Re:Why isn't slashdot blacking out?
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly. The real question is why isn't Facebook in blackout, or at the very least have a banner at the top of the page noting the issue. I'm really happy about Wikipedia since it is frequently used by the 'unwashed masses' but think Facebook would reach an even wider audience.
Oh shit, my avatar is in need of an AR15/M16/M4 or some other evil black rifle - I tried looking a while back and couldn't find one and just figured MS banned them to protect teh childrenz from images of firearms. Anyone know where I can get one before its too late?
Why do you want to encrypt the RFS? You shouldn't have any sensitive data there, and having to decrypt your binaries before they can be loaded into memory is a huge performance hit. Or am I not understanding what you're trying to do?
Yeah, like an ethanol addict that would die if they just up and quit cold turkey. Just giving oil is a nice thought and all, but its unfortunately not very realistic yet - we need that petroleum fueled economy to develop an energy replacement.
He's not operating on rumor, he's absolutely correct. This type of thing happens all the time - a drug is developed in the US and approval is easily achieved in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc, and then it takes several more years to gain FDA approval. Most Phase 2 trials are performed in these countries because its just so much easier to get approval and then test it on the thousands of patients required to make the FDA happy.
Before you go on about how noble the FDA is about saving lives, I suggest you work with them first. They are far more dedicated to maintaining their bureaucracy than actually saving lives. They require filling out paperwork on filling out paperwork. And its not like people are dropping like flies in other industrial nations that have more efficient approval processes.
Furthermore, if you want to blame high drug prices in the US on anything, this is the problem right here - the gross majority of employees in any big pharma company are responsible for some FDA requirement. On the upside, they do create a ton of jobs.
The problem is our current social security and medicare/medicaid system are systematically flawed. They are pyramid schemes that depend on an exponential population growth that hasn't been happening because people just aren't fucking like they used to. In other words, the rate of expenditure growth is out pacing the rate of revenue growth and no amount of spending cuts or tax increases are going to fix that.
Of course we also need to seriously overhaul our tax code to eliminate the volumes of handouts to special interests and cut the huge waste that is our foreign military occupations. In the end though, its the exponential SS and medicare/medicaid liabilities that will kill us.
You'd be correct, except you are totally missing the cost of regulatory compliance. Actually coming up with and manufacturing a compound to treat some ailment is cheap and easy. Proving to the FDA that it is safe for sale for some purpose is extremely costly. No one is going to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to perform these trials if, once approved, anyone can go out and manufacture and sell the same drug for $2/bottle. How the hell are they ever going to cover the margins of millions of man hours invested in clinical trials competing against people whose only operating expense is a small factory in Mexico or China?
What people such as yourself don't understand is the primary business of pharma companies is regulatory compliance. The gross majority of people employed by these companies, and the gross majority of their expenses go to making the FDA happy. If you want cheap drugs and to eliminate the need for drug patents, you either need to eliminate the FDA (dumb) or place the burden of testing these drugs on the government and the tax payer (also dumb).
The system we have now may not be ideal, but it works pretty well. It's efficient and promotes innovation. Yeah, drugs are more expensive when they're first released, but the patents are short lived and cheap generics quickly make it to market. If anything, this should be an example of how the patent system should work - patents last only long enough for the inventor/investor to make an ROI before expiring and entering the public domain.
So we should all just walk then? That doesn't seem very conducive to our right to freely travel.
This logic doesn't fly (pardon the pun) with other rights; how is it at all acceptable that we should be expected to waive one set of rights to reasonably realize another?
Oh, and I take it you don't understand that rights don't come from the US Constitution - you are born with them and the US Constitution is designed to put limits on the government to prevent it from violating those rights. It is not an exclusive list of rights. At least, it wasn't supposed to be before we started pissing on it in the name of safety.
Exactly. We call them traffic circles and we've had tons of them in NJ for a very long time - way, way before 1990. Being able to navigate traffic circles in NJ is a trademark skill required for any resident and is often a problem for new comers. Many of the circles have been eliminated, or are in the process of being eliminated, simply because they don't scale well to the ever increasing traffic volume.
While I actually enjoy navigating circles, a well designed intersection with an adaptive traffic light system yields a much better result.
Re:Share ratio requirements
on
BitTorrent Turns 10
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· Score: 4, Informative
You are correct - seeding torrents is like a P2P pyramid scheme and the people on the bottom are left holding the bag.
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.
I figured. This is a common trap - to initially assume blame for your area of expertise. I find I do the same thing, but in reality, its almost never the electronics that fail - its usually the sensors, actuators, or wiring. This is especially true with automotive gear where the electronics combined with a CAN interconnect are damn near bullet proof, and are by far the highest grade kit the average consumer owns.
The accelerator position is measured by the throttle position sensor, which is just a potentiometer bolted to the side of the throttle body. This is usually measured directly by the ECU, and in no way involves the CAN bus or OBD (unless of course the signal goes outside of an acceptable range and an error is thrown). There are so many things that could go wrong - fouled TPS, damaged wiring/connector, fried ADC, etc - that would cause incorrect readings and not throw a trouble code. Of course, this would cause serious problems with the drivability of the car since acceleration enrichments would be wrong causing lurching and perhaps stalling on acceleration.
I think the important point to be made here is that our electronic gizmos can't measuring anything directly - they depend entirely on proxy measurements based on a set of assumptions. If any of those assumptions are violated, the measurement is no longer valid. I think the best example is GPS - it assumes a clear, direct line of sight to each satellite it uses. This assumption is violated in urban or mountainous areas where multipath reflections become a major concern, and location, velocity, heading, and acceleration are no longer valid.
Simply because you do not own the roads, you do not clean up the mess and you don't have to pay for all the costs of hospitalisation, rehabilitation and permanent disability.
It's called vehicle registrations and drivers licence, don't like it, walk or take public transport.
Neither does the federal government. Roads are owned by state and local governments. The clean up is usually done by the local government. The insurance that I pay for pays for the expenses that result, and if I'm at fault, both my insurance company and myself are liable for damages.
Motor vehicle transportation, including licensing and registration, has always been a state issue - so why is it acceptable for a group of unelected federal bureaucrats to pass a decree that would greatly implicate the privacy for the majority of the population? Where do they derive their authority? Do you think something like this would actually go anywhere if they tried to enact it by legislation?
Furthermore, is there a real problem that this solves, or is it just a solution in search of a problem? Will this really provide that much more useful data that can't be determined through traditional means (aka measurements and physics)? I just see this being too susceptible to abuse - ie police scanning impounded cars as part of their 'inventory inspection' and writing additional summons for what they find.
I work in aviation and privacy is a big concern for some of our customers. Sometimes its for security concerns (the richer you are, the more people who want to make a mask with your face) and other times its for PR reasons (it doesn't look good when a company fires a few thousand employees in the name of cutting costs and then turns around and picks up a few new G550s - even though the new aircraft will save them money in the long run).
What these guys usually do is operate under a pseudonym. I don't know the full mechanics of it, but we regularly have customers with bogus names operating under bogus corporations. They get paint schemes totally devoid of any company logos or color schemes and doing a tail number search yields meaningless results. We know who they are, but on lookers, like in this case, will be totally in the dark.
Famous people usually don't care. While most celebrities can't even afford to look at a private jet, those that can often get their names painted all over the side of their aircraft as if saying 'look at the size of my penis!' The point being, if they want to be private, they can, but it seems these guys just don't care.
Now that isn't to say that they should have to go out of their way to maintain privacy. The FAA logs and keeps way too much information on these guys to the point it is downright scary. Of course, the relative safety of air travel has a lot to do with the strict controls of the FAA, but none the less, they need to be more concerned with privacy - if not for the sake of the VIPs, then for the safety of the couple dozen technicians and crew members maintaining and operating the aircraft.
I have prototype devices used for development that have had their EEPROMs erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times without any signs of a problem. A customer in the field would never come anywhere close to this.
In any case, this would be better served by flash memory than EEPROM.
I have to disagree with this. When you go on to actually use the math you've learned, not using a calculator is plain silly. There is no way I could have completed a few EE exams without my TI89 because of the large amount of complex (in both uses of the term) math required. I remember a number of my friends had trouble simply because they didn't know how to use their calculators and had to do their calcs by hand. I'm sorry, but when you have a test with a dozen problems, each requiring as much number crunching as an average calc exam, you need the calculator.
And now that I'm all grown up, I'm not going to model a filter by hand on a piece of graph paper. I'm going to use Matlab. If an engineer wanted to do math by hand today, they'd be seen as a dinosaur wasting time - not some mathematical genius.
If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.
I think the difference is that we hear about 0-day exploits in Adobe software on a much more regular basis than in Linux or its associated software stack. It feels like Adobe announces another PDF or Flash vulnerability every month and that they have a complete disregard for secure practices.
Combined with the fact that they still don't have a stable 64-bit release of Flash for any OS makes me feel like they are a bunch of no-talent ass clowns without a sound development process in place.
Oh, and in the Linux world, we use tools like SELinux or Apparmor so a hijacked spreadsheet can't go accessing parts of the system where it doesn't belong.
Please prove your point with examples, otherwise I'm not seeing where you're drawing this conclusion from. Give just one example where going to a family share plan does NOT save money.
If you are a Verizon customer and on a family plan and do not have five phones on the account, very, very, very likely you can save money by moving away from the family plan and converting to individual plans without shared minutes.
That's total bullshit. I suggest you go to their website and do some simple math.
A single plan with 450 minutes and unlimited texts is $60/month.
A family share with 2 people sharing 700 minutes and unlimited texts is $100/month, or $50/month/person.
Yeah, you get fewer minutes, but, In my experience, the number of minutes have never been a limiting factor. In the three years I've had such a plan, I've never gotten close to going over, much like I've never come close to using my 450 minutes when I had a single plan. Heck, I don't think we've ever used over 450 minutes combined. Instead, we each save $10/month.
I just added 2 more people to my family share and the savings gets even better. 1100 minutes (plus unlimited calls to 10 numbers you can designate) with unlimited texts shared with 4 people is $140/month, or $35/person/month. Now we each save $25/month. Yes, again fewer minutes, but again, not a limiting factor. Plus, since 90%+ of our minutes used each month go to fewer than 10 numbers that can be designated for unlimited calling, the 4 of us now use less than I did by myself.
I'm not trying to sound like a salesman here - I just went through VZW's billing myself and can't stand leaving mindless, ignorant hater bullshit like this alone. VZW's billing is fairly simple and straight forward and if you claim to have trouble with it you are either being disingenuous or are mildly retarded. Now Comcast's billing, on the other hand, is quite clearly intentionality confusing and misleading, but that's for another day.
As for texting costs, you, and most other technical people, don't understand how costs are set. Right, so SMS uses the cellular scraps that would otherwise be trashed, but that doesn't indicate its value. Value is set by the consumer, and unfortunately, people are still willing to pay $20/month for SMS. It doesn't matter if something costs a fraction of a cent to manufacture; if people are willing to spend significantly more, that is how much it will cost. Until people start seeing the value of using IM and email and cancel their texting plans, we will continue to see high SMS costs. And if the perceived value of SMS ever does drop, the cellular providers will just need to make up the revenue somewhere else and raise other prices.
Not to be a negative-nancy or anything, but current satphones max out at a hair over 2000bps. Unless ASCII porn is your thing, you're pretty limited in today's internet.
Usable data rates would require a dish antenna and, depending where in the world we're talking about, putting new satellites in orbit.
Agreed. I got a Guruplug for a project for work and quickly realized it was a pile of garbage. I have relegated it to be my home router and it does serve pretty well - granted the enclosure is removed since the original design clearly didn't even begin to take heat dissipation into account. I was planning on fabricating a heat sink for it, but its been going for a few months now without one without a problem - I'm at 44 days of uptime now, and the last time it was down was intended.
I haven't had stability problems like many have reported, but I compiled the kernel and built the RFS myself, so IDK if the factory image was broken or what.
What I would REALLY like to see is them upgrade to a modern version of the ARM ISA. The Marvell Kirkwood processors are all stuck on ARMv5 and not ARMv7 like everyone else with beefy ARM based application processors. While I'm not limited by the performance of the device, it is annoying that I'm limited to Debian or older versions of Ubuntu since most people are compiling for v7 these days. I don't have the patience to compile everything myself. Of course, if performance was a concern, it would be really swell to have high-tech features like the bigger pipeline and NEON that are in current devices.
Whether reasonable or not, the Guruplug has put a bad taste in my mouth with Marvell's products - while this isn't a Marvell implementation, it is endorsed by them. I find it very unlikely that I would consider them over Freescale or Ti in the future largely because of this product.
You realize the host CPU (x86, ARM, POWER, etc - the one that gets all the press) isn't the only microprocessor in the system - many of these binary blobs run on other microprocessors and don't need to be recompiled for different host architectures. In a given system, there are usually several other processors that handle various, often real-time, functions. It is common for these devices to lack non-volatile storage and must boot from their host (the CPU) which is why these blobs are needed.
For example, your wireless adapter probably contains its own microprocessor whose firmware must be loaded by the host CPU during system initialization.
That isn't to say vendors aren't releasing the source for their kernel drivers that interfaces with these devices - they are, and generally have been for sometime. I think this has more to do with the magic doesn't usually happen in these drivers anyway as they only provide an interface to an external device. At the same time, releasing the kernel driver source code and providing free examples of using their devices is a good marketing tool - I'm more likely to go with a vendor who makes my life easy and lets me see how to implement their devices without getting the lawyers involved. Now, the firmware that runs on these devices is what is worth protecting, and, from my experience, is still largely closed and protected by NDAs.
I should also point out that many such devices are really just consumer friendly implementations produced by Company X of a product developed by Company Y. Company Y usually makes the firmware, and may or may not make the drivers, but it is up to Company X to package it all together and sell it to you, the consumer. Company X may want to GPL the drivers, but it is up to Company Y to GPL the firmware.
Who's complaining? Who are these 'people'?/.ers? Obviously not your average computer user seeing as after a decade of Windows tablets, Apple steals the whole market with the iPad and its 'segragated' OS. And remember, these same 'people' said no one would buy an iPad.
Don't get me wrong, as a geek, I agree with you and see your points, but for the average user, it misses the target.
Furthermore, ChromeOS is just a Linux distro that uses a web browser as the window manager. It delivers the same web as any other machine, but without the extra fluff that gets Joe Sixpack in trouble. There's nothing particularly different or magical about it, and no one is suggesting that. The only thing new here is Google is providing an entire vertically integrated solution to the average Joe. This is where all the other solutions you've suggested fail.
You are being disingenuous if you're trying to compare web apps to terminal services like SSH, VNC, etc. Have you ever tried to use these over the Internet? Not a user friendly experience to say the least.
Again, you're clearly looking at this from the geek's perspective based on technological merits and not from the perspective of the average user. This is a common mistake in the tech world, and probably one of the greatest challenges in delivering a widely accepted product.
ChromeOS isn't targeted to the average/.er - it's targeted to the average computer user. You know, the ones that call you to come fix their computer because they click yes to every question that pops up while surfing the interwebs? Most people really only need the internet and have no use for native apps - or at least really shouldn't be installing native apps. Honestly, I would recommend a product like ChromeOS to at least 3/4 of the non-techy people I know as I don't think a full-blown OS suits their use case well.
Secondly, saying ChromeOS and Android fit the same market is really, really dumb and misses the point completely. One is intended for the touchscreen only, while the other is geared for the traditional mouse and keyboard. These are significantly different UI approaches, targeting significantly different markets, and require more than just simple patching and hacking to go from one to the other. Even patching the OS's UI elements leaves all of the 3rd party applications with a disarray of usability between types of UI. Just look at Windows on the tablet as an example.
It's strange that no one seems to complain about Apple using iOS on its mobile devices, while using OS X on its computers, or that Microsoft uses Windows 7 on the computer and Windows Phone 7 on mobile devices. Instead, this is clearly the preferred approach. Yeah, Google is going the opposite direction, but I think it still applies - you are going between two radically different use cases and trying to go with a one-size-fits-all approach usually yields a one-size-sucks-for-all result. Granted, I'm sure we'll see a gradual merging of the code bases between ChromeOS and Android, but for either to remain a usable product, they need to be tailored for their specific uses.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. The real question is why isn't Facebook in blackout, or at the very least have a banner at the top of the page noting the issue. I'm really happy about Wikipedia since it is frequently used by the 'unwashed masses' but think Facebook would reach an even wider audience.
Oh shit, my avatar is in need of an AR15/M16/M4 or some other evil black rifle - I tried looking a while back and couldn't find one and just figured MS banned them to protect teh childrenz from images of firearms. Anyone know where I can get one before its too late?
Why do you want to encrypt the RFS? You shouldn't have any sensitive data there, and having to decrypt your binaries before they can be loaded into memory is a huge performance hit. Or am I not understanding what you're trying to do?
Yeah, like an ethanol addict that would die if they just up and quit cold turkey. Just giving oil is a nice thought and all, but its unfortunately not very realistic yet - we need that petroleum fueled economy to develop an energy replacement.
He's not operating on rumor, he's absolutely correct. This type of thing happens all the time - a drug is developed in the US and approval is easily achieved in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc, and then it takes several more years to gain FDA approval. Most Phase 2 trials are performed in these countries because its just so much easier to get approval and then test it on the thousands of patients required to make the FDA happy.
Before you go on about how noble the FDA is about saving lives, I suggest you work with them first. They are far more dedicated to maintaining their bureaucracy than actually saving lives. They require filling out paperwork on filling out paperwork. And its not like people are dropping like flies in other industrial nations that have more efficient approval processes.
Furthermore, if you want to blame high drug prices in the US on anything, this is the problem right here - the gross majority of employees in any big pharma company are responsible for some FDA requirement. On the upside, they do create a ton of jobs.
The problem is our current social security and medicare/medicaid system are systematically flawed. They are pyramid schemes that depend on an exponential population growth that hasn't been happening because people just aren't fucking like they used to. In other words, the rate of expenditure growth is out pacing the rate of revenue growth and no amount of spending cuts or tax increases are going to fix that.
Of course we also need to seriously overhaul our tax code to eliminate the volumes of handouts to special interests and cut the huge waste that is our foreign military occupations. In the end though, its the exponential SS and medicare/medicaid liabilities that will kill us.
You'd be correct, except you are totally missing the cost of regulatory compliance. Actually coming up with and manufacturing a compound to treat some ailment is cheap and easy. Proving to the FDA that it is safe for sale for some purpose is extremely costly. No one is going to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to perform these trials if, once approved, anyone can go out and manufacture and sell the same drug for $2/bottle. How the hell are they ever going to cover the margins of millions of man hours invested in clinical trials competing against people whose only operating expense is a small factory in Mexico or China?
What people such as yourself don't understand is the primary business of pharma companies is regulatory compliance. The gross majority of people employed by these companies, and the gross majority of their expenses go to making the FDA happy. If you want cheap drugs and to eliminate the need for drug patents, you either need to eliminate the FDA (dumb) or place the burden of testing these drugs on the government and the tax payer (also dumb).
The system we have now may not be ideal, but it works pretty well. It's efficient and promotes innovation. Yeah, drugs are more expensive when they're first released, but the patents are short lived and cheap generics quickly make it to market. If anything, this should be an example of how the patent system should work - patents last only long enough for the inventor/investor to make an ROI before expiring and entering the public domain.
So we should all just walk then? That doesn't seem very conducive to our right to freely travel.
This logic doesn't fly (pardon the pun) with other rights; how is it at all acceptable that we should be expected to waive one set of rights to reasonably realize another?
Oh, and I take it you don't understand that rights don't come from the US Constitution - you are born with them and the US Constitution is designed to put limits on the government to prevent it from violating those rights. It is not an exclusive list of rights. At least, it wasn't supposed to be before we started pissing on it in the name of safety.
Exactly. We call them traffic circles and we've had tons of them in NJ for a very long time - way, way before 1990. Being able to navigate traffic circles in NJ is a trademark skill required for any resident and is often a problem for new comers. Many of the circles have been eliminated, or are in the process of being eliminated, simply because they don't scale well to the ever increasing traffic volume.
While I actually enjoy navigating circles, a well designed intersection with an adaptive traffic light system yields a much better result.
You are correct - seeding torrents is like a P2P pyramid scheme and the people on the bottom are left holding the bag.
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.
I figured. This is a common trap - to initially assume blame for your area of expertise. I find I do the same thing, but in reality, its almost never the electronics that fail - its usually the sensors, actuators, or wiring. This is especially true with automotive gear where the electronics combined with a CAN interconnect are damn near bullet proof, and are by far the highest grade kit the average consumer owns.
The accelerator position is measured by the throttle position sensor, which is just a potentiometer bolted to the side of the throttle body. This is usually measured directly by the ECU, and in no way involves the CAN bus or OBD (unless of course the signal goes outside of an acceptable range and an error is thrown). There are so many things that could go wrong - fouled TPS, damaged wiring/connector, fried ADC, etc - that would cause incorrect readings and not throw a trouble code. Of course, this would cause serious problems with the drivability of the car since acceleration enrichments would be wrong causing lurching and perhaps stalling on acceleration.
I think the important point to be made here is that our electronic gizmos can't measuring anything directly - they depend entirely on proxy measurements based on a set of assumptions. If any of those assumptions are violated, the measurement is no longer valid. I think the best example is GPS - it assumes a clear, direct line of sight to each satellite it uses. This assumption is violated in urban or mountainous areas where multipath reflections become a major concern, and location, velocity, heading, and acceleration are no longer valid.
Simply because you do not own the roads, you do not clean up the mess and you don't have to pay for all the costs of hospitalisation, rehabilitation and permanent disability. It's called vehicle registrations and drivers licence, don't like it, walk or take public transport.
Neither does the federal government. Roads are owned by state and local governments. The clean up is usually done by the local government. The insurance that I pay for pays for the expenses that result, and if I'm at fault, both my insurance company and myself are liable for damages.
Motor vehicle transportation, including licensing and registration, has always been a state issue - so why is it acceptable for a group of unelected federal bureaucrats to pass a decree that would greatly implicate the privacy for the majority of the population? Where do they derive their authority? Do you think something like this would actually go anywhere if they tried to enact it by legislation?
Furthermore, is there a real problem that this solves, or is it just a solution in search of a problem? Will this really provide that much more useful data that can't be determined through traditional means (aka measurements and physics)? I just see this being too susceptible to abuse - ie police scanning impounded cars as part of their 'inventory inspection' and writing additional summons for what they find.
I work in aviation and privacy is a big concern for some of our customers. Sometimes its for security concerns (the richer you are, the more people who want to make a mask with your face) and other times its for PR reasons (it doesn't look good when a company fires a few thousand employees in the name of cutting costs and then turns around and picks up a few new G550s - even though the new aircraft will save them money in the long run).
What these guys usually do is operate under a pseudonym. I don't know the full mechanics of it, but we regularly have customers with bogus names operating under bogus corporations. They get paint schemes totally devoid of any company logos or color schemes and doing a tail number search yields meaningless results. We know who they are, but on lookers, like in this case, will be totally in the dark.
Famous people usually don't care. While most celebrities can't even afford to look at a private jet, those that can often get their names painted all over the side of their aircraft as if saying 'look at the size of my penis!' The point being, if they want to be private, they can, but it seems these guys just don't care.
Now that isn't to say that they should have to go out of their way to maintain privacy. The FAA logs and keeps way too much information on these guys to the point it is downright scary. Of course, the relative safety of air travel has a lot to do with the strict controls of the FAA, but none the less, they need to be more concerned with privacy - if not for the sake of the VIPs, then for the safety of the couple dozen technicians and crew members maintaining and operating the aircraft.
Limited usually being 100,000+ times
I have prototype devices used for development that have had their EEPROMs erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times without any signs of a problem. A customer in the field would never come anywhere close to this.
In any case, this would be better served by flash memory than EEPROM.
I have to disagree with this. When you go on to actually use the math you've learned, not using a calculator is plain silly. There is no way I could have completed a few EE exams without my TI89 because of the large amount of complex (in both uses of the term) math required. I remember a number of my friends had trouble simply because they didn't know how to use their calculators and had to do their calcs by hand. I'm sorry, but when you have a test with a dozen problems, each requiring as much number crunching as an average calc exam, you need the calculator.
And now that I'm all grown up, I'm not going to model a filter by hand on a piece of graph paper. I'm going to use Matlab. If an engineer wanted to do math by hand today, they'd be seen as a dinosaur wasting time - not some mathematical genius.
If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.
I think the difference is that we hear about 0-day exploits in Adobe software on a much more regular basis than in Linux or its associated software stack. It feels like Adobe announces another PDF or Flash vulnerability every month and that they have a complete disregard for secure practices.
Combined with the fact that they still don't have a stable 64-bit release of Flash for any OS makes me feel like they are a bunch of no-talent ass clowns without a sound development process in place.
Oh, and in the Linux world, we use tools like SELinux or Apparmor so a hijacked spreadsheet can't go accessing parts of the system where it doesn't belong.
Please prove your point with examples, otherwise I'm not seeing where you're drawing this conclusion from. Give just one example where going to a family share plan does NOT save money.
If you are a Verizon customer and on a family plan and do not have five phones on the account, very, very, very likely you can save money by moving away from the family plan and converting to individual plans without shared minutes.
That's total bullshit. I suggest you go to their website and do some simple math.
A single plan with 450 minutes and unlimited texts is $60/month.
A family share with 2 people sharing 700 minutes and unlimited texts is $100/month, or $50/month/person.
Yeah, you get fewer minutes, but, In my experience, the number of minutes have never been a limiting factor. In the three years I've had such a plan, I've never gotten close to going over, much like I've never come close to using my 450 minutes when I had a single plan. Heck, I don't think we've ever used over 450 minutes combined. Instead, we each save $10/month.
I just added 2 more people to my family share and the savings gets even better. 1100 minutes (plus unlimited calls to 10 numbers you can designate) with unlimited texts shared with 4 people is $140/month, or $35/person/month. Now we each save $25/month. Yes, again fewer minutes, but again, not a limiting factor. Plus, since 90%+ of our minutes used each month go to fewer than 10 numbers that can be designated for unlimited calling, the 4 of us now use less than I did by myself.
I'm not trying to sound like a salesman here - I just went through VZW's billing myself and can't stand leaving mindless, ignorant hater bullshit like this alone. VZW's billing is fairly simple and straight forward and if you claim to have trouble with it you are either being disingenuous or are mildly retarded. Now Comcast's billing, on the other hand, is quite clearly intentionality confusing and misleading, but that's for another day.
As for texting costs, you, and most other technical people, don't understand how costs are set. Right, so SMS uses the cellular scraps that would otherwise be trashed, but that doesn't indicate its value. Value is set by the consumer, and unfortunately, people are still willing to pay $20/month for SMS. It doesn't matter if something costs a fraction of a cent to manufacture; if people are willing to spend significantly more, that is how much it will cost. Until people start seeing the value of using IM and email and cancel their texting plans, we will continue to see high SMS costs. And if the perceived value of SMS ever does drop, the cellular providers will just need to make up the revenue somewhere else and raise other prices.
Not to be a negative-nancy or anything, but current satphones max out at a hair over 2000bps. Unless ASCII porn is your thing, you're pretty limited in today's internet.
Usable data rates would require a dish antenna and, depending where in the world we're talking about, putting new satellites in orbit.
Agreed. I got a Guruplug for a project for work and quickly realized it was a pile of garbage. I have relegated it to be my home router and it does serve pretty well - granted the enclosure is removed since the original design clearly didn't even begin to take heat dissipation into account. I was planning on fabricating a heat sink for it, but its been going for a few months now without one without a problem - I'm at 44 days of uptime now, and the last time it was down was intended.
I haven't had stability problems like many have reported, but I compiled the kernel and built the RFS myself, so IDK if the factory image was broken or what.
What I would REALLY like to see is them upgrade to a modern version of the ARM ISA. The Marvell Kirkwood processors are all stuck on ARMv5 and not ARMv7 like everyone else with beefy ARM based application processors. While I'm not limited by the performance of the device, it is annoying that I'm limited to Debian or older versions of Ubuntu since most people are compiling for v7 these days. I don't have the patience to compile everything myself. Of course, if performance was a concern, it would be really swell to have high-tech features like the bigger pipeline and NEON that are in current devices.
Whether reasonable or not, the Guruplug has put a bad taste in my mouth with Marvell's products - while this isn't a Marvell implementation, it is endorsed by them. I find it very unlikely that I would consider them over Freescale or Ti in the future largely because of this product.
CR-48, Chrome OS 0.9.128.12: 4416
You realize the host CPU (x86, ARM, POWER, etc - the one that gets all the press) isn't the only microprocessor in the system - many of these binary blobs run on other microprocessors and don't need to be recompiled for different host architectures. In a given system, there are usually several other processors that handle various, often real-time, functions. It is common for these devices to lack non-volatile storage and must boot from their host (the CPU) which is why these blobs are needed.
For example, your wireless adapter probably contains its own microprocessor whose firmware must be loaded by the host CPU during system initialization.
That isn't to say vendors aren't releasing the source for their kernel drivers that interfaces with these devices - they are, and generally have been for sometime. I think this has more to do with the magic doesn't usually happen in these drivers anyway as they only provide an interface to an external device. At the same time, releasing the kernel driver source code and providing free examples of using their devices is a good marketing tool - I'm more likely to go with a vendor who makes my life easy and lets me see how to implement their devices without getting the lawyers involved. Now, the firmware that runs on these devices is what is worth protecting, and, from my experience, is still largely closed and protected by NDAs.
I should also point out that many such devices are really just consumer friendly implementations produced by Company X of a product developed by Company Y. Company Y usually makes the firmware, and may or may not make the drivers, but it is up to Company X to package it all together and sell it to you, the consumer. Company X may want to GPL the drivers, but it is up to Company Y to GPL the firmware.
Who's complaining? Who are these 'people'? /.ers? Obviously not your average computer user seeing as after a decade of Windows tablets, Apple steals the whole market with the iPad and its 'segragated' OS. And remember, these same 'people' said no one would buy an iPad.
Don't get me wrong, as a geek, I agree with you and see your points, but for the average user, it misses the target.
Furthermore, ChromeOS is just a Linux distro that uses a web browser as the window manager. It delivers the same web as any other machine, but without the extra fluff that gets Joe Sixpack in trouble. There's nothing particularly different or magical about it, and no one is suggesting that. The only thing new here is Google is providing an entire vertically integrated solution to the average Joe. This is where all the other solutions you've suggested fail.
You are being disingenuous if you're trying to compare web apps to terminal services like SSH, VNC, etc. Have you ever tried to use these over the Internet? Not a user friendly experience to say the least.
Again, you're clearly looking at this from the geek's perspective based on technological merits and not from the perspective of the average user. This is a common mistake in the tech world, and probably one of the greatest challenges in delivering a widely accepted product.
ChromeOS isn't targeted to the average /.er - it's targeted to the average computer user. You know, the ones that call you to come fix their computer because they click yes to every question that pops up while surfing the interwebs? Most people really only need the internet and have no use for native apps - or at least really shouldn't be installing native apps. Honestly, I would recommend a product like ChromeOS to at least 3/4 of the non-techy people I know as I don't think a full-blown OS suits their use case well.
Secondly, saying ChromeOS and Android fit the same market is really, really dumb and misses the point completely. One is intended for the touchscreen only, while the other is geared for the traditional mouse and keyboard. These are significantly different UI approaches, targeting significantly different markets, and require more than just simple patching and hacking to go from one to the other. Even patching the OS's UI elements leaves all of the 3rd party applications with a disarray of usability between types of UI. Just look at Windows on the tablet as an example.
It's strange that no one seems to complain about Apple using iOS on its mobile devices, while using OS X on its computers, or that Microsoft uses Windows 7 on the computer and Windows Phone 7 on mobile devices. Instead, this is clearly the preferred approach. Yeah, Google is going the opposite direction, but I think it still applies - you are going between two radically different use cases and trying to go with a one-size-fits-all approach usually yields a one-size-sucks-for-all result. Granted, I'm sure we'll see a gradual merging of the code bases between ChromeOS and Android, but for either to remain a usable product, they need to be tailored for their specific uses.