I use hard links. Everything by Ridley Scott is in the movies/directed_by/Ridley_Scott directory, everything based on a Phillip K. Dick story is in the movies/story_by/Phillip_K._Dick directory, everything from 1982 is in movies/year_released/1982. I can delete things at will without fear of suddenly creating dangling symlinks.
My one strong caveat (I did say it was worth a SECOND look - which happens here) - once you identify a technology that might be of interest, the question should always be, "Is this worth it (time, money, pedagogy, etc.), and can I do the same thing low-tech?" This is where you cut out the "It's just like real life, but ONLINE!" instinct that sometimes pops up.
Even if the same thing could be done low-tech, it may still be worth adapting into high-tech - but make sure your reasons are good. [...]
Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace. What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance, as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?
That's an article I revisit from time to time, to remind me to cut out the "It's just like real life, but ONLINE!" instinct.
How about nobody is allowed to post on/. without first building their own computer? I'll be generous, you're allowed to simply strap a uC to a board, but you do have to write your own bootstrap routine. Bonus points for doing it properly and using discretes. Now, back to physics, it's about measuring it yourself, and understanding every step. Video camera + crazy software is going to take a long time to understand (care to explain motion artefacts captured by a video camera?). Start from Galileo, work up.
I've written several bootstrap loaders. Some were for minicomputers (and I've still got the paper tape somewhere), one was for 8086 5-1/2 floppies which would display ASCII animation if you rebooted your PC-XT with the floppy in the drive. (Hey, you kids, get off of my lawn!)
In college, there were some Chem E. guys in my dorm, who'd make nitrogen triiodide for pranks. Paint it on a door frame and wait for someone to close the door. Paint it on the shoe soles of someone taking a nap. Paint it on a light bulb and wait for someone to turn on the light. That last one almost got them killed, someone had just opened a big care package of homemade cookies which then got covered in glass shards.
There was a guy who worked in the physics department machine shop. He'd save long magnesium shavings from the lathe for various "experiments". Late one night we filled a balloon with hydrogen, tied a foot-long magnesium thread to it, lit it, and turned it loose. Then we turned on the police band scanner and listened to the UFO reports about bright lights floating in the sky, then disappearing in a flash and a bang.
blocking people from buying copyrighted goods in other countries and taking them home
Things that can be copyrighted: Books, nicknacks, travel brochures, the pattern on my boxers... Not only will you have to strip naked for the TSA, you'll have to remain naked while crossing national borders.
Yes, but Kinect mocap data is very low quality in comparison to what most studios use for professional production. Also, the skeleton tracking doesn't include rotations of the head, feet or hands. On top of this, it doesn't track props, fingers or faces so it is quite limited. If you watched the video you hear the narrator talking about the Kinect getting them 70% there with lots of tweaking (he specifically mentioned adding head animation).
So for the next release, you put red and green stickers on the left and right sides of everything, so the software can tell which side it's seeing. (Hey, maybe I should patent this idea!)
I'm disappointed that there were no links to the software in the story. Google turns up some open source motion capture software, but everything I've found so far predates the Kinect. Anyone know what they're using? (I haven't watched the video yet, so maybe it'll be there.)
Sony don't want pirates using PSN and if you try signing on from a modded box they will have ways of finding out, e.g. running an arbitrary challenge / response during signon. You could still run modded firmware and play pirate stuff and get away with it but it might be smart to stay well away from the online service. Of course it means no patches, DLC, multiplayer but that is rather the point. Microsoft does similar with XBL too.
Well, only until someone works around the challenge / response. I recall someone's IM software from a decade ago that implemented a challenge / response to prevent third-party clients from connecting. In short order, there was a procedure to install the authorized client's binaries in a subdirectory so the third-party client client could compute checksums on arbitrary sub-ranges of the code. I expect something similar to appear soon for PS3; worst-case you'd need to completely virtualize the system and run Sony's authorized firmware inside a VM. Looking at http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/545-Paper_TheCellProcessor.pdf, Cell processors have virtualization support built-in. In fact, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines lists several GPL'ed systems that already support PowerPC.
I wonder if Sony's going to demand a take-down of this post?
Apartments mess up the definitions a bit, but fiber to the curb generally means that the fiber is terminated away from the living space (generally in a distribution cabinet within 300 meters of your building), fiber to the home means it's terminated at boundary of the living space, such as a box on the outside wall of a home. It may be more common to have a switch somewhere in the basement and then cat5 to the endpoints, but there nothing preventing you from running fiber as well. I've worked at a place that ran fiber all the way to the cubicle. The desktop PCs all had fiber NICs, but laptop users had to settle for using converter boxes. (WiFi only became popular after I left, so I'm not sure what they use today.)
The Holovideo Cheops system provides six synchronized frame buffers to drive our 256Kx144 display
I infer that holographic resolution takes 1,000 times the bandwidth of conventional video. So, yeah, I think I can think of ways to use this much bandwidth at home.
I observe that your calculation is wrong, and from that I infer that you don't know what infer means / how to use it correctly.
I calculate that conventional video has 1920x1080 or roughly 2M pixels vs 256Kx144 or about 36.8M pixels, or about 20 times greater bandwidth, not about 1000.
Calculations are easy, but you made some incorrect assumptions in yours, namely that the Holovideo Cheops system provides an image similar to 1080p HD television. Please refer to my first quote, "The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction." The display isn't conventional video, but has only 144 vertical scan lines. The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing that the screen's aspect ratio is square. In that case, I can calculate that HPO holographic resolution requires 1.778K bits of data for each bit of vertical video resolution. Note that a 4x3 aspect ratio would mean that there are 1.334K HPO bits for each vertical bit, and 16x9 would mean a ratio of exactly 1K. The good news is that it's a raw data stream. I'd expect that a future Holographic Picture Experts Group would devise a compression algorithm at least as good as the current MPEG standards, but I don't know how much better; I'm assuming that my hypothetical HPEG will compress it's raw stream no more than twice as well as MPEG.
> What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?
Upgrading the speed of the fiber backbone does not mean an automatic speed increase in your broadband connection. It has nothing to do with ADSL or Cablemodems.
Just a few hours ago,/. had this story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2222246/A-Kinect-Princess-Leia-Hologram-In-Realtime. If you follow a few links, you eventually arrive at http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/M2.html, where you will find these bits of information:
The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction.
and
The Holovideo Cheops system provides six synchronized frame buffers to drive our 256Kx144 display
I infer that holographic resolution takes 1,000 times the bandwidth of conventional video. So, yeah, I think I can think of ways to use this much bandwidth at home.
Especially with all the calls recently saying how we need to be prepared for cyberwar. If this is true, we are more than prepared for it: we are doing it.
There is a difference between being able to attack and being able to defend. The US, Israel, China and Russia are apparently able to mount attacks quite well but the development of "armor" has lagged significantly.
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome.
Unless, of course, you're playing Nethack, where it's just one more feature.;-)
The truth is that, unless they read a lot of spoilers before going in, Nethack kills newbies with delightful regularity. And even reading the spoilers doesn't always help, because you may not remember something crucial until it's killed you once of twice. The trick is to understand that you're really playing meta-Nethack, where each of those deaths teaches you something new about the world.
...so many lawyers in this thread. How about I cite one?
I also think that MS might successfully argue that "Windows" is not a generic term for operating systems, but is descriptive of an attribute of the goods, thereby opening the door for acquired distinctiveness -- an undoubtedly easy showing.
In addition to the United States, Microsoft also sued Lindows in Sweden, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Canada. Lindows started off with a handicap of having to defend themselves from their own lawyers (from St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company) who initially refused to defend Lindows.[1] Judge Robert Takasugi found St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company had breached their contract.[2][3] In response to these lawsuits, Lindows launched ChoicePC.com, which allowed people to purchase lifetime Lindows memberships that included a free copy of LindowsOS, free LindowsOS upgrades for life, and a ChoicePC.com t-shirt, for $100 US. All money from the memberships went towards helping Lindows in its legal battle against Microsoft. Lindows had also retaliated against Microsoft's lawsuits with Lin---s (pronounced Lindash) and the corresponding domain lin---s.com (now disused). Consumers and resellers from countries in which Microsoft has blocked the sale of Lindows products due to the trademark lawsuits were encouraged to visit the Lin---s website instead of Lindows.com to purchase the Lin---s software, which was identical to Lindows except for the name change. As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and that the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before[4]. Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims[5]. The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared that a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark..
Settlement
In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million US, and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.
I just run with Flash disabled in my primary browser. If I really want to look at something, I can fire up IE and get all of my security holes at once.
"There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers"
"There's nothing fundamental in the iPod that would get in the way of an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Microsoft or one of the other MP3 player makers"
"There's nothing fundamental in the MacBook that would get in the way of an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Lenovo or one of the other laptop makers"
Yes, there is nothing that would "get in the way" but that presupposes that someone is willing to turn control over to an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team. To date, only Apple has shown the willingness to do that (although I'll concede that Sony's VAIO and Dell's Alienware come close).
A HTTP redirect system requires extra http request to be made without even knowing where the client is. You could be making that request from South Africa to North America, adding big delay.
An HTTP redirect is typically resolved in less than a second. If your download is going to take over a minute, that's less that 1% of your total download time.
When 99.9% of internet users use their local ISP's DNS it just makes sense to build it like that. Sure it's not perfect for the odd geeks who have changed their DNS settings, but that is so small minority it doesn't make any sense to slow down their whole system.
When your power users don't use their local ISPs, it makes sense to at least filter out those requests for special handling. Right now, if I were asked to chose a CDN, I'd have to recommend someone other that Akamai, if only because I use OpenDNS at home. If I were Akamai, I'd want to route Google and OpenDNS requests to servers that provide HTTP redirects based on the client's IP.
Akamai has been in this business for a very long time and has their infrastructure on datacenters all over the planet. They know what they're doing.
If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't have this problem. Level 3 was able to grab Netflix, which indicates at least some customer dissatisfaction, and Limewire is growing at twice Akamai's rate. Do you work for Akamai, or are you a free-lance apologist?
[...]The reason we are disclosing this event is because we have removed your existing password from the addons site and are asking you to reset it by going back to the addons site and clicking forgot password. We are also asking you to change your password on other sites in which you use the same password. Since we have effectively erased your password, you don't need to do anything if you do not want to use your account.[...]
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Chris Lyon Director of Infrastructure Security
This has inconvenienced me.
Over the years, I've used different password schemes; for a few years I used a few passwords of different tiers, then I switched to using passwords built from the domain name, and most recently I've used LastPass to start setting up unique cryptographically secure passwords everywhere. At least with the Gawker screwup, I could figure out which password I'd originally used with them and then check if there were other places that used the value.
Since Mozilla doesn't seem to be making the compromised hashes available, I have no idea if I was using the same password as I did for other services, so I guess I'll need to change everything that isn't yet using a password generated by LastPass. I was migrating in that direction, but this has accelerated my schedule.
(Yes, I know that LastPass imported all of my passwords from all of my web browsers. Unfortunately, I had a bunch of passwords that were lost a few years back when my laptop crashed and my Firefox profile wasn't being backed up.)
Id never had as much money as Valve got from HL and CS. They could never have made the investment necessary to create Steam without getting permanent support from a publisher who would have ruined it before it left the cradle out of fear of it destroying them.
Quite so! Everyone knows that a lack of funds is why Carmack could never fulfill his dreams of spaceflight.
I only use Facebook from my iPhone and incognito windows in Chrome (I created an application desktop shortcut and added the '--incognito' option to its command line.) I'm trusting that Facebook isn't peeking at my iPhone browser sessions. Over in Chrome, however, I just looked at my cookies and saw both cookies and "super-cookies' (HTML5 local data) that were set from allfacebook.com. I've now blocked that URL (facebook.com was already blocked), but I wonder about other, less obvious, URLs.
Slashdot Mirror
I use hard links. Everything by Ridley Scott is in the movies/directed_by/Ridley_Scott directory, everything based on a Phillip K. Dick story is in the movies/story_by/Phillip_K._Dick directory, everything from 1982 is in movies/year_released/1982. I can delete things at will without fear of suddenly creating dangling symlinks.
My one strong caveat (I did say it was worth a SECOND look - which happens here) - once you identify a technology that might be of interest, the question should always be, "Is this worth it (time, money, pedagogy, etc.), and can I do the same thing low-tech?" This is where you cut out the "It's just like real life, but ONLINE!" instinct that sometimes pops up.
Even if the same thing could be done low-tech, it may still be worth adapting into high-tech - but make sure your reasons are good. [...]
That reminds me of http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html:
Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace. What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance, as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?
That's an article I revisit from time to time, to remind me to cut out the "It's just like real life, but ONLINE!" instinct.
How about nobody is allowed to post on /. without first building their own computer? I'll be generous, you're allowed to simply strap a uC to a board, but you do have to write your own bootstrap routine. Bonus points for doing it properly and using discretes. Now, back to physics, it's about measuring it yourself, and understanding every step. Video camera + crazy software is going to take a long time to understand (care to explain motion artefacts captured by a video camera?). Start from Galileo, work up.
I've written several bootstrap loaders. Some were for minicomputers (and I've still got the paper tape somewhere), one was for 8086 5-1/2 floppies which would display ASCII animation if you rebooted your PC-XT with the floppy in the drive. (Hey, you kids, get off of my lawn!)
In college, there were some Chem E. guys in my dorm, who'd make nitrogen triiodide for pranks. Paint it on a door frame and wait for someone to close the door. Paint it on the shoe soles of someone taking a nap. Paint it on a light bulb and wait for someone to turn on the light. That last one almost got them killed, someone had just opened a big care package of homemade cookies which then got covered in glass shards.
There was a guy who worked in the physics department machine shop. He'd save long magnesium shavings from the lathe for various "experiments". Late one night we filled a balloon with hydrogen, tied a foot-long magnesium thread to it, lit it, and turned it loose. Then we turned on the police band scanner and listened to the UFO reports about bright lights floating in the sky, then disappearing in a flash and a bang.
blocking people from buying copyrighted goods in other countries and taking them home
Things that can be copyrighted: Books, nicknacks, travel brochures, the pattern on my boxers... Not only will you have to strip naked for the TSA, you'll have to remain naked while crossing national borders.
Yes, but Kinect mocap data is very low quality in comparison to what most studios use for professional production. Also, the skeleton tracking doesn't include rotations of the head, feet or hands. On top of this, it doesn't track props, fingers or faces so it is quite limited. If you watched the video you hear the narrator talking about the Kinect getting them 70% there with lots of tweaking (he specifically mentioned adding head animation).
So for the next release, you put red and green stickers on the left and right sides of everything, so the software can tell which side it's seeing. (Hey, maybe I should patent this idea!)
I'm disappointed that there were no links to the software in the story. Google turns up some open source motion capture software, but everything I've found so far predates the Kinect. Anyone know what they're using? (I haven't watched the video yet, so maybe it'll be there.)
My sources disagree with what Paypal is saying. http://www.quora.com/Can-PayPal-withdraw-money-from-a-linked-Bank-account
Sony don't want pirates using PSN and if you try signing on from a modded box they will have ways of finding out, e.g. running an arbitrary challenge / response during signon. You could still run modded firmware and play pirate stuff and get away with it but it might be smart to stay well away from the online service. Of course it means no patches, DLC, multiplayer but that is rather the point. Microsoft does similar with XBL too.
Well, only until someone works around the challenge / response. I recall someone's IM software from a decade ago that implemented a challenge / response to prevent third-party clients from connecting. In short order, there was a procedure to install the authorized client's binaries in a subdirectory so the third-party client client could compute checksums on arbitrary sub-ranges of the code. I expect something similar to appear soon for PS3; worst-case you'd need to completely virtualize the system and run Sony's authorized firmware inside a VM. Looking at http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/545-Paper_TheCellProcessor.pdf, Cell processors have virtualization support built-in. In fact, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines lists several GPL'ed systems that already support PowerPC.
I wonder if Sony's going to demand a take-down of this post?
Apartments mess up the definitions a bit, but fiber to the curb generally means that the fiber is terminated away from the living space (generally in a distribution cabinet within 300 meters of your building), fiber to the home means it's terminated at boundary of the living space, such as a box on the outside wall of a home. It may be more common to have a switch somewhere in the basement and then cat5 to the endpoints, but there nothing preventing you from running fiber as well. I've worked at a place that ran fiber all the way to the cubicle. The desktop PCs all had fiber NICs, but laptop users had to settle for using converter boxes. (WiFi only became popular after I left, so I'm not sure what they use today.)
The Holovideo Cheops system provides six synchronized frame buffers to drive our 256Kx144 display
I infer that holographic resolution takes 1,000 times the bandwidth of conventional video. So, yeah, I think I can think of ways to use this much bandwidth at home.
I observe that your calculation is wrong, and from that I infer that you don't know what infer means / how to use it correctly.
I calculate that conventional video has 1920x1080 or roughly 2M pixels vs 256Kx144 or about 36.8M pixels, or about 20 times greater bandwidth, not about 1000.
Calculations are easy, but you made some incorrect assumptions in yours, namely that the Holovideo Cheops system provides an image similar to 1080p HD television. Please refer to my first quote, "The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction." The display isn't conventional video, but has only 144 vertical scan lines. The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing that the screen's aspect ratio is square. In that case, I can calculate that HPO holographic resolution requires 1.778K bits of data for each bit of vertical video resolution. Note that a 4x3 aspect ratio would mean that there are 1.334K HPO bits for each vertical bit, and 16x9 would mean a ratio of exactly 1K. The good news is that it's a raw data stream. I'd expect that a future Holographic Picture Experts Group would devise a compression algorithm at least as good as the current MPEG standards, but I don't know how much better; I'm assuming that my hypothetical HPEG will compress it's raw stream no more than twice as well as MPEG.
> What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?
Upgrading the speed of the fiber backbone does not mean an automatic speed increase in your broadband connection. It has nothing to do with ADSL or Cablemodems.
Haven't you ever heard of fiber to the home? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x
Just a few hours ago, /. had this story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2222246/A-Kinect-Princess-Leia-Hologram-In-Realtime. If you follow a few links, you eventually arrive at http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/M2.html, where you will find these bits of information:
The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction.
and
The Holovideo Cheops system provides six synchronized frame buffers to drive our 256Kx144 display
I infer that holographic resolution takes 1,000 times the bandwidth of conventional video. So, yeah, I think I can think of ways to use this much bandwidth at home.
Especially with all the calls recently saying how we need to be prepared for cyberwar. If this is true, we are more than prepared for it: we are doing it.
There is a difference between being able to attack and being able to defend. The US, Israel, China and Russia are apparently able to mount attacks quite well but the development of "armor" has lagged significantly.
'Nuff said!
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome.
Unless, of course, you're playing Nethack, where it's just one more feature. ;-)
The truth is that, unless they read a lot of spoilers before going in, Nethack kills newbies with delightful regularity. And even reading the spoilers doesn't always help, because you may not remember something crucial until it's killed you once of twice. The trick is to understand that you're really playing meta-Nethack, where each of those deaths teaches you something new about the world.
...so many lawyers in this thread.
How about I cite one?
At this point, only a lawyer being paid by Microsoft would believe that. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows...
The case
In addition to the United States, Microsoft also sued Lindows in Sweden, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Canada. .
Lindows started off with a handicap of having to defend themselves from their own lawyers (from St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company) who initially refused to defend Lindows.[1] Judge Robert Takasugi found St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company had breached their contract.[2][3]
In response to these lawsuits, Lindows launched ChoicePC.com, which allowed people to purchase lifetime Lindows memberships that included a free copy of LindowsOS, free LindowsOS upgrades for life, and a ChoicePC.com t-shirt, for $100 US. All money from the memberships went towards helping Lindows in its legal battle against Microsoft.
Lindows had also retaliated against Microsoft's lawsuits with Lin---s (pronounced Lindash) and the corresponding domain lin---s.com (now disused). Consumers and resellers from countries in which Microsoft has blocked the sale of Lindows products due to the trademark lawsuits were encouraged to visit the Lin---s website instead of Lindows.com to purchase the Lin---s software, which was identical to Lindows except for the name change.
As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and that the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before[4]. Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims[5]. The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared that a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark.
Settlement
In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million US, and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.
I just run with Flash disabled in my primary browser. If I really want to look at something, I can fire up IE and get all of my security holes at once.
"There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers"
"There's nothing fundamental in the iPod that would get in the way of an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Microsoft or one of the other MP3 player makers"
"There's nothing fundamental in the MacBook that would get in the way of an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Lenovo or one of the other laptop makers"
Yes, there is nothing that would "get in the way" but that presupposes that someone is willing to turn control over to an industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team. To date, only Apple has shown the willingness to do that (although I'll concede that Sony's VAIO and Dell's Alienware come close).
A HTTP redirect system requires extra http request to be made without even knowing where the client is. You could be making that request from South Africa to North America, adding big delay.
An HTTP redirect is typically resolved in less than a second. If your download is going to take over a minute, that's less that 1% of your total download time.
When 99.9% of internet users use their local ISP's DNS it just makes sense to build it like that. Sure it's not perfect for the odd geeks who have changed their DNS settings, but that is so small minority it doesn't make any sense to slow down their whole system.
When your power users don't use their local ISPs, it makes sense to at least filter out those requests for special handling. Right now, if I were asked to chose a CDN, I'd have to recommend someone other that Akamai, if only because I use OpenDNS at home. If I were Akamai, I'd want to route Google and OpenDNS requests to servers that provide HTTP redirects based on the client's IP.
Akamai has been in this business for a very long time and has their infrastructure on datacenters all over the planet. They know what they're doing.
If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't have this problem. Level 3 was able to grab Netflix, which indicates at least some customer dissatisfaction, and Limewire is growing at twice Akamai's rate. Do you work for Akamai, or are you a free-lance apologist?
[...]The reason we are disclosing this event
is because we have removed your existing password from the addons site
and are asking you to reset it by going back to the addons site and
clicking forgot password. We are also asking you to change your password
on other sites in which you use the same password. Since we have
effectively erased your password, you don't need to do anything if you
do not want to use your account.[...]
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Chris Lyon
Director of Infrastructure Security
This has inconvenienced me.
Over the years, I've used different password schemes; for a few years I used a few passwords of different tiers, then I switched to using passwords built from the domain name, and most recently I've used LastPass to start setting up unique cryptographically secure passwords everywhere. At least with the Gawker screwup, I could figure out which password I'd originally used with them and then check if there were other places that used the value.
Since Mozilla doesn't seem to be making the compromised hashes available, I have no idea if I was using the same password as I did for other services, so I guess I'll need to change everything that isn't yet using a password generated by LastPass. I was migrating in that direction, but this has accelerated my schedule.
(Yes, I know that LastPass imported all of my passwords from all of my web browsers. Unfortunately, I had a bunch of passwords that were lost a few years back when my laptop crashed and my Firefox profile wasn't being backed up.)
What sort of people need to show themselves or their peers how good they are at video games to validate their self-worth?
CA is for Canada, you insensitive clod!
I've already tagged the article "!canada" and I urge others to do the same.
Id never had as much money as Valve got from HL and CS. They could never have made the investment necessary to create Steam without getting permanent support from a publisher who would have ruined it before it left the cradle out of fear of it destroying them.
Quite so! Everyone knows that a lack of funds is why Carmack could never fulfill his dreams of spaceflight.
I only use Facebook from my iPhone and incognito windows in Chrome (I created an application desktop shortcut and added the '--incognito' option to its command line.) I'm trusting that Facebook isn't peeking at my iPhone browser sessions. Over in Chrome, however, I just looked at my cookies and saw both cookies and "super-cookies' (HTML5 local data) that were set from allfacebook.com. I've now blocked that URL (facebook.com was already blocked), but I wonder about other, less obvious, URLs.
I break for braking news.