Realistically, if one has CFLs, that is good enough. Those give a significant energy savings from filament bulbs, and the difference in electricity use between those and LEDs isn't worth it to justify a replacement until the CFL dies.
The LED bulbs were pricier, and compared to CFLs, they might not be the best price/performance out there, but I do like the safety aspect of not having to clean up broken glass if something happens.
I just wish our government would want to get some better pictures and send a probe up just to one-up China. It would make for better news than yet another government shutdown, doomsday counter until a budget default, or yet another celebrity having affluenza and ending up in rehab.
You hit the nail on the head. Where this comes into play is the criminal justice "system". Someone arrested, as soon as they are booked, the info goes into hundreds, if not thousands of separate, public databases. Even if it is a case of someone using an alias or mistaken identity, those hundreds of databases now have that info in them, and just one being wrong can hose up someone's future chances at a job forever (good luck finding which one too.)
It can possibly work on a P2P basis. About a year ago on/., a cryptographer made a decent way to have parts [1] of a key for encrypted data be stored on a number of machines, and accessible only until the time expired. If a few machines still offered the key, it was still no dice -- it would take a majority of the machines to be compromised to get the expired key back and recovered.
However, once assembled and the document decrypted, the user can do with it what they feel like. In reality, software on the endpoint is "just" another DRM system which is eventually doomed. However, it can be there as a suggestion, similar to the PGP private viewer, that the document not be exported or saved.
However, even just that speedbump of having it in its own viewer can be good enough to assure a document will vanish once the expiration date hits.
[1]: With some parity, a "need four pieces of a key from 7 chunks) type of thing.
The ~20% price hike did put a damper on things, but at least it is up front.
I'd definitely move any servers to RHEL [1] if given the option, but be aware it will cost about the same amount as Windows server software, especially if you use xfs in a supported manner, and you will need to pay yearly.
I agree about the remote access. The fewer ways a box can be hit by untrusted parties, the better.
Of course, W2012 and W2012R2 do bring some nice features (better filesystem and LVM replacement, deduplication, autotiering), but for an existing app server, it is highly likely it may not be worth the time to upgrade to it [2].
[1]: I'm assuming you need commercial production Linux with a support contract which makes auditors happy, and certified FIPS/Common Criteria compliance.
[2]: IMHO, "upgrading" Windows from any major rev consists of a complete box rebuild. Trying to go from W2008 to W2012 may mean leaving too much OS cruft behind which can cause issues later.
I just worry about the ever increasing times it takes to parse blockchains. This will become ever more an issue when coins get divided up into smaller and smaller chunks.
Yes, one can let an exchange go about that, but there is always the concern about how trustworthy any exchange can be. Banks are not any more trustworthy, but at least there are regulations and insurance on them so someone coughs up your cash if they go toes-up.
India has its issues, but it is good that -someone- is warning potential investors of the risks of BitCoin. Education is always important, especially the basics like be careful about one's wallet because it can be too easy to lose one's BTC stash forever if it isn't backed up or if a bad guy is able to open it.
With absolutely nothing pushing the pendulum in the direction of increased privacy, I'm for an erasable Internet, just because nothing else is there to push in that direction. Governments love the info. Companies love it. People don't have the power or voice to state anything. So, it is obvious when someone comes along that sort of guarantees [1] a picture will disappear, people will flock to that service en masse since they are so tired of a large, WORM database. Post a pic on FB, it is there forever. Post it on a website, reputable search engines will slurp it up. Use robots.txt and a hidden URL, it gets slurped up anyway unless there is some type of active authentication.
A company that makes a peer to peer protocol to send encrypted messages where the key comes from multiple clients (and each client will not send the piece after the expiration date) is going to make money. People do want privacy, but it so incredibly hard to get that. If I wanted to send a photo to someone, and physically travelling is out of the picture, I'd have to get with them, set up gpg, then send it via that. Or, copy it onto offline media and snail mail it. Some firm that uses decent cryptography will make a mint just assuring people that a conversation has a high chance of staying stays private and vanishing after it was done.
[1]: How long the pic really remains on the company's server is a question, but to people, it is off the record.
Depends on the color temperature. Some LED bulbs are higher on the scale, and give that bluish look. Others tend to be warmer and are good enough to not be discerned from incandescent bulbs unless compared side by side.
I've pulled every incandescent in my place and replaced with LED bulbs that are "warm white". Not because they save that much more than CFL, but because of life and the fact that if dropped, it is less of a disaster than dropping either an incandescent or CFL.
Of course, incandescents have their place. Nobody has yet created a 40 watt LED heat lamp to keep a compartment in a camper above freezing yet, while an old filament bulb does this job quite well.
Depends on what you are looking for. A couple years ago, I bought a bunch of 12 volt LEDs for my RV, a buck each from eBay, with free shipping (although it took a few weeks to get here). Said lights, though high on the color temperature scale, are still going strong, and use 1/7 as much electricity as the normal filament bulbs, which is very useful when boondocking.
Since most LEDs are made overseas anyway, one might be able to find a no-name Taiwanese provider who sells the same bulbs as a name brand, but for far less.
I think you hit the nail on the head, although I'd probably code in a messaging similar similar to what banks have so a user logs onto the healthcare site to receive notices... this will protect against phishing.
The batch system is by far the best way to do this, as it disconnects one from having to depend on other databases in real time.
I'd also consider using content delivery networks for static content. That way, the data coming from the dynamic website is as small as possible. Google does a good job at this with YouTube.
It will need some good, directional ventilation. The vertical cooling of the new canisters is not exactly friendly to the in from the front, out from the back of rack mounted machines.
This is a shame that Apple doesn't have anything but the Mac Mini that can easily be racked [1]. I understand not bringing back the 1U XServe [2], but it would be nice to have a relatively powerful machine that can be used where density is important.
[1]: Yes, one could buy a 1U rack drawer, Dremel holes for the MagSafe cable, ventilation tunnel and other items, then toss a MacBook Pro in it, but it would be nice to have an elegant solution for the musician/studio/video producer racks.
[2]: The XServes were well built machines. Beats the usual 1U x86 stuff chattering away in the racks any day.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It would be nice to have had the canister Mac Pro be sold as a workstation, and the old tower with the ability to use expansion cards be made into a case that could function as a tower, or rack ears attached and put in that way.
Heck, Compaq was able to do this with some of their Deskpros in the mid-1990s (IIRC), and Sun had kits for this for various Ultra models... I don't see why Apple couldn't offer this, so they have at least some presence in a server room without a major hassle.
This cylinder looks cool, but for someone with FPGA boards [1], being limited to the relatively few PCIe lanes that Thunderbolt exposes to the breakout box will be a hurdle compared to just sticking the card into the case and going from there.
[1]: Not for BitCoin mining, although when not in use, that has come to mind.
This poses an interesting item, and it might be something worth noting. Always have a backup of one's wallet, preferably in multiple places. This way, a loss of a machine doesn't mean the coins are lost forever to the aether.
Old school JB people dislike the app pirates. Once, it was discussed about having a jailbreak actively disallow rogue installer apps. However, this was vetoed because it would create a "jailbreak the jailbreak" arms race.
I think one reason is that a proper jailbreak isn't just clicking on something and up pops a pound sign, or something happens allowing a chrooted su executable to be slid into/system/xbin.
A jailbreak on the iPhone is a bigger PITA, in general, than root in Android that for the simple reason that iOS has almost no userland as we know it. Plus, unlike Android where the security model is unaffected by rooting, other than a Trojan asking for root with a su prompt [1], iOS jailbreaks might affect the entire security model of the device, where one app going rogue can easily cause a lot of damage once the jails are gone.
So, rooting and jailbreaking, can be considered completely different things, as jailbreaking definitely constitutes getting root access, as well as several other exploits to get out of the BSD chroots.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Apple's model works because they only allow apps to come in from the App Store (for the most part), and the store is actively moderated. Android's model relies less on the security of where the apps came from, but what the apps want as permission [2].
[1]: Even a Trojan asking for a su prompt is partially mitigated because there is a SUPERUSER permission that root-using apps declare in the Play Store store, it is obvious that anyone downloading that app that it might want root access, and without that permission, most su programs can be configured to disallow root access.
[2]: Of course, this is where Android's model is weak, not in security, but in the human factor. It is easy for someone nontechnical to not read, nor just not bother reading the permissions of a fleshlight app they downloaded, then wonder how they got so compromised.
What I wonder about is if the Feds have just the wallet, or access to the coins inside? This is similar to having a PGP encrypted file, versus the file and its decryption key.
With just the wallet, the coins are pretty much taken out of the BitCoin ecosystem. With the wallet + access to spend coins, the coins can be considered usable assets for auction or spending.
Now that would be an app whose time has come for iOS -- something like Mr. Number that checks the robodialer databases and blocks the number, preferably with a pickup and hangup (just so the robodialer tries to get a live person on the ACD.)
There is one downside of "free" apps. When I read some various iPhone forums, it is amazing how many people get stung by rogue IPAs and end up having to DFU restore.
There is a reason for moderated/curated app stores, and yes, other places might have other people's app for free, but those apps might just bring along more than just the program itself.
Even more basic... want ad blocking? Jailbreak. Want some privacy? JB time. Jailbreaking allows one to use their device, which they paid for (in one way or another) as they see fit.
iBlacklist is another useful feature, only available by jailbreaking. Yes, I can block callers by creating contacts, but it gets old having a bunch of "zzzzRoboCaller" entries in my contacts as opposed to just one blacklist that does the job in a few taps.
What would be nice is a BT interface (read-only of course) that can tell if car doors are opened. That way, if someone is going through a bad neighborhood, if a window is broken or one of the doors is opened before the person gets to the destination or deactivates the app, it is assumed that a carjacking happened, and the vehicle would either run for a bit and stall, or some other behavior.
I don't understand the point of buying AV software on a non-enterprise basis when a decent program is installed (or downloadable at no charge -- a utility that doesn't throw pop-ups at you demanding subscriptions), the two exceptions would be SpywareBlaster (which updates killbits, adds blocking cookies), and Malwarebytes (which blocks IP addresses.)
The enterprise is a different story. AV software is a must for jumping through regulatory hoops, and something like System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection or Symantec Endpoint Protection is a must because it offers an audit trail that can be saved to a central server. This is critical come internal audit time, or when the external auditors start knocking.
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Realistically, if one has CFLs, that is good enough. Those give a significant energy savings from filament bulbs, and the difference in electricity use between those and LEDs isn't worth it to justify a replacement until the CFL dies.
The LED bulbs were pricier, and compared to CFLs, they might not be the best price/performance out there, but I do like the safety aspect of not having to clean up broken glass if something happens.
I just wish our government would want to get some better pictures and send a probe up just to one-up China. It would make for better news than yet another government shutdown, doomsday counter until a budget default, or yet another celebrity having affluenza and ending up in rehab.
You hit the nail on the head. Where this comes into play is the criminal justice "system". Someone arrested, as soon as they are booked, the info goes into hundreds, if not thousands of separate, public databases. Even if it is a case of someone using an alias or mistaken identity, those hundreds of databases now have that info in them, and just one being wrong can hose up someone's future chances at a job forever (good luck finding which one too.)
It can possibly work on a P2P basis. About a year ago on /., a cryptographer made a decent way to have parts [1] of a key for encrypted data be stored on a number of machines, and accessible only until the time expired. If a few machines still offered the key, it was still no dice -- it would take a majority of the machines to be compromised to get the expired key back and recovered.
However, once assembled and the document decrypted, the user can do with it what they feel like. In reality, software on the endpoint is "just" another DRM system which is eventually doomed. However, it can be there as a suggestion, similar to the PGP private viewer, that the document not be exported or saved.
However, even just that speedbump of having it in its own viewer can be good enough to assure a document will vanish once the expiration date hits.
[1]: With some parity, a "need four pieces of a key from 7 chunks) type of thing.
The ~20% price hike did put a damper on things, but at least it is up front.
I'd definitely move any servers to RHEL [1] if given the option, but be aware it will cost about the same amount as Windows server software, especially if you use xfs in a supported manner, and you will need to pay yearly.
I agree about the remote access. The fewer ways a box can be hit by untrusted parties, the better.
Of course, W2012 and W2012R2 do bring some nice features (better filesystem and LVM replacement, deduplication, autotiering), but for an existing app server, it is highly likely it may not be worth the time to upgrade to it [2].
[1]: I'm assuming you need commercial production Linux with a support contract which makes auditors happy, and certified FIPS/Common Criteria compliance.
[2]: IMHO, "upgrading" Windows from any major rev consists of a complete box rebuild. Trying to go from W2008 to W2012 may mean leaving too much OS cruft behind which can cause issues later.
I just worry about the ever increasing times it takes to parse blockchains. This will become ever more an issue when coins get divided up into smaller and smaller chunks.
Yes, one can let an exchange go about that, but there is always the concern about how trustworthy any exchange can be. Banks are not any more trustworthy, but at least there are regulations and insurance on them so someone coughs up your cash if they go toes-up.
India has its issues, but it is good that -someone- is warning potential investors of the risks of BitCoin. Education is always important, especially the basics like be careful about one's wallet because it can be too easy to lose one's BTC stash forever if it isn't backed up or if a bad guy is able to open it.
With absolutely nothing pushing the pendulum in the direction of increased privacy, I'm for an erasable Internet, just because nothing else is there to push in that direction. Governments love the info. Companies love it. People don't have the power or voice to state anything. So, it is obvious when someone comes along that sort of guarantees [1] a picture will disappear, people will flock to that service en masse since they are so tired of a large, WORM database. Post a pic on FB, it is there forever. Post it on a website, reputable search engines will slurp it up. Use robots.txt and a hidden URL, it gets slurped up anyway unless there is some type of active authentication.
A company that makes a peer to peer protocol to send encrypted messages where the key comes from multiple clients (and each client will not send the piece after the expiration date) is going to make money. People do want privacy, but it so incredibly hard to get that. If I wanted to send a photo to someone, and physically travelling is out of the picture, I'd have to get with them, set up gpg, then send it via that. Or, copy it onto offline media and snail mail it. Some firm that uses decent cryptography will make a mint just assuring people that a conversation has a high chance of staying stays private and vanishing after it was done.
[1]: How long the pic really remains on the company's server is a question, but to people, it is off the record.
Depends on the color temperature. Some LED bulbs are higher on the scale, and give that bluish look. Others tend to be warmer and are good enough to not be discerned from incandescent bulbs unless compared side by side.
I've pulled every incandescent in my place and replaced with LED bulbs that are "warm white". Not because they save that much more than CFL, but because of life and the fact that if dropped, it is less of a disaster than dropping either an incandescent or CFL.
Of course, incandescents have their place. Nobody has yet created a 40 watt LED heat lamp to keep a compartment in a camper above freezing yet, while an old filament bulb does this job quite well.
Depends on what you are looking for. A couple years ago, I bought a bunch of 12 volt LEDs for my RV, a buck each from eBay, with free shipping (although it took a few weeks to get here). Said lights, though high on the color temperature scale, are still going strong, and use 1/7 as much electricity as the normal filament bulbs, which is very useful when boondocking.
Since most LEDs are made overseas anyway, one might be able to find a no-name Taiwanese provider who sells the same bulbs as a name brand, but for far less.
For general computing, iffish.
For embedded computing where I am worried about every chunk of space, and I can deal with the 3-4 GB RAM limit, definitely.
This is useful, and IMHO, should be considered the mainstream kernel, but it isn't something everyone would use daily.
I think you hit the nail on the head, although I'd probably code in a messaging similar similar to what banks have so a user logs onto the healthcare site to receive notices... this will protect against phishing.
The batch system is by far the best way to do this, as it disconnects one from having to depend on other databases in real time.
I'd also consider using content delivery networks for static content. That way, the data coming from the dynamic website is as small as possible. Google does a good job at this with YouTube.
It will need some good, directional ventilation. The vertical cooling of the new canisters is not exactly friendly to the in from the front, out from the back of rack mounted machines.
This is a shame that Apple doesn't have anything but the Mac Mini that can easily be racked [1]. I understand not bringing back the 1U XServe [2], but it would be nice to have a relatively powerful machine that can be used where density is important.
[1]: Yes, one could buy a 1U rack drawer, Dremel holes for the MagSafe cable, ventilation tunnel and other items, then toss a MacBook Pro in it, but it would be nice to have an elegant solution for the musician/studio/video producer racks.
[2]: The XServes were well built machines. Beats the usual 1U x86 stuff chattering away in the racks any day.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It would be nice to have had the canister Mac Pro be sold as a workstation, and the old tower with the ability to use expansion cards be made into a case that could function as a tower, or rack ears attached and put in that way.
Heck, Compaq was able to do this with some of their Deskpros in the mid-1990s (IIRC), and Sun had kits for this for various Ultra models... I don't see why Apple couldn't offer this, so they have at least some presence in a server room without a major hassle.
This cylinder looks cool, but for someone with FPGA boards [1], being limited to the relatively few PCIe lanes that Thunderbolt exposes to the breakout box will be a hurdle compared to just sticking the card into the case and going from there.
[1]: Not for BitCoin mining, although when not in use, that has come to mind.
Thank you for the clarification.
This poses an interesting item, and it might be something worth noting. Always have a backup of one's wallet, preferably in multiple places. This way, a loss of a machine doesn't mean the coins are lost forever to the aether.
Old school JB people dislike the app pirates. Once, it was discussed about having a jailbreak actively disallow rogue installer apps. However, this was vetoed because it would create a "jailbreak the jailbreak" arms race.
I think one reason is that a proper jailbreak isn't just clicking on something and up pops a pound sign, or something happens allowing a chrooted su executable to be slid into /system/xbin.
A jailbreak on the iPhone is a bigger PITA, in general, than root in Android that for the simple reason that iOS has almost no userland as we know it. Plus, unlike Android where the security model is unaffected by rooting, other than a Trojan asking for root with a su prompt [1], iOS jailbreaks might affect the entire security model of the device, where one app going rogue can easily cause a lot of damage once the jails are gone.
So, rooting and jailbreaking, can be considered completely different things, as jailbreaking definitely constitutes getting root access, as well as several other exploits to get out of the BSD chroots.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Apple's model works because they only allow apps to come in from the App Store (for the most part), and the store is actively moderated. Android's model relies less on the security of where the apps came from, but what the apps want as permission [2].
[1]: Even a Trojan asking for a su prompt is partially mitigated because there is a SUPERUSER permission that root-using apps declare in the Play Store store, it is obvious that anyone downloading that app that it might want root access, and without that permission, most su programs can be configured to disallow root access.
[2]: Of course, this is where Android's model is weak, not in security, but in the human factor. It is easy for someone nontechnical to not read, nor just not bother reading the permissions of a fleshlight app they downloaded, then wonder how they got so compromised.
There are people who have tried very similar arguments when the RIAA/BSA/MPAA came a-knocking and lost that case overwhelmingly in civil court.
What I wonder about is if the Feds have just the wallet, or access to the coins inside? This is similar to having a PGP encrypted file, versus the file and its decryption key.
With just the wallet, the coins are pretty much taken out of the BitCoin ecosystem. With the wallet + access to spend coins, the coins can be considered usable assets for auction or spending.
Now that would be an app whose time has come for iOS -- something like Mr. Number that checks the robodialer databases and blocks the number, preferably with a pickup and hangup (just so the robodialer tries to get a live person on the ACD.)
There is one downside of "free" apps. When I read some various iPhone forums, it is amazing how many people get stung by rogue IPAs and end up having to DFU restore.
There is a reason for moderated/curated app stores, and yes, other places might have other people's app for free, but those apps might just bring along more than just the program itself.
Even more basic... want ad blocking? Jailbreak. Want some privacy? JB time. Jailbreaking allows one to use their device, which they paid for (in one way or another) as they see fit.
iBlacklist is another useful feature, only available by jailbreaking. Yes, I can block callers by creating contacts, but it gets old having a bunch of "zzzzRoboCaller" entries in my contacts as opposed to just one blacklist that does the job in a few taps.
What would be nice is a BT interface (read-only of course) that can tell if car doors are opened. That way, if someone is going through a bad neighborhood, if a window is broken or one of the doors is opened before the person gets to the destination or deactivates the app, it is assumed that a carjacking happened, and the vehicle would either run for a bit and stall, or some other behavior.
Sadly, we have plenty of institutions for the mentally ill... they are called private jails or private prisons.
I don't understand the point of buying AV software on a non-enterprise basis when a decent program is installed (or downloadable at no charge -- a utility that doesn't throw pop-ups at you demanding subscriptions), the two exceptions would be SpywareBlaster (which updates killbits, adds blocking cookies), and Malwarebytes (which blocks IP addresses.)
The enterprise is a different story. AV software is a must for jumping through regulatory hoops, and something like System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection or Symantec Endpoint Protection is a must because it offers an audit trail that can be saved to a central server. This is critical come internal audit time, or when the external auditors start knocking.