I can see the intent of this distro. Web surfing and reading email on Windows leaves many traces on the harddrive, IE and Outlook Expess being the prime examples. This tool prevents you from leaving those traces on the harddrive *except* for (as you point out) when the system memory of the VM gets swapped to disk. It can't stop the host kernel from snooping on the memory of the VM either. The webpage also doesn't talk about disk encryption, so your user data is *probably* sitting unencrypted on the flashdrive. It's an interesting concept, but too many holes at this point in development to entrust it with your privacy.
If I were building this I'd try something faster like coLinux, but only if there was a way to keep system RAM from being swapped to disk. A virtual machine can always be snooped from the host OS. If I was worried about that, I'd just boot into a livecd distro, but then you'd still have to worry about hardware keyboard loggers.
"Unfortunately, that flash fob is of very limited lifespan."
That's not really a problem. Damnsmalllinux is a livecd distro and the concept is similar when you boot off a flashdrive. The boot media is mounted readonly and the OS actually runs in a ramdisk (these days it's called a shared memory filesystem). The only writes would be user data which is very little compared to the OS.
As far as disposing of a broken flashdrive, I'd say take a hammer to the thing and be sure to smash up the flash chips very well.
It depends how picky you are about sound quality, but I'm less picky about sound on portable players because it's already noisy outside and I play my iPod through an FM modulator. In that case you could always encode your high quality Oggs to a lower bitrate MP3 for portable use. Yes, it sounds like shit converting lossy to lossy, but you'd just treat the MP3 as a dispoable file then, and computers are fast enough these days that reencoding to lower bitrates doesn't take long.
I'm not as old as that, but I do remember checking out these 20+ year old electronics books from the public library that had projects to build your own vacuum tube radio. They did talk about transistors too, but as an exotic, expensive unaffordable item.
Erm, that's the DVP642 in the article blurb on top, and $69 is the regular price that everybody sells it for. For a real bargain try Amazon.com at $63 w/ free shipping or if you can't wait most Best Buy and Fry's have it for $69.99 in store. And yes, it is a nice player. Plays just about every Divx/Xvid file I tried except for sound on a really old Divx3.11 file that had Divx;-) audio (I think that was a hacked 64K WMA codec). It doesn't play files with QPEL either (a feature of Divx 5 Pro), but I haven't run into one of those yet.
Now can you build an HTPC that's quiet, not 3 times the size and weight, and doesn't use 4 times the electricity of a DVP642? I have one now, and I'm retiring the HTPC. But to be fair, I never got it working as well as I wanted, and I could have spent more time on tweaking it.
So-called assault weapons are involved in a small fraction of gun crimes compared to handguns, *but* those shootings are often notorious, high profile crimes like mass shooting rampages and big shootouts with police. In that kind of scenario, a large capacity magazine is an advantage. In a more common scenario like robbing a store or killing one person, 10 shots is plenty. I've also heard interviews where the law enforcement side complains about flash suppressors which might be a legitimate concern. A folding stock does make a rifle more concealable. Still, with everything else, your point is well made. The AWB is just a red herring. It bans cosmetic features like pistol grips and synthetic stocks. Hunting rifles fire the same high powered rounds as assault rifles. Handguns are used in the vast majority of gun crimes.
"Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better."
There's economics involved, but it's not because the censored CDs are so popular with fans of the music and their parents. They can't afford complaints from the core customer base which is rural and conservative. They can afford to lose a few music CD sales in exchange for not pissing off customers who buy a whole lot more crap than CDs.
"They worked as a team, for the good of the team, knowing that at least some of them would win even if the others bombed."
This strategy is common in bicycle racing. The lead rider is supported by his teammates. Among other things, they'll go in front and let him draft off them so he'll be more rested at the end.
"The independants can't afford to compete with WalMart on the hits, but can't survive only on non-hits."
They can compete another way. If Walmart even sells Eminem, it would be the censored, clean lyrics version. They're run by Bible-thumping prudes. They wouldn't sell music with explicit lyrics no matter how wildly popular it was. Of course, you still won't have enough customers in a rural area to support an indie record store, but there's always mail order like Amazon or just downloading.
"now I have a x30 that plays SNES and Gameboy Advance games at 30fps with no problem."
Is that with the 624Mhz model? I tried Morphgear on a 400Mhz X5. It was choppy with the sound on and no problems with the sound off. Also, the directional pad on the X5 feels cheap and flimsy so I gave up on using it for gaming.
Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?
Yes, it's an OEM-only release. Hardware support for tuner cards and remote controls is pretty limited so MS only sells it to OEMs who preinstall it on systems with tested compatible hardware. OEM also means don't call Microsoft for support, call the hardware manufacturer.
"There are lots of ways to make profits disappear. A comedian in the Netherlands for instance completely destroyed a type of malt beer by making fun of it. Still, that's not stealing."
Same thing here when Winger's career was destroyed by Beavis and Butthead making fun of them.
"Why is everyone so eager to make their lives ever more complex and laborious?"
Quite the opposite. It makes a huge difference in time and effort not having to preplan your music mixes. I started out with a crappy 64MB Creative Nomad. It was like commuting in an electric car. Every night you pick your songs for the next day and load them onto the player (at a whopping 120K/s). I'd have just enough music for the drive to work and back. Next I bought an MP3-CD player. It's nice being able to fit 10 hours onto one CD, but you still had to preplan your music. The obvious way to organize was to make single-genre CDs, which is good for backup and archiving, but gets monotonous if you're listening to it nonstop. Maybe if I experimented with more mixed-genre CDs it might have worked out better. Now with a 15GB iPod, it's so convenient. Any song for any mood, boom it's there. If you wanted to show your friend some cool or funny song, boom it's there. Don't knock it until you've tried it. I suppose the 1G player with 30 hrs is somewhat of a middle ground. The Rio Nitrus is right around that capacity too, but with Dell DJs and many other players for around $200, it's not worth buying smaller capacity players unless you really want the smaller size.
I suppose you won't be buying an iPod 'cause they're made in China too. They build lots of high end name-brand gear along with the cheap crap with no QC, and it really is cheaper to build things there. You can't compete with efficient, hard-working factory workers making $.50 an hour. The economic reforms in China along with free trade agreements resulted in a booming manufacturing industry there. You have a lot more to worry about from them than cheap plastic junk.
BMW has active steering. It can change the gear ratio of the steering rack depending on speed and make minor corrections for crosswinds. That's not the same as steer by wire. It does feel weird (review here ), but at its heart it's still a mechanical steering linkage. The hybrids like the Prius do have brake by wire because they combine regenerative braking and the discs and drums.
No argument from me here. I always said you could grab any one of his fans off the street, put him in the studio and he could do the same act just as well as Howard. Never understood how an obnoxious no-talent dirtbag could be so popular, but you can't argue with his popularity, and I hate the censors even more.
He's talking about the toxic chemicals used to produce silicon wafers. It's some nasty shit. Now multiply that by a hundred times or so assuming we ramp up production of photovoltaic cells.
Getting back to nuclear, fusion is the only way out of this mess. It's the holy grail of clean, endless energy (the oceans are full of hydrogen). If we turn our backs on fusion research now, the world will be a nasty place when the lights go out in what? 50-100 years.
Yes, that is the unspoken implication of green farming isn't it? The fact is, we can't feed 6 billion people with 19th century farming. They couldn't even feed 1/2 billion people in the 19th century with their farming technology. Famine and starvation were a regular occurence. World population is a problem, but the answer isn't turning our backs on modern agriculture (not saying the status quo of GM foods and pesticides is perfect by any means). It might work, but depopulating the world by 5 billion people that way would be ugly.
Some of his responses were quite reasonable, but I have to call bullshit on green farming.
PDAs are general purpose compromise devices. Bigger and less battery life than an iPod, smaller and more battery life than a laptop. They can do a lot of things but not as well on any job as a single purpose device.
Here's what I have on my Dell X5 (admitted a big clunker, but has a CF slot and a bigger battery compared to slimmer models):
1. Music player: either Winampaq or Mortplayer. They both play OGG, MP3 and a few other formats. You can load it with a 512MB or a Gig of flash memory pretty cheap, but I don't use it as much for this since getting an iPod. It's the size of a big MP3 player like a Dell DJ but only holds as much as a flash player.
2. Video player: Windows Media player for WMV and PocketMVP for DIVX. It takes a few hours to encode videos for PocketPC, but I can fit a movie in 100MB at 320x240. CPU load shortens battery life, but still enough time to watch 2 movies on one charge. The single purpose devices like the DVD players and the Creative PMC do this better now but it's still pretty cool.
3. Wifi: Pocket IE is a joke, but 2003 SE now lets you browse in landscape mode which is a big improvement (unfortunately not for me). PocketWinc and Ministumbler are handy for finding APs, but my card is too underpowered for real wardriving. It's good for finding rogue APs at work if you ever needed to do that. Battery life sucks with the Wifi radio on, less than half of regular.
4. Passwords: I recommend Passwordsafe (open source too), but there are others too.
5. Quicken: I actually use SPB Finance which is better and cheaper than Pocket Quicken. Syncs to desktop Quicken too.
6. Maps: Mapopolis is great. If I had a CF GPS or a cable for an external GPS is can even do navigating too, but I don't. It sure beats carrying around a map book. I wouldn't suggest it for a handheld GPS, it's too delicate compared to a Garmin eTrex.
7. Games: It's fast enough to run arcade or SNES games in an emulator, but too slow with sound. I wouldn't suggest action games because the directional pad is too delicate compared to a GBA, but I can play SNES FF games just fine. Just get a GBA SP if you want games.
8. Address, Phones, and Calendar: I have it but I don't use it much. It only syncs to Outlook and I've pretty much decided to only use my phone for this stuff instead of doing triple and quadruple entries on all my gadgets.
9. Calculator: It can do scientific or IP subnets. It's overpowered for it, but it works.
10. Photo Album: screen is 2x bigger than my digital camera. If I want a better look at pictures pop in the CF card.
I'm not so sure how free this competition is. AT&T presumably has other, profitable lines of business so they could afford to cut prices below costs to eliminate competition. However, since they're still $5 more than Vonage, you can't call this predatory pricing. Price wars have a way of carrying momentum beyond just the equilibrium price of the free market (I know, that's a highly theoretical concept and I have no idea what the equilibrium price might be for this service). Still, price wars often result in a shakeout and consolidation.
Weighing the costs of repair or replace really depends on your mechanic skills. If you pay full retail for spare parts and shop time ($60+ per hour), even minor repairs like belts or a water pump can quickly add up to the price of a few monthly payments on a newer car. Such a car may not be "worn out", but the efficiency of mass production compared to the inefficiency of the custom labor to repair makes replacing cheaper than repairing. Even counting the cost of tools you can save A LOT by doing repairs yourself and maybe scrounging for used parts (for those repairs feasible for a DIYer). It also depends on how much your time is worth. In my minimum wage college days, I would say my time was worth approx. zero, and I did attempt many time consuming repairs on my vehicles.
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I can see the intent of this distro. Web surfing and reading email on Windows leaves many traces on the harddrive, IE and Outlook Expess being the prime examples. This tool prevents you from leaving those traces on the harddrive *except* for (as you point out) when the system memory of the VM gets swapped to disk. It can't stop the host kernel from snooping on the memory of the VM either. The webpage also doesn't talk about disk encryption, so your user data is *probably* sitting unencrypted on the flashdrive. It's an interesting concept, but too many holes at this point in development to entrust it with your privacy.
If I were building this I'd try something faster like coLinux, but only if there was a way to keep system RAM from being swapped to disk. A virtual machine can always be snooped from the host OS. If I was worried about that, I'd just boot into a livecd distro, but then you'd still have to worry about hardware keyboard loggers.
"Unfortunately, that flash fob is of very limited lifespan."
That's not really a problem. Damnsmalllinux is a livecd distro and the concept is similar when you boot off a flashdrive. The boot media is mounted readonly and the OS actually runs in a ramdisk (these days it's called a shared memory filesystem). The only writes would be user data which is very little compared to the OS.
As far as disposing of a broken flashdrive, I'd say take a hammer to the thing and be sure to smash up the flash chips very well.
It depends how picky you are about sound quality, but I'm less picky about sound on portable players because it's already noisy outside and I play my iPod through an FM modulator. In that case you could always encode your high quality Oggs to a lower bitrate MP3 for portable use. Yes, it sounds like shit converting lossy to lossy, but you'd just treat the MP3 as a dispoable file then, and computers are fast enough these days that reencoding to lower bitrates doesn't take long.
I'm not as old as that, but I do remember checking out these 20+ year old electronics books from the public library that had projects to build your own vacuum tube radio. They did talk about transistors too, but as an exotic, expensive unaffordable item.
Erm, that's the DVP642 in the article blurb on top, and $69 is the regular price that everybody sells it for. For a real bargain try Amazon.com at $63 w/ free shipping or if you can't wait most Best Buy and Fry's have it for $69.99 in store. And yes, it is a nice player. Plays just about every Divx/Xvid file I tried except for sound on a really old Divx3.11 file that had Divx ;-) audio (I think that was a hacked 64K WMA codec). It doesn't play files with QPEL either (a feature of Divx 5 Pro), but I haven't run into one of those yet.
Now can you build an HTPC that's quiet, not 3 times the size and weight, and doesn't use 4 times the electricity of a DVP642? I have one now, and I'm retiring the HTPC. But to be fair, I never got it working as well as I wanted, and I could have spent more time on tweaking it.
So-called assault weapons are involved in a small fraction of gun crimes compared to handguns, *but* those shootings are often notorious, high profile crimes like mass shooting rampages and big shootouts with police. In that kind of scenario, a large capacity magazine is an advantage. In a more common scenario like robbing a store or killing one person, 10 shots is plenty. I've also heard interviews where the law enforcement side complains about flash suppressors which might be a legitimate concern. A folding stock does make a rifle more concealable. Still, with everything else, your point is well made. The AWB is just a red herring. It bans cosmetic features like pistol grips and synthetic stocks. Hunting rifles fire the same high powered rounds as assault rifles. Handguns are used in the vast majority of gun crimes.
Bayes in Spamassassin doesn't seem to recognize 419 emails very well. What does work are the fraud rules from the Spamassassin Rules Emporium.
"Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better."
There's economics involved, but it's not because the censored CDs are so popular with fans of the music and their parents. They can't afford complaints from the core customer base which is rural and conservative. They can afford to lose a few music CD sales in exchange for not pissing off customers who buy a whole lot more crap than CDs.
"They worked as a team, for the good of the team, knowing that at least some of them would win even if the others bombed."
This strategy is common in bicycle racing. The lead rider is supported by his teammates. Among other things, they'll go in front and let him draft off them so he'll be more rested at the end.
"The independants can't afford to compete with WalMart on the hits, but can't survive only on non-hits."
They can compete another way. If Walmart even sells Eminem, it would be the censored, clean lyrics version. They're run by Bible-thumping prudes. They wouldn't sell music with explicit lyrics no matter how wildly popular it was. Of course, you still won't have enough customers in a rural area to support an indie record store, but there's always mail order like Amazon or just downloading.
"now I have a x30 that plays SNES and Gameboy Advance games at 30fps with no problem."
Is that with the 624Mhz model? I tried Morphgear on a 400Mhz X5. It was choppy with the sound on and no problems with the sound off. Also, the directional pad on the X5 feels cheap and flimsy so I gave up on using it for gaming.
Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?
Yes, it's an OEM-only release. Hardware support for tuner cards and remote controls is pretty limited so MS only sells it to OEMs who preinstall it on systems with tested compatible hardware. OEM also means don't call Microsoft for support, call the hardware manufacturer.
"There are lots of ways to make profits disappear. A comedian in the Netherlands for instance completely destroyed a type of malt beer by making fun of it. Still, that's not stealing."
Same thing here when Winger's career was destroyed by Beavis and Butthead making fun of them.
Yes, because if there's one thing every hiking trail needs, it's an electric ATV quad that can do self balancing wheelies.
"Why is everyone so eager to make their lives ever more complex and laborious?"
Quite the opposite. It makes a huge difference in time and effort not having to preplan your music mixes. I started out with a crappy 64MB Creative Nomad. It was like commuting in an electric car. Every night you pick your songs for the next day and load them onto the player (at a whopping 120K/s). I'd have just enough music for the drive to work and back. Next I bought an MP3-CD player. It's nice being able to fit 10 hours onto one CD, but you still had to preplan your music. The obvious way to organize was to make single-genre CDs, which is good for backup and archiving, but gets monotonous if you're listening to it nonstop. Maybe if I experimented with more mixed-genre CDs it might have worked out better. Now with a 15GB iPod, it's so convenient. Any song for any mood, boom it's there. If you wanted to show your friend some cool or funny song, boom it's there. Don't knock it until you've tried it. I suppose the 1G player with 30 hrs is somewhat of a middle ground. The Rio Nitrus is right around that capacity too, but with Dell DJs and many other players for around $200, it's not worth buying smaller capacity players unless you really want the smaller size.
I suppose you won't be buying an iPod 'cause they're made in China too. They build lots of high end name-brand gear along with the cheap crap with no QC, and it really is cheaper to build things there. You can't compete with efficient, hard-working factory workers making $.50 an hour. The economic reforms in China along with free trade agreements resulted in a booming manufacturing industry there. You have a lot more to worry about from them than cheap plastic junk.
BMW has active steering. It can change the gear ratio of the steering rack depending on speed and make minor corrections for crosswinds. That's not the same as steer by wire. It does feel weird (review here ), but at its heart it's still a mechanical steering linkage. The hybrids like the Prius do have brake by wire because they combine regenerative braking and the discs and drums.
No argument from me here. I always said you could grab any one of his fans off the street, put him in the studio and he could do the same act just as well as Howard. Never understood how an obnoxious no-talent dirtbag could be so popular, but you can't argue with his popularity, and I hate the censors even more.
I think I tried it before and it's pretty good too. Never cared about http streaming though. See comments about Wifi battery life.
He's talking about the toxic chemicals used to produce silicon wafers. It's some nasty shit. Now multiply that by a hundred times or so assuming we ramp up production of photovoltaic cells.
Getting back to nuclear, fusion is the only way out of this mess. It's the holy grail of clean, endless energy (the oceans are full of hydrogen). If we turn our backs on fusion research now, the world will be a nasty place when the lights go out in what? 50-100 years.
Yes, that is the unspoken implication of green farming isn't it? The fact is, we can't feed 6 billion people with 19th century farming. They couldn't even feed 1/2 billion people in the 19th century with their farming technology. Famine and starvation were a regular occurence. World population is a problem, but the answer isn't turning our backs on modern agriculture (not saying the status quo of GM foods and pesticides is perfect by any means). It might work, but depopulating the world by 5 billion people that way would be ugly.
Some of his responses were quite reasonable, but I have to call bullshit on green farming.
PDAs are general purpose compromise devices. Bigger and less battery life than an iPod, smaller and more battery life than a laptop. They can do a lot of things but not as well on any job as a single purpose device.
Here's what I have on my Dell X5 (admitted a big clunker, but has a CF slot and a bigger battery compared to slimmer models):
1. Music player: either Winampaq or Mortplayer. They both play OGG, MP3 and a few other formats. You can load it with a 512MB or a Gig of flash memory pretty cheap, but I don't use it as much for this since getting an iPod. It's the size of a big MP3 player like a Dell DJ but only holds as much as a flash player.
2. Video player: Windows Media player for WMV and PocketMVP for DIVX. It takes a few hours to encode videos for PocketPC, but I can fit a movie in 100MB at 320x240. CPU load shortens battery life, but still enough time to watch 2 movies on one charge. The single purpose devices like the DVD players and the Creative PMC do this better now but it's still pretty cool.
3. Wifi: Pocket IE is a joke, but 2003 SE now lets you browse in landscape mode which is a big improvement (unfortunately not for me). PocketWinc and Ministumbler are handy for finding APs, but my card is too underpowered for real wardriving. It's good for finding rogue APs at work if you ever needed to do that. Battery life sucks with the Wifi radio on, less than half of regular.
4. Passwords: I recommend Passwordsafe (open source too), but there are others too.
5. Quicken: I actually use SPB Finance which is better and cheaper than Pocket Quicken. Syncs to desktop Quicken too.
6. Maps: Mapopolis is great. If I had a CF GPS or a cable for an external GPS is can even do navigating too, but I don't. It sure beats carrying around a map book. I wouldn't suggest it for a handheld GPS, it's too delicate compared to a Garmin eTrex.
7. Games: It's fast enough to run arcade or SNES games in an emulator, but too slow with sound. I wouldn't suggest action games because the directional pad is too delicate compared to a GBA, but I can play SNES FF games just fine. Just get a GBA SP if you want games.
8. Address, Phones, and Calendar: I have it but I don't use it much. It only syncs to Outlook and I've pretty much decided to only use my phone for this stuff instead of doing triple and quadruple entries on all my gadgets.
9. Calculator: It can do scientific or IP subnets. It's overpowered for it, but it works.
10. Photo Album: screen is 2x bigger than my digital camera. If I want a better look at pictures pop in the CF card.
I'm not so sure how free this competition is. AT&T presumably has other, profitable lines of business so they could afford to cut prices below costs to eliminate competition. However, since they're still $5 more than Vonage, you can't call this predatory pricing. Price wars have a way of carrying momentum beyond just the equilibrium price of the free market (I know, that's a highly theoretical concept and I have no idea what the equilibrium price might be for this service). Still, price wars often result in a shakeout and consolidation.
Weighing the costs of repair or replace really depends on your mechanic skills. If you pay full retail for spare parts and shop time ($60+ per hour), even minor repairs like belts or a water pump can quickly add up to the price of a few monthly payments on a newer car. Such a car may not be "worn out", but the efficiency of mass production compared to the inefficiency of the custom labor to repair makes replacing cheaper than repairing. Even counting the cost of tools you can save A LOT by doing repairs yourself and maybe scrounging for used parts (for those repairs feasible for a DIYer). It also depends on how much your time is worth. In my minimum wage college days, I would say my time was worth approx. zero, and I did attempt many time consuming repairs on my vehicles.