I don't think that word means what you think it means. Admittedly, China and Vietnam have been doing a lot of manufacturing lately, but that has nothing to do with NAFTA.
In other words, they set artificial intelligences to the task of rolling their own encryption, and just like real intelligences, they came up with Security Through Obscurity(tm)!
If the password is so important to the security of the device, then they should do it like the makers of DSL modems do (at least the ones used by AT&T), and print a random default password on the device itself. (along with a bar code to load it during factory testing)
2003? The "Aluminum" era of Powerbooks had cases that were total crap. I owned three of them (one G4, two Intel) and the worst part was that the optical drive mount would go out of alignment and it couldn't eject disks. Also, the skin oils in the palms of my hands etched the surface of the case like crazy. They were just bad, but I had a "Pismo" G3 from 2000 that was even worse about falling apart inside.
I'm currently using a "Late 2011" 17" MacBook Pro that I got in 2012 when Apple announced that they would be discontinued. The "Unibody" cases are much more sturdy. Mine has been through a lot of bumps and scratches, and the worst thing that happened was I dropped it on the corner by the power plug and the video connector came loose and had to be re-seated. The second worst thing was after four years, gunk accumulated under the edges of the trackpad and it wouldn't click properly anymore. I fixed that too. (I'm aware that some of that series had GPU problems that were probably due to lead-free solder, but not mine.) Quad i7, full-HD 16:10 LED-backlight display, upgraded to 16GB RAM and SSD. It's been a fucking workhorse. I still feel like all the Retina models so far would be a downgrade.
So "Crappy model of Powerbook is crappy." Who'd have thunk it?
SCSI? nobody else (in the consumer market) used that
ADB? nobody else used that (it was for the keyboard/mouse, not printers)
Mini-DIN 8 RS-422 serial? nobody else used that
Firewire? hardly any non-Mac people used that, and most of the PCs that did used the stupid Sony iLink connector with no power so they could connect to cameras, and cameras don't use it anymore
Optical out? That stupid little switch in my MBP's headphone jack gets stuck into "optical cable present" mode when I unplug headphones, but fortunately I can store a toothpick (to unjam it) in the hinge area above the keyboard and it will still close properly
USB A? There are over 15 years worth of everybody using it, and the plugs are everywhere. I have a crate overflowing with cables and various thingies that use it. But nothing yet with USB C. Don't get me wrong, I think USB C is a good thing, but even modern TV sets that got rid of S-video inputs in favor of HDMI still have composite video inputs.
If only there were some way you could turn all of that off. Maybe they could put it into a control panel widget or something. (Yes, including the thing with the keyboard.)
At least it ceases to suck when you do that on a Mac. On a Windows laptop it merely sucks a little less when you turn everything off.
I normally use a MacBook Pro, and Apple's touchpads have always been superior, even before they got gestures. Whenever I would have to use a Windows laptop, the touchpads universally sucked. They sucked even more so in PS/2 emulation mode because of that fucking "tap-to-click" which was on by default in emulation mode. The result was that when dragging stuff, it would randomly report mouse clicks. Never mind that they always had two perfectly usable buttons right below the pad. I would always have to find and install the stupid drivers just so I could turn that abomination off. Synaptics or Alps, they both sucked.
The only modern "gesture" I use is two-finger scroll. I miss it when I use an older MacBook Pro or Powerbook G4. And that's the other part of Windows trackpads that I hate. The early ones had a scrolling region in the edge, which is simply a pain in the ass to use. Eventually they did get two-finger scroll, but the few times I have had it, it is quite jumpy compared to a real scroll wheel.
Literally the only problem I have had with the MBP trackpad (pre-Retina, at least) is that eventually dead skin gunk accumulates under the top edge and keeps it from clicking properly. To clean it out, you have to remove the trackpad to get access to clean the gunk out of that (machined) edge. The 17" model has good access, but I also have a first-gen 15" unibody where I was almost but not quite able to get it open because I needed a long, thin screwdriver, and the screwdriver kit I had that day had bits that were too short.
What is it about PhD students that causes so many of them to store all their work using ONE PROGRAM on ONE COMPUTER (or even worse, ONE DISK) and never make backups? I guess there must be something to the old joke of "piled higher and deeper".
I'm a touch typist who keeps my fingernails to about 1mm most of the time. Right now the my 4-year-old 17" MacBook Pro keyboard has five keys where the black color on top has been eroded away: E A S D and left shift. The control and command keys area also showing some wear on the top coating.
So what happens when the key is an active electronic device? I guess at some point a key top will just stop working. At the worst it might even short something out. And I know they will want it to rewrite the key tops when you use the accent composing feature, so just hope that a key doesn't die right after you hit option-E!
bash scripting is so mind bending that it makes Perl look easy. Its syntax has lots of oddities that trip up even veteran programmers. Of all the languages out there, bash is one of the worst ones to use as a beginner's language.
Isn't a lot of this due to all the new stuff that Unicode keeps adding? I still have a Bitstream Cyberbit font somewhere from... was it back in the late '90s? This is the same thing all over again, just up to date.
I've got to agree with this. Maybe when 3.5" HD floppies were new they were okay, but once you could buy them in boxes of 25, they were crap. The 3.5" DD floppies were only bad when they were still new (mid '80s). Of course most PC manufacturers didn't put 3.5" drives in until HD was already a thing, so most PC users never got to use the 720K versions.
You smug Apple II and Commodore guys, the rest of us that had systems that used real floppy disk controller chips had to cut an index hole too. At first, I would carefully wedge a hole punch in there, then I later just cut out a rough hexagon with an x-acto knife.
Also, it's not too hard to quickly ship emergency supplies during the summer. Mars takes either a long time or a really long time to get there.
For instance, there hasn't been a lot of talk about it yet because it's still a relatively new discovery, but human eyes apparently do not do well in prolonged periods of micro-gravity. You can't just pop down to the Wal-Mart to get your eyes checked and order a new pair of glasses. There has been some success at 3D printing lenses, but I'm sure that it's nowhere near as good as properly milled poly-carbonate plastic. Even if you have a CNC mill and slabs of optical plastic, you still to have eye testing equipment to know how to mill it. Forget anything along the path and you have to try your luck with hacking something up.
Of course the problem with Mars transfer orbits is that, depending on when you leave, it either takes 3 months, or it takes over a year and a half. When you get there on the short route, you can either leave immediately for a long ride home, or stay there for over a year to get the short ride home.
But were those long address protocols designed to be routable in a worldwide network? Sure, Ethernet had a 48-bit address too, but it was only intended to be a unique hardware ID. There is no way to contact an arbitrary Ethernet MAC address outside of your LAN, even if you already know that it exists. Were they designed to work with the low-speed serial links that were common back in the day? Sure, you can spare a few extra bits when you've got over a million per second, but not when you've got a mere thousands of bits per second.
Back in those days communications were slow (56Kbps was about 6 characters per second, or 7cps synchronous). And CPUs weren't fast. People wouldn't have tolerated protocols that took up a significant percentage of CPU time. More importantly, fast routing depends on custom logic to handle headers without a CPU, and variable-length headers make this much harder. IPv6's optional headers are tricky enough, but variable address lengths would have been very hard to process with custom logic.
And encryption? It was literally a non-issue for network protocols back in those days because it is so compute-intensive. The point of a network protocol is to route data, you don't stick something as expensive as encryption on the lower layers without a good reason, such as wireless transmission. WiFi has link-layer encryption, but that disappears once the data goes onto a wire. And if you're not going to encrypt the headers anyhow (how do you use the options that specify encryption in an already encrypted header?), then why the fuck even bother? If the data needs to be encrypted, put that at layer 5 or 6 or 7 of the protocol.
Also, which algorithm? Any sufficiently fast algorithm from those days would be useless today. DES was brand new in the '70s, and eventually got chips, but you're going to require one of those in every network node? There are still unanswered questions about how its specific design was chosen. All specifying an algorithm would do is keep a bad algorithm alive forever. SSL is still trying to shake off bad algorithms. We've already thrown away at least two generations of encryption just for WiFi alone, that you can still use, and it's barely 20 years old. And yes, the munitions bullshit was another reason why they would have kept it completely out of the network protocol. It just isn't the business of a routing protocol to deal with encryption.
Hindsight is easy when you don't consider the limitations of what was knowable or possible back in the day. Very few things (other than perhaps the limitations of classful routing) could have been foreseen in what was still considered a mostly experimental system. There was no way they could have known that TCP/IP (which wasn't even their first protocol!) would have ended up the winner and persisted for decades until long after the point where it had run out of addresses.
48 or 64 bit addresses would have been enough, IPv6 only used 128 bits because its designers wanted to be really, really, really sure that we wouldn't run out, this time, for sure. The initial classful address allocations didn't help, but we eventually reached a point where a single wasted class A only puts off exhaustion by a few months. What broke everything in the end was the sheer enormous number of addresses used by mobile networks. Now we have enough bits that we can use Ethernet MACs as part of routable addresses and still have plenty.
The problem is that back when IP was new, even 56Kbps was considered fast. TCP headers are already 20 bytes. The overhead of 4 more bytes per packet would have been significant, but 12 more bytes per packet? That's 2ms per packet at 56K asynchronous, and 12ms at 9600 bps. PPP had a way to shorten headers for this reason, but it was a later protocol, after the more obvious SLIP had already been in use.
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2nd world countries
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Admittedly, China and Vietnam have been doing a lot of manufacturing lately, but that has nothing to do with NAFTA.
They're just upholding the proud decades-long tradition of FTP putting everything in the clear.
In other words, they set artificial intelligences to the task of rolling their own encryption, and just like real intelligences, they came up with Security Through Obscurity(tm)!
Don't give them any ideas or we'll end up with the MacBook Pro DS.
If the password is so important to the security of the device, then they should do it like the makers of DSL modems do (at least the ones used by AT&T), and print a random default password on the device itself. (along with a bar code to load it during factory testing)
2003? The "Aluminum" era of Powerbooks had cases that were total crap. I owned three of them (one G4, two Intel) and the worst part was that the optical drive mount would go out of alignment and it couldn't eject disks. Also, the skin oils in the palms of my hands etched the surface of the case like crazy. They were just bad, but I had a "Pismo" G3 from 2000 that was even worse about falling apart inside.
I'm currently using a "Late 2011" 17" MacBook Pro that I got in 2012 when Apple announced that they would be discontinued. The "Unibody" cases are much more sturdy. Mine has been through a lot of bumps and scratches, and the worst thing that happened was I dropped it on the corner by the power plug and the video connector came loose and had to be re-seated. The second worst thing was after four years, gunk accumulated under the edges of the trackpad and it wouldn't click properly anymore. I fixed that too. (I'm aware that some of that series had GPU problems that were probably due to lead-free solder, but not mine.) Quad i7, full-HD 16:10 LED-backlight display, upgraded to 16GB RAM and SSD. It's been a fucking workhorse. I still feel like all the Retina models so far would be a downgrade.
So "Crappy model of Powerbook is crappy." Who'd have thunk it?
SCSI? nobody else (in the consumer market) used that
ADB? nobody else used that (it was for the keyboard/mouse, not printers)
Mini-DIN 8 RS-422 serial? nobody else used that
Firewire? hardly any non-Mac people used that, and most of the PCs that did used the stupid Sony iLink connector with no power so they could connect to cameras, and cameras don't use it anymore
Optical out? That stupid little switch in my MBP's headphone jack gets stuck into "optical cable present" mode when I unplug headphones, but fortunately I can store a toothpick (to unjam it) in the hinge area above the keyboard and it will still close properly
USB A? There are over 15 years worth of everybody using it, and the plugs are everywhere. I have a crate overflowing with cables and various thingies that use it. But nothing yet with USB C. Don't get me wrong, I think USB C is a good thing, but even modern TV sets that got rid of S-video inputs in favor of HDMI still have composite video inputs.
many of the top VPN players have given up on finding ways to Netflix's block tech.
Maybe they could try to accidentally Netflix's block tech.
If only there were some way you could turn all of that off. Maybe they could put it into a control panel widget or something. (Yes, including the thing with the keyboard.)
At least it ceases to suck when you do that on a Mac. On a Windows laptop it merely sucks a little less when you turn everything off.
As a touch-typist, I find it gets in the way of my finger (on a Dell Latitude) whenever I try to use the B key.
I normally use a MacBook Pro, and Apple's touchpads have always been superior, even before they got gestures. Whenever I would have to use a Windows laptop, the touchpads universally sucked. They sucked even more so in PS/2 emulation mode because of that fucking "tap-to-click" which was on by default in emulation mode. The result was that when dragging stuff, it would randomly report mouse clicks. Never mind that they always had two perfectly usable buttons right below the pad. I would always have to find and install the stupid drivers just so I could turn that abomination off. Synaptics or Alps, they both sucked.
The only modern "gesture" I use is two-finger scroll. I miss it when I use an older MacBook Pro or Powerbook G4. And that's the other part of Windows trackpads that I hate. The early ones had a scrolling region in the edge, which is simply a pain in the ass to use. Eventually they did get two-finger scroll, but the few times I have had it, it is quite jumpy compared to a real scroll wheel.
Literally the only problem I have had with the MBP trackpad (pre-Retina, at least) is that eventually dead skin gunk accumulates under the top edge and keeps it from clicking properly. To clean it out, you have to remove the trackpad to get access to clean the gunk out of that (machined) edge. The 17" model has good access, but I also have a first-gen 15" unibody where I was almost but not quite able to get it open because I needed a long, thin screwdriver, and the screwdriver kit I had that day had bits that were too short.
Wow. That was only slightly better than the old joke password of "hunter2".
What is it about PhD students that causes so many of them to store all their work using ONE PROGRAM on ONE COMPUTER (or even worse, ONE DISK) and never make backups? I guess there must be something to the old joke of "piled higher and deeper".
I'm a touch typist who keeps my fingernails to about 1mm most of the time. Right now the my 4-year-old 17" MacBook Pro keyboard has five keys where the black color on top has been eroded away: E A S D and left shift. The control and command keys area also showing some wear on the top coating.
So what happens when the key is an active electronic device? I guess at some point a key top will just stop working. At the worst it might even short something out. And I know they will want it to rewrite the key tops when you use the accent composing feature, so just hope that a key doesn't die right after you hit option-E!
Warren Buffet has said that he believes should pay more taxes. But he won't willingly simply add more money to whatever he already pays.
bash scripting is so mind bending that it makes Perl look easy. Its syntax has lots of oddities that trip up even veteran programmers. Of all the languages out there, bash is one of the worst ones to use as a beginner's language.
You young kids and your fancy print statements, what's so hard about FORMAT statements and Hollerith formatting codes?
Isn't a lot of this due to all the new stuff that Unicode keeps adding? I still have a Bitstream Cyberbit font somewhere from... was it back in the late '90s? This is the same thing all over again, just up to date.
In my experience, they usually call with a voice synthesizer. Yours must have been the ones too cheap to pay for something to cover their accent.
I've got to agree with this. Maybe when 3.5" HD floppies were new they were okay, but once you could buy them in boxes of 25, they were crap. The 3.5" DD floppies were only bad when they were still new (mid '80s). Of course most PC manufacturers didn't put 3.5" drives in until HD was already a thing, so most PC users never got to use the 720K versions.
You smug Apple II and Commodore guys, the rest of us that had systems that used real floppy disk controller chips had to cut an index hole too. At first, I would carefully wedge a hole punch in there, then I later just cut out a rough hexagon with an x-acto knife.
Also, it's not too hard to quickly ship emergency supplies during the summer. Mars takes either a long time or a really long time to get there.
For instance, there hasn't been a lot of talk about it yet because it's still a relatively new discovery, but human eyes apparently do not do well in prolonged periods of micro-gravity. You can't just pop down to the Wal-Mart to get your eyes checked and order a new pair of glasses. There has been some success at 3D printing lenses, but I'm sure that it's nowhere near as good as properly milled poly-carbonate plastic. Even if you have a CNC mill and slabs of optical plastic, you still to have eye testing equipment to know how to mill it. Forget anything along the path and you have to try your luck with hacking something up.
Of course the problem with Mars transfer orbits is that, depending on when you leave, it either takes 3 months, or it takes over a year and a half. When you get there on the short route, you can either leave immediately for a long ride home, or stay there for over a year to get the short ride home.
But were those long address protocols designed to be routable in a worldwide network? Sure, Ethernet had a 48-bit address too, but it was only intended to be a unique hardware ID. There is no way to contact an arbitrary Ethernet MAC address outside of your LAN, even if you already know that it exists. Were they designed to work with the low-speed serial links that were common back in the day? Sure, you can spare a few extra bits when you've got over a million per second, but not when you've got a mere thousands of bits per second.
Back in those days communications were slow (56Kbps was about 6 characters per second, or 7cps synchronous). And CPUs weren't fast. People wouldn't have tolerated protocols that took up a significant percentage of CPU time. More importantly, fast routing depends on custom logic to handle headers without a CPU, and variable-length headers make this much harder. IPv6's optional headers are tricky enough, but variable address lengths would have been very hard to process with custom logic.
And encryption? It was literally a non-issue for network protocols back in those days because it is so compute-intensive. The point of a network protocol is to route data, you don't stick something as expensive as encryption on the lower layers without a good reason, such as wireless transmission. WiFi has link-layer encryption, but that disappears once the data goes onto a wire. And if you're not going to encrypt the headers anyhow (how do you use the options that specify encryption in an already encrypted header?), then why the fuck even bother? If the data needs to be encrypted, put that at layer 5 or 6 or 7 of the protocol.
Also, which algorithm? Any sufficiently fast algorithm from those days would be useless today. DES was brand new in the '70s, and eventually got chips, but you're going to require one of those in every network node? There are still unanswered questions about how its specific design was chosen. All specifying an algorithm would do is keep a bad algorithm alive forever. SSL is still trying to shake off bad algorithms. We've already thrown away at least two generations of encryption just for WiFi alone, that you can still use, and it's barely 20 years old. And yes, the munitions bullshit was another reason why they would have kept it completely out of the network protocol. It just isn't the business of a routing protocol to deal with encryption.
Hindsight is easy when you don't consider the limitations of what was knowable or possible back in the day. Very few things (other than perhaps the limitations of classful routing) could have been foreseen in what was still considered a mostly experimental system. There was no way they could have known that TCP/IP (which wasn't even their first protocol!) would have ended up the winner and persisted for decades until long after the point where it had run out of addresses.
48 or 64 bit addresses would have been enough, IPv6 only used 128 bits because its designers wanted to be really, really, really sure that we wouldn't run out, this time, for sure. The initial classful address allocations didn't help, but we eventually reached a point where a single wasted class A only puts off exhaustion by a few months. What broke everything in the end was the sheer enormous number of addresses used by mobile networks. Now we have enough bits that we can use Ethernet MACs as part of routable addresses and still have plenty.
The problem is that back when IP was new, even 56Kbps was considered fast. TCP headers are already 20 bytes. The overhead of 4 more bytes per packet would have been significant, but 12 more bytes per packet? That's 2ms per packet at 56K asynchronous, and 12ms at 9600 bps. PPP had a way to shorten headers for this reason, but it was a later protocol, after the more obvious SLIP had already been in use.