With Windows you get the so called bloatware or trialware which is included with the installation at in almost 100% of the cases.
I don't believe for a second that the bloatware not only pays the cost of the Windows OS, Office, and whatever-else license, but additionally turns a $50 profit. There just aren't that many users turning their 30-day free trial of McAfee into the full paid version, to make the bloatware worth paying that much to Dell.
Is Google actually getting the data from the modded apps?
Yes, Google is certainly gathering analytics from navigation handsets, but that is never their ONLY source of traffic flow information.
In the US, various government agencies make near-real-time traffic information publicly available. In addition, a number of private companies aggregate that info with their own additional sources, and re-sell it to other companies who need traffic information.
A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone (and accessories) signals to monitor traffic patterns? It's amazing! Why doesn't Slashdot ever accept a story on the subject?
Samsung also has the least-expensive laser printers (for home use at least, not sure about higher-end models). Though it's no longer produced, I'm very happy with my $150 CLP-325W color-laser printer with ethernet and WiFi (g), though I hear early-adopters had to live with some firmware bugs. 4W idle, and 0.5W switched-off. Also, the "w" was their only CLP model that included PCL compatibility.
Their earlier entries into the market weren't so stellar... Lots of paper jams with the CLP-300, not the best longevity, and idle and powered-off power levels were terribly high. That said, toner for the CLP-300 is dirt cheap, while newer models aren't so competitive. For home use it makes no difference, but for workgroup use it might matter.
A printer should be a computer that only receives files and prints them. They should not be "connected" to a network any more than a UDP package is connected to its recipient.
Oh good, because we wouldn't want to have any assurances that our 100MB print jobs were transferred to the printer successfully... Or know when they're running low on toner... or that there's a paper jam and the printer has caught fire... or be able to tell it to use the media in tray number 5... or be able to connect a printer to your WiFi network.
Does anyone know if this exploit could be used to alter/remove the tracking dots every color laser printer marks its documents with?
Samsung is basically the only manufacturer that DOESN'T insert yellow tracking dots. Your own link DOESN'T include Samsung on the list of manufacturers to call, and the EFF link of affected models lists all tested Samsung units as free and clear.
we had a failure mode where the most responsive server was one that had tripped over a subtle bug causing all subsequent requests to that instance of the service to almost immediately respond with an http 200 and empty content
Load balancers can be configured to verify the checksum of the content returned, and not just assume the return code is accurate.
I'd rather have 98% of the developers focused on application logic and a specialized 2% of the developers providing productivity improvements to the core platform.
The whole idea of writing crap code, and "optimizing" it later, whether with automated tools or by handing it off to others, works very, very poorly in practice. Putting a little effort in, at the start, to architect services properly, and keeping an eye on the design through the coding process, pays off in spades later on.
If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge?
Physics says "no". The bus probably weighs an order of magnitude more than your vehicle... The passengers might not even notice that you ran into them, and mistake the collision for having hit a pothole. The real question would be, say, a dump truck following too closely behind a motorcycle...
In general, I want machines to be as stupid an fail-safe as possible. Think: missile defense systems around an airport... The most likely failure mode is the "protection" system accidentally turning on you, and causing a higher death-toll than the "threat" would have accomplished in a century.
The vast majority of load balancing algorithms on VIPs are round robin-based.
A fair point... Stay away from the cheaper units, and make sure you use something that uses latency to make proper decisions.
This application allows balancing of the services - not the servers.
Services these days are damn near all TCP/IP based... Your front-end is making a network request to a Tomcat backend, which is running an app that's make JSON requests to some other service, which is pulling some data from some database, which is... you get the point. Every single one of those can go through a load-balancer, even if they all happen to be running on the same local machine. Of course the onus is on the admins and devs not to use 127.0.0.1 everywhere, and do proper networking, instead.
An HTTP load balancer is great for HTTP calls, but not everything in a complex infrastructure is HTTP
A common load balancer isn't restricted to HTTP. Any TCP connection can be load balanced quite well.
And you do realize that you followed up a weak critique of a backend scalability tool with a critique about a failing of their front-end application, right? What relevance does that have?
No, I followed-up by saying the old API was superior, while less taxing on the back-end... A common issue with "Web-2.0" interfaces.
I hate to say it, but the only thing I take away from this is that Netflix's software is such an unwieldy mess that they need a library just to enforce application separation and provide default fall-backs when a service call does fail.
FWIW, my preferred "circuit breaker" is a load balancer... All possible requests are network calls that go through load balancers, where it goes to the most responsive server, and if your admins screw up and none of the servers are responding quickly enough to answer the health check in time, a standard HTTP service unavailable response is supplied, without hammering the busy back-end.
And with all that complexity and effort, Netflix still can't handle two movies in your queue being assigned the same number, or a mixture of reordering and deleting titles at the same time... Things it handled just fine years ago, when it was a much smaller, web-1.0 service that didn't even require javascript.
When your car gets towed for parking in front of a fire hydrant, there's no trial before-hand. That doesn't mean you've been deprived of due-process, just because your property is seized up-front.
RAM goes bad over time -- a shockingly short time. (google the papers (by google) about RAM failure rates, and what they do after 18 months). After a couple of years error rates go up -- way up.
Google's problems stem from high temperatures, and extremely high utilization... Their servers are maxed-out at 100% continually, and their memory is almost always past full (they've complained that the Linux OOM Killer isn't fast and aggressive enough for them).
My experience has been that after 24 months, you should just toss the ram dimms in the trash and start with new ones -- and you might as well max out the ram at that point. Otherwise the machine starts getting flaky as soft and uncorrected errors happen with increasing frequency.
Your statements REEK of computer superstition. It mostly comes from Windows users, as all the things running behind-the-scenes and layers of abstraction make for a system that is non-deterministic. But many people can tell you, error rates even with consumer hardware are EXTREMELY LOW. Even low-end hardware can manage uptimes of years without problems.
And furthermore, while I've never played on Google's scale, I've been in charge of THOUSANDS of servers, all with ECC memory and all kinds of monitoring in-place, and I can say, conclusively, that memory errors are very rare, even among servers 5+ years-old. Though there are those few outliers that have serious issues, sometimes immediately, sometimes years on. But the idea that ALL your DIMMs are going bad after 2 years is absolutely, positively ridiculous.
I've heard "return rates" used to claim the junkiest brands were actually the best.
Return rates are highly affected by purchase price, warranty terms, customer service, etc. I don't want to prefer the company that makes returns the biggest and most expensive hassle, and therefore has the lowest "return rate" figure.
And as for bad caps, I doubt anybody got through that one unscathed, unless by pure dumb luck.
Walmart was somewhat similar to Target but at least their site loaded and Amazon's prices were lower for the same or very similar product and next-day option at $3.99 or free at 2 day killed anything I saw elsewhere.
I don't see how you can possibly prefer Amazon's site to Walmart's. Walmart actually has everything categorized, and not the same item in 15 different categories. You can browse their site, and see EVERYTHING in that category. When you sort by price, it damn-well works, not randomly scattering the results. And finally, they've got tons of reviews, and right at the top there's a percentage of reviewers who would choose to buy the item again. And I'm not even getting into how Amazon chooses to splatter junk all over every otherwise empty square inch of every page.
It's a choice between organized information, and wide open chaos, ala eBay.
Seriously is there anything worth shopping for in a mobo?
Are you kidding? The mobo is the #1 part to fail, and the cheap ones do that quite often. Since replacing a mobo is a huge hassle, I have no decided to stick STRICTLY to the big three... Asus / MSI / Gigabyte. I don't buy mobos from anyone else, as the lifetime, compatibility, and warranty is so much better.
Buying a PCChips mobo is a good way to get a system that's minimally working, but practically useless. Last one I got wouldn't boot if one of the 6 screw holes was grounded... Had all kinds of incompatibility issues with accessories, etc.
Mobos are more important these days than ever... Your power management is dependent on the mobo maker putting the proper ACPI in the firmware, and any weirdness is extremely difficult to work-around, and effectively means Suspend / Hibernate / Cool'n'Quiet / etc may never work on your system.
... So saying it ships without pins doesn't really say much.
The Japanese article he cites, doesn't say the chips are "pin-less", it specifically says Intel's Broadwell chips will be packaged as "BGA" (Ball-grid array).
Right, so holding up a definition from your favourite dictionary wins.
No, I've referenced several dictionaries, and encyclopedias. Oxford is the only deviant that seeks to expand the term to accommodate common mis-use of the word.
Don't use atheism as a straw man to make agnosticism seem the rational rising above the irrationality of atheism and theism.
We're talking beliefs here, rationality doesn't enter into it. Besides, I've personally encountered several such irrational atheists (hence my original post), so they most certainly do exist in decent numbers, and the term is perfectly useful. It's not my fault that some of the folks you may identify with, just happen to be just as irrational (and frankly, batshit insane) as the various religious extremists.
Other sources have similar definitions of the term. Wikipedia uses a similar definition as well:
"Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5]"
Those definitions seem to have been written from a religious point of view.
Tone down the persecution-complex there, bud. Just because you've been using a word wrong for years, doesn't change its meaning, and make all the dictionary writers conspirators to discredit you. I'm sure if you take a few seconds to look, you'll find a perfectly cromulent alternate term to suit you.
: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
First, let's not confuse atheists with agnostics...
Speaking for myself only, I'd call all self-assured atheists crazy zealots. If you profess to be rational, but are CERTAIN that there can't be any deity out there, you're just nuts. There's the simple fact that you can't prove a negative, the fact that insufficient evidence to prove a positive does not disprove the original point, etc.
If you don't know what's out there, so you don't believe in any particular religion (agnostic), I say more power to you. If instead, you're an angry, loud-mouthed jack-ass who has to spout-off about how sure you are that there's no deity, and jump into every discussion, attacking the beliefs of all those who disagree with you, calling them idiots who deserve to be harmed... You're just as much of a blind believer, and a dangerous zealot who would probably kill for his religion should the appropriate circumstances arrise.
"Despite the US still being conservative compared to the progessive world, it is definetly far more liberal than nations such as Saudi Arabia"
You're way the hell off base. Liberal vs conservative is completely irrelevant to proper stewardship of the internet. The defining question is how highly you regard freedom of speech, and the US is decidedly number one in the world, at least among large nations.
European countries would censor the internet... Posting a negative review about a merchant EVEN IF COMPLETELY TRUE, could lead to jail time, so such things would be banned from the net. The same goes for things like "hate speech" from neo nazi groups, or even just any display of nazi logos, which makes historic WWII relics impossible to sell on the internet in those countries.
But at the same time, countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Australia want to block content and filter everything from anti-government speech, to pornography, and will cripple the internet to do so, without a second thought.
The US' big problem is being beholden to media companies, so blocking of copyright infringing materials has gone much too far. But this is a far less crippling issue than any of the other countries would wish to impose if they had control.
What country would you nominate as the best steward of the internet, having both sufficient technical prowess, and even stronger support for the free-flow of information, with no interest in filtering?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe for a second that the bloatware not only pays the cost of the Windows OS, Office, and whatever-else license, but additionally turns a $50 profit. There just aren't that many users turning their 30-day free trial of McAfee into the full paid version, to make the bloatware worth paying that much to Dell.
Yes, Google is certainly gathering analytics from navigation handsets, but that is never their ONLY source of traffic flow information.
In the US, various government agencies make near-real-time traffic information publicly available. In addition, a number of private companies aggregate that info with their own additional sources, and re-sell it to other companies who need traffic information.
A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone (and accessories) signals to monitor traffic patterns? It's amazing! Why doesn't Slashdot ever accept a story on the subject?
You can read more here:
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/19/143247
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/19/0745248
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/01/159241
http://slashdot.org/story/05/10/16/076217
http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/30/1243247
http://slashdot.org/story/02/06/13/0428229
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/10/2337259
http://slashdot.org/story/07/08/31/168228
http://slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/2318245
http://slashdot.org/story/06/11/05/2220211
http://slashdot.org/story/02/10/14/1224244
There, that's better. Hopefully, one day they'll come to their senses, and post a story or two on the subject.
Samsung also has the least-expensive laser printers (for home use at least, not sure about higher-end models). Though it's no longer produced, I'm very happy with my $150 CLP-325W color-laser printer with ethernet and WiFi (g), though I hear early-adopters had to live with some firmware bugs. 4W idle, and 0.5W switched-off. Also, the "w" was their only CLP model that included PCL compatibility.
Their earlier entries into the market weren't so stellar... Lots of paper jams with the CLP-300, not the best longevity, and idle and powered-off power levels were terribly high. That said, toner for the CLP-300 is dirt cheap, while newer models aren't so competitive. For home use it makes no difference, but for workgroup use it might matter.
Oh good, because we wouldn't want to have any assurances that our 100MB print jobs were transferred to the printer successfully... Or know when they're running low on toner... or that there's a paper jam and the printer has caught fire... or be able to tell it to use the media in tray number 5... or be able to connect a printer to your WiFi network.
Samsung is basically the only manufacturer that DOESN'T insert yellow tracking dots. Your own link DOESN'T include Samsung on the list of manufacturers to call, and the EFF link of affected models lists all tested Samsung units as free and clear.
If anything, this is REVERSE karma.
Load balancers can be configured to verify the checksum of the content returned, and not just assume the return code is accurate.
The whole idea of writing crap code, and "optimizing" it later, whether with automated tools or by handing it off to others, works very, very poorly in practice. Putting a little effort in, at the start, to architect services properly, and keeping an eye on the design through the coding process, pays off in spades later on.
Physics says "no". The bus probably weighs an order of magnitude more than your vehicle... The passengers might not even notice that you ran into them, and mistake the collision for having hit a pothole. The real question would be, say, a dump truck following too closely behind a motorcycle...
In general, I want machines to be as stupid an fail-safe as possible. Think: missile defense systems around an airport... The most likely failure mode is the "protection" system accidentally turning on you, and causing a higher death-toll than the "threat" would have accomplished in a century.
A fair point... Stay away from the cheaper units, and make sure you use something that uses latency to make proper decisions.
Services these days are damn near all TCP/IP based... Your front-end is making a network request to a Tomcat backend, which is running an app that's make JSON requests to some other service, which is pulling some data from some database, which is... you get the point. Every single one of those can go through a load-balancer, even if they all happen to be running on the same local machine. Of course the onus is on the admins and devs not to use 127.0.0.1 everywhere, and do proper networking, instead.
All I get from your comment is the fact that you've NEVER used a load balancer before, and don't really know what it is and does.
A common load balancer isn't restricted to HTTP. Any TCP connection can be load balanced quite well.
No, I followed-up by saying the old API was superior, while less taxing on the back-end... A common issue with "Web-2.0" interfaces.
I hate to say it, but the only thing I take away from this is that Netflix's software is such an unwieldy mess that they need a library just to enforce application separation and provide default fall-backs when a service call does fail.
FWIW, my preferred "circuit breaker" is a load balancer... All possible requests are network calls that go through load balancers, where it goes to the most responsive server, and if your admins screw up and none of the servers are responding quickly enough to answer the health check in time, a standard HTTP service unavailable response is supplied, without hammering the busy back-end.
And with all that complexity and effort, Netflix still can't handle two movies in your queue being assigned the same number, or a mixture of reordering and deleting titles at the same time... Things it handled just fine years ago, when it was a much smaller, web-1.0 service that didn't even require javascript.
When your car gets towed for parking in front of a fire hydrant, there's no trial before-hand. That doesn't mean you've been deprived of due-process, just because your property is seized up-front.
Google's problems stem from high temperatures, and extremely high utilization... Their servers are maxed-out at 100% continually, and their memory is almost always past full (they've complained that the Linux OOM Killer isn't fast and aggressive enough for them).
Your statements REEK of computer superstition. It mostly comes from Windows users, as all the things running behind-the-scenes and layers of abstraction make for a system that is non-deterministic. But many people can tell you, error rates even with consumer hardware are EXTREMELY LOW. Even low-end hardware can manage uptimes of years without problems.
And furthermore, while I've never played on Google's scale, I've been in charge of THOUSANDS of servers, all with ECC memory and all kinds of monitoring in-place, and I can say, conclusively, that memory errors are very rare, even among servers 5+ years-old. Though there are those few outliers that have serious issues, sometimes immediately, sometimes years on. But the idea that ALL your DIMMs are going bad after 2 years is absolutely, positively ridiculous.
I've heard "return rates" used to claim the junkiest brands were actually the best.
Return rates are highly affected by purchase price, warranty terms, customer service, etc. I don't want to prefer the company that makes returns the biggest and most expensive hassle, and therefore has the lowest "return rate" figure.
And as for bad caps, I doubt anybody got through that one unscathed, unless by pure dumb luck.
I don't see how you can possibly prefer Amazon's site to Walmart's. Walmart actually has everything categorized, and not the same item in 15 different categories. You can browse their site, and see EVERYTHING in that category. When you sort by price, it damn-well works, not randomly scattering the results. And finally, they've got tons of reviews, and right at the top there's a percentage of reviewers who would choose to buy the item again. And I'm not even getting into how Amazon chooses to splatter junk all over every otherwise empty square inch of every page.
It's a choice between organized information, and wide open chaos, ala eBay.
Are you kidding? The mobo is the #1 part to fail, and the cheap ones do that quite often. Since replacing a mobo is a huge hassle, I have no decided to stick STRICTLY to the big three... Asus / MSI / Gigabyte. I don't buy mobos from anyone else, as the lifetime, compatibility, and warranty is so much better.
Buying a PCChips mobo is a good way to get a system that's minimally working, but practically useless. Last one I got wouldn't boot if one of the 6 screw holes was grounded... Had all kinds of incompatibility issues with accessories, etc.
Mobos are more important these days than ever... Your power management is dependent on the mobo maker putting the proper ACPI in the firmware, and any weirdness is extremely difficult to work-around, and effectively means Suspend / Hibernate / Cool'n'Quiet / etc may never work on your system.
The Japanese article he cites, doesn't say the chips are "pin-less", it specifically says Intel's Broadwell chips will be packaged as "BGA" (Ball-grid array).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array
Hey iPhone Users!
BB10 has maps...
And they don't suck!
End of review
No, I've referenced several dictionaries, and encyclopedias. Oxford is the only deviant that seeks to expand the term to accommodate common mis-use of the word.
It's no straw man by any stretch of the imagination. You can find LOTS of people who hold such views, even in this very thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3270605&cid=42082221
It's hardly my fault you choose to mis-use a term.
I'd just like to thank you for stepping-in to this conversation at the right time, and completely proving every one of my points.
We're talking beliefs here, rationality doesn't enter into it. Besides, I've personally encountered several such irrational atheists (hence my original post), so they most certainly do exist in decent numbers, and the term is perfectly useful. It's not my fault that some of the folks you may identify with, just happen to be just as irrational (and frankly, batshit insane) as the various religious extremists.
Other sources have similar definitions of the term. Wikipedia uses a similar definition as well:
"Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5]"
Tone down the persecution-complex there, bud. Just because you've been using a word wrong for years, doesn't change its meaning, and make all the dictionary writers conspirators to discredit you. I'm sure if you take a few seconds to look, you'll find a perfectly cromulent alternate term to suit you.
According to Merriam-Webster...
Agnostic:
: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
Atheist:
: one who believes that there is no deity
First, let's not confuse atheists with agnostics...
Speaking for myself only, I'd call all self-assured atheists crazy zealots. If you profess to be rational, but are CERTAIN that there can't be any deity out there, you're just nuts. There's the simple fact that you can't prove a negative, the fact that insufficient evidence to prove a positive does not disprove the original point, etc.
If you don't know what's out there, so you don't believe in any particular religion (agnostic), I say more power to you. If instead, you're an angry, loud-mouthed jack-ass who has to spout-off about how sure you are that there's no deity, and jump into every discussion, attacking the beliefs of all those who disagree with you, calling them idiots who deserve to be harmed... You're just as much of a blind believer, and a dangerous zealot who would probably kill for his religion should the appropriate circumstances arrise.
"Despite the US still being conservative compared to the progessive world, it is definetly far more liberal than nations such as Saudi Arabia"
You're way the hell off base. Liberal vs conservative is completely irrelevant to proper stewardship of the internet. The defining question is how highly you regard freedom of speech, and the US is decidedly number one in the world, at least among large nations.
European countries would censor the internet... Posting a negative review about a merchant EVEN IF COMPLETELY TRUE, could lead to jail time, so such things would be banned from the net. The same goes for things like "hate speech" from neo nazi groups, or even just any display of nazi logos, which makes historic WWII relics impossible to sell on the internet in those countries.
But at the same time, countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Australia want to block content and filter everything from anti-government speech, to pornography, and will cripple the internet to do so, without a second thought.
The US' big problem is being beholden to media companies, so blocking of copyright infringing materials has gone much too far. But this is a far less crippling issue than any of the other countries would wish to impose if they had control.
What country would you nominate as the best steward of the internet, having both sufficient technical prowess, and even stronger support for the free-flow of information, with no interest in filtering?