One thing about Truecrypt that always impressed me was how well it worked with Windows -- containers with drive letters, whole disk encryption, etc.
If you were to recreate it, what would be the hardest part -- doing the encryption or doing the OS integration bits? I assume doing encryption securely (ie, not leaving keys or passphrases hanging around in memory or written to swap files) is non-trivial, but I also assume that integrating well with Windows is, too.
They're a relatively small company now, so it's hard to make comparisons but I wonder if at the end of the day there will be a meaningful difference between a Tesla with physical sales offices and physical service centers and a dealership that rolls them into one unit.
Unless they stay a very niche player selling only a small number of cars, it's hard to see them having only one service center unless its a really big one.
I drive a Volvo which is kind of a niche car and there's two dealerships in the entire metro area, one of which has two locations and all three shops are usually pretty busy. One I wouldn't use at all because it's 30 miles away and a pain to get to but I've called a couple of times when I needed something more time-consuming done and couldn't get in at the closer location.
Is there any business or industry that has some kind of perfect mirroring of the broader ethnic and gender demographics between their own population and society at large -- and whose mirror is the same up and down the pay scale (ie, I wouldn't call some some factory with a big majority of blacks or hispanics on the factory floor and all white men in the office a good example)?
The problem I have with super high res displays is the limitations of window management. I have yet to find a decent tool for Windows that allows for virtual monitors that lets me subdivide a very large display into multiple displays. You end up with maximized windows that make poor use of screen real-estate, like this dinky box on a mostly empty window I'm typing in.
And what about window content scaling? I'd be nice to scale the content of a window so that I could display more in the same window or make it larger, especially when combined with a way to scale subdivided display regions.
In my city, we have a government-run monopoly on sewer and water supply. We have not had a public vote on rates ever in the more than twenty years I've lived here. It is ridiculous to assume that any other government-run service will have voter-set prices. Even were they to be voted on, you'd wind up with the situation easily predicted -- the voters who want free stuff will outnumber the fiscally responsible ones who actually pay the bills and there will be NO possibility of competition because you can't sell cheaper than "free".
US government is generally a republic and not direct democracy. A handful of states out West have initiative and referendum processes that allow for more granular public policies to be put to a direct vote, but by and large government policy is set by elected representatives and administration by appointed administrators.
So, in effect, you have voted for sewer and water rates but you just don't know it. What you voted for were elected representatives who have mostly decided that that sewer and water utilities should be self-financed through user user fees, so the rates are basically held at a rate that covers operations and debt service. And that seems to be so uncontroversial that few people challenge it, which is why you never vote on it or even vote for a candidate with any kind of public opinion on it. The closest thing I can think of to issues with these services is extending the metro sewer system to undeveloped edge suburbs but that gets entangled with other development issues and seldom matters to people already served unless it involves rate hikes to cover debt service on expansion.
I think a municipal network is a good idea, but only the distribution infrastructure. Any service derived from it, whether it is Internet access or video services or whatever should be provided by a commercial entity who buys access to the network.
Roads are a pretty decent analogy -- the government provides the roads and the users pay taxes -- some more direct, like license fees and fuel taxes, some indirect like property taxes or some portion of income taxes. The government doesn't sell most services that use the roads -- private entities license access to the roads and provide services on the roads (UPS, the pizza delivery guy, taxis, etc).
The government does provide some basic services like mass transit and the mail, but these are clearly not squelching any private competition in the delivery or transport industries. You could probably make an argument for even a cut-rate municipal ISP that would provide bandwidth-limited, NAT-only ISP service to end users at break-even prices that wouldn't compete with private ISPs who could provide deeper services (public IPs, higher bandwidth, etc) to ensure that private industry wasn't squeezed out.
Every other USB3 drive I've bought has well exceeded USB2 performance, from 16 GB to 128 GB, including the store-brand Microcenter sticks which have historically been just meh in their USB2 varieties.
Maybe it's true that the there's something special about 8 gig sticks that requires fancy flash for parallelism or that 8 gig sticks get low-end-yet-standards-compliant USB3 controllers with the idea that they're only 8 gig.
My mistake was trusting the Kingston *brand* and not reading the reviews more closely as you state.
But I also think that Kingston crossed a line -- I think they KNEW that they would attract people expecting USB3 performance out of a USB3 stick but deliberately provided a low-end product.
I would imagine as more and more "smart" network-enabled devices come on line you're going to see this kind of background power consumption increase.
Not from an end-user functionality perspective but because the devices will be sold cheap with the vendors making money from the trove of in-home data harvested by the device and sold to marketers.
Factor in devices whose functionality is tied to constant cloud connectivity and general crappy software quality that makes no attempt to manage power consumption ("Hey, it's plugged in, what's another 20 watts").
I've been more than happy with everything else I've bought that's been USB3. I'm not looking for the last 20% of speed possible, just generic USB3 speeds.
I just thought it was such a deliberate bait and switch to label a USB key "USB3" and then downgrade the performance to USB2 speeds. I'm not sure if they just use shit flash or if they have some specific technique they turn on to hobble performance of a device that would otherwise run at 3 speeds.
I needed a half-dozen 8 gig USB keys to serve as flash boot and installers.
I figured I might as well get USB3 versions since about half the time they would be written on USB3 based systems. I found a Kingston on Amazon, it was cheap and I bought them without thinking, figuring they were decent.
When I went to use them I had a WTF moment when they were so slow. Benchmarked them against a PNY 128 and another off-brand, both USB3 and the performance with them was as expected but the Kingston one was performing like a slow USB2 key.
Went to Amazon and read the reviews and found out that everyone was bitching and each review had a vendor followup from some flack at Kingston explaining that they were USB3 but considered "value" USB3 and that if I wanted "performance" USB3 I should buy another Kingston product at a ridiculous price.
Nowhere on the packaging does it say "slow, USB2-style speeds".
Anyway, this is just more news that Kingston is happy to bait and switch.
You couldn't sustain that bit rate on a SATA interface. No normal workflow would sustain that volume of writes or encoding, especially prosumer or lower.
There may be broadcast or industrial uses but they would be writing to industrial strength storage via 16 gig fc to SAS SLC arrays.
I've noticed that both Amazon and Netflix seem to make navigating streaming kind of murky, never wanting you to have a good grasp of what is or isn't available besides what they show you as featured titles. I've always suspected that this was done to mask the relatively thin and lame streaming titles that weren't on their short list of high-profile titles.
I've also been surprised at how hard it is to browse the web site for DVDs on the iPad. The web site works, but its so Javascript laden that it makes it hard to use. Third party queue management apps were a salvation. Maybe they're trying to make finding DVDs annoying, too, so that all we'll do is watch the featured streams.
This is why they have the groovy, left-leaning longhair on the web page.
They want to make this into a warm-and-fuzzy progressive issue on how cruel our current immigration system is on children, families and their Chihuahuas, as well as how "stupid" it is because all the super-smart PhDs in nuclear physics who can't get a green card but reallyreally want to come help us advance our build-out of next-generation nuclear power.
Most economists feed into the rich, corporate Republican arguments by saying that lots of immigrants means economic growth, which may be true, but they never seem to get around to the costs associated with bulk-importing lots of low-wage labor which won't be buying Obamacare policies.
What surprises me more than anything else is the total silence by Black congressional leadership on "immigration reform" -- given that the low levels of educational attainment and extremely high levels of unemployment in the black community, aren't they the really big losers in the immigration reform game?
You can probably make a lot of arguments that immigration is broken in many ways but I don't see how this automatically leads to the conclusion that the fixes for what's broken are in agreement, or, even necessarily agreement on what's broken.
On some level this feels a little like astroturfing for more H1Bs if so many big companies are behind it, maybe with a little feel-good "reform" directed at some of the hardships experienced by run-of-the-mill illegals from Latin America.
They always write "skills shortage" when the fully phrased version is "skilled and experienced workers we can hire without benefits for below market rates."
No, you couldn't. At the time, "calling the phone company" about DSL was about as useful as calling the NSA to ask about Eschalon. You looked it up online or you didn't know.
Plus, the phone company didn't have any information about DSL availability based on addresses, only on phone numbers. In Minneapolis the rollout wasn't complete until late 2000 and availability was a function of telephone exchanges, which at the time (before number portability) were more or less locked to specific wire centers.
Even then the availability of DSL was a crapshoot -- even if the exchange was part of a DSL-available wire center, not every address within the wire center service area was within the distance limits of DSL. You could have ordered DSL just to find out that weeks later when they got around to doing the install that you were too far away.
The house we ended up buying was the LAST wire center supported. I can remember driving to it and measuring the distance to see if I was within the distance limit.
That reminds me of my house hunting back in 1998 when I'd have my wife distract the real estate agent while I made a surreptitious call to our apartment so I could capture the house's phone number on caller id and check online to see if they had DSL available there.
I think you could make that abstract argument concerning the relationship between OSS and many things.
The problem with guns specifically is that it just obliterates anything to do with open source in the comments. It becomes just another Slashbot debate about guns.
And I don't think Bruce has any kind of qualifications about gun ownership generally that makes his opinion anything more than an opinion.
Now, maybe this is supposed to be one of those celebrity interviews where merely the fact that he's got some kind of technology rock star status makes any opinion he has, from guns to Gorgonzola, relevant.
But that's one thing that makes me nuts about celebrities, the notion that they are celebrities means the opinions they have are somehow worthwhile outside of the source of their celebrity. Bono knows rock music. Eastwood knows films. But what makes their opinion of politics worth more than my dog's opinion of bones?
...anything else unrelated to computers/networking in here?
I'm sure he has opinions about Coke vs. Pepsi, Football vs. Baseball, Brownies (chewy vs. cake, frosted vs. unfrosted), and so on. He's a thoughtful guy and they may even be interesting, but his expertise is in IT not beverages, sports, baked goods or politics.
I'm sure everyone has an opinion on gun rights but I don't see why we should read about it here.
When will we see the "Criterion" version of movie streams or downloads?
Too often what's on consumer video of many films (and, maybe, all films in some way) is compromised intentionally or circumstantially, either in the making of the film or the home video release production.
Will we ever get "Criterion" editions of these films as streams or downloads? I imagine the jungle of licensing gets in the way not to mention the lowest common denominator thinking that goes with Netflix. But I would expect iTunes or Amazon to sell Criterion streams as downloads.
Hijacked? Was there ever any real structure around it?
I seem to remember some grass-roots seeming protest/gatherings late in the Bush presidency focused on illegal immigration and bank bail outs that got labeled as "Tea Party" protests along the lines of the Boston Tea Party -- ie, objections to the established government, which was Republican.
Some hard-core, anti-tax bible types like Michelle Bachman kind of latched onto it and seemed to co-opt any semblance of authenticity out of it, turning it into something of a banner for a militant wing of the Republican party.
About at this point it became an "official" organization in the eyes of the Democrats who used it as kind of a political bogeyman, embodying everything they hate -- racists, gun nuts, anti-tax types, fundamentalist Christians, etc.
By this point it stuck me as completely devoid of its origins and less of a real movement and just an idea of a movement that had nothing behind it.
That's a nice patent portfolio you've got there. You say your entire business model hinges on intellectual property, some ephemera that requires a court system to adjudicate? And maybe some Customs officers to block infringing devices from the US market?
Why, it'd be a shame if the courts and Customs didn't help. Kind of hard to be exclusive with just a bunch of paper backing you up..
Of course, you report that income and pay those taxes, that's maybe something we could help you with.
Or maybe your Irish friends can help you, you know, use that diplomatic influence they have with the Chinese and Koreans, since you seem to see them as your global HQ..
Slashdot Mirror
One thing about Truecrypt that always impressed me was how well it worked with Windows -- containers with drive letters, whole disk encryption, etc.
If you were to recreate it, what would be the hardest part -- doing the encryption or doing the OS integration bits? I assume doing encryption securely (ie, not leaving keys or passphrases hanging around in memory or written to swap files) is non-trivial, but I also assume that integrating well with Windows is, too.
They're a relatively small company now, so it's hard to make comparisons but I wonder if at the end of the day there will be a meaningful difference between a Tesla with physical sales offices and physical service centers and a dealership that rolls them into one unit.
Unless they stay a very niche player selling only a small number of cars, it's hard to see them having only one service center unless its a really big one.
I drive a Volvo which is kind of a niche car and there's two dealerships in the entire metro area, one of which has two locations and all three shops are usually pretty busy. One I wouldn't use at all because it's 30 miles away and a pain to get to but I've called a couple of times when I needed something more time-consuming done and couldn't get in at the closer location.
Even with less mechanical stuff to break, I'm sure the usual malfunctions can occur.
Lacking a dealership, how do you get things fixed on a Tesla? Does some guy come to your house?
Is there any business or industry that has some kind of perfect mirroring of the broader ethnic and gender demographics between their own population and society at large -- and whose mirror is the same up and down the pay scale (ie, I wouldn't call some some factory with a big majority of blacks or hispanics on the factory floor and all white men in the office a good example)?
The problem I have with super high res displays is the limitations of window management. I have yet to find a decent tool for Windows that allows for virtual monitors that lets me subdivide a very large display into multiple displays. You end up with maximized windows that make poor use of screen real-estate, like this dinky box on a mostly empty window I'm typing in.
And what about window content scaling? I'd be nice to scale the content of a window so that I could display more in the same window or make it larger, especially when combined with a way to scale subdivided display regions.
In my city, we have a government-run monopoly on sewer and water supply. We have not had a public vote on rates ever in the more than twenty years I've lived here. It is ridiculous to assume that any other government-run service will have voter-set prices. Even were they to be voted on, you'd wind up with the situation easily predicted -- the voters who want free stuff will outnumber the fiscally responsible ones who actually pay the bills and there will be NO possibility of competition because you can't sell cheaper than "free".
US government is generally a republic and not direct democracy. A handful of states out West have initiative and referendum processes that allow for more granular public policies to be put to a direct vote, but by and large government policy is set by elected representatives and administration by appointed administrators.
So, in effect, you have voted for sewer and water rates but you just don't know it. What you voted for were elected representatives who have mostly decided that that sewer and water utilities should be self-financed through user user fees, so the rates are basically held at a rate that covers operations and debt service. And that seems to be so uncontroversial that few people challenge it, which is why you never vote on it or even vote for a candidate with any kind of public opinion on it. The closest thing I can think of to issues with these services is extending the metro sewer system to undeveloped edge suburbs but that gets entangled with other development issues and seldom matters to people already served unless it involves rate hikes to cover debt service on expansion.
I think a municipal network is a good idea, but only the distribution infrastructure. Any service derived from it, whether it is Internet access or video services or whatever should be provided by a commercial entity who buys access to the network.
Roads are a pretty decent analogy -- the government provides the roads and the users pay taxes -- some more direct, like license fees and fuel taxes, some indirect like property taxes or some portion of income taxes. The government doesn't sell most services that use the roads -- private entities license access to the roads and provide services on the roads (UPS, the pizza delivery guy, taxis, etc).
The government does provide some basic services like mass transit and the mail, but these are clearly not squelching any private competition in the delivery or transport industries. You could probably make an argument for even a cut-rate municipal ISP that would provide bandwidth-limited, NAT-only ISP service to end users at break-even prices that wouldn't compete with private ISPs who could provide deeper services (public IPs, higher bandwidth, etc) to ensure that private industry wasn't squeezed out.
Every other USB3 drive I've bought has well exceeded USB2 performance, from 16 GB to 128 GB, including the store-brand Microcenter sticks which have historically been just meh in their USB2 varieties.
Maybe it's true that the there's something special about 8 gig sticks that requires fancy flash for parallelism or that 8 gig sticks get low-end-yet-standards-compliant USB3 controllers with the idea that they're only 8 gig.
My mistake was trusting the Kingston *brand* and not reading the reviews more closely as you state.
But I also think that Kingston crossed a line -- I think they KNEW that they would attract people expecting USB3 performance out of a USB3 stick but deliberately provided a low-end product.
I would imagine as more and more "smart" network-enabled devices come on line you're going to see this kind of background power consumption increase.
Not from an end-user functionality perspective but because the devices will be sold cheap with the vendors making money from the trove of in-home data harvested by the device and sold to marketers.
Factor in devices whose functionality is tied to constant cloud connectivity and general crappy software quality that makes no attempt to manage power consumption ("Hey, it's plugged in, what's another 20 watts").
I've been more than happy with everything else I've bought that's been USB3. I'm not looking for the last 20% of speed possible, just generic USB3 speeds.
I just thought it was such a deliberate bait and switch to label a USB key "USB3" and then downgrade the performance to USB2 speeds. I'm not sure if they just use shit flash or if they have some specific technique they turn on to hobble performance of a device that would otherwise run at 3 speeds.
I needed a half-dozen 8 gig USB keys to serve as flash boot and installers.
I figured I might as well get USB3 versions since about half the time they would be written on USB3 based systems. I found a Kingston on Amazon, it was cheap and I bought them without thinking, figuring they were decent.
When I went to use them I had a WTF moment when they were so slow. Benchmarked them against a PNY 128 and another off-brand, both USB3 and the performance with them was as expected but the Kingston one was performing like a slow USB2 key.
Went to Amazon and read the reviews and found out that everyone was bitching and each review had a vendor followup from some flack at Kingston explaining that they were USB3 but considered "value" USB3 and that if I wanted "performance" USB3 I should buy another Kingston product at a ridiculous price.
Nowhere on the packaging does it say "slow, USB2-style speeds".
Anyway, this is just more news that Kingston is happy to bait and switch.
You couldn't sustain that bit rate on a SATA interface. No normal workflow would sustain that volume of writes or encoding, especially prosumer or lower.
There may be broadcast or industrial uses but they would be writing to industrial strength storage via 16 gig fc to SAS SLC arrays.
I've noticed that both Amazon and Netflix seem to make navigating streaming kind of murky, never wanting you to have a good grasp of what is or isn't available besides what they show you as featured titles. I've always suspected that this was done to mask the relatively thin and lame streaming titles that weren't on their short list of high-profile titles.
I've also been surprised at how hard it is to browse the web site for DVDs on the iPad. The web site works, but its so Javascript laden that it makes it hard to use. Third party queue management apps were a salvation. Maybe they're trying to make finding DVDs annoying, too, so that all we'll do is watch the featured streams.
Maybe the key to the Turing test is one question -- Top or Bottom?
This is why they have the groovy, left-leaning longhair on the web page.
They want to make this into a warm-and-fuzzy progressive issue on how cruel our current immigration system is on children, families and their Chihuahuas, as well as how "stupid" it is because all the super-smart PhDs in nuclear physics who can't get a green card but reallyreally want to come help us advance our build-out of next-generation nuclear power.
Most economists feed into the rich, corporate Republican arguments by saying that lots of immigrants means economic growth, which may be true, but they never seem to get around to the costs associated with bulk-importing lots of low-wage labor which won't be buying Obamacare policies.
What surprises me more than anything else is the total silence by Black congressional leadership on "immigration reform" -- given that the low levels of educational attainment and extremely high levels of unemployment in the black community, aren't they the really big losers in the immigration reform game?
You can probably make a lot of arguments that immigration is broken in many ways but I don't see how this automatically leads to the conclusion that the fixes for what's broken are in agreement, or, even necessarily agreement on what's broken.
On some level this feels a little like astroturfing for more H1Bs if so many big companies are behind it, maybe with a little feel-good "reform" directed at some of the hardships experienced by run-of-the-mill illegals from Latin America.
I agree, I think that "land speed" records using what amounts to jet aircraft on wheels is kind of bogus.
I do think the idea of using a gas turbine for a power source driving the wheels isn't really a problem.
They always write "skills shortage" when the fully phrased version is "skilled and experienced workers we can hire without benefits for below market rates."
No, you couldn't. At the time, "calling the phone company" about DSL was about as useful as calling the NSA to ask about Eschalon. You looked it up online or you didn't know.
Plus, the phone company didn't have any information about DSL availability based on addresses, only on phone numbers. In Minneapolis the rollout wasn't complete until late 2000 and availability was a function of telephone exchanges, which at the time (before number portability) were more or less locked to specific wire centers.
Even then the availability of DSL was a crapshoot -- even if the exchange was part of a DSL-available wire center, not every address within the wire center service area was within the distance limits of DSL. You could have ordered DSL just to find out that weeks later when they got around to doing the install that you were too far away.
The house we ended up buying was the LAST wire center supported. I can remember driving to it and measuring the distance to see if I was within the distance limit.
That reminds me of my house hunting back in 1998 when I'd have my wife distract the real estate agent while I made a surreptitious call to our apartment so I could capture the house's phone number on caller id and check online to see if they had DSL available there.
I think you could make that abstract argument concerning the relationship between OSS and many things.
The problem with guns specifically is that it just obliterates anything to do with open source in the comments. It becomes just another Slashbot debate about guns.
And I don't think Bruce has any kind of qualifications about gun ownership generally that makes his opinion anything more than an opinion.
Now, maybe this is supposed to be one of those celebrity interviews where merely the fact that he's got some kind of technology rock star status makes any opinion he has, from guns to Gorgonzola, relevant.
But that's one thing that makes me nuts about celebrities, the notion that they are celebrities means the opinions they have are somehow worthwhile outside of the source of their celebrity. Bono knows rock music. Eastwood knows films. But what makes their opinion of politics worth more than my dog's opinion of bones?
...anything else unrelated to computers/networking in here?
I'm sure he has opinions about Coke vs. Pepsi, Football vs. Baseball, Brownies (chewy vs. cake, frosted vs. unfrosted), and so on. He's a thoughtful guy and they may even be interesting, but his expertise is in IT not beverages, sports, baked goods or politics.
I'm sure everyone has an opinion on gun rights but I don't see why we should read about it here.
Good to know, thanks.
When will we see the "Criterion" version of movie streams or downloads?
Too often what's on consumer video of many films (and, maybe, all films in some way) is compromised intentionally or circumstantially, either in the making of the film or the home video release production.
Will we ever get "Criterion" editions of these films as streams or downloads? I imagine the jungle of licensing gets in the way not to mention the lowest common denominator thinking that goes with Netflix. But I would expect iTunes or Amazon to sell Criterion streams as downloads.
Hijacked? Was there ever any real structure around it?
I seem to remember some grass-roots seeming protest/gatherings late in the Bush presidency focused on illegal immigration and bank bail outs that got labeled as "Tea Party" protests along the lines of the Boston Tea Party -- ie, objections to the established government, which was Republican.
Some hard-core, anti-tax bible types like Michelle Bachman kind of latched onto it and seemed to co-opt any semblance of authenticity out of it, turning it into something of a banner for a militant wing of the Republican party.
About at this point it became an "official" organization in the eyes of the Democrats who used it as kind of a political bogeyman, embodying everything they hate -- racists, gun nuts, anti-tax types, fundamentalist Christians, etc.
By this point it stuck me as completely devoid of its origins and less of a real movement and just an idea of a movement that had nothing behind it.
That's a nice patent portfolio you've got there. You say your entire business model hinges on intellectual property, some ephemera that requires a court system to adjudicate? And maybe some Customs officers to block infringing devices from the US market?
Why, it'd be a shame if the courts and Customs didn't help. Kind of hard to be exclusive with just a bunch of paper backing you up..
Of course, you report that income and pay those taxes, that's maybe something we could help you with.
Or maybe your Irish friends can help you, you know, use that diplomatic influence they have with the Chinese and Koreans, since you seem to see them as your global HQ..