You've been paying closer attention than I have, since I never hear about anyone "switching" from Linux to Mac. It's usually in the context of _adding_ a Mac, often in the form of a laptop. They don't switch, they just assimilate another platform.
Reporters sometimes do this thing called investigating where they ask people questions and stuff and can sometimes come up with theories about why something happened without having the specific people on hand to answer the obvious direct questions.
But I guess blaming the reporters for not doing a coherent job of reoprting is just...unfair.
Are we at a length (eg, 2M) where externally connected SATA devices are a realistic option?
1M is probably do-able, but once you factor in interface port to end device and the actual cable runs involved (port to external connector, external connector to external device, external device port to actual device connector), 2M seems like a minimum for no-fuss connections with breathing room.
I'm not even playing the world's smallest violin for you.
Compare telemarketing with another interstate business, trucking:
1) Each state has different rules. Telemarketing rules are MUCH simpler than trucking rules, which can encompass equipment, cargo, drivers, hours of operation.
2) Trucking a load of ammonia between two states involves knowing ALL that rules for all the intervening states, and possibly even out of the way adjacent states, since they may have more flexible rules, there may be detours, etc. Telemarketers calling from NY to CA only need to know two rules, NY and CA.
3) If a DNC list purchase is like a "license" from a state, telemarketers are lucky. Interstate trucks often need ICC licenses, license plates (truck AND trailer), fuel licenses, hazmat licenses, driver licenses (often with hazmat riders), vehicle registrations, and on and on.
4) Compliance for telemarketers is the largely non-rocket-science DBA skill of list scrubbing, taken care of with the equipment and tools they already have (and presumably use already). Compliance for truckers is complicated and involved, often requiring inspections, special tools or facilities, or outside vendors.
Trucking seems to work despite these regulations. Why can't telemarketing? Oh, that's right, people want stuff delivered by trucks and will put up with the regulation. Nobody wants telemarketing.
My point was that the will to build a system that satisfies the criteria of improving on mass transit to the point of being a compelling alternative to cars is likely to be at least as big as the system itself.
It took Minnesota 10 years of wrangling and $800M to build a single leg (~10 miles) of a light transit system -- and they had 90% of the right of way already. Presumably PRT will be no cheaper.
Thus the political will to build and fund a $XX billion dollar PRT system isn't likely to exist. Perhaps a smaller system that services some high density area like SF, NY or Boston, but nothing substantial will likely ever be built.
ssh and terminal services are fine for day to day use, but when you've got your rack full of 1U servers and one is refusing to boot... or ssh just simply is not working... then what do you do?
I don't disagree, but I think a lot of places lacking legacy (non-TS capable Windows, etc) systems have done the math and figured that a plastic cart with a display, keyboard and mouse (and maybe a PC and a 2 port KVM) is simlper and cheaper to use to do breakfix on a non-cooperative box the few times it needs it vs. the cost and complexity of doing kvm for hundreds of boxes.
Especially if the boxes support built-in KVM and power support over the network like HP's RILO Advanced. That gives you THE console as well as reset and power on/off. If all your boxes supported that, KVM would be obsolete -- ssh and/or terminal services for every day stuff, and RILO for critical on-console work. RILO works even without an OS booted.
I think a lot of machine rooms are avoiding KVM altogether. Stuff like HPaq's remote insight lights out advanced gives you console-level KVM without any wires at all over the network, and a lot of places just jack in a KVM on a cart if and when they need to, and everything else is done via ssh or terminal services.
I think a single, standardized KVM port would make a lot of sense (which is what I think you're describing) -- one jack that can handle a keyboard, a mouse and video onto a single cable. The problem with this idea isn't that it makes sense, but that Belkin and others selling a cable with all that stuff glued together and the ends hanging loose. It's most of the advantages of one cable without the whole new standard problem.
None of this makes the idea of KVM input into a laptop moot, particularly since you could make an otherwise slow laptop into a reasonable LCD display. I never thought of the FW/USB2 HDD option, ALL the peripherals should be accessable, such as optical drives, HDDs and so forth. I guess it would be easier if the peripherals were on the USB bus to begin with (NICs usually aren't), but it might be helpful if there was some way to bridge all devices to USB for external access.
I'd like an internal GPS, but I'm not sure I'd get all that much use out of it. It sure seems like the cell companies could pull their heads from their profit margins and share the GPS
What I would like to see on laptops is a KVM-type capability where the laptop could be used as a keyboard, mouse and display for an external PC. This would be done at a hardware level (no kludgy, slow, unreliable USB dongles digitizing the external system's video) to be useful.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been to a client location to fix something or other and had to fool around with displays, keyboards, etc, and usually they had no spare. Being able to pass a cable between the machine and my laptop would be much simpler.
It's inept management to shitcan 15k people, since it's inept management to "suddenly" find yourself with 15k redundant people who need to be shitcanned all at once.
But my guess is that someone's just assuming that they can can 10% of the workforce and nobody'll notice the difference and they'll net about a billion after expenses in extra profit.
Re:Land of the "Free"!
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
They would make our neighborhoods a whole lot safer if they would keep convicted sex offenders (like the guy in Idaho) in prison forever. I'd go for executing sex offenders convicted of serious crimes (forcible rape or child molestation), provided that there was conclusive DNA evidence linking them to the crime.
Back in the 1970s, what cable "was" was highly open to debate. In rural areas, it was just a community method of distributing a satellite feed of network programming. In urban areas, it was movies and porn.
When "cable" channels began to be added to the mix in both areas, these were largely commercial free, not because their owners were generous but because their household penetration was some small number under 10 percent of households and there weren't many/any advertisers willing to spend money to reach those people who were already being reached via network ads -- which would have been shown on network satellite feeds replayed in rural areas, and on "superstations" that were just pumping their local signal to a bird in the sky.
There just wasn't any money initially in buying commercials on early specialty channels. ESPN -- the people watching Iowa State play Minnesota on a Tuesday night were either watching in Iowa or Minnesota on OTA channels, and it was thought that a regional game wasn't really of any interest on ESPN, thus nobody watches, thus no ads on ESPN, or the *appearance* of no ads on ESPN.
Most turkey loads for shotguns are effective at ranges up to 25 yards and would fulfill the "Zombie" criteria of a lethal head shot. While any shotgun load would not likely remove the head, at point-blank range a 10 ga magnum load would likely leave something that resembled a semi-spherical collander.
I also think you understate the.50 round. It'll penetrate half-inch steel plate and concrete walls. This round CAN severe limbs and remove heads -- 710 grains @ 2800 ft/sec. It wouldn't be practical except where ammo was available and only as a temporary clearing mechanism for coping with large assemblages of zombies blocking access passages that can be moved through quickly.
Most zombie survival scenerios involve what's necessary to defeat small groups of zombies in the course of finding supplies, moving to a safer area, or getting away from an unsafe area. Small arms are ideal for this task, and contemporary military assault rifles are almost perfect for this -- literally centuries of evolution..223 and 7.62x39 rounds WILL provide lethal head shots at ranges most people can handle the weapon at -- up to about 200 yards.
SMGs are a waste of time. No accuracy, huge amounts of ammo expended. Beneficial only in highly limited circumstances.
As for running out of ammo, since you're not engaging in full-auto firefights running out of ammo isn't a huge risk. It's assumed that there is no practical way to defeat a large enough mass of zombies with small arms. For more permanent fortifications, reloading is a viable option.
Setting up a new civilization is a whole other game. I'm primarily concerned with localized self-defense against zombies and the other living people you'd face in social breakdown.
I was irritated when they got snippy with the System on the Apple-supplied OS install CDs and wouldn't let it run on other media. It was just a shedload of work to get a bootable system on a Zip disk.
Better yet, when will Windows be USB bootable?
on
The End of a Floppy Era
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From the adjacent replies in this thread it appears that DOS is at least USB bootable from thumb drives.
When will Windows be bootable from USB? Why isn't it now? Is there a solid technical reason or is it the same reason there's no print command from Windows Explorer? The inflexibility of boot devices relative to technology on Windows is kind of appalling.
I cede boot flexibility to the Mac world completely. You've always been able to boot into Mac OS from any darn connected drive -- 1394, USB, CDs (dunno about OS X on CD, tho).
Color inkjets do produce better prints, particularly when using photo paper, but I find the current generations of color laser printers pretty stunning.
Even the cheap ones are impressive, the test pages that come out of the $800 models at Office Depot are as good as I'd ever need for my photos.
Plus as you point out, they'll be much cheaper in the long run to operate. Even the low end ones are rated at at least 10k pages a month and the toner will last for a long time relative to the ink.
If you think they should act otherwise, then you should get your government to make rules about that banning the companies from bending to Chinese will.
The parent entity is right, businesses will sell stuff to China that enhances the government's dictatorial control over their people if they can make a buck on it. It's like blaming a dog for eating a bit of food on the floor; it's what dogs do, and selling stuff is what corporations do (the analogy wasn't intentionally ironic, yet is...).
We used to have laws (now sadly limited to North Kora, Syria and Cuba) that *prohibited* trade with communist block countries except for very rare exceptions, as it was well understood that providing stuff to them they didn't have (and the communist block always lagged technologically) undermined our position.
A desire to tweak the Soviets in the late 70s and early 80s, coupled with economic stagnation made doing business with the Chinese seem like a good idea -- we could coopt them with Levis, Coke and Marlboros, and they would buy a shedload of our goods, and in the end they'd ditch communism for capitalist democracy, much like the Japanese ditched fascism. And if we didn't want the economic growth, the Europeans would be glad to take it from us, and we'd lose a chance to box out the Soviets.
Except now it appears that we have miscalculated. The Chinese have used our investment to bolster their totalitarian government. This wouldn't be so bad if our corporations were run by the same guys that used to run them -- military vets who waved flags, went to American Legion meetings, and by and large bought into the whole Civics lesson on freedom and democracy.
But instead our corporations are run by greedy, egotistical megalomaniacs with allegience only to their own personal enrichment and aggrandizement. They could give a shit about American values and whenever they get the chance like to pursue a totalitarian policy in the office (newsletter propaganda, email snooping, arbitrary and capricious rules, illegal discrimination, etc). A whole *country* where you can do this enthralls them -- think of the order and discipline!
It's not hopeful; in fact, I expect us to import totalitarian practices more and more since they work so well and our business class would like to see them available here as well.
It's a great book, but I take issue with the author's weapons advice.
Disparaging pistols and shotguns because they're close range weapons makes and promoting the epitome of close-range weapons, a blade, makes no sense.
I also think that the M1 carbine is a terrible choice for a weapon
While it might be cheap (or was cheap in surplus form at one time), the ammo would be nowhere as easy to come by as.223 Remington (AR-15/M-16 ammo, aka 5.56). And its ammo also is notoriously ineffective at any range.
The best weapon is likely to be civilian sporting weapons, if only for the widely available ammunition. 12 guage shotgun shells capable of blowing a head off at 25 yards could be found anywhere. There's also a half-dozen hunting rounds (.308,.30-06, 30-30,.270,.243) that are likely to be easily found at sporting goods stores and other places where you'd be scrounging for anything.
The best rifle choices are likely to be M4-style AR-15s in.223 Remington and the AK-47. An AR-15 based weapon has a ton of existing ammo (and compatibility with military weapons), is accurate and ideally powered for head shots at ranges most people can be accurate at.
I think AKs tend to be less accurate, but they're also dead reliable, even when full of mud or rust. Ammo availability would be good, but not what the AR-15 clones would have in the US. Outside the US, the AK would be a no-brainer.
The author is mostly right about machine guns, but I have to believe that in some limited situations, a high volume of fire from a large-caliber gun (US.50 M2, Russian 12.7mm) would be excellent at stopping mid-sized mobs of zombies or clearing paths for armored vehicles to pass through. Even though only head shots are killers, a single.50 cal bullet will easily cut several zombies in half. Massed fire on a narrow field of zombies could grind them into a much less threatening mess.
Handguns are more effective than the author claims, despite the difficulty in getting headshots outside of 35 feet or so. At panic ranges a handgun is indispensable and its size makes carrying as a backup a no-brainer.
Many hunting pistols (mostly 6" barrel revolvers) would be decent with scopes at ranges up to 150 feet and be more maneuverable than any rifle, and the ammo is everywhere.
A 100 node zombie net can be blocked pretty easily, but your 10k node network will require a many more nodes to be blocked if they are all/mostly running at 10 or 100Mbit links.
A 10k node network @ 256Kbit requires a much lower percentage of hosts blocked to mitigate the attack.
But it's like the phone/cable cos are ever gonna give us 100Mbit uplink anyway.
The challenge of a software-only solution is, of course, the hardware compatibility issue. So maybe it should be a $xx bundle of software and a cheapie PCI encoder card, perhaps ideally having the encoder card handle NSTC output as well as tuning, remote control, etc.
The "commercial" aspect of this might also benefit from the ability to handle cablecard, which an OSS project seems less likely (or in much longer timeframes) to be able to use.
Perhaps a commercial version of Myth could even be used as a for-profit arm of a non-profit foundation to support Myth development.
*I* don't have the time to build HTPCs anymore -- work, wife, house, other hobbies eat my time up. But I would consider doing it if the right software + hardware solution were easily available.
It's not that there aren't valid things the U.S. government does that are, broadly, "anti-freedom". But drawing a parallel between eminent domain and the actions of a totalitarian theocracy (despite it's elections, Iran remains dominated by the Revolutionary Guard and its supreme religious leader) and saying "The US is just as bad" is foolish and naive.
Sure, the U.S. government (or, more precisely, a small number of members of the U.S. government) are, time and again, doing something stupid that isn't what you'd expect of a free country, and the examples go back to the founding of the country (counting slaves as 2/3 of a person, etc). Things like Jim Crowe, Viet Nam, Watergate, Iran/Contra, etc etc.
But almost without exception these events are noted in the press, analyzed, criticized, written about by thousands in letters to the editor, protested in the street and very often -- tada -- CHANGED. Civil rights act, voting rights act, Nixon's impeachment, Iran/Contra hearings. And no secret police organization decended on private citizens and beat them, impisoned or tortured them for having an opinion contrary to the government or its policies.
Are we perfect? No way. Are we more free than just about any other place? Absolutely. Will we continue to make missteps from time to time? Sure. Human nature isn't always pretty.
You can be a pessimist and argue that evidence points to a declining level of freedom and government accountability. Maybe. But that hardly means that we're even comperable to North Korea, Iran, Syria, or any of a number of other totalitarian/dicatorial/theocratic societies.
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You've been paying closer attention than I have, since I never hear about anyone "switching" from Linux to Mac. It's usually in the context of _adding_ a Mac, often in the form of a laptop. They don't switch, they just assimilate another platform.
You made the leap to "solve crimes", not I.
Reporters sometimes do this thing called investigating where they ask people questions and stuff and can sometimes come up with theories about why something happened without having the specific people on hand to answer the obvious direct questions.
But I guess blaming the reporters for not doing a coherent job of reoprting is just...unfair.
Are we at a length (eg, 2M) where externally connected SATA devices are a realistic option?
1M is probably do-able, but once you factor in interface port to end device and the actual cable runs involved (port to external connector, external connector to external device, external device port to actual device connector), 2M seems like a minimum for no-fuss connections with breathing room.
I'm not even playing the world's smallest violin for you.
Compare telemarketing with another interstate business, trucking:
1) Each state has different rules. Telemarketing rules are MUCH simpler than trucking rules, which can encompass equipment, cargo, drivers, hours of operation.
2) Trucking a load of ammonia between two states involves knowing ALL that rules for all the intervening states, and possibly even out of the way adjacent states, since they may have more flexible rules, there may be detours, etc. Telemarketers calling from NY to CA only need to know two rules, NY and CA.
3) If a DNC list purchase is like a "license" from a state, telemarketers are lucky. Interstate trucks often need ICC licenses, license plates (truck AND trailer), fuel licenses, hazmat licenses, driver licenses (often with hazmat riders), vehicle registrations, and on and on.
4) Compliance for telemarketers is the largely non-rocket-science DBA skill of list scrubbing, taken care of with the equipment and tools they already have (and presumably use already). Compliance for truckers is complicated and involved, often requiring inspections, special tools or facilities, or outside vendors.
Trucking seems to work despite these regulations. Why can't telemarketing? Oh, that's right, people want stuff delivered by trucks and will put up with the regulation. Nobody wants telemarketing.
My point was that the will to build a system that satisfies the criteria of improving on mass transit to the point of being a compelling alternative to cars is likely to be at least as big as the system itself.
It took Minnesota 10 years of wrangling and $800M to build a single leg (~10 miles) of a light transit system -- and they had 90% of the right of way already. Presumably PRT will be no cheaper.
Thus the political will to build and fund a $XX billion dollar PRT system isn't likely to exist. Perhaps a smaller system that services some high density area like SF, NY or Boston, but nothing substantial will likely ever be built.
Now that you've solved the technological problems, let us know when you find the political will to fund it and build it.
I'm sure I'll still be driving a car then.
You're not married, are you?
ssh and terminal services are fine for day to day use, but when you've got your rack full of 1U servers and one is refusing to boot... or ssh just simply is not working... then what do you do?
I don't disagree, but I think a lot of places lacking legacy (non-TS capable Windows, etc) systems have done the math and figured that a plastic cart with a display, keyboard and mouse (and maybe a PC and a 2 port KVM) is simlper and cheaper to use to do breakfix on a non-cooperative box the few times it needs it vs. the cost and complexity of doing kvm for hundreds of boxes.
Especially if the boxes support built-in KVM and power support over the network like HP's RILO Advanced. That gives you THE console as well as reset and power on/off. If all your boxes supported that, KVM would be obsolete -- ssh and/or terminal services for every day stuff, and RILO for critical on-console work. RILO works even without an OS booted.
What does that do?
I think a lot of machine rooms are avoiding KVM altogether. Stuff like HPaq's remote insight lights out advanced gives you console-level KVM without any wires at all over the network, and a lot of places just jack in a KVM on a cart if and when they need to, and everything else is done via ssh or terminal services.
I think a single, standardized KVM port would make a lot of sense (which is what I think you're describing) -- one jack that can handle a keyboard, a mouse and video onto a single cable. The problem with this idea isn't that it makes sense, but that Belkin and others selling a cable with all that stuff glued together and the ends hanging loose. It's most of the advantages of one cable without the whole new standard problem.
None of this makes the idea of KVM input into a laptop moot, particularly since you could make an otherwise slow laptop into a reasonable LCD display. I never thought of the FW/USB2 HDD option, ALL the peripherals should be accessable, such as optical drives, HDDs and so forth. I guess it would be easier if the peripherals were on the USB bus to begin with (NICs usually aren't), but it might be helpful if there was some way to bridge all devices to USB for external access.
I'd like an internal GPS, but I'm not sure I'd get all that much use out of it. It sure seems like the cell companies could pull their heads from their profit margins and share the GPS
What I would like to see on laptops is a KVM-type capability where the laptop could be used as a keyboard, mouse and display for an external PC. This would be done at a hardware level (no kludgy, slow, unreliable USB dongles digitizing the external system's video) to be useful.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been to a client location to fix something or other and had to fool around with displays, keyboards, etc, and usually they had no spare. Being able to pass a cable between the machine and my laptop would be much simpler.
As opposed to the guy in Idaho who had already been convicted of killing someone and was let out to kill again?
It's inept management to shitcan 15k people, since it's inept management to "suddenly" find yourself with 15k redundant people who need to be shitcanned all at once.
But my guess is that someone's just assuming that they can can 10% of the workforce and nobody'll notice the difference and they'll net about a billion after expenses in extra profit.
They would make our neighborhoods a whole lot safer if they would keep convicted sex offenders (like the guy in Idaho) in prison forever. I'd go for executing sex offenders convicted of serious crimes (forcible rape or child molestation), provided that there was conclusive DNA evidence linking them to the crime.
I think commercial free cable is an urban legend.
Back in the 1970s, what cable "was" was highly open to debate. In rural areas, it was just a community method of distributing a satellite feed of network programming. In urban areas, it was movies and porn.
When "cable" channels began to be added to the mix in both areas, these were largely commercial free, not because their owners were generous but because their household penetration was some small number under 10 percent of households and there weren't many/any advertisers willing to spend money to reach those people who were already being reached via network ads -- which would have been shown on network satellite feeds replayed in rural areas, and on "superstations" that were just pumping their local signal to a bird in the sky.
There just wasn't any money initially in buying commercials on early specialty channels. ESPN -- the people watching Iowa State play Minnesota on a Tuesday night were either watching in Iowa or Minnesota on OTA channels, and it was thought that a regional game wasn't really of any interest on ESPN, thus nobody watches, thus no ads on ESPN, or the *appearance* of no ads on ESPN.
Most turkey loads for shotguns are effective at ranges up to 25 yards and would fulfill the "Zombie" criteria of a lethal head shot. While any shotgun load would not likely remove the head, at point-blank range a 10 ga magnum load would likely leave something that resembled a semi-spherical collander.
.50 round. It'll penetrate half-inch steel plate and concrete walls. This round CAN severe limbs and remove heads -- 710 grains @ 2800 ft/sec. It wouldn't be practical except where ammo was available and only as a temporary clearing mechanism for coping with large assemblages of zombies blocking access passages that can be moved through quickly.
.223 and 7.62x39 rounds WILL provide lethal head shots at ranges most people can handle the weapon at -- up to about 200 yards.
I also think you understate the
Most zombie survival scenerios involve what's necessary to defeat small groups of zombies in the course of finding supplies, moving to a safer area, or getting away from an unsafe area. Small arms are ideal for this task, and contemporary military assault rifles are almost perfect for this -- literally centuries of evolution.
SMGs are a waste of time. No accuracy, huge amounts of ammo expended. Beneficial only in highly limited circumstances.
As for running out of ammo, since you're not engaging in full-auto firefights running out of ammo isn't a huge risk. It's assumed that there is no practical way to defeat a large enough mass of zombies with small arms. For more permanent fortifications, reloading is a viable option.
Setting up a new civilization is a whole other game. I'm primarily concerned with localized self-defense against zombies and the other living people you'd face in social breakdown.
I was irritated when they got snippy with the System on the Apple-supplied OS install CDs and wouldn't let it run on other media. It was just a shedload of work to get a bootable system on a Zip disk.
From the adjacent replies in this thread it appears that DOS is at least USB bootable from thumb drives.
When will Windows be bootable from USB? Why isn't it now? Is there a solid technical reason or is it the same reason there's no print command from Windows Explorer? The inflexibility of boot devices relative to technology on Windows is kind of appalling.
I cede boot flexibility to the Mac world completely. You've always been able to boot into Mac OS from any darn connected drive -- 1394, USB, CDs (dunno about OS X on CD, tho).
Color inkjets do produce better prints, particularly when using photo paper, but I find the current generations of color laser printers pretty stunning.
Even the cheap ones are impressive, the test pages that come out of the $800 models at Office Depot are as good as I'd ever need for my photos.
Plus as you point out, they'll be much cheaper in the long run to operate. Even the low end ones are rated at at least 10k pages a month and the toner will last for a long time relative to the ink.
If you think they should act otherwise, then you should get your government to make rules about that banning the companies from bending to Chinese will.
The parent entity is right, businesses will sell stuff to China that enhances the government's dictatorial control over their people if they can make a buck on it. It's like blaming a dog for eating a bit of food on the floor; it's what dogs do, and selling stuff is what corporations do (the analogy wasn't intentionally ironic, yet is...).
We used to have laws (now sadly limited to North Kora, Syria and Cuba) that *prohibited* trade with communist block countries except for very rare exceptions, as it was well understood that providing stuff to them they didn't have (and the communist block always lagged technologically) undermined our position.
A desire to tweak the Soviets in the late 70s and early 80s, coupled with economic stagnation made doing business with the Chinese seem like a good idea -- we could coopt them with Levis, Coke and Marlboros, and they would buy a shedload of our goods, and in the end they'd ditch communism for capitalist democracy, much like the Japanese ditched fascism. And if we didn't want the economic growth, the Europeans would be glad to take it from us, and we'd lose a chance to box out the Soviets.
Except now it appears that we have miscalculated. The Chinese have used our investment to bolster their totalitarian government. This wouldn't be so bad if our corporations were run by the same guys that used to run them -- military vets who waved flags, went to American Legion meetings, and by and large bought into the whole Civics lesson on freedom and democracy.
But instead our corporations are run by greedy, egotistical megalomaniacs with allegience only to their own personal enrichment and aggrandizement. They could give a shit about American values and whenever they get the chance like to pursue a totalitarian policy in the office (newsletter propaganda, email snooping, arbitrary and capricious rules, illegal discrimination, etc). A whole *country* where you can do this enthralls them -- think of the order and discipline!
It's not hopeful; in fact, I expect us to import totalitarian practices more and more since they work so well and our business class would like to see them available here as well.
It's a great book, but I take issue with the author's weapons advice.
.223 Remington (AR-15/M-16 ammo, aka 5.56). And its ammo also is notoriously ineffective at any range.
.30-06, 30-30, .270, .243) that are likely to be easily found at sporting goods stores and other places where you'd be scrounging for anything.
.223 Remington and the AK-47. An AR-15 based weapon has a ton of existing ammo (and compatibility with military weapons), is accurate and ideally powered for head shots at ranges most people can be accurate at.
.50 M2, Russian 12.7mm) would be excellent at stopping mid-sized mobs of zombies or clearing paths for armored vehicles to pass through. Even though only head shots are killers, a single .50 cal bullet will easily cut several zombies in half. Massed fire on a narrow field of zombies could grind them into a much less threatening mess.
Disparaging pistols and shotguns because they're close range weapons makes and promoting the epitome of close-range weapons, a blade, makes no sense.
I also think that the M1 carbine is a terrible choice for a weapon
While it might be cheap (or was cheap in surplus form at one time), the ammo would be nowhere as easy to come by as
The best weapon is likely to be civilian sporting weapons, if only for the widely available ammunition. 12 guage shotgun shells capable of blowing a head off at 25 yards could be found anywhere. There's also a half-dozen hunting rounds (.308,
The best rifle choices are likely to be M4-style AR-15s in
I think AKs tend to be less accurate, but they're also dead reliable, even when full of mud or rust. Ammo availability would be good, but not what the AR-15 clones would have in the US. Outside the US, the AK would be a no-brainer.
The author is mostly right about machine guns, but I have to believe that in some limited situations, a high volume of fire from a large-caliber gun (US
Handguns are more effective than the author claims, despite the difficulty in getting headshots outside of 35 feet or so. At panic ranges a handgun is indispensable and its size makes carrying as a backup a no-brainer.
Many hunting pistols (mostly 6" barrel revolvers) would be decent with scopes at ranges up to 150 feet and be more maneuverable than any rifle, and the ammo is everywhere.
A 100 node zombie net can be blocked pretty easily, but your 10k node network will require a many more nodes to be blocked if they are all/mostly running at 10 or 100Mbit links.
A 10k node network @ 256Kbit requires a much lower percentage of hosts blocked to mitigate the attack.
But it's like the phone/cable cos are ever gonna give us 100Mbit uplink anyway.
I think there is a business opportunity there.
The challenge of a software-only solution is, of course, the hardware compatibility issue. So maybe it should be a $xx bundle of software and a cheapie PCI encoder card, perhaps ideally having the encoder card handle NSTC output as well as tuning, remote control, etc.
The "commercial" aspect of this might also benefit from the ability to handle cablecard, which an OSS project seems less likely (or in much longer timeframes) to be able to use.
Perhaps a commercial version of Myth could even be used as a for-profit arm of a non-profit foundation to support Myth development.
*I* don't have the time to build HTPCs anymore -- work, wife, house, other hobbies eat my time up. But I would consider doing it if the right software + hardware solution were easily available.
It's not that there aren't valid things the U.S. government does that are, broadly, "anti-freedom". But drawing a parallel between eminent domain and the actions of a totalitarian theocracy (despite it's elections, Iran remains dominated by the Revolutionary Guard and its supreme religious leader) and saying "The US is just as bad" is foolish and naive.
Sure, the U.S. government (or, more precisely, a small number of members of the U.S. government) are, time and again, doing something stupid that isn't what you'd expect of a free country, and the examples go back to the founding of the country (counting slaves as 2/3 of a person, etc). Things like Jim Crowe, Viet Nam, Watergate, Iran/Contra, etc etc.
But almost without exception these events are noted in the press, analyzed, criticized, written about by thousands in letters to the editor, protested in the street and very often -- tada -- CHANGED. Civil rights act, voting rights act, Nixon's impeachment, Iran/Contra hearings. And no secret police organization decended on private citizens and beat them, impisoned or tortured them for having an opinion contrary to the government or its policies.
Are we perfect? No way. Are we more free than just about any other place? Absolutely. Will we continue to make missteps from time to time? Sure. Human nature isn't always pretty.
You can be a pessimist and argue that evidence points to a declining level of freedom and government accountability. Maybe. But that hardly means that we're even comperable to North Korea, Iran, Syria, or any of a number of other totalitarian/dicatorial/theocratic societies.