The choice [of a Broadcom SoC] by the RPi-team was utterly stupid and can only be attributed to incompetence.
Well, Eben Upton's job working for Broadcom was probably a factor there... Personally, I'd trace the idea back before he had that job - I recall a discussion about the Gameboy Advance developer kit in the summer of 2002, and the lack of affordable programmable devices at the time. I suspect he'd have had a real struggle getting anywhere close to the Pi's target price without getting discounted access to the Broadcom SoC he used, though. I haven't spoken to him recently, but my impression was that far from "RPi Foundation pressed Broadcom to stop selling BCM2835 to competing projects" as claimed, it was more "Eben twisted arms and got Broadcom to give RPF a special cut-price deal so they could afford it".
If anyone were to bring out a rival device from a "significantly superior" competitor, I'd be delighted to see it - and I suspect most if not all of the RPF people would too, since it wasn't about making money by selling lots of systems. (Of course, Broadcom didn't buy up the remains of ARM's parent company for nothing, so I'd be surprised to see something much better from a rival!) I was happy to see the Pi being ARM based, as a fan of ARM as far back as the ARM2 I first programmed, but I'm also happy to see rivals like the MIPS32 one mentioned recently: I like ARM, but I also like having a choice of platform, both hardware and software!
But acting like they don't, or even loosing a minor case might set other criminals at ease about the security of their data within the Microsoft infrastructure.
Which, of course, could be exactly what the NSA want - police and FBI priorities may differ, but I suspect the NSA would rather have access to more information, thanks to a false sense of security, even at the expense of not being able to use it in court easily. If they "win", they get to use evidence this time - and they just warned the next hundred criminals to avoid MS servers, because of this case. "Lose", and they can keep reading it all in secret, using the information behind the scenes instead.
All too easily it seems; my first MacBook Pro power lead caught fire a few years ago as well. This was the low-voltage (hence high current) end, though: in their quest to make everything thin and light, the cable was thin and flimsy, so one of the braided conductors frayed after a while. More current going down a thinner wire meant more heat - which softened the remaining copper and made the problem worse, until arcing started and I got a micro-firework display on my desk. (One of is successors managed to melt the plastic in the plug, that didn't make me happy either!)
On the mains end, even a hefty (for laptops) 300-odd watt PSU is only 3A from a US outlet, half that on the higher voltages elsewhere - usually easy enough to deal with, but one sloppy connection and you can get a tiny point getting very hot indeed. It's worse on the low voltage end: a single cable possibly carrying 20 or more amps, while getting rolled up, folded and stood on in transit, designed to be very light weight - yet also done on a budget. As soon as you start trying to shave weight and cost, I suspect it's all too easy for a wire to be just slightly too thin for the current, or a connection to be a little bit too weak for long term mobile use.
If you were building a high school or college electronics project and said you planned to run laptop currents and voltages through such thin wires and tiny connectors, you'd probably be told off or marked down - but commercially, thin, light and cheap trump safety margins and robustness.
There is no such thing as negative energy price, unless you're retarded? Why would you pay someone to take your excess energy, when you can just dump it into the atmosphere through a resistor heating element? They are not that expensive, even if you have to finance one. Of course you might be benevolent and give it away for free, or even exert some effort out of love to they neighbor, and pay some for him to take it, but in a selfish capitalist view you can get rid of energy very easily, it's not like trash that is costly to get rid of.
You might not have a massive resistor handy at the instant you need it, but I suspect subsidies will play a part in this. If you get paid a certain subsidy per unit of electricity you produce, in addition to receiving whatever the wholesale price is at the time, you could still end up turning a profit by paying someone to receive your surplus electricity. (In Europe, there are also obligations for power companies to get a certain % of power from renewable sources - so it could be better for them to take this power now, giving it away for free or even paying a big industrial customer a tiny bit to use it, just to meet the government targets.) Hopefully, dumping that power into your own resistor bank doesn't earn you subsidy payments!
I'm currently working on a project for Cox Communications in which they are chemically dissolving the foam inside of the coaxial cable conduit & then air blowing fiber through the newly created space inside the conduit. Pretty cool stuff. This avoids the costs associated with permitting, digging new trench & burying separate fiber conduit & they can use the DWDM hardware they already have on hand instead of buying new systems like this.
Wow, that is neat. (At first, I misinterpreted that as dissolving the foam dielectric inside the itself - which could also be neat at some point, for doing FTTH, but rather more demanding.) I take it this is the "final mile" conduit between the cabinet and individual homes, or is it just pushing the HFC boundary down to street level for much shorter runs of coax?
Why are we still flogging the dead horse?
FTTH will always outperform copper, without exception, and it's gaining traction quicker than the telco would embrace G.Fast
In the long term yes - but the economics are very different short term. A couple of telco engineers could install VDSL2 (or, presumably, G.fast) for a whole wiring cabinet - a hundred or more households - in the time it would take to run fiber to a single one of those premises. Apart from anything else, it seems right now all the engineers are busy installing those FTTC services; switching them to putting in more FTTP/FTTH would not only mean more expense, it would take longer, leaving everyone else on ADSL for longer. I suspect things will be different in a few years, once that FTTC rollout is complete and manpower is freed up.
I actually have the option of FTTH right now, if I wanted: 330 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up, using GPON. The problem is, I'd have to pay heavily for it: high three figures installation, then a three year contract lock-in at GBP 100 per month - just for the line to the exchange, that doesn't include any actual Internet connectivity! Needless to say, I'm staying on FTTC (VDSL2) for now: 80 Mbps down and 20 up, for a fraction of that price.
Now, when it comes to new housing, it's another matter: if you've got to go and dig up a road anyway to put in the wires to a new housing development, it's much the same cost whether it's copper or glass you put in (or both). So, you can sometimes get a fiber connection for the price of VDSL2!
Sadly, much of it comes from coal, but e.g. in Norway a huge amount comes from hydroelectric plants. That is why oil refining and metalworking is a large industry in Norway.
Yes, Norway's quite good in that respect - as is the US Pacific North-West, as I recall: the abundant hydro-electric power gave Microsoft and Amazon a cheap, clean electricity supply for their early "cloud" offerings. Eroded now by global expansion, I think: once they built huge hosting sites elsewhere, they used whatever power was present in that area, usually something much less clean. Of course, Norwegian oil refining activity will also be boosted significantly by the small detail of having a major oil supply, unlike other European countries...
I've seen a few hosting outfits offering "carbon neutral" services, which I think you can do quite affordably by locating somewhere with suitable clean power. A bit of a niche market compared to more mainstream hosting services, but there's obviously some demand there.
In a sense, CA is getting what it voted for: stamping out "dirty" industry. Other countries are getting what their governments want/permit: economic growth, regardless of CO2 etc. I suspect both will regret it to some extent and change course: China has a major smog problem and is trying to clean up, CA has a major economic problem and power shortfall and will have to give that a higher priority soon, if it isn't already.
They need to pick a name which is similar, to be identifiable, but less tarnished by past bad experiences. I propose Infernal Excrement: still "IE", but much less off-putting than the name they have soiled so badly with IE6 and other fiascoes.
To be fair... it does suck much less now. I suppose it's rather like working for a surviving offshoot of Enron or Lehman Bros... Who, thinking about it, have probably done less economic damage globally than IE has.
Othervise, it would have been nice to allow only certain binaries or software developers/publishers to run. It would also be nice to sign the binaries
and not allow changes.
That would be less help than you might expect (although OS X does do exactly this by default now). Remember all those Word macro viruses of a few years ago? Totally unaffected: it's a genuine copy of MS Word that's running, it's just doing something it really, really shouldn't be. Likewise any browser exploit. Trojans have always relied on the user to execute - and in general, they will execute them, whatever dire warnings you may put in place, unless you can give them a totally locked down system (which, even in a strict corporate setting, is often politically impossible). In a University setting, I've had very senior academics call me up with "I can't open this CampusLife.pdf.exe file someone sent me... and it won't open on my secretary's PC either." Of course it was malware - but any computer restrictions to prevent that would probably have resulted in unemployment rather than a more secure PC. Telling people at the top of the food chain "you aren't allowed to do that" just won't work. (Fortunately, opening that particular worm did nothing anyway - it either relied on Outlook, or having outbound port 25 open, neither of which applied at that time.)
Ultimately, for anything more than the most limited functionality, you will have security holes - just like you will get hard drives and power supplies failing, keyboards and mice getting choked up with gunk. Reduce the risks where it makes sense (RAID and redundant PSUs for servers, good patch management, sensible firewall settings) and then deal with things that go wrong effectively when it does happen (spares, backups, etc).
Like real life, take sensible security precautions - but going too far can do as much harm as having poor security. Do you drive everywhere in an armored vehicle with armed escorts? Unless you're POTUS or equivalent, that would just be silly - I seem to recall there have been cases of people dying after getting trapped in "panic rooms" after false alarms, because medical help couldn't get to them in time! So, don't be the computer equivalent: blocking attachments entirely is secure, but is it useful?
The controller feels that this is more or less an acceptable trade-off over time -- my labor cost to rebuild the PCs vs. the ongoing cost of AV.
They are probably right there - of those 3 rebuilds, how many do you think would have been prevented by paying more for any given AV product? Thinking back, I can remember several PCs needing recovery work because of the AV system in use (good old McAfee pulled down an update which declared a piece of Windows XP itself to be malware and need deletion - leaving a machine you couldn't log in to until that file was reinstalled), and probably two nasty infections for me to clean, which got in despite McAfee being present with fairly paranoid settings.
Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose. Unfortunately the way of the world is that technical people would be quickly shuffled out of the way by sales and marketing if they started to reduce revenue by telling a customer what they really wanted instead of what the spec says.
All too true, sadly. Tendering processes seem to exacerbate this: when a government control freak puts out a document announcing that the government is really determined to buy a chocolate teapot, whatever the price, the bidder saying "here's a stainless steel teapot which will do the job for $5" gets dumped, while the one saying "we'll stick bars of premium Swiss chocolate together with chewing gum for $1m" gets handed the million - then another million to patch the chocolate teapot with cement to make it hold hot liquids. Then it turns out they were actually needing a milkshake dispenser in the first place but didn't understand anything about beverages, so they have to start again from scratch, $2m down.
One large government contract I was involved in stipulated in minute detail exactly what error message had to appear when the service was offline. There was no SLA, however, not even an incentive in the contract to improve it! (This was the result of the previous project for that department having been a high-profile failure, with servers overwhelmed by the load. The bureaucrats responded to that with "next time, let's make sure it can show an error when busy!" rather than requiring scalability or load tests.) On the bright side, the winning bidder had the integrity to make sure it didn't fall apart anyway.
I can see it now--we'll have trans-Pacific transmission lines from India and China!
No, just more imported products of energy-intensive industrial processes, like steel and aluminum. It's already happening to an alarming extent in Europe for exactly that reason, with large metal-working plants (which can consume hundreds of megawatts each) getting moved overseas. Just because you can't import the electricity itself doesn't mean the resulting products have to be made in the US!
But, but... That doesn't make any sense! Using HTTP, the connection isn't encrypted in either direction. If they can see the original request, they can also see the original response, so why not just cache that?
It's an absolutely crazy implementation, I agree (particularly speaking as someone implementing something which analyzes HTTP downloads right now). It's not caching, but some sort content analysis; my guess, and it is only a guess, is that it's intended as a workaround to copyright. Genuine caching is OK, for cacheable content, but I don't think this use would be covered by that copyright exemption: by fetching their own copy from the server like a regular web spider, they're no longer "making a copy". The other possibility is bandwidth: being a major ISP, it might be easier to intercept only the requests in-line, then queue them up for spidering by a separate system; intercepting the downloaded content as well would mean forcing all traffic through the analysis system in realtime.
Mine just hashes and logs the objects as they get fetched. Of course, I'm doing it in the firewall, with the user's knowledge and consent. I just remembered, though, a friend who works for an anti-malware vendor company mentioned to me that their security proxy does the same bizarre duplication rather than scanning in transit, which IIRC screwed up music streaming services, so presumably there's a good reason for that. (Weird, because if I were shipping malware, I'd find that all too trivial to circumvent by serving different content to the client and the scanner.)
Conversely, I seem to find (in the UK at least) that cheaper ones and shops are more likely to have free WiFi, while pricier hotels and bigger chains seem to be more likely to charge for it. The poshest one I've spent any time in - part of the same chain as the Savoy in London - charges crazy prices (and has lousy mobile reception), though it's a rock-solid signal throughout the large building; a much cheaper hotel nearby just had a Wifi access point on ADSL somewhere, with no password, for anyone to use.
A question of attitude I suppose: a small hotel thinks £20 or so a month is a trivial investment to make guests happier, like having newspapers in reception; a bigger chain sees it as spending millions across the chain to roll out a service which should generate revenue.
Still, HTTPS would at least prevent your ISP from monitoring your browsing activity.
That's part of it - a valuable enough part in itself, IMO; at least one UK ISP, TalkTalk, has started duplicating HTTP requests made by their customers: so, if you request http://example.com/stuff on one of their lines, 30 seconds later they'll go and request the same URL themselves for monitoring purposes. Obviously, enabling SSL prevents this kind of gratuitous stupidity - and the previous incarnation of such snooping, Phorm. If enough websites enable SSL, ISPs will no longer have the ability to monitor customer behavior that closely, all they will see are SSL flows to and from IP addresses, and whatever DNS queries you make to their servers, if any. (Use encrypted connections to OpenDNS or similar, and your ISP will only ever see IP addresses and traffic volume - exactly as it should be IMO!)
So, I agree with you that simply predicting reverse/affirm at 70% accuracy may be easy, but predicting 68000 individual justice votes with similar accuracy might be a significantly greater challenge.
In fact, it looks like very much the same challenge: with most decisions being unanimous reversals, it seems only a small minority of those individual votes are votes to affirm the lower court decision. So, just as 'return "reverse";' is a 70+% accurate predictor of the overall court ruling in each case, the very same predictor will be somewhere around 70% accurate for each individual justice, for exactly the same reason. (For that matter, if I took a six-sided die and marked two sides "affirm" and the rest "reverse", I'd have a slightly less accurate predictor giving much less obvious predictions: it will correctly predict about two-thirds of the time, with incorrect predictions split between unexpected reversals and unexpected affirmations.)
This is the statistical problem with trying to measure/predict any unlikely (or indeed any very likely) event. I can build a "bomb detector" for screening airline luggage, for example, which is 99.99% accurate in real-world tests. How? Well, much less than 0.01% of actual airline luggage contains a bomb... so a flashing green LED marked "no bomb present" will in fact be correct in almost every single case. It's also completely worthless, of course! (Sadly, at least two people have put exactly that business model into practice and made a considerable amount of money selling fake bomb detectors for use in places like Iraq - one of them got a seven year jail sentence for it last year in England.)
With blood transfusions, I understand there's now a two stage test used to screen for things like HIV. The first test is quick, easy, and quite often wrong: as I recall, most of the positive readings it gives turn out to be false positives. What matters, though, is that the negative results are very, very unlikely to be false negatives: you can be confident the blood is indeed clean. Then, you can use a more elaborate test to determine which of the few positives were correct - by eliminating the majority of samples, it's much easier to focus on the remainder. Much the way airport security should be done: quickly weed out the 90-99% of people/bags who definitely aren't a threat, then you have far more resources to focus on the much smaller number of possible threats.
Come to think of it, the very first CPU branch predictors used exactly this technique: they assumed that no conditional branch would ever be taken. Since most conditional branches aren't, that "prediction" was actually right most of the time. (The Pentium 4 is much more sophisticated, storing thousands of records about when branches are taken and not taken - hence "only" gets it wrong about one time in nine.)
Now, I'd like to think the predictor in question is more sophisticated than this - but to know that, we'd need a better statistical test than those quoted, which amount to "it's nearly as accurate as a static predictor based on no information about the case at all"! Did it predict the big controversial decisions more accurately than less significant ones, for example? (Unlikely, of course, otherwise they wouldn't have been so controversial.)
Usually, a terrestrial phone doesn't need to do anything much to "look" for a tower, besides keeping its receiver turned on. Towers emit beacons, and if you don't hear the beacon, there's no point in you sending anything - you won't receive a reply because you don't even hear the tower's beacon.
True - the problem AIUI is that "just" keeping the receiver turned on constantly consumes a significant amount of power in itself. Once synced with a tower, the phone can turn off the receiver, knowing that it has, say, 789ms until the next beacon it needs to check for; if it's waiting, it needs to be listening constantly. Worse, it doesn't know what frequency the tower might appear on - so until it finds one, it will be constantly sweeping all the different frequency bands a tower could be using, until it actually finds one - on a modern handset, cycling between at least three different modes (GSM, 3G and LTE), each on several different frequency bands. Also, because of the possibility of roaming, it may be hitting other networks then checking whether or not it can use those ("Hi network 4439, I'm from network 4494, can I connect? No? Kthxbye")
I can't imagine that absolutely none of the requests where verifiable facts. {like a mis-typed date}
That wouldn't come under "right to be forgotten" though, a simple edit or correction request would address that.
The whole notion of a "right" to prohibit someone else from making a factually accurate statement on one website about the content of another site seems utterly absurd to me. Removing the destination page itself could perhaps be excused in some cases... but to accept that the owner of a page making a statement about somebody has a right to keep it, even if it's out of date, then turn round and gag the likes of Google from making current factual statements about that page? Every "judge" supporting that nonsense needs to be unemployed ASAP.
How is that any different than swinging a load around with a crane? People will just have to be careful and realize the suits can be dangerous if misused.
I think the dexterity is the key here. Yes, a crane can lift 10+ tonnes at the touch of a button/lever - once someone has attached the hook to the object. You can't just reach down and pick something up with a crane, except in very carefully controlled circumstances (like shipping containers lined up on a dockyard). Imagine a suit like this in rescue situations, though: lifting lots of chunks of rubble off trapped survivors, clearing blocked paths. A crane could lift the weight easily, but can't pick chunks of rubble up; a bulldozer or excavator could move it all, but would kill the people trapped underneath. Also, in those situations there is often a lot of dust etc around - and filter masks don't fit well with the physical exertion of lifting and moving heavy debris.
Also, like the previous comment says, I imagine they'll scale up to heavier weights and other features in future (adding power tools, for example).
I'd call cropping the image a trivial tweak. How you dealing with that?
That's a good point - unfortunately, it's not one that can easily be addressed algorithmically, because you stray into the much more abstract question of "what is porn?" (or, in this case, what is an "illegal image"). If I were to take a 1 megapixel illegal image and slice it into 100 tiles, how many of those tiles would themselves contain illegal imagery? Identifying a file as being the top-left corner of "known child abuse image #515345" isn't actually conclusive in itself, because that bit of picture may be innocuous in itself.
In the context of my work, I'd be logging that the offender in question had downloaded a 533k JPEG from a certain URL on dodgy-site.com, so the parole guys can skim through looking for anything suspicious: the domain name, or what search engine terms led to it, will probably be informative enough in itself. Hash matching is a quick and easy check to automate, but far from the only thing that will be checked: Facebook usage, for example ("Now, Mr Sex Offender, why exactly do you have a Facebook accounting claiming to be a 13 year old girl sending out friend requests...?") Fortunately, it's not a case of gathering proof for a prosecution, it's a much broader goal of assessing behaviour and compliance.
That means only the most incompetent pedos aren't already randomly tweaking their jpgs - the smart ones are doing it in the EXIF section so it won't even change the picture.
The smart implementations probably hash the image payload excluding EXIF, for exactly that reason - maybe downsample and reduce the colorspace too, so trivial tweaks won't have that effect any more.
(In fact, the implementation I'm working with right now for exactly this purpose - I have a small research project underway with the police in Scotland as part of their Offender Management work - just hashes HTTP payloads for the moment - although refining this is on the drawing board for later.)
I do find this very disturbing in principle though. Is absolutely everything in your mailbox entirely innocent? I have, for example, a list of various Microsoft product keys in mine. As it happens, those are legitimate - all issued to me by Microsoft via MSDN subscription, then I stuck them all in a spreadsheet to keep track of which key was in use for what - but would Google or the police know that just from looking at the list? They might turn up with a warrant looking for the piracy ring I'm obviously running, just because Google got nosy and went vigilante!
Since we're talking about desktop market shares here, Linux's number isn't that far off.
I wonder about that, actually: I'm quite sure Linux users are much more likely to be running the likes of NoScript and various ad-blockers than Windows users are - and anyone who blocks whatever analytics script this survey uses will be ignored completely, skewing figures away from their platform. Maybe it's not a large proportion, but I'm sure it will be a factor there.
The scary thing is that Vista actually gained users, and the interesting gap is how desktop versus mobile usage compares: how would IE/Chrome/Safari compare across all form factors look? (Bearing in mind that mobile users on the Chrome rendering engine are all on Linux kernels, probably dwarfing the Linux desktop users.)
The two times I've had in-store card referrals (high value transactions: the first time was buying a P3 laptop, which was quite high end in those days; the second was furnishing a new apartment after moving to Houston), I'm pretty sure it was the issuing bank ultimately handling the call - I can't imagine the bank would have transferred the personal information they were asking for as a security check to the merchant services provider: past unlisted contact details, previous transactions etc. I suspect the call may have been transferred to them, though, rather than called directly.
I had a similar issue this year with British Telecom working on a broadband fault. The service manager wanted to speak directly to the field engineer working on the fault (different divisions: the engineer's BT Openreach, the manager was BT Wholesale) - but the Openreach guy said he couldn't call the Wholesale one directly. So, the Wholesale one called my number and asked to speak to him...
it is the retailer who is supposed to make the call to the financial institution on the retailer's own phone line
To be fair, the Apple Store staff tried phoning on their own iPhones first, but none of them could figure out how to hold it to get a signal, so they had to borrow the customer's phone instead...
I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.
You might want to rethink that after being reminded of jet airliners being brought down by birds - not an ounce of metallic content, just a few pounds of meat and soft lightweight bones - or the 747 which almost crashed after all four engines failed from ingesting some ash. (Fortunately, they happened to be relatively near an airport and were high enough to glide for over a hundred miles, which bought them just enough time to restart an engine while they had been preparing to ditch in the ocean, buying them enough time to limp to the nearest runway - although all four engines were damaged beyond repair.)
For that matter, the French Concorde which crashed in 2000 was destroyed by a single thin strip of metal, 17 inches long and just over an inch wide, less than four ounces: essentially, a slightly larger than average metal ruler. It didn't even go into an engine, it just burst a tire - violently enough that the ten pound lump of rubber ruptured the wing and number 5 fuel tank, causing the crash which killed everyone on board.
That was a single 4 oz strip of metal hitting a tire. A pound of bolts or nails will destroy the engine - or a metal drone engine that size.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Eben Upton's job working for Broadcom was probably a factor there... Personally, I'd trace the idea back before he had that job - I recall a discussion about the Gameboy Advance developer kit in the summer of 2002, and the lack of affordable programmable devices at the time. I suspect he'd have had a real struggle getting anywhere close to the Pi's target price without getting discounted access to the Broadcom SoC he used, though. I haven't spoken to him recently, but my impression was that far from "RPi Foundation pressed Broadcom to stop selling BCM2835 to competing projects" as claimed, it was more "Eben twisted arms and got Broadcom to give RPF a special cut-price deal so they could afford it".
If anyone were to bring out a rival device from a "significantly superior" competitor, I'd be delighted to see it - and I suspect most if not all of the RPF people would too, since it wasn't about making money by selling lots of systems. (Of course, Broadcom didn't buy up the remains of ARM's parent company for nothing, so I'd be surprised to see something much better from a rival!) I was happy to see the Pi being ARM based, as a fan of ARM as far back as the ARM2 I first programmed, but I'm also happy to see rivals like the MIPS32 one mentioned recently: I like ARM, but I also like having a choice of platform, both hardware and software!
Which, of course, could be exactly what the NSA want - police and FBI priorities may differ, but I suspect the NSA would rather have access to more information, thanks to a false sense of security, even at the expense of not being able to use it in court easily. If they "win", they get to use evidence this time - and they just warned the next hundred criminals to avoid MS servers, because of this case. "Lose", and they can keep reading it all in secret, using the information behind the scenes instead.
All too easily it seems; my first MacBook Pro power lead caught fire a few years ago as well. This was the low-voltage (hence high current) end, though: in their quest to make everything thin and light, the cable was thin and flimsy, so one of the braided conductors frayed after a while. More current going down a thinner wire meant more heat - which softened the remaining copper and made the problem worse, until arcing started and I got a micro-firework display on my desk. (One of is successors managed to melt the plastic in the plug, that didn't make me happy either!)
On the mains end, even a hefty (for laptops) 300-odd watt PSU is only 3A from a US outlet, half that on the higher voltages elsewhere - usually easy enough to deal with, but one sloppy connection and you can get a tiny point getting very hot indeed. It's worse on the low voltage end: a single cable possibly carrying 20 or more amps, while getting rolled up, folded and stood on in transit, designed to be very light weight - yet also done on a budget. As soon as you start trying to shave weight and cost, I suspect it's all too easy for a wire to be just slightly too thin for the current, or a connection to be a little bit too weak for long term mobile use.
If you were building a high school or college electronics project and said you planned to run laptop currents and voltages through such thin wires and tiny connectors, you'd probably be told off or marked down - but commercially, thin, light and cheap trump safety margins and robustness.
You might not have a massive resistor handy at the instant you need it, but I suspect subsidies will play a part in this. If you get paid a certain subsidy per unit of electricity you produce, in addition to receiving whatever the wholesale price is at the time, you could still end up turning a profit by paying someone to receive your surplus electricity. (In Europe, there are also obligations for power companies to get a certain % of power from renewable sources - so it could be better for them to take this power now, giving it away for free or even paying a big industrial customer a tiny bit to use it, just to meet the government targets.) Hopefully, dumping that power into your own resistor bank doesn't earn you subsidy payments!
Wow, that is neat. (At first, I misinterpreted that as dissolving the foam dielectric inside the itself - which could also be neat at some point, for doing FTTH, but rather more demanding.) I take it this is the "final mile" conduit between the cabinet and individual homes, or is it just pushing the HFC boundary down to street level for much shorter runs of coax?
In the long term yes - but the economics are very different short term. A couple of telco engineers could install VDSL2 (or, presumably, G.fast) for a whole wiring cabinet - a hundred or more households - in the time it would take to run fiber to a single one of those premises. Apart from anything else, it seems right now all the engineers are busy installing those FTTC services; switching them to putting in more FTTP/FTTH would not only mean more expense, it would take longer, leaving everyone else on ADSL for longer. I suspect things will be different in a few years, once that FTTC rollout is complete and manpower is freed up.
I actually have the option of FTTH right now, if I wanted: 330 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up, using GPON. The problem is, I'd have to pay heavily for it: high three figures installation, then a three year contract lock-in at GBP 100 per month - just for the line to the exchange, that doesn't include any actual Internet connectivity! Needless to say, I'm staying on FTTC (VDSL2) for now: 80 Mbps down and 20 up, for a fraction of that price.
Now, when it comes to new housing, it's another matter: if you've got to go and dig up a road anyway to put in the wires to a new housing development, it's much the same cost whether it's copper or glass you put in (or both). So, you can sometimes get a fiber connection for the price of VDSL2!
Yes, Norway's quite good in that respect - as is the US Pacific North-West, as I recall: the abundant hydro-electric power gave Microsoft and Amazon a cheap, clean electricity supply for their early "cloud" offerings. Eroded now by global expansion, I think: once they built huge hosting sites elsewhere, they used whatever power was present in that area, usually something much less clean. Of course, Norwegian oil refining activity will also be boosted significantly by the small detail of having a major oil supply, unlike other European countries...
I've seen a few hosting outfits offering "carbon neutral" services, which I think you can do quite affordably by locating somewhere with suitable clean power. A bit of a niche market compared to more mainstream hosting services, but there's obviously some demand there.
In a sense, CA is getting what it voted for: stamping out "dirty" industry. Other countries are getting what their governments want/permit: economic growth, regardless of CO2 etc. I suspect both will regret it to some extent and change course: China has a major smog problem and is trying to clean up, CA has a major economic problem and power shortfall and will have to give that a higher priority soon, if it isn't already.
They need to pick a name which is similar, to be identifiable, but less tarnished by past bad experiences. I propose Infernal Excrement: still "IE", but much less off-putting than the name they have soiled so badly with IE6 and other fiascoes.
To be fair ... it does suck much less now. I suppose it's rather like working for a surviving offshoot of Enron or Lehman Bros... Who, thinking about it, have probably done less economic damage globally than IE has.
That would be less help than you might expect (although OS X does do exactly this by default now). Remember all those Word macro viruses of a few years ago? Totally unaffected: it's a genuine copy of MS Word that's running, it's just doing something it really, really shouldn't be. Likewise any browser exploit. Trojans have always relied on the user to execute - and in general, they will execute them, whatever dire warnings you may put in place, unless you can give them a totally locked down system (which, even in a strict corporate setting, is often politically impossible). In a University setting, I've had very senior academics call me up with "I can't open this CampusLife.pdf.exe file someone sent me ... and it won't open on my secretary's PC either." Of course it was malware - but any computer restrictions to prevent that would probably have resulted in unemployment rather than a more secure PC. Telling people at the top of the food chain "you aren't allowed to do that" just won't work. (Fortunately, opening that particular worm did nothing anyway - it either relied on Outlook, or having outbound port 25 open, neither of which applied at that time.)
Ultimately, for anything more than the most limited functionality, you will have security holes - just like you will get hard drives and power supplies failing, keyboards and mice getting choked up with gunk. Reduce the risks where it makes sense (RAID and redundant PSUs for servers, good patch management, sensible firewall settings) and then deal with things that go wrong effectively when it does happen (spares, backups, etc).
Like real life, take sensible security precautions - but going too far can do as much harm as having poor security. Do you drive everywhere in an armored vehicle with armed escorts? Unless you're POTUS or equivalent, that would just be silly - I seem to recall there have been cases of people dying after getting trapped in "panic rooms" after false alarms, because medical help couldn't get to them in time! So, don't be the computer equivalent: blocking attachments entirely is secure, but is it useful?
They are probably right there - of those 3 rebuilds, how many do you think would have been prevented by paying more for any given AV product? Thinking back, I can remember several PCs needing recovery work because of the AV system in use (good old McAfee pulled down an update which declared a piece of Windows XP itself to be malware and need deletion - leaving a machine you couldn't log in to until that file was reinstalled), and probably two nasty infections for me to clean, which got in despite McAfee being present with fairly paranoid settings.
All too true, sadly. Tendering processes seem to exacerbate this: when a government control freak puts out a document announcing that the government is really determined to buy a chocolate teapot, whatever the price, the bidder saying "here's a stainless steel teapot which will do the job for $5" gets dumped, while the one saying "we'll stick bars of premium Swiss chocolate together with chewing gum for $1m" gets handed the million - then another million to patch the chocolate teapot with cement to make it hold hot liquids. Then it turns out they were actually needing a milkshake dispenser in the first place but didn't understand anything about beverages, so they have to start again from scratch, $2m down.
One large government contract I was involved in stipulated in minute detail exactly what error message had to appear when the service was offline. There was no SLA, however, not even an incentive in the contract to improve it! (This was the result of the previous project for that department having been a high-profile failure, with servers overwhelmed by the load. The bureaucrats responded to that with "next time, let's make sure it can show an error when busy!" rather than requiring scalability or load tests.) On the bright side, the winning bidder had the integrity to make sure it didn't fall apart anyway.
No, just more imported products of energy-intensive industrial processes, like steel and aluminum. It's already happening to an alarming extent in Europe for exactly that reason, with large metal-working plants (which can consume hundreds of megawatts each) getting moved overseas. Just because you can't import the electricity itself doesn't mean the resulting products have to be made in the US!
It's an absolutely crazy implementation, I agree (particularly speaking as someone implementing something which analyzes HTTP downloads right now). It's not caching, but some sort content analysis; my guess, and it is only a guess, is that it's intended as a workaround to copyright. Genuine caching is OK, for cacheable content, but I don't think this use would be covered by that copyright exemption: by fetching their own copy from the server like a regular web spider, they're no longer "making a copy". The other possibility is bandwidth: being a major ISP, it might be easier to intercept only the requests in-line, then queue them up for spidering by a separate system; intercepting the downloaded content as well would mean forcing all traffic through the analysis system in realtime.
Mine just hashes and logs the objects as they get fetched. Of course, I'm doing it in the firewall, with the user's knowledge and consent. I just remembered, though, a friend who works for an anti-malware vendor company mentioned to me that their security proxy does the same bizarre duplication rather than scanning in transit, which IIRC screwed up music streaming services, so presumably there's a good reason for that. (Weird, because if I were shipping malware, I'd find that all too trivial to circumvent by serving different content to the client and the scanner.)
Conversely, I seem to find (in the UK at least) that cheaper ones and shops are more likely to have free WiFi, while pricier hotels and bigger chains seem to be more likely to charge for it. The poshest one I've spent any time in - part of the same chain as the Savoy in London - charges crazy prices (and has lousy mobile reception), though it's a rock-solid signal throughout the large building; a much cheaper hotel nearby just had a Wifi access point on ADSL somewhere, with no password, for anyone to use.
A question of attitude I suppose: a small hotel thinks £20 or so a month is a trivial investment to make guests happier, like having newspapers in reception; a bigger chain sees it as spending millions across the chain to roll out a service which should generate revenue.
That's part of it - a valuable enough part in itself, IMO; at least one UK ISP, TalkTalk, has started duplicating HTTP requests made by their customers: so, if you request http://example.com/stuff on one of their lines, 30 seconds later they'll go and request the same URL themselves for monitoring purposes. Obviously, enabling SSL prevents this kind of gratuitous stupidity - and the previous incarnation of such snooping, Phorm. If enough websites enable SSL, ISPs will no longer have the ability to monitor customer behavior that closely, all they will see are SSL flows to and from IP addresses, and whatever DNS queries you make to their servers, if any. (Use encrypted connections to OpenDNS or similar, and your ISP will only ever see IP addresses and traffic volume - exactly as it should be IMO!)
In fact, it looks like very much the same challenge: with most decisions being unanimous reversals, it seems only a small minority of those individual votes are votes to affirm the lower court decision. So, just as 'return "reverse";' is a 70+% accurate predictor of the overall court ruling in each case, the very same predictor will be somewhere around 70% accurate for each individual justice, for exactly the same reason. (For that matter, if I took a six-sided die and marked two sides "affirm" and the rest "reverse", I'd have a slightly less accurate predictor giving much less obvious predictions: it will correctly predict about two-thirds of the time, with incorrect predictions split between unexpected reversals and unexpected affirmations.)
This is the statistical problem with trying to measure/predict any unlikely (or indeed any very likely) event. I can build a "bomb detector" for screening airline luggage, for example, which is 99.99% accurate in real-world tests. How? Well, much less than 0.01% of actual airline luggage contains a bomb ... so a flashing green LED marked "no bomb present" will in fact be correct in almost every single case. It's also completely worthless, of course! (Sadly, at least two people have put exactly that business model into practice and made a considerable amount of money selling fake bomb detectors for use in places like Iraq - one of them got a seven year jail sentence for it last year in England.)
With blood transfusions, I understand there's now a two stage test used to screen for things like HIV. The first test is quick, easy, and quite often wrong: as I recall, most of the positive readings it gives turn out to be false positives. What matters, though, is that the negative results are very, very unlikely to be false negatives: you can be confident the blood is indeed clean. Then, you can use a more elaborate test to determine which of the few positives were correct - by eliminating the majority of samples, it's much easier to focus on the remainder. Much the way airport security should be done: quickly weed out the 90-99% of people/bags who definitely aren't a threat, then you have far more resources to focus on the much smaller number of possible threats.
Come to think of it, the very first CPU branch predictors used exactly this technique: they assumed that no conditional branch would ever be taken. Since most conditional branches aren't, that "prediction" was actually right most of the time. (The Pentium 4 is much more sophisticated, storing thousands of records about when branches are taken and not taken - hence "only" gets it wrong about one time in nine.)
Now, I'd like to think the predictor in question is more sophisticated than this - but to know that, we'd need a better statistical test than those quoted, which amount to "it's nearly as accurate as a static predictor based on no information about the case at all"! Did it predict the big controversial decisions more accurately than less significant ones, for example? (Unlikely, of course, otherwise they wouldn't have been so controversial.)
True - the problem AIUI is that "just" keeping the receiver turned on constantly consumes a significant amount of power in itself. Once synced with a tower, the phone can turn off the receiver, knowing that it has, say, 789ms until the next beacon it needs to check for; if it's waiting, it needs to be listening constantly. Worse, it doesn't know what frequency the tower might appear on - so until it finds one, it will be constantly sweeping all the different frequency bands a tower could be using, until it actually finds one - on a modern handset, cycling between at least three different modes (GSM, 3G and LTE), each on several different frequency bands. Also, because of the possibility of roaming, it may be hitting other networks then checking whether or not it can use those ("Hi network 4439, I'm from network 4494, can I connect? No? Kthxbye")
That wouldn't come under "right to be forgotten" though, a simple edit or correction request would address that.
The whole notion of a "right" to prohibit someone else from making a factually accurate statement on one website about the content of another site seems utterly absurd to me. Removing the destination page itself could perhaps be excused in some cases ... but to accept that the owner of a page making a statement about somebody has a right to keep it, even if it's out of date, then turn round and gag the likes of Google from making current factual statements about that page? Every "judge" supporting that nonsense needs to be unemployed ASAP.
I think the dexterity is the key here. Yes, a crane can lift 10+ tonnes at the touch of a button/lever - once someone has attached the hook to the object. You can't just reach down and pick something up with a crane, except in very carefully controlled circumstances (like shipping containers lined up on a dockyard). Imagine a suit like this in rescue situations, though: lifting lots of chunks of rubble off trapped survivors, clearing blocked paths. A crane could lift the weight easily, but can't pick chunks of rubble up; a bulldozer or excavator could move it all, but would kill the people trapped underneath. Also, in those situations there is often a lot of dust etc around - and filter masks don't fit well with the physical exertion of lifting and moving heavy debris.
Also, like the previous comment says, I imagine they'll scale up to heavier weights and other features in future (adding power tools, for example).
That's a good point - unfortunately, it's not one that can easily be addressed algorithmically, because you stray into the much more abstract question of "what is porn?" (or, in this case, what is an "illegal image"). If I were to take a 1 megapixel illegal image and slice it into 100 tiles, how many of those tiles would themselves contain illegal imagery? Identifying a file as being the top-left corner of "known child abuse image #515345" isn't actually conclusive in itself, because that bit of picture may be innocuous in itself.
In the context of my work, I'd be logging that the offender in question had downloaded a 533k JPEG from a certain URL on dodgy-site.com, so the parole guys can skim through looking for anything suspicious: the domain name, or what search engine terms led to it, will probably be informative enough in itself. Hash matching is a quick and easy check to automate, but far from the only thing that will be checked: Facebook usage, for example ("Now, Mr Sex Offender, why exactly do you have a Facebook accounting claiming to be a 13 year old girl sending out friend requests...?") Fortunately, it's not a case of gathering proof for a prosecution, it's a much broader goal of assessing behaviour and compliance.
The smart implementations probably hash the image payload excluding EXIF, for exactly that reason - maybe downsample and reduce the colorspace too, so trivial tweaks won't have that effect any more.
(In fact, the implementation I'm working with right now for exactly this purpose - I have a small research project underway with the police in Scotland as part of their Offender Management work - just hashes HTTP payloads for the moment - although refining this is on the drawing board for later.)
I do find this very disturbing in principle though. Is absolutely everything in your mailbox entirely innocent? I have, for example, a list of various Microsoft product keys in mine. As it happens, those are legitimate - all issued to me by Microsoft via MSDN subscription, then I stuck them all in a spreadsheet to keep track of which key was in use for what - but would Google or the police know that just from looking at the list? They might turn up with a warrant looking for the piracy ring I'm obviously running, just because Google got nosy and went vigilante!
This isn't the first time, though; I recall a malware researcher getting rather upset after Google started eating samples from his Inbox - even when they were inside password-protected ZIP files. I can see that they mean well, but to me that crosses a line.
I wonder about that, actually: I'm quite sure Linux users are much more likely to be running the likes of NoScript and various ad-blockers than Windows users are - and anyone who blocks whatever analytics script this survey uses will be ignored completely, skewing figures away from their platform. Maybe it's not a large proportion, but I'm sure it will be a factor there.
The scary thing is that Vista actually gained users, and the interesting gap is how desktop versus mobile usage compares: how would IE/Chrome/Safari compare across all form factors look? (Bearing in mind that mobile users on the Chrome rendering engine are all on Linux kernels, probably dwarfing the Linux desktop users.)
The two times I've had in-store card referrals (high value transactions: the first time was buying a P3 laptop, which was quite high end in those days; the second was furnishing a new apartment after moving to Houston), I'm pretty sure it was the issuing bank ultimately handling the call - I can't imagine the bank would have transferred the personal information they were asking for as a security check to the merchant services provider: past unlisted contact details, previous transactions etc. I suspect the call may have been transferred to them, though, rather than called directly.
I had a similar issue this year with British Telecom working on a broadband fault. The service manager wanted to speak directly to the field engineer working on the fault (different divisions: the engineer's BT Openreach, the manager was BT Wholesale) - but the Openreach guy said he couldn't call the Wholesale one directly. So, the Wholesale one called my number and asked to speak to him ...
To be fair, the Apple Store staff tried phoning on their own iPhones first, but none of them could figure out how to hold it to get a signal, so they had to borrow the customer's phone instead...
You might want to rethink that after being reminded of jet airliners being brought down by birds - not an ounce of metallic content, just a few pounds of meat and soft lightweight bones - or the 747 which almost crashed after all four engines failed from ingesting some ash. (Fortunately, they happened to be relatively near an airport and were high enough to glide for over a hundred miles, which bought them just enough time to restart an engine while they had been preparing to ditch in the ocean, buying them enough time to limp to the nearest runway - although all four engines were damaged beyond repair.)
For that matter, the French Concorde which crashed in 2000 was destroyed by a single thin strip of metal, 17 inches long and just over an inch wide, less than four ounces: essentially, a slightly larger than average metal ruler. It didn't even go into an engine, it just burst a tire - violently enough that the ten pound lump of rubber ruptured the wing and number 5 fuel tank, causing the crash which killed everyone on board.
That was a single 4 oz strip of metal hitting a tire. A pound of bolts or nails will destroy the engine - or a metal drone engine that size.