We don't do double blind 100 year studies, and without knowing the underlying cause, any foods, medication, procedure (pre or post natal) could be causing dramatically increased risk, and the cause and effect would be so far separate we'd never pick up on it.
Your own premise is belied by the vast amount of human history before germ theory was concieved, after untold large scale human suffering.
equally important is the fact that it must be a pleasure to use by first being a pleasure to look at.
Bull... shit...
When contractors are shopping for tools, they don't buy the one that's pretty, they buy the one that fucking works the best. Asthetics be dammed.
Give me black and white icons, I don't care. Mac OS was beloved with its primitive scheme for years. Put me in front of a Windows 7 system, and Office 2007 with it's god-dammed awful ribbon that makes it hard to do the basics, and impossible to do anything remotely advanced, and I'll throw the fucking thing out the window, no matter how pretty it might be.
Worst of all, I think there are a number of people that bought the same feaux Jobsian bullship mantra as you, which is why Gnome and Kde are slashing and burning their base, and XFce grows in popularity despite absolutely never improving in any way... (in fact XFce3 was better all-around).
Hell, I'd switch back to text-mode if the text-only apps were developing a bit better (links is dead and rotting).
120VAC (not the 150AC the writer failed to fact check)
Meh. 120V AC is just the accepted root-mean squared (RMS) measurement. In fact 150V is also a valid measurement of utility voltage, as anyone with an oscilloscope will tell you...
Nope, March of '92. Others have pointed out that Windows 3.0 was out at that time, but I still maintain practically nobody was running it. In 91 it was very much a DOS world.
It predated anything useful, even the Web I think. Netscape was being launched in 1998, Berners-Lee was making a NeXT browser in 1990, and AOL for Windows existed in 1991.
The web was around, and in-force MUCH earlier than you would imagine. Windows 98 had Internet Explorer version 4 inextricably linked to the OS. Not version 1, but version 4. Internet Explorer was concieved as a weapon against Netscape, so there's no way IEv4 predated Netscape...
And before the WWW, the internet was quite useful. Newsgroups, FTP sites, and Gopher sites contained a lot. Many people here were downloading floppies of Slackware Linux back then...
I don't think I could have surfed the Web in 1991 with a Windows machine, but I could use AOL.
No, you couldn't because NOBODY had Windows in 91. Everyone was running on MS-DOS. I still remember the Compuserve and Prodigy login-screens from their old DOS apps. Trumpet Winsock is irrelevant in the DOS days.
Firewire didn't lose to USB. Firewire lost to Ethernet. Printers & high-end scanners, external storage (NAS), and many other high-speed device-to-device interconnects. Ethernet just makes sense, and ever more devices are getting gigE ports.
dd's a poor solution; if it hits a bad block on the drive, the default is the fail.
DD IS a poor solution, but not really for any reasons you managed to hit upon. The only difference between partimage/clonezilla and DD is that the former knows enough about the filesystem structure to SKIP any blocks marked as unused, saving space and backup/restore time. If your bad block is one that is allocated, partimage/clonezilla will fail just as badly. They have the advantage of speed (possibly a LOT of speed) and nothing else...
( even if you zero the drive first like some suggested, you'll have gigs of wasted space from deleted installation files).
You don't zero your drives first... when you're ready to create an image, you fill up the filesystem(s) with a large file with a single repeating character, usually nulls (0x00) from/dev/zero but really any other character works just as well. When all free space is full of those large file(s) filled with zeros, you delete the files to recover the space, then immediately create a DD image, and compress the result.
The Opera browser on the Android Tablets is excellent. Everything works fine. Dolphin is also excellent
I use both quite frequently, and no, they don't work remotely as well as a desktop browser, and mobile pages have nothing to do with it (setting the user agent equivalent to a desktop is easy enough). It's impressive for tiny embedded browsers that they handle as many sites as well as they do, but there's endless cases where you still have to resort to walking over and using a real computer, which I run into all the damn time. In fact the reason I have 3 different browsers installed is on the off chance one of the 3 will work a bit better on a given page, but they rarely ever do.
There are plenty of alternatives and solutions, just none that involve having 7 billion people or more living on Earth in the year 2100 using as much energy as an American uses today.
There's no truth in that at all. The math has been done over and over again. The get through the next hundred years of projected energy demands, we have two possible options:
1). Build a new Nuclear power plant every couple weeks, or: 2). Develop solar power.
That's it. There's only two, but they exist and are very much real "solutions" that can be built on.
And solar is by far the more promising of the two. Modular, low operating costs, low depreciation, and massive capacity. We currently consume about 15 Terawatts of power, and solar on the surface of the earth maxes out at 69,000 terawatts, so plenty of headroom there, even without the America-hating. Might even help REVERSE global warming.
When listening to music or audiobooks i really with there were a physical set of buttons i could use without having to turn the screen back out. Rewind, play, pause and fast-forward would be the most obvious and useful ones.
A bluetooth receiver costs about $20, and should include play/pause forward & rewind buttons, in addition to volume up/down.
I liked it at first, but then found the need to carry around (and keep charged) a second device was not worth the added effort. In addition, the sound quality was noticeably degraded, and the lag made video watching considerable hassle. Also, while Winamp and others work nicely with the bluetooth buttons, other apps don't honor them.
10" tablets are big enough to replace many uses of a laptop or desktop computer and handle the equivalent of a full sheet of paper, so they're not just supporting niche applications like Angry Birds or phone-sized mini-browsers, they're enough to do full-sized web browsing. Maybe a 7" tablet can steal part of that market at half the price, but I'm skeptical.
I'm skeptical across the board...
The web browser on those tablets isn't any better than the web browser on your smart phone... Meaning a LOT of pages won't render correctly, you don't have the Add-Ons you have on the desktop, many files won't download, you don't have the plugins to view, well, just about anything, and the touch-screen model still breaks the semantics of many javascript, CSS, and Flash powered web sites.
What's more, whether 10" or 7", tablets are far, far too big to comfortably hold and use with one-hand, and sliding your finger across a 10" screen is extremely tiresome quite quickly, making current tablets across the board a DOWNGRADE from simple ($150) top-tier smart phones. This sentiment was echoed by many reviews of Dell's 5" tablet, which had the advantage of nice big screen, but was still small and light enough to be operated one-handed.
In addition, I'd throw in input. Plenty of Android smart phones have slide-out qwerty keyboards, allowing halfway decent input (I type-up many a/. post on one) but tablets never do, and a bluetooth or detachable (transformer) keyboard is an extra item to be lugged around.
And with all of these issues, I've only just started covering the downside of web browsing with a tablet. The more I think about and try to use them for even basic tasks, the less desirable they become.
I would be happy with an Android tablet as a mere thin client, but alas, that's not even workable. While the SSH apps (and many apps, for that matter) are passable for brief usage, their feature-bareness really comes out quickly when you try to really use it. The same is true for RDP and VNC apps, and the utter lack of an NX app for either Android or iOS.
Considering just these issues, it very, VERY quickly becomes clear that a cheap Linux Netbook (ala, EEE) is a vastly superior choice for just about any usage case you can come up with (that doesn't involve Angry Birds). And even if you find a need for a few mobile apps, Android emulators run on Linux just fine, and Canonical has been working to integrate them even more.
Argh... we're building weapons systems based on windows or mac or linux? What are these people, nuts?
If there was ever a place where capability based security should be used, this is it. An application that has the ability to literally kill people should not be run in an environment which defaults to permissive...
You DO realize Linux has all those features already, don't you? It's called SELinux, it was created by the NSA, and it is enabled by default in RHEL. In fact "permissive" is one of the modes of operation you can choose if you're not fully willing to comit.
In fact MacOS X COULD have those features as well. TrustedBSD has been around before SELinux, but since OSX just uses the FreeBSD userland, I doubt they ported those over to the MACH kernel, but they certainly could have.
When I hear fear about plugging in drives, I think that's just as amazing as people saying to not surf porn sites or be careful about what links you click on. If those activities pose the slightest risk of infection, then your computer is already "infected" with shitware, and shouldn't be used for anything important.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, there is one big whopping footnote to this: DMA.
Plugging a drive into a port that supports DMA will be massively risky no matter what software you use. A microcontroller (bug) slipped into a USB flash drive will have full, hardware-level access to the entire computer when plugged-in, as if you let a tech come in and rip the system apart.
It starts out by saying "false," and then in the write-up (below the "false" write-up) they explain why it's true
The very first sentence of the write-up is as good of a summary, explanation, and justification as I could come up with. Why don't you just go read it again?
Most of the "facts" presented in the story are false, and the overall theme is only very, very loosely accurate... The link from each technology to the next is very tenuous. eg. there were 3 different rail gauges in the USA, so which of those is the width of a wagon, and a horses' ass, exactly? Is it the one we use now, or one of the other two? In addition, there are simply practical constraints that caused those dimensions to be chosen. It's not as if rail gauge might be twice as wide today IF ONLY xyz...
The premise is absurd, the plots are absurd, the characters are absurd.
The big conceit of the whole show is that one group of the best spies around always finds themselves in the center of numerous state, national and international criminal organizations. Other than that, I'm perfectly prepared to defend the basis in reality for most everything in the show.
While the stories are over-the-top, they aren't otherwise too unrealistic. The advice provided for spies, in particular, is accurate and insightful, which probably has a lot to do with the former corporate spies on the payroll.
The comparison to McGuyver is a poor one. That show made NO attempt at realism, and would have the main character taking on an army head-on, with nothing but a can-opener, and coming out without a scratch. I can't think of anything more contrived. I certainly can't see Burn Notice pretending you can make a radar jamming device in 60 seconds by taping a colander to a blender... Turning a cheap cell phone into a bug, though...
Perhaps in the long run, people will be less likely to invest in creating expensive entertainment ( lets face it, the SyFy Channel has pretty much bailed on it already because their existing "make money on the DVD sales" model collapsed). Whether the lack of expensively produced entertainment is actually a bad thing is another discussion entirely.
Cable TV was always a wasteland. Back in the 80's, it was ALL re-runs of TV shows that had been canceled a few years before. In the 90's we had a brief surge in budgets and production values for a few key shows, on a few key networks, and it lasted for a few years, before decaying. Once in a while a new network tries to establish itself, and we get a brief flash of big money, but that falls away quickly once they're picked up and a tiny percentage of people would care if you took away the 1 show on that channel which they like...
So now we're back where we started. OTA broadcast TV networks are still where you go for content, and cable is where you go for cheap crap and endless repeats of what was on OTA broadcast a few days, weeks or months before (instead of years). But now, OTA broadcast is digital, so you get a higher quality picture putting up an antenna than buying cable, and with digital sub-channels, there's a pretty good selection as well.
That said, there are exceptions, and I'd call Burn Notice the best show on TV, which happens to be on USA Network.
A few HBO and Showtime shows are notable exceptions, but when 99% of their content is 20 year old movies, you've got to realize you're paying an absorbitant amount of money for early access to one decent series. They end up in syndication after a couple years, and end up on broadcast as well. Even buying the DVD sets on a regular basis is far cheaper.
I've seen the same thing... We've got offices on several continents, with many more foreign employees than domestic across most departments. Yet, when there are technical issues, the admins over there show that they really aren't even Jr. level, and I end up getting a lot of late night calls, where they pay me more than any 10 guys over there, to fix sometimes rather simple issues.
Overwhelmingly, anybody who is good at what they do, relocates to the US directly, and has to compete with the rest of us. The salary difference is that large that nothing else makes sense.
And really, have prices fallen that much with outsourcing? Not for the items that are essential.
When was the last time you saw a US-made cheap white T-shirt? They make them, they're just $15 a piece. Similar imported T-shirts are less than $2.
7X price reduction is pretty significant.
How about Jeans? I used-to buy Levi's when they were US-made and $50/each. Now, after years of inflation, I can buy imported generics for $8.
It's not so easy to see because companies extract as much profit as they can, and imports arriving on the scene are priced just a bit lower, until competition slowly drives down those massive margins.
You say you're still paying $30 for a bag of socks? It's not the fault of the imports, it's Wal-mart taking MASSIVE profits on a few of their products, kinda giving away the pretzels and charging $10 for a bottle of water, hoping people aren't smart enough to shop-around and beat this strategy...
And that's certainly not all. Buying direct from Chinese factories on eBay often halves the price of most products compared to buying them from US retailers, even with the high cost of parcel shipping.
And at least some foods benefit from this as well. Those tomatoes from South America, lots of processed foods from Mexico, plenty of imports from Europe. Etc. And even domestic products are produced by under-paid illegal imigrants, so don't get too high and mighty.
You assume prices wouldn't be much higher, but reality is quite different.
I do love your fox news esque spin, ridiculing what I said without any argument or supporting evidence at all. I can also assure you I have no desire to sway your pov, just to point out many ways in which your statements are factually and objectively wrong, rather than leave them unchallenged and potentially misguiding passers by.
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We don't do double blind 100 year studies, and without knowing the underlying cause, any foods, medication, procedure (pre or post natal) could be causing dramatically increased risk, and the cause and effect would be so far separate we'd never pick up on it.
Your own premise is belied by the vast amount of human history before germ theory was concieved, after untold large scale human suffering.
Bull... shit...
When contractors are shopping for tools, they don't buy the one that's pretty, they buy the one that fucking works the best. Asthetics be dammed.
Give me black and white icons, I don't care. Mac OS was beloved with its primitive scheme for years. Put me in front of a Windows 7 system, and Office 2007 with it's god-dammed awful ribbon that makes it hard to do the basics, and impossible to do anything remotely advanced, and I'll throw the fucking thing out the window, no matter how pretty it might be.
Worst of all, I think there are a number of people that bought the same feaux Jobsian bullship mantra as you, which is why Gnome and Kde are slashing and burning their base, and XFce grows in popularity despite absolutely never improving in any way... (in fact XFce3 was better all-around).
Hell, I'd switch back to text-mode if the text-only apps were developing a bit better (links is dead and rotting).
That's a lame hope...
I hope we find the underlying cause and determine that simple dietary and behavioral changes will make such diseases fleetingly rare.
Meh. 120V AC is just the accepted root-mean squared (RMS) measurement. In fact 150V is also a valid measurement of utility voltage, as anyone with an oscilloscope will tell you...
I feel I was lied to on all 3 counts, and have come for my refund...
Nope, March of '92. Others have pointed out that Windows 3.0 was out at that time, but I still maintain practically nobody was running it. In 91 it was very much a DOS world.
The web was around, and in-force MUCH earlier than you would imagine. Windows 98 had Internet Explorer version 4 inextricably linked to the OS. Not version 1, but version 4. Internet Explorer was concieved as a weapon against Netscape, so there's no way IEv4 predated Netscape...
And before the WWW, the internet was quite useful. Newsgroups, FTP sites, and Gopher sites contained a lot. Many people here were downloading floppies of Slackware Linux back then...
I don't think I could have surfed the Web in 1991 with a Windows machine, but I could use AOL.
No, you couldn't because NOBODY had Windows in 91. Everyone was running on MS-DOS. I still remember the Compuserve and Prodigy login-screens from their old DOS apps. Trumpet Winsock is irrelevant in the DOS days.
No, photovoltaics have toxic byproducts.
Solar-thermal power plants just require a turbine and a bunch of mirrors (and maybe some salt).
Firewire didn't lose to USB. Firewire lost to Ethernet. Printers & high-end scanners, external storage (NAS), and many other high-speed device-to-device interconnects. Ethernet just makes sense, and ever more devices are getting gigE ports.
DD IS a poor solution, but not really for any reasons you managed to hit upon. The only difference between partimage/clonezilla and DD is that the former knows enough about the filesystem structure to SKIP any blocks marked as unused, saving space and backup/restore time. If your bad block is one that is allocated, partimage/clonezilla will fail just as badly. They have the advantage of speed (possibly a LOT of speed) and nothing else...
You don't zero your drives first... when you're ready to create an image, you fill up the filesystem(s) with a large file with a single repeating character, usually nulls (0x00) from /dev/zero but really any other character works just as well. When all free space is full of those large file(s) filled with zeros, you delete the files to recover the space, then immediately create a DD image, and compress the result.
Yeah, changing netflix into nutflix, that's the best of SNL right there. Real first-class social comentary. How do they do it?
Excuse me while I resume ignoring everything SNL until someone finally puts it out of its misery.
I use both quite frequently, and no, they don't work remotely as well as a desktop browser, and mobile pages have nothing to do with it (setting the user agent equivalent to a desktop is easy enough). It's impressive for tiny embedded browsers that they handle as many sites as well as they do, but there's endless cases where you still have to resort to walking over and using a real computer, which I run into all the damn time. In fact the reason I have 3 different browsers installed is on the off chance one of the 3 will work a bit better on a given page, but they rarely ever do.
There's no truth in that at all. The math has been done over and over again. The get through the next hundred years of projected energy demands, we have two possible options:
1). Build a new Nuclear power plant every couple weeks, or:
2). Develop solar power.
That's it. There's only two, but they exist and are very much real "solutions" that can be built on.
And solar is by far the more promising of the two. Modular, low operating costs, low depreciation, and massive capacity. We currently consume about 15 Terawatts of power, and solar on the surface of the earth maxes out at 69,000 terawatts, so plenty of headroom there, even without the America-hating. Might even help REVERSE global warming.
A bluetooth receiver costs about $20, and should include play/pause forward & rewind buttons, in addition to volume up/down.
I liked it at first, but then found the need to carry around (and keep charged) a second device was not worth the added effort. In addition, the sound quality was noticeably degraded, and the lag made video watching considerable hassle. Also, while Winamp and others work nicely with the bluetooth buttons, other apps don't honor them.
I'm skeptical across the board...
The web browser on those tablets isn't any better than the web browser on your smart phone... Meaning a LOT of pages won't render correctly, you don't have the Add-Ons you have on the desktop, many files won't download, you don't have the plugins to view, well, just about anything, and the touch-screen model still breaks the semantics of many javascript, CSS, and Flash powered web sites.
What's more, whether 10" or 7", tablets are far, far too big to comfortably hold and use with one-hand, and sliding your finger across a 10" screen is extremely tiresome quite quickly, making current tablets across the board a DOWNGRADE from simple ($150) top-tier smart phones. This sentiment was echoed by many reviews of Dell's 5" tablet, which had the advantage of nice big screen, but was still small and light enough to be operated one-handed.
In addition, I'd throw in input. Plenty of Android smart phones have slide-out qwerty keyboards, allowing halfway decent input (I type-up many a /. post on one) but tablets never do, and a bluetooth or detachable (transformer) keyboard is an extra item to be lugged around.
And with all of these issues, I've only just started covering the downside of web browsing with a tablet. The more I think about and try to use them for even basic tasks, the less desirable they become.
I would be happy with an Android tablet as a mere thin client, but alas, that's not even workable. While the SSH apps (and many apps, for that matter) are passable for brief usage, their feature-bareness really comes out quickly when you try to really use it. The same is true for RDP and VNC apps, and the utter lack of an NX app for either Android or iOS.
Considering just these issues, it very, VERY quickly becomes clear that a cheap Linux Netbook (ala, EEE) is a vastly superior choice for just about any usage case you can come up with (that doesn't involve Angry Birds). And even if you find a need for a few mobile apps, Android emulators run on Linux just fine, and Canonical has been working to integrate them even more.
You DO realize Linux has all those features already, don't you? It's called SELinux, it was created by the NSA, and it is enabled by default in RHEL. In fact "permissive" is one of the modes of operation you can choose if you're not fully willing to comit.
In fact MacOS X COULD have those features as well. TrustedBSD has been around before SELinux, but since OSX just uses the FreeBSD userland, I doubt they ported those over to the MACH kernel, but they certainly could have.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, there is one big whopping footnote to this: DMA.
Plugging a drive into a port that supports DMA will be massively risky no matter what software you use. A microcontroller (bug) slipped into a USB flash drive will have full, hardware-level access to the entire computer when plugged-in, as if you let a tech come in and rip the system apart.
The whole story can be summarized with the following quote:
Miles Fidelman: "I kind of wonder if..."
That's about it. Let's have some more fun.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Have Been Planted By Dick Cheney.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Product of Iran Intelligence Agency.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Designed to Target Nude Beaches.
etc.
Not good enough! I demand his blog be taken off the internet immediately! Like, say, within 10 minutes of hitting the front-page.
That would be acceptable... Now how do we make that happen?
No. No, you don't...
The very first sentence of the write-up is as good of a summary, explanation, and justification as I could come up with. Why don't you just go read it again?
Most of the "facts" presented in the story are false, and the overall theme is only very, very loosely accurate... The link from each technology to the next is very tenuous. eg. there were 3 different rail gauges in the USA, so which of those is the width of a wagon, and a horses' ass, exactly? Is it the one we use now, or one of the other two? In addition, there are simply practical constraints that caused those dimensions to be chosen. It's not as if rail gauge might be twice as wide today IF ONLY xyz...
The big conceit of the whole show is that one group of the best spies around always finds themselves in the center of numerous state, national and international criminal organizations. Other than that, I'm perfectly prepared to defend the basis in reality for most everything in the show.
While the stories are over-the-top, they aren't otherwise too unrealistic. The advice provided for spies, in particular, is accurate and insightful, which probably has a lot to do with the former corporate spies on the payroll.
The comparison to McGuyver is a poor one. That show made NO attempt at realism, and would have the main character taking on an army head-on, with nothing but a can-opener, and coming out without a scratch. I can't think of anything more contrived. I certainly can't see Burn Notice pretending you can make a radar jamming device in 60 seconds by taping a colander to a blender... Turning a cheap cell phone into a bug, though...
Cable TV was always a wasteland. Back in the 80's, it was ALL re-runs of TV shows that had been canceled a few years before. In the 90's we had a brief surge in budgets and production values for a few key shows, on a few key networks, and it lasted for a few years, before decaying. Once in a while a new network tries to establish itself, and we get a brief flash of big money, but that falls away quickly once they're picked up and a tiny percentage of people would care if you took away the 1 show on that channel which they like...
So now we're back where we started. OTA broadcast TV networks are still where you go for content, and cable is where you go for cheap crap and endless repeats of what was on OTA broadcast a few days, weeks or months before (instead of years). But now, OTA broadcast is digital, so you get a higher quality picture putting up an antenna than buying cable, and with digital sub-channels, there's a pretty good selection as well.
That said, there are exceptions, and I'd call Burn Notice the best show on TV, which happens to be on USA Network.
A few HBO and Showtime shows are notable exceptions, but when 99% of their content is 20 year old movies, you've got to realize you're paying an absorbitant amount of money for early access to one decent series. They end up in syndication after a couple years, and end up on broadcast as well. Even buying the DVD sets on a regular basis is far cheaper.
I've seen the same thing... We've got offices on several continents, with many more foreign employees than domestic across most departments. Yet, when there are technical issues, the admins over there show that they really aren't even Jr. level, and I end up getting a lot of late night calls, where they pay me more than any 10 guys over there, to fix sometimes rather simple issues.
Overwhelmingly, anybody who is good at what they do, relocates to the US directly, and has to compete with the rest of us. The salary difference is that large that nothing else makes sense.
When was the last time you saw a US-made cheap white T-shirt? They make them, they're just $15 a piece. Similar imported T-shirts are less than $2.
7X price reduction is pretty significant.
How about Jeans? I used-to buy Levi's when they were US-made and $50/each. Now, after years of inflation, I can buy imported generics for $8.
It's not so easy to see because companies extract as much profit as they can, and imports arriving on the scene are priced just a bit lower, until competition slowly drives down those massive margins.
You say you're still paying $30 for a bag of socks? It's not the fault of the imports, it's Wal-mart taking MASSIVE profits on a few of their products, kinda giving away the pretzels and charging $10 for a bottle of water, hoping people aren't smart enough to shop-around and beat this strategy...
And that's certainly not all. Buying direct from Chinese factories on eBay often halves the price of most products compared to buying them from US retailers, even with the high cost of parcel shipping.
And at least some foods benefit from this as well. Those tomatoes from South America, lots of processed foods from Mexico, plenty of imports from Europe. Etc. And even domestic products are produced by under-paid illegal imigrants, so don't get too high and mighty.
You assume prices wouldn't be much higher, but reality is quite different.
I do love your fox news esque spin, ridiculing what I said without any argument or supporting evidence at all.
I can also assure you I have no desire to sway your pov, just to point out many ways in which your statements are factually and objectively wrong, rather than leave them unchallenged and potentially misguiding passers by.