If you are not passing another vehicle, than you are breaking the law and are doing something that is not safe. If you are not passing another vehicle, get out of the passing lane.
In California, it's perfectly LEGAL to be a left-lane bandit. In other states, you may be okay until someone flashes their high-beams at you, then you have to pull over. Or in some cases, you are, indeed, required to travel right, and only pass left, but I strongly suggest you actually check your local laws before assuming you're harassing a law-breaker, because they might be perfectly in the clear, while you get yourself arrested for aggressive driving.
- This road is where there is a lot of flat land. Even at 85 you can see where you will be in a few minutes (and virtually not take a turn until you get there). You can also see any animals that may enter this road, but it's mostly a bridge anyway which avoids that.
I've driven through Texas a few times. I-40 fits your definition, but the last time I drove it, the fog across hundreds of miles of it was so thick that tail-lights would suddenly pop out of the mist in-front of me. I slowed down considerably, but I was seriously concerned that folks behind me were not, and I risked a rear-end collision. That's always the trickiest issue with fog... Besides, it's laborious to always be on your guard for cars suddenly appearing in front of you without warning. How many people do you think will be such careful drivers, and how many do you think will continue to drive over the speed limit even when the weather gets bad? I'd certainly have some reservations.
I suspect we are probably over the carrying capacity for our current behavior.
No such thing. "Our current behavior" is changing daily, as prices go up and down. Prices are dictated by, among other things, how much free "capacity" is available. More people just means higher prices, and people changing their behavior to compensate. It's always happened... It will continue to happen. Maybe 20 years from now, beef will be a luxury again, but we're orders of magnitude away from not being about to house and feed the entire population of the planet, even with just basic technology.
This is a lot of noise for nothing. For kids and amateurs, here's a quick summary...
fsync used-to be the go-to, but that was decades ago, when IDE was in full-swing. Back then, there was a big hub-hub about drives lying. Since then, it's been common knowledge and status-quo that fsync is not trustworthy, end of story.
Today, we have WRITE BARRIERS, and they work great. Ever since, say, the advent of 60GB IDE drives, I've never found a drive that doesn't support write barriers, and in my conversations with Theodore Tso (maintainer of EXT3/EXT4), he said as much as well. I was surprised when I started up DRBD on a test system and found the system complaining the old 40GB drive I was using for testing didn't support write barriers, so that's how long ago we're talking about this having LAST been an issue.
There's still some issue with non-journaled file systems. If you're a BSDer, you really need to disable disk cache to prevent risks of corruption with soft updates. The XFS guys recommend disabling disk cache as well, but I suspect that's just because larger RAID arrays may have entire large files cached, resulting in some individual file loss after power-outages.
Any RAID controllers will have such an option... Write-through and write-back... with advice to be sure your RAID cache's backup battery is working fine before enabling write caching.
Don't expect much. MVNOs typically only have rights to sell ancient tech... eg. 2G phones when 3G was new, and now 3G phones while LTE is rolling out.
That's why it was such a huge deal that Sprint recently allowed MVNOs to use their LTE network... Imagine cheap, pre-paid 4G LTE ala Boost / Virgin Mobile. It could have a huge impact in driving down consumer costs, and driving more customers to Sprint, potentially growing them to the point that they aren't disadvantaged when competing with AT&T and Verizon.
I have no films and only a couple GB worth of songs.
If a phone has good "data creation" hardware (i.e., a good camera) it really needs a lot of, or expandable, storage.
Note: "the cloud" is not the answer.
The cloud is the answer...
I used-to want huge amounts of storage for my phone/tablet/netbook. In fact I used-to carry around 2.5" HDDs in external caddies, back when USB thumb drives didn't have huge capacities.
Now, I don't even have the storage on my phone/tablet/netbook maxed-out... I found lower capacity SD cards were much faster and much cheaper at the time.
The biggest change is video. These days, I'm almost always near an internet connection (wifi or good cell signal) where I can stream videos in real-time. I did a little CGI scripting on my home DVR PC, and all my movies get transcoded in realtime down to the dimentions and codecs needed for my low-def phone/tablet/netbook screens. For those who want to do less work with it, VLC Remote is widely available for Android / iPhone. I can see internet speeds not being fast enough for people who want to watch highdef videos on their tablets, yet, but phones are definitely good to go, as are most low-end or old tablets, and anyone who doesn't care about video quality quite that much.
And if bandwidth is fast enough for video, you know it's plenty fast for audio, still pictures, etc. In fact my car stereo is nothing more than a bluetooth receiver... Radio for me is almost entirely Pandora, with some PRI or other live streaming on occasion, plenty are available in the app store.
The answer: the cloud. And if you actually have a good reason to reject it, well, there's always options like USB-host mode, and WiFi storage devices.
What in the hell are you talking about? I ask because it doesn't bear any resemblance to the conversation I took part in. How do your comments have ANYTHING to do with what I quoted or said?
With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around.
Not true. Frequency reuse for teleco frequencies can be very, very, very high. Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power. No addition spectrum required. This is oversimplified, but the concept is entirely correct. There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
Don't worry, most don't want to move to Wash. People are moving towards the sun-belt, not away from it... Every year, the migration is going further south and west. Florida and Texas are booming, and Phoenix and California are growing, too.
The average high in Mountain View never gets below 57F, and the average low never below freezing. Shut up about cold.
"Average" doesn't mean much. And besides, I didn't say Northern California was Canada, just that the weather isn't much better than London.
And what is it with everything north of LA being "northern california"?
No, go a bit north of LA and you reach Central California. But Silicon Valley is squarely in Northern Cal.
Personally, I hate the LA basin being called Southern California, too. I don't live there, but rather in an area of So.Cal where the weather isn't so mild, it isn't so damn crowded and polluted, traffic isn't a nightmare, and I'm not falling over people taking up every square inch of available land.
I already explained this in a reply to my own comment, which you obviously didn't read. It was meant to go in my original comment, but I submitted quickly before the lightning knocked out the power again.
*Actually, the "nice" (consistently around 70F degrees) weather in Souther California, is confined to coastal areas... The Los Angeles Basin, Orange County, and San Diego. Go inland just a bit, across the mountain ranges to the north or east, and you'll hit desert, with very high temperatures in the summer, and possibly sub-freezing temperatures in winter.
Personally, I hate the "nice" weather in the coastal areas, what I'd call consistently cold... I much prefer the deserts, with nice warm temperatures much of the year, and winters cold enough for snow, as well as frequent strong winds blowing the horrible air pollution away.
But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves.
Bull! SOUTHERN California has nice weather*... Northern California (where Silicon Valley is actually located) can easily rival Brittan for cold and rain and fog.
In the same way Brittan benefits from Atlantic currents, warming it up to livable temperatures, while being at the same latitude as Canada... Northern California gets the cold Pacific currents, coming down from the Arctic, making for cold weather even in summer, and a comfy and hospitable home for great white sharks.
Hell, this week's forecast temperatures for London and San Fran are practically IDENTICAL:
If you want wonderful weather, take Florida, where it never gets down to freezing... Or ANYWHERE in the tropics. They sure don't have their own silicon valleys, despite the superior weather.
While fake reviews are never good... there are enough incompetent idiots out there posting reviews, that requires specific strategies to deal with.
Using walmart.com as an example, they ask everyone whether they'd suggest the item to a friend, and compile the votes. Anything less than 70% posiitive is likely a crap product. And you can't buy enough reviewers to move that percentage too far into positive territory. From there, reading the top two comments, then reading through as many of the comments that rated the product poorly, to see what kind of pitfalls I need to be concerned with, and selectively discarding any which could be defects (unless there's a high number of such comments.)
This strategy works well on many sites. Sadly Amazon doesn't allow sorting comments by lowest rating first, nor do they request whether you'd recomend the product, so there it's a free-for-all... read as many as you can stomache and take the chance. But even there, buying reviewers wouldn't give them enough signal-to-noise to hide a significant number of negative reviews.
However, they certainly COULD buy enough reviewers to damage the otherwise positive reputation of a competitors product. I suspect this doesn't happen because such behavior might legally be considered libel.
Reviews certainly are immensely useful... I couldn't stand buying from some stores (like walmart) because you can't trust the company to only stock decent-quality products. But with a large number of reviews, consumers are finally empowered to keep from falling victim to such dirty behavior, and a little bit of peeing in the pool won't be able to change that.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things
Nope. A quick search shows that cubesats cost $40k to launch, and developing a cubesat reportedly runs from $25-50k, easily a significant fraction of launch price.
Is the cost of computing anywhere near that significant [...] rather than a slightly more expensive, but by no means all that esoteric, ARM SoC board designed for embedded applications?
You really should read TFA. Cell phones are perfect because they include a compass, gyro, camera, etc. A LOT more than just an ARM SoC. Hell, they can probably sell the screens on eBay and make back a significant portion of their purchase price.
Thought TFA didn't say so, the power management in Android phones is probably better than what you'll get anywhere else... Standby and talk time are major advertised features, so manufacturers make sure it's working as well as possible. And with a satellite, electrical limits are a major issue.
In the same vein, is there an advantage to using an Android environment(whose virtues lie primarily in UI and 3rd party applications) rather than a standard embedded linux or other OS?
Android is a standard embedded Linux OS... It's basically just got a custom UI instead of X11. From the command-line, you wouldn't know the difference. Many people install Debian on their Android phones...
This whole security scare is a false dilemma, people who need secure systems know how to do it. [...] There is a reason we use physical keys to control nuke's, rather than, say a garage door opener.
You're the one making this a false dilemma... between absolutely zero security, and nuclear bunker-level insane security procedures.
Your bank absolutely is not going to go for nuclear bunker-levels of security, yet a pretty good amount of security is needed there. Your proposal is... nothing.
and then walk through your server farm swapping the keys
Spoken like someone who has never managed a server farm...
Server farms are lights-out. Having people walk around to physically switch around hardware is going completely backwards...
To me, your idea reeks of bringing back the good old AT&T operators, manually patching calls through a switchboard... Positively primitive, extremely inconvenient, very expensive, and utterly impossible to scale-up.
Diesel here in CA is under $4, usually a few cents less than unleaded, and in any case, generators can use the road-tax-free supply (ala. Home heating oil) which drops the price significantly, still.
How about a NON FLASHABLE bios? - we used to have them. We used to have non shitty programmers that could write code that didn't have to be updated every 6 months. There was a time a flashable bios was justified. Now it's just a cross between laziness and DRM.
This is idiotic. Back when those non-flashable BIOSes existed, the BIOS was damn tiny. These days it's still got all that legacy code, while also handling ACPI, power management, fan speed, configuring CPU/PCI/RAM bus speeds and multipliers (instead of jumpers of dip switches), as well as safety features like detecting when a system doesn't boot and going into safe mode so you can change those CPU settings again. The BIOS gets pressed into other use as well, including enumerating the USB bus to find bootable devices, managing settings for on-board graphics and sound, and even work-arounds for design bugs in CPUs.
Seeing this article reveals we have some very stupid people in some very high places in the IT world.
No, it's pretty clear the stupidity is localized right here on/.
if you want protected BIOS, I suggest it be read only, put it in a socket, and if needs an update, you have one shipped, or go to your local store and get one.
That'll work well when you need to update the BIOS on hundreds of servers...
And I would agree that updating the BIOS on server hardware is particularly exceptional.
WTF are you talking about? Every time a server is having hardware issues, one of the first steps the trained-monkeys at Dell tell you to do is update the firmware (if newer versions are available), including the BIOS.
Welcome to/., where a prereq for sweeping generalizations is that you don't actually have any experience in the field...
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In California, it's perfectly LEGAL to be a left-lane bandit. In other states, you may be okay until someone flashes their high-beams at you, then you have to pull over. Or in some cases, you are, indeed, required to travel right, and only pass left, but I strongly suggest you actually check your local laws before assuming you're harassing a law-breaker, because they might be perfectly in the clear, while you get yourself arrested for aggressive driving.
- This road is where there is a lot of flat land. Even at 85 you can see where you will be in a few minutes (and virtually not take a turn until you get there). You can also see any animals that may enter this road, but it's mostly a bridge anyway which avoids that.
I've driven through Texas a few times. I-40 fits your definition, but the last time I drove it, the fog across hundreds of miles of it was so thick that tail-lights would suddenly pop out of the mist in-front of me. I slowed down considerably, but I was seriously concerned that folks behind me were not, and I risked a rear-end collision. That's always the trickiest issue with fog... Besides, it's laborious to always be on your guard for cars suddenly appearing in front of you without warning. How many people do you think will be such careful drivers, and how many do you think will continue to drive over the speed limit even when the weather gets bad? I'd certainly have some reservations.
No such thing. "Our current behavior" is changing daily, as prices go up and down. Prices are dictated by, among other things, how much free "capacity" is available. More people just means higher prices, and people changing their behavior to compensate. It's always happened... It will continue to happen. Maybe 20 years from now, beef will be a luxury again, but we're orders of magnitude away from not being about to house and feed the entire population of the planet, even with just basic technology.
This is a lot of noise for nothing. For kids and amateurs, here's a quick summary...
fsync used-to be the go-to, but that was decades ago, when IDE was in full-swing. Back then, there was a big hub-hub about drives lying. Since then, it's been common knowledge and status-quo that fsync is not trustworthy, end of story.
Today, we have WRITE BARRIERS, and they work great. Ever since, say, the advent of 60GB IDE drives, I've never found a drive that doesn't support write barriers, and in my conversations with Theodore Tso (maintainer of EXT3/EXT4), he said as much as well. I was surprised when I started up DRBD on a test system and found the system complaining the old 40GB drive I was using for testing didn't support write barriers, so that's how long ago we're talking about this having LAST been an issue.
There's still some issue with non-journaled file systems. If you're a BSDer, you really need to disable disk cache to prevent risks of corruption with soft updates. The XFS guys recommend disabling disk cache as well, but I suspect that's just because larger RAID arrays may have entire large files cached, resulting in some individual file loss after power-outages.
Any RAID controllers will have such an option... Write-through and write-back... with advice to be sure your RAID cache's backup battery is working fine before enabling write caching.
That is purely a myth, with absolutely no sound scientific basis behind it. Stop spreading false information.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth
Don't expect much. MVNOs typically only have rights to sell ancient tech... eg. 2G phones when 3G was new, and now 3G phones while LTE is rolling out.
That's why it was such a huge deal that Sprint recently allowed MVNOs to use their LTE network... Imagine cheap, pre-paid 4G LTE ala Boost / Virgin Mobile. It could have a huge impact in driving down consumer costs, and driving more customers to Sprint, potentially growing them to the point that they aren't disadvantaged when competing with AT&T and Verizon.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-03/tings-lte-victory-could-the-iphone-be-next
The cloud is the answer...
I used-to want huge amounts of storage for my phone/tablet/netbook. In fact I used-to carry around 2.5" HDDs in external caddies, back when USB thumb drives didn't have huge capacities.
Now, I don't even have the storage on my phone/tablet/netbook maxed-out... I found lower capacity SD cards were much faster and much cheaper at the time.
The biggest change is video. These days, I'm almost always near an internet connection (wifi or good cell signal) where I can stream videos in real-time. I did a little CGI scripting on my home DVR PC, and all my movies get transcoded in realtime down to the dimentions and codecs needed for my low-def phone/tablet/netbook screens. For those who want to do less work with it, VLC Remote is widely available for Android / iPhone. I can see internet speeds not being fast enough for people who want to watch highdef videos on their tablets, yet, but phones are definitely good to go, as are most low-end or old tablets, and anyone who doesn't care about video quality quite that much.
And if bandwidth is fast enough for video, you know it's plenty fast for audio, still pictures, etc. In fact my car stereo is nothing more than a bluetooth receiver... Radio for me is almost entirely Pandora, with some PRI or other live streaming on occasion, plenty are available in the app store.
The answer: the cloud.
And if you actually have a good reason to reject it, well, there's always options like USB-host mode, and WiFi storage devices.
What in the hell are you talking about? I ask because it doesn't bear any resemblance to the conversation I took part in. How do your comments have ANYTHING to do with what I quoted or said?
Not true. Frequency reuse for teleco frequencies can be very, very, very high. Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power. No addition spectrum required. This is oversimplified, but the concept is entirely correct. There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
Don't worry, most don't want to move to Wash. People are moving towards the sun-belt, not away from it... Every year, the migration is going further south and west. Florida and Texas are booming, and Phoenix and California are growing, too.
"Average" doesn't mean much. And besides, I didn't say Northern California was Canada, just that the weather isn't much better than London.
No, go a bit north of LA and you reach Central California. But Silicon Valley is squarely in Northern Cal.
Personally, I hate the LA basin being called Southern California, too. I don't live there, but rather in an area of So.Cal where the weather isn't so mild, it isn't so damn crowded and polluted, traffic isn't a nightmare, and I'm not falling over people taking up every square inch of available land.
I already explained this in a reply to my own comment, which you obviously didn't read. It was meant to go in my original comment, but I submitted quickly before the lightning knocked out the power again.
*Actually, the "nice" (consistently around 70F degrees) weather in Souther California, is confined to coastal areas... The Los Angeles Basin, Orange County, and San Diego. Go inland just a bit, across the mountain ranges to the north or east, and you'll hit desert, with very high temperatures in the summer, and possibly sub-freezing temperatures in winter.
Personally, I hate the "nice" weather in the coastal areas, what I'd call consistently cold... I much prefer the deserts, with nice warm temperatures much of the year, and winters cold enough for snow, as well as frequent strong winds blowing the horrible air pollution away.
Bull! SOUTHERN California has nice weather*... Northern California (where Silicon Valley is actually located) can easily rival Brittan for cold and rain and fog.
In the same way Brittan benefits from Atlantic currents, warming it up to livable temperatures, while being at the same latitude as Canada... Northern California gets the cold Pacific currents, coming down from the Arctic, making for cold weather even in summer, and a comfy and hospitable home for great white sharks.
Hell, this week's forecast temperatures for London and San Fran are practically IDENTICAL:
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=San+Francisco,CA
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=London,England
If you want wonderful weather, take Florida, where it never gets down to freezing... Or ANYWHERE in the tropics. They sure don't have their own silicon valleys, despite the superior weather.
While fake reviews are never good... there are enough incompetent idiots out there posting reviews, that requires specific strategies to deal with.
Using walmart.com as an example, they ask everyone whether they'd suggest the item to a friend, and compile the votes. Anything less than 70% posiitive is likely a crap product. And you can't buy enough reviewers to move that percentage too far into positive territory. From there, reading the top two comments, then reading through as many of the comments that rated the product poorly, to see what kind of pitfalls I need to be concerned with, and selectively discarding any which could be defects (unless there's a high number of such comments.)
This strategy works well on many sites. Sadly Amazon doesn't allow sorting comments by lowest rating first, nor do they request whether you'd recomend the product, so there it's a free-for-all... read as many as you can stomache and take the chance. But even there, buying reviewers wouldn't give them enough signal-to-noise to hide a significant number of negative reviews.
However, they certainly COULD buy enough reviewers to damage the otherwise positive reputation of a competitors product. I suspect this doesn't happen because such behavior might legally be considered libel.
Reviews certainly are immensely useful... I couldn't stand buying from some stores (like walmart) because you can't trust the company to only stock decent-quality products. But with a large number of reviews, consumers are finally empowered to keep from falling victim to such dirty behavior, and a little bit of peeing in the pool won't be able to change that.
You're borderline illiterate if you think I said or implied anything like that.
Nope. A quick search shows that cubesats cost $40k to launch, and developing a cubesat reportedly runs from $25-50k, easily a significant fraction of launch price.
http://www.space.com/308-cubesats-tiny-spacecraft-huge-payoffs.html
You really should read TFA. Cell phones are perfect because they include a compass, gyro, camera, etc. A LOT more than just an ARM SoC. Hell, they can probably sell the screens on eBay and make back a significant portion of their purchase price.
Thought TFA didn't say so, the power management in Android phones is probably better than what you'll get anywhere else... Standby and talk time are major advertised features, so manufacturers make sure it's working as well as possible. And with a satellite, electrical limits are a major issue.
Android is a standard embedded Linux OS... It's basically just got a custom UI instead of X11. From the command-line, you wouldn't know the difference. Many people install Debian on their Android phones...
You're the one making this a false dilemma... between absolutely zero security, and nuclear bunker-level insane security procedures.
Your bank absolutely is not going to go for nuclear bunker-levels of security, yet a pretty good amount of security is needed there. Your proposal is... nothing.
Spoken like someone who has never managed a server farm...
Server farms are lights-out. Having people walk around to physically switch around hardware is going completely backwards...
To me, your idea reeks of bringing back the good old AT&T operators, manually patching calls through a switchboard... Positively primitive, extremely inconvenient, very expensive, and utterly impossible to scale-up.
Diesel here in CA is under $4, usually a few cents less than unleaded, and in any case, generators can use the road-tax-free supply (ala. Home heating oil) which drops the price significantly, still.
I demand both.
This is idiotic. Back when those non-flashable BIOSes existed, the BIOS was damn tiny. These days it's still got all that legacy code, while also handling ACPI, power management, fan speed, configuring CPU/PCI/RAM bus speeds and multipliers (instead of jumpers of dip switches), as well as safety features like detecting when a system doesn't boot and going into safe mode so you can change those CPU settings again. The BIOS gets pressed into other use as well, including enumerating the USB bus to find bootable devices, managing settings for on-board graphics and sound, and even work-arounds for design bugs in CPUs.
No, it's pretty clear the stupidity is localized right here on /.
That'll work well when you need to update the BIOS on hundreds of servers...
That'll work well when you need to update the BIOS on hundreds of servers...
That'll work well when you need to update the BIOS on hundreds of servers...
WTF are you talking about? Every time a server is having hardware issues, one of the first steps the trained-monkeys at Dell tell you to do is update the firmware (if newer versions are available), including the BIOS.
Welcome to /., where a prereq for sweeping generalizations is that you don't actually have any experience in the field...