You can easily drive a 30 year old car and get all the convenience and luxury that was available in that car 30 years ago... today. We get all excited by things like leather seats and air conditioning, but both were easily available 30 years ago. The reality is that it's more of a style thing: Mullets were cool in 1990, but they are SOOOO out now. So things that were "cool" then aren't now, but functionally, there really isn't that much that a mid-budget 1975 car couldn't do that a mid-budget 2005 car can.
Let's see what the improvements are:
Radios are digital. (ooh!)
Electric locks with a button in your key. (ooh!)
Automatic transmission?
Better seat belts. (ok...)
10% or so better gas mileage?
You can get from point A to point B driving at 65 MPH, with reasonable safety, in either car, and sadly, at a very comparable cost. 30 years of "innovation", and that's the best that we can do?
I've driven 5-10 year old cars forever, pocketing the $10,000 or so that I save (per car) by doing so and spending it on things like college education for my kids and private airplanes. The truth is that new cars are mostly about fashion, not function. If you want function, go to craigslist and buy a car that's about 5-10 years old with 40k to 80k miles on it. If you are at all careful (and have a relationship with a good mechanic) you'll get a car with 100,000 useful miles on it that will cost you 1/3 as much as the original buyer of the car, while still getting you where you want to go, with repairs not much more often than a new car, and without that nasty monthly payment.
What are you on about? 3kW is nothing... YATTA YATTA SNIP
I guess you missed the point. My own situation is fairly modest. But my own situation is in a very small amount of space, and my 42U rack is actually not that full, most of the racks around mine are much more utilized than mine. Multiply that by THOUSANDS and your "piddly" 3kW becomes a very big number. And, this power IS backed up, IS fully redundant, and IS running 24x7.
Similarly "many terabytes" is unimpressive when I can get 2TB drives for well under $200... YATTA YATTA SNIP
Do you actually think I'm putting consumer grade hard drives into my production cluster? Really? this is more my style, since performance DOES matter and double the cost since everything we do is RAID level 1. Go ahead - look at the cost for a 600 GB, 15k SAS drive.
Don't know if you've ever taken a look outside a data center, but they often have multiple, high-voltage power feed dead-end at the building. At my current colo, the excellent Herakles data center in Sacramento, CA, they are literally located directly under a major set of power lines.
So you take some office building that was burning perhaps a couple hundred watts per 100 SqFt during mid-day, and colocate 42U racks within, raising energy density from maybe 200 watts/100 SqFT to a few thousand. To give some idea, I personally oversee about 3,000 watts in a single 1U rack at my colo, well over 200 cores, and many terabytes of data. And that's in a single 1U rack, maybe 24" wide and 36" deep, with some allowance for aisleway... and my situation isn't even mildly unusual.
We're not talking 3,000 watts capacity, we're talking 3,000 watts 24x7 continuous draw, of redundant, backed-up power - the most expensive kind. Whole houses usually don't draw this much. And this is a *single* 42U rack.
True, a small percentage knows/cares about it. But it's that small percentage who tend to notice things going awry, and clang the alarms for the rest of the soddy folks who haven't a clue. This isn't a bad thing! It's a small minority who become doctors that look out for the rest of us. It's a small minority who become security experts (EG: police) who look out for the rest of us.
It's called "specialization" and it's the only way to effectively utilize domain expertise to the benefit of all.
And Apple isn't working just as feverishly for their own lockin?
Sure, they are, but they aren't trying to leverage MacOS out into the iPod Nano. The difference is that Microsoft isn't willing to compete on features + quality alone, they want to bring all their application base to the new platform. They may eventually succeed, but it would be a long, hard road. Apple seems perfectly willing to ditch their "application base" if/when the need arises - witness OSX itself, which is a complete, ground-up rewrite of their O/S for Macs. And it's worked very well for them. I type this on a Mac Mini that I've grown to love.
So much, that I was just about to turn in my geek cards and pick up the Apple Fanboi deck. But I have to say, with their recent shenanigans around Flash and the iPad, any urge to do so have vaporized. As a developer myself, I'm thinking I'd rather take my chances on Android than deal with the increasingly dystopic-looking future with Apple!
You will grow old and feeble waiting. Progressives don't operate in the fact based world, they FEEL.
Strange - because my definition of a "progressive" includes people with adherence to scientific principles (which are observed) rather than religious principles (which are definitely felt) as is common among conservatives. This leads progressives to solutions that actually work, such as distributing birth control to minors (which demonstrably reduces the teen pregnancy rate) rather than teaching ideological principles such as abstinence (which demonstrably raises the teen pregnancy rate) with little success.
This is part of a pattern where they 'KNOW' (read feel) the AZ immigration law is racist without needing to read it.
I don't know about racist, but if you were in Arizona and were looking for an illegal immigrant, what color which he/she be? 'Cause you never know when them Canadians might bust the fence! And for that matter, you paint the broad brush of "not reading the law" to imply a negligent position on the part of opponents when many of those who voted on it never read it. You have to read any and all laws you wish to criticize?
Should you have to read laws you support, too? How many people support the Bible but haven't read it?
Which is why they feel the Internet must be brought under government control because, with no facts to back it, they just 'know' evil reactionary forces are working to control it.
This is called the "straw man argument" - you paint a picture of what your opposition is (apparently, you are anti-progressive, though you don't actually state position of your own) and then destroy that fallacious image. As far as I know, it's the progressives that are backing "network neutrality", which is all about keeping the Internet free for all people who wish to provide content thereupon.
You may do well to learn more about what you are posting about rather than blindly accept your talking points from an angry, overweight talk show host.
Dollars are votes. We the People hold power to bankrupt corporations out of existence. No such power exists over Gov't.
So.... you start off by saying that money is akin corporations as votes are for government, but then say that votes don't work for government like money works for corporations?
I think you need to research the concept of "cognitive dissonance".
If you ever drank some of the swill often referred to as 'beer' here, you wouldn't want to drink it in Central Park, either. It's little wonder why that's a violation of law. But photography in public is pretty much a good idea, too.
In the United States, recording Wifi information runs over two sets of laws, one of which makes it legal, the other of which is very illegal.
On one hand, it's very illegal to break into a computer network without permission/authorization.
On the other hand, it's perfectly legal to access *any* broadcasted radio frequency. According to the FAA, there is no restriction on the radio frequencies you are allowed to listen on. Broadcasting is another matter, but nobody's saying that Google broadcast anything.
A wifi is just broadcasting information, and the Google van apparently was listening. So even in the United States, which set of laws apply?
In a literal sense, you are correct. When you add features, you add stuff for the computer to do.
But that doesn't represent the reality of the past 30 years. For 30 years, we've gotten significantly more for the *same* amount of consumption. My computer today burns about 120 watts total, about the same as the first 286/20 I ever had. So we have a millionfold improvement in performance at *no* meaningful additional cost.
Software may cost more to run to add more features, but this is countermanded by the fact that all of today's software is grossly inefficient and there is incredible room for improvement in overall performance if we only take the time to do so! I've seen software performance improve 100x simply by limiting the amount of data involved in a string pattern match, for example!
Yes, in most cases, you can have your cake, sell a piece, and still eat it, if you focus on software inefficiency and make your software work quickly. I improved the performance of one of our products by about 70% in two days by running lots of testing to find out what the cause was.
The result is an application that seems WAY FASTER without doing any less than before. w00t!
Voyager is anything but brand new. Voyager is probably older than most Slashdotters, having been launched in 1977. Think about it: 1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store. 1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
And yet, some 33 years later, Voyager 2 is still chugging on, after visiting ALL of the outer planets, still going waaayayyyyyyy past its original design limits, still providing meaningful information on its way out roughly towards the star Sirius. It's now twice as far away from the Sun as Pluto is.
Like the Mars rovers, this is truly good engineering at work.
The problem that they had wasn't with the sonic booms - all they had to do was slow down below Mach 1 (actually, about mach 0.81 or so) before/during their descent.
The problem that Concorde had was that was simply a gross fuel hog, making trips on the Concorde prohibitively expensive. Would you pay 3x as much for a trip to Australia if it got you there in half the time?
Neither would anybody else. In today's dollars, that's like paying $2,100 instead of $700. (rough prices, San Francisco, California to Sydney, Australia) That makes sitting on the plane pay over $150/hour - few people can afford those kinds of prices.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the rest of the story.
Steve is really trying to sell himself short, here. His reality distortion field has gone to his head, and he thinks he's bulletproof. And you know what? When he was the only game in town, he was bulletproof.
But he's not the only game in town. In fact, as of 1st Q 2010, he's not even the biggest game in town! As an application developer myself, the recent shenanigans around dictating to developers like me how we can or can't do our job and/or what tools we can use make the iphone a non-starter.
Sorry, too hostile for me, too much lockin for my clients, and not enough benefit. Android it is!
Isn't it ironic that the company responsible for opening up the smartphone market is now offering the most closed platform?
For years, I co-located at the top-rated 365 Main data center in San Francisco, CA until they had a power failure a few years ago. Despite having 5x redundant power that was regularly tested, it apparently wasn't tested against a *brown out*. So when Pacific Gas and Electric had a brownout, it failed to trigger 2 of the 5 redundant generators. Unfortunately, the system was designed so that any *one* of the redundant generators could fail and there wouldn't be any problem.
So power was in a brownout condition, the voltage dropped from the usual 120 volts or so down to 90. Many power supplies have brownout detectors and will shut off. Many did, until the total system load dropped to the point where normal power was restored. All of this happened within a few seconds, and the brownout was fixed in just a few minutes. But at the end of it all, there was perhaps 20% of all the systems in the building shut down. The "24x7 hot hands" were beyond swamped. Techies all around the San Francisco area were pulled from whatever they were doing to converge on downtown SF. And me, 4 hours drive away, managed to restore our public-facing services on the one server (of four) I had that survived the voltage spikes before driving in. (Alas, my servers had the "higher end" power supplies with brownout detection)
And so it was a long chain of almost success of well-tested, high-quality equipment that failed all in sequence because real life didn't happen to behave like the frequently performed tests did.
When I did finally arrive, the normally quiet, meticulously clean facility was a shambles. Littered with bits of network cable, boxes of freshly-purchased computer equipment, pizza boxes, and other refuge were to be found in every corner. The aisles were crowded with techies performing disk checks and chattering tersely on cell phones. It was other-worldly.
All of my systems came up normally; simply pushing the power switch and letting the fsck run did the trick, we were fully back up and all tests performed (and the system configuration returned to normal) in about an hour.
Upon reflection, I realized that even though I had some down time, I was really in a pretty good position:
1) I had backup hosting elsewhere, with a backup from the previous night. I could have switched over, but decided not to because we had current data on one system and we figured it was better not to have anybody lose any data than to have everybody lose the morning's work.
2) I had good quality equipment; the fact that none of my equipment was damaged from the event may have been partly due to the brownout detection in the power supplies of my servers.
3) At no point did I have any less than two backups off site in two different location, so I had multiple, recent data snapshots off site. As long as the daisy chains of failure can be, it would be freakishly rare to have all of these points go down at once.
4) Even with 75% of my hosting capacity taken offline, we were able to maintain uptime throughout all this because our configuration has full redundancy within our cluster - everything is stored in at least 2 places onsite.
Moral of the story? Never, EVER have all your eggs in one basket.
then you can be pretty sure that sql injection is a bigger problem than just about anything else. Yet, sadly, this is often what you get when you have an internally developed application. Especially when you are talking about an intranet application hacked together by a 1-year software major who switched to English and which was not designed to be put on the wild, wooly Internet but is put there anyway after the fact.
This is very *typical* of internal development teams.
1) Do quality work that's needed in a reasonable time frame.
2) Present a reasonably professional image. Most days, I'm totally OK with T-shirts, shorts, sandals, but if you are actually unclean (smell bad?) I will have trouble with that. And you'd better be wearing nice slacks, leather shoes, and a button-up collared shirt when we're making a public presentation.
3) Be courteous and work with others. We are all working on the same thing, solving different problems that are often interconnected. It's commonplace for a single change to impact everybody's sphere of influence, so reasonably getting along is a requirement. I understand that your co-workers aren't your drinking buddies, but a little bit of courtesy can go a long, long way.
4) Suggest ways to make things better if you have a better solution, but be OK if your suggestion gets turned down due to other circumstances.
Notice that, for my needs, I'm not looking for punctual. Generally being available when needed ranks high on my list, but if you show up at 9-ish instead of 8:55 sharp every morning, I'm not going to be any less inclined to give you a raise, and I'm pretty liberal if you want to take a few days off to go to the coast with your family for an extended weekend.
Bottom line: get the work done that's needed and/or make it easier to get more work done. When work gets done, we have stuff to sell, and when stuff sells, that is the bottom line, and that is why I'm here!
That's because you are a tech weenie. For you, going to websites and downloading software patches comes as naturally as hair dye comes to a platinum blonde. But the truth is, downloading patches and setting up handler applications and all the other stuff that you have to do is... HARD for most people!
As a software engineer, I find over and over again that "possible" isn't the same as "easy" or "automatic" or even "useful".
Some years ago, I wrote a tool to keep paperwork in electronic format, at a tremendous savings to our client organizations. My first attempt was usable, but required significant training, and we got a few nibbles. My next revision was better, and we got some strong interest from previously cool clients. My most current revision is drop-dead simple to use, needing little more than a button click, and customers are practically lining up.
It can be very hard to do, but easy is, for most people, the difference between doable and not worth the bother. I've many times wanted to listen to KGO radio in San Francisco. I can sorta get it with an AM radio, but it's static-y and unpleasant. I can stream it online, but to do this, I have to get a big, relatively expensive computer, plug it into the Internet, turn it on, load the browser, go to the website, and click to start, then plug the speaker jack into my stereo.
So I end up with a pile of wires, and a laptop that likes to fall asleep every few hours of listening while burning about 60 watts. Ouch!
If only I could just hit the power switch, and then turn a knob to the "KGO" station... ? I'd be pretty likely to buy something like this.
From the article: "... it won't matter if PCs are disinfected, swapped out, or replaced with iPads, the bad guys are still control because they own the network below." So the old Blame Windows standard won't work in this case.
No, don't blame Windows for this one. Blame craptastic vendors who choose not to properly utilize well-proven protection schemes such as SSL and other forms of encryption to protect all parties involved. I think what's been missed here is that on the wild and wooly Internet, there is no presumption of privacy or security. If you want it, you'd better come up with it yourself! (and we did)
You mean an open standard won out over a proprietary implementation?
Flash is about to be marginalized. It will happen quickly, in much the same way as the open HTML/DOM/Javascript beat out over 20 years of Microsoft "innovations" such as VB and.NOT. And in much the same way as Android is about the slaughter the iPhone.
See, open standards usually follow proprietary "trail blazers". Once the standard has been defined, copy-cats move in and do the same things, cheaper.
Apple originally won the desktop computer war, then lost it to the more open (and less expensive) Microsoft, which finally is losing it's lead to the even more open (and inexpensive) web/SOAP API. Apple got it right again with the iPhone, but is already losing it again with the highly proprietary iPhone now rapidly losing market share rapidly against the more open Linux/Google/Android platform. (Android's 4x marketshare growth in a single month - WTF!?!)
As a note, I have an HTC WinMo phone right now, but my next phone will almost assuredly be... Android!
Do you watch TV online? (Hulu/Netflix/etc?) Because in my family, we do, and we'll blow past your 30 GB in a week or so.
Today, few people are watching TV online, but that figure is growing rapidly. My own habits have spread to my 5 employees and my business partners, due in part to my endorsements. Add in online gaming, video chats, working from home via VPN and remote-desktop, and perfectly legit, normal usage suddenly passes your threshold for "reasonable".
But why? Bandwidth is one of the few things which has no unit cost! Think about it...
In the garage at my house is a router. Currently, it's an "N" router with a 1Gb wired hub. Let's look at its history, roughly:
15 years ago, it was a 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network.
10 years ago, it was a 10 Mbit switching hub.
5 years ago, it was a 100 Mbit switching hub.
Today, it's a 1000 Mbit switching hub.
My point? the 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network used about the same amount of power as the Gbit switching hub - less than 1 amp of power, a la power brick. And yet, there are 3 orders of magnitude in useful performance, from the top to the bottom. That's from 1, to 10, to 100, to 1000 units.
BAD CAR ANALOGY: Can you imagine having a car when you are 16, that goes 20 MPH? Can you imagine having a car when you are 21, that goes 200 MPH? Can you imagine having a car when you are 26, that goes 2000 MPH? Can you imagine having a car when you are 31, that goes 20,000 MPH?
See how silly this becomes? Bandwidth has no effective unit cost. Charging by the unit is counterproductive and is a detriment to social progress, and works to impede social advancements like watching the TV show you want, when you want to, and video chatting with Aunt Gladys before her Hysterectomy.
It's not just irritating, it's just a very bad idea founded in bad physics.
From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms.
And what, pray tell, have you seen of Theora? Are you talking about the whiney, highly inaccurate piece here a few weeks ago that threw out just enough jargon to sound relevant, but managed to compare apples to bicycles in the process? Perhaps you should see the rebuttal?
TL;DR: Many of the "points" raised were barely coherent, let alone verifiably accurate.
Ogg is an efficient, open-sourced, non-patent-encumbered container format. Theora is an efficient CODEC for video. The way patents are worded, it's tough to prove the non-patent-encumbered nature of just about anything, but that's what it was designed to be, and there are certainly no particular technical issues with its adoption except perhaps that hardware implementations are still not commonplace, even if they are available.
If the industry adopts H.264 widely, we'll all regret it in a few years.
How many of us have been berated for doodling while listening to a lecture in class? It's something that's oft criticized, and yet recent evidence has shown that doodling helps us pay attention by managing boredom. This counter-intuitive result makes it clear that what's really going on isn't always obvious.
I'm not going so far as to say that dickering on a netbook is a good idea when flying a commercial aircraft, but I will say that we should do some kind of study of the real effects of such "distractions" on real-world metrics like accident history, etc. We may well find that "distractions" result in better-qualified pilots remaining on the job rather than moving on elsewhere, and a subsequently reduced accident rate, even if individual pilot performance is somewhat reduced.
While phrases like "900,000 pound aircraft at 400 MPH" sound dramatic, the truth is that the aircraft are almost universally on auto-pilot, are flying somewhere above 30,000 feet, and are being monitored by RADAR at all times, so that any close calls cause planes to be diverted. And a "close call" is anything under 3 MILES of horizontal separation, and 1000 feet of vertical separation, so we aren't talking about a situation where you would even SEE the other aircraft without knowing exactly what direction to look for it.
Statistically speaking, it's safer to fly on a commercial airliner than it is to VISIT a family member in a hospital!
Slashdot Mirror
What?!?
You can easily drive a 30 year old car and get all the convenience and luxury that was available in that car 30 years ago... today. We get all excited by things like leather seats and air conditioning, but both were easily available 30 years ago. The reality is that it's more of a style thing: Mullets were cool in 1990, but they are SOOOO out now. So things that were "cool" then aren't now, but functionally, there really isn't that much that a mid-budget 1975 car couldn't do that a mid-budget 2005 car can.
Let's see what the improvements are:
Radios are digital. (ooh!)
Electric locks with a button in your key. (ooh!)
Automatic transmission?
Better seat belts. (ok...)
10% or so better gas mileage?
You can get from point A to point B driving at 65 MPH, with reasonable safety, in either car, and sadly, at a very comparable cost. 30 years of "innovation", and that's the best that we can do?
I've driven 5-10 year old cars forever, pocketing the $10,000 or so that I save (per car) by doing so and spending it on things like college education for my kids and private airplanes. The truth is that new cars are mostly about fashion, not function. If you want function, go to craigslist and buy a car that's about 5-10 years old with 40k to 80k miles on it. If you are at all careful (and have a relationship with a good mechanic) you'll get a car with 100,000 useful miles on it that will cost you 1/3 as much as the original buyer of the car, while still getting you where you want to go, with repairs not much more often than a new car, and without that nasty monthly payment.
You missed the point. He has shatty hardware. Best advice is to buy another one. price watch?
What are you on about? 3kW is nothing... YATTA YATTA SNIP
I guess you missed the point. My own situation is fairly modest. But my own situation is in a very small amount of space, and my 42U rack is actually not that full, most of the racks around mine are much more utilized than mine. Multiply that by THOUSANDS and your "piddly" 3kW becomes a very big number. And, this power IS backed up, IS fully redundant, and IS running 24x7.
Similarly "many terabytes" is unimpressive when I can get 2TB drives for well under $200... YATTA YATTA SNIP
Do you actually think I'm putting consumer grade hard drives into my production cluster? Really? this is more my style, since performance DOES matter and double the cost since everything we do is RAID level 1. Go ahead - look at the cost for a 600 GB, 15k SAS drive.
Don't know if you've ever taken a look outside a data center, but they often have multiple, high-voltage power feed dead-end at the building. At my current colo, the excellent Herakles data center in Sacramento, CA, they are literally located directly under a major set of power lines.
So you take some office building that was burning perhaps a couple hundred watts per 100 SqFt during mid-day, and colocate 42U racks within, raising energy density from maybe 200 watts/100 SqFT to a few thousand. To give some idea, I personally oversee about 3,000 watts in a single 1U rack at my colo, well over 200 cores, and many terabytes of data. And that's in a single 1U rack, maybe 24" wide and 36" deep, with some allowance for aisleway... and my situation isn't even mildly unusual.
We're not talking 3,000 watts capacity, we're talking 3,000 watts 24x7 continuous draw, of redundant, backed-up power - the most expensive kind. Whole houses usually don't draw this much. And this is a *single* 42U rack.
This is feasible? That's a *lot* of power...
True, a small percentage knows/cares about it. But it's that small percentage who tend to notice things going awry, and clang the alarms for the rest of the soddy folks who haven't a clue. This isn't a bad thing! It's a small minority who become doctors that look out for the rest of us. It's a small minority who become security experts (EG: police) who look out for the rest of us.
It's called "specialization" and it's the only way to effectively utilize domain expertise to the benefit of all.
Compare the United States to Canada, which has less population density than the United States and generally higher connection speeds.
And Apple isn't working just as feverishly for their own lockin?
Sure, they are, but they aren't trying to leverage MacOS out into the iPod Nano. The difference is that Microsoft isn't willing to compete on features + quality alone, they want to bring all their application base to the new platform. They may eventually succeed, but it would be a long, hard road. Apple seems perfectly willing to ditch their "application base" if/when the need arises - witness OSX itself, which is a complete, ground-up rewrite of their O/S for Macs. And it's worked very well for them. I type this on a Mac Mini that I've grown to love.
So much, that I was just about to turn in my geek cards and pick up the Apple Fanboi deck. But I have to say, with their recent shenanigans around Flash and the iPad, any urge to do so have vaporized. As a developer myself, I'm thinking I'd rather take my chances on Android than deal with the increasingly dystopic-looking future with Apple!
You will grow old and feeble waiting. Progressives don't operate in the fact based world, they FEEL.
Strange - because my definition of a "progressive" includes people with adherence to scientific principles (which are observed) rather than religious principles (which are definitely felt) as is common among conservatives. This leads progressives to solutions that actually work, such as distributing birth control to minors (which demonstrably reduces the teen pregnancy rate) rather than teaching ideological principles such as abstinence (which demonstrably raises the teen pregnancy rate) with little success.
This is part of a pattern where they 'KNOW' (read feel) the AZ immigration law is racist without needing to read it.
I don't know about racist, but if you were in Arizona and were looking for an illegal immigrant, what color which he/she be? 'Cause you never know when them Canadians might bust the fence! And for that matter, you paint the broad brush of "not reading the law" to imply a negligent position on the part of opponents when many of those who voted on it never read it. You have to read any and all laws you wish to criticize?
Should you have to read laws you support, too? How many people support the Bible but haven't read it?
Which is why they feel the Internet must be brought under government control because, with no facts to back it, they just 'know' evil reactionary forces are working to control it.
This is called the "straw man argument" - you paint a picture of what your opposition is (apparently, you are anti-progressive, though you don't actually state position of your own) and then destroy that fallacious image. As far as I know, it's the progressives that are backing "network neutrality", which is all about keeping the Internet free for all people who wish to provide content thereupon.
You may do well to learn more about what you are posting about rather than blindly accept your talking points from an angry, overweight talk show host.
Dollars are votes. We the People hold power to bankrupt corporations out of existence. No such power exists over Gov't.
So.... you start off by saying that money is akin corporations as votes are for government, but then say that votes don't work for government like money works for corporations?
I think you need to research the concept of "cognitive dissonance".
If you ever drank some of the swill often referred to as 'beer' here, you wouldn't want to drink it in Central Park, either. It's little wonder why that's a violation of law. But photography in public is pretty much a good idea, too.
In the United States, recording Wifi information runs over two sets of laws, one of which makes it legal, the other of which is very illegal.
On one hand, it's very illegal to break into a computer network without permission/authorization.
On the other hand, it's perfectly legal to access *any* broadcasted radio frequency. According to the FAA, there is no restriction on the radio frequencies you are allowed to listen on. Broadcasting is another matter, but nobody's saying that Google broadcast anything.
A wifi is just broadcasting information, and the Google van apparently was listening. So even in the United States, which set of laws apply?
In a literal sense, you are correct. When you add features, you add stuff for the computer to do.
But that doesn't represent the reality of the past 30 years. For 30 years, we've gotten significantly more for the *same* amount of consumption. My computer today burns about 120 watts total, about the same as the first 286/20 I ever had. So we have a millionfold improvement in performance at *no* meaningful additional cost.
Software may cost more to run to add more features, but this is countermanded by the fact that all of today's software is grossly inefficient and there is incredible room for improvement in overall performance if we only take the time to do so! I've seen software performance improve 100x simply by limiting the amount of data involved in a string pattern match, for example!
Yes, in most cases, you can have your cake, sell a piece, and still eat it, if you focus on software inefficiency and make your software work quickly. I improved the performance of one of our products by about 70% in two days by running lots of testing to find out what the cause was.
The result is an application that seems WAY FASTER without doing any less than before. w00t!
Voyager is anything but brand new. Voyager is probably older than most Slashdotters, having been launched in 1977. Think about it: 1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store. 1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
And yet, some 33 years later, Voyager 2 is still chugging on, after visiting ALL of the outer planets, still going waaayayyyyyyy past its original design limits, still providing meaningful information on its way out roughly towards the star Sirius. It's now twice as far away from the Sun as Pluto is.
Like the Mars rovers, this is truly good engineering at work.
The problem that they had wasn't with the sonic booms - all they had to do was slow down below Mach 1 (actually, about mach 0.81 or so) before/during their descent.
The problem that Concorde had was that was simply a gross fuel hog, making trips on the Concorde prohibitively expensive. Would you pay 3x as much for a trip to Australia if it got you there in half the time?
Neither would anybody else. In today's dollars, that's like paying $2,100 instead of $700. (rough prices, San Francisco, California to Sydney, Australia) That makes sitting on the plane pay over $150/hour - few people can afford those kinds of prices.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the rest of the story.
Steve is really trying to sell himself short, here. His reality distortion field has gone to his head, and he thinks he's bulletproof. And you know what? When he was the only game in town, he was bulletproof.
But he's not the only game in town. In fact, as of 1st Q 2010, he's not even the biggest game in town! As an application developer myself, the recent shenanigans around dictating to developers like me how we can or can't do our job and/or what tools we can use make the iphone a non-starter.
Sorry, too hostile for me, too much lockin for my clients, and not enough benefit. Android it is!
Isn't it ironic that the company responsible for opening up the smartphone market is now offering the most closed platform?
For years, I co-located at the top-rated 365 Main data center in San Francisco, CA until they had a power failure a few years ago. Despite having 5x redundant power that was regularly tested, it apparently wasn't tested against a *brown out*. So when Pacific Gas and Electric had a brownout, it failed to trigger 2 of the 5 redundant generators. Unfortunately, the system was designed so that any *one* of the redundant generators could fail and there wouldn't be any problem.
So power was in a brownout condition, the voltage dropped from the usual 120 volts or so down to 90. Many power supplies have brownout detectors and will shut off. Many did, until the total system load dropped to the point where normal power was restored. All of this happened within a few seconds, and the brownout was fixed in just a few minutes. But at the end of it all, there was perhaps 20% of all the systems in the building shut down. The "24x7 hot hands" were beyond swamped. Techies all around the San Francisco area were pulled from whatever they were doing to converge on downtown SF. And me, 4 hours drive away, managed to restore our public-facing services on the one server (of four) I had that survived the voltage spikes before driving in. (Alas, my servers had the "higher end" power supplies with brownout detection)
And so it was a long chain of almost success of well-tested, high-quality equipment that failed all in sequence because real life didn't happen to behave like the frequently performed tests did.
When I did finally arrive, the normally quiet, meticulously clean facility was a shambles. Littered with bits of network cable, boxes of freshly-purchased computer equipment, pizza boxes, and other refuge were to be found in every corner. The aisles were crowded with techies performing disk checks and chattering tersely on cell phones. It was other-worldly.
All of my systems came up normally; simply pushing the power switch and letting the fsck run did the trick, we were fully back up and all tests performed (and the system configuration returned to normal) in about an hour.
Upon reflection, I realized that even though I had some down time, I was really in a pretty good position:
1) I had backup hosting elsewhere, with a backup from the previous night. I could have switched over, but decided not to because we had current data on one system and we figured it was better not to have anybody lose any data than to have everybody lose the morning's work.
2) I had good quality equipment; the fact that none of my equipment was damaged from the event may have been partly due to the brownout detection in the power supplies of my servers.
3) At no point did I have any less than two backups off site in two different location, so I had multiple, recent data snapshots off site. As long as the daisy chains of failure can be, it would be freakishly rare to have all of these points go down at once.
4) Even with 75% of my hosting capacity taken offline, we were able to maintain uptime throughout all this because our configuration has full redundancy within our cluster - everything is stored in at least 2 places onsite.
Moral of the story? Never, EVER have all your eggs in one basket.
... ...
are all bigger problems than
sql injection
Speak for yourself. When you see an address like
http://www.myagency.gov/reports/show.php?sql=Select+%2A+from+customers+where+id%3D39
then you can be pretty sure that sql injection is a bigger problem than just about anything else. Yet, sadly, this is often what you get when you have an internally developed application. Especially when you are talking about an intranet application hacked together by a 1-year software major who switched to English and which was not designed to be put on the wild, wooly Internet but is put there anyway after the fact.
This is very *typical* of internal development teams.
What do I look for?
1) Do quality work that's needed in a reasonable time frame.
2) Present a reasonably professional image. Most days, I'm totally OK with T-shirts, shorts, sandals, but if you are actually unclean (smell bad?) I will have trouble with that. And you'd better be wearing nice slacks, leather shoes, and a button-up collared shirt when we're making a public presentation.
3) Be courteous and work with others. We are all working on the same thing, solving different problems that are often interconnected. It's commonplace for a single change to impact everybody's sphere of influence, so reasonably getting along is a requirement. I understand that your co-workers aren't your drinking buddies, but a little bit of courtesy can go a long, long way.
4) Suggest ways to make things better if you have a better solution, but be OK if your suggestion gets turned down due to other circumstances.
Notice that, for my needs, I'm not looking for punctual. Generally being available when needed ranks high on my list, but if you show up at 9-ish instead of 8:55 sharp every morning, I'm not going to be any less inclined to give you a raise, and I'm pretty liberal if you want to take a few days off to go to the coast with your family for an extended weekend.
Bottom line: get the work done that's needed and/or make it easier to get more work done. When work gets done, we have stuff to sell, and when stuff sells, that is the bottom line, and that is why I'm here!
I'm not really seeing the market for this.
That's because you are a tech weenie. For you, going to websites and downloading software patches comes as naturally as hair dye comes to a platinum blonde. But the truth is, downloading patches and setting up handler applications and all the other stuff that you have to do is... HARD for most people!
As a software engineer, I find over and over again that "possible" isn't the same as "easy" or "automatic" or even "useful".
Some years ago, I wrote a tool to keep paperwork in electronic format, at a tremendous savings to our client organizations. My first attempt was usable, but required significant training, and we got a few nibbles. My next revision was better, and we got some strong interest from previously cool clients. My most current revision is drop-dead simple to use, needing little more than a button click, and customers are practically lining up.
It can be very hard to do, but easy is, for most people, the difference between doable and not worth the bother. I've many times wanted to listen to KGO radio in San Francisco. I can sorta get it with an AM radio, but it's static-y and unpleasant. I can stream it online, but to do this, I have to get a big, relatively expensive computer, plug it into the Internet, turn it on, load the browser, go to the website, and click to start, then plug the speaker jack into my stereo.
So I end up with a pile of wires, and a laptop that likes to fall asleep every few hours of listening while burning about 60 watts. Ouch!
If only I could just hit the power switch, and then turn a knob to the "KGO" station... ? I'd be pretty likely to buy something like this.
From the article: "... it won't matter if PCs are disinfected, swapped out, or replaced with iPads, the bad guys are still control because they own the network below." So the old Blame Windows standard won't work in this case.
No, don't blame Windows for this one. Blame craptastic vendors who choose not to properly utilize well-proven protection schemes such as SSL and other forms of encryption to protect all parties involved. I think what's been missed here is that on the wild and wooly Internet, there is no presumption of privacy or security. If you want it, you'd better come up with it yourself! (and we did)
You mean an open standard won out over a proprietary implementation?
Flash is about to be marginalized. It will happen quickly, in much the same way as the open HTML/DOM/Javascript beat out over 20 years of Microsoft "innovations" such as VB and .NOT. And in much the same way as Android is about the slaughter the iPhone.
See, open standards usually follow proprietary "trail blazers". Once the standard has been defined, copy-cats move in and do the same things, cheaper.
Apple originally won the desktop computer war, then lost it to the more open (and less expensive) Microsoft, which finally is losing it's lead to the even more open (and inexpensive) web/SOAP API. Apple got it right again with the iPhone, but is already losing it again with the highly proprietary iPhone now rapidly losing market share rapidly against the more open Linux/Google/Android platform. (Android's 4x marketshare growth in a single month - WTF!?!)
As a note, I have an HTC WinMo phone right now, but my next phone will almost assuredly be... Android!
Do you watch TV online? (Hulu/Netflix/etc?) Because in my family, we do, and we'll blow past your 30 GB in a week or so.
Today, few people are watching TV online, but that figure is growing rapidly. My own habits have spread to my 5 employees and my business partners, due in part to my endorsements. Add in online gaming, video chats, working from home via VPN and remote-desktop, and perfectly legit, normal usage suddenly passes your threshold for "reasonable".
But why? Bandwidth is one of the few things which has no unit cost! Think about it...
In the garage at my house is a router. Currently, it's an "N" router with a 1Gb wired hub. Let's look at its history, roughly:
15 years ago, it was a 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network.
10 years ago, it was a 10 Mbit switching hub.
5 years ago, it was a 100 Mbit switching hub.
Today, it's a 1000 Mbit switching hub.
My point? the 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network used about the same amount of power as the Gbit switching hub - less than 1 amp of power, a la power brick. And yet, there are 3 orders of magnitude in useful performance, from the top to the bottom. That's from 1, to 10, to 100, to 1000 units.
BAD CAR ANALOGY: Can you imagine having a car when you are 16, that goes 20 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 21, that goes 200 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 26, that goes 2000 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 31, that goes 20,000 MPH?
See how silly this becomes? Bandwidth has no effective unit cost. Charging by the unit is counterproductive and is a detriment to social progress, and works to impede social advancements like watching the TV show you want, when you want to, and video chatting with Aunt Gladys before her Hysterectomy.
It's not just irritating, it's just a very bad idea founded in bad physics.
where does that subsidy come from? Why, yes, from economic activity derived from burning fossil fuels.
I dunno. When Northern Europe is reporting that wind energy significantly cuts the cost of power I'd guess that the "subsidies" issue is fast disappearing...
From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms.
And what, pray tell, have you seen of Theora? Are you talking about the whiney, highly inaccurate piece here a few weeks ago that threw out just enough jargon to sound relevant, but managed to compare apples to bicycles in the process? Perhaps you should see the rebuttal?
TL;DR: Many of the "points" raised were barely coherent, let alone verifiably accurate.
Ogg is an efficient, open-sourced, non-patent-encumbered container format. Theora is an efficient CODEC for video. The way patents are worded, it's tough to prove the non-patent-encumbered nature of just about anything, but that's what it was designed to be, and there are certainly no particular technical issues with its adoption except perhaps that hardware implementations are still not commonplace, even if they are available.
If the industry adopts H.264 widely, we'll all regret it in a few years.
I don't know why, but your post made me think about this XKCD cartoon.
Don't know, just sayin'...
How many of us have been berated for doodling while listening to a lecture in class? It's something that's oft criticized, and yet recent evidence has shown that doodling helps us pay attention by managing boredom. This counter-intuitive result makes it clear that what's really going on isn't always obvious.
I'm not going so far as to say that dickering on a netbook is a good idea when flying a commercial aircraft, but I will say that we should do some kind of study of the real effects of such "distractions" on real-world metrics like accident history, etc. We may well find that "distractions" result in better-qualified pilots remaining on the job rather than moving on elsewhere, and a subsequently reduced accident rate, even if individual pilot performance is somewhat reduced.
While phrases like "900,000 pound aircraft at 400 MPH" sound dramatic, the truth is that the aircraft are almost universally on auto-pilot, are flying somewhere above 30,000 feet, and are being monitored by RADAR at all times, so that any close calls cause planes to be diverted. And a "close call" is anything under 3 MILES of horizontal separation, and 1000 feet of vertical separation, so we aren't talking about a situation where you would even SEE the other aircraft without knowing exactly what direction to look for it.
Statistically speaking, it's safer to fly on a commercial airliner than it is to VISIT a family member in a hospital!