I love MAME and have been using it (on and off) since the very early MS-DOS days. The problem with MAME is that most of the needed ROM dumps are still copyrighted,
I fail to see how that can be considered a "problem" of MAME. It's a bit like saying the problem with ATMs is that they won't give you free money. I mean sure, that's a negative, of sorts, but a "problem"?
Personally, I think the situation with MAME is pretty positive... Copyrighted ROMs are pretty freely and widely available, and the gaming industry hasn't gone nuts suing everyone to try and stop it. But obviously commercial use of them will likely land you in hot water, but that's forbidden by the MAME license, anyhow.
Besides that, there's still a thriving market for old arcade games, and I'd bet a non-functioning board for a popular game of your choice would be reasonably cheap, and should give you the legal rights to the ROM you need to use a emulator.
All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM. Microsoft has already buried both the Atom and the netbook by blocking and discouraging them in every way they could imagine.
Tablets are hyped like crazy, but they sure as hell haven't replaced laptops and netbooks. Tablets are a joke by comparison. Sure, they're the trendy, fun thing, but rdesktop / citrix on them is a nightmare. No NX Clients exist. SSH clients are extremely primitive at best. Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phone, but 90% of it's appeal is the fact that I will have it in my pocket wherever I am. A tablet only sounds good until you think about the details of all the things it really can't do, and you forget that everything it can do, your phone can do to...
If I could only have one device, it would be an Android phone. If I can have two devices, though, the second would be a netbook...
Who cares what Microsoft is doing? Linux started the netbook craze, and there's no reason it can't go back to it's roots. If smartphones and tablets have proven anything, it's that people are perfectly happy being completely Windows-incompatible, so why don't netbook makers get it yet?
Oh, and netbooks and similar devices are doing just fine. AMD can't make their 15W, 1.6GHz Fusion CPUs fast enough... Somehow with AMD making Geode CPUs for years, and Intel making ATOMs for a few years now, they were both completely missing the mark no matter how hard they tried, and then AMD comes along and dummies their way into a super-hot market with massive pent-up demand just by making a low-spec CPU with a decent GPU.
Lord knows I have a million and one uses for cheap tablets.
Correction: You have a million and one uses for EXPENSIVE tablets, if you could get them cheap.
I've used several cheap tablets. There's good reason they are cheap. Usually, I wouldn't take them if they were giving them away for free...
On a very cheap tablet, expect the touch-screen to be either massively unresponsive, to the point you're gouging your thumb into it pretty hard to get it to respond, or even worse, very responsive, to the point it goes and does all sorts of things you didn't want it to... using swype on such devices is tantamount to cryptography.
And even if the they managed to not screw up the screen, expect the experience to still be painful, as in incredibly unresponsive, whether because of a pathetic CPU, too little RAM, very slow flash/rom, or just horrendous software development. And I know we're all accustomed to the last one being easy to work-around, but that's not true in the embedded world... CyanogenMod only supports a fairly small number of devices, and none of them are the cheapo crap tablets. And don't expect to find others, either... You'll get plenty of people releasing the normal firmware slightly hex-edited, and some hacked google market, but nothing more.
Oh, did I miss that part? Expect no light sensor, so you have to keep flipping around, blind, to adjust that up/down all the time, as you're blinded by the ultra-bright screen at night, and ultra-dim screen during the day, completely unreadable in even indirect sunlight. No compass, no GPS, and possibly no accelerometer so the screen doesn't even rotate on it's own. Likely no multitouch, so you've got big zoom buttons in every app sucking-up maybe 1/6th of the screen space and always getting in the way as you try to scroll or click on something at the very bottom... And there's always the low quality screens, with horrendous screen-door effect, even if the specs SEEM like the resolution SHOULD be high enough that you wouldn't expect such problems.
And just wait until you find out that they use ARMv6 (ARM11) CPUs, while every Android device you've ever come across has been ARMv7, and many programs simply aren't compatible, multimedia apps in particular, but also others like firefox as well.
And for the record, buying brands you've heard of is no solution. Archos, Samsung, LG, HTC, all make some truly crap Android products that you'll throw through a window in short order.
I don't really see how you would attack a machine behind a NAT if it doesn't have any open/redirected ports and isn't already talking to you.
A NAT box is a router. Give it a packet destined for PrivateIP, and it'll happily forward it on through to any connected networks. The trick becomes getting it there, as your ISP's routers obviously won't know you want PrivateIP to be handled by that particular NAT box's PublicIP.
Someone already mentioned source routing... In a network you control, routers may honor the source route options in IP packets, and you can simply do a: traceroute -g PublicIP PrivateIP Bingo, you're communicating. I've done this many times.
Another very simple way you can do at home it is to have your computer on the same broadcast domain as the PublicIP of the NAT box you want to bypass. Then, change your default gateway to the NAT box's PublicIP address, and start connecting. Your computer isn't directly connected to PrivateIP, so it forwards it to the NAT box, and the NAT conveniently forwards it through to the private network. The PrivateIP has it's default gateway set to the NAT box as well, and the NAT box knows how to forward it to you, so you've got a simple routed connection.
And those are just the two simplest "Try it at home" methods. There are dozens of other ways to do it, you just need to hack up the header of an IP packet to do some screwy things.
All of this is possible if you're just up against a NAT box. If there's a firewall in there, none of this can work. There are a few methods of firewall traversal, but they're very, very narrow cases, which are difficult to execute and generally something you get very, very little out of.
Well, isn't adding a dual-core CPU something like doubling CPU power?
No, definitely not. At best you get slightly faster multitasking... May be useful in the case of, eg. running Winamp in the background as you use your phone for other things, but I wouldn't expect to see a noticeable single application speed-up at all.
Source routing isn't the only option by far. There are a dozen other ways you can get a packet, with a private address as the destination, to the NAT box.
One of the statistics that I find horrifying is that nearly fifteen thousand people died in France alone during the 2003 heatwave. The death toll was attributed to the widespread lack of air conditioning in that country. A First World country wherein thousands of people die simply because it was hot outside? What's wrong with this picture?
What's horrifying isn't the lack of A/C, it's that people on the verge of a heat-stroke couldn't figure out that dumping a bucket of tap water over their head would drastically cool them down. 104F degrees? That's only slightly above normal body temperature. You must have severe medical issues if you can't easily survive that, barely breaking a sweat (literally) or else incredible stupidity, (eg. wearing long sleeves while pouring sweat).
I'd agree that handsets need a longer lifespan, but it seems like the handset hardware development moves pretty fast and the software seems to follow,
I don't know where this idea comes from. There haven't been any big thing that's changed in (high-end) Android phones in the past 2 years. There are minor improvements: dual-core chips are starting to be introduced, front-facing webcams are more common, and improved screens loom on the horizon, but all of the above are only minor improvements. Same 32GB max microSDHC card slot, same capacitive multi-touch screen. Same battery life. Same GPS/accelerometer/compass, same light sensor and proximity sensor. Same power button and volume control. Even the amount of RAM is generally unchanged in the past couple years.
All the articles I've read seem to come down to "it's more convenient" for applications not to have to deal with NAT... Of course it is also more convenient for people who mean to do you harm, too, since we're back to connections to outside resources coming from the machine's actual IP address, a public NATing of the private one.
NAT doesn't provide any security. Never has, never will. No, I'm not wrong. No, I'm still not wrong.
If you have a firewall between your private network and the public Internet, then you'll have all the security you want, whether using IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. If you don't, then it's trivial for bad guys to reach services you don't want them to get to. If there's NAT in-between, it'll take a couple extra specially-crafted packets, but it's pretty trivial to get around.
IPv6 addresses with a firewall? Bad guys can know the IPv6 address of your valuable systems all they want, but if your firewall is blocking incoming connections by default, they can't get a single bit through to the destination.
I don't understand why people's brains turn to jello when talking about IPv6.
This is free-market capitalism working. Supply is constant (there's only one Firefox), but demand increased (Bing wanted in on the traffic). Therefore prices increased.
It's anything-but supply and demand. You've got a monopoly dumping money into an adjacent industry, running their operations at an OBSCENE loss year after year. With the primary goal not of trying to get a foothold, but instead happily wasting money on a failed cause in hopes of wounding a major competitor on their home turf.
People just don't want to hear about it. They have their job, they expect you to do yours without bothering them about it.
This is as close to an accurate yet concise description of the problem as I've heard. It just misses one important point, the willful ignorance of non-IT folks.
Across multiple companies the one immutable truth to IT is that the majority of non-IT folks expect the handful of IT folks to do 90% of their job for them, because a computer happens to be involved. Any attempt to teach them even the most basic technical issues directly related to their jobs results in an arrogant dismissive "You're IT, you fix it, I don't do computers." attitiude, or worse an "I don't care how hard it is to make happen, I put in the request yesterday, so you need to have a new eCommerce site up and running for tomorrow's launch."
In those cases, being unresponsive is one of the few possible ways to force them to become less incompetent, because then they risk failing at their own job. IT always working like mad to pull rabbits out of hats just gets the pressure turned-up that much more as insane expectations become creeping normalcy.
And while it may get you off the hook the first time around, blaming IT as you consistently fail is hit-or-miss at best. Of course those that do make a lot of noise complaining about IT may get an all-too-responsive IT team, detailing what a time-sink you've been, how utterly unable to perform your job function you are, and perhaps finally, a not-so subtle hint about the fact that the IT team may very well have a higher salary than you, which you are wasting on trivialites.
There were indeed a large number of problems with analog TV, which switching to digital solved. Your blanket denial of this simple fact is what makes you look completely insane.
Most people get better reception and more channels. Maybe you are one of the few exceptions. Maybe you don't know WTF you are doing. Or maybe your tin foil hat is interfering with the reception, I don't know.
This DTV shit is for the birds, even with an external antenna and an amplifier the best I can get is 2 seconds of video with unsynced sound before the garbage freezes up for 15 seconds. Thanks Bush, sunk a hundred bucks into your bullshit little boxes and ended up getting fucking cable anyway so I can watch the god damned local news.
I'm in the opposite boat. Unintelligable static on analog gave way to a crystal clear high-definition picture, with a ton of sub-channels, and was directly responsible for my canceling my DTV subscription (900 channels playing repeats of Law & Order, CSI, and a thousand other repeats of broadcast TV shows).
You complain loudly, yet you didn't provide any facts. What city is this? What antenna did you buy? Which amp and why (they usually make things worse, not better)? What reciever areee you using? What's the height above terrain, which direction, and which channels are problematic? This is/. I'm willing to bet if you provided any info, you'd actually get useful responses, in-between the insults...
Using developers (experts) is exactly the point you're missing. I want to know, AFTER I've leaarned an interface, how quickly I'll be able to get things done. The user studies with beginners are what we shouldn't be spending so much effort on... Discoverability is nice, but only important in cirumstances where users are going to approach an interface once, use it briefly, and never again... Point me to an interface, aand tell me that I'll be able to do everything much fast AFTER I've learned it, and I'll be happy, even if the learning curve is steep.
The opposite ISN'T true... Tell me I'll be able to learn a user interface quickly, but it'll ALWAYS be slow to use, and I'll tell you I don't want a damn thing to do with it.
The average developer has no clue whatsoever how to build a good UI
Give the average developer a stop-watch (or equivalent software) and make them TIME how long it takes to get something done with their interface. Think of it as OBJECTIVE UI metrics, rather than the dogmatic artsy crap.
I'd much rather have streamlined operation than a slick-looking interface, and the inverse is exactly what's happening, everywhere. It's a disease that needs to be stopped.
Now, that doesn't obviate the need to bring in new users once in a while, and get their first "WTF" impressions about how non-obvious it is to look for Settings under the File menu, or some other unlabeled button, but even those need to be moderated by an expert.
It was initially created to "fight" against KDE, solely because KDE was using Qt and Qt had a proprietary license at the time. There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities. So GNOME wasn't even addressing a real technological deficiency in the first place.
GNOME 0.x and 1.x was a considerably better desktop environment than KDE 1.x. While GNOME was created because of license issues with QT (and it worked pretty well, didn't it?) it was also technically better in it's own right from early on. Unfortunately it didn't take long for all the familiar GNU/FSF nonsense to slip in, splitting everything into dozens and dozens of libraries that will never, ever be used by any other project, cloning the worse features of Mac OS, poorly, and generally obviously going the wrong direction. But from the offset, there was a lot of good reason for it to exist.
Good developers don't care for unnecessary licensing politics.
I think the OpenBSD developers would take exception to that (see: OpenSSH, PF, ksh, OpenCVS, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, etc., etc. and probably others I don't recall). And how about Debian developers (see IceWeasel and others)?
And good developers most definitely DO care about license issues... I can put lots of effort into developing KDE, but no distro can distribute QT (and thus KDE) if they include any patches at all? Gah!
Does anybody know which manufacturers offer the BEST warranties?
With WD dropping to 2yrs, and Seagate to 3years, you're pretty much just screwed. They own everybody else (Maxtor, Samsung, etc).
Seagate was notable for having 5-year warranties across the board. It was the one and only reason to buy from them.
Western Digital only had 3-year warranties, but they make the better drives (Green drives are awesomely silent and run cool to the touch, while not performing too badly) and more than that, they're really awesome on warranty support. They'll cross-ship drives, including a return shipping label, no charge. I once even complained that my drive failed a few days after the warranty period expired, and they made an exception, no problem.
Hitachi is the budget option, and they have generally maintained a 3yr warranty, but after this announcement, I'll be surprised if they don't reduce their warranty as well, so best to pay attention.
That's when the programming changes to "should we take a nose-dive? has anyone ever solved anything with a nose-dive? are we a fighter jet in a dog fight like they were?" Instead of what is it now: "what are the odds that we should be in a nose-dive? well, nothing else seems better."
All you're talking about is sanity/range checking, and reaction limiting. No psychology needed. What you're talking about, special-casing all NORMAL flying scenarios, sounds like a very good way to get a lot of people killed when one part is damaged beyond spec, and the autopilot isn't ALLOWED to compensate for it because the psychologies and pilots decided THAT SHOULDN'T EVER HAPPEN. Would you care to guess how many "couldn't happen" scenarios have, in fact, occurred in flight? Lots.
So it goes something like this:
Computer #1: Sensors say the engines are at full throttle and the air speed is so low the plane is about to stall and fall out of the sky, but I have rules against nose-diving, so I guess I'll blink a little light on the console and hope it gets somebody's attention before we all die...
Computer #2: Flaps are at 50%, but we're still rolling near sideways. I'm never supposed to go past 50% on the control surfaces, so I'll sit here and hope somebody grabs the controls in the next 5 seconds before we're completely inverted and unrecoverable.
To get your permit for ANYBODY moving in, you MUST have heating in the house. That is a requirement in every state in the union
Okay, then we just move out a bit to the next loophole. Question, do these building codes specify a minimum capacity for these HVAC systems?
If no, then a 600w portable electric heater/fan will do, and require just a tiny solar installation.
If yes, then insulation is never going to be the answer, as you're still required to install X solar panels to power the XYZ BTU monster, and insulation doesn't free you of that requirement.
I don't believe for a second anyone has written loop-hole-free building codes that require a home be equipped HVAC that can sustain a 72F / 22C degree temperature based on realistic loads.
There's plenty of results out there which say Theora is, while not the best, a good codec. To quote Wikipedia:
Wkipedia is a shit-hole, end of story. There's tons of utterly inaccurate crap on there, which will never go away. There have been plenty of fights over quality on there for many years, but eventally the fair-minded give up and the cult of Xiph & RMS stay, and corrupt it.
The idea that Theora can remotely compete with H.264 is positively laughable. That you believe it either suggests you've got a TERRIBLE source of information, or you're drinking the kool-aid too, and I'm wasting my time even responding to you. Try to find ANY experts outside of Xiph that agree with their assessment. It's hard enough getting experts to admit that WebM/VP8 is nearly as good as H.264.
Becoming the HDTV standard would be an unrealistic goal. [...] I'm interested to know what your theory is that Xiph could drive HDTV standards and have handled this better than a small company could?
It's not *my* theory... VP3 was up for consideration as the HDTV standard when it was open sourced.
Xiph's decision to go with a different bitstream and their own container format COMPLETELY stalled development on the video format itself for close to a decade. If they had hit the ground running, and just started improving the quality and performance of the existing DLLs, and developing utilities to handle the format on Linux/BSD/etc., adoption of VP3 could have gone through the roof right away, and quality could have been drastically higher than MPEG-2, offering a clear, major benefit (not just license fees). Instead they split the base (plenty of VP3 is still out there, incompatible with Theora), wasted many years taking it nowhere, annihilated the interested developer base (compare the ffmpeg community to the Theora community--or compare the mailing lists in the early days with today) and left it stagnating while the wide world adopted then dropped several other formats in that time, instead of standardizing on VP3.
Remember, when VP3 was released, we were still in the RealPlayer days. Real was popularly deprecated as WMV gained hold, in parallel Divx gained a lot of popular support and undermined WMV's dominance. Then Quicktime adopted Divx (MPEG-4 SP) in a MOV container, which gained it some support. And Flash started gaining ground over all of the above with it's primitive H.263 codec, then VP6 of all things, and finally H.264.
It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out all the spots in that time line where a completely free codec like VP3, with a nice big installed base, with high quality (easily better than Divx, probably as good as WMV) and an active developer community, could have jumped into the fray, and stayed there, to the exclusion of all others, and become dominant.
4) Contractors will simply NOT install central heating/cooling, thereby avoiding the requirement. Buyers will be forced to buy HVAC from a 3rd party or freeze to death. As an added bonus, the sale price of the home is now several thousand dollars lower.
With so glib an interpretation, I can see why you don't understand...
Sometimes the stories about solar panel improvements on/. are about consumer cells, but often they aren't... they might be about the high efficiency solar cells used in satellites.
There seems to be one very simple underlying theme on solar panels across the board... there is no shortage of space. While improvements in efficiency are great, and will see some use, mostly people want the cheapest solaar panels they can get, and don't care that they're 2% efficient, because their roof is big enough, and that (hypotetical) 2% efficiency isn't a bad thing because the fuel in question is free, anyhow.
Many claim the be cheap, but that's usually an estimate of a price at full-scale production, compared to buying more cells at current prices. In the interim, the cost of those cells goes down, and production can't go from 0 to 100 instantly, so the combination of the two conspire to make the new technology stillborn. The technology here might go the same way, or it might really be dirt cheap enough and close enough to ready to roll out that it'll be the exception to the rule. Take your pick, and become an angel investor if you think you've got all the answers.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see how that can be considered a "problem" of MAME. It's a bit like saying the problem with ATMs is that they won't give you free money. I mean sure, that's a negative, of sorts, but a "problem"?
Personally, I think the situation with MAME is pretty positive... Copyrighted ROMs are pretty freely and widely available, and the gaming industry hasn't gone nuts suing everyone to try and stop it. But obviously commercial use of them will likely land you in hot water, but that's forbidden by the MAME license, anyhow.
Besides that, there's still a thriving market for old arcade games, and I'd bet a non-functioning board for a popular game of your choice would be reasonably cheap, and should give you the legal rights to the ROM you need to use a emulator.
Tablets are hyped like crazy, but they sure as hell haven't replaced laptops and netbooks. Tablets are a joke by comparison. Sure, they're the trendy, fun thing, but rdesktop / citrix on them is a nightmare. No NX Clients exist. SSH clients are extremely primitive at best. Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phone, but 90% of it's appeal is the fact that I will have it in my pocket wherever I am. A tablet only sounds good until you think about the details of all the things it really can't do, and you forget that everything it can do, your phone can do to...
If I could only have one device, it would be an Android phone. If I can have two devices, though, the second would be a netbook...
Who cares what Microsoft is doing? Linux started the netbook craze, and there's no reason it can't go back to it's roots. If smartphones and tablets have proven anything, it's that people are perfectly happy being completely Windows-incompatible, so why don't netbook makers get it yet?
Oh, and netbooks and similar devices are doing just fine. AMD can't make their 15W, 1.6GHz Fusion CPUs fast enough... Somehow with AMD making Geode CPUs for years, and Intel making ATOMs for a few years now, they were both completely missing the mark no matter how hard they tried, and then AMD comes along and dummies their way into a super-hot market with massive pent-up demand just by making a low-spec CPU with a decent GPU.
Correction: You have a million and one uses for EXPENSIVE tablets, if you could get them cheap.
I've used several cheap tablets. There's good reason they are cheap. Usually, I wouldn't take them if they were giving them away for free...
On a very cheap tablet, expect the touch-screen to be either massively unresponsive, to the point you're gouging your thumb into it pretty hard to get it to respond, or even worse, very responsive, to the point it goes and does all sorts of things you didn't want it to... using swype on such devices is tantamount to cryptography.
And even if the they managed to not screw up the screen, expect the experience to still be painful, as in incredibly unresponsive, whether because of a pathetic CPU, too little RAM, very slow flash/rom, or just horrendous software development. And I know we're all accustomed to the last one being easy to work-around, but that's not true in the embedded world... CyanogenMod only supports a fairly small number of devices, and none of them are the cheapo crap tablets. And don't expect to find others, either... You'll get plenty of people releasing the normal firmware slightly hex-edited, and some hacked google market, but nothing more.
Oh, did I miss that part? Expect no light sensor, so you have to keep flipping around, blind, to adjust that up/down all the time, as you're blinded by the ultra-bright screen at night, and ultra-dim screen during the day, completely unreadable in even indirect sunlight. No compass, no GPS, and possibly no accelerometer so the screen doesn't even rotate on it's own. Likely no multitouch, so you've got big zoom buttons in every app sucking-up maybe 1/6th of the screen space and always getting in the way as you try to scroll or click on something at the very bottom... And there's always the low quality screens, with horrendous screen-door effect, even if the specs SEEM like the resolution SHOULD be high enough that you wouldn't expect such problems.
And just wait until you find out that they use ARMv6 (ARM11) CPUs, while every Android device you've ever come across has been ARMv7, and many programs simply aren't compatible, multimedia apps in particular, but also others like firefox as well.
And for the record, buying brands you've heard of is no solution. Archos, Samsung, LG, HTC, all make some truly crap Android products that you'll throw through a window in short order.
A NAT box is a router. Give it a packet destined for PrivateIP, and it'll happily forward it on through to any connected networks. The trick becomes getting it there, as your ISP's routers obviously won't know you want PrivateIP to be handled by that particular NAT box's PublicIP.
Someone already mentioned source routing... In a network you control, routers may honor the source route options in IP packets, and you can simply do a: traceroute -g PublicIP PrivateIP
Bingo, you're communicating. I've done this many times.
Another very simple way you can do at home it is to have your computer on the same broadcast domain as the PublicIP of the NAT box you want to bypass. Then, change your default gateway to the NAT box's PublicIP address, and start connecting. Your computer isn't directly connected to PrivateIP, so it forwards it to the NAT box, and the NAT conveniently forwards it through to the private network. The PrivateIP has it's default gateway set to the NAT box as well, and the NAT box knows how to forward it to you, so you've got a simple routed connection.
And those are just the two simplest "Try it at home" methods. There are dozens of other ways to do it, you just need to hack up the header of an IP packet to do some screwy things.
All of this is possible if you're just up against a NAT box. If there's a firewall in there, none of this can work. There are a few methods of firewall traversal, but they're very, very narrow cases, which are difficult to execute and generally something you get very, very little out of.
No, definitely not. At best you get slightly faster multitasking... May be useful in the case of, eg. running Winamp in the background as you use your phone for other things, but I wouldn't expect to see a noticeable single application speed-up at all.
Source routing isn't the only option by far. There are a dozen other ways you can get a packet, with a private address as the destination, to the NAT box.
What's horrifying isn't the lack of A/C, it's that people on the verge of a heat-stroke couldn't figure out that dumping a bucket of tap water over their head would drastically cool them down. 104F degrees? That's only slightly above normal body temperature. You must have severe medical issues if you can't easily survive that, barely breaking a sweat (literally) or else incredible stupidity, (eg. wearing long sleeves while pouring sweat).
I don't know where this idea comes from. There haven't been any big thing that's changed in (high-end) Android phones in the past 2 years. There are minor improvements: dual-core chips are starting to be introduced, front-facing webcams are more common, and improved screens loom on the horizon, but all of the above are only minor improvements. Same 32GB max microSDHC card slot, same capacitive multi-touch screen. Same battery life. Same GPS/accelerometer/compass, same light sensor and proximity sensor. Same power button and volume control. Even the amount of RAM is generally unchanged in the past couple years.
NAT doesn't provide any security. Never has, never will. No, I'm not wrong. No, I'm still not wrong.
If you have a firewall between your private network and the public Internet, then you'll have all the security you want, whether using IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. If you don't, then it's trivial for bad guys to reach services you don't want them to get to. If there's NAT in-between, it'll take a couple extra specially-crafted packets, but it's pretty trivial to get around.
IPv6 addresses with a firewall? Bad guys can know the IPv6 address of your valuable systems all they want, but if your firewall is blocking incoming connections by default, they can't get a single bit through to the destination.
I don't understand why people's brains turn to jello when talking about IPv6.
You got it backwards...
It's anything-but supply and demand. You've got a monopoly dumping money into an adjacent industry, running their operations at an OBSCENE loss year after year. With the primary goal not of trying to get a foothold, but instead happily wasting money on a failed cause in hopes of wounding a major competitor on their home turf.
This is as close to an accurate yet concise description of the problem as I've heard. It just misses one important point, the willful ignorance of non-IT folks.
Across multiple companies the one immutable truth to IT is that the majority of non-IT folks expect the handful of IT folks to do 90% of their job for them, because a computer happens to be involved. Any attempt to teach them even the most basic technical issues directly related to their jobs results in an arrogant dismissive "You're IT, you fix it, I don't do computers." attitiude, or worse an "I don't care how hard it is to make happen, I put in the request yesterday, so you need to have a new eCommerce site up and running for tomorrow's launch."
In those cases, being unresponsive is one of the few possible ways to force them to become less incompetent, because then they risk failing at their own job. IT always working like mad to pull rabbits out of hats just gets the pressure turned-up that much more as insane expectations become creeping normalcy.
And while it may get you off the hook the first time around, blaming IT as you consistently fail is hit-or-miss at best. Of course those that do make a lot of noise complaining about IT may get an all-too-responsive IT team, detailing what a time-sink you've been, how utterly unable to perform your job function you are, and perhaps finally, a not-so subtle hint about the fact that the IT team may very well have a higher salary than you, which you are wasting on trivialites.
There were indeed a large number of problems with analog TV, which switching to digital solved. Your blanket denial of this simple fact is what makes you look completely insane.
Most people get better reception and more channels. Maybe you are one of the few exceptions. Maybe you don't know WTF you are doing. Or maybe your tin foil hat is interfering with the reception, I don't know.
Enjoy the tin foil hat.
I'm in the opposite boat. Unintelligable static on analog gave way to a crystal clear high-definition picture, with a ton of sub-channels, and was directly responsible for my canceling my DTV subscription (900 channels playing repeats of Law & Order, CSI, and a thousand other repeats of broadcast TV shows).
You complain loudly, yet you didn't provide any facts. What city is this? What antenna did you buy? Which amp and why (they usually make things worse, not better)? What reciever areee you using? What's the height above terrain, which direction, and which channels are problematic? This is /. I'm willing to bet if you provided any info, you'd actually get useful responses, in-between the insults...
Using developers (experts) is exactly the point you're missing. I want to know, AFTER I've leaarned an interface, how quickly I'll be able to get things done. The user studies with beginners are what we shouldn't be spending so much effort on... Discoverability is nice, but only important in cirumstances where users are going to approach an interface once, use it briefly, and never again... Point me to an interface, aand tell me that I'll be able to do everything much fast AFTER I've learned it, and I'll be happy, even if the learning curve is steep.
The opposite ISN'T true... Tell me I'll be able to learn a user interface quickly, but it'll ALWAYS be slow to use, and I'll tell you I don't want a damn thing to do with it.
Give the average developer a stop-watch (or equivalent software) and make them TIME how long it takes to get something done with their interface. Think of it as OBJECTIVE UI metrics, rather than the dogmatic artsy crap.
I'd much rather have streamlined operation than a slick-looking interface, and the inverse is exactly what's happening, everywhere. It's a disease that needs to be stopped.
Now, that doesn't obviate the need to bring in new users once in a while, and get their first "WTF" impressions about how non-obvious it is to look for Settings under the File menu, or some other unlabeled button, but even those need to be moderated by an expert.
GNOME 0.x and 1.x was a considerably better desktop environment than KDE 1.x. While GNOME was created because of license issues with QT (and it worked pretty well, didn't it?) it was also technically better in it's own right from early on. Unfortunately it didn't take long for all the familiar GNU/FSF nonsense to slip in, splitting everything into dozens and dozens of libraries that will never, ever be used by any other project, cloning the worse features of Mac OS, poorly, and generally obviously going the wrong direction. But from the offset, there was a lot of good reason for it to exist.
I think the OpenBSD developers would take exception to that (see: OpenSSH, PF, ksh, OpenCVS, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, etc., etc. and probably others I don't recall). And how about Debian developers (see IceWeasel and others)?
And good developers most definitely DO care about license issues... I can put lots of effort into developing KDE, but no distro can distribute QT (and thus KDE) if they include any patches at all? Gah!
Surprise! Seagate bought out Samsung's HDD business. You're hoping that Seagate will stupidly compete against itself...
Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi. That's it. The end.
Two of them are decreasing their warranty period per this story, the third was hit-or-miss to begin with, and will probably react in-kind anyhow.
With WD dropping to 2yrs, and Seagate to 3years, you're pretty much just screwed. They own everybody else (Maxtor, Samsung, etc).
Seagate was notable for having 5-year warranties across the board. It was the one and only reason to buy from them.
Western Digital only had 3-year warranties, but they make the better drives (Green drives are awesomely silent and run cool to the touch, while not performing too badly) and more than that, they're really awesome on warranty support. They'll cross-ship drives, including a return shipping label, no charge. I once even complained that my drive failed a few days after the warranty period expired, and they made an exception, no problem.
Hitachi is the budget option, and they have generally maintained a 3yr warranty, but after this announcement, I'll be surprised if they don't reduce their warranty as well, so best to pay attention.
All you're talking about is sanity/range checking, and reaction limiting. No psychology needed. What you're talking about, special-casing all NORMAL flying scenarios, sounds like a very good way to get a lot of people killed when one part is damaged beyond spec, and the autopilot isn't ALLOWED to compensate for it because the psychologies and pilots decided THAT SHOULDN'T EVER HAPPEN. Would you care to guess how many "couldn't happen" scenarios have, in fact, occurred in flight? Lots.
So it goes something like this:
Computer #1: Sensors say the engines are at full throttle and the air speed is so low the plane is about to stall and fall out of the sky, but I have rules against nose-diving, so I guess I'll blink a little light on the console and hope it gets somebody's attention before we all die...
Computer #2: Flaps are at 50%, but we're still rolling near sideways. I'm never supposed to go past 50% on the control surfaces, so I'll sit here and hope somebody grabs the controls in the next 5 seconds before we're completely inverted and unrecoverable.
Okay, then we just move out a bit to the next loophole. Question, do these building codes specify a minimum capacity for these HVAC systems?
If no, then a 600w portable electric heater/fan will do, and require just a tiny solar installation.
If yes, then insulation is never going to be the answer, as you're still required to install X solar panels to power the XYZ BTU monster, and insulation doesn't free you of that requirement.
I don't believe for a second anyone has written loop-hole-free building codes that require a home be equipped HVAC that can sustain a 72F / 22C degree temperature based on realistic loads.
Wkipedia is a shit-hole, end of story. There's tons of utterly inaccurate crap on there, which will never go away. There have been plenty of fights over quality on there for many years, but eventally the fair-minded give up and the cult of Xiph & RMS stay, and corrupt it.
The idea that Theora can remotely compete with H.264 is positively laughable. That you believe it either suggests you've got a TERRIBLE source of information, or you're drinking the kool-aid too, and I'm wasting my time even responding to you. Try to find ANY experts outside of Xiph that agree with their assessment. It's hard enough getting experts to admit that WebM/VP8 is nearly as good as H.264.
It's not *my* theory... VP3 was up for consideration as the HDTV standard when it was open sourced.
Xiph's decision to go with a different bitstream and their own container format COMPLETELY stalled development on the video format itself for close to a decade. If they had hit the ground running, and just started improving the quality and performance of the existing DLLs, and developing utilities to handle the format on Linux/BSD/etc., adoption of VP3 could have gone through the roof right away, and quality could have been drastically higher than MPEG-2, offering a clear, major benefit (not just license fees). Instead they split the base (plenty of VP3 is still out there, incompatible with Theora), wasted many years taking it nowhere, annihilated the interested developer base (compare the ffmpeg community to the Theora community--or compare the mailing lists in the early days with today) and left it stagnating while the wide world adopted then dropped several other formats in that time, instead of standardizing on VP3.
Remember, when VP3 was released, we were still in the RealPlayer days. Real was popularly deprecated as WMV gained hold, in parallel Divx gained a lot of popular support and undermined WMV's dominance. Then Quicktime adopted Divx (MPEG-4 SP) in a MOV container, which gained it some support. And Flash started gaining ground over all of the above with it's primitive H.263 codec, then VP6 of all things, and finally H.264.
It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out all the spots in that time line where a completely free codec like VP3, with a nice big installed base, with high quality (easily better than Divx, probably as good as WMV) and an active developer community, could have jumped into the fray, and stayed there, to the exclusion of all others, and become dominant.
You missed a very important one...
4) Contractors will simply NOT install central heating/cooling, thereby avoiding the requirement. Buyers will be forced to buy HVAC from a 3rd party or freeze to death. As an added bonus, the sale price of the home is now several thousand dollars lower.
With so glib an interpretation, I can see why you don't understand...
Sometimes the stories about solar panel improvements on /. are about consumer cells, but often they aren't... they might be about the high efficiency solar cells used in satellites.
There seems to be one very simple underlying theme on solar panels across the board... there is no shortage of space. While improvements in efficiency are great, and will see some use, mostly people want the cheapest solaar panels they can get, and don't care that they're 2% efficient, because their roof is big enough, and that (hypotetical) 2% efficiency isn't a bad thing because the fuel in question is free, anyhow.
Many claim the be cheap, but that's usually an estimate of a price at full-scale production, compared to buying more cells at current prices. In the interim, the cost of those cells goes down, and production can't go from 0 to 100 instantly, so the combination of the two conspire to make the new technology stillborn. The technology here might go the same way, or it might really be dirt cheap enough and close enough to ready to roll out that it'll be the exception to the rule. Take your pick, and become an angel investor if you think you've got all the answers.