The biggest problem with online services in general, and Gmail specifically, is that companies keep trying to impose arbitrary confines on them.
You know why GMail can't add space fast enough? Because they don't have a Yahoo Briefcase type service, with a nice interface, where people can directly store and manage their files, and more than that, directly SHARE a file with an unlimited number of other users. Instead, somebody hacks up a program, and your files get stuffed into an e-mail with all the overhead, and thousands of people have their own private copies of the same damn file.
Such a service might not be profitable on its own, but it might just make up the difference, thanks to saving them tons of money from not having to keep upgrading their mail servers that have been picking up the slack for people that need such a service.
How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums
Probably every one of them.
(with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?)
If the worst problem you have from an event of major data loss, is being forced to input some metadata, you can count yourself as damn lucky.
These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss
As opposed to storing everything locally? I know lots of people that have lost lots of data when their local system was ruined thanks to viruses, OS bugs, and hardware failure. Many, many more than have had a sudden data loss from any major service provider.
I imagine free internet storage is the only form of backups most regular people have. I would certainly trust Google over any particular hard drive, and the chances are pretty damn slim that both would fail catastrophically at the same time.
A smart scammer could parasitize a group of GMail accounts and send out a few spams a day from each account from a million accounts at once.
After a couple days, when Google gets a dozen complaints about each account, then what? How long will it take to get a million accounts again? A "single point of failure" is also a single point of control that can be used quite effectively against malicious individuals like spammers.
And if a criminal finds a way to create an internal GMail worm (one that can propagate itself from account to account without any interaction by the account holder), then they can turn the entire GMail system into a botnet.
And if a bullfrog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hopped.
Just because you can invent a magical little hypothetical doesn't make it actually possible.
My point is that these massive system have some serious single-points of failure and are becoming extremely high-value targets for internet criminals.
"Massive" tends to be mutually exclusive with "single-points of failure" and the site where you upload your GBs of pictures is about the lowest-value a target could possibly be.
Getting access to a web site doesn't grant criminals any special privileges. All they can do is potentially capture the information you input to that specific site. A very, very different thing than getting root access on a local machine. Websites have been taken-over many times before, and no matter how important the site, it wasn't the end of the world for anyone.
I'd be much, much, MUCH more worried about the security of my paypal account than my GMail and Flikr accounts.
Of course. But there is always someone that will pay, no matter how ridiculous. The fact you're glossing over is that price determines HOW MANY units will be sold...
DVD players sold fine at $100, and would just sell many, many more at $10. Does that mean DVD players are only worth $10 and the patents on the technology can't be worth more than $1? Of course not.
This man spends almost as much on electricity as the average American makes in a year
There's nothing hypocritical about that at all, or did I fail to notice the part of his presentation where he said nobody should use electricity, or set a hard maximum limit to how much electricity a single building can ever use?
Fine. You can have TCP/IP. Can we have the WWW back?
The parent absolutely, positively didn't say anything about somebody owning any technology. Why are you getting so defensive about where some bit of technology was created?
Its this stupid "We invented it" mentality that is horribly twisted thruths, that makes US people behave like overlords all the time.
That's beyond idiotic. I'm sure there's absolutely nobody in the US that feels any more or less justified about tapping international traffic just because some technology was or wasn't invented here.
complex technologgy isn't invented,
By your definition, nothing ever qualifies as invented, except, perhaps the very first tool ever used by humans.
As a Swedish citizen, I feel so lucky that all my communications will be monitored by a government I can not influence through voting!
That's a simple fact of life whenever you make an international call. No exceptions. The other end of your call inherently falls under their laws, which you have no influence over.
The only difference here is that all the anger is getting directed at the US, since it's the 800 lbs gorilla everyone loves to hate.
I, for one, do not welcome the casnning of my email by the USA
Oh? So which country did you want to have spying on all you traffic instead? Just name them.
It's utterly unrealistic to believe there is any country that isn't spying on every bit of international traffic they can get their hands on. At least the US is largely open and honest about the spying (it wasn't a Chinese newspaper you heard about this from...) while other countries either lack the opportunity to spy on anyone, or are just better at keeping it quiet.
I'd be very doubtful of the information shown by that graph.
I wouldn't. It seems perfectly reasonable.
It seems to suggest that there's more telephone traffic between London and Western Australia, and between the USA and eastern Australia than there is between the two bits of Australia.
Eastern Australia calling Western Australia isn't "international phone-call traffic" by any stretch of the imagination, so it doesn't qualify for inclusion on that map.
why is that people in Western Australia phone London and people in eastern Australia don't?
No doubt there is a fiber optic link to the UK at the West coast of Australia, and NOT one in the east. So, any call made from the east presumably would be transfered terrestrially across the continent, then, from the western coast, get transferred to the UK.
I suspect that the graph has been prepared from data which simply shows where calls passing through the USA and London have originated.
I suspect you have no idea what the graph is actually supposed to show.
What kills me is that a quarter to a half of the people who are up in arms about this publish their daily lives and personal details on blogs
People are only too happy to tell you about the things they want you to know. I sincerely doubt people are so stupid that they are posting on the internet the private things they only want one or two close friends/family to know...
Here's a clue people... I don't talk about my private life on the intertubes... never have... never will.
But you do on the telephone, Google isn't listening, the NSA is.
Instead, patent violation should be assessed only in the amount of money owed from one party to another,
Patent licenses aren't sold off-the-shelf at the market down the street... The "amount of money owed" could be ANYTHING under the sun. The patent holder could just say they charge $1 million per device, and bankrupt a company. Of course the foreign company could refuse to pay, then an injunction is the only method to prevent future infringement.
calculated as a reasonable fraction of the profit earned from goods in violation of the patent.
Oh, so if I take some patent that took many millions of dollars to come up with, like some major pharmaceutical drug, and instead of paying the $100 fee per bottle, sell illegal generics for $10, I only have to pay some fraction of $10 instead of $100?
Sometimes, the patented technology is worth well in excess the material cost of the end product. With prices on digital electronics ever falling, expect to see that happen more and more often. The cheapest DVD players aren't far from it.
In other words, I think all licensing of patents should be compulsory. I can't see any argument why any party should disallow any other party from implementing their patents.
Preventing a party from using a patent at all is the only possible bargaining tool you have, in negotiating a price.
You could apply the same thing to (physical) property... selling your property, to anyone that offers to buy it, should also be compulsory.
By painting the surface of huts/housing flat black and placing clear plastic water bottles on them for a few hours. The sun & UV help to kill off most parasites and biological pathogens quite effectively
You've got that wrong, one way or another...
For UV sterilization, you want a highly reflective surface, that will reflect the UV back through the water a second time, as most organisms are already adapted to handle 1X sun-levels of UV. Better yet, of course, is a solar concentrator that will focus several more times as much UV at the water.
"Black" sounds like an attempt to use solar heat to raise the water temperature, but if so, it's unlikely to confer much of its heat to the bottle of water in this manner, and especially in winter, I doubt it will get near enough to boiling to do a good job of sterilization. Plus, it's not uncommon for such methods to have difficulty killing larger hardier organisms (parasite/insect larva).
Personally, I'm a much bigger fan of an even cheaper and simpler method; percolating water through a couple meters of fine sand to naturally remove 99% of contaminants. Instead of just killing biological contaminants, it also removes suspended solids and similar contamination that causes water to taste terrible. And it's so simple and uses widely and cheaply available materials (quite unlike paint or polished metal) even the poorest individuals can replicate sand filters.
The WHO apparently agrees: "Under suitable circumstances, slow sand filtration may be not only the cheapest and simplest but also the most efficient method of water treatment."
I'm pretty darned sure the summary meant "Quicktime" the software
Even if it was meant that way, it's still 100% wrong. I'm quite sure Linspire most certainly has NOT aquired a license to port Apple's Quicktime software to Linux. What's more, I can't imagine any reason they would, as several more full-featured and standards-compliant implementations of the codecs in question exist, and can playback Quicktime compatible files easily, as well as handling standards compliant files that just happen to be Quicktime INCOMPATIBLE. Quicktime itself has absolutely nothing to offer.
Well, I can do a lot of that, but a lot of it doesn't interest me.
Good for you. But try not to ridicule others who just don't happen to share your preference of vacation destinations...
but I also want to see other places, and learn other cultures.
That would fall under the age-old tradition of Spring Break... Ah yes, the Cancunians and their ancient ritual of the wet t-shirt contest. Their strange and exotic foods, which cause visitors to observe another ancient ritual--the midnight dash for the toilet.
Batteries wear out, but it's quite easy to detect reduced battery capacity and notify the user before it becomes an issue. Batteries are very easy to replace. And if you want to double the "reliability" you can pretty easily just include TWO batteries...
And if you don't mind the lack of performance and increased power requirements of Flash, as well as long-term "reliability" I fail to see the problem you have with hibernate (S4) storing an image of RAM on the HDD. HDD throughput is easily faster than most all Flash.
No wonder you guys never get a chance to leave the US and see what the rest of the world is about.
How frequently do your vacations include flying across an ocean? If your trip is any shorter, it isn't at all equivalent to leaving the US.
The real reason many people never leave the USA is because it's simply a huge place, spanning a large continent. Also, everything most people could want to see in their lifetime can be found inside the US. Here in the west, in a day I can drive from my house, to the tallest mountain in the contiguous US (4421m, Mt Whitney), past the oldest living organism (Methuselah tree) on earth, through a forest with the tallest trees on earth (Sequoia), to the lowest point on the content, right through the area with the highest recorded temperature on the planet, then, for good measure, round off the day by visiting The Grand Canyon.
Even if you don't normally use floppies anymore, you're crazy not to have at least a single drive and a few blank floppies lying around somewhere. There's always one scenario like this which continues to make them a critical tool. This happens very, very rarely, but it does still happen.
And why is that a problem? If you have regular power outages, the cheapest little $30 UPS could keep a single system powered in S3 mode for a couple weeks. On notebooks, even a nearly discharged battery has enough power to keep RAM refreshed for days. Much more time and power is needed to write-out data from RAM to a different form of storage, even Flash, so you'll need to be keeping your computer powered down for days each time for it to even potentially be a power advantage.
Else why use anything but RAM for storage of anything?
Because RAM isn't cheap. If I could buy 400GBs of RAM for $200, I'd happily replace my hard drives. A tiny battery built-in can keep RAM refreshed in the event of even lengthy power loss. In fact, that's exactly how high-end RAID controllers work...
I haven't had S3 suspend to RAM fail in any way, even ONCE, even though I've used S3 about 3 times a day on my desktop (which I'm using right now) for about 6 months now.
[...] proprietary software and formats such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Flash, Real, and Microsoft OOXML
Quicktime is absolutely, 100% non-proprietary at this point... h.264, MPEG-4 (ASP), AAC, MP3, are all open standards. They require patent license fees, but so do most open standards, including the WiFi card your probably using...
Windows Media is at least mostly open, with VC-1 now an SMPTE standard.
Microsoft is working towards standardizing OOXML as well. It's getting a lot of heat for not being entirely free, while ODF is, but that doesn't make it proprietary.
Real also isn't a very good example, with a player having long been provided for free use on any available Linux system.
Of note is that only the Slashdot summary made these mistakes. TFA did not mention these as proprietary. It did incorrectly mention many other open standards as being proprietary: MP3, Java, PDF, Flash, etc. though at least Flash was proprietary in the past. It also confuses proprietary software (closed implementations) eg. Acrobat, and proprietary standards eg. PDF.
With a bad install or software bug, I can just re-install, but a bad bios can hose the motherboard.
No it can't.
First, it's been several years since I saw a motherboard with a socketed Flash chip, and even then, it was only the dirt cheap OEM boards from the likes of Dell/HP/etc, while the retail boards used a socket.
It's actually pretty easy to buy a replacement Flash chip, or salvage one from a dead system, and do a little hot-swap trick to Flash it with your current BIOS image for back-up/recovery purposes.
Secondly, the better motherboard manufacturers (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte) have included recovery methods for a few years now, either in the form of a dual Flash chips, or a built-in mini-BIOS of sorts, that can read an image from a floppy disk and flash the BIOS, even if you otherwise can't boot.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem with online services in general, and Gmail specifically, is that companies keep trying to impose arbitrary confines on them.
You know why GMail can't add space fast enough? Because they don't have a Yahoo Briefcase type service, with a nice interface, where people can directly store and manage their files, and more than that, directly SHARE a file with an unlimited number of other users. Instead, somebody hacks up a program, and your files get stuffed into an e-mail with all the overhead, and thousands of people have their own private copies of the same damn file.
Such a service might not be profitable on its own, but it might just make up the difference, thanks to saving them tons of money from not having to keep upgrading their mail servers that have been picking up the slack for people that need such a service.
Probably every one of them.
If the worst problem you have from an event of major data loss, is being forced to input some metadata, you can count yourself as damn lucky.
As opposed to storing everything locally? I know lots of people that have lost lots of data when their local system was ruined thanks to viruses, OS bugs, and hardware failure. Many, many more than have had a sudden data loss from any major service provider.
I imagine free internet storage is the only form of backups most regular people have. I would certainly trust Google over any particular hard drive, and the chances are pretty damn slim that both would fail catastrophically at the same time.
After a couple days, when Google gets a dozen complaints about each account, then what? How long will it take to get a million accounts again? A "single point of failure" is also a single point of control that can be used quite effectively against malicious individuals like spammers.
And if a bullfrog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hopped.
Just because you can invent a magical little hypothetical doesn't make it actually possible.
"Massive" tends to be mutually exclusive with "single-points of failure" and the site where you upload your GBs of pictures is about the lowest-value a target could possibly be.
Getting access to a web site doesn't grant criminals any special privileges. All they can do is potentially capture the information you input to that specific site. A very, very different thing than getting root access on a local machine. Websites have been taken-over many times before, and no matter how important the site, it wasn't the end of the world for anyone.
I'd be much, much, MUCH more worried about the security of my paypal account than my GMail and Flikr accounts.
Of course. But there is always someone that will pay, no matter how ridiculous. The fact you're glossing over is that price determines HOW MANY units will be sold...
DVD players sold fine at $100, and would just sell many, many more at $10. Does that mean DVD players are only worth $10 and the patents on the technology can't be worth more than $1? Of course not.
I didn't realize the Nobel Prize was awarded for movies now...
There's nothing hypocritical about that at all, or did I fail to notice the part of his presentation where he said nobody should use electricity, or set a hard maximum limit to how much electricity a single building can ever use?
The parent absolutely, positively didn't say anything about somebody owning any technology. Why are you getting so defensive about where some bit of technology was created?
That's beyond idiotic. I'm sure there's absolutely nobody in the US that feels any more or less justified about tapping international traffic just because some technology was or wasn't invented here.
By your definition, nothing ever qualifies as invented, except, perhaps the very first tool ever used by humans.
That's a simple fact of life whenever you make an international call. No exceptions. The other end of your call inherently falls under their laws, which you have no influence over.
The only difference here is that all the anger is getting directed at the US, since it's the 800 lbs gorilla everyone loves to hate.
Oh? So which country did you want to have spying on all you traffic instead? Just name them.
It's utterly unrealistic to believe there is any country that isn't spying on every bit of international traffic they can get their hands on. At least the US is largely open and honest about the spying (it wasn't a Chinese newspaper you heard about this from...) while other countries either lack the opportunity to spy on anyone, or are just better at keeping it quiet.
I wouldn't. It seems perfectly reasonable.
Eastern Australia calling Western Australia isn't "international phone-call traffic" by any stretch of the imagination, so it doesn't qualify for inclusion on that map.
No doubt there is a fiber optic link to the UK at the West coast of Australia, and NOT one in the east. So, any call made from the east presumably would be transfered terrestrially across the continent, then, from the western coast, get transferred to the UK.
I suspect you have no idea what the graph is actually supposed to show.
People are only too happy to tell you about the things they want you to know. I sincerely doubt people are so stupid that they are posting on the internet the private things they only want one or two close friends/family to know...
But you do on the telephone, Google isn't listening, the NSA is.
Patent licenses aren't sold off-the-shelf at the market down the street... The "amount of money owed" could be ANYTHING under the sun. The patent holder could just say they charge $1 million per device, and bankrupt a company. Of course the foreign company could refuse to pay, then an injunction is the only method to prevent future infringement.
Oh, so if I take some patent that took many millions of dollars to come up with, like some major pharmaceutical drug, and instead of paying the $100 fee per bottle, sell illegal generics for $10, I only have to pay some fraction of $10 instead of $100?
Sometimes, the patented technology is worth well in excess the material cost of the end product. With prices on digital electronics ever falling, expect to see that happen more and more often. The cheapest DVD players aren't far from it.
Preventing a party from using a patent at all is the only possible bargaining tool you have, in negotiating a price.
You could apply the same thing to (physical) property... selling your property, to anyone that offers to buy it, should also be compulsory.
You've got that wrong, one way or another...
For UV sterilization, you want a highly reflective surface, that will reflect the UV back through the water a second time, as most organisms are already adapted to handle 1X sun-levels of UV. Better yet, of course, is a solar concentrator that will focus several more times as much UV at the water.
"Black" sounds like an attempt to use solar heat to raise the water temperature, but if so, it's unlikely to confer much of its heat to the bottle of water in this manner, and especially in winter, I doubt it will get near enough to boiling to do a good job of sterilization. Plus, it's not uncommon for such methods to have difficulty killing larger hardier organisms (parasite/insect larva).
Personally, I'm a much bigger fan of an even cheaper and simpler method; percolating water through a couple meters of fine sand to naturally remove 99% of contaminants. Instead of just killing biological contaminants, it also removes suspended solids and similar contamination that causes water to taste terrible. And it's so simple and uses widely and cheaply available materials (quite unlike paint or polished metal) even the poorest individuals can replicate sand filters.
The WHO apparently agrees: "Under suitable circumstances, slow sand filtration may be not only the cheapest and simplest but also the most efficient method of water treatment."
Even if it was meant that way, it's still 100% wrong. I'm quite sure Linspire most certainly has NOT aquired a license to port Apple's Quicktime software to Linux. What's more, I can't imagine any reason they would, as several more full-featured and standards-compliant implementations of the codecs in question exist, and can playback Quicktime compatible files easily, as well as handling standards compliant files that just happen to be Quicktime INCOMPATIBLE. Quicktime itself has absolutely nothing to offer.
Good for you. But try not to ridicule others who just don't happen to share your preference of vacation destinations...
That would fall under the age-old tradition of Spring Break... Ah yes, the Cancunians and their ancient ritual of the wet t-shirt contest. Their strange and exotic foods, which cause visitors to observe another ancient ritual--the midnight dash for the toilet.
Of which the Methuselah tree is the oldest... A short distance from Mt Whitney.
The Libya temperature record has since been discredited. Death Valley once again officially holds the highest recorded temperature.
Batteries wear out, but it's quite easy to detect reduced battery capacity and notify the user before it becomes an issue. Batteries are very easy to replace. And if you want to double the "reliability" you can pretty easily just include TWO batteries...
And if you don't mind the lack of performance and increased power requirements of Flash, as well as long-term "reliability" I fail to see the problem you have with hibernate (S4) storing an image of RAM on the HDD. HDD throughput is easily faster than most all Flash.
Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.
...and:
And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:
"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times."
"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."
Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.
Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.
How frequently do your vacations include flying across an ocean? If your trip is any shorter, it isn't at all equivalent to leaving the US.
The real reason many people never leave the USA is because it's simply a huge place, spanning a large continent. Also, everything most people could want to see in their lifetime can be found inside the US. Here in the west, in a day I can drive from my house, to the tallest mountain in the contiguous US (4421m, Mt Whitney), past the oldest living organism (Methuselah tree) on earth, through a forest with the tallest trees on earth (Sequoia), to the lowest point on the content, right through the area with the highest recorded temperature on the planet, then, for good measure, round off the day by visiting The Grand Canyon.
Even if you don't normally use floppies anymore, you're crazy not to have at least a single drive and a few blank floppies lying around somewhere. There's always one scenario like this which continues to make them a critical tool. This happens very, very rarely, but it does still happen.
And why is that a problem? If you have regular power outages, the cheapest little $30 UPS could keep a single system powered in S3 mode for a couple weeks. On notebooks, even a nearly discharged battery has enough power to keep RAM refreshed for days. Much more time and power is needed to write-out data from RAM to a different form of storage, even Flash, so you'll need to be keeping your computer powered down for days each time for it to even potentially be a power advantage.
Because RAM isn't cheap. If I could buy 400GBs of RAM for $200, I'd happily replace my hard drives. A tiny battery built-in can keep RAM refreshed in the event of even lengthy power loss. In fact, that's exactly how high-end RAID controllers work...
I haven't had S3 suspend to RAM fail in any way, even ONCE, even though I've used S3 about 3 times a day on my desktop (which I'm using right now) for about 6 months now.
I'm using FreeBSD 6.2 FWIW.
How did you know about my bumper sticker?
Lucient: (noun) Lucifer + Lucent
Quicktime is absolutely, 100% non-proprietary at this point... h.264, MPEG-4 (ASP), AAC, MP3, are all open standards. They require patent license fees, but so do most open standards, including the WiFi card your probably using...
Windows Media is at least mostly open, with VC-1 now an SMPTE standard.
Microsoft is working towards standardizing OOXML as well. It's getting a lot of heat for not being entirely free, while ODF is, but that doesn't make it proprietary.
Real also isn't a very good example, with a player having long been provided for free use on any available Linux system.
Of note is that only the Slashdot summary made these mistakes. TFA did not mention these as proprietary. It did incorrectly mention many other open standards as being proprietary: MP3, Java, PDF, Flash, etc. though at least Flash was proprietary in the past. It also confuses proprietary software (closed implementations) eg. Acrobat, and proprietary standards eg. PDF.
No it can't.
First, it's been several years since I saw a motherboard with a socketed Flash chip, and even then, it was only the dirt cheap OEM boards from the likes of Dell/HP/etc, while the retail boards used a socket.
It's actually pretty easy to buy a replacement Flash chip, or salvage one from a dead system, and do a little hot-swap trick to Flash it with your current BIOS image for back-up/recovery purposes.
Secondly, the better motherboard manufacturers (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte) have included recovery methods for a few years now, either in the form of a dual Flash chips, or a built-in mini-BIOS of sorts, that can read an image from a floppy disk and flash the BIOS, even if you otherwise can't boot.