened due to licensing issues, the effort needed to get to a viable state is even greater. I'm not sure opening the code would bring that much value, but I do agree with you, since it couldn't hurt.
It's what happens if you somehow become interesting that matters. Involved in an accident with a powerful official or wealthy person? The ability to examine your supposedly private information for some leverage against you would be useful. Decide to participate in an "Occupy" event? Your dossier will be much easier to fill with easy access to all your "private" information. It's not that hard to come up with realistic scenarios in which an "uninteresting" person could be put at risk by unfettered access to private information.
The problem with any cloud provider is that you have to trust that their claims about privacy are true without any verifiable evidence that they are in fact true.
Startpage and Duck Duck Go *claim* searches are private, but there is no actual evidence this is true. Believe so at your own peril.
Likewise, Spideroak's claim that they can't even look at your data themselves is comforting, but still just a claim. It may be true and they may believe it to be true (their site is very convincing), but without an audit of their methods, source code, architecture etc., it could just as easily be a lie.
At the end of the day, what they are selling you is a fantasy that may give you some peace of mind, not actual security. Maybe these providers give you legal recourse you don't get with others - IANAL. If the claims are false, you're just as compromised as you would have been with a "less secure" provider, whether you have grounds for legal action or not.
That's pretty shaky ground to stand on.
In the end, the only approach that offers even a chance of real security is to encrypt your data yourself without any 3rd party involvement. Realistically that means placing your trust in software others built for you (if the tool is provided as a binary) or source code others wrote for you (if you didn't write it yourself), which isn't that great either, but still much better than the fantasy offered by trusting in unsubstantiated claims.
If you are willing to game the system like that, why not just download the tracks illegally? Besides, resale price of used CDs is usually far below of what you paid for them, as with most things.
You just answered your own question - because it is *legal*, and that in itself has some value. No need to hide where you got a track from, worry about prosecution for illegal downloading or keep your collection secret - Amazon offers proof you paid for it legitimately. And it's not gaming the system because of the first sale doctrine - you have a right to sell the physical CD, but since you paid for the music, the fact that you don't own the delivery medium any longer isn't really relevant.
This story made the rounds over a week ago, ran its course and faded into the background again. I was surprised to see it appear here - Slashdot is probably the last place on the web to run it as a front page story.
I don't think that everything that runs on Slashdot needs to be completely current, particularly if the subject is interesting, deep or has long term implications. This story is none of those things - it almost had a gossipy tabloid quality to it ("Vic Gundotra banned from Twitter!"). Oh, and the incident occurred over a year earlier, in June 2011 and seemed to be a non-event. Ho Hum. It should have been passed over in favor of a less stale story.
A decent 7000 watt generator can be had for $800-900 (I know, just bought one) and a tri-fuel conversion kit that adds support for natural gas/propane can be had for a few hundred more. That leaves quite a bit from the original $2k to pay for installation of a proper transfer switch and fuel.
The residents of Connecticut lived through three major storms in the past 16 months and suffered widespread power outages too. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Sandy, the impact of these storms (Tropical Storm Irene and the october noreaster) was more severe in CT (and Vermont/New Hampshire) than in NY and NJ. Now I understand how the residents of the dust mote in "Horton Hears a Who" felt.
Wasn't running full screen - otherwise there would have been no mention of the fact that resizing the browser window had no effect (meaning the page wasn't even coded to fill a percentage of the window).
I don't give a crap about scrolling - that's what mouse wheels are for, and they work great.
I mentioned zooming because on several of the dozen devices I view internet content with, zooming onto an element is a viable way to focus on the content of interest without being distracted by the other content on the page (ads etc). It's easy on an Android device (double tap with the finger), but not so easy on the desktop (if the browser can zoom at all), so not worth the bother.
I have a wide screen monitor. The article uses about 1/4 of the total screen width. The column on the right a little bit more. The rest is whitespace. Resizing my browser window has no effect - just more or less whitespace. I skimmed the article but didn't read it because it is annoyingly narrow and I balk at zooming in or increasing the font size to fill more of the screen. Fixed width content needs to go.
Citizen United and take the money out of the electoral system:
Money doesn't matter as much as you think. Here in Connecticut, Linda McMahon (professional wrestling magnate and aspiring politician) has attempted to buy herself a senate seat twice now, drawing from her own substantial money pool. She's been handily defeated each time, by people who are by no stretch of the imagination appealing and should stand no chance against her carefully cultivated grandmotherly demeanor. Her first defeat? At the hands of Dick Blumenthal, who is affectionately known to us as Skeletor. The second? Chris Murphy, a non-person that few people know much about and who looks like a guy that was beat up a lot in school.
Money didn't work. Carefully crafted image didn't work. Money can buy lots of ads, but it can't make people vote for you.
Interesting. Yet even their home page says "A journey towards self-sufficiency". Apparently complete self-sufficency is not as easy as all that. I'm not even sure it's all that desirable on a society-wide scale. Cohesively interdependent works better for me.
How would homesteading look w/ 21st century technology? How much land does one need for a self-sufficient existence for a family of 4?
Probably about as much land as a small-medium sized farm. In addition to growing enough food to feed yourself and the other 3 people year-round, you would need enough surplus to provide an income. You know, to pay for everything else needed to survive and thrive. Example of things you would still need to pay for: Additional food to provide a varied enough diet to ensure proper nutrition, health insurance, crop insurance, clothing, transportation, essential material goods (stove, refridgeration, heating/cooling, electricity, lighting etc), medication, property taxes, water, communications, educational materials for the kids, food for the livestock (and veterinary bills). And so on. You'd need to be able to grow a hell of a lot of vegetables to become sustainably self-sufficient, and a couple of green houses on your 1/4 - 1/2 acre of suburban land won't be enough.
MicroVAX for me. As I recall, the visual component was there initially, if your monitor could display graphics. Since the WWW was originally concieved as a way for researchers to share research results over the internet, URLs could refer to non-textual information, including, but not limited to visual information. Though the original browser was text-only, you could browse to an image that would display on your graphics capable monitor. It just wasn't integrated into the page alongside the text. The integrated text+graphics browser you're thinking of became popular with the development of Mosaic, although there were a few other WWW clients that did a passable job of it before Mosaic came along. Mosaic worked best, though, so it was the game-changer.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I don't know who these Nasuni people are and am not sure why I should care.
2. My experience of Microsoft over 2 decades is of a company that seems to be mostly stumbling along and not quite getting things right, occasionally hitting the target seemingly by accident, engaging in questionable business practices to ensure their market position and generally being a company many avoid doing business with if they can.
3. Amazon, by contrast has been a pleasure to do business with from my first day as a customer, continually improves it's services in a way that most people seem happy with, occasionally surprises me with things like AutoRip and is a company that most of my family (extended too) is happy to do business with. Dealing with Amazon as a partner may leave something to be desired, but dealing with Amazon as a customer is almost always a pleasure.
Given that MIcrosoft is a company that thrives by forcing customers to accept what *it* wants, while Amazon seems to be a company that thrives on giving customers what they want, my initial reaction to this report is:
Meh. So what? It's a little bit faster now - but ... Microsoft. Amazon will probably narrow and exceed that performance gap in a reasonable time frame if that's what their customers find important. So jumping over to Azure based on this report might make short-term sense, but doesn't make sense to the long-term thinker.
Addendum: What all of the above really says is that any genuine talent or ability Microsoft may have is undermined by how it chooses to do business and the resulting reputation it has earned. Which is a damned shame, particularly for all the people that work there and believe in what they do.
Thanks for the insight - that's good to know.
You can't be serious. How exactly would one determine this "ability to pay"? How much would *that* kind of policing cost? That cost is not justified when the fee to publish is as reasonable as this. You just argued that meaningful research can be done with almost no overhead cost (pencil and paper is cheap, but a piece of charcoal and the concrete embankment of the bridge you're living under costs even less). If the research is that meaningful, it should be possible to convince enough sponsors to raise the money for the fee. But if you're living under a bridge, maybe there are bigger problems to solve?
As is often the case when closed code is made free, it may become clear why they decided to switch rather than clean up their own. Proprietary codebases are often a mess compared to a high quality open codebase. Seems to be most common with games, given the extreme deadline pressures they are subject to, but not unheard of in other areas. The value of opening the code is countered by the effort required to clean it up. And if there are gaps left by proprietary bits that can't be opened due to licensing issues, the effort needed to get to a viable state is even greater. I'm not sure opening the code would bring that much value, but I do agree with you, since it couldn't hurt.
Doesn't quite work, but nice try.
The android version you're alluding to is called "froyo", not "frodo".
Perhaps you were trying to (weakly) pun-ish us?
It's what happens if you somehow become interesting that matters. Involved in an accident with a powerful official or wealthy person? The ability to examine your supposedly private information for some leverage against you would be useful. Decide to participate in an "Occupy" event? Your dossier will be much easier to fill with easy access to all your "private" information. It's not that hard to come up with realistic scenarios in which an "uninteresting" person could be put at risk by unfettered access to private information.
The problem with any cloud provider is that you have to trust that their claims about privacy are true without any verifiable evidence that they are in fact true.
Startpage and Duck Duck Go *claim* searches are private, but there is no actual evidence this is true. Believe so at your own peril.
Likewise, Spideroak's claim that they can't even look at your data themselves is comforting, but still just a claim. It may be true and they may believe it to be true (their site is very convincing), but without an audit of their methods, source code, architecture etc., it could just as easily be a lie.
At the end of the day, what they are selling you is a fantasy that may give you some peace of mind, not actual security. Maybe these providers give you legal recourse you don't get with others - IANAL. If the claims are false, you're just as compromised as you would have been with a "less secure" provider, whether you have grounds for legal action or not.
That's pretty shaky ground to stand on.
In the end, the only approach that offers even a chance of real security is to encrypt your data yourself without any 3rd party involvement. Realistically that means placing your trust in software others built for you (if the tool is provided as a binary) or source code others wrote for you (if you didn't write it yourself), which isn't that great either, but still much better than the fantasy offered by trusting in unsubstantiated claims.
If you are willing to game the system like that, why not just download the tracks illegally? Besides, resale price of used CDs is usually far below of what you paid for them, as with most things.
You just answered your own question - because it is *legal*, and that in itself has some value. No need to hide where you got a track from, worry about prosecution for illegal downloading or keep your collection secret - Amazon offers proof you paid for it legitimately. And it's not gaming the system because of the first sale doctrine - you have a right to sell the physical CD, but since you paid for the music, the fact that you don't own the delivery medium any longer isn't really relevant.
On the one hand, yes, anyone who complains about a company that stops providing a free service is a Winer who deserves the scorn people send them.
There, fixed that for ya. :-)
This story made the rounds over a week ago, ran its course and faded into the background again. I was surprised to see it appear here - Slashdot is probably the last place on the web to run it as a front page story.
I don't think that everything that runs on Slashdot needs to be completely current, particularly if the subject is interesting, deep or has long term implications. This story is none of those things - it almost had a gossipy tabloid quality to it ("Vic Gundotra banned from Twitter!"). Oh, and the incident occurred over a year earlier, in June 2011 and seemed to be a non-event. Ho Hum. It should have been passed over in favor of a less stale story.
A decent 7000 watt generator can be had for $800-900 (I know, just bought one) and a tri-fuel conversion kit that adds support for natural gas/propane can be had for a few hundred more. That leaves quite a bit from the original $2k to pay for installation of a proper transfer switch and fuel.
Generator: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/home-garden/home-improvement/generators/generator-ratings/models/overview/troy-bilt-xp-7000-30477-99044703.htm
Tri-fuel kits: http://www.propane-generators.com/tri-fuel_kits.htm
The residents of Connecticut lived through three major storms in the past 16 months and suffered widespread power outages too. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Sandy, the impact of these storms (Tropical Storm Irene and the october noreaster) was more severe in CT (and Vermont/New Hampshire) than in NY and NJ. Now I understand how the residents of the dust mote in "Horton Hears a Who" felt.
YOP!
Just sayin'
Either incompetent or lying, it would seem.
Wasn't running full screen - otherwise there would have been no mention of the fact that resizing the browser window had no effect (meaning the page wasn't even coded to fill a percentage of the window).
I don't give a crap about scrolling - that's what mouse wheels are for, and they work great.
I mentioned zooming because on several of the dozen devices I view internet content with, zooming onto an element is a viable way to focus on the content of interest without being distracted by the other content on the page (ads etc). It's easy on an Android device (double tap with the finger), but not so easy on the desktop (if the browser can zoom at all), so not worth the bother.
I have a wide screen monitor. The article uses about 1/4 of the total screen width. The column on the right a little bit more. The rest is whitespace. Resizing my browser window has no effect - just more or less whitespace. I skimmed the article but didn't read it because it is annoyingly narrow and I balk at zooming in or increasing the font size to fill more of the screen. Fixed width content needs to go.
Citizen United and take the money out of the electoral system:
Money doesn't matter as much as you think. Here in Connecticut, Linda McMahon (professional wrestling magnate and aspiring politician) has attempted to buy herself a senate seat twice now, drawing from her own substantial money pool. She's been handily defeated each time, by people who are by no stretch of the imagination appealing and should stand no chance against her carefully cultivated grandmotherly demeanor. Her first defeat? At the hands of Dick Blumenthal, who is affectionately known to us as Skeletor. The second? Chris Murphy, a non-person that few people know much about and who looks like a guy that was beat up a lot in school.
Money didn't work. Carefully crafted image didn't work. Money can buy lots of ads, but it can't make people vote for you.
After enduring 18 months of campaign torture, I spend 18 seconds with a sharpie, get my sticker and it's over.
Interesting. Yet even their home page says "A journey towards self-sufficiency". Apparently complete self-sufficency is not as easy as all that. I'm not even sure it's all that desirable on a society-wide scale. Cohesively interdependent works better for me.
How would homesteading look w/ 21st century technology? How much land does one need for a self-sufficient existence for a family of 4?
Probably about as much land as a small-medium sized farm. In addition to growing enough food to feed yourself and the other 3 people year-round, you would need enough surplus to provide an income. You know, to pay for everything else needed to survive and thrive. Example of things you would still need to pay for: Additional food to provide a varied enough diet to ensure proper nutrition, health insurance, crop insurance, clothing, transportation, essential material goods (stove, refridgeration, heating/cooling, electricity, lighting etc), medication, property taxes, water, communications, educational materials for the kids, food for the livestock (and veterinary bills). And so on. You'd need to be able to grow a hell of a lot of vegetables to become sustainably self-sufficient, and a couple of green houses on your 1/4 - 1/2 acre of suburban land won't be enough.
It's sarcasm, people. Whooosh!
Incandescents are no safer when broken.
Citation needed.
Dude. Do NOT go there (again, because you already did). Please.
The classic pattern repeats itself.
No inline graphics - helper program in a separate window launched by custom mimetype configuration, as I recall.
MicroVAX for me. As I recall, the visual component was there initially, if your monitor could display graphics. Since the WWW was originally concieved as a way for researchers to share research results over the internet, URLs could refer to non-textual information, including, but not limited to visual information. Though the original browser was text-only, you could browse to an image that would display on your graphics capable monitor. It just wasn't integrated into the page alongside the text. The integrated text+graphics browser you're thinking of became popular with the development of Mosaic, although there were a few other WWW clients that did a passable job of it before Mosaic came along. Mosaic worked best, though, so it was the game-changer.