What are all of the three letter agencies so afraid of? I mean, If they aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't be concerned with some reasonable transparency. As long as they don't have anything to hide, right?
Privacy advocates always say "if you have nothing to hide, hide everything". And that is exactly what these organisations obviously try to do: hide everything.
Now the difference of course is that you and I are individuals, and the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. are US-government subsidised organisations. It would make sense if the people that pay for them (the general population) would be kept in the know of what they're up to, and how well they perform. Yet they simply try to "hide everything".
The other issue I have with this, is that I have the feeling being spied upon by some foreign government, of a country that I have never visited, and that I have nothing to do with (business deals with US based companies, use of US-based web sites like this one don't count for that matter to me). What is their business spying on random foreigners? Let them stick to their own people, if they want to randomly check what people are doing.
And for the spying on foreigners part: it makes sense to me that any government keeps track of certain individuals. Individuals that are flagged by their counterparts in foreign countries (e.g. through police investigation or court convictions). And they likely want to keep that secret - many such individuals will be extra careful if they know they're being spied upon. Some proper intelligence sharing through Interpol or the likes would be much more useful than gathering as much information as possible on as many people as possible "just because they can".
You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
As a user I may be boring as well, but the vast majority of web sites that I visit do not allow much, if any, interaction. It doesn't go much further usually than a place to leave comments (like this site, or Facebook). The vast majority of corporate web sites that I visit are even more static: they present information about a company, and that's why I visit them. Shopping sites also don't have that much interaction really: you click a link, they say it's available or not, you click a button, and go for payment. Filling in some simple forms on the way.
Those sites I really don't understand why there should be so high levels of complexity involved that it doesn't run in anything not bleeding edge. Sure it may look prettier and so, but the interaction level a browser provides is and will always be far less than what a desktop application can do, for the simple reason that all communication with the backend is asynchronous and request/response based.
Then there are other sites that feature complete word processors (like Google Docs) or specialised editors like circuitlab.com. That's a totally different ballgame, but those sites are a tiny minority of all the web sites out there.
And, sadly, this brings us back to the good old days of "best viewed in Netscape" or "best viewed in Internet Explorer".
Not sure who to blame in this case, though.
Web developer for failing to support the other browser? I assume you're a competent developer, and know what you're doing. Which implies that it's really hard to do some stuff in IE that is easy to pull off in the other browsers.
Browser developers? Some browsers implement features that other browsers don't. That's just like what happened back in the day, the Netscape vs IE browser wars. Though now it seems these features are somewhat related to open standards. Or are those standards so standard? Standard because some w3c published them, or standard because another browser supports the same feature in the same way?
Interesting difference with the previous browser wars is that it's now MS with their IE browser doing the catch-up. They used to be the ones ahead of the pack - it's not just because that so many sites are linked to IE6, which back in the day had many advanced features that other browsers didn't have, and was arguably the most advanced web browser. And with development stalled, it was not obvious that MS would drop those features right away when they continued development.
And I don't see the end of this, really. Not until there is a finished standard and all browsers support that standard. And that won't happen as the standard will never be finished.
Will also depend greatly on your specific use case: whether it's lookups from a huge, mostly read-only database, or for use in a mail server which is constantly writing data as well. By my understanding at least it's the writes that wear out the SSD, not the reads.
Such trains would not stop at every small station, rather at the major stations only. And there you quickly rack up the volume to set up airport-style security without costs going over the top (well that is if you consider the current security to be a cost effective operation, of course).
Multimodal transport is not really suitable for moving people. One of the issues is that people want to move fast and on schedule, without having to wait on other parts of the train to arrive. Also a passenger train usually offers more comfort and space than a bus, allow for seats to face one another, and allow passengers to walk a few coaches down to the restaurant, like many long-distance trains offer.
For freight it's better - as long as weight is not an issue, so you see multimodal shipping using containers limited to road, rail and water. A shipping container is not taken on board of a plane, the box itself weighs about 3800 kg (40' container). Reloading the cargo on the plane is cheaper overall (and air cargo lots are usually far smaller than complete container loads - and you really don't want to fly empty space, which happens when not enough cargo can be consolidated).
And even when it comes to freight, usually the truck is not taken on the train, only the cargo container. This truck is an expensive piece of equipment, and requires a dedicated driver to be present. So trucks on the trains is only done in special cases, like when crossing the Alps, or the Channel tunnel.
I haven't used IE in ages, as there is no Linux version so can't even try it.
TFA however lists benchmarks as well, without further explanation, but based on the numbers I make up that IE is a bit slower than the others.
And the 1W saving is on a 15W base power draw for laptops, or 2W saving on a 38W desktop. That's just over 5% power saving - which is rather surprising to me, and in itself is asking for further investigation. Your low-power netbook won't have a 1w saving, more likely about 5% of however much power it normally uses.
YouTube is at the top of the power-hungry pages, which is of course caused by the flash plugin playing video. Other pages will have moving ads, that also continue to use energy. Rendering will likely cause a power spike when loading a page, however thinking of dynamic pages like/. discussion, where you can show and hide pieces of the page, rendering is more continuous. So the time spent reading, commenting, the amount of extra comments opened: it all adds to power use.
They must have come up wiht some "typical use case" and then replicate that over the various sites they tested. And it is of course telling that barebones site Craigslist is the most energy efficient.
The difference is about 5% in power use of the computers only. Which may translate to 1% or less overall savings.
However IE is also slower in rendering pages, causing productivity loss (a few seconds a page of employee time eaten up) which easily costs more than the energy cost saved.
Let's see, everybody in this household has a phone, tablet and we have a netbook. 7 devices for 3 people.
Yeah, I can see mobile devices outnumbering people.
In the rich part of the world maybe. Where I live that's the situation too - many years ago we were well over 100% penetration rate for mobile phones - and that's counting actual telephone numbers in use. Many people have two phones, two numbers.
However only a minority of the world's population is that rich. China and India together make up almost half the world's population - and have a far lower mobile device use rate, though of course it's rising fast, and with mobile phones and subscriptions as cheap as they are nowadays it's getting in reach for more and more people. Though you'd need at least like 80% of their population to own at least one mobile device to stand a chance of reaching more than one per head of the world population.
Will be hard to repair metal parts, and bumpers are quite cheap to produce as they're injection moulded. It's the labour needed to replace them that's expensive.
For the car and key: you may want a set of say one million codes, each for one time use. When used, a code is invalidated. These codes are say 50 digits long, so to randomly guess one of the still unused codes is nearly impossible, you'd have to correctly guess at least in the order 44 digits. And of course if a code or two is found skipped, the car just disables all intermediate codes as well. One million not enough? Have it refreshed every time the car goes for a check up.
Now the attacker: intercepting a code on say a busy beach doesn't help, attacker does not know which car it belongs to, or where that car is. You'd have to intercept a code out of range of the car, then go to the car (so you also have to know where to find the car that belongs to the code), and replay it. Then you may unlock that specific car. Doable, but really hard.
If you know the unlock codes (which these criminals apparently do), it's not too hard to simulate the "second click" in your device: on keypress send first-click-code, wait a moment, send second-click-code. Those issues are quite trivial after getting through the, presumably, well encrypted unlock sequence.
walking by a car, then walking back when the lighs go on, is quite odd and suspicious. I suppose the locks in question are still mechanical (the actual locking mechanism), so you walk towards the car, press the button, and hear if it unlocks or not before you're actually at the passenger door.
What you suggest is I think mostly a software issue, not so much a hardware issue. Bluetooth can take care of the mouse and keyboard part, and many phones already can output 1080p HD video. Wifi comes built in so that part is solved already.
Actually I have heard Android works quite well with a mouse (no personal experience with this whatsoever). That could be promising, and getting very close to what you want. Indeed a typical current phone has the computing power of a desktop of maybe five years ago, so that's not the problem.
I'd like to see that happen in a slightly different manner, where the phone acts as some kind of central storage system, and allows you to access you data either via the phone itself, or via the PC you connect it to. Because after all that's what you're actually interested in: your data. Not the exact software that runs on the phone, or the PC. Let that be different: a more powerful version for the PC that makes good use of the better input devices (proper mouse and keyboard) and another version for the phone that gets around the limitations of the touch screen only input.
You want to read your e-mail more than you care whether your mail reader (be it Pine or Evolution or Outlook) is running on your phone or your PC. You want to continue writing your report, either in the MS Word from your Windows PC, LibreOffice on your Linux PC at home, or some PhoneOffice that runs on your phone. You need to have your data around, in an open data format, so you can use whatever hardware is at hand or convenient.
And the people that do know and use those 500 statistical formulas in Excel usually do not share the spreadsheet file itself, as it's too much information for anyone else. They use the spreadsheet at their own desktop, distil the data they need, put that in a simple report, and send that to their bosses.
The iPhone is much easier replaced by its users than Windows. Phones are in part utility, part fashion items. Phones do not have people locked in to a technology as much as desktop computers do. Apple really has to work a lot harder to stay on top of their market than MS.
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What are all of the three letter agencies so afraid of? I mean, If they aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't be concerned with some reasonable transparency. As long as they don't have anything to hide, right?
Privacy advocates always say "if you have nothing to hide, hide everything". And that is exactly what these organisations obviously try to do: hide everything.
Now the difference of course is that you and I are individuals, and the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. are US-government subsidised organisations. It would make sense if the people that pay for them (the general population) would be kept in the know of what they're up to, and how well they perform. Yet they simply try to "hide everything".
The other issue I have with this, is that I have the feeling being spied upon by some foreign government, of a country that I have never visited, and that I have nothing to do with (business deals with US based companies, use of US-based web sites like this one don't count for that matter to me). What is their business spying on random foreigners? Let them stick to their own people, if they want to randomly check what people are doing.
And for the spying on foreigners part: it makes sense to me that any government keeps track of certain individuals. Individuals that are flagged by their counterparts in foreign countries (e.g. through police investigation or court convictions). And they likely want to keep that secret - many such individuals will be extra careful if they know they're being spied upon. Some proper intelligence sharing through Interpol or the likes would be much more useful than gathering as much information as possible on as many people as possible "just because they can".
Owls appear to be a pretty suitable stabiliser, too.
Yes... so short a comment, and people still don't read to the end. Just look at another reply to my comment - about the operating systems.
I have Chromium and Firefox installed on Linux. Firefox and IE on Windows. Two browsers on one OS doesn't seem to be an issue.
Then many corporations are by now caught between a rock and a hard place.
IE6 can use the internal stuff but almost nothing on the Internet; IE10 can handle modern web pages but not the internal stuff.
And I can't imagine they can afford to lose access to either. The Internet is just too important a resource.
You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
As a user I may be boring as well, but the vast majority of web sites that I visit do not allow much, if any, interaction. It doesn't go much further usually than a place to leave comments (like this site, or Facebook). The vast majority of corporate web sites that I visit are even more static: they present information about a company, and that's why I visit them. Shopping sites also don't have that much interaction really: you click a link, they say it's available or not, you click a button, and go for payment. Filling in some simple forms on the way.
Those sites I really don't understand why there should be so high levels of complexity involved that it doesn't run in anything not bleeding edge. Sure it may look prettier and so, but the interaction level a browser provides is and will always be far less than what a desktop application can do, for the simple reason that all communication with the backend is asynchronous and request/response based.
Then there are other sites that feature complete word processors (like Google Docs) or specialised editors like circuitlab.com. That's a totally different ballgame, but those sites are a tiny minority of all the web sites out there.
And, sadly, this brings us back to the good old days of "best viewed in Netscape" or "best viewed in Internet Explorer".
Not sure who to blame in this case, though.
Web developer for failing to support the other browser? I assume you're a competent developer, and know what you're doing. Which implies that it's really hard to do some stuff in IE that is easy to pull off in the other browsers.
Browser developers? Some browsers implement features that other browsers don't. That's just like what happened back in the day, the Netscape vs IE browser wars. Though now it seems these features are somewhat related to open standards. Or are those standards so standard? Standard because some w3c published them, or standard because another browser supports the same feature in the same way?
Interesting difference with the previous browser wars is that it's now MS with their IE browser doing the catch-up. They used to be the ones ahead of the pack - it's not just because that so many sites are linked to IE6, which back in the day had many advanced features that other browsers didn't have, and was arguably the most advanced web browser. And with development stalled, it was not obvious that MS would drop those features right away when they continued development.
And I don't see the end of this, really. Not until there is a finished standard and all browsers support that standard. And that won't happen as the standard will never be finished.
If you can not install another browser, how come you can install Chrome Frame?
Use two browsers? IE6 for legacy; IE10 or FF or whatever for actual browsing.
Can't really imagine you can do much on the regular Internet with IE6 these days.
Will also depend greatly on your specific use case: whether it's lookups from a huge, mostly read-only database, or for use in a mail server which is constantly writing data as well. By my understanding at least it's the writes that wear out the SSD, not the reads.
So you're replacing RAM with SSD, not HD with SSD. Interesting.
And would you even be able to do this with DRAM modules? Normal PC motherboards don't support that.
Such trains would not stop at every small station, rather at the major stations only. And there you quickly rack up the volume to set up airport-style security without costs going over the top (well that is if you consider the current security to be a cost effective operation, of course).
Multimodal transport is not really suitable for moving people. One of the issues is that people want to move fast and on schedule, without having to wait on other parts of the train to arrive. Also a passenger train usually offers more comfort and space than a bus, allow for seats to face one another, and allow passengers to walk a few coaches down to the restaurant, like many long-distance trains offer.
For freight it's better - as long as weight is not an issue, so you see multimodal shipping using containers limited to road, rail and water. A shipping container is not taken on board of a plane, the box itself weighs about 3800 kg (40' container). Reloading the cargo on the plane is cheaper overall (and air cargo lots are usually far smaller than complete container loads - and you really don't want to fly empty space, which happens when not enough cargo can be consolidated).
And even when it comes to freight, usually the truck is not taken on the train, only the cargo container. This truck is an expensive piece of equipment, and requires a dedicated driver to be present. So trucks on the trains is only done in special cases, like when crossing the Alps, or the Channel tunnel.
I haven't used IE in ages, as there is no Linux version so can't even try it.
TFA however lists benchmarks as well, without further explanation, but based on the numbers I make up that IE is a bit slower than the others.
And the 1W saving is on a 15W base power draw for laptops, or 2W saving on a 38W desktop. That's just over 5% power saving - which is rather surprising to me, and in itself is asking for further investigation. Your low-power netbook won't have a 1w saving, more likely about 5% of however much power it normally uses.
Rendering is only part of the energy use.
YouTube is at the top of the power-hungry pages, which is of course caused by the flash plugin playing video. Other pages will have moving ads, that also continue to use energy. Rendering will likely cause a power spike when loading a page, however thinking of dynamic pages like /. discussion, where you can show and hide pieces of the page, rendering is more continuous. So the time spent reading, commenting, the amount of extra comments opened: it all adds to power use.
They must have come up wiht some "typical use case" and then replicate that over the various sites they tested. And it is of course telling that barebones site Craigslist is the most energy efficient.
The difference is about 5% in power use of the computers only. Which may translate to 1% or less overall savings.
However IE is also slower in rendering pages, causing productivity loss (a few seconds a page of employee time eaten up) which easily costs more than the energy cost saved.
Let's see, everybody in this household has a phone, tablet and we have a netbook. 7 devices for 3 people.
Yeah, I can see mobile devices outnumbering people.
In the rich part of the world maybe. Where I live that's the situation too - many years ago we were well over 100% penetration rate for mobile phones - and that's counting actual telephone numbers in use. Many people have two phones, two numbers.
However only a minority of the world's population is that rich. China and India together make up almost half the world's population - and have a far lower mobile device use rate, though of course it's rising fast, and with mobile phones and subscriptions as cheap as they are nowadays it's getting in reach for more and more people. Though you'd need at least like 80% of their population to own at least one mobile device to stand a chance of reaching more than one per head of the world population.
Will be hard to repair metal parts, and bumpers are quite cheap to produce as they're injection moulded. It's the labour needed to replace them that's expensive.
For the car and key: you may want a set of say one million codes, each for one time use. When used, a code is invalidated. These codes are say 50 digits long, so to randomly guess one of the still unused codes is nearly impossible, you'd have to correctly guess at least in the order 44 digits. And of course if a code or two is found skipped, the car just disables all intermediate codes as well. One million not enough? Have it refreshed every time the car goes for a check up.
Now the attacker: intercepting a code on say a busy beach doesn't help, attacker does not know which car it belongs to, or where that car is. You'd have to intercept a code out of range of the car, then go to the car (so you also have to know where to find the car that belongs to the code), and replay it. Then you may unlock that specific car. Doable, but really hard.
If you know the unlock codes (which these criminals apparently do), it's not too hard to simulate the "second click" in your device: on keypress send first-click-code, wait a moment, send second-click-code. Those issues are quite trivial after getting through the, presumably, well encrypted unlock sequence.
walking by a car, then walking back when the lighs go on, is quite odd and suspicious. I suppose the locks in question are still mechanical (the actual locking mechanism), so you walk towards the car, press the button, and hear if it unlocks or not before you're actually at the passenger door.
What you suggest is I think mostly a software issue, not so much a hardware issue. Bluetooth can take care of the mouse and keyboard part, and many phones already can output 1080p HD video. Wifi comes built in so that part is solved already.
Actually I have heard Android works quite well with a mouse (no personal experience with this whatsoever). That could be promising, and getting very close to what you want. Indeed a typical current phone has the computing power of a desktop of maybe five years ago, so that's not the problem.
I'd like to see that happen in a slightly different manner, where the phone acts as some kind of central storage system, and allows you to access you data either via the phone itself, or via the PC you connect it to. Because after all that's what you're actually interested in: your data. Not the exact software that runs on the phone, or the PC. Let that be different: a more powerful version for the PC that makes good use of the better input devices (proper mouse and keyboard) and another version for the phone that gets around the limitations of the touch screen only input.
You want to read your e-mail more than you care whether your mail reader (be it Pine or Evolution or Outlook) is running on your phone or your PC. You want to continue writing your report, either in the MS Word from your Windows PC, LibreOffice on your Linux PC at home, or some PhoneOffice that runs on your phone. You need to have your data around, in an open data format, so you can use whatever hardware is at hand or convenient.
And the people that do know and use those 500 statistical formulas in Excel usually do not share the spreadsheet file itself, as it's too much information for anyone else. They use the spreadsheet at their own desktop, distil the data they need, put that in a simple report, and send that to their bosses.
The iPhone is much easier replaced by its users than Windows. Phones are in part utility, part fashion items. Phones do not have people locked in to a technology as much as desktop computers do. Apple really has to work a lot harder to stay on top of their market than MS.