Essentially it's a remote backup service, plus a couple of bits. You tell it which folder/s to use and it uploads them to remote servers. Any time you're connected it syncs local and remote folders to the newest versions. It can run on multiple machines connected to the same account, so for example my Documents folder is identical on my netbook and desktop, and sync'd whenever either is online. There's also a web based interface so you can also access your files from *any* machine connected to the internet.
Useful, I like it. I'm not going to rely on it, and there's nothing particularly new there (you could have done exactly the same in the 80s with cron and ftp if the bandwidth was there), but it is quite handy.
Why did I say that? Why?! Within an hour I'm back down to 18Kb/s max. How long will it take this time? Three days? Probably. Could anyone who modded me "Interesting" change it to "Funny" please. (In the absence of a "Should-Have-Know-Better-Than-Tempting-Fate" mod option)
Well that's embarrassing. Not entirely surprising, and not a big deal to be honest, but yet again we have it demonstrated that short of being physically disconnected from the internet and placed in a lead lined box there's no such thing as 100% security. If you want secure, don't put it on a computer and certainly don't plug the computer into the interwebs.
The systems are generally OK - I'm in the middle of nowhere and get a reasonable 2Mb/s most of the time, the home hub does the job and is fairly easy to use, but where they really fall down is whan anything goes wrong. We were recently down to 20Kb/s max for about three days and got nothing from telephone support other than "your line is rated at 2.8Mb/s" and the usual "can you reset your router" (and, memorably, "have you tried unplugging the ethernet cable?" on a machine with no wireless card).
Yup, the telephone support absolutely sucks. Their Twitter support, on the other hand, is really rather good - good communication, the guy (Keiran I think) actually seemed to know what he was talking about, and they got the problem fixed. He even got the xkcd shibboleet reference, and that is what it felt like talking to them after the phone support debacle. I seriously hope BT read this and put whoever deals with their Twitter support in charge of everything. (@BTCare should you need them).
Pity you can't vote for another party and leave the Dems and Reps out of it. Mind you, you'd need some kind of system in place that allows anyone to stand for a seat and be voted in, regardless of how much money they put in to one of the two parties in the democracy.
Because hurricanes are powered by heat differentials. OK, you'd need some kind of tower pumping hot air a few thousand feet upward, but it couid happen.
When oil is ten times the price it is today (give it, oh, a decade tops) then anything will look cheap.
Imagine we'd only just discovered oil - we'd probably be shouting down some lunatic scheme to build a huge floating platform, tow it out into deep, windy, wavy waters and then drill several kilometers into poorly understood geology to tap a pressurised well of highly flammable oil and explosive gas.
On top of that, "shutdown" will involve opening closing a few doors. In fact, the only major problems I can see would be resonance shaking the thing to bits, and the world's pretty much got that sorted now. In fact, build for resonance and harness the power from that too. Stick a windmill on it while you're at it. And an array of solar collectors beneath it. And keep going downwards for a bit of geothermal.
They would, however, be public. NI's lawyers will probably be able to prevent the "legal" release into the public domain, and the company might be hit with a fairly trifling (for them) fine. If they go public however, NI stand to lose a hell of a lot more than the million pounds or whatever they might fined, they could lose multiples of that in many different countries and/or legal jurisdictions. It's one of those rare occasions where law and justice don't entirely mesh...
And about the same price bookshops pay for it in the first place. Why publishers put up with demands for supply at zero-profit (sometimes negative profit) terms from amazon I don't know, but it's led to a situation where I have a 45 minute drive to visit my nearest bookshop. I don't shop online generally, and refuse to use amazon on principle, so it all suck a bit. If I have to buy books online I tend to use AbeBooks, a collective of independant bookshops. At least that way my money goes to an actual bookshop rather than a huge multinational something-or-other.
And the correct scientific response on being drawn in to one of these "war" things (science doesn't really get "war", it's all sociology) is to take the course of least harm. Many scientists from both "sides" of WWII worked on the Manhattan Project because they believed that was less harmful than letting Nazi's develop atomic weapons. >/Godwin
I think British Telecom might still be using them. We've been on a 20Kb/s connection for the last week. It's called "broadband" apparently. The guy on the phone said we could speed things up by taking out the ethernet cable altogether, but then the computer stopped talking to the telephone and he sounded surprised. Seriously, I'd LOVE to have a 1Mb/s connection today, let alone a 1Gb/s.
Minecraft fails rather more gracefully though. If it can't get to the authentication server you just get some fairly unobtrusive text in the top left of the screen informing you it may be a dodgy copy and you really should think about buying it. I agree with you, it is DRM, but it's the way DRM should be done, leaving the game intact and playable even if the servers go down.
Not bad, ignoring the fact that gravitationally bound systems lose energy by moving apart. So we'll lose the moon, not crash with it. Nice try though, and really quite eloquent;)
Several distilleries dispose of their condenser water via local swimming pools and schools and the like, so the excess thermal energy gets used for something useful. OK, it's not actual generation, but it's an efficiency. The local one to me (Glenmorangie) vents into one of my local kitesurfing spots, so I get a slightly warmer place to play in the winter. They also feed the spent mash (kind of like porridge, a by-product of making whisky) to the local livestock. It's slightly alcoholic, so the cows round here tend to have grins on their faces a lot of the time. Scotland's pretty good for renewables - wind and wave are useful, and there's certainly no shortage, and we've had large hydro-storage schemes for decades, they were originally used to generate peak-time electricity from the excess produced off-peak, but they're going to be very useful as enormous batteries to store (for example) wind power when it's windy and feed it back in when it's not.
Certainly not in my day (1994 onwards). I studied astrophysics rather than CS, but CS was much the same in structure - during the first two years we had to take a few outside courses, with something vaguely sciency but not directly related to the core subject being normal. I took introductory courses in biology, psychology and geology as I had a vague interest and had never studied them formally. Many years later as a science buyer for a bookstore chain it's turned out to be very useful indeed.
Never underestimate the value of a basic knowledge in outside fields - Feynman made a habit of it, and if it was good enough for him... oblig xkcd
You can't hack something that isn't plugged in. Or code that's been deleted. That's what Sony are doing, taking the servers offline.
The really sensible thing to do would be to hack the security and/or game and/or consoles (depending on Sony's setup) so that servers can be hosted by players rather than a central system. I honestly don't know why companies don't make this a "support" option more often, most seem more than happy to do a similar thing with unofficial fora and the like.
Hell, even if Sony are being as mercenary as we often accuse them of you'd still expect them to offer a "buy a server licence for $10/month" idea...never make it difficult for people to give you money, first rule of being an faceless multinational corporation;)
Presuming we're just talking about the US government here, blaming the electorate for the government (basically a choice of two, so we might as well toss a coin) is like blaming somebody who voted for either Kodos or Kang. Get a substantial proportion of non-Democrat, non-Republicans realistically competing for seats and you might have a point, but as it is it's not really democracy is it?
Crowdsourcing? Sometimes you don't even need that, sometimes a muppet hands himself in because he LOVES FACEBOOK SO MUCH! Honestly. Read it and weep for humanity.
It's easy enough to do (and people make a fortune selling larger versions of this to rich people with yachts):
You're looking for a laser beacon - a bog standard IR laser diode with a mirror that spins to disperse the beam 360 degrees. It'll overload the CCD in cameras and leave them overexposed. Doesn't work with old school film cameras.
Ubuntu One is very useful, but I'm not sure if it will also work with Windows (Cygwin maybe? Never tried it). As mdragan says though, he wants it running on his own server I think, so it's not what he's after.
To be honest I'd just use an ftp folder and cron jobs for the synchronisation if the data's not particularly sensitive.
Slashdot Mirror
Took me a while too!
Essentially it's a remote backup service, plus a couple of bits. You tell it which folder/s to use and it uploads them to remote servers. Any time you're connected it syncs local and remote folders to the newest versions. It can run on multiple machines connected to the same account, so for example my Documents folder is identical on my netbook and desktop, and sync'd whenever either is online. There's also a web based interface so you can also access your files from *any* machine connected to the internet.
Useful, I like it. I'm not going to rely on it, and there's nothing particularly new there (you could have done exactly the same in the 80s with cron and ftp if the bandwidth was there), but it is quite handy.
Why did I say that? Why?! Within an hour I'm back down to 18Kb/s max. How long will it take this time? Three days? Probably. Could anyone who modded me "Interesting" change it to "Funny" please. (In the absence of a "Should-Have-Know-Better-Than-Tempting-Fate" mod option)
Well that's embarrassing. Not entirely surprising, and not a big deal to be honest, but yet again we have it demonstrated that short of being physically disconnected from the internet and placed in a lead lined box there's no such thing as 100% security. If you want secure, don't put it on a computer and certainly don't plug the computer into the interwebs.
(Disclaimer: No, that's still not 100% secure.)
The systems are generally OK - I'm in the middle of nowhere and get a reasonable 2Mb/s most of the time, the home hub does the job and is fairly easy to use, but where they really fall down is whan anything goes wrong. We were recently down to 20Kb/s max for about three days and got nothing from telephone support other than "your line is rated at 2.8Mb/s" and the usual "can you reset your router" (and, memorably, "have you tried unplugging the ethernet cable?" on a machine with no wireless card).
Yup, the telephone support absolutely sucks. Their Twitter support, on the other hand, is really rather good - good communication, the guy (Keiran I think) actually seemed to know what he was talking about, and they got the problem fixed. He even got the xkcd shibboleet reference, and that is what it felt like talking to them after the phone support debacle. I seriously hope BT read this and put whoever deals with their Twitter support in charge of everything. (@BTCare should you need them).
Yup, I'm with you and Clarke. This is an L4 object, 60 degrees ahead of us.
Pity you can't vote for another party and leave the Dems and Reps out of it. Mind you, you'd need some kind of system in place that allows anyone to stand for a seat and be voted in, regardless of how much money they put in to one of the two parties in the democracy.
Because hurricanes are powered by heat differentials. OK, you'd need some kind of tower pumping hot air a few thousand feet upward, but it couid happen.
(I jest, I jest!)
When oil is ten times the price it is today (give it, oh, a decade tops) then anything will look cheap.
Imagine we'd only just discovered oil - we'd probably be shouting down some lunatic scheme to build a huge floating platform, tow it out into deep, windy, wavy waters and then drill several kilometers into poorly understood geology to tap a pressurised well of highly flammable oil and explosive gas.
In engineering and financial terms, this is easy.
On top of that, "shutdown" will involve opening closing a few doors. In fact, the only major problems I can see would be resonance shaking the thing to bits, and the world's pretty much got that sorted now. In fact, build for resonance and harness the power from that too. Stick a windmill on it while you're at it. And an array of solar collectors beneath it. And keep going downwards for a bit of geothermal.
From their Twitter account: "We think, actually we may not release emails from The Sun, simply because it may compromise the court case."
They would, however, be public. NI's lawyers will probably be able to prevent the "legal" release into the public domain, and the company might be hit with a fairly trifling (for them) fine. If they go public however, NI stand to lose a hell of a lot more than the million pounds or whatever they might fined, they could lose multiples of that in many different countries and/or legal jurisdictions. It's one of those rare occasions where law and justice don't entirely mesh...
And about the same price bookshops pay for it in the first place. Why publishers put up with demands for supply at zero-profit (sometimes negative profit) terms from amazon I don't know, but it's led to a situation where I have a 45 minute drive to visit my nearest bookshop. I don't shop online generally, and refuse to use amazon on principle, so it all suck a bit. If I have to buy books online I tend to use AbeBooks, a collective of independant bookshops. At least that way my money goes to an actual bookshop rather than a huge multinational something-or-other.
And the correct scientific response on being drawn in to one of these "war" things (science doesn't really get "war", it's all sociology) is to take the course of least harm. Many scientists from both "sides" of WWII worked on the Manhattan Project because they believed that was less harmful than letting Nazi's develop atomic weapons. >/Godwin
I think British Telecom might still be using them. We've been on a 20Kb/s connection for the last week. It's called "broadband" apparently. The guy on the phone said we could speed things up by taking out the ethernet cable altogether, but then the computer stopped talking to the telephone and he sounded surprised. Seriously, I'd LOVE to have a 1Mb/s connection today, let alone a 1Gb/s.
Minecraft fails rather more gracefully though. If it can't get to the authentication server you just get some fairly unobtrusive text in the top left of the screen informing you it may be a dodgy copy and you really should think about buying it. I agree with you, it is DRM, but it's the way DRM should be done, leaving the game intact and playable even if the servers go down.
Not bad, ignoring the fact that gravitationally bound systems lose energy by moving apart. So we'll lose the moon, not crash with it. Nice try though, and really quite eloquent ;)
Several distilleries dispose of their condenser water via local swimming pools and schools and the like, so the excess thermal energy gets used for something useful. OK, it's not actual generation, but it's an efficiency. The local one to me (Glenmorangie) vents into one of my local kitesurfing spots, so I get a slightly warmer place to play in the winter. They also feed the spent mash (kind of like porridge, a by-product of making whisky) to the local livestock. It's slightly alcoholic, so the cows round here tend to have grins on their faces a lot of the time.
Scotland's pretty good for renewables - wind and wave are useful, and there's certainly no shortage, and we've had large hydro-storage schemes for decades, they were originally used to generate peak-time electricity from the excess produced off-peak, but they're going to be very useful as enormous batteries to store (for example) wind power when it's windy and feed it back in when it's not.
Certainly not in my day (1994 onwards). I studied astrophysics rather than CS, but CS was much the same in structure - during the first two years we had to take a few outside courses, with something vaguely sciency but not directly related to the core subject being normal. I took introductory courses in biology, psychology and geology as I had a vague interest and had never studied them formally. Many years later as a science buyer for a bookstore chain it's turned out to be very useful indeed.
Never underestimate the value of a basic knowledge in outside fields - Feynman made a habit of it, and if it was good enough for him... oblig xkcd
You can't hack something that isn't plugged in. Or code that's been deleted. That's what Sony are doing, taking the servers offline.
;)
The really sensible thing to do would be to hack the security and/or game and/or consoles (depending on Sony's setup) so that servers can be hosted by players rather than a central system. I honestly don't know why companies don't make this a "support" option more often, most seem more than happy to do a similar thing with unofficial fora and the like.
Hell, even if Sony are being as mercenary as we often accuse them of you'd still expect them to offer a "buy a server licence for $10/month" idea...never make it difficult for people to give you money, first rule of being an faceless multinational corporation
Presuming we're just talking about the US government here, blaming the electorate for the government (basically a choice of two, so we might as well toss a coin) is like blaming somebody who voted for either Kodos or Kang. Get a substantial proportion of non-Democrat, non-Republicans realistically competing for seats and you might have a point, but as it is it's not really democracy is it?
Wanna buy some tulips?
Crowdsourcing? Sometimes you don't even need that, sometimes a muppet hands himself in because he LOVES FACEBOOK SO MUCH! Honestly. Read it and weep for humanity.
I drank unpasteurised milk until I was 12, it's fine. Yeah, it needs to be fresh, but raw milk is no problem in itself,
It's easy enough to do (and people make a fortune selling larger versions of this to rich people with yachts):
You're looking for a laser beacon - a bog standard IR laser diode with a mirror that spins to disperse the beam 360 degrees. It'll overload the CCD in cameras and leave them overexposed. Doesn't work with old school film cameras.
Ubuntu One is very useful, but I'm not sure if it will also work with Windows (Cygwin maybe? Never tried it). As mdragan says though, he wants it running on his own server I think, so it's not what he's after.
To be honest I'd just use an ftp folder and cron jobs for the synchronisation if the data's not particularly sensitive.