No, it isn't okay to screw people over who *aren't* ignorant. You can feel free to screw yourself over with ignorance.
There is no evidence of malicious intent, and even if it was done deliberately, there is no reason to think that it was illegal to capture these broadcasts, at least in many locales.
Like I said, if you wanted to target someone who actually had a chance to both prevent the ignorance, and protect their customers, then the class action should be targeting Netgear, Linksys, Dlink, etc.
Google shouldn't necessarily be singled out for mapping wifi networks. There are tons of other companies doing it. Whether it is right or not, is something that should be decided categorically, not as part of a 'google is evil' campaign.
There are plenty of real reasons to be upset at Google besides whether they saved some packets of unencrypted data that were being broadcast by a radio for anyone to see. Let's focus on those than try and drum up some fake outrage over this minor shit.
The funny part is where she claims to be a high-tech worker...
"Van Valin works in a high technology field, and works from her home over her Internet-connected computer a substantial amount of time," the complaint read.
"In connection with her work and home life, Van Valin transmits and receives a substantial amount of data from and to her computer over her wireless network. A significant amount of the wireless data is also subject to her employer's non-disclosure and security regulations."
I do also think there is something to the complaints/commentary of those that say that we are losing generations of our brightest minds in mathematics, artificial intelligence, science and other endeavors, at their most productive times to the financial industry. There contributions there are simply to their companies well-being, hidden behind NDA's (not publishing to journals the advances they make) and spent on 'finding a true market price faster' which is arguably of less lasting benefit to society than if they had worked on endeavors that otherwise benefited humanity writ large.
I won't claim to know as much about the markets as you apparently do. However I will make some observations.
HFT can go wrong. It isn't some holy flawless grail, it is a set of algorithms and knobs created by programmers and controlled by the operators. Being 'allowed' to see prices and transactions before anyone else leads to arbitrage, though I don't know that there is a good systemic way to prevent it. 'Jumping in front of orders' with fractional penny increases seems dubious. Placing fake orders then immediately canceling them, just to see into the dark pool, doesn't seem fair either. Not being able to introduce brakes in trading to allow the HFT to adjust the knobs manually, to handle the situations not covered by the model, has been shown to fail in the past (LTCM for instance).
HFT may in fact lead to 'true pricing' faster, but by wringing any profit out of pricing differences solely for the HF traders.
HFT may be the ultimate form of competition, but so is an arms race (nuclear, chemical, conventional or otherwise), as an analogy. It doesn't necessarily lead to the outcomes we find socially beneficial. (OMG I used 'socially' I must be a socialist...) It impinges our sense of fairness and emphasizes that the playing field is not level.
Perhaps if the beneficial functions of HFT were performed by a disinterested 3rd party or the markets themselves. Otherwise HFT is going to continue to suffer from an image/PR issue.
I don't have the answers, other than say limiting the number of trades or cancellations or preventing fractional penny trades, etc. that might help even out the playing field slightly. Putting an added cost on the number of trades made, so you could continue trading but it would cost you more the more frequently you traded. Just throwing ideas out. Feel free to explain why they wouldn't work or if I am completely off base with my perception (as a semi-educated lay person/comp programmer who has followed this fairly closely the past few weeks).
Android has the right idea, in my book, they just need to take it further and allow users to deny the permissions that are asked for in the manifest. The manifest lists all of the secure things that can be accessed by the app, there just needs to be a line-item veto. A timer/stop watch application does not need 'Full Internet Access' or 'Access to My Contacts'.
If you wanted 26 network shares to have drive letters you couldn't...how is that not using up drive letters?
I'm not into Daemon Tools or drive mounting. I just kind of think it's stupid, personally.
I wasn't suggesting that you couldn't work around it, just that the artificial limitation of drive letters can and is an issue for a significant minority of users. Fortunately there are workarounds, as I described.
ISOs are for burning. Want it on your computer? Decompress it.
And for downloading and sharing as well as burning. ISO's aren't compressed (though OSX DMG's are).
Lots of drive letters...(paraphrase)
You must have a very understanding wife, haha.
And no, I don't have to remember names of things. That's silly. If I want to watch, for example, Nip/Tuck, and I have 100 episodes in a folder
Like I said suggested before, it depends on how you are using the drives, as this is the first I am hearing of video files. Before bat folders, etc were mentioned.
Very helpful because I try not to watch something a 2nd time until 7 years have passed.
Be interesting to find out if there was some metadata that MPC or KMPLayer or VLC or whatever could set for that, besides 'Last Access Time'. Don't know off the top of my head.
I have definitely run out of drive letters before, though I didn't make any special effort to try and use A: and B:.
You are excluding netwrok shares from your drive count, plus heck by default Daemon Tools would use 4 drive letters for mounting ISOs as virtual drives, and you can obviously add more (or have DTools and PowerISO both installed). Many USB SD/MiniSD Card readers use another 4 for all of the card permutations. Throw in a couple of physical media drives and you are already at 11, including system disk and A/B. Add a few more local drives, a USB thumb drive, a camera, a cell phone, and a few more network shares and you can get there easily. By your own example you must be using quite a few.
I don't use stacks of USB drives. I use bare internal hard drives and a USB dock that accepts the drive like a cartridge. They sit in a draw not sucking power when not in use (stored in anti-static bags). You sort of contradict yourself on the power saving front with your 'keep all my drives online at all times in any computer available' scenario in your wife's computer, etc..
As far as your false dichotomy: You have to remember the name of the file to begin with, don't you? A lot (most?) people don't remember those things as explictly nowadays, they use search (as in INSIDE the files). Doing a CLI search across multiple drive letters is probably a pain, or at least I don't know off the top of my head how to do one. Pretty sure even linux users can and do use modern search/file management.
Yikes...yea I just reripped everything I have on CD/DVD back onto Harddrives, something like 3000 discs. Weighs too much, too hard to find, media goes bad, etc.
I use drive docks/hot swap now for all of that. Ideally what I would like is a HD Jukebox, ala a DVD jukebox though without moving the drives or anything, that had virtual catalog software/vitrual drive that knew what was on all the drives and would automate powering on the proper drive to access, and would be cheap per drive (like $10 per slot with 20 slots).
Lol, I am pretty sure Microsoft shares my 'snobbery' and realizes that the drive letter is one of the worst decisions they ever made from a UI/UX perspective. The very fact that it limits the number of devices you can have to 26 (without learning the 'works for everything' way).
Again, I can only image your use case is fairly esoteric since you only use CLI to get to your files. Also, I wasn't suggesting that all drives from all computers be accessible from one location. My assumption was you had a file server with a number of drives you needed to make accessible to a group of clients, not a group of peers all sharing drives with each other.
To me it would seem easier to remember that the 'bedroom' computer had the file I needed rather than drive P:. And with the modern marvel of tab completion you might just be able to type P:\b to navigate to the x:\bedroom folder hosted on \\server\mnt\bedroom.
Yea I wasn't responding to that, just that you had used jailbreaking as an acceptable solution in a few posts, and according to Apple it isn't one.
I think a lot of it has to do with preponderance of actions that have painted Apple in a negative light recently. Having worked at a company that was portrayed negatively for a long period of time (DCLK before Google bought them) I can tell you it sucks for the people who work there, when executive decision after decision casts an ugly pall over your hard work.
That last paragraph is just a comment, not a response about anything, or directed at any comment you or anyone else has made.
But as I described, you could always mount c:\mnt to X:\ on the same computer and it would then be less of an issue (you would still have to navigate to the subfolder for each drive).
Without knowing further what is on the drives and why you need to type things to get to them it is harder to assess your solution. For GUI navigation in my experience it is easier having everything in one place.
I do use a E Texteditor (Textmate for Windows) file that has all of the dir/p for my drives and is always open, so I can reg exp find things as needed, so I do get that. I guess I just don't use CLI for anything but ruby dev/linux work stuff anymore, enough that a few chars would matter.
Sounds like you have a system that works. Hopefully someone may have found my solution to be an interesting alternative for them even if it isn't what you need.
I found remembering if X: was mapped on location to another on one particular computer or another, and having to set that up each time to be onerous. No idea what you are doing that typing extra letters would be necessary.
Pretty sure z: (mounted drive) cd/mnt then you can cd wherever.
If you want you can always mount the c:\mnt\ drive as its own drive letter on the server itself.
The point is you create a single share called 'mnt' or 'media' or 'whatever' on the c:\mnt folder. (Right click in explorer, choose the Sharing tab, and set the permissions/options.)
Then on each of your other computers you just map the network drive in explorer or
net use z: \\myserver\mnt
assuming the share is named mnt. Whenever you add a drive it will automagically.
Just to be clear: Your c:\mnt folder would have subfolders for each of your drives, or however else you wanted to structure it. Here is what mine looks like:
(I use _mnt just so it sorts first in Explorer)
c:/_mnt/movies c:/_mnt/movies/usb (a drive mounted thru a USB dock) c:/_mnt/movies/recent (a drive in a hot swap bay) c:/_mnt/movies/news (a drive pointing to recently downloaded movies) c:/_mnt/audio ( a drive with all of my mp3s) c:/_mnt/tv/news c:/_mnt/tv/recent
('news' is because they are downloaded thru usenet and thats where all the unraring etc occurs.)
Point is you can even name them:
c:/mnt/c c:/mnt/d c:/mnt/e to emulate drive letters if you want, but you only need to manage one actual mount point/share on the other computers.
There is still some question as to the legality of jailbreaking.
From Wikipedia was the latest info I could find.
"The legality of jailbreaking an iPod or iPhone remains unclear, particularly in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As part of the 2009 DMCA rulemaking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the US Copyright Office to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple's store.[26] In response to this, Apple filed comments opposing this exemption and indicating that they do consider jailbreaking to be a violation of copyright (and by implication prosecutable under the DMCA). A ruling on this proposed exemption has not yet been made, but a decision is expected sometime later in 2010."
Wow, I actually kind of agree with you on this one (and sounds surprising like some of what I was suggesting). However, I guess we would disagree on whether government regulation would be helpful in providing that solution after our last discussion.:P
Museums are the place art goes to die, not were artistic creativity is born.
Again, I assume you are using Windows (since mounting devices to the/mnt folder is commonplace on linux, or/Volumes on OSX).
I just do it in Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Storage/Disk Management
From there, just select the drive, Right Click and do 'Change Drive Letter And Paths'. You can remove the existing drive letter, and 'Add' a new mount point by putting in the path there.
You can also do it directly when you format a new drive (there is an option to mount to a folder).
Drive letters are dead! Long live drive letters! (I wish)
Reposting for you since it applies. My idea for a Hard drive Jukebox.
Basically your could plug 20+ hard drives into what amounts to plastic holders for the harddrives. You then have a jukebox/cataloguing software like DVD jukeboxes or some sort of virtual drive that keeps track of all the files on all the drives. When you need to access a file, it powers on and spins up the correct drive. Ideally two or three drives could be activated at once. The Jukebox software would automatically handle all of that.
As far as how the connections were made: You could do it a couple of ways. Have each drive with its own SATA connectors that all fed into an electronic switching hub that handled activating the drives. Or you could have it be a phsyical/motorized scenario, where each drive plugged into a custom SATA header that then interfaced with a motorized SATA connector to attach to a specific drive.
This has already been done with tape drives & DVDs obviously, but I am talking about something CHEEEP (the extra E is for extra cheap).
Mapping drives to drive letters is so 1995. You should be mounting them to a single folder (each drive is a subfolder) called c:\mnt, and then just sharing your mnt folder on the other computers. You can do that in disk manager on windows (since linux you would already be doing that presumably) instead off mapping the drive to a drive letter.
There are some quirks in certain copy programs if you are moving files from one mapped drive to another and the copy program isn't 'mounted disk' aware. Nothing to worry about, but you might not get progress bars for moves, for instance.
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No, it isn't okay to screw people over who *aren't* ignorant. You can feel free to screw yourself over with ignorance.
There is no evidence of malicious intent, and even if it was done deliberately, there is no reason to think that it was illegal to capture these broadcasts, at least in many locales.
Like I said, if you wanted to target someone who actually had a chance to both prevent the ignorance, and protect their customers, then the class action should be targeting Netgear, Linksys, Dlink, etc.
Doesn't make it any less funny.
Ignorance isn't Google's fault. Perhaps the class action should be targetting the Wifi access point providers instead.
Google shouldn't necessarily be singled out for mapping wifi networks. There are tons of other companies doing it. Whether it is right or not, is something that should be decided categorically, not as part of a 'google is evil' campaign.
There are plenty of real reasons to be upset at Google besides whether they saved some packets of unencrypted data that were being broadcast by a radio for anyone to see. Let's focus on those than try and drum up some fake outrage over this minor shit.
Except when it isn't, and only after a judge or jury says it is, or it is disposed of in some other manner.
The funny part is where she claims to be a high-tech worker...
"Van Valin works in a high technology field, and works from her home over her Internet-connected computer a substantial amount of time," the complaint read.
"In connection with her work and home life, Van Valin transmits and receives a substantial amount of data from and to her computer over her wireless network. A significant amount of the wireless data is also subject to her employer's non-disclosure and security regulations."
Sorry to double reply:
I do also think there is something to the complaints/commentary of those that say that we are losing generations of our brightest minds in mathematics, artificial intelligence, science and other endeavors, at their most productive times to the financial industry. There contributions there are simply to their companies well-being, hidden behind NDA's (not publishing to journals the advances they make) and spent on 'finding a true market price faster' which is arguably of less lasting benefit to society than if they had worked on endeavors that otherwise benefited humanity writ large.
I won't claim to know as much about the markets as you apparently do. However I will make some observations.
HFT can go wrong. It isn't some holy flawless grail, it is a set of algorithms and knobs created by programmers and controlled by the operators. Being 'allowed' to see prices and transactions before anyone else leads to arbitrage, though I don't know that there is a good systemic way to prevent it. 'Jumping in front of orders' with fractional penny increases seems dubious. Placing fake orders then immediately canceling them, just to see into the dark pool, doesn't seem fair either. Not being able to introduce brakes in trading to allow the HFT to adjust the knobs manually, to handle the situations not covered by the model, has been shown to fail in the past (LTCM for instance).
HFT may in fact lead to 'true pricing' faster, but by wringing any profit out of pricing differences solely for the HF traders.
HFT may be the ultimate form of competition, but so is an arms race (nuclear, chemical, conventional or otherwise), as an analogy. It doesn't necessarily lead to the outcomes we find socially beneficial. (OMG I used 'socially' I must be a socialist...) It impinges our sense of fairness and emphasizes that the playing field is not level.
Perhaps if the beneficial functions of HFT were performed by a disinterested 3rd party or the markets themselves. Otherwise HFT is going to continue to suffer from an image/PR issue.
I don't have the answers, other than say limiting the number of trades or cancellations or preventing fractional penny trades, etc. that might help even out the playing field slightly. Putting an added cost on the number of trades made, so you could continue trading but it would cost you more the more frequently you traded. Just throwing ideas out. Feel free to explain why they wouldn't work or if I am completely off base with my perception (as a semi-educated lay person/comp programmer who has followed this fairly closely the past few weeks).
http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/google-implemented-an-android-kill-switch-those-rascals/
Android has this too.
Android has the right idea, in my book, they just need to take it further and allow users to deny the permissions that are asked for in the manifest. The manifest lists all of the secure things that can be accessed by the app, there just needs to be a line-item veto. A timer/stop watch application does not need 'Full Internet Access' or 'Access to My Contacts'.
Network shares don't detract from drive count
If you wanted 26 network shares to have drive letters you couldn't...how is that not using up drive letters?
I'm not into Daemon Tools or drive mounting. I just kind of think it's stupid, personally.
I wasn't suggesting that you couldn't work around it, just that the artificial limitation of drive letters can and is an issue for a significant minority of users. Fortunately there are workarounds, as I described.
ISOs are for burning. Want it on your computer? Decompress it.
And for downloading and sharing as well as burning. ISO's aren't compressed (though OSX DMG's are).
Lots of drive letters...(paraphrase)
You must have a very understanding wife, haha.
And no, I don't have to remember names of things. That's silly. If I want to watch, for example, Nip/Tuck, and I have 100 episodes in a folder
Like I said suggested before, it depends on how you are using the drives, as this is the first I am hearing of video files. Before bat folders, etc were mentioned.
Very helpful because I try not to watch something a 2nd time until 7 years have passed.
Be interesting to find out if there was some metadata that MPC or KMPLayer or VLC or whatever could set for that, besides 'Last Access Time'. Don't know off the top of my head.
I have definitely run out of drive letters before, though I didn't make any special effort to try and use A: and B:.
You are excluding netwrok shares from your drive count, plus heck by default Daemon Tools would use 4 drive letters for mounting ISOs as virtual drives, and you can obviously add more (or have DTools and PowerISO both installed). Many USB SD/MiniSD Card readers use another 4 for all of the card permutations. Throw in a couple of physical media drives and you are already at 11, including system disk and A/B. Add a few more local drives, a USB thumb drive, a camera, a cell phone, and a few more network shares and you can get there easily. By your own example you must be using quite a few.
I don't use stacks of USB drives. I use bare internal hard drives and a USB dock that accepts the drive like a cartridge. They sit in a draw not sucking power when not in use (stored in anti-static bags). You sort of contradict yourself on the power saving front with your 'keep all my drives online at all times in any computer available' scenario in your wife's computer, etc..
As far as your false dichotomy: You have to remember the name of the file to begin with, don't you? A lot (most?) people don't remember those things as explictly nowadays, they use search (as in INSIDE the files). Doing a CLI search across multiple drive letters is probably a pain, or at least I don't know off the top of my head how to do one. Pretty sure even linux users can and do use modern search/file management.
Yikes...yea I just reripped everything I have on CD/DVD back onto Harddrives, something like 3000 discs. Weighs too much, too hard to find, media goes bad, etc.
I use drive docks/hot swap now for all of that. Ideally what I would like is a HD Jukebox, ala a DVD jukebox though without moving the drives or anything, that had virtual catalog software/vitrual drive that knew what was on all the drives and would automate powering on the proper drive to access, and would be cheap per drive (like $10 per slot with 20 slots).
Lol, I am pretty sure Microsoft shares my 'snobbery' and realizes that the drive letter is one of the worst decisions they ever made from a UI/UX perspective. The very fact that it limits the number of devices you can have to 26 (without learning the 'works for everything' way).
Again, I can only image your use case is fairly esoteric since you only use CLI to get to your files. Also, I wasn't suggesting that all drives from all computers be accessible from one location. My assumption was you had a file server with a number of drives you needed to make accessible to a group of clients, not a group of peers all sharing drives with each other.
To me it would seem easier to remember that the 'bedroom' computer had the file I needed rather than drive P:. And with the modern marvel of tab completion you might just be able to type P:\b to navigate to the x:\bedroom folder hosted on \\server\mnt\bedroom.
Yea I wasn't responding to that, just that you had used jailbreaking as an acceptable solution in a few posts, and according to Apple it isn't one.
I think a lot of it has to do with preponderance of actions that have painted Apple in a negative light recently. Having worked at a company that was portrayed negatively for a long period of time (DCLK before Google bought them) I can tell you it sucks for the people who work there, when executive decision after decision casts an ugly pall over your hard work.
That last paragraph is just a comment, not a response about anything, or directed at any comment you or anyone else has made.
I get that you have to type c:\mnt in the server.
But as I described, you could always mount c:\mnt to X:\ on the same computer and it would then be less of an issue (you would still have to navigate to the subfolder for each drive).
Without knowing further what is on the drives and why you need to type things to get to them it is harder to assess your solution. For GUI navigation in my experience it is easier having everything in one place.
I do use a E Texteditor (Textmate for Windows) file that has all of the dir /p for my drives and is always open, so I can reg exp find things as needed, so I do get that. I guess I just don't use CLI for anything but ruby dev/linux work stuff anymore, enough that a few chars would matter.
Sounds like you have a system that works. Hopefully someone may have found my solution to be an interesting alternative for them even if it isn't what you need.
Fun chatting.
Not that I can find sadly. But at least there is prior art if someone tries to patent it :P
I found remembering if X: was mapped on location to another on one particular computer or another, and having to set that up each time to be onerous. No idea what you are doing that typing extra letters would be necessary.
Pretty sure /mnt
z: (mounted drive)
cd
then you can cd wherever.
If you want you can always mount the c:\mnt\ drive as its own drive letter on the server itself.
You can also use junctions on XP/Vista/Windows 7 to make other locations that you don't necessarily want to move to the /mnt/ folder appear there.
Look up 'windows junction' to find tools that create hard links ala linux's ln command
The point is you create a single share called 'mnt' or 'media' or 'whatever' on the c:\mnt folder. (Right click in explorer, choose the Sharing tab, and set the permissions/options.)
Then on each of your other computers you just map the network drive in explorer or
net use z: \\myserver\mnt
assuming the share is named mnt. Whenever you add a drive it will automagically.
Just to be clear:
Your c:\mnt folder would have subfolders for each of your drives, or however else you wanted to structure it. Here is what mine looks like:
(I use _mnt just so it sorts first in Explorer)
c:/_mnt/movies
c:/_mnt/movies/usb (a drive mounted thru a USB dock)
c:/_mnt/movies/recent (a drive in a hot swap bay)
c:/_mnt/movies/news (a drive pointing to recently downloaded movies)
c:/_mnt/audio ( a drive with all of my mp3s)
c:/_mnt/tv/news
c:/_mnt/tv/recent
('news' is because they are downloaded thru usenet and thats where all the unraring etc occurs.)
Point is you can even name them:
c:/mnt/c
c:/mnt/d
c:/mnt/e
to emulate drive letters if you want, but you only need to manage one actual mount point/share on the other computers.
There is still some question as to the legality of jailbreaking.
From Wikipedia was the latest info I could find.
"The legality of jailbreaking an iPod or iPhone remains unclear, particularly in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As part of the 2009 DMCA rulemaking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the US Copyright Office to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple's store.[26] In response to this, Apple filed comments opposing this exemption and indicating that they do consider jailbreaking to be a violation of copyright (and by implication prosecutable under the DMCA). A ruling on this proposed exemption has not yet been made, but a decision is expected sometime later in 2010."
Wow, I actually kind of agree with you on this one (and sounds surprising like some of what I was suggesting). However, I guess we would disagree on whether government regulation would be helpful in providing that solution after our last discussion. :P
Museums are the place art goes to die, not were artistic creativity is born.
Again, I assume you are using Windows (since mounting devices to the /mnt folder is commonplace on linux, or /Volumes on OSX).
I just do it in Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Storage/Disk Management
From there, just select the drive, Right Click and do 'Change Drive Letter And Paths'. You can remove the existing drive letter, and 'Add' a new mount point by putting in the path there.
You can also do it directly when you format a new drive (there is an option to mount to a folder).
Drive letters are dead! Long live drive letters! (I wish)
More info along with cli solution:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx
Reposting for you since it applies. My idea for a Hard drive Jukebox.
Basically your could plug 20+ hard drives into what amounts to plastic holders for the harddrives.
You then have a jukebox/cataloguing software like DVD jukeboxes or some sort of virtual drive that keeps track of all the files on all the drives. When you need to access a file, it powers on and spins up the correct drive. Ideally two or three drives could be activated at once. The Jukebox software would automatically handle all of that.
As far as how the connections were made: You could do it a couple of ways. Have each drive with its own SATA connectors that all fed into an electronic switching hub that handled activating the drives. Or you could have it be a phsyical/motorized scenario, where each drive plugged into a custom SATA header that then interfaced with a motorized SATA connector to attach to a specific drive.
This has already been done with tape drives & DVDs obviously, but I am talking about something CHEEEP (the extra E is for extra cheap).
If you have a compulsive collection issue, it is a cheap way to satisfy it. :)
Mapping drives to drive letters is so 1995. You should be mounting them to a single folder (each drive is a subfolder) called c:\mnt, and then just sharing your mnt folder on the other computers. You can do that in disk manager on windows (since linux you would already be doing that presumably) instead off mapping the drive to a drive letter.
There are some quirks in certain copy programs if you are moving files from one mapped drive to another and the copy program isn't 'mounted disk' aware. Nothing to worry about, but you might not get progress bars for moves, for instance.