WTF are you talking about? HTTP requires an inbound connection from the client to the server, and the session is always controlled by the client, but the data can flow as strongly as desired in either direction. I routinely use an HTTPS-based file transfer tool that I wrote some 10 years ago to transfer files of any size, well into the GBs from the client to the server. (it's called POST and isn't particularly tough to do)
Simple. Secure. Reliable. Why does SFTP have to be such a pain in the neck to do right, automatically?
... and I find that KDE4 has become an idea powerhouse, with all the features that I actually want and use close by. It's become a thing of beauty, and I really love.
Instant preview on the file manager, for example. Gorgeous! Widgets and icons that I can customize, so I find what I want with a single click? Magnificent!
KDE 4 got my seething rage when I first saw it in Fedora Core 9, which was, in a word, just awful. But by FC11 it was usable, and now, at 14, is just marvelous!
Ok, maybe so you don't like things like groupware calendar integration built into your desktop. I do, and Kmail/Korganizer does this quite well.
I *did* take a pay cut while my children were younger. I turned down options that would have taken me away from my family for more money. I regret not a single day of my reduced pay.
For years, I worked in the living room armchair, with a cordless phone and a laptop. I didn't always pay close attention to my young children, but I did spend every last single small break in the same house as them, interacting with them during my frequent, short breaks.
Because of this, I have a good, close relationship with all of my six children as they now enter adulthood. We didn't live like kings! I drove older used cars and frequently sweat the bills. But your kids will only be kids once. You have this chance to be a father/mother/parent. You didn't marry your childcare worker, you married your spouse! You want your spouse to raise your children, and just as importantly, your spouse chose you to raise his/her children.
Sacrifice as you need to be the best parent you can be. You'll never regret a single day of it. Good parents don't always drive late model cars, and often don't wear the latest fashions. But the relationships you'll develop as one will vastly outshine financial rewards.
My daughter won "Best of show" at the local fair for her gorgeous photography. She competed against tens of thousands of participants, almost none of whom spent less on the picture frame than the $10 won in prize money.
As a private pilot familiar with experimental aviation, I can say that the money is not the point. EA types will spend 2 years tweaking a plane to fly 10 knots faster with the same fuel burn rate and payload, or provides a 50 pound payload improvement, etc.
It's mostly about establishing whether or not the prize is "significant". $60,000 is 2x the annual mean income, and a reasonable statement of legitimacy. IMHO, this is a big deal.
You can be sure that *nobody* competing for the prize spent anything less than 2x the prize money on the plane. And like the Ansari X prize, nobody competed with the idea of "making it big" on the prize money, they competed with the goal of the legitimacy that being the prize winner would give them.
It's about winning, not profiting on the prize money!
Why should we be trusting some dis-interested third party to give us that assurance? It's a loser's game! Certificate vendors are in a price war. They don't get paid extra for "going the mile" to confirm your identity, they get paid extra for processing more applications faster and charging 10% less than the other guy. The actual cost of the certificate is too cheap to measure - a couple of used PCs bought on Ebay and a free copy of Linux could probably satisfy most of the global need for certificates. They don't need to be "super certain" they only need to be "reasonably certain", enough to not get sued, and still pass a SAS-70 audit by yet another, disinterested accountancy firm.
Are you feeling confident yet?
In a very real sense, the thing that asserts the IP address of your domain is your DNS server. It's what declares, to the world, where your server is. Since it's the declarative source, why shouldn't it be the confirmational one, as well?
DNSSEC comes close. With DNSSEC you can confirm with certificates and the "chain of trust" that the answer you have came from the DNS server you thought you were asking for the answer from. Now, just one more step: the certificate for the web server should be generated by the trusted DNS server.
It's no assurance that www.screwmebadly.com is a friendly site, but it is a very effective assurance that you are properly connected to www.screwmebadly.com!
And this segment is *important* because already, I do as much browsing and web-surfing on my Motorola Droid 2 Android phone as my fire breathing Intel Core i7 laptop computer.
Remember that x86 started out as the cheap chip on the block that was "good enough" for basic stuff that little people could afford, and it slowly grew upward and increased its applicable market segments until it, now, is the high end of the marketplace.
ARM is now potentially in a similar situation. And like the x86 before it, it has tremendous inertia in the smartphone platform, any of which are easily capable enough to operate as a PC for most uses for most people. It uses something less than 1/100th the power of my laptop and is a reasonable, convenient stand-in for said laptop for pretty much all personal use other than for my work. (I'm a software engineer)
I've already started to note the conflict: do stuff on the phone or the laptop? So far, it's mostly worked because stuff I do on the phone is pretty much "in the cloud" and is accessible from the PC.
But Pictures? I've taken a few hundred pictures, and keeping them in synch starts to become a hassle...
At some point, it could make sense to jump, to switch from one to the other. Why couldn't my phone have a plug or a bluetooth connection to a keyboard, monitor, etc?
There's an attitude that's commonplace among with regards to stuff that you are supposed to do a particular thing with it. When you buy a can of Pringles, you are supposed to throw away the can! You buy a microwave for cooking, and the PS3 is for video games, and crayons are for kids to draw with, etc.
It's considered anachronistic to use crayons as an electric insulator, or PS3 for calculating aerodynamics, or use a microwave for generating and studying R/F interference patterns. And making long-range communications equipment from a Pringles can is.... just odd.
Yet none of these alternative uses would be particularly surprising to the engineering type, who think nothing of making a filter out of pantie-hose and a plastic butter container, because our type not only thinks outside the box, we decide what would be the best way to slice up the box in order to satisfy the problem at hand.
Sitting in front of me is a ground-pounding, fire-breathing Intel Core i7 laptop with 8 GB of RAM and 500 GB of Hard Disk. It alone has more computer processing power than EXISTED worldwide in 1980. Even with those amp-sucking specs, it's able to run for about 2 hours on internal batteries.
Currently, I'm using it to post a message.
These are NiMH batteries which have an insane power density in order to pull this off. Those prototype batteries which were announced 10+ years ago and have been incrementally improved ever since.
I have an LED flash light on my keychain that will run for days on end with nothing more than a couple of watch batteries. I remember when flash lights never lasted more than a few hours, even with "D" batteries. Something the size of my pinky throwing as much clean, white light (or laser!) as my little key chain penlight would have been James Bond material in my youth.
I use this amuse my cat. (Doh!)
The problem with the "revolutionary" technologies is that the changes they wrought are incorporated into our lives and we just stop thinking about the miracle of technology that brings it all about.
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
We moved to an agricultural society so that we wouldn't have to try to eke out our existence on the little tidbits provided by nature. Wanna prepare? Fine. But don't think for a minute that there will be lots of game waiting for your bullets.
Linux has long had the "repo" concept. It's like a cross between the "Windows way" and the app store you see on mobile. I think it's ideal!
1) There's no gatekeeper. Anybody can build a repo, and customers can choose what repos they want.
2) Everything is cryptographically verified, so security is strong.
3) You have just one place in your computer to do updates, so you aren't barraged by a raft of "OMG U R UPDATEZ!" when you boot up a computer that's been sitting for a while, like you do on Windows.
4) Updates can occur in the background. For me, it's a small KDE Icon that alerts me to the process. I can continue working while it's happening. If I need to reboot, I don't have to do it right away.
I think MS really blew it with their Windows Update, because it requires end users to reboot multiple times, and it doesn't handle application updates, just Windows.
There's a local WISP called Digital Path that has gone the wireless route. Just like the guy in the article, they bounce WiFi around the hills with directional antennae and itty-bitty homebrew routers that run some micro-version of Linux on embedded-scale "servers" running on CF drives.
Their focus is on outlying areas... Just East of the California Central Valley is the Sierra Nevada mountains and there are LOTS of customers that really appreciate having a few Mbits connection beamed in at a few hundred bucks/month.
Now we have many smartphone OSes and handsets at a time.
The size of each of which dwarfs the size of 80's game consoles. Plus, smartphones are "persistent" in that they are on you, 24x7. It's extremely rare that I'm more than 50' away from my Droid2.
I have had a Droid 2 since just after they came out. I love it!
When I saw the LG Optimus for less than half the price, I got one for my Wife, with MetroPCS. It functions almost exactly like my Droid2 - the buttons are even in the same place! The only down sides are that it doesn't have a keyboard and doesn't have as sharp a screen. (still very usable/readable)
The Optimus is a great phone that I'd recommend to anybody!
I got Magic Jack. It's now my home "phone line". It's a little USB dongle that plugs into my Mac (which is on, anyway) and my my home telephone line, so all my normal phones work on the MJ. It replaces the phone company. To use my normal phones, I unscrewed the wires at the junction box so my internal wires weren't connected to the telco anymore.
$20/year, no hassles, unlimited calls, I can plug it into my computer at anyplace with a 'net connection and my phone # stays with it. Whatever bandwidth it uses has been below my threshold of noticability.
Interesting result in that it so exactly counters my own experience developing an extremely complex spreadsheet-like application in HTML/JS. Tremendous amounts of DOM manipulation, string/integer comparison, and raw maths.
IE8 is a non-starter; our clients know this up front. FF isn't bad, but Chrome, especially the last 2 or three releases has come out shining! We've begun specifically recommending it.
I guess it's not whether or not it's optimized, it's a matter of what you are optimizing for.
Personally, my favorite is to hit reply-all, pointing out the stupidity of putting everybody on the "to:" line, and instructing original sender to use BCC so that inanities like somebody hitting "reply-all" could torture everybody with something stupid, followed by a rant explaining how everybody receiving this message will SOON BE INUNDATED BY SPAM if ANY of the 4,000 recipients has been infected with a virus, which is most assuredly the case, so everybody knows who to thank for their new, unlimited supply of p3n1Z piL1z spam!
Autoland use ILS radio aproaches. While ILS isn't going to be replaced any time soon at big airports, smaller ports are starting to prefer GPS approaches. Currently, GPS approaches exist at many small airport that could never afford ILS, now ILS is starting to fade since there is no equipment maintenance costs for GPS.
Better results and lower costs: why wouldn't they?
Sure, it's always a good idea to have your own backups. But a very good reason for going with cloud-based solutions is that it's THEIR problem to back up the data.
So, go with cloud-based solutions that back up their data! It's been a long-known issue that Gmail doesn't back up their data, instead relying on redundant storage (roughly analogous to RAID) for data integrity.
Does google perform backups of data for gmail accounts that are paid? (EG: edu clients)
You think the biggest cost in lighting is in the bulb?
For the cost of running a single incandescent bulb, I can light most of the rest of my house! Even at $2 apiece that last a year, CFLs save many, many times over their original cost for me. I've been 100% CFL for years now; I'm never looking back.
CFLs make lighting cheap enough that I don't really bother being retentive about turning lights off. Currently, the big consumers in my house are: (in order) central heat, dryer, refrigerator, computers, lights.
Most people just don't understand just how *bad* incandescents (at 2% efficiency) really are! In the summer time, you pay double for this inefficiency because you pay for the light, and then you pay again to pump out the heat via the A/C.
I'm with Vixie on this one. You shouldn't jack with one of the fundamentals of the internet.
One of the fundamentals of the Internet is its distributed, peer-based nature. Merely a method of exchanging packets. Surely, having a centralized authoritarian DNS system falls afoul of this basic premise?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly HTTP is mostly one way
WTF are you talking about? HTTP requires an inbound connection from the client to the server, and the session is always controlled by the client, but the data can flow as strongly as desired in either direction. I routinely use an HTTPS-based file transfer tool that I wrote some 10 years ago to transfer files of any size, well into the GBs from the client to the server. (it's called POST and isn't particularly tough to do)
Simple. Secure. Reliable. Why does SFTP have to be such a pain in the neck to do right, automatically?
... and I find that KDE4 has become an idea powerhouse, with all the features that I actually want and use close by. It's become a thing of beauty, and I really love.
Instant preview on the file manager, for example. Gorgeous! Widgets and icons that I can customize, so I find what I want with a single click? Magnificent!
KDE 4 got my seething rage when I first saw it in Fedora Core 9, which was, in a word, just awful. But by FC11 it was usable, and now, at 14, is just marvelous!
Ok, maybe so you don't like things like groupware calendar integration built into your desktop. I do, and Kmail/Korganizer does this quite well.
PS: KDE fan for years...
Do you have young kids?
I *did* take a pay cut while my children were younger. I turned down options that would have taken me away from my family for more money. I regret not a single day of my reduced pay.
For years, I worked in the living room armchair, with a cordless phone and a laptop. I didn't always pay close attention to my young children, but I did spend every last single small break in the same house as them, interacting with them during my frequent, short breaks.
Because of this, I have a good, close relationship with all of my six children as they now enter adulthood. We didn't live like kings! I drove older used cars and frequently sweat the bills. But your kids will only be kids once. You have this chance to be a father/mother/parent. You didn't marry your childcare worker, you married your spouse! You want your spouse to raise your children, and just as importantly, your spouse chose you to raise his/her children.
Sacrifice as you need to be the best parent you can be. You'll never regret a single day of it. Good parents don't always drive late model cars, and often don't wear the latest fashions. But the relationships you'll develop as one will vastly outshine financial rewards.
My daughter won "Best of show" at the local fair for her gorgeous photography. She competed against tens of thousands of participants, almost none of whom spent less on the picture frame than the $10 won in prize money.
As a private pilot familiar with experimental aviation, I can say that the money is not the point. EA types will spend 2 years tweaking a plane to fly 10 knots faster with the same fuel burn rate and payload, or provides a 50 pound payload improvement, etc.
It's mostly about establishing whether or not the prize is "significant". $60,000 is 2x the annual mean income, and a reasonable statement of legitimacy. IMHO, this is a big deal.
You can be sure that *nobody* competing for the prize spent anything less than 2x the prize money on the plane. And like the Ansari X prize, nobody competed with the idea of "making it big" on the prize money, they competed with the goal of the legitimacy that being the prize winner would give them.
It's about winning, not profiting on the prize money!
To be fair, the historic "garbage" was quite different in composition than the garbage we generate today.
Why should we be trusting some dis-interested third party to give us that assurance? It's a loser's game! Certificate vendors are in a price war. They don't get paid extra for "going the mile" to confirm your identity, they get paid extra for processing more applications faster and charging 10% less than the other guy. The actual cost of the certificate is too cheap to measure - a couple of used PCs bought on Ebay and a free copy of Linux could probably satisfy most of the global need for certificates. They don't need to be "super certain" they only need to be "reasonably certain", enough to not get sued, and still pass a SAS-70 audit by yet another, disinterested accountancy firm.
Are you feeling confident yet?
In a very real sense, the thing that asserts the IP address of your domain is your DNS server. It's what declares, to the world, where your server is. Since it's the declarative source, why shouldn't it be the confirmational one, as well?
DNSSEC comes close. With DNSSEC you can confirm with certificates and the "chain of trust" that the answer you have came from the DNS server you thought you were asking for the answer from. Now, just one more step: the certificate for the web server should be generated by the trusted DNS server.
It's no assurance that www.screwmebadly.com is a friendly site, but it is a very effective assurance that you are properly connected to www.screwmebadly.com!
And this segment is *important* because already, I do as much browsing and web-surfing on my Motorola Droid 2 Android phone as my fire breathing Intel Core i7 laptop computer.
Remember that x86 started out as the cheap chip on the block that was "good enough" for basic stuff that little people could afford, and it slowly grew upward and increased its applicable market segments until it, now, is the high end of the marketplace.
ARM is now potentially in a similar situation. And like the x86 before it, it has tremendous inertia in the smartphone platform, any of which are easily capable enough to operate as a PC for most uses for most people. It uses something less than 1/100th the power of my laptop and is a reasonable, convenient stand-in for said laptop for pretty much all personal use other than for my work. (I'm a software engineer)
I've already started to note the conflict: do stuff on the phone or the laptop? So far, it's mostly worked because stuff I do on the phone is pretty much "in the cloud" and is accessible from the PC.
But Pictures? I've taken a few hundred pictures, and keeping them in synch starts to become a hassle...
At some point, it could make sense to jump, to switch from one to the other. Why couldn't my phone have a plug or a bluetooth connection to a keyboard, monitor, etc?
There's an attitude that's commonplace among with regards to stuff that you are supposed to do a particular thing with it. When you buy a can of Pringles, you are supposed to throw away the can! You buy a microwave for cooking, and the PS3 is for video games, and crayons are for kids to draw with, etc.
It's considered anachronistic to use crayons as an electric insulator, or PS3 for calculating aerodynamics, or use a microwave for generating and studying R/F interference patterns. And making long-range communications equipment from a Pringles can is.... just odd.
Yet none of these alternative uses would be particularly surprising to the engineering type, who think nothing of making a filter out of pantie-hose and a plastic butter container, because our type not only thinks outside the box, we decide what would be the best way to slice up the box in order to satisfy the problem at hand.
Good show Air Force!
Sitting in front of me is a ground-pounding, fire-breathing Intel Core i7 laptop with 8 GB of RAM and 500 GB of Hard Disk. It alone has more computer processing power than EXISTED worldwide in 1980. Even with those amp-sucking specs, it's able to run for about 2 hours on internal batteries.
Currently, I'm using it to post a message.
These are NiMH batteries which have an insane power density in order to pull this off. Those prototype batteries which were announced 10+ years ago and have been incrementally improved ever since.
I have an LED flash light on my keychain that will run for days on end with nothing more than a couple of watch batteries. I remember when flash lights never lasted more than a few hours, even with "D" batteries. Something the size of my pinky throwing as much clean, white light (or laser!) as my little key chain penlight would have been James Bond material in my youth.
I use this amuse my cat. (Doh!)
The problem with the "revolutionary" technologies is that the changes they wrought are incorporated into our lives and we just stop thinking about the miracle of technology that brings it all about.
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
We moved to an agricultural society so that we wouldn't have to try to eke out our existence on the little tidbits provided by nature. Wanna prepare? Fine. But don't think for a minute that there will be lots of game waiting for your bullets.
Guns are for self-defense.
Linux has long had the "repo" concept. It's like a cross between the "Windows way" and the app store you see on mobile. I think it's ideal!
1) There's no gatekeeper. Anybody can build a repo, and customers can choose what repos they want.
2) Everything is cryptographically verified, so security is strong.
3) You have just one place in your computer to do updates, so you aren't barraged by a raft of "OMG U R UPDATEZ!" when you boot up a computer that's been sitting for a while, like you do on Windows.
4) Updates can occur in the background. For me, it's a small KDE Icon that alerts me to the process. I can continue working while it's happening. If I need to reboot, I don't have to do it right away.
I think MS really blew it with their Windows Update, because it requires end users to reboot multiple times, and it doesn't handle application updates, just Windows.
I've read your post twice. I'm still not sure what it was that you said.
WTF? Could you include a "TL;DR" for everybody next time you decide to write a book?
Intelsat is paying $280 million for 1000kg of fuel. Adds up to about $800000/gallon
Dang! Isn't that almost as much as printer ink?
There's a local WISP called Digital Path that has gone the wireless route. Just like the guy in the article, they bounce WiFi around the hills with directional antennae and itty-bitty homebrew routers that run some micro-version of Linux on embedded-scale "servers" running on CF drives.
Their focus is on outlying areas... Just East of the California Central Valley is the Sierra Nevada mountains and there are LOTS of customers that really appreciate having a few Mbits connection beamed in at a few hundred bucks/month.
They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.
Now we have many smartphone OSes and handsets at a time.
The size of each of which dwarfs the size of 80's game consoles. Plus, smartphones are "persistent" in that they are on you, 24x7. It's extremely rare that I'm more than 50' away from my Droid2.
I have had a Droid 2 since just after they came out. I love it!
When I saw the LG Optimus for less than half the price, I got one for my Wife, with MetroPCS. It functions almost exactly like my Droid2 - the buttons are even in the same place! The only down sides are that it doesn't have a keyboard and doesn't have as sharp a screen. (still very usable/readable)
The Optimus is a great phone that I'd recommend to anybody!
You must be BLIND...
I got Magic Jack. It's now my home "phone line". It's a little USB dongle that plugs into my Mac (which is on, anyway) and my my home telephone line, so all my normal phones work on the MJ. It replaces the phone company. To use my normal phones, I unscrewed the wires at the junction box so my internal wires weren't connected to the telco anymore.
$20/year, no hassles, unlimited calls, I can plug it into my computer at anyplace with a 'net connection and my phone # stays with it. Whatever bandwidth it uses has been below my threshold of noticability.
I don't work for MJ, just a happy customer.
Interesting result in that it so exactly counters my own experience developing an extremely complex spreadsheet-like application in HTML/JS. Tremendous amounts of DOM manipulation, string/integer comparison, and raw maths.
IE8 is a non-starter; our clients know this up front. FF isn't bad, but Chrome, especially the last 2 or three releases has come out shining! We've begun specifically recommending it.
I guess it's not whether or not it's optimized, it's a matter of what you are optimizing for.
Personally, my favorite is to hit reply-all, pointing out the stupidity of putting everybody on the "to:" line, and instructing original sender to use BCC so that inanities like somebody hitting "reply-all" could torture everybody with something stupid, followed by a rant explaining how everybody receiving this message will SOON BE INUNDATED BY SPAM if ANY of the 4,000 recipients has been infected with a virus, which is most assuredly the case, so everybody knows who to thank for their new, unlimited supply of p3n1Z piL1z spam!
Autoland use ILS radio aproaches. While ILS isn't going to be replaced any time soon at big airports, smaller ports are starting to prefer GPS approaches. Currently, GPS approaches exist at many small airport that could never afford ILS, now ILS is starting to fade since there is no equipment maintenance costs for GPS.
Better results and lower costs: why wouldn't they?
You think flash is bloated, update happy, buggy and insecurely beastly now? Just wait until it's ported to javascript as an emulator!
Sure, it's always a good idea to have your own backups. But a very good reason for going with cloud-based solutions is that it's THEIR problem to back up the data.
So, go with cloud-based solutions that back up their data! It's been a long-known issue that Gmail doesn't back up their data, instead relying on redundant storage (roughly analogous to RAID) for data integrity.
Does google perform backups of data for gmail accounts that are paid? (EG: edu clients)
> You still can't beat 4 bulbs for $.99.
You think the biggest cost in lighting is in the bulb?
For the cost of running a single incandescent bulb, I can light most of the rest of my house! Even at $2 apiece that last a year, CFLs save many, many times over their original cost for me. I've been 100% CFL for years now; I'm never looking back.
CFLs make lighting cheap enough that I don't really bother being retentive about turning lights off. Currently, the big consumers in my house are: (in order) central heat, dryer, refrigerator, computers, lights.
Most people just don't understand just how *bad* incandescents (at 2% efficiency) really are! In the summer time, you pay double for this inefficiency because you pay for the light, and then you pay again to pump out the heat via the A/C.
I'm with Vixie on this one. You shouldn't jack with one of the fundamentals of the internet.
One of the fundamentals of the Internet is its distributed, peer-based nature. Merely a method of exchanging packets. Surely, having a centralized authoritarian DNS system falls afoul of this basic premise?