"(Blowouts would still be a risk, but that, too, can be largely obviated by requiring all tires to be of the run-flat variety.)"
No need. Blow outs are not a issue if the driver takes the correct action fast enough - i.e. in the kind of response time a computer could manage.
Your forgetting the inherent latency in meat space programming. Humans have a practical 1-2 second reaction time in response to danger. Robot drivers will put an end to nose-tail accidents, even if the tire of the car in front blows out, the rear car can start braking in milliseconds.
The idea that safety equipment and performance makes people drive more dangerously is ignoring the 3000-pound elephant in the room.
Already pointed out here is that many modern cars have a very insulated driving experience. It's the comfort to blame, that's the cause, the effect is cars don't give the driver enough feedback. It's that lack sensory input that makes you think you can talk on your mobile and drive at the same time.
To be specific cars have light throttle action - sometimes the natural weight of your foot, if not held back, would send you up to 90mph. Add to that light docile steering, responsive engines that are well silenced even at higher output and automatic gearboxes that do thinking for you. Combined with the ever winning battle against engine and road noise in car design it makes the experience of driving fast very easy and far less frightening than it should be.
The author is right about the old vs new car example. Lets ignore the fact your more still likely to die in the older car, on the balance of all things.
Boiling it down, accelerating and traveling at dangerous speed is far too effortless. The connection between the drivers senses and the laws of physics is purposely muffled by the car designers. This is a direct invitation for people who are even slightly impatient, over-confident or perhaps just outright reckless to drive dangerously.
This is a patently Not Good thing.
Oh SUVs and domesticated utility vehicles are especially to blame. Your sensation of speed is further reduced in a massive vehicle.
In my own experience, I realised a long time ago as I was doing 170kph in my late model nissan maxima that it didn't feel much faster than 100kph. Infact it was just as smooth. (errr on closed road with professional stunt drivers, your honour). My first car was a much loved 1970s mitsubushi GTO, albeit modified, much more scary at speed. Indeed I found myself slowing down and cruising, accelerating gently, because it was simply more comfortable and I could hold a conversation with a passneger.
This has bothered me for a long time, and with every new car I do modifications to get around some of this, such as a stiffer throttle spring and heavier power steering.
I also have hacks like smoothing the signal from the throttle sensor, as well as lean running and a automatic transmission gear-hold hack.
The vast majority of cars I drive from the last 10 years have very light steering, especially at speed, where a proper sports car has more progressive resistance and feedback at speed (translates into stability directly). Many cars it doesn't feel like the steering is connected to anything, this must contribute to accidents since a small accidental movement at highway speed can run you off the road or into another vehicle.
This also translates into 99/100 drivers have no chance of controlling a car should it enter a slide, which is likely to happen in anything other than ideal braking conditions.
Truth is, ABS and stability control (no I don't have it equipped to my car, I have the meatspace version: car control skill), have saved my bacon on more than one occasion, likely from a potentially injury causing accident.
Braking is also one that gets me. It requires far too little muscle strength to brake at a reasonable pace, I wonder how people manage to put on full emergency braking pressure, especially the eldery or a particularly sedantry obsese person, simply because they haven't got the praciced strength.
If you've ever driven a car without power steering or brakes, you're driving habits are much different in that vehicle. It's human nature to tend to minimize physical energy expenditure, you'll tend to drive slower.
If what your boss tells you to do is unethical, quit, and tell him why in your resignation letter.
Because quitting is so effective. Whats to say the next fool won't just do what he asked? It's much better to just do what your told, but fight the cause with reasonable logic and persistence. You never know, the higher-ups may not share the same opinion, especially if you highlight legal issues. One may end up with the bosses job even, if he's out on his ass for triggering litigation.
Encrypting torrent traffic goes a long way. It's still possible to detect P2P traffic behaviorally, rather than inspecting packet payload, i.e. by ports, packet size and behavior patterns. Randomize those and suddenly it becomes near impossible to block or throttle.
A P2P app could use HTTPS over port 80 - that would be impossible to detect.
Thus we get to fundamentals of why any prohibition scheme is fundamentally flawed.
At the end of the piracy arms race, if the winners are the big guys, we may end up with a sanitized internet where all traffic is illegal if it is not traffic on an approved protocol.
The internet's strength is it's solidarity and neutrality and the fact that there really aren't many black holes and darknets. We may yet see it break up eventually, as some have predicted.
What is deeply concerning is the way the MafRIAA's of the world are as highly organised as they are. Keeping my tin foil hat off, the same kind of push for legislative change is popping up in many countries just reccently, to disconnect infringing users on accusation being the common theme. In some cases the legislation is slipping through in the dead of night, in the case of New Zealand's section 92A. Which has now thankfully as good as dead in the water.
So they tried it on and it didn't work, in about 4-5 different countries, the ones where it's easier to push through legislation. This is typical behavior of lobbyists, cavalier lets-see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude, if it doesn't work they back it off a little, and try again with something less heavy - the process softens up the lawmakers and public's response. So is this the new strategy? Throttle instead of disconnect? Disturbingly, this is one ISPs may be much more inclined to support.
This generation have been fed on heroic IT success stories, like how a couple of college DNFs in a garage start up a company, and are billionaires before their 30, amongst other IT legends.
These are kids that do not recall a time where there were no computers in homes, typically. The younger kids, about age 20, do not know a world without the internet. They've also grown up aware of the worlds most pressing issues, overpopulation, global warming, general doom and gloom, and the now ubiquitous message that we simply don't have a future if we don't do something about it.
(Where my bunch are lazy and self-indulgent. But I kinda like that)
Given that, there's little surprise there are are high expectations of gains from entering the IT industry, along with a ever decreasing tolerance for tedium and BS. I've observed this in the fresh out of school age group following my lot.
I don't think this is a bad thing however. I find many of them actually refreshingly motivated and willing to change things, rather suck-it-up and keep your head down and wait for your opportunity to move up. In comparison my age group (born circa 1980) is rather lazy.
I'm tempted to buy one of these to rename all my music stuff like "jobs sucks balls.mp3" listen to it announce the song.
If the ipod shuffle is a long running joke then this really takes the cake. Yet I'm perplexed by how this has not been identified by the fine institution of slashot.
The first ipod shuffle was priced higher than it's competition, was one of the few players without a display at the time, had mediocre sound quality and was locked-in to all hell to itunes. It just wasn't really any good. However it still sold, for the reason that people like to impulse buy things that are shiny and tiny .
Oh and it had apple trademark battery life claims.
Hmmm? Oh you know what I mean, it would say n-hours of playback on the box, but you could only hope to possibly achieve somewhat less than n of this quoted time, otherwise time would stop and the shuffle would have infinite mass.
In lieu of actually improving the product how about adding a gimmicky feature, with some dubious marketing claims about it's originality?
Thus we arrive at what is without a doubt the single worst product that apple has ever released. Google that kind of statement I'm not the only person saying that, including apple-head websites.
It must be a joke.
Yes, thanks for asking, but I did once buy an Ipod. I took it back to the store citing local consumer law here 'must be fit for a purpose', resisting the urge to make a scene finding a way to crumble it into little bits, but ask for a trade down to a cheaper sony walkman, getting a refund of the difference, to have claimed 36-hour playback that you actually get and the best sound quality I have ever had out of a mp3 player.
If you really care about music you'll take your ipod whatever back to the store and smash it to bits on the counter with your shoe.
Personally, I'm less interested in the buisness or the open-source aspect of it and more interested in getting frags in Quake Live and still having enough money to buy necessities. Like porn and beer, which should also be free. Someone should work on that.
I'm directing this at programmers and OSS developers and asking seriously not rhetorically.
Why don't we have the equivalent in the gaming world, that the OS world has with Linux?
Why isn't there a killer Open Source game engine that outperforms Cryengine and Unreal III engine, is more sophisticated and stable? Where a 'distribution' of the engine is complete game with GPL Game engine + Creative Commons content???
Nice headline but the actual tool is more like a zooming and scrolling image. It would be really neat if this was anything like google maps and you actually deep zoomed into further detail. Even more interesting would be being able to go all the way down to the code and make changes!
Coders kind of learn to visualize the high level structure of their work, but it's very hard for one coder to grasp the whole program. Indeed to manage complex projects, this is how it's done with lots of diagrams and charts, otherwise nobody stands a chance of understanding it.
Actually being able to see it would be truely remarkable.
ARM architecture will allow them to dodge harassment from Microsoft goons. They can respond "we'd LOVE to have a derivative of your OS on our machines but unfortunately we use ARM chips!"
Negroponte probably got sick of pigs heads on his doorstep and anonymous phone calls at 4am.
I accuse you of down playing the issue, you conveniently missed the what was further down.
...If threats of violence fail to persuade the customer to pay for the protection policy proceed to detain the customer in the sound proof room behind the office and follow the procedures in the Stage 1 Pain and Humiliation guide. Do not proceed with Stage 2 Amputation and Mutilation until completing stage 1
...
...be sure to sever the finger/kneecap all the way through...
Tonight I'm going to start on a flash game. Basically your an intoxicated youth, you run around knifing people in town centres trying to stay off CCTV (because that's what youths do I understand), you need to steal bottles of liqour and syringes as power ups. If you drink too much your screen blurs, you fall down and The Fuzz get you, if you sober up, you go back to school get a job and the game is over. Watch out for the CCTV. What shall I call it? "Tax This!"
The Betas of Vista became slower and slower towards RTM, which was a dog. On my old AMD Athlon test box RTM was sluggish and unusable where the early builds I tried were plenty zippy on a XP-spec box even with 512mb. However as RTM approached, Vista performance improved on up to date 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, and on lower spec turned to crap.
So clearly Microsoft is not abandoning users of low-spec gear like they did with Vista. Without the features and total ram of more current hardware, Windows 7 seems to be properly optimised to compensate for lacking multiple cores, extra instruction sets, and manages memory better. It will run on machines that don't really run Vista now.
The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969
Not quite. DARPAnet was hardly 'Internet' as we know it, since the Internet is best defined as a collection of protocols and so much has changed since the DARPA days. For one example it used NCP to move data, TCP/IP and DNS were to follow in the 80's. BGP was standardised even later (1989).
The internet as we know it was whole by the time the web was ready, but by then removed enough from what was happening with DARPAnet. Right now, we're yet to see true Internet 2.0 be ready (IPV6, DNSSEC whatever the hell else), but at some point all the old protocols will be redundant and you could say the internet has been replaced.
Particle physics is generating huge volumes of data. I remember hearing about physicists needing to move a 40 terabyte set of data internationally in 1996 -- in the end they had to do it by a literal container load of disks. Today worldwide research networks (Yes, Internet 2.0, cliche) can move this data over fibre in practical time frames. LHC will be producing mind boggling amounts.
It's this kind of bleeding edge usage of the internet that is driving infrastructure development forward. Dollars spent at Fermi lab and the like have nontrivial indirect benefits this way. I would argue that the pool of research money that drove universities to need to connect up internationally and spawn the Internet 1.0 has much more than been paid off in gains to the global economy.
That's the justification for keeping this research going even in a worldwide recession.
They were tired of engineers having all the fun. The fact that there are no legal repercussions for false accusation is a giveaway.
Fun night in:
1. Get (student) friends together
2. Drink beer
3. Send accusation letters to ISPs accusing high-profile/celebrity New Zealanders of copyright infringement.
4. Drink more beer and wait for media frenzy
5. Drinksh more beers *hic*
6. Repeath!
I don't think New Zealand is on the same internet I am.
It isn't, or at least it hangs on by a few tenuous undersea cables.
NZ is one of the worst places in the developed world to file-share. Our pipes out to the big interweb are pretty narrow and our local bandwidth is pretty average. Here you can have a 10mbps cable line into fibre optic infrastructure and have low quality videos stall and buffer on youtube, just because it's 8pm and everybody else is doing the same thing. Most (affordable) internet plans charge you more or slow you down if you go over 10-20gb. P2P is not only very slow here but such capped usage doesn't really encourage anyone going nuts with file-sharing.
And they claim downloading copyrighted works is a problem in NZ?
We already share alot by swapping portable hard drives (I call them slut drives coz they get around) in this country, now it'll get worse.
I have an example which is in fact a common experience for me and others. I often get asked for advice on what is the best anti-virus security protection for a PC. e.g. a friend or family member with computer problems.
I give my usual spiel that the best protection is not to pay money for anything, it's hard to say it's worth it (Slowing down your system, possibly causing more crashes and program compatibility issues, and then only catching perhaps 90% of threats). Open-source or freeware tools will do just fine to actually scan and heal threats. Largely it's the users actions that are the initial problem. I then offer my time, for free, to teach some safe practices.
You can't just punch in your credit card number and expect adequate protection.
Mark my words, there are lots of botnet'd windows boxes that have full-paid anti-virus software on them running just fine. My parents had one of them. (problem was identified in the logs of their linux firewall). The solution was to wipe it, given them firefox with some add-ons and clam-av. Zero issues since.
If your machine is properly patched your very unlikely to be taken over by a worm attack. Following that, with the right software, your unlikely to be hijacked in your browser and then infected. With the right ISP you won't have spam and e-mail threats. It's down to how the user operates, and discouraging them from skipping virus scanning that keygen.exe when downloading warez. Largely it's browsing that's the problem. Firefox plus some add-ons, and a little bit of user coaching.
I really wonder in who's interests it is to keep users dumbed down on security matters. Which in todays world has become as important as locks and alarms on houses cars and businesses. It's protection of critical infrastructure.
Why pay a exorbitant monthly subscription for a security guard to stand outside your house, because your house is equipped with vulnerable locks and the occupants are poorly trained at keeping the doors closed when they go out?
In hindsight I should have modded as redundant the mandatory:
Install Linux
which is inexplicably modded +5 something.
If 90% of the world ran one Linux distribution we would still have a thriving ecosystem viruses, trojans (albeit on a lesser scale). Good design, transparency and rapid patching in OSS only goes so far, it's not magic immunity. There is also a fairly constant amount of problems between the keyboard and chair - now that will not go away. Windows is the most common, therefore the most attacked... is the statement that raises hackles for some. However it is the truth. In much the same way having millions of genetically identical crops/livestock in unnatural concentrations provides for massive outbreaks of everything from blight to foot and mouth disease. Likewise millions of humans living in close proximity results in plagues - the human immune system was not built for this. And so our information technology infrastructure suffers the same fundamental laws of nature, you have one monoculture of identical entities you invite pandemic infection.
So how do we live in 20-30 million person cities, and don't all get wiped out in two weeks by ebola? We have sanitation: we all get taught how to cover our mouths when we cough, cook food properly and wash our hands after visiting the lavatory etc etc and we have some sanitary measures to back it up, ie chemicals that can clense pathogens.
User education is the key. The first thing we can teach is to stay the hell away from clearly rogue companies. We can also stop beating redundant very tired drums.
Air force One isn't exactly a sitting duck, it is known to be equipped with counter-measures. The details are classified but it would be a safe guess to say it has chaff and flare launchers. Now, what do you think airborne lasers are being developed for? Defending air force one will be (is?) the first application
Slashdot Mirror
"(Blowouts would still be a risk, but that, too, can be largely obviated by requiring all tires to be of the run-flat variety.)"
No need. Blow outs are not a issue if the driver takes the correct action fast enough - i.e. in the kind of response time a computer could manage.
Your forgetting the inherent latency in meat space programming. Humans have a practical 1-2 second reaction time in response to danger. Robot drivers will put an end to nose-tail accidents, even if the tire of the car in front blows out, the rear car can start braking in milliseconds.
The idea that safety equipment and performance makes people drive more dangerously is ignoring the 3000-pound elephant in the room.
Already pointed out here is that many modern cars have a very insulated driving experience. It's the comfort to blame, that's the cause, the effect is cars don't give the driver enough feedback. It's that lack sensory input that makes you think you can talk on your mobile and drive at the same time.
To be specific cars have light throttle action - sometimes the natural weight of your foot, if not held back, would send you up to 90mph. Add to that light docile steering, responsive engines that are well silenced even at higher output and automatic gearboxes that do thinking for you. Combined with the ever winning battle against engine and road noise in car design it makes the experience of driving fast very easy and far less frightening than it should be.
The author is right about the old vs new car example. Lets ignore the fact your more still likely to die in the older car, on the balance of all things.
Boiling it down, accelerating and traveling at dangerous speed is far too effortless. The connection between the drivers senses and the laws of physics is purposely muffled by the car designers. This is a direct invitation for people who are even slightly impatient, over-confident or perhaps just outright reckless to drive dangerously.
This is a patently Not Good thing.
Oh SUVs and domesticated utility vehicles are especially to blame. Your sensation of speed is further reduced in a massive vehicle.
In my own experience, I realised a long time ago as I was doing 170kph in my late model nissan maxima that it didn't feel much faster than 100kph. Infact it was just as smooth. (errr on closed road with professional stunt drivers, your honour). My first car was a much loved 1970s mitsubushi GTO, albeit modified, much more scary at speed. Indeed I found myself slowing down and cruising, accelerating gently, because it was simply more comfortable and I could hold a conversation with a passneger.
This has bothered me for a long time, and with every new car I do modifications to get around some of this, such as a stiffer throttle spring and heavier power steering.
I also have hacks like smoothing the signal from the throttle sensor, as well as lean running and a automatic transmission gear-hold hack.
The vast majority of cars I drive from the last 10 years have very light steering, especially at speed, where a proper sports car has more progressive resistance and feedback at speed (translates into stability directly). Many cars it doesn't feel like the steering is connected to anything, this must contribute to accidents since a small accidental movement at highway speed can run you off the road or into another vehicle.
This also translates into 99/100 drivers have no chance of controlling a car should it enter a slide, which is likely to happen in anything other than ideal braking conditions.
Truth is, ABS and stability control (no I don't have it equipped to my car, I have the meatspace version: car control skill), have saved my bacon on more than one occasion, likely from a potentially injury causing accident.
Braking is also one that gets me. It requires far too little muscle strength to brake at a reasonable pace, I wonder how people manage to put on full emergency braking pressure, especially the eldery or a particularly sedantry obsese person, simply because they haven't got the praciced strength.
If you've ever driven a car without power steering or brakes, you're driving habits are much different in that vehicle. It's human nature to tend to minimize physical energy expenditure, you'll tend to drive slower.
Fixed? Isn't the internet perpetually broken and therefore needing more investment in hardware and expertise?
Do these have useful properties at all? Where's the (wild and unfounded) speculation?
paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2080
finally lithp architecture may have a chance. Yeth, Lithp.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/22/amazon-reader-review.html
If what your boss tells you to do is unethical, quit, and tell him why in your resignation letter.
Because quitting is so effective. Whats to say the next fool won't just do what he asked? It's much better to just do what your told, but fight the cause with reasonable logic and persistence. You never know, the higher-ups may not share the same opinion, especially if you highlight legal issues. One may end up with the bosses job even, if he's out on his ass for triggering litigation.
Encrypting torrent traffic goes a long way. It's still possible to detect P2P traffic behaviorally, rather than inspecting packet payload, i.e. by ports, packet size and behavior patterns. Randomize those and suddenly it becomes near impossible to block or throttle.
A P2P app could use HTTPS over port 80 - that would be impossible to detect.
Thus we get to fundamentals of why any prohibition scheme is fundamentally flawed.
At the end of the piracy arms race, if the winners are the big guys, we may end up with a sanitized internet where all traffic is illegal if it is not traffic on an approved protocol.
The internet's strength is it's solidarity and neutrality and the fact that there really aren't many black holes and darknets. We may yet see it break up eventually, as some have predicted.
What is deeply concerning is the way the MafRIAA's of the world are as highly organised as they are. Keeping my tin foil hat off, the same kind of push for legislative change is popping up in many countries just reccently, to disconnect infringing users on accusation being the common theme. In some cases the legislation is slipping through in the dead of night, in the case of New Zealand's section 92A. Which has now thankfully as good as dead in the water.
So they tried it on and it didn't work, in about 4-5 different countries, the ones where it's easier to push through legislation. This is typical behavior of lobbyists, cavalier lets-see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude, if it doesn't work they back it off a little, and try again with something less heavy - the process softens up the lawmakers and public's response. So is this the new strategy? Throttle instead of disconnect? Disturbingly, this is one ISPs may be much more inclined to support.
This generation have been fed on heroic IT success stories, like how a couple of college DNFs in a garage start up a company, and are billionaires before their 30, amongst other IT legends.
These are kids that do not recall a time where there were no computers in homes, typically. The younger kids, about age 20, do not know a world without the internet. They've also grown up aware of the worlds most pressing issues, overpopulation, global warming, general doom and gloom, and the now ubiquitous message that we simply don't have a future if we don't do something about it.
(Where my bunch are lazy and self-indulgent. But I kinda like that) Given that, there's little surprise there are are high expectations of gains from entering the IT industry, along with a ever decreasing tolerance for tedium and BS. I've observed this in the fresh out of school age group following my lot.
I don't think this is a bad thing however. I find many of them actually refreshingly motivated and willing to change things, rather suck-it-up and keep your head down and wait for your opportunity to move up. In comparison my age group (born circa 1980) is rather lazy.
I'm tempted to buy one of these to rename all my music stuff like "jobs sucks balls.mp3" listen to it announce the song.
If the ipod shuffle is a long running joke then this really takes the cake. Yet I'm perplexed by how this has not been identified by the fine institution of slashot.
The first ipod shuffle was priced higher than it's competition, was one of the few players without a display at the time, had mediocre sound quality and was locked-in to all hell to itunes. It just wasn't really any good. However it still sold, for the reason that people like to impulse buy things that are shiny and tiny .
Oh and it had apple trademark battery life claims. Hmmm? Oh you know what I mean, it would say n-hours of playback on the box, but you could only hope to possibly achieve somewhat less than n of this quoted time, otherwise time would stop and the shuffle would have infinite mass.
In lieu of actually improving the product how about adding a gimmicky feature, with some dubious marketing claims about it's originality?
Thus we arrive at what is without a doubt the single worst product that apple has ever released. Google that kind of statement I'm not the only person saying that, including apple-head websites.
It must be a joke.
Yes, thanks for asking, but I did once buy an Ipod. I took it back to the store citing local consumer law here 'must be fit for a purpose', resisting the urge to make a scene finding a way to crumble it into little bits, but ask for a trade down to a cheaper sony walkman, getting a refund of the difference, to have claimed 36-hour playback that you actually get and the best sound quality I have ever had out of a mp3 player.
If you really care about music you'll take your ipod whatever back to the store and smash it to bits on the counter with your shoe.
Personally, I'm less interested in the buisness or the open-source aspect of it and more interested in getting frags in Quake Live and still having enough money to buy necessities. Like porn and beer, which should also be free. Someone should work on that.
Done and done.
1. Get Girlfriend (kinky one).
2. Homebrew (not one them stupid kits).
I'm directing this at programmers and OSS developers and asking seriously not rhetorically.
Why don't we have the equivalent in the gaming world, that the OS world has with Linux?
Why isn't there a killer Open Source game engine that outperforms Cryengine and Unreal III engine, is more sophisticated and stable? Where a 'distribution' of the engine is complete game with GPL Game engine + Creative Commons content???
Explain. I'm perplexed.
Pay services start out expensive, proprietary and monopolised. So starts the three stages of business in the information age.
Eventually they become affordable and ubiquitous with competition driving down the market rate.
Finally it becomes difficult to charge for services at all, and micro payment schemes become a stop gap before it becomes unprofitable.
So wait a while and there will be ad-supported crime services!
Nice headline but the actual tool is more like a zooming and scrolling image. It would be really neat if this was anything like google maps and you actually deep zoomed into further detail. Even more interesting would be being able to go all the way down to the code and make changes! Coders kind of learn to visualize the high level structure of their work, but it's very hard for one coder to grasp the whole program. Indeed to manage complex projects, this is how it's done with lots of diagrams and charts, otherwise nobody stands a chance of understanding it.
Actually being able to see it would be truely remarkable.
ARM architecture will allow them to dodge harassment from Microsoft goons. They can respond "we'd LOVE to have a derivative of your OS on our machines but unfortunately we use ARM chips!"
Negroponte probably got sick of pigs heads on his doorstep and anonymous phone calls at 4am.
...
...be sure to sever the finger/kneecap all the way through ...
Tonight I'm going to start on a flash game. Basically your an intoxicated youth, you run around knifing people in town centres trying to stay off CCTV (because that's what youths do I understand), you need to steal bottles of liqour and syringes as power ups. If you drink too much your screen blurs, you fall down and The Fuzz get you, if you sober up, you go back to school get a job and the game is over. Watch out for the CCTV. What shall I call it? "Tax This!"
The Betas of Vista became slower and slower towards RTM, which was a dog. On my old AMD Athlon test box RTM was sluggish and unusable where the early builds I tried were plenty zippy on a XP-spec box even with 512mb. However as RTM approached, Vista performance improved on up to date 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, and on lower spec turned to crap.
So clearly Microsoft is not abandoning users of low-spec gear like they did with Vista. Without the features and total ram of more current hardware, Windows 7 seems to be properly optimised to compensate for lacking multiple cores, extra instruction sets, and manages memory better. It will run on machines that don't really run Vista now.
The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969
Not quite. DARPAnet was hardly 'Internet' as we know it, since the Internet is best defined as a collection of protocols and so much has changed since the DARPA days. For one example it used NCP to move data, TCP/IP and DNS were to follow in the 80's. BGP was standardised even later (1989). The internet as we know it was whole by the time the web was ready, but by then removed enough from what was happening with DARPAnet. Right now, we're yet to see true Internet 2.0 be ready (IPV6, DNSSEC whatever the hell else), but at some point all the old protocols will be redundant and you could say the internet has been replaced.
Particle physics is generating huge volumes of data. I remember hearing about physicists needing to move a 40 terabyte set of data internationally in 1996 -- in the end they had to do it by a literal container load of disks. Today worldwide research networks (Yes, Internet 2.0, cliche) can move this data over fibre in practical time frames. LHC will be producing mind boggling amounts.
It's this kind of bleeding edge usage of the internet that is driving infrastructure development forward. Dollars spent at Fermi lab and the like have nontrivial indirect benefits this way. I would argue that the pool of research money that drove universities to need to connect up internationally and spawn the Internet 1.0 has much more than been paid off in gains to the global economy.
That's the justification for keeping this research going even in a worldwide recession.
They were tired of engineers having all the fun. The fact that there are no legal repercussions for false accusation is a giveaway.
Fun night in:
1. Get (student) friends together
2. Drink beer
3. Send accusation letters to ISPs accusing high-profile/celebrity New Zealanders of copyright infringement.
4. Drink more beer and wait for media frenzy
5. Drinksh more beers *hic*
6. Repeath!
I don't think New Zealand is on the same internet I am.
It isn't, or at least it hangs on by a few tenuous undersea cables.
NZ is one of the worst places in the developed world to file-share. Our pipes out to the big interweb are pretty narrow and our local bandwidth is pretty average. Here you can have a 10mbps cable line into fibre optic infrastructure and have low quality videos stall and buffer on youtube, just because it's 8pm and everybody else is doing the same thing. Most (affordable) internet plans charge you more or slow you down if you go over 10-20gb. P2P is not only very slow here but such capped usage doesn't really encourage anyone going nuts with file-sharing.
And they claim downloading copyrighted works is a problem in NZ?
We already share alot by swapping portable hard drives (I call them slut drives coz they get around) in this country, now it'll get worse.
I give my usual spiel that the best protection is not to pay money for anything, it's hard to say it's worth it (Slowing down your system, possibly causing more crashes and program compatibility issues, and then only catching perhaps 90% of threats). Open-source or freeware tools will do just fine to actually scan and heal threats. Largely it's the users actions that are the initial problem. I then offer my time, for free, to teach some safe practices.
You can't just punch in your credit card number and expect adequate protection.
Mark my words, there are lots of botnet'd windows boxes that have full-paid anti-virus software on them running just fine. My parents had one of them. (problem was identified in the logs of their linux firewall). The solution was to wipe it, given them firefox with some add-ons and clam-av. Zero issues since.
If your machine is properly patched your very unlikely to be taken over by a worm attack. Following that, with the right software, your unlikely to be hijacked in your browser and then infected. With the right ISP you won't have spam and e-mail threats. It's down to how the user operates, and discouraging them from skipping virus scanning that keygen.exe when downloading warez. Largely it's browsing that's the problem. Firefox plus some add-ons, and a little bit of user coaching.
I really wonder in who's interests it is to keep users dumbed down on security matters. Which in todays world has become as important as locks and alarms on houses cars and businesses. It's protection of critical infrastructure.
Why pay a exorbitant monthly subscription for a security guard to stand outside your house, because your house is equipped with vulnerable locks and the occupants are poorly trained at keeping the doors closed when they go out?
In hindsight I should have modded as redundant the mandatory:
Install Linux
which is inexplicably modded +5 something.
If 90% of the world ran one Linux distribution we would still have a thriving ecosystem viruses, trojans (albeit on a lesser scale). Good design, transparency and rapid patching in OSS only goes so far, it's not magic immunity. There is also a fairly constant amount of problems between the keyboard and chair - now that will not go away. Windows is the most common, therefore the most attacked... is the statement that raises hackles for some. However it is the truth. In much the same way having millions of genetically identical crops/livestock in unnatural concentrations provides for massive outbreaks of everything from blight to foot and mouth disease. Likewise millions of humans living in close proximity results in plagues - the human immune system was not built for this. And so our information technology infrastructure suffers the same fundamental laws of nature, you have one monoculture of identical entities you invite pandemic infection.
So how do we live in 20-30 million person cities, and don't all get wiped out in two weeks by ebola? We have sanitation: we all get taught how to cover our mouths when we cough, cook food properly and wash our hands after visiting the lavatory etc etc and we have some sanitary measures to back it up, ie chemicals that can clense pathogens.
User education is the key. The first thing we can teach is to stay the hell away from clearly rogue companies. We can also stop beating redundant very tired drums.
Build something idiot proof and someone will build a better idiot.
Air force One isn't exactly a sitting duck, it is known to be equipped with counter-measures. The details are classified but it would be a safe guess to say it has chaff and flare launchers. Now, what do you think airborne lasers are being developed for? Defending air force one will be (is?) the first application